by Suzy Vitello
“Connor?” I say, too quickly.
“Good Lord,” booms Dad. “She has to sit in a classroom with that, that, jackass?”
“Now, John, no need for the name-calling.”
Dad slams a fist on top of the photo of Martha and her Mt. Hood painting. “I don’t want him anywhere near our family, is that understood?”
“Well, it sounds like you needn’t worry. He’s officially dropped out,” Mom says.
My stomach and heart go another round. Connor’s dropped out?
“Anyway, Brady, the point is, you need to let us in. You need to tell us how you feel,” says my mother, mistress of duplicity.
“How I feel? You really want to know, Mom?”
“Yes, Little Bird,” says Dad. “We do.”
“How I feel is, I don’t even know who you are anymore. Dad, you’re drunk most of the time, and Mom, you sneak around like some sort of weasel.” I want to mention the phone call in the beach house bathroom, but I stop myself. Dad’s eyes are as bulged out as one of those pug-type dogs.
“Anger,” Mom says, matter-of-factly. “Good. We can get somewhere with that.”
I close my eyes thinking back on last Friday, the chain of events. The car nearly slipping down the slope. Connor, pulling it out. Getting home just in time, packing my bag for the beach, and then, spending the weekend with my empty-shell parents. Pretending that it’s just another Easter weekend.
“And speaking of sneaking around,” Mom adds. “Where were you Friday, when you were supposed to be in school?”
eight
Beaverton Grief & Family is wedged between a beer-making supply store and a doggy daycare in a strip mall walking distance from Greenmeadow. During our sessions, quiet pauses are often interrupted by yapping pups. On this, our fourth visit, the dogs seem especially agitated. A hound is baying and a few terrier-types are non-stop with their high-pitched barks. Mom’s forehead creases with every yip. Our therapist, Dr. Stern, conducts the session calmly as ever. Leaning forward, the flesh of belly roll obscuring his belt, he invites us to “Speak our hearts.”
“So, Easter marked the first family holiday without Sabine,” he says, his voice slightly up-speak at the end.
“It was very difficult,” says Dad. “I thought we could, you know, spread some of her ashes, have some closure, but clearly, that was premature.”
Dr. Stern nods and scribbles something down in his leather diary.
Mom, fingers massaging her temples, adds, “I’ve heard that sometimes it takes years—a decade even—to find the right time to distribute cremains. When a child is involved.”
I know part of Mom’s reluctance is the Catholic thing. Nona and Nono were upset that Sabine was burned up in the first place—they had offered to pay for a burial plot. Dad refused, end of discussion. Dad says, “A decade?”
Dr. Stern directs his gaze across the room to the farthest chair, at me. “How did it feel, Brady, at the beach without your sister?”
No hesitation, I offer, “She was there.”
Dr. Stern’s eyebrows go up and a series of deep growls punctuate the room. “You felt Sabine’s presence then?”
“She was with us in every way.”
Dad clears his throat.
“Brady has been having the hardest time letting go,” Mom says. “She wore Sabine’s prom dress to a school function last Thursday.”
Again, eyebrows up, Dr. Stern says, “Tell us about that, Brady.”
“It wasn’t her prom dress.”
Dr. Stern says, “Did you feel closer to Sabine, wearing her clothes?” I don’t offer that I hear her voice. “Sort of.”
“Our daughter had a traumatic experience last week,” Dad says.
“Oh?”
“I wouldn’t call it traumatic. Just, well, annoying, I guess.”
“Oh, come on Brady,” Mom chimes, “it was horrible. She’s supposed to get an award for a painting she did, and then her best friend comes in and steals her thunder. You may have seen it in yesterday’s paper?”
“First of all,” I say, through gritted teeth, “I wouldn’t call it horrible. And secondly, it was a charcoal sketch, not a painting. And—your threatened lawsuit is the reason they gave it to Martha.”
Dr. Stern says, “That must have been very difficult, Br—.”
Mom interrupts, her sharp voice accompanied by a cacophony of pooches, “Lawsuit? No, it’s your grades, Brady. Your truancy and insubordination. That’s why they pulled the scholarship.”
