The Face of Death

by Cody McFadyen

  Bonnie smiles back, more sun and roses. They get milk, an important ingredient. I watch them down some donuts and I reflect on the fact that this, this simple minute, brings to me a burst of happiness that is almost a perfect thing. Friends and donuts and smiling daughters, the elixir of laughter and life.

  “No, honey-love,” I hear Callie say. “Never eat without dunking first. Unless no milk is available, of course, because that’s the first rule of life, and never forget it: The donut always trumps the milk.”

  I stare at my friend in wonder. She’s unaware of it, engrossed in doling out her donut-lore. This is one of the things that makes Callie one of my favorite people. Her willingness to have fun. To grab, guiltless, at the low-hanging fruit of happiness.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I say.

  I pad up carpet-covered stairs to my bedroom and look around. It’s a good-sized master. Plantation shutters on the front wall can be configured to let the sunshine in by increments, or in force. The walls are painted in off-whites, the bed coverings are a bright splash of light-blue color. The bed dominates the room, four-poster, king-sized, top-of-the-line, heaven-sent mattress. Heaps of pillows, mountains of pillows. I love pillows.

  There are two matching chests of drawers, one for Matt and one for me, all in dark-colored cherrywood. A ceiling fan churns away, quiet, its low-slung hum my longtime sleep companion.

  I sit down on the bed and look around, taking it in as a whole.

  I need a moment, before it all starts. A moment to see it for what it was, not what it’s going to become.

  Great things and terrible things and things banal, all happened here, on this bed. They run through me like raindrops through tree leaves. A quiet thundering on the roof of my world.

  Memories eventually lose their sharp edges and stop drawing blood. They quit cutting you and start stirring you. That’s what my memories of my family have become, and I’m pretty happy about that. There was a time when a thought of Matt or Alexa would double me over in pain. Now I can remember and smile.

  Progress, babe, progress.

  Matt still talks to me from time to time. He was my best friend; I’m not ready to stop hearing his voice in my head.

  I close my eyes and remember moving this bed into this room, after Matt and I bought it at some mom-and-pop furniture store. This was our first home, purchased by cleaning out our bank accounts for a down payment and praying for an understanding lender. We bought a home in an up-and-coming area of Pasadena, a newer two-story (no way could we afford one of the hundred-year-old Craftsman homes, though we eyed them wistfully). It wasn’t so close to work, but neither of us wanted to live in LA proper. We wanted a family. Pasadena was safer. The house looked like every other one around it, yes, it lacked identity, true—but it was ours.

  “This is a home,” Matt had said to me in the front yard, hugging me from behind as we both looked up at the house. “We’re going to make a life here. I think a new bed fits that. It’s symbolic.”

  It was silly and sappy, of course. And I agreed, of course. So we bought the bed, and struggled it up the stairs ourselves. We broke a happy sweat assembling the headboard and frame and baseboard, grunted getting the box spring and mattress on. We sat on the floor of the bedroom, panting.

  Matt had looked over at me and smiled. He’d bobbed his eyebrows up and down. “Whatcha say we slap some sheets on the bed and engage in some horizontal mambo?”

  I had giggled at his crudity. “You sure know how to charm a girl.”

  His face had grown mock-serious. He’d placed a hand on his heart, while raising the other. “My father taught me the rules of bedding a wench. I promise, as always, to live by them.”

  “What are they again?”

  “Never wear your socks during sex. Know the location of the clitoris. Cuddle her to sleep before falling asleep yourself. No farting in bed.”

  I nod, solemn. “Your father was a wise man. I agree to your terms.”

  We mamboed all afternoon, and into the dusk.

  I look down at the bed. Feeling it more than seeing it.

  Alexa was conceived on this bed, in some sweaty, tender moment, or maybe during something rougher and more acrobatic, who knows. Matt and I came together two and parted three. A successive joy, divine addition.

  I spent sleepless nights on this bed while I was pregnant. Ankles swollen, back aching. I blamed Matt for everything. Blamed him with a bitterness you can only achieve at three in the morning and 210 days. I loved Matt for everything too. A depthless love that was a mixture of real joy and hormones gone berserk.

  Most people start out, really, too selfish for marriage. A pregnancy will beat that right out of you.

  The day after we brought her home, Matt and I set Alexa down in the middle of this bed. We lay on either side of her, and wondered at the fact of her.

  Alexa was made here. She cried here sometimes. She laughed here, she was angry here, I think she even vomited here once after Matt let her eat too much ice cream. I cleaned up the bed, Matt slept on the couch.

  I have learned lessons in this bed. Once, Matt and I were making love. Not having sex—making love. It had been preceded by wine and candles. We had the perfect CD playing at the perfect volume—loud enough to create an atmosphere, low enough not to distract. The moon was lush and the night breeze was temperate. We had just enough sweat going to keep us slippery in a sexy, non-sticky way. It was sensuous defined.

  And then, I farted.

  It was a ladylike toot, sure—but a fart nonetheless. We both froze. Everything seemed to hang in a long, agonizing, embarrassed moment.

