My Dead Parents

by Anya Yurchyshyn

  However, she was livid that Babtsia wanted my father buried in a cemetery that was close to our grandmother but an almost two-hour drive for us. Not only was it far but Babtsia knew that my mother wouldn’t want to be buried there. She wasn’t Ukrainian, and she didn’t want to be near the in-laws who’d rejected her. There was another problem as well. My father had told my mother that he wanted to be cremated and she was determined to do it, but she knew Babtsia would object.

  My mom confessed her concerns to my father’s sister, Lana, and was relieved when Lana understood why my father needed to be cremated and agreed to help find a solution that would work for everyone.

  Lana consulted the director of the Ukrainian cemetery, and after some pleading, he agreed to bury an empty coffin. My mother purchased a fancy wooden casket and had my father cremated, sprinkling some of his ashes over the photographs and bricks that were entombed instead of his body. The rest were spread by her under an apple tree on our New Hampshire property, and scattered in India when Alexandra traveled there the following year.

  The day of the funeral, my mother insisted that Alexandra and I act as pallbearers with her, instructing us to raise our chins so we looked proud and strong as we accompanied the casket to the front of the church. When we entered, I saw it was so full that rows of people were standing in the back and along the sides. It was a formal Ukrainian service, but my godfather gave a eulogy in English as well as Ukrainian. I tried to force myself to pay attention, telling myself that this was a huge moment in my life whether I was sad or not, but I kept staring at the Byzantine-style art that hung on the walls and zoning out. When it was over, my mother ran to the casket, flung herself on it, and sobbed while guests silently made their way to the exit.

  We were driven to the Ukrainian cemetery in black town cars. I’d been there a decade before, when my grandfather was buried in a double plot that would later also accommodate my grandmother, whose name was not yet inscribed on the pink headstone.

  A space next to my grandparents’ had been dug. The casket had beat us there and hovered above it. The priest at the cemetery was Ukrainian as well, so he only said one word that my mother, sister, and I understood: Amen. My sister and I glanced at each other as Babtsia wept silently. We knew she wouldn’t do anything dramatic like open the coffin, but what if something else happened? What if the coffin somehow flipped over and revealed its true contents? Did the priest know what was happening? Had anyone been bribed? What if the director of the cemetery was suddenly overtaken with guilt and confessed?

  My mother wept as well. I wanted to remind her that the burial wasn’t real; it was a performance. It didn’t occur to me that it didn’t have to be real for her to feel sad. The burial was fake, but her husband was really dead.

  Alexandra returned to Kiev to attend the service honoring my father and his coworkers and to finish her internship. My mother said she was too bereft to attend, but sent along a short letter to be read to the crowd and toys for the children of the other victims.

  My mother spent the rest of the summer sitting at the dining-room table, the spot that had been my father’s, reading stacks of papers and legal documents, and agonizing over what they did and didn’t say. Before he’d died, my father had told her he’d been made partner, but his company claimed that he hadn’t and there was no document that proved otherwise. She believed he’d been given a partnership agreement and had held off on signing it until he next returned to America, and that the coworkers who’d told my sister to leave his apartment had stolen it. My father’s status at the time of his death affected whatever payment she might receive if the investments he’d made were successful. This money, worker’s compensation, and whatever she earned from teaching part-time would be our only income. My father had a retirement account with a decent amount of money, but she wouldn’t be able to access it until she was sixty-five. There were other issues as well. His boss said that money was missing from the petty-cash fund and claimed that my father had used it to purchase art for himself. My mother disagreed, explaining that my father had told her he often had to use that money to pay their workers because it was so difficult to get dollars. They also fought about the apartment that my father had been living in. Since it was in my father’s name, my mother believed he was the owner and she wanted to sell it for cash, but the firm insisted that the apartment belonged to them, telling her what they’d told my sister: It was a company investment that was in my father’s name only to make the purchase easier. My mother was overwhelmed and exhausted, and didn’t understand what she was being asked to read or sign.

