by Kat Spears
Introductions are a blur of names I will never remember, and I am awkward meeting new people. It seems so easy for everyone else. They shake hands and says things like “How do you do” and make polite conversation. People always try to make small talk about sports, as if it’s a safe topic because I’m a guy and guys are supposed to care about football and basketball. I don’t know anything about sports, other than skateboarding and snowboarding. When I meet new people I try to smile but I can feel that my face is a twisted grimace, like I’m holding in a fart.
Mr. Cargill, the senior partner of Cargill, Cargill, Cargill & Cargill, is younger than I expected him to be. He is probably about Dad’s age, if Dad were still alive, and he is fit and tan. Chuck is tan, too—at least his face and arms—from spending time on the golf course, but he isn’t physically fit. His pants ride high in the back above his large ass, and low in the front below his gut. He pays a tailor good money, but there’s only so much that guy can do.
“It’s nice to meet you, Dane,” Mr. Cargill says. “My younger daughter is about your age but she couldn’t be with us tonight. She mentioned something about a party like this potentially boring her out of her mind.” Mr. Cargill smiles as Mom and Chuck laugh, too eagerly, at his joke.
I give him a half-hearted smile for his effort and Mom says, “Dane tried to get out of coming, but I wanted him to see that the people who will be operating his dad’s firm are really great people.”
Mr. Cargill’s smile gets bigger and the creases around his eyes are evidence that he has smiled a lot in his life. “That’s nice of you to say,” he says, nodding at Mom. “And I’m so sorry about your dad, Dane. My own father died when I was in college so I know how hard it must be on you.”
Mom cuts me a knowing side-eye as the mention of Dad raises a familiar lump in my throat. I take a minute to wish that Mom was dating Mr. Cargill instead of Chuck and wonder if Mr. Cargill is married and, if so, if his marriage is in trouble.
I am still caught up in the fantasy of the weekends when Mr. Cargill will take me fishing or hiking, where we will have long talks and he’ll get me—really get me—as a person. I can see the father-son weekends like a slideshow of Instagram posts—the two of us smiling while holding up a big fish on a hook, the two of us standing at a scenic overlook along the Appalachian Trail, a close-up selfie of us with Mr. Cargill’s arm around my shoulders.
“That’s very nice of you to say,” Mom says, filling in the hole I have created in the conversation. Everyone is staring at me, waiting for my reaction, but I am too flustered now that I have been caught fantasizing about Mr. Cargill as a substitute father.
I mumble an apology, though I’m not sure what I’m sorry about this time. I say something about needing to go to the bathroom, which makes Mom cringe, but it’s so much better than saying what’s actually happening in my mind.
Then I am walking away, toward the main corridor where the bathrooms are. I walk past the bathrooms and to the front door and out into the night without looking over my shoulder to see if anyone is coming after me. I have to sit in the car for a few minutes waiting for my breathing to slow down and for my brain to stop its death spiral into chaos.
* * *
When Dad got too sick to drive, I took his 1982 diesel Mercedes as my car. The car is old enough to be considered vintage instead of just lame. Dad loved his old Mercedes and swore he would never drive any other car. And, though it wasn’t really the way he meant it, his prediction came true.
Now the car is like a time capsule of Dad’s life. His sunglasses still rest on the dashboard, patiently awaiting his return. Empty packets of nicotine gum lay crushed in the console. Dad was always trying to quit something—quit smoking, quit drinking, quit eating carbs. Usually it was Mom leading the charge, telling him what he had to quit. Mom hasn’t eaten a carb since the nineties.
Though Dad always kept the Mercedes in the garage, these days I usually leave it parked on the street, exposed to the elements. The exterior of the car is dotted with withered mulberries from a nearby tree, along with splatters of bird poop. The bird poop consists mostly of mulberries in another stage of the life cycle. Eventually, all living things—humans, birds, mulberries—turn back into shit one day.
