The Moment Before

by Suzy Vitello

  Certainly they wouldn’t take Sabine’s Volvo. Or even Martha’s zoomy little Beemer. No, they would most likely rent a classic vehicle, some mid-century boat of a Chrysler with sharp fins and shiny chrome. Dusk has turned to coal black, and Connor asks me again if I’m sure I want to head to the country club. If I’m certain I want to stir the Greenmeadow pot. I am. Pretty sure. Even if he’s not.

  “What you told me last night, about Sabine and her need to play with fire?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe that stirred something in me. Like, she was so much more of a risk taker than me, you know? Always pushing the envelope. The whole, she lived on the edge thing.”

  “Brady,” Connor reminds me as we round the corner to the swanky country club, “people don’t always do edgy things because they’re brave. Sabine was scared to fail. It drove her to do stupid shit sometimes.”

  It’s true, what Connor says. And I’m remembering how, in middle school, she’d play the Eraser Game with the boys. How it went was, you’d have someone rub a pencil eraser hard on your arm while you drilled through the alphabet, A through Z, coming up with words that started with all 26 letters in turn. The person with the biggest wound at the end of the game, won. And if you made the person who was erasing your arm stop before Z, you were a total pussy. It was the stupidest game ever, but Sabine always had something to prove. She stopped playing it after joining the cheer squad. There were other ways to be best, ones that didn’t involve being disfigured.

  We stop at the edge of the driveway into the club, and pull off the road onto a maintenance path. With the yard tools and mower in the back of Connor’s truck, no one will really suspect we aren’t simply the contracted help, working after hours to deadhead the rhodie blossoms and keep Multnomah Country and Golf Club well-tended so the wealthy can enjoy perfection while they whack those little white balls.

  We scramble out, and dart through the bushes and between trees like stealth troops in combat. The charcoal on my hands feels like part of the costume. Cat burglars on the prowl. Connor has traded his Mariner’s hat for a black ski cap. All we need are walkie-talkies, but, of course, we have iPhones.

  The clubhouse is lit up with Christmas lights and candles, and as we approach it, I begin to feel a surprising sadness wash over me. Brady Brooder, always the outsider. Why wasn’t I wearing a sequined, feathered, cocktail dress? Where was my tulle skirt and sweetheart neckline? My strands of pearls and velvet hair tie?

  Prom, for me, was all about the outfit. For years I drew elaborate gowns in my notebooks. Princesses and starlets, goddesses and beauty queens. As we inch closer to the action, Connor and me, I get sadder. Sabine was so looking forward to Prom. She’d had a dress on back-order, and had already made an appointment with the hairdresser. Things you realize when someone dies—there are appointments to cancel. Mail from prospective colleges just keeps coming, addressed to Sabine Wilson. Cheer camp brochures. Invitations to apply for a student credit card.

  Mom made a dozen copies of the death certificate, sending them hither and yon. Like birth announcements in reverse. Where it would say weight and length on a birth certificate, there is a fill-in-blank line for cause of death. In Sabine’s case, complete internal decapitation.

  Connor slides in next to me as I crouch behind a golf cart. Limos pull up, and all our peers spill out of them, one after the other. Up-dos, tuxedos, long and short gowns. Some girls are like storks, pegging along on heels too high for them. Others are wearing modest pumps. The boys are all over the map. Everything from super formal to polo shirt and Dockers. I glance over at Connor, wondering for a second which way he’d go. Sport jacket, probably. I don’t see him in a tux.

  He crawls the fingers of his hand over to where they find mine. He whispers, “Seen enough?”

  I shake my head, and then, my phone vibrates. I look down. Mom. Figures. I told her I’d be home by nine, and it’s ten after. I push the I’m not answering this button, and continue gawking at the prom attendees. So far, no Martha and Nick.

  “Would you have gone?” I ask him, as Walter Pine slinks out of his mother’s sedan, yanking Cathi Serge by the wrist. They look good, actually—fashionable, even—which annoys me. Walter’s hair is slicked, and he’s wearing a plaid cummerbund. Cathi’s hair is ringlets, and aside from the poufy sleeves of her gown, she looks pretty awesome.

  “Maybe. I already had a date lined up.”

