Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

  It was where we’d buried our father. Our mother’s plot was empty beside his, graves they’d purchased in duplicate back when death felt a long way off. Strange to know my father’s body was buried less than a block from his own house. Like he could just get up one night and come home, unlock the front door with the spare key, and sit down comfortably, sipping beer in his recliner. Watch The Late Show. Fall into bed beside my mother. Sleep like he wasn’t gone from us, forever.

  I parked behind my brother, pulling over the oil spot where my father’s truck used to leak before my mother sold it. That spot would never grow again, and in fact looked smaller to me, the hot beat of the sun and the persistent rain working to erode the memory of it.

  Bats clipped through the purple sky, narrowly diving in and out of the branches of the oaks that bookended the house. The light over the door had burned out again and the mail was piled up inside the metal mailbox. I took in the assorted catalogs, bills, a few small packages that felt like they could’ve been DVDs, and dusted off the dead moths that had made the mail their grave.

  I unlocked the door and walked inside, passing framed pictures of our family, studio shots in church clothes. My brother looked tall and gangly and pimpled in his best suit at age fourteen, myself trussed up like a piglet in a frilly pink party dress I wore only if someone threatened death. My teeth were bared in the shot, as if I were restraining myself from biting my brother’s hand, which rested awkwardly on my shoulder.

  I kicked off my boots right there in the entryway, socked feet sinking into the orange-and-yellow shag. The microwave whirred in the kitchen. My mother was heating a Pyrex bowl full of frozen mixed vegetables, and my niece, Lolee, sat at the counter, cracking open Oreos and peeling out the centers. She stacked them until there were matching piles of cream and cookies.

  “Gonna eat those cookies?”

  “Nope.” The cookie stack was unceremoniously dumped into the same trash can where my mother threw the packaging from a sticky Styrofoam tray of chicken parts. Lolee picked up the wad of icing and rolled it between her palms, forming it into a dense ball. Then she took a big bite. Cream gummed in her braces, she turned to me and grinned.

  Grabbing a cookie from the plastic tray, I sat down and peeled free the center, then handed it to her. Before Lolee, Brynn had eaten the filling. We’d sat beside each other in the kitchen, watching my mother make dinner. Nearly every Tuesday she threw together chicken cacciatore made with bottled spaghetti sauce and too many bell peppers, cooked just long enough that it wouldn’t give us salmonella.

  Lolee had long blonde hair she’d bleached white at the ends. It was crunchy and beginning to turn green from repeated dunkings in the public pool. She was all teenage summer smells: fruity lip balm, body spray, and the strong aroma of chlorine. A miniature Brynn, if Brynn were the kind of girl who’d grown up with adults who cared about her. At Lolee’s age, Brynn and I were fucking things up. She was already thinking about leaving by the time she was fourteen, wondering how she could escape, when all the while I was thinking about how to trap her with me forever.

  “Ma, you need help?” I asked, not bothering to get up. My mother hated help with anything in the kitchen. She dropped the Pyrex lid on the counter and the clang sounded like a yell.

  She brought over a tube of refrigerated crescent rolls and dropped it on the counter. I held one end of the tube while Lolee took the other. She curled back the cardboard while we both pulled. It exploded with a loud pop, and dough oozed from the rift.

  “Get the baking sheet,” my mother said, pulling something from the toaster oven. “Damn it, this is already burnt.”

  Kneeling on the floor, I pulled out the best tray, flecked rusty brown from years of cooking spray burned onto its surface. Lolee flung the cookie parts at me. I caught very few of them; most slid beneath the fridge until my mother slapped the back of Lolee’s head, then pinched her cheek and rubbed her neck.

  Lolee was all odds and ends. Dressed in a T-shirt and cutoff jean shorts, she’d kicked off her flip-flops and kept nudging at them with her toes. She had the brightness of Brynn and my own jaw set—stark, as if the strong line of muscle had come from biting down and holding back. There was a sharpness to her that revealed itself only in slips. I knew that she wasn’t mine. These parts were Morton by association, the giving up of genetic material from my brother, but I claimed her in my heart. I’d held her to my breast when she was an infant and nuzzled her fuzzy baby head. The starling bird daughter that would never come from my own egg.