The interior of the car is a light gray, the floor mats dotted with purple-black stains of mulberry juice from the berries that get trapped in the soles of shoes. The stains will never come out, like bad memories stamped into a troubled mind.
My mind is definitely troubled. Sometimes I think I’m the only person in the world who is fully awake. Every day we are fed a constant stream of digital horrors—mass shootings, global warming, the continent of plastic trash in the Pacific, genocides and their refugees, and the premature death of young Black men at the hands of law enforcement. There’s barely time to feel the appropriate level of outrage or sadness before you’re being asked to be outraged or sad about something else. It’s impossible to stay on top of feeling sadness or outrage or outraged sadness for all of the people and situations deserving of it. At a certain point I just gave up and attempted suicide. It wasn’t a very good attempt. In addition to being a mediocre student and a non-seeded athlete, I am also a failed suicidist.
If you consider that I could have been born in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, or born into the losing side of a civil war in Syria, or born in a town that doesn’t have a Starbucks, my life really isn’t so terrible. I live in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of fewer than fifty thousand people but that sustains not one, but two J.Crews. When you think about just how terrible life could be—hunger, disease, racial injustice, non-J.Crew clothing—my existence is pretty golden. But those aren’t arguments your mind can formulate when you’re in the mood to die.
I take out my phone as I sit in the car before I start the engine and type a text to Dad, to let him know I’m thinking about him. I don’t know who has Dad’s phone number now. It’s just another part of him that Mom threw out after he died, like his clothes and his books. She threw out anything that was taking up space or costing her money. It was so easy for her to just let everything go. I wanted to hold on to Dad’s things, and Mom asked me, “What are you going to do when you move out? Just keep boxes and boxes of stuff no one will ever use again?” She told me it was better if I moved on, but where I’m supposed to be moving on to? That part is less certain.
Anyway, I don’t know if people can get text messages in the afterlife, or if there is an afterlife, but I still text Dad sometimes.
I miss you. Sometimes I hate you for leaving.
The response comes almost right away.
I know, is all it says.
I feel like everybody has moved on but me. You still exist for me.
That’s all that matters.
Even though I don’t know who has Dad’s phone now, it’s an older person, I figure, because they always use punctuation and complete sentences and no emojis, though what emojis a spirit would choose to send from the afterlife is almost too depressing to contemplate. I’m surprised that they haven’t blocked me by now, but I’m grateful that they haven’t. It’s like I can still talk to Dad even though he isn’t there. When I do text with him, it’s like I can imagine he’s just on a business trip somewhere. Not dead. Not really gone. Maybe the person who responds to me does it as a joke, a sick thrill. But I don’t think so.
* * *
I enjoy the drive home, taking the curves with my foot hovering over the brake. Residential McLean is not laid out in a grid like most towns, but instead has winding roads cut into the hills near the fall line of the Potomac River. The whole river valley is a once-upon-a-time forest, now smothered under a blanket of gourmet grocery stores, coffee shops, and yoga studios. In my neighborhood, houses are set back into deep wooded lots with long driveways. There are few streetlights and little traffic to disrupt the quiet.
As I round the last curve in the road before home, the glare of the headlights catches movement and I quickly mash the brakes and the Mercedes ro
cks on its suspension as I lurch forward in my seat. A coyote is just emerging from the trees at the side of the road, but it doesn’t run away from the approach of headlights. It stops in the middle of the road and swings its head in my direction, surveying the Mercedes as a threat. Coyotes are rare, and secretive, like unicorns, so I figure this has to be the same one that I have seen a few times around the neighborhood since Dad died.
The coyote’s head hangs low, which makes it seem wary and aggressive rather than curious, but still, he doesn’t run. “Wow,” I say in a reverent whisper. The moment demands I say something, even though I am alone in the car. Before this I have caught only fleeting glimpses of the coyote. It looks like a small wolf, with a saddle of dark gray fur on his back, the rest of it a shaggy brown, with a bushy copper tail.
