And they could keep one too—provided they could move it.
A buddy of their father’s had a big enough truck, and together the two men had big enough muscles. Once Dad planted the piano in the corner of their living room, he said meaningfully, “This thing better get played, Danny.”
And it did, as soon as it was tuned. The upper register of the old upright rang a little clinky and the lower, a little growly, but Danny’s pieces mostly took him to the middle. Musical instruments sought him out after adopting the piano. Santa put a harmonica in his stocking. Mrs. Walters gave him the recorder in the fourth grade. The trombone and the oboe were gifts from a retiring middle school teacher when she heard they were downsizing their house to live in a mobile home. Was that generosity why Danny taught now? Danny slung a guitar around his neck in high school, like every boy in his class. After Dad’s death he’d picked up a director’s baton. If she slipped a baton between his fingers now, she feared it would fall to the tiled floor with a soft tink tink as it rocked back and forth and rolled under the bed.
He didn’t smile like himself. In fact, his face reminded her a bit of someone with too much Botox. Stiff, slow swallowing. She remembered suddenly. “I brought you something.”
He didn’t reveal if the object jogged memories of them both riding the bus to high school, sharing earbuds during the only time of day they didn’t pretend not to know each other. U2 and Coldplay coursed through the thin white wires on frosty winter mornings in a private concert. She would always close her eyes and lean against the glass, and he would have control of the “Skip” button to veto.
Greta lifted one of the buds to his ear and tucked it inside. His ears were shaped like hers—so narrow that normal earbuds were a tight fit, so she brought her own and fitted them in. Greta put the other half in her own ears to make sure the volume was right. She spun the tracker wheel on the iPod, the screen jumping to life. She hadn’t thought about the old brick for years, until last night, when she found it in a drawer in Meg’s place. Plugged it in and it turned on. Wonder of wonders.
She selected “Beautiful Day,” one of their unspoken morning anthems in high school. While their Dad might have said they were sullen, Greta knew they’d been finding their shells for the first time. Hermit crabs that knew they needed protection.
She didn’t know what she wanted Danny to do when he heard the music. Did she think he would cry? Sing along? Blink twice? Whatever she expected, it wasn’t what happened. When the music started up, the slow build of the rippling opening under Bono’s voice, Danny started to moan without moving his mouth. The moan got more insistent as the song went on, and Danny’s head started to move, then his shoulders, as if he were wrapped in a straightjacket but trying to move away from a fire. Greta took the earbuds out of both of their ears and stopped the music.
“Does that hurt?”
He started by saying no. Repeating no. Then single words built like Legos into a nonsense phrase, or at least it seemed that way. This time, he kept saying something. The word was all vowels and made no sense to her, but his expression did. His face cringed when he said it—he meant something, and it was something bad.
Greta heard noises in the hallway, and a nurse came in with fresh bedding and a cup of juice. “What’s wrong with him?”
The nurse eyed the iPod. “He didn’t like it with you either?”
“No, he started writhing. Like he was in pain.”
“Our physical therapist usually plays music during sessions—pairing movement with music can help treatment,” the nurse said. “In your brother’s case, it made his muscles freeze up.”
“Damn it,” Greta said, to herself or Danny or the iPod—she wasn’t sure.
The nurse looked nonplussed, explained that recovery could be unpleasant: everything felt magnified, but his pain was being managed. “Not to worry” was the phrase she ended on, like she was a British nanny.
Greta kissed Danny on the forehead. “I’m sorry for the music.”
How many other things she should apologize for, she didn’t know. Sorry for being a terrible twin. Sorry for not talking much in the past few years. Sorry for not knowing what to say when Dad died and Greta had literally no idea what they needed to do next. Call the cops on your Dad’s dead body to report a murder? Call the mortuary like it was some hotel that took reservations?
