by Kelly Fordon
Afterward
When he was in the grip of it, my son would yell: “You’re such a fucking bitch, Mom!”
I thought I was doing the right thing. I never responded. It was better than reacting. God knows I didn’t want to tell him what I thought of him.
I kept the door locked. I closed the curtains.
Sometimes, the pounding went on for hours. “Do you know how this makes me feel?” he’d scream.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
And then the crying.
I ignored it all.
Did I drive him to it? What should I have done?
I knew something was wrong when I saw the voicemail. He’d never left me a voicemail before.
“Mom, you can find your son on the corner of Jefferson and Alter in the parking lot around the back of the bank building. Mom, this is not a prank call. I’m sorry.”
It sounded like a computer-generated voice. It wasn’t my son’s voice. Or that of any of his friends. Or even a human voice. I put the phone down and sat on my hands, which were freezing. I sat on my hands and stared out the back window at the trampoline, which had a layer of snow across the top of it. The trampoline I had bought seven years ago when he was eleven.
The day before it happened, I had requested a book from the library.
The Waves by Virginia Woolf.
The Waves was on the hold shelf, and I was on my way to pick it up when I got the call.
For days afterward, the name kept bumping up on my shore.
The waves.
The waves.
The waves.
At night I dreamed about the waves.
My tiny rowboat, useless oars dangling from the paddle clamps, and a huge wave—a seiche wave—running me down.
I am thinking about the call. How much time passed before they made the call? Could they have saved him but were too high—too . . . blasted, strung out, so undone that someone could die right beside you and . . .
I can hear him laughing. I’m sure all these words are the wrong words. Why don’t I even have the right words to describe the last moments of my own son’s life? How could I have been so far away at the end? On another plane, with another vocabulary, on the other side of the galaxy.
He overdosed in the house, and they carried him to the alley. That’s what the police said. A couple of junkies trekking across the empty lot. They leaned him against the dumpster as if he just needed a rest. Wedged him in between the wall and the dumpster so he wouldn’t fall over. The police said:
He was transported with care.
Then whoever it was—someone else’s son or daughter—phoned his mother.
with care
The rowboat dream again. Except now the boat is empty. I’m not in it anymore. Just an empty rowboat and a massive wave. Where did I go? Did I jump? Have I given up? Have I already drowned? Maybe I am swimming for shore. Maybe I am swimming right into the wave.
Maybe I am just waiting to die.
I would like to kill every person in this fucking funeral home. I know they are all thinking, this could never happen to me.
My sister with her how-are-you-holding-up look.
Aunt Betsy and her simpering pink mouth and her fat arms. When she puts her puffy hands on me, I want to spit in her face.
I want to spit on her children, too. There they are, the poster children for perfect offspring.
The bachelor’s in communications.
The nurse.
Aunt Betsy, your family is doing so well!
A year ago, I would have been sitting in the back row of a funeral for a heroin addict, and I would have been sure that nothing like this could ever happen to me.
“Daniel is with the Lord.”
“We wish he could have stayed with us longer, but it isn’t for us to understand the plan.”
When I heard the Father say those words, I wanted to scream and tear my dress down the front and race up and down the aisle. If I had a bat, I would have taken his head off.
I am possessed by the Devil and I am capable of great evil.
But I don’t do anything.
I just sit in my pew and shake like a leaf, Ron next to me.
We don’t touch.
Not even once.
I hate him, too.
I really do.
The rowboat is still empty. If I am still swimming, someone should give me a medal. But why would I bother? There is a fucking seiche wave tipping the small bowl of this lake, and all the water is going to run over the side.
And a new twist last night:
Crowds on the beach.
Spectators clapping.
I can’t find myself.
All I can see are the spectators standing onshore looking out at the water. I must be surfacing and going under again and again and again.
They are a long way off.
Why are they clapping?
I know Ron blames me. I know Ron is shuffling around the house in his bathrobe looking at the ground because he knows that if he looks up at me, he will take the coffee pot and pour the scalding liquid on my head.
He thinks that because we fought, because I was hard on Daniel, because I wouldn’t let him borrow the car, because I changed the locks and called the cops on him when he robbed the Frains next door, I caused it.
I drove him to it.
I got up today, went to the bathroom, and went back to bed. Dr. Richardson stopped by just after lunch and offered me Xanax, and Ron had to hold me back because I tried to kick the man.
The wrestling injury—the very man who prescribed the Oxycontin. A murderer in my house.
And do you know what I did? Dutiful mama?
I gave him two Oxycontin every six to eight hours (or as needed), and I did it when he said he needed it . . .
. . . and I got him more when he said he still needed it two weeks later.
I wrote a ten-page letter to the American Medical Association, and then I wrote to the newspaper. At 4 p.m., I called his office. When the nurse said, “Doctor Richardson’s office,” I yelled, “Murderer!”
I spend a lot of time lying in bed thinking about my rowboat. Before I jumped or drowned or swam away, did I ever run into anyone else out on the water? If I’m not in the boat any longer, is it possible I was rescued? And why doesn’t the wave ever hit the empty boat? Why the same dream every night with the wave just about to hit and then . . .
