by Alan Rossi
Almost simultaneously, David’s car pulled into the parking lot and her phone buzzed with a text message. She looked at the text, a number she didn’t recognize, and then read the text, which said, We need to talk, and not understanding who this text was from, she quickly typed to Louis Walters that she had to go. As she typed it, she looked up the area code of the phone number, saw that the number came from an area code she didn’t recognize, and realized this was April’s mother contacting her. We need to talk, the text read. Louis Walters was saying something, but Katherine wrote, Please don’t try to contact me. She’d contact him if she felt she could. She thought about saying that she missed him – if only because she might want to see him again – but she didn’t. Suddenly this was clear. She missed his hands on her, his mouth on her, his body making her body feel like a young body again, but these were all things she also had come to hate, and in this way, she did not miss him at all. She missed the pleasure he provided, a momentary pleasure, and everything else, she felt, which was beneath the pleasure, was her sickness. Some brief pleasure was what she got from Louis Walters, and the rest, none of which she really liked and almost all of which made her feel bad, she did to herself, and so she wrote, Bye, Louis, and closed out the Skype window, and searched for an article about how to make quiche with goat cheese, and texted April’s mother back: Let’s all meet when you get in on Friday so we can discuss exactly what is going to happen.
TAMMY
Flowers fall even though we love them; weeds grow even though we dislike them. Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out enlightenment through the self is realization.
—DOGEN, GENJOKOAN
Your mind is [. . .] always attempting to leave here and now, to look for purpose or meaning beyond itself.
—DAININ KATAGIRI
There were accidents along the way, stupid people, Tammy thought, driving recklessly, making it harder for everyone else, but most annoyingly, there was one not two hours from her house, right at the beginning of her drive across the country. Good omen, she thought, sitting in the traffic. She felt some generalized anger at everything in her perception – at the flashing lights of police cars passing her on the shoulder, at an ambulance, a fire truck, the red taillights of other cars and trucks and semis, the steady rain, the people inside the cars, even the buildings and restaurants off the side of the highway, the night sky polluted by city light, a sickly grey-orange, the leafless trees – and this anger shifted to an annoyed boredom, a sort of wispy feeling of wishing stupid people out of existence. The world might be better then. If there was something some mad scientist could slip into the water that only affected stupid people, causing them to Facebook themselves to death or something, uploading pictures of themselves and their pets for days on end without eating or drinking, growing sickly and tired, eventually falling asleep in front of their webcam, dying a selfish and peaceful death, feeling loved by themselves and their pit bulls. Tammy thought the headline in the paper the next day would be, FB Users Die in Front of FB, Immediately Improving the World.
For a moment, she thought of April, whose house she was driving to, who she kept thinking she’d be seeing, but wouldn’t be seeing. There’d only be Jack, and she knew this was her one opportunity, a chance not only to correct mistakes she’d made as a parent to April, but also to give Jack the kind of life he deserved and to show everyone that she was capable of doing this. And she was driving to the boy to do this despite the fact that she hadn’t been told that her daughter had been in a car accident, had actually died in the car accident, until four days after the crash and she was driving there now, four days later, despite the fact that the other side of the family barely registered her existence, that they didn’t like her, and despite Steve’s disapproval. Yesterday, when they had first learned about the accident, Steve had been his usual caring, considerate self. Like her, he also couldn’t believe it’d taken her four days to learn about the accident. It had occurred early Wednesday morning, and the wreck wasn’t discovered until Wednesday at daybreak. And yet she didn’t find out until fucking Sunday. The story was the authorities contacted Nathaniel and that side of the family, but hadn’t contacted her because April didn’t have the same last name, had no will, no contact information for her mother, then some mix-up occurred where supposedly someone from the other side of the family was supposed to contact her, but never did. She got a bunch of apologies and we’re so sorries from David after (somehow, who knows fucking how, Tammy told Steve) he finally realized she hadn’t been contacted. She heard David’s explanations that the other side of the family had forgotten, they’d all forgotten, in their grief it had all gotten mixed up, and the police or whoever hadn’t done their damn jobs, and he was so sorry, this father of Nathaniel and Nicholas had said, apologizing over and over to her. But his apologies counted for nothing, she’d thought. Steve had said that it was bullshit was what it was, and after doing some bitching together about how small-town police cut corners, but really that it was this other side of the family that was worse, she’d then said she didn’t even want to think of any of it anymore. And she didn’t want to. She wanted to think of April, of Jack.