  She hired a lawyer who said the company was making things unnecessarily difficult, while my father’s company accused her of slowing down the process. When I listened to our answering machine, I often heard my father’s boss tersely telling my mother that she needed to sign something or hand over a document. As he lived on our block, I occasionally ran into him, and he’d tell me that my mother needed to “pick up her pace.” I didn’t report these interactions to my mother; she’d told me many times that my father’s company was harassing her when she should be given time to grieve. I agreed, and when Halloween came around a few months later, I had Eli unload two dozen eggs on his house.

  I was on her side for that battle, but I didn’t want to be near her pain. My reactions to her grief ranged from uncomfortable to disgusted. I was happy, and I thought she should be, too. Every time I came home from work or hanging out with friends, she’d put on a plastic smile and ask me how I was. I’d go to her, but since I felt fine, I didn’t have much to report, so instead she’d tell me how she was feeling. She’d whimper and say that she felt alone, that she missed my father’s touch, that all the men in her life had left her, and I’d slowly recoil. Once I realized how these conversations would go, I avoided them, and her. When I came home, I ran straight up to my room. “Your marriage wasn’t even that great,” I fumed silently. “This is a second chance!” I thought she was choosing to wallow.

  One day, when we’d ended up in the kitchen at the same time, she told me about a nightmare she’d had the previous evening. She spoke quietly as her hands shook. My father had come to her, covered in cobwebs, and said that he’d been murdered. She’d asked and then begged him to tell her who’d done it, but he couldn’t answer.

  “Do you really think he could have been murdered?” I asked. I hadn’t considered the possibility since the day he’d died.

  She nodded.

  When I asked why, she just shook her head. I took that to mean that her nightmare was her only evidence, and thought she was being paranoid or was turning her fight with my father’s company into something bigger than it was. From what I knew, there was no reason to think the crash had been anything but an accident.

  My father’s death upended the house. My mother emptied drawers looking for his life insurance policy, put his clothing in piles, stacked the paintings he’d collected in Ukraine wherever there was space. One night, when she was out to dinner, I failed to close the front door properly after leaving. A neighbor saw the open door and called the police. After seeing the state of the living room, they determined our home had been ransacked. The police were still there when my mother returned. After an initial panic, she explained that we hadn’t been robbed; she was newly widowed and struggling to keep the house clean. “Thanks a lot, Anya,” she said when I got back. “Now everyone thinks we live in chaos.”

  We did. Melancholy had seeped into the walls. Our home was rotting, and I retreated as I had when I was a child, trying to avoid its decay by insulating myself, or better, by not being there at all. I took extra shifts at the drugstore and camped out at Eli’s.

  One morning I woke up and found myself covered in small bites. I’d been itchy for a while, but couldn’t figure out why. I looked at our cats, Mischa and Topsider, and saw them scratching themselves furiously. I inspected them both; they were covered in fleas.

 
I showed my spotted arms and legs to my mother. “We have fleas,” I told her. “We have to do something.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, Anya.”

  I pushed up her sleeve and found she was covered in bites as well. “See! Aren’t you itchy?”

  She pulled her shirt back to her wrist. “Those are mosquito bites.”

  “Look,” I said, and revealed the bumps I had on my ankles. “These aren’t mosquito bites.”

  She sighed and said, “How could we have fleas?” to an audience who wasn’t there.

  I pointed at the cats. Mischa was scratching himself feverishly, while Topsider was rolling spastically on the carpet. “They go outside.”

  “There aren’t fleas in Boston,” she said, and then floated out of the room like she was in a trance.

  That afternoon, Eli came over wearing white socks. Within a minute, they were covered with trembling bugs. He kissed me and said, “You know I have to leave, right?” I nodded. He told me he’d try to get his mom to talk to mine. She called, but my mom refused to talk to her. “I’m sorry I can’t help,” his mother told me. “Ask one of your mother’s friends. And hon, please understand, we adore you, but we can’t have you over until we know you won’t come with fleas.”