What is the meaning of this stupid dream?
We are all at the mercy of the waves.
How trite.
Even my dreams are trite.
A lifetime of drift.
That’s life.
One day you the wave will engulf you as well, fucker.
You know what they do now? They don’t bring you down to the morgue. They pull up the faces on a computer screen. They push a button and there is your beloved son, his face, the scar on his chin from that time when he was four, when he jumped off the bed and cut it open on the dresser. The little divot and the scar above his right eyebrow from the time he was eleven and fell off his bike. That was before he sold his bike. That was after the Oxycontin and before the heroin.
•
When he died he weighed 117 pounds. He was 6′2″.
Maybe if I hadn’t yelled at him.
Maybe if I hadn’t yelled at him to come out of his room, to pick up the dirty laundry, to turn off the computer, to make it home on time, to stop using, to stop stealing, to stop wandering off, to stop running away, to stop selling.
To stop.
That’s the word I used more than any other:
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
He was such a good boy.
Last night, the wave crashed into the rowboat. Finally. It happened in slow motion. At first the wave appeared to be pushing the boat along, then it rolled the boat. I felt like I was watching from above, from a great distance. The wave kept coming until it filled the screen of my mind and everything went blank.
I woke up.
I died.
I woke up.
I died.
I died and then
I woke up.
When he was little, we used to take naps in the afternoon. If I woke up before him, I’d roll on my side and stare into his angelic face. His skin was soft and his lips were pink and his blond hair was like a curtain over his eyes. His little hands were cupped. One time he woke up while I was watching him.
“I wish we could stay like this forever,” he said.
In the Doghouse
Leah’s friend Sasha had convinced her that estate sales were a terrific way to save money. The items were cheap to begin with, and one could easily bargain them down. Leah didn’t want to go because she was too broke to buy anything—even if it was on sale. In the end, she relented because she lacked an alternate plan for the day.
The sale was on Moran Road, one of the nicest streets in town. According to Sasha, ritzy addresses usually drew scads of shoppers. If they wanted to find anything worth buying, they had to arrive right at 9 a.m. They turned onto the block at 8:55. Both sides of the street were already lined with cars. A clump of dumpy-looking people were congregated on the front lawn waiting for their entry numbers. Sasha found a spot near the end of the street underneath an elm tree. All the trees on Moran were imposing, impervious to the diseases that had brought down the spindly elms on Leah’s street. Pesticide, like everything else, meted out to the rich first.
The estate sale house was the only ugly one on the block, a gray split-level with latticework running up both sides of the plywood door.
“Oh no!” Leah exclaimed when she realized which house they were headed toward.
“Whoever built this little turd of a house must have been on drugs,” Sasha said as they made their way up the front walk.
For Leah, the fact that the house was unappealing wasn’t the problem. It was the location. The estate sale house was right next to a beautiful redbrick colonial in which Leah’s friend Tina Buhler had once lived.
Leah had been jealous of Tina Buhler. She’d met her at a Junior League meeting five years earlier when Leah’s husband, Paul, was still in law school. Leah had dropped out of the Junior League when Paul decided to become a police officer instead. Although she was happy Paul was pursuing his passion, it was clear she was never going to have her own Junior League show house. Besides, she imagined some of the sustainers looked askance at his new profession. She remembered feeling a teensy bit sorry for herself when she brought the kids over to Tina Buhler’s swanky house for play dates. But then she would remind herself: at least my husband isn’t a drunk; at least he isn’t out every night carousing with his twenty-two-year-old paralegal.
These days, Leah felt more comfortable with people of humble means like Sasha, who was married to a schoolteacher. Sasha never offered condolences when Leah said she was spending Christmas vacation at home instead of skiing in Park City.
Tina Buhler was from West Virginia. She’d met her husband, Zane, at Princeton, which she’d attended on scholarship, the first Ivy Leaguer from her town. The colonial, the Audi, and the unlimited clothing budget had been an overwhelming boon for her, but she’d always seemed ambivalent about it. She once said that even though she didn’t have much when she lived there, she’d been happier in West Virginia with her family.
“People there watch out for each other,” she said. “I don’t get that feeling here.”
Leah had commiserated with her on that front. People in Tina’s snobby neighborhood always seemed bent on knocking each other down a notch. People in Leah’s middle-class neighborhood, not five miles away, knew that life delivered its own blows and that friends and family were essential to cushion the fall.
In West Virginia, Tina said she had not dealt with mean neighbors like the old woman, Eunice, who lived in the ugly house next door—the same house that Leah was now approaching for the estate sale.
Leah remembered that Eunice had called the police on Tina when the children made whooping sounds in her backyard or hit a baseball over the fence or even laughed raucously for more than two minutes at a stretch.
“She hates me,” Tina used to say. “She asked me where I was from, and when I said West Virginia, she said, ‘Coal mining country?’ in this really snide voice. She said she had a maid named Stella who looked just like me. Another time, she just came right up to me and said, ‘I don’t know what it’s like in the hills of West Virginia, but people around here don’t ride around all night on their bicycles like drunken fools and then lock themselves out of their own houses.’”
