The Possibilities

by Kaui Hart Hemmings

  My dad looks at my glass of wine. “Got some cork in there.”

  I drink it.

  On television a singer on a stage lit dark blue has his eyes rolled back, his body convulsing.

  I get up to pour more wine. “Oh my God,” I say.

  “What’s wrong, sport?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “Just got a little off balance.” I hold the wine bottle upside down over my glass and give it a shake.

  “Maybe ease up a little,” he says.

  I think of his past purchases: mops that can clean hard-to-reach places, a robotic vacuum, a fork/spoon/knife (all in one), an ab roller, ab stretcher, ab vibrator, knives that can cut through walls, all those books.

  “You ease up,” I say, “on buying crap.”

  I go back and sit down aggressively, making his plate bounce.

  “Some things are clever,” he says. “They’d be good gifts. Better than some of the things you put on your show. It’s a sham you have to pay to be featured. Other places could use more help, seeing they’re being charged up the ass for property tax—you know that it’s more per square inch on Main than a shop on Fifth Avenue in New York City? I should go in and—”

  “Dad, shut up about all that already. You don’t work there anymore! No one cares!”

  I don’t dare look at him. Why is it that when a child feels sad or ashamed, they’re mean to their parents? Do we do it from age two to their deaths? My tear ducts get to work. They never fail to work after I’ve been cruel to him.

  The couch shifts as he gets up. I was perfectly situated and now it’s ruined. I adapt and move to the right, sighing extra audibly. I hear him walk down the stairs to his room.

  I get up and busy myself by sorting through the mail on the counter. Cully keeps getting random things—offers for free oil changes, catalogs from Motor Trend, requests from Easter Seals, and I never get around to making any of it stop. Maybe I won’t. I remember we’d still get mom’s catalogs in the mail, flyers and things that are easier to keep getting than to make them stop coming. I think we both liked it anyway. My hands are shaking as I pick up the mail, pretending to be busy, but just thinking of my dad alone in his little room, so much like Cully’s room with its lack of expression. I give in, walk down.

  He must think about my mom at times like these. He never shares his experience with death to help me, and I guess I’m grateful. He must know the need to feel alone and slighted, like no one has ever felt the same way before. I remember not running to my dad when my mom died. I was home from kindergarten. I heard him talking on the phone in the kitchen and knew what was happening, knew what he was being told. He called to me. I told him I was busy. I was watching an animated Japanese film. I continued to watch it. I remember refusing to stop. The memory I have of how I felt at the time is stilted, and maybe this isn’t a memory but the way I actually felt at the time—the emotions pounded out flatly and loudly as if on a drum:

  The movie was scary.

  I had to watch it.

  I had to be brave.

  Everything was going to be different in good ways and bad.

  My mom isn’t sick anymore. She isn’t alive.

  She won’t be there to read to me as I eat my cereal in the morning.

  She won’t drive me to ballet and give me the thumbs-up from the bench.

  She won’t kiss the top of my head and tell me that I smell so good or that I need a bath.

  I won’t have to mind her. I can be loud and careless.

  The movie is scary; it’s making me cry, the movie.

  The cancer is dead, but it died with her, like a friend.

  This was the thought that finally made me sob like the child I was, and the sobs turned into wails at the sight of my dad, head down, coming to tell me what I already knew.

  • • •

  I STAND IN front of my dad’s closed door and feel like an apology is due but am not sure whom the apology should be from. We all have so many problems. Sometimes you just have to fend for yourself.

  “Dad?” I say before opening the door.

  “Come in, champ.”

  His back is toward me. He adjusts a painting on the wall near his bed.

  “I heard you stomping down the steps,” he says. “You don’t have to warn me. I’m not masturbating or anything.”

  I scan his room and it reminds me of Cully’s. There’s more me in here than him. “Putting up your pictures?”

  “May as well.”

