by Katie Porter
He holds out a hand. “Would you like to come downstairs?”
I don’t go to him. I turn back to the large, awkward hospital bed I’ve been staring at. “I suppose we should see about selling this back to a hospital supply company or something. Maybe we can donate it.”
“It works differently here. That’s NHS property. They’ll collect it.”
“Oh,” I say dumbly. I nod as well, the better to emphasize that I get it now. “Sure. That’s fine.”
“What is that you have there?”
“This?” I look down at the plaid blanket clutched in my arms. I’m practically hugging it. “It’s no big deal. A mess I found. It has a stain, so I need to throw it away.”
He comes alongside me. The rustle of his trousers is so quiet, as if expensive trousers have a sense of decorum. I think he means to take the dirty blanket from me. I hold it tighter. I’ll throw it away in just a minute. Like, thirty seconds. Any moment now.
He makes no move for it. Instead, he puts an arm around my shoulder. Not a heavy arm. He’s not holding me down. He’s... holding me in. Keeping my pieces laced together.
“The car is waiting for us at the back,” he eventually says. There’s no judgement in the words. No weight. They’re carefully measured, absent of anything for the angry, petulant part of me to scramble and claw at.
“Is there any reason in particular?” I ask.
“There’s some press out front.” He smooths a caress down my arm. “Not many, and I know most of them. Polite blokes.”
“What a story here. The Skies’ ex-guitarist dies in your house the same night as your first gig in twelve years.” I lift a hand to my face. The blanket goes with it. I hide behind the smells of medicine and the acrid tang of slow death. That memory of Dad has taken over any kind of Old Spice of childhood. “Does it ever get exhausting?”
“What part?”
“Being a large fish in a tiny fucking pond.” Too much disgust comes through my words. I try to suck in a breath. This isn’t his fault. “Okay. We should go.”
I use the edge of the blanket to wipe specs of dust off the skirt of my black Armani dress. Waiting by the back door is my perfect Burberry cashmere coat. It’s also black. I doubt I’ll ever wear them again after today. All together it’s a misuse of four thousand dollars, but it isn’t my money. Alec’s, I suppose. The clothing was waiting in my room last night. I appreciate the thoughtfulness and feel guilty for the waste at the same time.
A town car waits for us. Or a black cab. I’m not sure of the difference right now, and I don’t have the wherewithal to suss it out. All I know is it’s a big, black car and we both ride in the back. The leather along the seat is supple and tan. I run my hand over the pebbled surface. It’s cold.
Dad’s hand was cold. In the hospital. When I got there too late.
“Should I have picked a priest?” My voice comes out high pitched and too fast. “Dad used to be Catholic, but he lapsed. But a ‘celebrant’ sounds so weird.”
Alec’s hand finds my knee. “Celebrants are common over here. Mr. Whitshaw was very confident in Gertrude’s abilities.”
Gertrude, the celebrant. Mr. Whitshaw, the funeral director. Hysteria attacks at the edges, threatening to drag me into ridiculous, inappropriate laughter. I don’t think I’ve ever heard more British-sounding names. These are the people who will bury my father. He wanted to die in merry old fucking England, after all, even if he never brought himself to ever say so. I have to believe that’s true, or the last three months meant nothing.
So we’re going to have a committal, which sounds like I’ll have him locked up in Bedlam two hundred years ago. Apparently it’s the funeral service held before cremation. Before Dad is burned into ash.
Why won’t my ribs open up? They’re squeezing me so tight.
“Maybe I should take him home.”
“If you wish to, that can be arranged.” He’s so fucking calm. Rational.
I want to scratch his face and make him snarl. He’s capable of it when I push him too far. What would “too far” look like today? Would he forgive me anything?
“If he stays here,” I say, “then he gets cremated.”
I’m not making sense. If I take him back to San Francisco, he’d be cremated there too. You have to head outside the city to be buried in a box in the ground. That’s not even what I want. This whole system is so fucked. I don’t understand why it costs as much as an education to put a dead man in a coffin.
