Those thoughts sounded like Paul, and Tyler was glad that at least Paul’s sentiment had followed him here. Once he entered this house, he would need all the support he could get.
Sasha answered on the first knock. She was freshly showered, her wet hair hanging loose around her face, which was make-up free and healthy pink. Was that the pregnant glow he had heard about? She wore jeans and a baggy sweatshirt that made it impossible to admire her breasts. She invited him in and until she smiled he had completely forgotten her snaggletooth.
He had expected swollen red eyes and ratty hair and twitchy fingers, but instead Sasha was calm and happy. Refreshed. Was that because she was pregnant and happy or because she was happy that the police were on their way with cuffs that had his name on them?
“Hi,” was all Tyler managed to say.
Her house was something right out of a Make the Best of Your Trailer Park Life book. The outside had been well landscaped and the house gave off a healthier aura than many of the other mobile homes scattered over the hills. This one had, at one time, been a mobile home but it was now anchored solidly to the earth and the illusion of home living truly perfected. The walls resembled those in his own house, though smaller, but suggesting strength and professional polish. Pictures decorated these walls and clean carpet lined the floors. Only the faintest sense of claustrophobia or maybe an actual smell (something sour, almost rancid) suggested that this home was not all it appeared to be.
A few steps led up off a tiny foyer to the main living area where a gigantic television dominated the living/dining room. The TV was so close to the dining room table that during Thanksgiving meals someone probably had to sit on the television. A few more stairs descended from the foyer where an abundance of coats dangled froad danglem hooks to a smaller basement-like area. Red light flickered down there and something else, a sound, like a dying whisper, floated on the air like the vanishing wisps of cigarette smoke.
He started to peer down there and Sasha grabbed his arm. “My room is up here.”
She pulled him up the few steps but before he took those steps, he managed to duck down just enough to see into the downstairs. The angle was steep and since he was in mid-stride his angle was askew like the way little kids sometimes take pictures with the camera turned practically sideways. Red tea light candles had been set atop a long table covered with a white sheet at the far side of the room. To the right of the table, nearly out of sight, stood someone in all black, back to him, head bowed. The whispering was louder suddenly and he caught a few words—it sounded like
sack
rice
and
luff chide
—and then he was upstairs and headed down a narrow hallway to a small bedroom.
Sack rice
. Sacrifice? Maybe. If her mother was downstairs casting some witchery, sacrifice would be one of the most common words. But
luff chide
? What the hell was that?
“Is your mother home?”
She pulled him into a bedroom saturated in pink--comforter, pillows, curtains. How very
unwitchy
of her. She pushed the door closed but it didn’t shut all the way, leaving a sliver of space between door and frame.
“No. She went out.”
Then who was downstairs? “You sounded like you were in a hurry,” he said. “On the phone.”
She smiled; her snaggletooth protruded out from beneath her lip like a venomous bug sliding out of its dirt hole. “Sorry. I just really wanted to see you again before . . . things got out of hand.”
“What do you mean?”
She laced her hands together in an awkward way and her fingers began to fight each other. Her eyes drifted from his for a moment and then zeroed in on him again. “Nothing. Never mind.”
“So, we’re okay then?”
The fingers on her right hand had overtaken those on her left and her knuckles had gone white from the pressure. What was going on in her head? Where was the trap? Was she waiting for the police?
“I didn’t want to wait until Monday at school. You know . . . ”
“Did you tell anyone about last night?”
Her hands broke apart as if the left hand had discovered a secret weapon to protect itself and then her fingers found the edge of her sweatshirt; in one quick movement she pulled her sweatshirt off over her head and tossed in on the floor. Her breasts were popping out of a bra that was a size too small. There was only one way to interpret this gesture, but the look in her eyes stopped him. Her eyes didn’t say,
take me
or
let’s fuck
; they said,
I’m lost and I don’t know what I’m doing
.
Tyler opened his mouth expecting something to come out but nothing did and he simply stood there, mouth agape, Sasha’s breasts a foot away. Her fingers resumed their war. She tilted her head slightly and smiled, not too large and risk showing off that snaggletooth, but just enough to push away the caution holding him in place. Her eyes might be confused, but her smile said,
Come and get it
.