I sit there, completely transfixed, willing to watch the coyote for as long as it will sit still and let me.
Dad would have appreciated the coyote. He respected anything that killed rodents. As I sit in awe, I feel connected to the coyote, more connected than I have felt to anyone or anything for a long time. It’s part of the mystic web of the universe—the part of Dad left behind when he died.
If you ask someone what animal best describes them or what animal they would want to be reincarnated as, they always say something like a wolf or a lion, or, if they have limited imagination, something like a house cat.
Nobody ever says the animal they most resemble is something common and unexceptional, like a squirrel.
With seven billion people on the planet … it just stands to reason that the majority of us would be reincarnated as squirrels. We can’t all be mountain lions.
Because Dad liked to chase impossible dreams, his life’s goal was to eliminate the squirrel population in our immediate neighborhood. He would trap the squirrels who came into our yard, then relocate them to Great Falls Park. Had it been socially acceptable in a place like McLean, Dad would have shot the squirrels with the .22-caliber rifle he kept in the garage. I’m not sure why he hated squirrels so much. Like a fear of snakes, it was something programmed so deeply into his DNA I don’t think he could have explained it if you asked him.
When I was a kid I always felt bad for the squirrels. Dad would bait them with balls of suet and birdseed. Once they were trapped in the steel box, he’d load them into the Mercedes and drop them at their new home in the park on his way to work, a coat-and-tie-wearing vigilante with the noble mission of squirrel population control.
Since Dad died and the coyote turned up in the neighborhood, I’d been imagining Dad’s spirit in the form of a coyote. But maybe he was really a squirrel. Probably if my dad had to imagine a fate worse than death without an afterlife, it would be to come back as a squirrel. It was impossible to overstate how much he hated them.
Mrs. Swope, who lives on our street and has to be at least a hundred years old, always feeds the squirrels. It used to drive Dad crazy to see her outside casting sunflower seeds and peanuts into her yard. Everyone in our neighborhood thinks Mrs. Swope is crazy, and I admire the fact that she doesn’t give a shit.
The coyote loses interest in the encounter before I do and finishes crossing the road, disappearing into the trees. Maybe he is headed to Mrs. Swope’s to kill some of her precious squirrels.
Since Chuck started staying over at the house, I’ve parked on the street instead of in the driveway. It’s a small act of defiance. The driveway has enough room to park six cars but it’s my way of making myself separate and apart from the house that isn’t a home.
Even from the end of the long driveway the house is visible because of the light that spills through the large plate-glass windows. Mom always has lights burning in every room. She hasn’t gotten the memo about climate change.
As I climb out of the car I detect the faint smell of cigarette smoke, and I turn in a circle looking for the source of the smell. From just down the street, under the shadows of a giant oak tree, is the swell of a cigarette ember.
“Ophelia?” I call out in a hoarse whisper, trying to project my voice without waking the whole neighborhood. “That you?”
“No,” a voice comes out of the black hole in the yard. “It’s your mom.”
Definitely Ophelia. She’s the only girl I know who makes “your mom” jokes.
I walk toward the sound of her voice.
“Hey,” I say as I saunter the last few yards to reach her. All five feet and glorious eight inches of her is standing there, watching me, waiting for me to say something interesting. After two years of her living next door, my heart still lurches at the sight of her.
“You got a cigarette?” I ask her. I don’t really want a cigarette. What I want is an excuse to talk to Ophelia.
She sighs with impatience, but it is too dark to see her eyes roll. “No,” she says, and then, because she can never just let anything go, adds, “You smoked them all.”
Ophelia is beautiful but does her best to keep it on the down-low. She hardly ever wears anything but jeans and T-shirts and usually keeps her black curls in a loose braid that hangs to the middle of her back.
In flat feet she is already close to my height, which is an unspectacular five feet eleven inches, which I always extend to six feet if anyone is asking. Until tenth grade I was shorter than many of the girls my age. An alarming growth spurt over the past year had finally propelled me to a whole new class of masculinity.