She told this to Steve, and he agreed that that was what she should be thinking about. He had said that he too had lost someone close, a thing she already knew, but so he knew what she was going through. She’d watched him speaking, watched him talking about himself, not with surprise, but with curiosity. Was he really talking about himself at this moment? They’d only been seeing each other seven months, but he had already moved in, they had already shared whatever they typically hid of their pasts, they were too old to do any testing of the relationship, and so moved in together easefully if only half-enthusiastically. It felt to Tammy like a kind of maturity. Steve had told her many times about the old girlfriend, and he did it again after news of the accident. How he’d been driving on a country road after being at a bar. Back when he was still drinking too much. He’d seen a green light turn yellow too late, the car skidded through and they were hit by a truck. His old girlfriend, who was in the passenger seat, she was the one hit by a truck. She died instantly. While telling her this, Tammy was always amazed at how easily he could take a situation and make it about himself while at the same time forgetting that he’d told her all this several times, once right when they began seeing each other, and then a few months later when her cousin died. He even told her some version of the story when her mother got sick and had to have her gallbladder removed. There were always slight changes to his story: one time, they were drinking beer, one time, whisky, one time, it was raining, one time, it was only misting. The one thing that didn’t change was the way the story ended. With the notion of the guilt he carried around and that the accident was his rock bottom, that made him quit drinking, that made him take responsibility for himself and his life. At first, Tammy had admired this, had admired him. She still did. But in the last month or so, she’d begun to pity him. He seemed a man consumed by his past. An event that happened over twenty years ago shading the rest of his life. She felt she could never replace the dead woman who she only recently realized he was sort of romanticizing. When Steve learned April was gone, he’d said, I know what you’re going through. It’s like, you know, they tell you they’re dead, but you can’t help but think you’ll see them tomorrow, or in a few hours. It’s almost like you want to say, Yes, I know she’s dead, but then you wait for her to show up at your door. And I bet your daughter was just like Sloane for me. You’re afraid of forgetting the perfect things this person did. The way she’d cut off her split ends while sitting on the sofa and then there’d be hair everywhere. Or how every Thursday was fresh gulf shrimp. She just had to have it. Stuff you didn’t even notice before, but that you now saw were the perfect things about these people. Tammy’d listened to him, feeling both the loss of April and the loss of Steve, finally realizing just how much he hadn’t moved on, how much he felt, but al
most never said aloud, that he killed the girl, and that made her feel like he was pathetic, made her hate him some, and made her want to take care of him too. But mostly it made her pity him and wonder what he would’ve been like had he never met this woman, or at least if their relationship had ended in a normal way. Though what was normal? she’d wondered. At least you can see it as just one of life’s things though, Steve had added. You have no guilt in this. You didn’t cause it. It was as close as he’d come to it, saying it this way. Partly in order to make him stop talking, to stop him thinking about himself, she’d looked at him and said, Jack’s coming to stay with us. Steve had sat back from her on the sofa then stood up. He went to the kitchen, got a cup of coffee for himself, for her. His typical measured movements. Careful. Considerate. He wanted to appear considerate, she knew. She hated that she’d said Jack was going to live with them as a way to take him a down a notch. You want to make this about you? she’d thought. Let’s see what this looks like when you’re actually involved. When you’re forced to stop thinking about yourself. At the same time, she knew the boy needed to be with her, that she alone among both sides of the family knew what the boy needed. She’d been an overworked, overstressed young mother, who hadn’t paid enough attention to April, and she knew this, this alone – attention and care, really being there – was something she could give Jack. She knew it because she’d failed at it. And she didn’t trust Nathaniel or Stefanie, she didn’t trust Jack’s grandparents on the other side, simply because things had come too easily for them. Jack would be there, but would they really be there for Jack? In addition to this, she was afraid, she could acknowledge that, that these other people would push her out, or at the very least would neglect her, ignore her, and she wouldn’t know her grandchild, and that wasn’t happening. Steve brought her the coffee and told her that he understood what she was going through, he knew that pain, that loss, but getting the boy wasn’t going to make that loss go away. Trust me, he told her. I tried so many things to make that pain and loss go away. You can’t. Plus, look at our lives. We can’t look after a four-year-old. That wouldn’t be fair to him. You have to think about him, Steve had said. Tammy had taken the coffee, drunk it and tried to appear satisfied. Tried to appear pleased with his point of view. She was careful not to say anything though. Just drink your coffee, she remembered thinking. Then do what you know is right, which was what she was doing now, in the car, on the way to Jack, the only real option there was. She hadn’t even told him she was going. The last thing he’d said to her was something like, Let’s think about it and then we can talk about it in a couple days when you’re more clearheaded. He had also said, Maybe I was wrong earlier, maybe this is something we could pull off, but let’s sit on it first. Tammy had agreed, gone to work, and left around five in the evening, well before her shift was over, asking Dolores to cover for her, and then, only a couple hours into the drive, hit the accident she was sitting in now.