It was true that drunken bicycle riding was a recurring problem for Tina’s husband, Zane. He did not hold up well at all under Eunice’s scrutiny.
Now, standing in Eunice’s entryway, Leah would have given anything to see Eunice’s face as interlopers scurried from room to room snatching up lamps and end tables and taking down pictures. What a lame ending for that snotty old bitch, Leah thought with more than a little satisfaction.
It was only 9:05, but several people were already struggling under the weight of their acquisitions. Neon-green carpeting covered the floor in the foyer, living room, dining room, study, and staircase. The house smelled like rotting bananas, ashtrays, and smelly shoes.
“Why do old people stink?” Sasha whispered as they made their way through the foyer.
Leah shrugged. “I think it’s because they lose their sense of smell. You know, it’s the precursor to dementia.”
“Really? Well, promise me you’ll tell me when I start to reek,” Sasha said before rushing up the stairs past a portly gray-haired man who had a small area rug rolled up and tucked under his arm.
Leah stood in the middle of the foyer and looked around. In the living room, two small armchairs upholstered with a pink-and-green floral print flanked the fireplace. A checked pink-and-green sofa sat opposite it. They were so bright, they seemed to be pulsing. Leah turned away and decided to head upstairs too.
In the bedroom, several women were rifling through what must have been Eunice’s closet. A size 14 red taffeta dress hung from the closet door. It looked like something Nancy Reagan might have worn, albeit in a smaller size.
Leah walked around the bed and peeked out the window, which looked down directly into Tina’s yard. Eunice must have sat up in this bed in the lavender terrycloth robe now being offered up for a dollar and watched Zane during one of his drunken blowouts, maybe even the final one. It was too terrible to believe. Leah closed the sheers.
Opposite the twin bed where Eunice had probably expired was an old 19-inch television on a rolling cart. No wonder she’d heard Zane outside the window. She probably couldn’t get any reception on her antiquated TV. All she could hear was her inebriated neighbor stumbling around and pounding on his back door. She’d probably had all sorts of theories about Zane: the rich boy stifled by his father who resorted to alcohol and a sexy, moronic wife. In reality, Tina had been far from a moron, but how would Eunice have known that? She’d never been able to see past Tina’s West Virginia twang.
Next to the bed were a Bible, a rosary, an avocado-green rotary phone, and a paperback novel called Bones. Someone touched Leah’s shoulder. A tiny man with a pencil mustache apologized when she flinched. He just wanted to slip past to examine the phone.
“I’m a collector,” he said. “I love these old rotary phones.”
The basement walls were knotty pine and a full bar lined the back wall with a plaque over the top that read Mi Casa Es Su Casa! All sorts of mixers and tumblers and shot glasses and other party paraphernalia lined the bar. In the other corner of the room was a fireplace. The stools were the kind that spun all the way around. Leah’s parents had also had a bar in their house when she was growing up and they’d had similar stools. The stools had provided Leah with a lot of entertainment when her parents were busy with their guests.
“Every time I get my hands on something, this snooty bitch slaps me down.” Sasha had appeared o
ut of nowhere carrying a blue porcelain lamp and a small red Oriental rug. “She’s got the sterling and the bookshelf, but she is not getting these things.”
“You have to be tough,” Leah agreed.
“People are so aggressive,” Sasha sighed. “Isn’t this basement the best? They used to have more fun in the old days.”
The patio furniture was black wrought iron with more pink-and-green floral cushions. It reminded Leah of her grandmother’s house in Florida. She’d stayed with her grandmother every Christmas while her parents booked a hotel for themselves a mile away right on the beach. Her grandmother’s house had looked out onto the Intracoastal Waterway. Every now and then, a manatee would make its way into the canal. A couple of times Leah had been sitting on the dock when one surfaced. They were slow and gentle-looking creatures. Of course, that’s why they were nearly extinct now. If her grandmother hadn’t sold the house, Leah could probably sit on the dock for weeks without spotting one. If her grandmother hadn’t sold the house in the ’80s, Leah would be rich. C’est la vie. She sat down in a wrought-iron chair and bounced a couple of times, wondering who had purchased her grandmother’s patio furniture.
“I found a couple of great chairs upstairs in the bedroom,” Sasha said when they met back up in the kitchen. “And I’m going to nab them before that witch gets her hands on them. Can you come with me to take a look?”
Leah didn’t want to go back up to the bedroom, but Sasha didn’t know Tina’s story, and Leah didn’t want to explain her reluctance, so she followed her.
The night Zane died, Eunice had told the police it was not the first time her neighbor had passed out in the yard. She told them the drinking to excess was “a nightly occurrence.” She said that Zane played loud music late at night. His white trash wife didn’t care what he did. She’d seen them dancing provocatively in the backyard.
According to Leah’s husband, Paul, who had heard it from Bill, a fellow police officer working the night shift, Eunice had been disgusted by Zane’s perpetual intoxication.
“A man with young children! Behaving like that! Night after night!”