They left him in the hospital bed until I arrived. Someone washed him. His hair was still damp, his face perfectly clean. He wore hospital scrubs instead of jacquard cotton pajamas. No way would he have allowed that while he was alive. I pretended to wonder why they needed to change his clothes, but I knew. I just didn’t want to have to think about my father enduring the filthy humiliation of death. I wondered who had to clean his dead body. A nursing assistant, most likely.
I trace a finger over the cold car window. I hope she got a bonus for that. Maybe there’s some way to find her.
A drizzling rain falls, turning the passing city into something evil. Or ephemeral. Things can be both fleeting and full of malice. London feels that way right now. Maybe that’s the depth of my guilt, though. He’d been dying so long. How could I have known he’d actually die that night? But why did I leave after our argument? I made one selfish choice after another. I existed in the stratosphere of The Skies, and I pretended that I never needed to come back down.
We arrive at the cemetery much sooner than I would have expected. Or I’ve been lost in thought longer than I realized. The car pulls up directly in front of the Dissenter’s Chapel. I’d also been offered a facility the funeral director called the “New Crematorium,” but it was appallingly modern. Dad was determined to come die in England. I’m going to give him the most British fucking funeral I can manage. The Dissenter’s Chapel is made of pale cream stone and gothic arches. A grand rose window looks down upon all who enter. That seemed Dad-like enough for me. I find it fitting that it’s called Dissenter’s Chapel, since, well, he never saw fit to elaborate on his history or how he was raised. He was nothing if not a dissenter, and he ensured I would be the same.
Gertrude waits for us inside. She stands at the end of the first pew, a short woman with nearly white hair and a gentle expression on her long face. The soaring ceilings mean the chapel is freezing. I’m glad for my expensive coat. I have to pry my hands out from my sides when Gertrude reaches for me. She grasps my elbow and forearm. I’m still carrying Dad’s blanket. I stare down at it dumbly. Alec never said anything about it. I guess that comfort wasn’t all the coat.
“Hello, Harlow,” Gertrude says. Her gentle timbre is somewhere between a therapist and a grandmother. “I’m here to talk if you like. You’ll never get over your loss, but you will get through it.”
He had a heart attack. After the pulmonary embolism that put him back in the hospital that night, and after all the complications from when his lung cancer metastasized, a heart attack finally took him out. No one has answered me when I ask if he was sleeping or not. No one knows. I wonder if he realized how alone he was in a hospital that held a thousand people. The alarms went off when his vitals crashed, and they tried to resuscitate him, but it was too late. Too late and he was too frail.
“Is this for today’s ceremony?” She touches the plaid cloth but doesn’t try to take it. “Would you like to speak about it?”
I shake my head frantically. “I’m not speaking. You are. That’s what you’re for.”
“I’m here to do anything I can to make your journey easier.” She looks over my head to where Alec stands behind me.
He takes hold of my shoulders. “Come, let’s sit down. People will be arriving soon.”
Points to me for not scoffing. Who the hell does he think will swarm the funeral of a cranky old introvert?
He leads me to wooden chairs at the front of the chapel, where a priest or a pastor might wait for a service. I count a
ll the empty pews. Light pours in through the beautiful round window at the front of the chapel. I love that window. I could stare at it for hours.
Maybe I will. It seems like a better option than looking at an empty chapel and counting the people who’ve ghosted on us. On me.
Even my mom was reluctant to come across the ocean. I understand not wanting to attend her ex-husband’s funeral, but I thought she might at least come to support me. She has a schedule conflict. Tucker, her youngest son, has a water polo tournament. It’s a qualifier for the Junior Olympics, so he can’t miss it. And I guess he can’t swim without her holding his hand.
We should have been artfully late. I watch the door for a disgustingly long time, wondering who the first person will be. Who I want it to be. Whether anyone will come.
When Sinjin is first to stride through the doors, I am caught somewhere between laughter and tears. Of-fucking-course. Alec’s ex-boyfriend is the first person at my father’s funeral. This says dire things about Dad and me.
