Sunny Side Up

by Daniel Stallings

  “So,” she said as they settled at a wooden table, “what’s your name?”

  “L-Liam.”

  “Well, Liam, tell me about yourself.”

  Li wrung his hands together so hard that his knuckles burned white. “H-How come?”

  Rosemary tilted her head to one side and studied him. She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head, and her emerald eyes sparkled with encouragement. There wasn’t a ripple in the milky smoothness of her complexion.

  “You look like you have a story tell. I saw how close you were to a nervous breakdown. And it worried me. So I thought I would ask around.”

  It was all bundled up inside Li. The pain…the fear…the sickness…He stuffed it inside his heart. His mouth quivered. He dug his teeth deep into his bottom lip. No one needed to know how hurt he was, how angry he had been, and how badly he wanted to go home.

  Rosemary warmed his cold hand with hers. Something about the glow in her eyes and the tenderness of her voice reminded Li of his mother when she would talk to him after he was bullied at school. Her questions were gentle; her face expressive of a genuine compassion that tugged at the battlements around his heart. And wasn’t there an echo of grief in those green eyes? A grief that seemed to mirror his own?

  She asked the question Li both wanted and feared. “What happened to your dad?”

  Li broke. His eyes started to leak. He made a soft whine like a hurt dog. Then words, broken and wet with tears, flew out his mouth.

  “He was my best friend. Dad and I were pals since I was a baby. He used to make my mother insane with worry, because he’d take me to construction sites and have me in a playpen in his office with wooden toys he made for me. Dad took me everywhere. I was his boy. Everyone knew what I meant to him. And he was my Papa! He knew everything about the world! I used to pester him for hours with questions about everything from why the sky was blue to why Mom spent so long getting dressed in the morning. Sometimes he laughed—It was a great laugh, one of those husky ones that always feels warm when you hear it—but he would answer every last question I had. And he was honest. He never lied to me, and he never kept secrets. I knew how taxes worked when I was ten! Dad…Dad liked that I was so curious. He said it meant I was smart. And I used to tell him everything about what happened at school or with friends. I could trust Dad.”

  Li stopped to fist the tears from his eyes.

  “He loved to build things. It was more than his job. He just loved to put things together. When I got interested in medieval stuff in kindergarten, he made me a castle out of cardboard. And I don’t mean a refrigerator box with windows cut in it. He spent days fabricating this huge structure with turrets and chambers and places to hide. I loved that castle. Dad and I spent HOURS playing in it. Sometimes he’d be the scary dragon, and I’d be the knight who would save the kingdom. Sometimes we were both knights on a quest to find my mom’s good silver, which Dad always hid. Mom would often force me to go to bed, but Dad would always wriggle out a few extra minutes of playtime. I think he had more fun than I did.” Li sniffed, and his face scrunched up into a strict knot to keep the tears from falling. His voice cracked. “And I was forced to throw it away after he died!”

  Rosemary paled, and her own lip trembled. “How did he die?”

  Li lifted a shaking hand and raked his fingers through his hair. His stormy-blue eyes, the same color as his father’s, swelled red. “I was fifteen. We all knew he wasn’t feeling well. I didn’t worry about it. Dad would tell me if something was wrong. Dad told me everything. We had no secrets.” He laughed, but it was a short, sharp noise that hurt his throat. “Well, it turned out he researched his symptoms and got a diagnosis long before he told us! He never mentioned seeing a doctor! Not once! He had been terrified of telling us, his family, that he was sick and dying. That’s how he put it. At dinner one night. While my little sister talked about her class trip to the aquarium. The four of us just sat around the dining table, eating my mom’s tuna casserole, when he blurted it out. ‘I’m dying,’ he said. That’s all he had to say! ‘I’m dying.’ Then my sister started to whimper.” Li stood so abruptly that one of the textile rainbows slunk to the ground in fright. “And I was furious! How could he not tell me, his son, that he had leukemia? We never had secrets before! How could he keep that from me? And how could he just drop a bomb like that and not give us any warning? To this day, I can’t even look at tuna casserole without wanting to puke!”