  I showed my mother my bites again, told her I was too itchy to sleep, didn’t know what to wear, that Eli’s mom said I couldn’t come over, but she turned away. When I got hysterical, she waved me off. “Mom,” I cried, “what is going on?” Instead of answering, she went to her bedroom.

  Sylvia, my mother’s best friend since grade school, arrived the next day. She’d been at the funeral and had come back to help my mother organize and get rid of my father’s things. When she rang the bell, I ran to the door and announced we had fleas.

  She grimaced. “Fleas?”

  “I’ve been trying to get Mom to do something about it, but she won’t listen. You have to help me.”

  My mother came down the stairs and threw her arms open for an embrace. Sylvia held up her hand and my mother froze. “What’s this about you having fleas?”

  My mother laughed. “Anya’s being dramatic. Come in!”

  We all went to the couch. By that point, the fleas in our house were acting like cartoon characters, somersaulting in top hats from human to cat to rug. I told my mother again that we, our four-story house crammed full of shit, and our two cats had fleas. Once again, she denied it. Sylvia moved her hand toward a lamp so my mother could see the flea that had already jumped into her palm. “Anita, you do.”

  My mother nodded. I cheered and tried to hug Sylvia, but she wouldn’t let me.

  Sylvia arranged for an exterminator to come two days later. Before the house was bombed and we had to wash everything we owned, I had to give the cats a flea bath. They were going to be temporarily boarded at the vet, and they had to be as flea-free as possible.

  I bathed them in the claw-foot tub I’d once filled with kupon and stained with hair dye. Topsider was almost impossible to wash, scratching my arms bloody and biting my neck. When I was finally able to submerge him, pools of red appeared and pulsed away from his body.

  Mischa was next. He was old and already a bit weak from leukemia. He did not have Topsider’s size or ability to fight, so he just wailed in the tub as I scrubbed his thin frame and fleas abandoned his body. As the water got darker and darker, his wails turned into moans. Over and over, I apologized to him. “I’m sorry, Mischa. I’m sorry, baby.” I rinsed him, wrapped him in a towel, cradled him to me, and for the first time that summer cried on his bony, wet head.

  The extermination was successful, and we stopped letting the cats outside. The house stayed messy, but I didn’t care. I was relieved to be flea-free, and hopeful that my mother’s alarming denial of that problem was a blip in her sanity that would pass when she stopped grieving, which I assumed would happen soon.

  When school started, I learned that over the summer, I’d become the girl whose father died. My friends who’d come to my father’s wake had spread the news of his death, and as I walked the halls, people stared at me for a moment too long. In their faces, I saw a respect that I liked. I didn’t want sympathy, but I liked being marked by tragedy because I could show everyone how little it affected me.

  The night before my birthday in September, my mother crawled into my bed and wrapped herself tightly around me. “It’s your birthday,” she said. Her voice was calm, but her breath was hot and sweet with alcohol. She was drunk.

  “It’s the first holiday since your father died. You’re probably upset. You can tell me if you’re upset.” She tried to stroke my head, but slapped it instead. “Your father loved you so much.”

  I curled away from her and tightened my jaw. “Please let me sleep.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I know you’re sad.”

  I pretended to pass out, staying still under my blanket even though its weight and the warmth of her sticky skin were making me sweat, and eventually she left.

  When I woke up the next morning, I felt dirty. I tried to dump my mother’s grime in the shower, but even soap and a scratchy sponge couldn’t remove it. I put on a smile as I walked into school and accepted my friends’ birthday hugs and Eli’s kisses, but by the end of first period, I was tipsy with worry that something was very wrong. Instead of going to my next class, I sought out my guidance counselor and told her what had happened.

  She pushed me into a chair and handed me a box of tissues. I took two and crumpled one in each hand, though I knew I wasn’t going to cry. She softened her already soft eyes and said, “When your mother was in your bed, did she touch you in a sexual way?”

  “What?” I yelped. “No!”

