by T. L. Bodine
“We can, actually, and we have. If you’ll reference your agreement —”
“You can’t!” I yell, and then it’s over, I’ve lost my grip on myself in every possible sense. I’m across the desk without realizing that I’ve moved, my hand wrapping tight around the collar of Decker’s button-up, pulling his face close enough to mine that surely he can see the poor stitching on my face, surely he can smell the rot on my breath that can’t be hidden by a mint. He’s close enough to know that I’m not alive, and in this moment I don’t even care. “Did you kill him? Did you fucking kill my father and burn the body? Stop lying and tell me the truth!”
He fumbles for a button on his desk, and almost instantly the door bursts open, the guards burst through, and I’ve got hands on my arms, dragging me back, the fabric slipping through my fingers as I lose hold on Decker’s collar. This is it. They’re going to kill me. Forget working here. Forget walking away. They’re going to drag me down the hall and lock me in a cell; they know what I am, and they’re not going to let me walk out of here. I can see it in my mind, clear as day, can see them dragging me from the room and taking me out to the grounds, and maybe they don’t even bother with the cell, maybe they just duck behind a stone wall and bash my brains in here and now.
Zoe’s at home. She’s waiting for me to get back.
She’ll belong to the state.
I go limp in their grasp, all of the fight leaking out of me. I’m as quiet and meek as a puppy, and I let them pull me backward.
“I can understand that you’re upset. Grief is a terrible thing. I’m sorry, Mr. Montoya.” Decker smiles, and it’s an unpleasant, leering sort of smile. “I’ll have the papers delivered to you. We will need them returned before we can release the ashes. I recommend that you do not return. You will not be welcome on these grounds again.”
I want to scream. I want to tear out of their grasp and wheel on these guards and unleash every bit of Undead fury I can. I want to gouge out their eyes and dig my teeth into them, and it’s not Lazarus doing that, it’s just pure, natural rage.
But I don’t, because they’re not man-handling me out into a holding cell. They’re not yelling for backup. They’re not even, really, treating me like an Undead.
Just a guy, crazy with grief. Just a customer service problem. An issue to resolve.
And because of that, they let me go when I get to the truck. They warn me to move along. But they don’t stop me from pulling away.
I get a few miles down the highway and pull onto the shoulder to scream. There’s nobody to hear me out here.
Chapter 19
When our mom was dying of cancer, Zoe made it a point to learn everything she could about the disease. There was a book she bought in the hospital gift shop, a picture book for explaining terminal illness to kids. It was obviously far too young for her, too simplistic, but she read it solemnly in the waiting room and then went back to the gift shop to scour the shelves for more. When she ran out of options there, I took her to the library so she could learn more. For a little while, it looked like she was studying to be an oncologist, a teenage prodigy. She crammed her brain with information, facts spilling out at odd moments.
In the car: “Did you know that the early Egyptians were diagnosing cancer as early as 1600 B.C.?”
In the waiting room: “Did you know that naked mole rats are immune to cancer?”
At the dinner table: “Did you know that there’s a type of cancer that dogs can spread like an STD?”
Our own living encyclopedia of macabre facts.
Mom died, and we buried her, and she stayed in the ground. People still did that back then. It wasn’t a very big funeral. Mom had some family, but they weren’t interested in our lives; they’d never approved of her marriage with our dad, never saw why she’d stayed with him through the ebb and flow of his drinking, never saw why she’d choose to stay in Los Ojos instead of finding some kind of opportunity and moving up, moving on. Dad was late to the funeral. I was trying to make excuses for him, and the funeral director was nice about it, even as Dad came in reeking of whiskey and the funeral home staff had to strong-arm him into a separate room until the service was over so he didn’t disrupt anyone with his howling. The funeral director said that kind of thing happened all the time, that grief is unpredictable, that no one should be judged for the way they handle their pain.
But the way Dad handled his pain left more for me to do, so I was too busy to pass judgment anyway.