Her first caught bugs had been those fireflies, caught on camping nights. Caught in baby food jars their mother saved to store buttons. Greta scattered the buttons on the den floor. Each button, pale and round and similar, came from a paper packet with one of her father’s shirts. Each button represented a second chance if a button went missing. Greta didn’t care about buttons. She had her jar. After caging a firefly with her hands, she slid them one by one under the lid of the jar until she had a dozen. They landed on the strand of grass she had there, seemed to stare at each other in the small space—a bunch of men at a party where they were told girls were supposed to be. When Greta brought the jar inside at bedtime, Martha stood in the kitchen with buttons in her hands. Both hands, full of buttons. She tipped her palms sideways and let the buttons skitter across the floor, bouncing unevenly on the cheap linoleum. “Pick them up,” Martha had said.
Greta shook her head. Danny trailed inside after Greta as the screen door slammed.
“Pick them up,” Martha repeated.
Danny offered to pick them up, but Martha sent him to bed, said she would be up soon to tuck him in. She eyed down Greta until Greta felt as large as the flies in the jar and just as trapped. They flashed wearily. Morse code.
In the end, after a few silent minutes, Greta had picked up the buttons. She dug them out from the cracks in the dishwasher opening and from under the legs of the chairs. She left them in a neat pile on the table while Martha watched with her arms folded across her chest. “Don’t touch things that aren’t yours,” she said. She didn’t tuck Greta in that night.
When Greta checked the jar on her bedside table the next morning and saw a dozen dead fireflies, she thought maybe Martha had cast a spell on them. Maybe, like the witch in “Sleeping Beauty” or “Snow White,” she’d given them a potion because Greta was bad. It wasn’t until she learned the next year in school that all animals—including insects—needed oxygen that Greta realized she herself had killed them. But it was too late then to apologize to Martha for hating her for a year over buttons.
* * *
When Greta got back to the apartment, Meg was sitting on the floor in the main room, with Franz asleep next to the television. She rested her back lightly against the sofa like she was afraid to disturb Greta’s pillow on top of it. The sight of Meg in Meg’s own apartment shocked Greta. After the baked bra incident, Greta had seen Meg more often at the hospital than her own apartment. Greta stretched the long days even longer by going to the entomology building on campus after work, and Meg left so early for the middle school, that Meg’s presence hardly had a chance to sink in. But here she was.
“Sorry,” Meg said, gesturing to the TV with a knitting needle. “It’s almost over. It’s live.”
Greta glanced at the screen. Actors panted, arm in arm in a complicated dance, while a familiar soundtrack played in the background.
“Sit,” Meg said. “Just got back from Danny?”
As if Danny were a place. “Yeah.”
Meg nodded and kept knitting. “We were supposed to watch this together. It’s his favorite musical. He got us tickets to see the show when it toured.” Meg swallowed and examined the large wad of yarn perched on her lap, like it was a small, technicolor animal.
“What are you making?” Greta asked. She didn’t really care, but she didn’t want to keep talking about Danny. Meg’s Danny and Greta’s Danny couldn’t exist in the same place.
“You’ll laugh,” Meg said, her voice cautious.
“Have you ever heard me laugh?”
“Fair enough. It’s a cat vest. My friend Ginger has one of those hairless—”
&n
bsp; Greta waved a hand in front of her face like she was shooing away a fly. “Never mind.”
They were silent for a few minutes. A new song started up. The guy with slicked-back black hair dipped the girl on the screen. “I saw you bought dog food,” Meg said.
Greta had. “Well, he was getting low. And I was at the store anyway.”
“Thank you.”
Franz growled in his sleep as if echoing the thanks.
A commercial for car insurance started. “It’s our anniversary today,” Meg said. Greta’s eyebrows rose, and Meg took that as an invitation to continue. “Three years. You know, it’s funny. You spend so long remembering a first date, and then after the wedding, it won’t be the date that counts anymore.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Greta said. Her stomach reminded her she’d forgotten to eat dinner. That was obviously the problem here, the twist. Hunger. It was so much easier to like Meg when she forgot that Danny loved her.