  “Who?” I demand, louder and more jealous than I should.

  “Melinda Root.”

  Oh. Another cheerleader. “Isn’t she going out with Tom Aceno?”

  He nods. “Now she is, yeah.”

  Connor’s stock was pretty high before the accident. And me, I was popular by association. The little sister of the Class Hottie. The designated licenseless driver, just a phone call away from bailing her sister out.

  My phone vibrates again. Another Mom call. Jesus.

  And then, it pulls up. A jet black limo from one of the better limo rental places. Scrubbed whitewalls, gleaming rims. It’s got to be the ride of the King and Queen. He gets out, Nick does, that Ichabod-skinny lacrosse captain, and, sure as shit, the delicate, bracelet-covered arm of Martha follows. It’s like they’ve practiced this. A red carpet entrance paparazzi-ready. Her gown is amazing. Salmon, strapless organza. There’s a crisscross bodice and a little rose at the waist. The skirt is full and reaches just below her knees. Martha has great calves. Slender, long. I must have sighed, or even gasped, really loud, because Connor nudges me. “I’ll ask you again. Seen enough?”

  I nod, but keep staring at them, Marnick, as they saunter into Prom.

  Bitch, says Sabine.

  “No kidding,” I say, out loud.

  “Huh?” says Connor.

  Mom calls me a third time. I slide the answer slide and hiss, “What?”

  There is quiet on the line.

  “Mom?”

  I look up at Connor, whose eyebrows are squinching again. I shake the phone, as if it’ll correct a bad connection. Why won’t she talk?

  Then, her breath, exhaling around a raspy, throat. An after-weeping noise. The sound of fear that you just don’t hear come out of my mother. “Brady, honey, your dad’s in the hospital. There’s been an accident.”

  twenty-three

  St. Vincent’s Medical Center is the hospital where Sabine and I were born. It’s also the hospital where Sabine’s body was hauled for organ harvest after the accident. Now, it’s where Dad is hooked up to monitors behind a curtained slice of hospital room. Not only was he in a car accident, but apparently suffered a heart attack as well.

  Connor had dropped me off in front of the hospital, his face stiff with fear, but trying to look hopeful. “This is the best heart place on the West Coast,” he said. “Your dad will be fine.”

  Inside my own heart was squeezed, having its own attack. My father, the minor league ball player. The Nike executive. The strongest man I knew. How could his body fail him? Who would dare to run into him after all he’s been through? “Thanks,” I said, shaking, and trying so hard not to explode into a zillion fragments. “I’ll call you. OK?”

  Connor moved in to hug me, but I couldn’t do it. It was like my entire body had been flattened—a freezer bag before you seal it up. I had nothing. And what I did have, I needed to fold and tuck somewhere safe. Instead of hugging Connor back, I hugged myself as I scrambled out the truck and into the well-lit building of miracles.

  Mom is in the waiting room area making calls, and she opens her free arm, guiding me in an awkward embrace. “I’ll call you Ma, soon as I know anything.”

  She gets off the phone and has me sit down next to her on the hard foam seat cushions in the glassed-in visitor’s lounge. Soothing aqua paint, a flat panel TV, and an intercom announcing hospital coded alerts every so often keeps us company while she unfolds the sequence of events that led to now.

  A buzz of words I half understand. Hypertension, ventricula
r arrhythmia, myocardial infarction. And this. He’d been drinking. The car accident, running a light in his Fusion, it was his fault. He slammed into another car and thank God nobody else was hurt. “Thank God,” Mom says, and as though conjuring her inner Nona, she makes the sign of the cross.

  “He’s pretty drugged up now, Brady. But I know he’d love to see you. Can you handle it? Seeing him on a gurney all hooked up to monitors?”

  I’m scared. Really freaked, but I nod, biting down hard on my lip. I don’t tell Mom, but the image in my head is the one in the paper. Sabine under a tarp.

  Mom puts her arm around my shoulder and together we walk down the shiny hall toward a pair of swinging doors. Cardiac Care Unit reads the marquee above them. There’s a poster-sized sign to the right: TELEMETRY. ABSOLUTELY NO CELL PHONE USE. I turn mine off, and so does Mom, and the doors magically part, like we’re in some James Bond world.