  I rolled the dough into small triangles and stuffed the tray into the oven alongside the chicken. Beers were in the old fridge out back, and my tired neck felt one calling my name. I left my mother with her cooking and my niece with her cookies and went out to find Milo.

  He was propped in my father’s old recliner on the back porch. He’d already cracked open his second beer, the first empty dropped beside his boot on the smooth concrete floor.

  “I told her about the lady at the art place. How she gave you a card.” He didn’t look at me while he said it, just peeled the label off his beer. It was coming off in wet hunks which he then scrubbed down onto his dirty jeans. The bits rolled and pilled like molting flesh. It looked like dying might.

  “I wish you hadn’t told her that.” Milo was usually the one I could count on for stability, but lately he’d been surprising me. Saying things, making decisions. I didn’t like it.

  There were only three beers left, one in the door and the other two jammed between some racks of venison that had definitely gone south. The last time we’d had any fresh meat was when my father had gone out with Andy Reeling from a few streets over and come back carting two big bucks. He’d mounted both heads and priced them over to Andy for BOGO. Said we didn’t need any more heads in our living room, and he was right—already there were multiples mounted on each wall, peering down at guests with their glassy, vacant eyes.

  When we were younger, Milo and I had given them the names of the seven dwarfs, plus a few additions we’d come up with: Sleepy was the one with the downcast eyes, Dopey the one with the tongue hanging slightly out and to the left, Happy with the perpetual grin—likely more a grimace of pain—plus Damn and Goddamn for how often our father shouted those words at the television set during Bucs games.

  The patio held the relics of furniture past. Our mother’s card table with the vinyl top slashed to bits from where she’d used an X-Acto knife while scrapbooking, the wicker-backed rocking chair that had lost nearly all tension in its seat, and a faded floral love seat ripped to shreds from the scratching of the dogs.

  I sat on the edge of the rocking chair and opened the beer with my key-chain bottle opener. Dad’s old one, the relief at the top the shape of a golden bass, mouth jutting open to bite at the cap. It hadn’t been on him when he shot himself, and I was glad for it. Still, as I opened the beer, Milo and I stared at each other and then looked away. I remembered my dad sitting on the back porch with a beer of his own, the bass hanging from his key chain, which always made a lump in his jeans pocket. Remembering soured the beer, made my tongue and teeth hurt. How his hands grasped the fish head, the hissing sound of the air releasing as the cap flung free. Milo and me running around in the yard, watching him drink. I’d wanted to be just like him. Tall, handsome, always unruffled. The kind of person who could take anything you threw at him. The kind of man who could drink a beer in two long pulls and smile afterward, completely satisfied with the life he’d built.

  “Remember when Brynn got me that bottle opener to look like Dad’s and it broke the first time I used it?”

  Of course I did. I was the one who helped her choose it. We were buying Christmas gifts at the mall and she asked me to pick something out for Milo. You know him better than I do, she’d said, and they’d already been married a year.

  “I remember that you tried to superglue it back together.”

  “Didn’t want her to know I’d already fucked it up.”

  He�
��d gotten her a necklace with a heart pendant, one of those things men always buy that women would never buy for themselves. She wore it over to my apartment, and when she took off her clothes, she draped it over a dusty lamp in the bedroom. I saw it dangling there the next morning through the bleary eyes of my hangover. The tiny diamond chips twinkled in the sunlight, laughing at me. She’d never asked for it back, and I’d never offered it.

  “Guess I fucked up a lot.” Milo’s hands fidgeted on his beer bottle, scraping off more waterlogged paper, rolling the tacky stuff into balls between his fingers.

  Brynn was a topic we didn’t discuss. What was there to say? She was gone. She’d left us. I could barely stomach my own memories; I didn’t want to deal with his.