“Sonia,” Dad says. “Please.”
The ever-calm Dr. Stern raises his hands like a preacher. “One at a time, thank you. Brady, you must have felt betrayed. Tell us about that.”
The word duplicity slithers around on my tongue like a snake. I open my mouth to let it out, the whole of it. Martha and Nick. Bowerman’s spiel about the lawsuit and impropriety. Mom’s secret phone call to … who? And Connor, knowing more about Sabine than any of us. But words won’t form. I just sit there dorkishly, my mouth open like a forgotten door.
Mom fills the void. “John has been drinking too much.”
Dr. Stern says, “Have you had a hard time managing alcohol in the past, Mr. Wilson?”
Dad says, “For goshsakes, my daughter was just killed. A little whiskey to blunt the pain…”
“We’re here, folks, as an antidote to blunting the pain. The only way out is through.”
The dogs next door offer a hearty consensus.
We’d come to therapy separately, and after therapy, we trickle away from one another, three little streams branching out from the river of Grief & Family. I’m taking the bus to the library to study, I tell them. Mom gets in her Subaru, and Dad climbs into his Fusion. We agree to meet back at the house at seven.
Where I’m really going is the AT&T store, where I hope they can give me Sabine’s password. It’s been four days of hearing the computer voice instead of Give me a “G” and Have a great day. I want my sister’s greeting back.
On the bus, bouncing down the various boulevards, passing the lingerie shops and the adult video stores with images of a bitten apple or a silhouette of a girl wearing devil horns and tail, the signs outside of these places promising to help patrons Escape to Your Fantasy, I remember the Johnsaffair summer—a piece of it—that I’d blocked from my mind. Sabine and I were at the beach house that July, after Mom had insisted that Dad take us out there so she could decide whether or not to divorce him. Sabine and I on the futon, Dad and Natalie in the master bedroom downstairs, Sabine said, “You know this is all Mom’s fault, don’t you?”
I wasn’t sure what “this” referred to. We were hunkered down in a quilt, each of us reading a Cosmo. Sabine was glancing through an article claiming to teach women how to drive men to the brink. There was a photo of a young woman in a red bra holding a man’s head just a bit away from her breasts like a bowl of steaming soup. “This” Sabine said, her index finger puncturing the pretty manicured hand of the model in the article. Then she pointed to the floor below, where our father and his mistress lay together on the waterbed Mom would ultimately replace. “That.”
“Mom’s fault?”
“She stopped sleeping with Dad. I know because I heard them argue about it. She complained about how much he wanted it all the time.”
“Sabine, gross.” I pulled the quilt up to my neck.
“Don’t be a baby, Brady. You should know that men can’t help themselves. It’s a primordial thing. A biologic imperative. See, it says it right here in the article, ‘Men will do anything for it.’”
“But we’re talking about Dad, Sabine, not some dude.”
“He’s a boy, Brady, just like the rest of them. And now he’s found himself a young girlfriend because Mom stopped putting out.”
Sabine’s self-assuredness, the way she slapped the Cosmopolitan closed and clicked off the light, leaving me with those horrific images, was so like her. I’m jerked back to the
present as the bus lurches to a stop in front of BabyDoll Espresso & Girls, and the door hisses open. This is my stop.
There is a line at AT&T, so it takes me a while to get a chance to plead my case, and by the time it’s my turn, I can tell the customer service representatives are exhausted. They’ve been screamed at all shift, putting the smiley face on for disgruntled customer after disgruntled customer. I stretch my mouth into a Sabine-sized cheering grin, and proceed to the counter, holding Sabine’s cell phone out in front of me when they call, “Fifty-six.”
“Account number?” the clerk named Ivan asks.
“Well, I don’t know it exactly. It’s my parents’ account.”
“But they know you’re here?”
“Well, it’s an odd situation. My sister and I, we’re on the account but…” I trail off. It’s always difficult to figure out a non-shocking way to reveal Sabine’s demise. The horror-struck faces, the oh-I’m-so-sorry gestures when you tell strangers that your sister was indeed the one they read about.