He leaned in for a kiss and her hands grabbed the back of his head. She buried her face against his so hard that their teeth mashed together and pain shivered through his face. She didn’t pull back; she actually pushed harder and forced her tongue into his mouth. Instead of fighting with each other, her fingers twirled in his hair and burrowed into his scalp.
She’s mauling me
, he thought,
like a bear
. That didn’t stop him, however, from unsnapping her bra and slipping it off her without breaking the embrace. In two short days, he had become quite the suave player. He should have asked her out back in September. He could have been having sex for months already.
He kissed her aggressively, grabbed her ass and squeezed it hard. When she finally broke the kiss and started sucking on his neck, she said through hoarse gasps, “Bed . . . bed.” He pushed her toward the pink-covered bed, their feet tangled together, and they collapsed onto the bed, he on top. She moaned when she bounced on the bed like he was fucking her already. Her fingernails scraped at his scalp and her teeth gnawed at his ear.
The heat was pulsing inside him again, throbbing and screaming
FIRE! FIRE!
and he had to have her. He tore at the top of her jeans and ripped them open and tugged them down off her hips. The heat burned inside him. There was only one way to quench the heat and that was with hers. One hand found its way into her crotch. Too many thoughts moving too quickly beneath the hollering
FIRE!
tried to rush into his forebrain—
this is fucking amazing, holy shit, this is ridiculously great, Paul will never believe this, but it could be a trap, it could still be something bad, something sinister; bullshit, she’s begging for it, this time she really wants it
.
“Is this what you want?” she whispered into his ear. Her hot breath threw more logs on the raging flames.
“
Yesyesyes
,” he said all as one word.
“Do you love me?”
Paul had once said, during one of his many elaborate “dictations” (as he called them) on women, that when women are completely overcome with passion, they can think of nothing else. Men always take the blame for being perverts and constantly thinking with their dicks, but once a woman is in the mood she is a completely illogical beast that cannot be stopped. That may sound great (it did) but there was a small problem.
Over the millions of years of evolution
, Paul said,
women have developed a last resort safeguard to protect them from sex that may later seem like a bad idea. This final stop-all is the dreaded love question. This isn’t,
Do I love him?
, no. When a woman’s panties are sopping wet, she doesn’t care about her own feelings; she’s committed. But she does care about the man’s. She wants to know not just that she is wanted and desired—she wants to know she is loved
.
Paul warned that no other question throughout all time could so shatter a man’s chances of getting laid as the
Do you love me
question. How a man handled that determined everything. If the man hesitated or replaced it with another
I want you so bad
, the woman would know immediately that the guy was using her like he uses a porno site and, for most women, the brakes would hit the floor and the final barrier would never be breached a be bre.
Tyler had known the question would come eventually, but a second date seemed really soon. Who knew if love existed on a second date? For that matter, what was love anyway? Hadn’t Hallmark invented it?
The heat started to recede. The other thoughts, those buried ones, jumped forward, but no longer did they offer doubt; now it was ridicule.
What the fuck are you doing? Tell her you love her and get on with it. It might be too late already, you asshole. You could be fucking her already. Just say it, whisper it
.
Someone was behind him. There was no reason why he should know that but he did and with absolute certainty. Someone was watching them from the doorway. He started to pull up, but she held him, nails biting his scalp.
“Say you love me,” she begged in his ear. “
Please
.”
“Someone’s in here.”
He yanked more aggressively and her nails pierced his scalp.
“Say it. Please, Tyler.
Please!
”
He felt blood in his hair. What the fuck was this crazy bitch doing? He thought of the candles downstairs, her mother’s face in the window last night, mouth opening and closing slowly, deliberately (just a dream). He thought of penises in jars of formaldehyde, their skin flaking off over years and years.
“I don’t love you.”
He jumped up and free of her. She cried out in surprise, “
No!,
” and it was so pathetic, so desperate--he had been a complete idiot to think she was even slightly attractive.
Someone was whispering behind him. He spun around. Sasha’s mother stood a foot away. Her matted black hair dangled around her face like torn window curtains. Heavy black and purple blotches smudged her face like severe bruising. The whiteness of her teeth made them appear fake, like she could slip them out of her mouth. Her lips moved slowly, forming words and complete phrases in a barely audible voice.