“‘It’ being the wedding?”
“‘It’ being you and Danny.” Greta sat on the couch to emphasize the period at the end of her statement.
But Meg’s head turned over her shoulder to stare at Greta. In a room lit by only the TV screen, Greta noticed the fineness of Meg’s bones. Her pale skin. The freckles along the ridge of her nose. Meg scrunched the freckles into a line. “I don’t like you either. I just thought I should tell you.”
“That’s good to know.”
Meg’s needles clicked together without her looking at them. She narrowed her eyes. From this angle, Greta could see right up her pert little nose. “I know you’re going through some stuff. I am too.” Greta didn’t say anything, but Meg took the silence in stride, like a part of the dialogue. “But do you ever let someone like you? Do you ever let someone get close enough to even try?”
“Danny.”
“Danny would love a dog that bit him,” Meg said turning back to her knitting. Her voice sounded decidedly less peppy than Greta was used to.
“Must be why he’s okay with you.”
Meg’s laugh rang, surprised and genuine. She barely glanced up at Greta before adding, “You really are something.”
Greta thought that being something was better than being nothing. She had felt like nothing before, and at least the solidness of someone’s disgust bouncing off her made her feel noticed. “I’m going to bed,” Greta said. She was going to couch, she meant. But it was a free couch, and it was hers. Meg turned the volume down way low, and despite the continued flashing light from the television, Greta was asleep within minutes.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Greta pulled the whoopee cushion out of her purse. It was the self-inflating kind, the kind that revolutionized the fake-fart industry (or at least Greta assumed so). She put it on the just-greening grass below her and plopped down on top. The sound from a higher altitude was always better, she knew, and the sound needed to reach a long distance to get the message across. She felt the corners of the pink cushion try to reinflate where her butt wasn’t covering it. She might have given it another go, but she saw another car pulling into the swerving P-shaped lane that made up the cemetery road.
“Sorry for no encores, Dad,” she muttered. She kissed her hand and touched it to the flat stone. Her father’s plot was on the edge of the cemetery, near a low chain-link fence. The location came with limitations on stone choices. For some reason, adjoining (living) neighbors didn’t want to see tombstones sticking up like gray teeth in their backyards, so the first hill of stones needed to be flat. The flatness came with a slight discount on the lot, and necessity meant making cuts in funeral preparations where possible. Her father had only been fifty. An old army dog, he hadn’t updated his will since his last tour of duty. He figured that if he wasn’t killed in the Middle East, he was unlikely to die in the Middle West before he was a hundred. Heart disease disagreed.
Maybe her father’s weak arteries should have cued her to be nervous for herself and Danny. At the time, she blamed her dad’s heart attack to a lifetime of smoking. Two packs a day of Marlboros or, in a pinch, Camels encouraged that clot to dislodge itself. As she knelt in the dirt, she loosened the pack of American Spirits from her coat pocket and placed it on top of the stone next to the pennies and nickels left there by comrades over the winter. Not like the cigarettes could hurt him now, plus, if anything, her father liked graveyard humor.
Sudden movement made Greta survey the ground near her knees. A recent warm snap had left the snow melted and muddy, but she could see something. There, on top of the edge of her father’s stone, was a beetle. She slowly leaned toward it, looking for identifying markers. She mentally scrolled through criteria, narrowing possibilities. It was small, black, and oblong, with thin antennae on its head that stretched a full body’s length . If only she had a kill jar with her, she could take it home to get a sure identification. She took a twig from the grass and tried to turn the insect. Before she could identify it, the beetle identified itself with a loud snapping sound. “Tricky little bastard,” Greta said, sitting back in surprise. As far as defense mechanisms went, click beetles had more bark than bite.
She verified the identification by flopping the beetle onto its back with a discarded twig. Sure enough, it arched and, with another loud click, flipped onto its belly before flying away.
She heard another click, this one louder and behind her. It was the metallic sound of a car door closing up the hill. Another mourner. That would make Danny happy.