Someone has to be there to write the checks, to answer the questions, to shake the hands and smile like you mean it when people tell you how very, very sorry they are. Someone has to be there in the moment to keep it all together, because there’s a lot of work to the business of dying. And in the end, everybody went home, none of the people who promised they’d call or write more ever did, and we swept the condolence cards into a box and hauled the flower arrangements out to the dumpster and got on with life, the way you do because you have to.
Zoe stopped sharing cancer “fun facts” after that. Not because they were ghoulish, I don’t think, but because they had stopped having any utility. They weren’t a thing she needed anymore. She had learned enough about cancer to find some sort of peace, make some kind of sense about the cause-and-effect, and she cried and spent some time looking at old photos and making a little memory album and then she was done. Just that easy. And I was so jealous then, and could never understand how it is that my little baby sister could have learned to grieve when I could never get the hang of it myself.
***
I’m glad, for once, about the long drive home from the Lazarus House. Grateful that it gives me time to roll the guilt and the shock and the anger around and around like smooth stones, grappling them and swallowing them down. My skin feels like it’s buzzing, an electric tingle that shivers up and down my arms in waves, deadened nerves sending ghostly signals back to a brain that’s increasingly ill-equipped to listen.
But I don’t know what I’m going to say, and I don’t know what to expect, even as I open the door and kick off my shoes and see Zoe sitting at the table, eating cereal out of a piece of tupperware because nobody remembered to run the dishwasher. I stand frozen in the entryway, not ready, not prepared to confront this moment, knowing I’m never going to be.
“Hey. Where’d you go?” She waves me over, gestures with her spoon at an open chair.
“Zoe. Something’s happened.”
She stiffens. “Is it Randy? Is he okay? Did you guys have a fight or something?”
The question is so completely off-track that I falter, almost laugh. “Randy’s fine,” I say, but that could be a lie. I don’t even know where he is, much less how he is. But that’s something I can’t find space to worry about right now. “It’s about Dad.”
“Oh.” She sounds disappointed. She shovels more cereal into her mouth.
I pull up a chair and sit, because it feels weird to stand and say this while she’s sitting there eating off-brand cereal and reading something on her phone. The cereal box is sitting on the table, a cartoon mascot of a cheerful blue sea lion staring at me with big blank eyes and a wide stupid grin, and I turn it around to face the other way. It doesn’t help. The same character is on the back, balancing a ball on his nose at the top of a maze, a spiral dotted with cereal ingredients — wheat and sugar and nuts and milk and fruit.
“He’s. Um. The Lazarus House called. I had to come down to…” there’s no amount of editorializing that is going to make this easier. I want to make this make sense for her, but it doesn’t even make sense to me. I reach a hand across the table and catch Zoe’s arm, the one not wielding a cereal spoon. I lay my wrist over her phone, wait for her to look up to meet my eye. I can read suspicion in her expression. “He’s dead. Full-dead. They…they cremated him this morning.”
The words are harsh and bald and cold.
She drops her spoon. Milk splashes from the bowl, a small spray of drops. “What?”
“I kn
ow.” I search for something else to say. And, lacking any embellishments that will make this any better, I end up just saying everything. “I don’t. I don’t know what happened. They said at first some kind of incident. Then the other guy said some bit about ‘failure to thrive.’ It all sounded like bullshit. I got…I got mad, they dragged me out of there like I was…like…I don’t know.”
“You’re not joking.”
“I would never joke about this.”
Her eyes go wide, shimmery, magnified behind her lenses. She grabs her phone off the table and before I can stop her, before I can ask her what she’s doing, she’s got it up to her ear and has pulled away from the table, made for the back door.
“Hi, yes, I’m Zoe Montoya,” I hear her say, with the kind of fake cheerfulness that you adopt when you’re talking to customer service. “Yes, I’ll hold.”