She raised one hand, black robe falling off her slender arm that was mottled with bruises. She held a small tube. She whispered something and he caught most of it:
sac rice bloods the luff chide use crate
. He leaned toward her, unable to fight the need to know what she was saying. She shook the tube and warm liquid splashed across his face, in his mouth, up his nose, and into the corner of his eye.
For a moment, Tyler stood there as Sasha’s mother kept whispering something he couldn’t quite hear and then his left eye started to burn. He pawed at the eye frantically, rubbing to wipe out the liquid, but the burn intensified. He closed his eye and covered it with one palm, pushing against it because the pain from that helped mask the pain of the stinging fluid.
“What the fuck was that?”
From behind him, Sasha begged on the verge of tears, “Please, Tyler. Please don’t freak out.
Please
.”
He spun on her. She shrank back against the bed, breasts flopping. “Stay away from me, you weird bitch.”
He turned back and Sasha’s mother was nose to nose with him. “
Sac rice bloods
,” she whispered. Her lips pulled back and her teeth were no longer white: streaks of blood melted off them and dribbled onto her chin.
Sasha was still crying for him to not freak out, not run away, for him to stay and listen
pleasepleaseplease
, but Tyler was already in the hall and moving fast. He skidded down the few steps to the foyer, almost lost his balance. Once outside, he could breathe again, though he didn’t pause for a breath of air until he was in his car speeding over the windy roads with one hand planted against his burning eye.
Not a tube of something—a
vial
of
blood
. And probably diseased blood. Maybe the kids at school were right and it was Sasha’s menstrual blood. The crazy bitch had a genuine fucking witch for a mother and he had been fooled just as he feared. The scene had happened so quickly that he couldn’t make any sense of it. He had to wash the blood out of his eye before it did any permanent damage.
It has already
, the Paul-like voice said.
She threw it in your eye because it would have a chance of getting in your blood stream and once that happens you’re fucked completely. You should have been more careful
.
Was that true? Could blood in the eye lead to infection? What if the blood was from an AIDS patient or something insane like an Ebola victim? He could be dead in a few hours. That fucking bitch. She wanted her revenge—
you raped me
—and he had fallen for it. He’d get her back. Unless, of course, he died first.
He couldn’t go home--Dad was having some alone time with Mom, likely watching her sleep--and he didn’t want to explain what happened to his eye or why he left Brendan at the bowling alley anyway. He could drive to the hospital but he was too frantic for anyone to give him the time of day, never mind medical treatment. He was probably overreacting. It was just a little blood. Right? He headed to Paul’s house, which wasn’t very far. Paul would help him figure this out.
As things went, he ended up at a hospital anyway.
2
Grief is a pit. You are dropped into it and then it’s up to you which way you go. You can struggle out of the pit, occasionally slipping on the muddy sides, or you can get on all fours and keep digging that sucker deeper until your fingernails break and your blisters bleed. Trying to crawl out is noble, good and respectful; digging deeper, however, is honest.
Anthony had crawled out before, but now there was no way. He couldn’t do it. What he could do was dig and dig he had for the past several days since Saturday when the Sergeant told him there had been an accident and Anthony sped to the hospital and was asked to identify the remains of his only daughter.
Her ravaged face hadn’t made him ill, but it had made him cry with torrential power. He had never experienced such tears before, tears that wracked the whole body and left him unable to move. On his knees before her corpse, Anthony wept and wept until a psychologist at the hospital brought him to her office. She spoke to him for over an hour, but he didn’t hear anything she said. He heard only his own screaming mind as it replayed for him over and over Delaney’s mutilated face. The clumps of blood in her hair reminded him of dried jelly or red tar.
The funeral director insisted on a closed casket, but through tears that never wanted to stop, Anthony handed the man an 8x10 school photograph, picture wobbling, and told the director he wanted him to make his daughter beautiful again. After admiring the picture (Delaney with a full-face smile as if she was about to burst out laughing, set ben. hing, sfore a holographic-like background of swirling reds and blues), the man’s thin eyebrows joining over his nose, he finally told Anthony that his employees were master craftsmen and would do their best, though he could promise no miracles. Anthony laughed out loud at that. Miracles? “There’s no such thing,” he said.