But there isn’t a Dad and me, anymore. I have to remember that. I mean, I’ll work on remembering it once I actually accept it and all that shit. Maybe ten years from now.
“Thanks for coming,” I say to Sinjin. I am an appropriately programmed society robot.
He’s impeccably dressed. The navy wool suit looks like it was sewn onto him. Artfully tousled ginger-auburn hair frames a forehead carved with concern. His freshy shaven jawline is as sharp as his gaze. He takes my hand between both of his. “The music world has lost an icon.”
I try to say something blithe and polite, but my first words come out strangled. “Christ, Sinjin. Laying it on a bit thick there, aren’t you?”
He lifts his eyebrows and his mouth quirks in a thin-lipped smile. “Did I go too far? There are many who say I can be quite coldhearted. I was trying to do better.”
“You’ll have to try again.”
“I wish you weren’t in pain.” He squeezes my hands.
The bastard. Tears leak from between my lashes. “Fuck you,” I mutter.
Alec puts an arm around my shoulders. They’re probably exchanging some look over my head. They’re welcome to it. This would be easier if they laughed and exchanged that superior manfolk thing where women are the overly sentimental ones. It would be easier to hate them both. Instead I stand here with my feelings.
Something about Sinjin’s simple phrase has broken me. I’m leaking. Alec hands me an actual handkerchief from his breast pocket. I lean against him as people begin to arrive. The members of The Skies come, along with their families. A few music industry people, agents and the like also show their faces. Frank shakes my hand, along with Melinda and a couple other people from the nursing staff. It’s quite kind of them. The pews are at least a third filled up, which is about what I expected, and most of them are... pity visits, I guess.
It’s not like things would have been different in the States. Here, Alec’s friends are in attendance. There, it would have been Dalia and Mandi and a few other friends. Kind to me, but Dad’s ghost would still be lonely.
I need a moment to identify the guy with a full beard who’s coming up the aisle. Especially with my eyes all watery, I don’t recognize him. But then I recall this image of him at Dad’s house, some ten years ago. They were sitting in the upstairs studio. He was sprawled on a futon with a mandolin in his hands while Dad scolded him. I had popped in to say I was on my way to the library for the evening.
An involuntary noise slips from me and I stand up straight.
“What is it?” Alec asks. “Are you alright?”
“That’s Hale/Swole.”
“Pardon?”
I try to hold in my smile with my fingertips. I don’t want Alec to think I’m laughing at him, even though I kind of am. His age is showing. “Dad produced his first album. He’s a singer-songwriter. He raps too.”
I shut my mouth when he comes closer. He has more tattoos than the last time I saw him. One tattoo is his performance name across one cheek.
“Hi, Cole.”
“Hey, Harlow.” He takes my hand and shakes it, then gives it a pat too. His eyes are bloodshot. I’m not crazy enough to think he was actually crying for Dad. It’s something chemical. But he does look sad, there in the downturn of his mouth. “I was real bummed to hear about your dad.”
“Thanks, dude,” I say, hearing myself drop back into California-speak. “He liked working on your first album.”
“He was...” Cole shakes his head. His hair is shaggy. “He was intense, that’s for sure. But man, he had vision when it came to music making. Talked about it like this living, breathing thing, not three minutes to fill silence. He changed the way I thought about shit.”
I want to say something in response, but a thick weight chokes me. Alec squeezes my shoulders. “Harlow is very thankful to hear that,” he says for me. I nod.
“Yeah,” Cole says laconically. “I gotta say, I was pissed at first when he wouldn’t produce my second album.”
“You...” I look up at Cole and his open expression. He’s got no reason to lie about this. “You wanted him back?”
“Yeah, for sure. But I got the message eventually. He didn’t have no background in the rap I wanted to add. He did right by me.” He pats my shoulder before turning to sit in a pew.
I stand at the head of the aisle, staring up at the rose window. The sky outside is winter grey. Maybe things always change, but I’m often surprised by how quickly it happens.