  The paintings used to hang in his office, images of the Old West and the old town. I feel that he too is a framed sepia photograph, something from old Breckenridge that the company put up because he looked good in their corner. A local kid with deep roots, rising up from ski patrol to VP of operations. I had no right to belittle him that way. The picture is an oil painting of an Indian crouched on his galloping horse, arrow poised to slay a boxy buffalo. Its title: Circle of Life. I laugh.

  “What?” he says.

  “That painting.” I point to the shaggy buffalo sniffing the prairie land, the skinny Indian, ass in the air like a jockey at Churchill Downs. “It’s a riot.”

  “You’re a riot,” he says.

  “I was thinking,” I say. I walk into the room and place my hand on the wall. “We could knock this down and connect to the other room. It could be a great space. It could be like a condo down here.”

  He looks at the wall separating his room from Cully’s and squints. He’s never been one for remodeling; everything is fine as it is, or can be.

  “I see,” he says. “That would really transform things.”

  I nod, eager, ready to pick up a club and start whaling. Then, once again, I feel guilty. Am I too eager to demolish and eradicate? No, I tell myself. You’re adapting, you’re surviving. Something like that. You’re trying to get to that elusive other side.

  He stands with his hands on his hips, maybe imagining the transformation. “I think it’s a good idea. Whether I stay or go, it’s a good idea, a good change. Here. I have something for you.”

  He walks to his shelf, then hands me a knife. It has a black rubber handle that’s comfortable to hold. On the handle is a switch.

  “Turn it on,” he says.

  I do as I’m told and a light turns red. “I’ve seen the infomercial for this,” I say, remembering the man having a terrible time spreading peanut butter onto a slice of bread. He would slab it on with an ordinary knife, but the knife would stick and tear the bread apart. He made subsequent attempts, each time failing, while a sympathetic voice-over narrated his aggravation. His kids, grumpy and ugly, stood there waiting for him, exchanging bratty glances.

  “It’s got a special warming agent,” my dad says. “It will soften your peanut butter so it can glide on easily. I thought you could use it since you make me all those sandwiches. I know it’s a pain in the ass.”

  He sits down on the bed. The last shot in the infomercial shows the father using the new knife to slice into a stick of hard butter. He does so easily, then spreads it on the bread without ripping it apart. His children are proud, and when he drops them off at school with their sack lunches, mothers look at him lustily. “Thanks,” I say.

  He shrugs.

  Next to his bed on the wall-sized storage shelf I see more boxes, most with pictures of the box’s contents. There’s an air ionizer, a five-speed back massager that looks like a small intestine, a Robotic Floor Vac with remote and wall mount, Christmas ornaments that change color at your touch, an embroidery machine. Next to the embroidery machine is an old pillowcase that I assume my father has tried, and failed, to embroider. He almost completed a letter: an S, perhaps, but gave up. The design looks shaky and manic, an art project by a person in some kind of recovery program. All the objects. It crosses my mind that I will inherit them one day. One of the saddest parts about a parent’s death must be feeling burdened by a lot of things they left behind. The thought makes me want to get rid of all my bad underwear.

  He follows my gaze, loo
ks back at the shelf. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “I know.”

  “No, it’s okay. We all need different things.” I try to look at him like the children whose father finally made them a sandwich.

  “I’m going to go try this out,” I say, but I don’t leave. I lean against the door frame, feeling the weight of fatigue. I’m down here to show that I’m sorry, but I also need him. This knowledge I have of Cully won’t make sense until I share it with him. I hesitate, but then think that whenever my kids confided in me, I felt soothed and proud, necessary. “Dad?”

  “Yeah, sport.” He starts to unbutton his shirt.

  “Cully was a drug dealer.”

  “Oh?” he says, his hands pausing on a button.

  “Pot. He sold pot.”

  My dad nods and squints as if trying to make a decision.

  “I didn’t know this,” I say. “And maybe there’s more I don’t know. Maybe he was out of control. I failed. I failed to keep him safe. I think that’s what people think. Maybe everyone thought he was a bad kid and I didn’t know this.” I am gripping the knife; the red button comes on and I press it off.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” I say. “I just feel stupid.” I want to slump down to the floor, but I hold myself up. I wait for his judgment.