  “Okay,” she said, and continued. How often did this happen?

  It was the first time.

  How often was my mother drinking?

  I had no idea.

  Was it possible she was drinking often and hiding it from me?

  Sure, I said. It was possible.

  My mother never came into my bed again. She started spending more time in New Hampshire, and my life became the best it had ever been. I had more time with Eli and more time for parties. It was easy to conceal what I did on the weekends. My parties were small, so the house never got too trashed. My mom didn’t keep track of her cigarettes, and she didn’t drink my father’s vodka, so she didn’t notice when it disappeared. I could have been worse at hiding my activities than I thought; she could have adopted the strategy I used to deal with her: Ignore, ignore, ignore. Only once did she confront me with evidence of a party, when she’d found a beer cap under the couch. I told her that Eli’s older brother bought us some beer, that we rarely drank, that it wasn’t a big deal.

  “Oh, you did more than drink beer.” She ran a finger across a dusty Chinese chest and held it to my face. “What’s this?”

  “Dirt?” I said.

  “It’s cocaine, Anya. You can’t fool me.”

  I laughed, but when I saw that she didn’t believe me, I tried to explain that it definitely wasn’t. I’d never done cocaine and neither had any of my friends. No one had ever done more than mushrooms at my house; we’d spent our childhoods watching Miami Vice and were terrified of hard drugs. Even if we’d wanted to do it, we wouldn’t have known where to get it.

  She told me that she expected me to experiment, and launched into a story about doing coke with my father and their friend Helmut on New Year’s in 1980. “This was before anyone knew it was bad for you,” she said. “It was so fun to do cocaine with your father because he was so quiet and reserved, but when he did coke, we would stay up all night talking.” Her face brightened at the memory. “Your sister was in bed but you wouldn’t go to sleep, so I had you on my lap. Everyone was talking and talking, but then I saw you grab the straw and try to put it up your nose. And then I knew…” She paused and put her hand on he
r heart. “It was time to put you to bed.”

  Like so many of her stories, she hadn’t considered how this one might sound. As usual, I didn’t hear that she was a great mother. “That’s when you knew?” I thought. It was okay to snort lines with me on your lap; your maternal instinct only kicked in when I reached for the straw.

  “But it’s a bad drug,” she continued. “Helmut got into a lot of trouble. I don’t know what happened to him. Last time we saw him, he borrowed a few hundred dollars from us and never paid us back.”

  “I know it’s bad!” I cried. “I haven’t done it!” She didn’t seem to believe me, but I was never punished. Years later, once I finally had done it, I realized that she’d have easily been able to determine if the dust was coke or not, so maybe she just wanted to scare me.

  That year I began trying to do well in school. I did most of my homework and studied for tests. When my father was alive, I didn’t see the point of putting in the effort; nothing I did was good enough for him, and I didn’t want to work hard and discover that everything he’d said about me was right. Before he died, I’d been determined to be an actress. I loved theater and had some proof that I was talented. My freshman and sophomore years, I’d been in plays that were a part of local competitions and had received awards for my performance in each. But my junior year, I was in a play that went to a state competition and lost badly. The experience exhausted me, and after a number of run-ins with my controlling acting teacher, who reminded me way too much of my dad, I gave it up as my main activity and decided I’d go to college for public policy instead of acting. My experience as a sex educator had brought me into so many different schools; I was stunned by the education inequalities I saw and wanted to fix them.

  I pushed all my creative impulses aside and tried my hardest to get B pluses in everything but science and math.

  In the spring of my senior year of high school, one Friday I came home to an empty house. I ran to the kitchen and saw that the answering machine was blinking. I put a tall glass under the fridge’s water dispenser as the first message unfurled, but stopped the water when I heard the urgency in the caller’s voice. “Anya, it’s Sydney. You have nothing to worry about. Your mother is safe. She’s in the hospital for the weekend because she needs some rest. I took her there this afternoon and helped her settle in. She said you’d be fine for the weekend, but you can call me if you need anything.”