The director’s craftsmen had done a respectable job but there had been no miracles created between last Saturday and today. The artisan had reconstructed Delaney’s face. With what resembled clay, the person whose job it was to rebuild the dead gave Delaney the flesh that had been torn from her face, and replaced her wonderful, warm smile with a pale imitation that almost made her look upset, perhaps flustered, or even downright crazy. Based on the reactions of the mourners during the first showing at the wake, the funeral director had been right about the closed casket.
Upon his first viewing, Anthony wept not from pain but joy. Whoever had done the work had practically brought his daughter back to life. But then the skin turned to clay and the smile collapsed into a near frown. Chloe, doped-up and near to passing out at any point, chuckled. It was the type of laugh a drunk utters after one too many drinks when the bartender suggests maybe driving home is a bad idea. Better yet, it was the kind of offhanded laugh someone offered to a particularly unfunny joke.
You think that’s my daughter
, her chuckle said,
well, you must be on crack then
.
Chloe turned away from her only daughter and collapsed into one of the cushioned armchairs the funeral director had put out for each of the surviving family members. Her sister Stephanie went to her side and cooed empty assurances that everything would be okay, everything would work out, everything happened for a reason.
Only Delaney’s hair was the same as when she lived. Someone had spent a while cleaning and styling her hair to resemble the do she had in her school photo. That hair style had cost almost ninety dollars, but it had made her smile so large because she had been so damn pretty. Now, however, the hairstyle looked overdone, as if she had gotten too primped up for her own funeral.
Even now, as the second showing began and people entered the room of chairs and depressing recorded organ music, Stephanie was sitting next to Chloe, rubbing her hand and repeating the mantra:
Everything will be okay. Everything happens for a reason
.
Had he any energy, Anthony would have spun on her and shouted that her little empty phrases amounted to nothing but self-assuring bullshit. Nothing happened for a reason. God had no plan. What god, after all, would kill a wonderful young woman like Delaney? What god would deem it acceptable for someone to drop a bowling ball onto her car and have her entire face crushed? Everything would not be okay, not tomorrow, not next week, not fucking ever.
People didn’t talk at wakes; they whispered. For the first viewing, Anthony had stood at the doorway to greet whoever might show up, but that had grown quickly tiring. It wasn’t the standing or even the incessant hugging and responses of thanks for coming that tired him out, but it was the realization that after he hugged and thanked these people they were going to step up to Delaney’s open casket, maybe use the kneeler, and offer some silent words or prayers. Every person who entered was going to get a chance to be witness to the corpse that used to be a fun-loving, beautiful teenage girl. Anthony felt the emotions of each person as he or she passed from him to the casket and the weight of those emotions finally sent him to one of the cushioned armchairs, which placed him front row centhe ont rower for the show in which the main character simply lay still, not breathing, dead.
This time around, Anthony would greet the people after they offered that mental prayer or grace as they proceeded toward the back of the room to sit in folding chairs and wait to see if this would be one of those wakes where a priest said a prayer and gave a brief eulogy. Anthony had told Reverend Slade not to say anything at the wake, told him, in fact, not to come. There would be enough religious ceremony to satisfy God on Thursday morning when Delaney’s casket rolled down the aisle Chloe had walked down once as an unmarried woman and then back out again, her arm wrapped around his.
Tyler, who cried long and hard during the first viewing, sat next to him. He leaned into Anthony’s ear. “You mind if I go outside for a little while?” He tugged on his tie, unable to breathe, perhaps.
Anthony nodded. He was watching a plump woman in black pants and black blazer use the edge of the coffin as support to stand up from the kneeler. What would happen if her weight was too much and the coffin tipped off its stand? How would people react? Chloe might not even notice.
Finally up, and without overturning the coffin, the plump woman turned to face Anthony. It was Molly Feingold from Human Resources. Red splotches tinged her cheeks, whether from badly applied makeup or from the physical excursion needed to stand was unclear. She smiled one of those half smiles that were meant to convey happiness at seeing one person while simultaneously acknowledging that something really terrible had recently happened to that same person. Some people were masters at this expression; Molly Feingold was not.