  And then, the giggling started. Followed by laughter. Followed by howls that we smothered with pillows, until we remembered Alexa was staying at a friend’s. Followed later by a different kind of sex. It was no longer storybook, but it was more tender and more true.

  You can have pride, and you can have love, but you can’t always have both. In this bed I learned that love was better.

  It wasn’t all farts and laughter. Matt and I fought in this bed too. God, did we have some good fights. That’s how we referred to them—“good fights.” We were convinced that a successful marriage required a healthy knockdown, drag-out every now and then. We took great pride in some of our “better efforts”—retrospective pride, of course.

  I was raped in this bed, and I watched Matt die while I was tied to this bed. Bad stuff.

  I breathe in, breathe out. The raindrops fall through the tree leaves, soft but inexorable. The basic truth: You get wet when it rains, no way around it.

  I consider the bed and think about the future. About all the good things that could still happen here, should I decide to stay. I didn’t have Matt, and I didn’t have Alexa, but I did have Bonnie, and I did have me.

  Life as it used to be, that was the milk. But life in general, was pure chocolate donut, and the donut trumps the milk.

  “So this is where all the magic happens.”

  Callie’s voice startles me from my reverie. She’s standing in the doorway, her gaze speculative.

  “Hey,” I say. “Thanks for coming. For helping me do this.”

  She walks into the room, her eyes roving. “Well, it was this or reruns of Charlie’s Angels. Besides, Bonnie feeds me.”

  I grin. “How to catch a wild Callie: chocolate donuts and a really big mousetrap.”

  She comes over, plops down on the bed. Bounces up and down on it a few times. “Very nice,” she judges.

  “I have a lot of good memories here.”

  “I’ve always wondered…” She hesitates.

  “What?”

  “Why did you keep it? This is the same bed, isn’t it? Where it happened?”

  “The one and only.” I run a hand over the comforter. “I thought about getting rid of it. I couldn’t sleep in it for the first few weeks after I came home. I slept on the couch. When I got up the courage to try, I couldn’t bear sleeping anywhere else. One terrible thing happened here. That sh
ouldn’t outweigh all of the good times. I loved people here. My people. I’m not letting Sands take that away from me.”

  I can’t decipher the look in her eyes. Sadness. Guilt. A little bit of longing?

  “See now? That’s the difference between us, Smoky. I have a single bad moment in my teens, sleep with the wrong boy, get pregnant, and give up my child. I make damn sure forever-after that I never have another committed relationship. You get raped in this bed, but its strongest memories for you are the moments you shared with Matt and Alexa. I admire your optimism, I really do.” Her smile is just short of melancholy. Her lips curve in self-mockery. “As for me? My cup runneth under.”

  I don’t reply, because I know my friend. She’s sharing this with me, but that’s all she’s capable of. Words of comfort would be embarrassing, almost a betrayal. I’m here so she can say these things and know someone heard her, nothing more.

  She smiles. “Know what I miss?” she asks. “Matt’s tacos.”

  I look at her in surprise. Then I smile too.

  “They were great, weren’t they?”

  “I dream about them sometimes,” she replies, melodramatic longing in her eyes.

  I couldn’t cook with a gun to my head. I could burn water, as the saying goes. Matt, as always, as in all things, was the whole package. He bought cookbooks and tried things and nine times out of ten the results were amazing.

  He’d learned how to make tacos by hand from someone, I don’t know who. Not the kind with the icky store-bought shells, but the kind where you begin with a supple tortilla and transform it on the spot into a stiff yet chewy half-moon of deliciousness. He added some kind of spice to the meat that literally made my mouth water.

  Callie too, it seems. She loved food, and invited herself to dinner three or four times a month. I can see her in my mind, scarfing down tacos, chewing her food while talking out of the side of her mouth. Saying something that made Alexa giggle till her milk went the wrong way and spewed out of her nose. Which was, of course, the height of hilarity, the apex of thigh-slappers for Alexa.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  She knows what I mean. Thank you for that memory, that forgotten bit of bittersweet, that punch in the gut that hurts and feels wonderful all at once.

  This is Callie, spinning in close to hug my soul, spinning back out to regain her haughty distance.

  She gets up from the bed and heads for the door. She looks back at me and smiles, a mischievous smile.

  “Oh, and so you know? You don’t need a mousetrap. Just drug the donuts. I’ll always eat the donuts.”

  5

  “HOW ARE YOU DOING, SMOKY?”

  Elaina is asking me this. She showed up about twenty minutes ago, and after going through the requisite hugs with Bonnie, she’d maneuvered me off so that we were sitting alone in my living room. Her gaze is frankness and kindness and klieg lights. She faces me head-on, piercing me with those brown eyes. “No bullshit allowed,” that look says.

  “Mostly good, some bad,” I say without hesitation. Being less than honest with Elaina never occurs to me. She is one of those rare people, the ones who are kind and strong at the same time.

  She softens her gaze. “Tell me about the bad.”