  Li saw the sharp glint of fear in Rosemary’s eyes and sank back into his chair.

  “And then I was angry at myself for being angry. The man was dying from leukemia. It had to be hell for him to try and explain to the family he adored that…that he was going to get very sick very fast. And that there was no cure. Do you remember 9/11, where all those families were ripped open by one big smack in the face?” Rosemary nodded, white to her lips. “It felt like 9/11 in my heart. I felt like some monster, some lunatic, murdered my Papa and I stood there and watched. It wasn’t enough that I had to hear about it. For two years, I had to sit and watch him die. When my dad told us he had leukemia, my childhood died. And my baby sister, who was only twelve at the time, had to hold her Daddy’s hand in the hospital while he tried not to bawl in front of her!”

  Li cried then. He collapsed into his folded arms and bawled, his sobs loud and rough as they scraped their way out of his body. Rosemary squeezed his arm with a delicate hand. Her voice was soft, encouraging. “It’s okay. Let it all out. Don’t hold back. I’ll know you better if you do. I…I understand how you feel.”

  His words were muffled. “I didn’t make the most out of those two years. Everything was a haze. Sometimes I avoided seeing my dad. I know I shouldn’t have. But I couldn’t stomach the idea of seeing the man who would move the earth to make me happy lying crumpled up like a used tissue in a hospital bed. He just got so weak. That hurt the most…to see him so helpless.”

  Rosemary’s eyes started to flood with tears. Her words stuttered a bit. “There you go. Keep…Keep talking.”

  Li lifted his head. His face burned with tear stains. “It was expensive. When the housing market crashed several years ago, my dad’s business went belly up. He had to shut it down. Then…Then the leukemia. We sold so many of our belongings to pay for whatever relief we could give him. The TV. Christmas decorations. Furniture. Anything we could lay our hands on! That’s when I took on my first job, to try and pay my dad’s medical bills. We wanted doctors there. We wanted them to think of something. We didn’t care that there was no cure for this disease. We wanted them to make a cure!” He was hysterical now. His shiner flushed black. The altar of rainbows trembled in a new gust of wind. “And none of it worked! We couldn’t save him! I couldn’t save him! Why couldn’t I save him? He was my Dad! He did everything for me! Why didn’t I try to do this one thing for him?”

  “Stop,” Rosemary said, her voice weak and wavering. “Stop right now. You did everything you could possibly do for him. He wouldn’t blame you.”

  Li stopped screaming, but he still wheezed and whimpered. “I blame myself.”

  “Don’t. That’s the worst thing you can do. He loved you. He wouldn’t want you to suffer like this.”

  Li looked out at the laughing, smiling bustle of people. His stomach churned. “I’ll always suffer. He died two years after the diagnosis, which is unheard of in this form of the disease. I was seventeen. Just a kid, really.” His eyes dropped to his dirty, threadbare sneakers. “We were broke by then. We couldn’t afford a funeral. We held a memorial service in the backyard. Our neighbors paid for a cremation. My dad’s ashes sit in an urn on our mantle.”

  “You didn’t think to spread his ashes?”

  Li jerked his head back and forth as if any undue motion would unleash more tears. “No. Dad was already taken from us. We couldn’t bear letting him go a second time.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “And my luck has been rotten ever since. I could only afford to go to a community college, if I worked my butt
off. Well, the State budget put so much strain on the college that they cut classes I really needed. I couldn’t afford to go to school anymore. So I dropped out. But I still try to study on my own, because I know that’s what my dad would want. Then it got too expensive for all three of us to live at home, so I volunteered to move out to spare my mom and sister. I haven’t seen them in months.” His wet, swollen, hurting eyes flicked up at the woman seated across from him. “Well…that’s my story.”

  Rosemary dabbed away her loose tears. Her stress lines returned, cutting dark lines into her skin. “Next time, warn me that you’re going to break my heart.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs.—”

  “Oh please, don’t be sorry! I asked for it. I just didn’t realize…” She cleared her throat. “I know how you feel. I…I also lost a loved one in…in a really horrible way.”