She tried to sit up and look down the highway, but could see only the taillights of cars reddening the road and her windshield. There was a soft humming from the car’s heater, so different from her own car, an old Jeep Cherokee from the nineties. The heater in the Cherokee rattled, like there was a squirrel working a tiny unicycle that fanned the air toward her. Tammy had even told this once to April. She liked picturing it, the little squirrel in there, but then April tore off two of the vent things one day trying to find him while he was napping. Tammy told her he’d nap or go grocery shopping when the car was stopped, but six-year-old April had broken the vents and so Tammy had to tell her the truth, which ruined the thing for her, too. The game was gone not just for April but for Tammy too. She turned up the heat in the car now. She sometimes forgot new cars were like this one, which was a Jetta, with a lighted, digital display, the phone connected to the speakers through Bluetooth. Her own Jeep no longer had a glove box door, a headrest was lost long ago when April was still young, just a teenager – a fight they’d had in which April calmly pulled the headrest off Tammy’s seat and dropped it out her window. The brakes had started to grind, again, too, and the wheel pulled hard to the right if Tammy let go. She sometimes felt like she was fighting the Jeep, that what it really wanted to do was turn around and go home, like an old dog on a walk. But this rental, this car, felt like if she were to let go of the wheel, it would convey her to where she needed to go. She’d been going, moving easily and smoothly in the car, barely driving it seemed, like a capsule through the night in a futuristic movie, conveying her toward the kid. Then she hit the traffic.
She called her sister Jeannie for something to do and told her that she was stuck in a traffic jam and needed some advice about Steve. Jeannie asked what she meant and Tammy told her that Steve didn’t want Jack to stay with them. Not only that, but she was driving now to North Carolina and hadn’t even told him. He thought she was at work. He would not be happy when he found out what was actually happening. There was a quiet moment on the line before Jeannie said that she hadn’t realized Tammy was the guardian. Tammy said that she wasn’t necessarily the guardian, that no one was necessarily the guardian, that April and Nicholas had never stated who the guardian would be, but she had to be. It couldn’t be the other side of the family. She’d never see Jack then. She told Jeannie that she didn’t necessarily want to be doing this, she just had to. For Jack. That was how it was for her: part of her didn’t want to do a thing and another part had to. A constant fighting in herself. Did her sister ever have that? It felt like that was her entire life, fighting with herself and the world. Not only was she fighting Steve, not only was she going to have to fight the other side of the family just to get Jack in the place he should be, she was also fighting the damn traffic. It was how her life always was. Same as always. Just turn around, her sister had said. What’s the point of driving? How long is that drive anyway? Fly out or something. Her sister said that this was a hard enough time for Tammy without having to drive across the country. Do herself a favor, turn around, go home, talk to Steve, tell him whatever you need to tell him, and then buy a plane ticket. Tammy told her sister that she knew she didn’t have money for a ticket, even with the bereavement rate. Plus, she had no choice. She’d gotten off a few days from the hospital now, this week, and that was all they were going to give her. She couldn’t drive back now and walk in and say, Hey, I’m going to take my shift after all, Dolores, thanks for coming in though. But hey, I’m flying out tomorrow night, so could you cover these new hours instead? Please. That wasn’t happening. Plus, if she wanted to be part of Jack’s life, she had no choice but to go now. The other side of the family was already there. They were already making plans. Without her. So, she had no choice. She was going. Also, Jack was the one chance she had, she said, to make things better. To correct some wrongs, and to finally feel right about her life. Just like Steve, these people didn’t care about that though, she explained to her sister. They were all probably figuring out the nicest way to tell her she wasn’t going to get to see Jack ever again, she told Jeannie. They’re probably debating how much money to give her that would equate to a grandmother’s relationship to a four-year-old boy. That’s not necessarily true, Jeannie said. Don’t think like that. I don’t understand how that’s helping anything right now. You’re not there. You don’t know. Maybe just try to be open to whatever happens.
Tammy paused, watching another police car pass by on the shoulder, the siren off but the blue lights flashing momentarily in her car, then lighting, strobe-like, the windows of the cars in front of her. Each of the thousand drops of rain on the windshield of her car flashed with the reflected blue light then were wiped away. She explained to Jeannie that she didn’t know these people, she only knew what April had told her, and sure, they appeared all nice on the surface, but underneath that surface they wanted what they wanted and they got it. It’s how the world was for them, she told her sister. It was the only way they knew the world. It gave them what they wanted. Plus, they had money to get what they wanted,
and if you were both lucky and had money, you didn’t need anything else. Really, Tammy said. Maybe money was luck. I’m not talking about these people I’ve never met anymore, Jeannie said. I’ll talk about something else, but I won’t do this gossip thing with you about people you barely know. Like you wouldn’t be thinking the same shit, Tammy said. What Tammy wanted to say was that she had called Jeannie for some support, for someone to be on her side, but now that she saw Jeannie wasn’t, she said that Jeannie couldn’t understand. She’d never been in this position before. And because Jeannie didn’t have kids, she never would be in this position. But thanks for the help, Tammy said. Jeannie said she was sorry, but she understood, this was a difficult time – stop saying that, Tammy said, you don’t understand. Jeannie said she didn’t know what else to say. After a moment, Jeannie said that, look, dinner was just finishing and Randall was hungry. It’d been a long day. I gotcha, Tammy said, feeling self-pitying and frustrated with herself. Say hello to Randy, Tammy said, in an obvious mocking of bright and happy. Jeannie said she’d call back after dinner to see how Tammy was doing and hung up.