Ivan’s face registers impatience as I stammer Dad’s phone number, and finally blurt out, “She died, and I need to reset her password.”
Ivan pulls out a form and hands it to me, all poker-faced. Both of our iPhones are out on the counter, Sabine’s and mine. Irish twin phones like two fallen dominoes there in front of me. Ivan slaps the triplicate layers of document on the counter next to the phones. “This will need to be filled out by the account-holder. We’ll need a death certificate in order to cancel the number without penalty.”
“No,” I say. “That’s not why I’m here. We don’t…at least not now…we don’t want to cancel the number. I just want access to the voicemail.”
Ivan sighs. “You’re not authorized, is the problem. We have a non-authorized minor sitch here. You’ll need your parents to call in.”
I want to jump over the counter and bash Ivan’s head against the computer monitor he’s staring into, his smug, cold eyes reviewing the facts and digits and codes that make up the Wilson account. I want to shake some humanness into his geeky, lifeless expression. She’s dead. I want to shout. Dead. And you’re talking about procedure?
Instead, I take the form and fold it up and put it in the pocket of my windbreaker, and cram the phones in with it. “Thanks, anyway,” I manage, before pivoting away so the next disgruntled customer can have it out with Ivan.
Outside, as I walk by BabyDoll Espresso & Girls, I try really hard to hold back the tears that are stinging the gooey parts of my eyes. Ever since the accident, it seems that there’s been nothing but big boulders in my way. Boulders the size of the ones in front of Jesus’ tomb, where he went before he “rose again according to the scripture.” I think some more about the resurrection story. The part of the creed that goes “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
Sabine and I, when we attended mass with Nona, we’d mumble right along, all the words glued together in one long mush: We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life blahblahblahblah until, We look for the resurrection of the dead and life of the world to come. Amen.
Back on the bus, I find myself mouthing the last part, my words barely a whisper. We look for the resurrection of the dead and life of the world to come. My sister in limbo and her greeting in limbo with her. I know what I have to do. I have to free her greeting. I have to hear her voice again. I can’t allow her to die, to truly die, this way.
On my own phone, I bring up Facebook. The Beenick Page and its cartoon lilies and sad emoticons are gone. Just like that. Sabine’s Facebook is still there though. Her timeline cover photo, taken a week before she died, her squad lined up. And in the middle, there’s Connor, holding her one foot, like the prince in Cinderella, as she performs her infamous single-leg scorpion, one leg bent impossibly behind her, reaching the spot between her shoulders. Her back is curved like a Grecian urn. Her bare stomach arched. The way his hands are wrapped around her base instep, those muscled wrestling arms, his eyes glued to her leg, like it’s a precious jewel—there’s no way he would have harmed her. I know right then, there’s just no way.
I don’t think it through too hard when I do it. I just run my fingers over the touchpad of my iPhone and press send. And by the time the bus pulls up to the stop near my house, my phone responds. YES says the message. I CAN DO THAT. NOW? WHERE?
nine
Connor meets me at the edge of Forest Park, on a trail known for the disposal of dead prostitutes. Amid newly fronded ferns and tri-petaled, pale purple trillium, he greets me with a slouched posture, again shrouded in a hoodie, but this time without my sister’s earring dangling from his lobe. “Hey,” he says.
“So,” I say. “I heard you quit school.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m thinking of transferring to BALC, finish up there.”
Beaverton Alternative Learning Center or balk, as it’s sometimes called, is the school where the druggies go before flunking out completely. I must be wincing because Connor follows it up with, “No, seriously, they have a great wrestling team.”
“You’re going to go back to wrestling, then?”
Connor slouches further into himself and says, “I think my cheer career is like, you know, over.”
My fingers are playing with the phones in my pocket. I want to get on with it. I’ll barely get home by 7:00 as it is. “So, thanks for, uh, meeting me. You think you can help?”
“Jailbreak Sabine’s phone? Yeah, I can do that. But I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”
The boulder of Ivan’s unhelpfulness appears in Connor’s face. Not him, too.