  Inside the CCU everything revolves around the nurse’s station, which is like the hole of a doughnut. The unit is arranged in a circle, with the patients spoked out in their little critical care cubicles. Dad’s behind a glass wall and two sets of curtains, and I can hear him snoring as we walk in. “That’s good, right? That he’s asleep?”

  Mom pushes me in front of her because it’s too narrow for us to walk in side-by-side.

  What I see before I see Dad are all the monitors and their jaggedy lines. It’s like “the wave” in a stadium where people rise and fall as a group. Dad’s heart. There’s beeping that sounds like something’s wrong, but no nurses are rushing in, so it’s probably just part of the normal state of affairs.

  It’s dark in this micro-room, and Dad’s eyes are closed. Green, black, red and yellow wires emerge from Dad’s hospital gown. On his index finger there’s a little clip and another wire tethering him to one of the bleeping monitors. I can see some of Dad’s chest in the split his gown makes, and all his hair has been shaved off. Small suction cups hold the wires in place. Dad’s covered in suction cups. I touch his hand, the one with the clip, and he quivers.

  Mom whispers, “The doctors want him to rest as much as possible. Steady rhythm, they keep saying is the goal.”

  I jerk my hand away, thinking, I’ve probably already screwed up. Dad’s five-o’clock shadow covers the bottom half of his face. He’s a twice-a-day shave guy if the occasion calls for it. Now, he looks a little like a bum. “I love you,” I whisper. “I love you so much.”

  Dad stays asleep the whole time we’re there, and at some point in the middle of the night, Mom suggests we go home, get some shut-eye, and then return the next day.

  Shut-eye. I can’t imagine it. But I do as she says, and we creep home like zombies. Neither of us can talk. All we can do is look straight ahead and go forward.

  Mom goes into her bedroom and clicks closed the door. I go to Sabine’s room and lie on top of her rose and pink quilt next to the American Girl cheerleader doll with the grassy-green pom-poms wedged into its tiny plastic hands. It still smells perfumy in here, after all these months, but now the perfume is tinged with something else. A rotten, decomposing scent, like flower stems soaked in water too long.

  I open and close my fists, like I’m squeezing invisible lemons. Sabine, what the hell? You’re supposed to be protecting us.

  Nothing.

  Maybe what Nona says is true about purgatory and praying for limboed souls, lest they remain forever in a state of sin. I wonder if Sabine would have done anything differently had she known her fate. Would she have chosen Connor over Nick for real? Would she have tried less hard to be first and best in everything she did? So now, she’s had to outsource her amends to her living relations. We, the Wilsons and Panapentos, have to kneel before the electric candle version of her, the image of a smiling, sweet Sabine. The image Nona and Nono want to take to their own graves.

  I’m furious with her. She doesn’t deserve heaven. Eternal damnation is too good for Sabine. Her father lies in a hospital bed fighting for his life because of her. Connor got kicked out of school because of her. Her beloved cheering squad fell apart after she died. Greenmeadow is now known as “that tragic school.”

  How did you turn into such a liar, Sabine?

  Somehow, amid the questions and the anger and the sorrow, I fall asleep. A deep, hard, dreamless sleep. And when I wake up in the morning, sun blasting through Sabine’s bedroom window, the first thing I notice is my hands are still covered in charcoal.

  twenty-four

  Dad is awake and spooning anemic custard into his mouth when Mom and I return Sunday morning. He’s shaved, or been shaved, and he looks pretty much like himself. The wires are still coming out of him like Frankenstein, but his cheeks are rosy and he smiles around his spoon when we arrive.

  “Little Bird,” he says. “Your old man’s turned into an old man, looks like.”

  The peaks on the heart monitor are little Mt. Hood after little Mt. Hood. I figure joking is probably on the yes list. “If you think I’m pushing your wheelchair, forget it.”

  Mom leans over his bedrail and gives him a juicy kiss, and he says, “Uh-oh, we’re gonna get kicked out of here if you can’t behave.”