She ducks outside the door and her voice goes muffled. I sit, left alone with soggy cereal. The sea lion on the box looks unbearably smug, and I take a swipe at it. The box flies, somersaulting in midair, showering a rain of cereal in an arc all across the table and floor. It skids to a stop beside the refrigerator.
If I were Randy, I would throw the bowl off the table, too. I would throw it at the tile and hope that it shattered.
And if I were my dad, I would leave it all there, soggy and sticky, leave it for the flakes to be crumbled to dust and tracked deep into the carpet.
But the thing about making a mess is that somebody needs to clean it up. It doesn’t matter how angry you are, how sad you are, how fucked up the whole world around you is, how bad you’re hurting — the ants don’t care. The carpet doesn’t care. And you can only get away with making your emotions somebody else’s problem if there’s somebody else around.
I get up and retrieve the broom and dust pan and start sweeping, and I don’t realize that I’ve started crying again until I see the dark spots splashing onto the tile, falling and making a mess even as I’m bent over trying to fix the last thing, and that’s it. That’s the breaking point. There’s no wrestling back control this time. There’s no dabbing at tears and plugging them up before they can ooze out. There’s no stopping these from coming, so I don’t even try. I let the grief take the wheel for once. Give myself over to it. I had wanted to surrender, right? Well. Here’s my chance.
I hit the ground and I’m huddled up against the cabinet, my face in my knees, when Zoe comes back inside.
She’s been crying, too. But of course, her tears are clear, glistening damp streaks down each cheek, not the disgusting mess that’s seeping from my eyes. But if she notices the splatters on the floor, or the scattered cereal, or the broom and dustpan lying abandoned beside me, she doesn’t say anything about them. Instead she sniffs and pulls off her glasses to clean them on the hem of her shirt.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hands, streaks painting my wrists. Something clear leaks out of my nose. I don’t know if it’s snot or cerebral fluid. I wipe it on my shirt either way. I’m shaking, the way you shake when you’ve been throwing up for a long time and your body’s all emptied out. The way you shake when you don’t have anything left to give but your body is demanding more.
“I called them,” she says, voice hollow. “It’s like you said. They wouldn’t really talk to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Yes, it is,” I say, and the words are ripping up through me like I’m vomiting shards of glass. Every one hurts, but I can’t stop. “I’m the one who made him go there. I’m the one who didn’t take care of him here. I’m the one who — who — let him die.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I knew he was bad off,” I say, and it’s not the Undead version of him I have in mind. It’s not the walking corpse that I’m envisioning. “I knew it. I shouldn’t have left him alone. I should have been watching out for him. I just…I couldn’t stand to be around him for one more minute so I just…I just left him alone and I should have known.”
I pull my knees in tighter and hear the crack and shift of my bones. My stomach sucks inward, the muscles bending at unusual angles to fill empty places where organs used to be, purged out of my body now to make room for something else, something rotten and festering. I cover my eyes, pressing the heels of each hand in hard to try to stem the flow, try to stop it from leaking and oozing out, but with my eyes closed all I can see is that living room, the sun streaming in, the dust dancing in the light; all I can see is my dad lying on the couch, a fly crawling over his open dead eye.
She flops down next to me on the floor, leaning her head on my shoulder, and we sit there for a while, not saying anything. I wait for her to say something comforting, to trot out some kind of platitude, but she’s too smart for that. So instead we just sit in silence, the last survivors of the family disaster, a couple of shipwrecked kids, and she doesn’t say anything about my gross Undead tears and I don’t say anything about how she’s smudging her glasses every time she tries to clean them.
Eventually I get up, taking her hand to pull her up to her feet. When I sweep up the cereal, she holds the dust pan steady.
“I’m supposed to be the one comforting you,” I say, waiting for her to shake out the cereal into the trash.
“Yeah, well, you suck at it,” she says, and flashes me a grin. “It’s okay, though. You’re good at a lot of other stuff. Are you okay?”
“I think so. No. I don’t know.”