“I mean, why?” he asks. “Why do you want to get into her business?”
“Personal reasons,” I say.
“Look, I know you two were tight, but there’s stuff about her you don’t know and, well, I don’t think she would want you messing around there.”
“Like what?”
“Brady, you should let this go.”
An unleashed dog comes romping up and sniffs our crotches, its frantic owner behind it, calling “Cookie. Cookie. Get over here.”
“Let what go? What are you getting at?”
Connor holds the runaway dog’s collar while the owner fumbles up the trail. Whatever Connor’s referring to will have to wait until we’re done with this interruption. I’m impatient. I should be getting home. My fingers shuffle the two phones in my pocket.
Once the owner and his pet are out of earshot Connor says, “How well do you know Nick?”
“He practically lived at our house the last couple of years. Pretty good, I guess. Where are you going with this?”
“Sabine had some secrets,” Connor says. “I made a promise to her. She told me stuff in confidence.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake.” I’m furious now. Why would Sabine confide in Connor and not me? “Look,” I tell him. “I just want to hear her voice. I miss it. Can you do that? Just clear her voicemail so I can hear her again?” I pull Sabine’s phone out and hand it over, like it’s a foreign document and Connor’s the translator.
Connor takes the phone, puts it in his pocket and we walk along the darkening path up and up, when we should be walking down, back toward our respective homes. It’s getting chillier and my windbreaker isn’t enough. An early evening breeze shoots through to my bones. A couple of birds, big black ones, flap the air as they cut across the path in front of us. Into the silence between us Connor says, “That so-called boyfriend of hers, he’s an asshole.”
“You keep saying that. I mean, I know you guys had your differences, but he really loved my sister.”
Connor lets out the sort of laugh that’s not really a laugh. A sneer mixed with disbelief. “Love. Right. Who he loves is himself. The guy’s up for 6A lacrosse player of the year. He’s got full ride offers all over the country. Kid just turned eighteen, can barely vote, and he acts like he’s Bill Fucking Gates.”
“Bill Gates?”
“OK,
maybe David Beckham. Thinks he walks on water. If I told you what I know about him? Jesus.”
Something occurs to me. “So, was he dating Martha before Sabine died?”
Connor shakes his head. “Nah. He was obsessed with your sister. And not in a good way.”
We get to a fork, and we follow the sign for Wildwood, going deeper into the woods. It’s past the time when the runners are out. The dog-walkers are all home. It’s getting colder and darker. I don’t feel scared though. Next to Connor, weirdly, I feel safer than I’ve felt in weeks. “Spill it.”
“Nick? Let’s just say, the Beenick thing? You know, all that Brangelina stuff? Bullshit.”
We hike through muddy ruts, our sneakered feet in step. Where it’s really mucky there are planks. The path wanders up and down. The creek below us flows in its spring enthusiasm. A few bold crickets chirp. Or maybe they’re frogs. Night sounds are overtaking day sounds and we’re continuing on.
A question pops out of me, so fast that it doesn’t even register until it’s out of my mouth, “Did you love her?”
“Your sister? Shit. Everyone did. She’s, she was, the hottest girl at Greenmeadow.”
His answer feels like a line from Cosmo, and it disappoints me. The dismissiveness of it. I slap his arm, lightly, like you do with a good friend who’s just pissed you off. Then, “I was looking at her timeline picture. Her doing that Scorpion stunt, and you holding onto her foot that way? That looked real to me, the way you held her.”
“That Scorpion stunt. Yeah. There was no holding your sister. Put it that way.”
He stops on the trail, fishes around his jeans pocket, and pulls out a doob, then a match. Lights it, cups his hand and sucks in the skunky weed and the tip of it lights up his face. Around the joint in his mouth he says, “Don’t imagine you want a hit?”
I shake my head. “I need to get back.”
We turn around and retrace our steps, the marijuana cigarette lighting our way. When we’re close to the main road, I change my mind about the messages. “Look, I want to know. I need to know. If there is stuff on her phone, don’t erase it.”