  “You mean Dustin?”

  It was a fatal mistake. Li wanted to bite back the words the second they escaped his lips. He saw her nostrils flare and her pupils contract. He thought about diving under the table to dodge the explosion.

  Rosemary lifted her hands as if warding off the charge of fury. “Normally, I want to butcher anyone who so much as mentions my baby brother, but I think you’ve had enough trouble in your life. How did you learn about him?”

  “I…I accidentally overheard your fight with…with your husband.”

  She seized a lock of flaming hair and started splitting it into individual strands. “So, you heard all about how my husband wanted to sleep with a murdering bitch, huh?”

  “Oh, I don’t think that—”

  “So now you’re an expert on my husband? I’ve been his wife for twenty-two years! I know when he wants sex! And I guess since I can’t get pregnant, he’ll—!” The words caught in her throat. Tears bloomed in her eyes. “Damn it…I should have known that would hurt.”

  Li rested a tentative hand on Rosemary’s own. “You…You’re infertile?”

  “That’s the polite way of saying it. Marty and I…we…we came on this cruise to try and escape everything. It…It was HELL knowing that I couldn’t have a family of my own. It…I…Well, maybe I should start from the beginning.”

  She began twisting the loose curl of hair into a tight coil. Li noticed how hard her throat worked to keep the sobs down and the way her eyes darted to his face. At that moment, he felt connected to her and her grief, to the long years of suffering they both endured. They both lost people they loved. They both lived with the guilt and pain day after day, constantly reminded of what they lost. They both wanted nothing more in the world than to escape the past. He could see his feelings and fears mirrored in her anxious glance. He squeezed her arm for comfort, worked to keep his own raw emotions in check, and spoke as calmly as he could.

  “Go on. I’m listening.”

  Rosemary swallowed her sobs, her voice quivering. “My brothers and I were orphaned as teenagers when our parents died in a car crash. We were the last ones in the family. The rest were dead. So we went to live with friends.” Her eyes misted over with memories. “They were nice, but they weren’t family. They had their own kids to worry about. It was lonely. So my brothers and I became inseparable. We formed our own little family.” She chuckled, but it was a hollow sound. “We used to call ourselves the Three Musketeers. All for one and one for all. I would have killed for my brothers.”

  “And Dustin?”

  “Dustin…” she whispered. She stopped coiling her hair and throttled her purse handle in her fists. “Dustin was a sweetheart. He was only fourteen when our parents died. My big brother and I raised him through those really tough years. I was worried that maybe he’d grow cold and distant, but not my baby brother. He still knew how to love. He had a huge heart, open to everyone. He loved with his entire soul.” The dragon flashed on her face for a heartbeat. “And then that bitch destroyed him.”

  “Charlegne?”

  She threw him a poisonous glare. Li recoiled from what could turn into another strangling. “Is there any other slut evil enough?” Li chewed on his lower lip. Those venomous snake eyes narrowed. “What? Is there something you want to say? Do you disagree with me? But I guess all men are biased where certain blondes are concerned.” Her grip on the purse tightened until her knuckles popped. “Well, Liam?”

  “I thought she was an unhappy woman.”

  Whatever Rosemary expected, it was not that.

  “Why the hell should she be unhappy? It’s not like she lost a baby brother to suicide! Suicide she caused, by the way! She had everything in the world! She was a damn queen even when she took a dump! And all she had to do was kill my brother! What did she lose?”

  Li recalled Charlegne’s words during that first dinner.

  Anything you lost isn’t nearly as bad as what I lost…

  “I think she lost a fiancé.”

  A vein pulsed in Rosemary’s temple. Again, Li noticed the strain her throat went through to suppress the screams scratching against her lips.

  “And you think she loved him enough for that to make a dent in her flawless life? Obviously, you don’t know the whole story of what that pretty, perfect whore did to my family.” She bent toward Li as if ready to drop hot gossip into his lap. “Charlegne modeled for my line some sixteen years ago, back when she was the biggest name in couture modeling. Dustin helped me out backstage during shows. That’s where he met Charlegne.” Her eyes slipped into the haze of memories again. “He couldn’t fight whatever spell she put on men. He adored her. It was sweet at first. Dustin was horribly shy and tended to blush when she floated near him. And when you have red hair, blushing is not becoming. But Charlegne seemed charmed by it.”