  After Brynn, he was less easygoing and more unavailable. Missing even more work, bailing on the kids. A no-show at sports events and dance recitals. Forgetting birthdays. He still smiled all the time, but it wasn’t the kind that reached his eyes. Faux happy, the kind of face I’d construct on an animal I was trying to make docile.

  I changed the subject before we got too far into maudlin territory. It was too easy to start him crying. “You think Mom should do it. Go work with that lady.”

  One of his shoulders rolled up into a shrug, a nonverbal maybe he’d been perfecting since he was a kid and didn’t want to talk. It was my chance to help fix what was wrong, to ask him questions. Get him to open up. But talking about things was never my specialty. I was the one you came to when you wanted something done. Change your oil, build your back deck, grill your fish. I showed my love by changing tires and jumping batteries. Milo was the one who listened. He always made people feel appreciated and cared for. I’d loved Brynn first, but I’d given her up to him, knowing he’d take better care of her. Someone to tell her all the meaningful, romantic things my mouth couldn’t seem to spew.

  “We just need to find something else for Mom to do,” I said. “Keep her busy.”

  Milo rolled his eyes. “She’s already doing that. It’s not working out so great.”

  After Dad killed himself, we’d both talked to her about seeing a therapist. She’d outright refused and hadn’t spoken to either of us for a week. She was offended we’d even asked, as if it were perfectly normal to traipse around in the middle of the night, putting together peep shows in our shop’s front window. I thought about the boar again, sitting lonesome and small in Lucinda’s gallery, and hoped she’d take good care of it. It felt a little like I’d given another woman an ex-girlfriend’s belongings.

  “You think we should bring up the therapist again?” I asked. “Maybe that would help.”

  “Don’t they have art therapy in counseling centers? Isn’t that a thing?”

  “Why does she even need to do art?”

  “She likes it. You know she did it in school before she married Dad. Sculpting and shit.” Milo flicked a fat carpenter ant off the arm of the chair. It landed on the floor close to my boot.

  “I didn’t know she was that into it.”

  Milo snorted and rocked back in his chair. “You don’t know a lot of things about Mom, Jessa.”

  It hadn’t felt necessary to learn more about my mother outside of her existence on the periphery of my life. She cleaned our clothes and bought us groceries. Made our meals, mopped and dusted, trimmed the tree. My father was the one I’d admired. He was the one I’d wanted to be like. But then he’d killed himself and left me the letter, and everything I’d thought I knew turned out to be wrong. I had a lot of working theories as to why my father chose me to find him, but the one that kept me up at night was the idea that he knew I was hard inside. That maybe he thought I’d treat him the way I would a deer carcass.

  Would I have done that? I wondered. Was there a part of me that could compartmentalize his death, skin him and treat him like just another piece in the shop?

  “Even in art therapy they make you talk,” I said. “So she’d have to deal with shit.”

  “Maybe you should go to therapy.”

  “Fuck you,” I replied, but there was no heat behind it.

  I was the one who’d called the police. I’d identified our father’s body in the morgue. In the span of twenty-four hours, I’d seen the father who’d bought me a Publix sub for lunch that afternoon, the dead one covered in blood that night, and the blue-hued body laid out naked under fluorescent lights in the county hospital at six the next morning. My mother had seen none of that. There were times I worried she didn’t really think he was dead, that maybe she just thought he’d left on a fishing trip for a couple of weeks.

  “Maybe I can find something for her to do at the shop. Organize shit, or clean up the front.”

  Humming, he tipped back in the recliner and drained the last of his beer. He set the empty on the cabinet beside him, one of the relics that had cluttered up my bedroom before being relegated to the back porch. Now it housed our empties, some still half-full, holding drowned cigarette butts and the carcasses of insects.

  “We’ll figure it out.” I swapped the bottle from hand to hand, listening to the murmur of voices slipping evenly through the crack in the sliding glass door.