I knew that Dad isolated himself. I knew it with every bit of me and yet I still find myself completely blown away by how fully he did so. Cole’s second album under the Hale/Swole persona went platinum. Maybe it wouldn’t have done so under Dad’s production. Maybe it would have and he cut himself out of something amazing.
He always acted as if it wasn’t his choice—that things were taken from him, not that he willingly gave them up.
How much love did he throw away?
Other than mine.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Alec
EVENTUALLY HARLOW AND I are alone in my house once again. Though we’d often been alone in her room or alone on a floor... The emptiness has a different feeling to it. The air slides more heavily over my skin. Eating becomes a task I have to remind Harlow to do. When she does eat, her nutrition consists of an entire bag of crisps. We bump along for the next weeks in fits and starts. At first, the hardest part is leaving to practice with The Skies and wondering what she’ll do for the whole time.
Then I see the tabloid cover at a newsstand as I exit the Underground station.
DAUGHTER OF SKIES EX-GUITARIST NOW ALEC’S KEPT WOMAN.
Bloody Christ. Foot traffic streams past me. My head swims at the patriarchal implications. Harlow isn’t even given her own name. It seems a small, perverted blessing that we’re not the main headline. Not famous and current enough, I suppose. The reunion gig is probably the only reason it’s mentioned at all.
I pay for the paper and flip to the article. It’s not too terrible after all: a quick overview of The Skies’ history, the reunion, Silas’s death of lung cancer, and a balanced treatment of his funeral.
And how Harlow is still living with me.
Even without a personal relationship, I wouldn’t kick her out on the street a mere two weeks after her father died. They don’t come out and say we’re fucking, but the implication is overt. The overtones are more than distasteful; they’re disgusting. The British press at its best.
I briefly consider concealing the article from Harlow before I decide that hiding it would be worse. She’s an adult. It’s not my duty to conceal her from the world at large, even if I’m concerned by her hazy demeanor. She’s unfocused. Lost. The purpose of her life has been taken.
When I get home, I find her in the conservatory. She’s laying on the couch and staring up at the grey sky. The television is on but muted.
“The forecaster said it might snow,” she says.
I sit on the arm
of the couch. My hand rests on her ankle. I slip my thumb under the hem of her leggings where her skin is soft and warm. “Don’t expect much. The snow will be in the air but it will melt once it hits ground.”
“She said there would be an inch.”
I shrug. It seems petty to take even this from her. “Perhaps.”
Beside the couch is a small pile of books, a couple teacups, a box of Kleenex, and an empty plate. She’s obviously spent most of the afternoon here, if not the whole day. “Before the weather was a segment on us,” she says. “It was sort of about Dad’s interment, but they made plenty of mention of how I’m still here with you. And how I’m so much younger and all.”
“Ah.” The decision was made for me, in the end. “A slow news day, I suppose.”
“Pretty much. The prime minister said something stupid too, but that’s not news anymore.” She sighs and pushes up to a sitting position, which drags her leg out of my reach. I wonder if it was intentional. “I mean, not that I let the evening news run my life, but they’re not wrong.”
“You are younger than me.”
“Not that part.” She waves a hand. Her hair is messy, the locks both tangled and frizzy. I’m not sure she’s brushed today. Or yesterday. “That too, but it’s never really mattered to us. I mean I should leave. Go home to California.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to.” She flashes me a grateful smile. Darkness lingers in her eyes. “I appreciate that.”
I don’t want her to be grateful. I want her love. I need her as twined around me as I am around her.
I extend my hand. She puts her fingers in my palm automatically. I tug. She comes closer. I need to lean down to kiss her. She stretches up to meet me. We’re on this same plane, at least. If nothing else, we are completely aligned when it comes to sex.
She finds my nape. Prickles spread over the back of my skull. She’s my epicenter. She’s before me and behind me. I’ll give anything to keep her, even if it means resorting to base measures.
“Come here.” I tug her up so that she stands before me.