If she is wearing shoes with a high heel, like she is now, we are eye-to-eye, which makes me feel even less spectacular than I already do on my best day when I am talking to Ophelia. It isn’t enough for her to be smarter than I am, or a better athlete, she has to be as tall as I am, too, which makes me hyperaware of how insignificant I am.
Ophelia lives with just her father, who is a colonel in the army. He’s strict, especially by McLean standards, where teenagers go largely unsupervised, drive expensive European cars, and only interact with their parents under the guidance of a prescribing therapist.
I am terrified of Colonel Marcus. Everyone, in fact, is terrified of him.
Ophelia and her father moved into the house next door two years ago. They never provided any explanation for why there was no mother in the house, even though the neighborhood gossips desperately wanted the intel. Especially since Ophelia’s father is Black, but Ophelia’s skin is much lighter than his, so everyone assumes her mom must be white. I’ve never asked her about her mom because it seems rude to bring it up, and not just because of the color of her skin.
We go to the same school, but Ophelia and I travel in different social circles. Actually, Ophelia has a social circle, a big one, and I am pretty much a loner. She is strictly focused on her grades and extracurricular activities that look good on college applications, which you would think has more to do with her dad’s goals than her own. But I think Ophelia would be a straight-A student even if her dad had nothing to say about it. She’s also a varsity athlete, and founder of the school’s a cappella group, which would be lame if anyone else did it.
During the fall semester she played Kate in the school’s production of Kiss Me Kate, and I saw every performance. I sat in the back of the auditorium so I could watch her without anyone watching me, and I watched the audience fall in love with her the same way I did.
My mom thinks that my fixation—her word—on Ophe-lia is about 50 percent proximity and 50 percent unattainability. This is a prime example of why it’s never a good idea for me to tell Mom anything personal. She always finds some way to invalidate my feelings.
As my neighbor, Ophelia is immediate and visible every day, which is what makes her, according to my mom, so desirable. Mom often argues that there are many girls my age who are smart and attractive like Ophelia, and infinitely more attainable.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that Mom is projecting her feelings about her own situation onto me, and that she has no appreciation for the idea of a soul mate. When Dad died, Mom latched on to the closest, most convenient person as a new romantic
partner. I don’t think love matters to her at all.
“Here,” Ophelia says as she hands me a cigarette.
“Thanks. I’ll get you some next time I’m at work.”
“You’ll buy them? Or steal them?”
“Steal them, of course.”
“Figures,” she says.
“I’m joking.” I’m not. “I’ll buy them when I’m working the register. I can’t buy them from Mr. Edgar. He won’t sell them to me because I’m underage.”
“So stupid,” she says. “Twenty-one to buy cigarettes is ridiculous. Back in the good old days people started smoking when they were twelve. Like my grandmother.”
“Your grandmother started smoking when she was twelve?”
“Sure,” Ophelia says. “She smoked for, like, forty years.”
“She die of lung cancer?” I ask.
“Nah. She got hit by a bus.”
“Jesus,” I say as the mental visual of a grandmother getting hit by a bus jumps into my brain uninvited. “Really?”
“I’m just messing with you,” Ophelia says with a chuckle at my expense and, even in the dark, I can sense her winking at me. Ophelia has the unconscious habit of winking when she drops an ironic comment or says something funny, and I envy her cool. I can’t wink without looking ridiculous for trying. “You’re such a good mark,” she says. “You’ll fall for just about anything.”
“Your dad know that you’re out here?” I ask, only to change the subject from my idiocy.
“No-o,” she drags the word out on a frustrated sigh. “I had to wait until he was asleep to sneak out.”
“Why don’t you just use a vape?” I ask. “Get some that smells like berries or bubble gum and he’ll just think it’s body spray or something.”
“You think I’d wear body spray that smells like bubble gum?” she asks, and she sounds kind of angry about it.