  We’re in there a few minutes more, making small talk, and then in comes the nurse, so we’re asked to leave. It’s check this, check that, bed pan, and meds. “Why don’t you give us a half hour or so. Go get something from the cafeteria,” the nurse suggests. “It’s Mother’s Day, after all. They have some strawberry crepes I hear.”

  Mother’s Day. I completely spaced it. And I spend the next several minutes, as we’re negotiating the various wings of St. Vincent’s, apologizing. If Mom’s upset, she doesn’t show it. “No worries. Really, the last thing we need to do right now is add some obligatory Hallmark event to our schedules. You just being here, with me and your dad, is Mother’s Day gift enough.”

  And then, after we’re sitting in some orange plastic chairs with plates of semi-cooked pancakes in front of us, she stirs her cup of hospital coffee and says, “Anyways, Mother’s Day, so soon after losing a child, is like an entire country rubbing salt in your eyes. Never-the-less, we do need to pay a visit to your grandmother.”

  My heart takes this in two ways. First, there’s the sorrow for Mom, any mom, who gets slapped across the face with constant reminders that her baby is dead. But the other way my heart hears this is a different kind of sorrow. The pity kind of sorrow. The, What am I, chopped liver? sorrow. I’m your baby, too, Mom. Can you even look at me?

  I, too, am stirring and sipping crappy coffee. Lukewarm watery brown elixir. All around us are visitors. Some happy and balloon-carrying, no doubt headed to the birth wing to sneak peeks at the newborns in their lives. Some heavy-hearted, tired-eyed. Whoever they’re here for is not doing well.

  There are nurses and doctors and other hospital workers peppered about on the orange chairs. Expressions range from grim to jubilant. Bad news:Good news.

  Cheer up, I think. Get Cheery. Keep Cheering. Cheer. All those variations of an uplifting word.

  Mom reaches for my arm and pats it. “I’m hoping that we can just move forward from here on out. Clean, fresh slate.”

  Now would be the time to ask Mom. But I can’t form the words. What would I say? Mom, I know you’ve been cheating on Dad. Or maybe, Mom, does that mean you’re going to break it off with whoever you’ve been seeing? Instead of anything like a confrontation, I smile and nod and agree. “That’d be great.”

  But Mom has some confronting of her own to do. She says, “We need to talk about the company you’ve been keeping.”

  She means Connor.

  “I know you have a different version of how things went down with Sabine, but, trust me. That boy is bad news.”

  I take in a breath, all set for a rebuttal. So many ways to prove she’s wrong. Unfortunately, she’s not finished yet.

  “I’m not telling this to make you feel guilty, Brady, but with your dad, well, I think his worrying abou
t you put him over the edge.”

  If she were aiming for a bull’s-eye, she nailed it. I stir the coffee some more, and watch the liquid swirl around. Our pancakes, untouched, are congealing. The syrup mortaring them together. They look as appetizing as a brick wall.

  “You have to promise me, for your father’s sake, that you’ll have nothing more to do with him.”

  The faint gray of charcoal remains on my fingers. When I close my eyes, I see yesterday’s sketch. Connor’s form emerging from shadows and lines. “Mom, it’s gotten a bit more complicated.”

  I tell her about Mrs. Cupworth, and her generous offer to have me use her studio. And how Connor is now her gardener. I leave out the part that he’s also my model. And how his lips feel against mine. And how Sabine used him. And how he makes me happier than anything else right now. I leave all of that out.

  Mom looks up at the big shop lights in the hospital cafeteria. Searching for a solution. A next demand. What she settles on is, “I’m one-hundred percent for you and your art, Brady. But I will have to have a conversation with Mrs. Cupworth about the boy.”

  She can’t even say his name.

  She adds, “Your dad, if everything keeps improving, will be back home in a few days. But, it’s up to us to provide a stress-free environment. Please understand how important that is.”

  On the way to Nona’s, my heart is split kindling. I think about that last therapy session, and the way I just walked out. And the comment I made about burning Sabine, and my father’s overly hard slap. The bruises and the wounds. The fractures and pain. I think about Nona’s beliefs: the way to salvation is prayer, sacrifice, virtue. Saint Agatha would see her breasts sliced off her chest rather than allow a man to have her. The Nicene Creed’s way to Heaven: We believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.