One of the more surreal conversations she’d ever had with her brother was soon after the death of their father, as they toured cemeteries like they were comparing wedding venues. Cost, of course, was a consideration, but there were also half a dozen little things Greta had never thought about. For instance, there was the questions of what one informative website deemed “ambient noise”—how much road traffic could be heard from inside the gates. Danny and Greta’s main point of disagreement came from the level of “foot traffic”—Greta couldn’t laugh at the marketing speak at the time, but it came back now to her and brought a smile. Greta pictured a quiet plot, a place away from everyone with a pulse. Danny disagreed. “I want a living cemetery,” he had said.
“For the record, I am anti-zombie,” Greta said, and made a cross with her fingers in front of her. Danny hadn’t smiled; he’d waited next to their father’s hospital bed for him to catch his breath from a dive that wasn’t going to end. Her comment didn’t bring a smile either.
“I want a place where I see people driving around and visiting, you know? So even if we aren’t here …” Danny had taken a shaky breath, and Greta wished, not for the first time, that she were a thousand miles away, that it was ten years ago and their father was hiding their shoes in the freezer like he used to when they lived at home. She remembered an Easter egg hunt at a park, and her thawing saddle shoes. Maybe death was her dad’s biggest prank. He’d pull a Tom Sawyer at the funeral. “I wanted to hear what you jerk-wads really thought of me,” he would say, pulling Greta in for a rough hug and giving Danny a noogie. Danny was so tall he would have to lean in.
It wasn’t a prank, and they’d buried him in this cemetery because it was visited. It was more expensive, but they bought a spot on the chain-link fence road. The cemetery manager had asked if they wanted to buy adjoining plots, and it had been then that Greta cried for the first time because not only had her father died, but she had also been asked by a stranger if the closest relationship she would form for the rest of her life was with a now-dead man, or if she wanted to buy an additional plot for a relationship she might never have or which might also end in acrimonious divorce like her parents’. This stranger was asking her if she would probably, like everyone expected, not start a family, or if she did, if they would visit her in a cemetery next to the grandfather they never knew in a chain-link adjacent plot that was probably quiet, no more foot traffic any more. She’d felt guilty for crying for herself, but the cemetery manager didn’t know the difference between
self-pity and grief. Just one spot, she had said. Just my father’s spot. She could only figure out one death that day, the one that had already happened.
And she hadn’t thought Danny’s had been a possibility at all, and here they were three weeks from an avoided funeral. Where she was kneeling would have been turned over black dirt, with a fresh stone.
Greta blinked the image away as she heard footsteps behind her. In reality, they were gloppy boot steps in the still-muddy grass. Greta noticed the figure, shadow short and stubby. “You shouldn’t be here,” Greta said.
“Did you bring Danny?” Martha asked.
Instead of answering that Danny wasn’t out of the hospital yet, Greta swallowed. She held back a comment about how he was beginning to string words together, the memory of him holding an oversized pencil in his fist, for physical therapy. Instead, she gestured around to the solitude in the cemetery. After a second of silence, Greta said, “He’s not yours.”
“Who? Your dad? Danny?”
“Both. You gave them away. Come back when I’m done.”
“There’s plenty of memory to go around,” Martha said. She had lipstick on and that was indecent. A seduction of a dead man. As Martha squatted next to her, Greta tried not to notice that their thigh bones were the same length, some genetic joke of duplicated bone structures.
Greta stood, erasing the similarities in their stance as she had tried to erase their similarities in everything else. Her mother was a nurse; Greta blocked medical dramas from her Netflix queue. Her mother liked Robin Eggs Whoppers around Eastertime. Greta pretended to share Danny’s preference for Peeps. She couldn’t delete her earlobes, bow legs, or narrow wrists, but she could pretend they came from modeling dough instead, or her father (though his earlobes hung so loose from his head that he used to wiggle them at restaurants to distract them when their food had taken too long).
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