“Yeah, me neither. It’s some shit.” Zoe hesitates, then catches my arm. “Mom and Dad dying, you know you didn’t make that happen, right? You’re not, like…god or something.”
I look up. She meets my eye.
“If anybody’s at fault for anything here, it’s those sketch-ass Lazarus House people. If they…if they did something, then we’ll find out about it and we’ll destroy them. That’s how we make this okay.”
She’s already started to pull away, to head for her computer, prepared to find some keyboard warrior way to take on the world, and I’m partway convinced that, given the opportunity, she’ll be able to do it. But she’s missing some pieces.
“Zoe.” I catch her before she goes. “There’s…some stuff I gotta tell you.”
***
Slowly, over the course of hours, it comes out.
Julian and the Undead in the desert. His dessicated body and the awful final request. Gail, who used to be like the rest of us and then, somehow, had become something else. The experiments at the Lazarus House. The money they promised to families in exchange. Chuy, walking and working and living at the Lazarus House. The job offer I had considered.
I don’t tell her everything. I don’t try to explain how things have gone so sideways with Randy. Because it’s not all my story to tell, maybe, and because it’s not her problem to fix. But I tell her more than I ever would have thought I could, even though it takes a while, even though it all comes out in a jumble.
I ask her if she wants to record this. If she wants to have it all on video for the documentary.
She tells me it’s all right, that we’ll fill it in later. Once we have the rest of the answers.
“The viewer will need all the dots connected,” she explains, but I think maybe she’s just too caught up with hearing it all.
We’re out on the back porch. I’ve been steadily working my way through a pack of smokes. She’s wrapped up against the wind chill, shawl tight around her shoulders as she sits on the corner of the table and stares at the sky, listening to me as I explain, only stopping for clarification or questions when I veer too far off track for her to follow.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything,” I say, when I’ve run out.
“Were you really thinking about going and working at the Lazarus House?”
“Yeah.”
She’s quiet a while, and I’m not sure what she’s going to do. Start yelling at me, maybe. She’d be well within her rights to. Instead she just shakes her head like
she’s disappointed. She gives me a look with an expression that’s hard to read. I think it might be pity.
“You dipshit,” she says, and her voice is hoarse, like maybe she’s going to cry again, but instead she just leans over the table and punches me in the shoulder. Then she slides down to the ground. “All right. Well. At least you came to your senses. So lets take those fuckers down.”
***
It’s still daytime, but I can’t think of anything else to do so I go back to my room and flop fully-clothed in my unmade bed, staring at the ceiling. There are outlines of stars imprinted in the ceiling. There used to be glow-in-the-dark stars up there, little luminescent decals, but I took them down when I was a teenager. Zoe had always loved them, coveted them, and I gave them to her for her room, but we couldn’t get them to stay stuck anymore. All the adhesive had worn off. We even tried super glue, but they still fell off, ripping off bits of plaster, like little glow-in-the-dark meteors bringing down the ceiling with them. We gave up and threw the stars away. But you can still make out their ghosts on my ceiling, the little outlines made by leftover adhesive and years of blocked light, and I stare up at them now with unfocused eyes and trace constellations between them.
I can hear Zoe in the other room, clicking and tapping at her keyboard.
The house is so quiet that the sound seems amplified, like a mouse gnawing in the dead of night.
Rats in the walls. Dad had been ranting about that. I wonder now if that was true. I think of a fat gray rat sliding its oily body up onto his bed at night, nibbling at an exposed toe. I imagine them pouring from a hole in the wall, a little furry tide of them rushing in to scavenge a corpse that, by rights, shouldn’t be able to fight back.
Or, when he talked about rats, did he mean lab rats? The people being experimented on? Was he one of them? Julian had made it sound like it was voluntary — like he was bribed into it with promises of money, not coerced — but what if that’s not true? What if they started experimenting on my dad just because they could? Because he was a pain in their ass. Because he was always causing trouble.