  My dad stays on his bed with his shirt partly undone. His torso is concave, the hair on his chest a gray black.

  “Well,” he says.

  I wonder if he’s just as ashamed and disappointed. He must be.

  “It’s too late.” He scratches his jaw. “Nothing you can do about it now.”

  I look up at the painting over him, then back down. He’s still pensive, trying to figure this out. I am rooting for him to solve it.

  “Torture yourself if you want,” he says. “But know that even if he were alive, even if he was doing something completely different, you’d still have those thoughts. I’d think all the time how I was messing you up. No mother, no siblings, and I didn’t invest all my money in the resort like some of my friends. Then I’d see other families—they’d do everything right, and you know what? Most of their kids were still idiots. Cully loved you and he felt loved by you. He made both good and bad decisions. He was a happy boy. That’s all. Besides.”

  He gets up and walks to his closet to hang up his shirt, turning his back to me. Sometimes I think he cries when I’m not looking. I’ve always imagined him doing it while hanging up his clothes or putting things away. It would be too indulgent to cry without accomplishing anything else.

  “Besides what?” I ask.

  “Besides, you don’t know what you’ve done. He didn’t have the chance to become himself, or to become a man. We’re very different from the people we were in our twenties. At that age I was a very different person. So were you.”

  I think of that self, on the verge of becoming another self. Then having Cully at twenty-one, right when I wanted nothing to do with motherhood. It was a beautiful mistake. Would his mistakes have one day been beautiful?

  “We’ve got a lot of lives in this lifetime,” he says, and I’m almost certain he’s thinking about his life with and without my mom.

  His back is still to me and I know he’d be more comfortable if I left. That’s the whole deal with being a parent—you have to give them an answer and you can’t let them know you need them right back. You can’t let them know you’re in pain and that you work so hard so that everything will be okay without you. My mom never let me see her fear. She must have been so afraid to let us go.

  “Remember your hair?” he asks. He glances back.

  “What about it?” I ask.

  “Your hair,” he says, letting his hands hover over his head. Then he turns to me with a face that’s recollecting something, pulling from the trenches of memory. “The way you wore it. In college.”

  I shake my head and grin with one side of my mouth, recalling my hair I’d insist on blowing out, then curling. It was an aggressive bounty of bleached blond tight curls and stiff bangs. I wanted to look like Tina Kilpatrick on the Denver news and unfortunately, I did.

  The week before Cully died he had cut his hair, and it made him look so grown up and handsome.

  I’m about to say good night, but then I notice Kit’s black book on his shelf. “You’re keeping the calendar?”

  He looks at the shelf. “I wanted to look through all of it,” he says. “Before I see her tomorrow.”

  He looks like he’s questioning something in his head. “It’s an odd thing to leave,” he says.

  “Ask her about it,” I say.

  “You think she’ll really come back?” he asks.

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  He looks up at me and then the confused expression leaves his face.

  “What?” I say.

  “There was something she said. We were talking about things—her dad, nature, you know.”

  I pretend to know.

  “I asked how her dad felt about her living here after college. She said something about him telling her that people in ski towns were prone to STDs. Wasn’t the outdoor type. She said she loved Indian Princesses, but while the other dads would be pointing out edible plants and berries, hers would be telling her that people like Ralph Waldo Emerson were fiscally retarded and there was nothing remarkable about men who got their jollies from drinking water out of a hoofprint.”

  “Wow,” I say. “Sounds like you guys had a lot to talk about.”

  “It’s just funny because Cully once said the same thing—about Emerson, about the hoofprint. Isn’t that strange?”

  “Maybe it’s from a movie,” I say, but something in me flutters.

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “Anyway,” he says, “I’m off. Off to bed. Good huddle.”

  “Good night,” I say. “Love you.”

  “Love you more,” he says.