  Milo leaned forward again and scrubbed both hands through his hair. The set of his shoulders gave me pause; hunched forward, he looked so much like our father. “About the business. I was thinking we could hire someone else.”

  My head ached fiercely, the knots of my braid yanking at my scalp. I wanted to be back in the workshop, focusing all my energy on the hawk I’d been struggling with—looking at the angle of its beak, the movement of the neck, the wings spanned in near flight, almost but not quite catching the breeze. “Milo, come on. You know I can’t.”

  “Just a few days a week, part-time work.”

  In the backyard, wind scattered yard debris that had accumulated in the months since our father passed. Leaves and grit kicked up against the screen. I stared hard at the old birdbath, cracked and full of brown muck. Sparrows hopped in and out of the detritus, flicking the dirty water delicately off their bodies with brisk shakes.

  Milo sat back again, jaw set. “It’s part mine, too. I get some say.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “I get some say, damn it.”

  We didn’t argue over much, but there was the one thing that continued to hurt my brother, over and over again. The rawboned son with his mother’s pale eyes and sloped shoulders, indicators of his uneasy personality. “When did Bastien get home?”

  “Last night. He’s staying in my old room.” Red crept up the bearded shadow of Milo’s neck, cloaking everything like a rash. His embarrassment was feral, an ugly, dirty thing I could nearly taste. “Thought he could stay with Mom for a while. That’s good, right? Another person to keep an eye on her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s been talking about getting one of those tiny homes they keep showing on television. The ones that are like three hundred feet square. Can fit a whole regular-sized house inside?” Milo smiled and shook his head. “Better than an apartment, he says.”

  I bit into the meat of my cheek, worked the flesh over with my molars. Bastien was Brynn’s oldest and had just finished a second stint in rehab. Not related by blood, not to the Mortons, but he looked so much like Brynn that Milo couldn’t help but love him. The last time he’d stayed in town, he’d pawned our mother’s jewelry and written eight hundred bucks’ worth of bad checks.

  “He’s better. You can see it in his coloring.” Milo looked at me and I saw that he believed what he was saying. Saw that he needed to feel like it was true, for a while, to make things seem solid again.

  Need, my father had written. To need meant to be vulnerable. It was one of the scariest things I could imagine. Needing anything meant you were open to invasion. It meant you had no control of yourself.

  “Only if he’s up for grunt work.” I couldn’t say no to my brother. Not when it was Brynn’s kid. “If he fucks up, he’s done. I mean it.”

  “Fine.” Mi
lo got up and pulled out another beer for himself. “He’s doing good. Just needs something to keep him busy.”

  Behind my brother, a shadow filled the sliding glass. Bastien stood with his long arm cradled around the door, as if holding himself in place. He looked better than the last time I’d seen him. His skin was clear of the scuzz of acne and he’d lost a lot of the sallowness. He wore a clean white T-shirt and some board shorts printed in varied shades of blue, pale palm trees emblazoned over a navy wash of waves. I recognized them as Milo’s clothes.

  “Grandma says dinner’s ready.” When he smiled, his teeth were dark, nearly wooden in his mouth. Already his hairline was receding, crawling toward the rear of his skull, as if escaping from the hard look in his eyes. “Got any more of those?” He pointed to the unopened beer cradled in Milo’s palm. “Go good with the chicken.”

  “Go get the jug of tea from the fridge, tell Grandma we’ll be there in just a minute.”

  I wondered how much he’d heard of our conversation. Bastien was a lot like his mother in that he let you know only what he wanted you to know. Everything else stayed locked up tight.

  Milo stashed the last two beers in the mildewed cupboard where our mother liked to stock preserves—they stood upright behind Ball jars of orange marmalade and strawberry jam turned the color of beef gravy. Then we went inside. It still smelled like home, though a faded-out version. There was less of my father’s aftershave. Less of the tanners and formaldehyde, a scent he’d always carried on his body.

  Smell, I’d learned, was something that would always be able to sucker-punch me.