  “Did…Did she love him too?”

  “It seemed so at first. Charlegne was a different woman then. Open. Friendly. Very smart. Had an eye on her future. She studied fashion design at FIDM. She wanted to start her own line before the gilt came off her modeling credentials.” Rosemary’s brow pleated in a frown. “I’m sorry to say I helped her. She was like a sister to me. I thought she loved my brother. She had the decency to blush whenever I asked about him.”

  “Sounds like true love.”

  “I thought so. They seemed perfect for each other. My big brother was a little jealous of them, in fact. At the time, his girlfriend left him after an ugly fight, and he was still sore about it. But there was never any hostility toward Dustin and Charlegne.”

  Li’s mind taunted him with a less sentimental approach. I think there would be a little hostility. To see someone in a happy, healthy relationship after losing your own is enough to make anyone jealous.

  Rosemary’s eyes hardened into brightly polished spheres of malachite. “A year after they met, they were engaged. I was…I was thrilled when it happened, because, you see. I had already designed Charlegne’s wedding dress. I had accepted her as a sister in my heart. She was family to me. I thought…I thought she would make Dustin happy.”

  “But what happened? Why wasn’t it a happy ending?”

  Rosemary’s defenses against her temper were pulling apart at the seams. Conscious of the crowd just outside the stall, she hissed through bared teeth. “The stupid slut left him for another man!”

  Li could see, in her heavy breathing and the determined thrust of the bones in her face, that they sat on the razor’s edge of Rosemary’s suffering. He could not provoke a woman who had lost her brother, her hopes for motherhood, and possibly her husband’s love.

  “I can’t see why she would leave a man who loved her,” he said, measuring his words with extreme caution. “Your poor brother.”

  A tear crawled down her cheek. “He was heartbroken. He called me when it happened, bawling his eyes out. She sent him a letter saying that the engagement had been a mistake, that it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Then she disappeared. She deserted Dustin. It was too much for him. He never really recovered from Mom and Dad’s deaths and losing another person he loved was like driving nails into his heart. So
he…he…”

  Li covered her hand with his again. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “No…No, I want to…” The stiff ridges of bone in her face seemed to melt with her tears. “He killed himself…threw himself off a bridge not far from his apartment. It was an awful scene. My big brother and I got letters from Dustin, and when we got to the bridge…” Her eyes, troubled with memory, widened, and her hands were rigid claws protruding before her as if she cradled her dead brother’s head. “The blood was all I saw. All on these huge rocks under the bridge. I bet that’s why he chose that bridge. The blood…the blood was everywhere. There was a big smear of it. The officer at the scene said that…that Dustin hit the rocks and bled to death. Then gravity pulled his body down the rocks, smearing the blood, and he fell into the river. To this day, I still picture his body. I cried every night for a year after his funeral.”

  Li felt his stomach twist in protest as he pictured the product of the suicide. A body broken by rocks, bloody from his wounds, and bloated from the river. “And Charlegne never learned about his death?”

  Rosemary’s words sharpened into ice. “Oh, I made sure she knew. She murdered my baby brother. She drove him to kill himself and then ran away with some asshole who left her the minute he got wind of her crime, I’m sure of it. She never modeled again. I didn’t confront her until she started her line and we became rivals.” The ice started to rumble with half-restrained thunder. “I let her know that she deserved to die. Painfully. I wanted her to suffer like Dustin. It wasn’t fair that she lived while I had to bury my brother.”

  “I understand that you would feel that way, but—”

  That was enough to ignite the powder keg. She screeched at Li, her face as red as Dustin’s blood, her hair alive like fire.

  “I hated her! I loathed her! I never forgave her for slaughtering Dustin! Don’t you dare ask me to give a damn about her feelings, you son of a bitch!”