  Chapter 8

  I should have listened to Holly. Work was an incredible disaster. I had to interview a “terrain park specialist” named Bone, who, while in school with Cully, was known for taping pictures of gay pornography to the backs of tourists. After that we went on to visit B Beauty, where we had to test out and comment on the clever names of the lipstick colors—Shop Teal You Drop! Ha ha! I tried to do my job, make people want things they don’t need, little luxuries that will break and peel by the time they return to sea level. They will want lipsticks they already own. They will want a lipstick holder and other lipstick accessories, something I didn’t even know existed.

  “Sarah, maybe more enthusiasm?” Holly said to me and pantomimed enthusiasm, which made her look like a crazed downhill ski racer. I rolled the lipsticks up and down, thinking that if this were a movie I wouldn’t be here. I’d be at home, perhaps. There’d be a shot of me looking at a picture of my son, a slow song in the background doing the work for me. Maybe I’d be gearing up to take his ashes to some exotic place he always wanted to see.

  A book would jump ahead and then meander its way back to one of the many beginnings. Cully as a child. Me giving birth. In print my thoughts would be beautiful, understandable, and fluid. There would be themes. It would be deep. I would not be so acerbic. I’d be a sympathetic character—warm and lovable, fragile. Neither the movie mother nor the book mother would clock in.

  I park in the lot above Empire Burgers, wanting to take a little stroll before seeing Billy. I called him as soon as I woke up, not really knowing why. Maybe it’s the same urgency that normal parents feel when they find their child has done something either good or bad. They want to confer and share so they don’t experience it alone.

  I walk down the steps to the sidewalk, past the boys eating burgers and drinking beer, aware that everyone loves to people-watch and right now I’m people. I watch them back, narrowing in on a tribe of kids in bright, toxic outerwear. I remember Cully called these neon kids with their skinny jeans “skittles.”

  I ate here once with him. He met me after a shoot. We noticed a lot of old people, then found out it was
Senior Discount Tuesday. That’s all I remember. And that it was a really good burger. Cully had such a hearty appetite. Maybe he was stoned.

  I’m patient with the tourist family in front of me and don’t bother to pass them. I look at their asses, all identically large and undefined like cumulus clouds. The father is studying the town map, holding his hands out wide, walking slowly.

  “I’m telling you,” his young son says, looking at his phone. “We went too far. We passed it. Dad. Dad. Dad.”

  “We passed it!” the daughter says. I’d say she’s around six. “I want to go home!”

  You are meant to be lost, I want to tell them. The walkways are designed to confuse; there are inlets and levels so you’re always wanting to see what’s up, down, through, or around the bend. There are alleys, some which connect, some which end in parking lots—all so that you feel like frontiersmen, like you’ve discovered something off the trail, off the map. Tourists will spend more this way. I know the backstories, the histories, the plan of this place. I imagine the settlers and the whores, the pastureland, the miners and dredgers, the few wives and women, the Ute Indians, my ancestors and Cully, all in perfect, silent geological layers.

  The family stops in the middle of the sidewalk to gather around the phone. The little girl sees me and flutters her eyelashes and raises her hands above her head in a ballet first position. I don’t smile. I will leave it to other people to tell her she’s cute. My son was a shwaggy pot dealer and I’m off to tell his father.

  At the crosswalk I go around the family. I pass Shirt and Ernie’s, almost to my destination, when I see the owner of the shop, Lorraine Bartlett, making a beeline toward me. I pretend I haven’t seen her and try to find my phone in my purse so I can do the Hi-I’m-on-the-phone walk-by, but she gets to me before I can get to it.

  “Sarah!”

  “Lorraine!” I say. “Hi there.”

  She approaches with that dreaded look of reverence.

  “How are you?” she says, her voice syrupy. She looks around like we’re on a stealth mission.

  “I’m okay,” I say. “You?” I take a step back.

  “Hanging in there,” she says. “Well, more than hanging. I’m doing well, actually. Pete got into law school. Danny found a new pet project—the garage, so we’ll see how that . . .” And so on. One question launches a thousand ships.