She started in with the standard
sorry for your loss, it’s just so tragic and horrible and I’m sorry
rigmarole, to which he nodded slowly, taking her chubby, cold hand and thanking her, and then she started talking about work and how busy it has been what with the bad economy and everything and how bad she felt for some people who were barely scraping by, how hard it must be. He nodded almost continuously like one of those bobble heads some people kept on their desk at work. Anthony was the Grieving Parent Bobble Head:
It
keeps bobbing through all your pointless gestures of sympathy, just like a real grieving parent would
.
After she walked past him, Anthony noticed that both Tyler and Brendan were gone. Tyler had probably taken his brother outside with him for some air. That was a good idea. He ought to have Stephanie drag Chloe outside, if, that was, she could carry her. Chloe had fallen asleep almost immediately after sitting down. No chuckles this time, just an occasional snore.
The air in here had turned stale since the first showing three hours ago. It tasted like dry cereal. If there were windows, it was hard to tell because of the dark-colored drapes hanging everywhere on the walls. There might be no ventilation in here at all. It didn’t matter, anyway, right, because the only person staying in the room for a long time was already dead. Maybe the air wasn’t stale; maybe it was the odor of Delaney’s body infiltrating the air. Even embalmed and degutted or whatever the hell was done to dead people, there would still have to be some kind of aroma. There was no way to get rid of all traces. Her molded face might be disintegrated in minute pieces, floating off her face. Everyone could be breathing her in without realizing.
A bald guy Anthony recognized but couldn’t name was squeezing his shoulder and expressing just how terribly sorry he was. Anthony returned to his bobble head ways and offered the stock
thank you so mucy sk you sh for coming
response.
“How’re those boys holding up?” the man asked. His pinstripe suit was a bit loose in the chest as though he had lost weight. Then Anthony had it—he was Greg Champ, who everyone called The Champ at work. He worked in Legal and was battling colon cancer.
“They’re okay,” Anthony said. “Tyler’s been taking it pretty hard and Brendan, well, I don’t think he’s even grieved yet. How are you?”
Greg shrugged. “Still here.”
Greg’s response was probably so automatic when anyone inquired about his cancer and those horrible treatments he had to endure that his brain forgot to stop the words before they left his mouth. His face went slack. “I’m so sorry, Anthony.”
But Anthony had shut him out. He was thinking about Brendan. While Tyler had shed tears over his lost sister, Brendan had simply sat through the entire first viewing with a blanched face and dry eyes. He didn’t have his composition book with him. He should have been writing, spilling his inner pain onto the safe pages inside a notebook if he was too afraid or unsure of himself to share those worries with his dad. Instead, Brendan just sat still, watching his sister’s dead body as if it might at any moment come to life. Now that would be a miracle, Lazarus and all that.
The boy was in shock, of course. And understandably so. He was only twelve and while he knew what death was, he had never known it to touch so deeply. After the baby’s death, Anthony had tried very hard to shield the kids from it. There had been a wake, in this same funeral home, perhaps this same room, though he couldn’t remember, and a brief ceremony at the burial. Few people attended, but they hadn’t expected many anyway. An infant’s death, while tragic, wasn’t like the death of a sixteen-year-old. Dr. Carroll had recommended the service and the burial; closure, it was called. It had worked for the kids and mostly for Anthony, too. Chloe was a different story, of course.
Brendan hadn’t cried for the baby, either, though he barely knew his youngest sibling. He had grown more focused and quieter. His grades had improved and he no longer forgot to put away his clothes or toys or put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. He matured. He might be a more serious pre-teen than average but that wasn’t a big deal. Was it? Everyone lost his or her innocence eventually. For some it came late, for others, early. Anthony lost his own father when he was nineteen and that had helped him focus on his collegiate studies and propel himself into the book-publishing world. It was the same with Brendan, that’s all—death was the catalyst that forced him to acknowledge his own mortality. You had to cut hay while the sun shined, after all, because it would be dark before you knew it.
Delaney’s death would only make Brendan even more introverted. The poor boy would throw himself into his studies as Anthony had done in college. He’d turn out alright as long as Anthony kept checking on him. Though maybe not. Assuming Brendan would be fine could be a grievous mistake. It was always the quiet kids, those harboring all their emotions, who eventually shot up their schools. That was an overreaction, obviously, but Anthony didn’t want to turn to CNN one morning and see his son’s school photo on the screen next to the words ALLEGED SHOOTER.