  I stare back at her, trying to find words for my new demon, the devil that romps through my mind while I sleep. I used to dream about Joseph Sands, he chuckled and chortled and raped me again and again, killed my family with a wink and a smile. Sands has faded; the nightmares now center around Bonnie. I see her sitting on a madman’s lap, a knife at her throat. I see her lying on a white rug, a bullet hole through her forehead, a crimson-angel spreading beneath her.

  “Fear. It’s the fear.”

  “What about?”

  “Bonnie.”

  Her forehead clears. “Ah. You’re afraid something’s going to happen to her.”

  “More like terrified. That she’s never going to talk and end up nuts. That I’m not going to be there when she needs me.”

  “And?” Elaina asks, nudging me. Pushing me to put the real terror, the guy at the bottom of that dark barrel, into words.

  “That she’s going to die, okay?” It comes out sounding snappish. I regret it. “Sorry.”

  She smiles to show me it’s fine. “All things considered, I think your fear makes sense, Smoky. You lost a child. You know it can happen. For goodness’ sake, Bonnie almost died in front of you.” A gentle touch, her hand on mine. “Your fear makes sense.”

  “But it makes me feel weak,” I reply, miserable. “Fear is weakness. Bonnie needs me to be strong.”

  I sleep with a loaded gun in my nightstand. The house is alarmed up the wazoo. The dead bolt on the front door would take an intruder an hour to drill through. All of it helps, but none of it dispels.

  Elaina gives me a sharp look and shakes her head once. “No. Bonnie needs you to be present. She needs you to love her. She needs a mother, not a superhero. Real people are messy and complicated and generally inconvenient, but at least they are there, Smoky.”

  Elaina is the wife of one of my team members, Alan. She’s a beautiful Latin woman, all gentle curves and poet’s eyes. Her true beauty comes from her heart; she has a fierce gentleness to her that says “Mom” and “Safe” and “Love.” Not in some silly, Pollyanna way—Elaina’s goodness is not sappy-sweet. It’s inexorable and undeniable and full of certainty.

  Last year she was diagnosed with stage-two colon cancer. She’d had surgery to remove the tumor, followed by radiation and chemo-therapy. She’s doing well, but she’s lost the hair that had always been so thick and unstoppable. She wears this indignity the way I’ve learned to wear my scars: uncovered and on display. Her head is shaved bald and isn’t hidden by a hat or bandanna. I wonder if the pain of this loss hits her out of the blue sometimes, the way the absence of Matt and Alexa used to hit me.

  Probably not. For Elaina, hair-loss would take a backseat to the joy of being alive; that kind of straightforwardness of purpose is a part of her power.

  Elaina came to see me after Sands took away my family. She barreled into my hospital room, shoved the nurse aside, and swooped down on me with her arms wide. Those arms captured and enfolded me like an angel’s wings. I shattered inside them, weeping rivers against her chest for what seemed like forever. She was my mother in that moment; I will always love her for it.

  She squeezes my hand. “The way you feel makes sense, Smoky. The only way you could be free of fear altogether would be to not love Bonnie the way you do, and I think it’s too late for that.”

  My throat tightens up. My eyes burn. Elaina has a way of getting to simple truths, the kind that are helpful and provide freedom, but carry a price: You can’t unlearn them. This Truth is ugly and beautiful and inescapable: I’m stuck with my fear because I love Bonnie. All I have to do to be stress-free is un-love her.

  Not gonna happen.

  “But will it stop being so bad?” I ask. I heave a frustrated sigh. “I don’t want to screw her up.”

  She takes both my hands, gives me that unswerving look. “Did you know I was an orphan, Smoky?”

  I stare, surprised.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  She nods. “Well, I was. Me and my brother, Manuel. After Mom and Dad died in a car accident, we ended up being raised by my abuela—my grandmother. A great woman. I mean that as in ‘greatness.’ She never complained. Not once.” Her smile is wistful. “And Manuel—oh, he was such a wonderful boy, Smoky. Bighearted. Kind. But he was frail. Nothing specific to point to, but he was always the first to catch anything going around and the last to get over it. One summer day my abuela took us to Santa Monica beach. Manuel got caught by the undertow. He died.”

  The words are simple, and spoken plainly, but I can feel the pain behind them. Quiet sorrow. She continues.

  “I lost my parents for no reason at all. I lost my brother on a beautiful day, and his only sin was that he couldn’t kick hard enough to get back to shore.” She gives me a shru
g. “My point, Smoky, is that I know that fear. The terror of losing someone you love.” She pulls her hand away, smiles. “So what do I do? I go and fall in love with a wonderful man who does a dangerous job, and yes, I’ve lain awake at night, afraid, afraid, afraid. There have been some times that I took it out on Alan. Unjustly.”

  “Really?” I am having trouble reconciling this with the pedestal I have Elaina perched on; I can’t imagine her as less than a perfect person.

  “Really. Sometimes years pass without a ripple. I don’t even think about losing him, and I sleep fine. But it always comes back. To answer your question: No, for me, it never goes away for good, but yes, I’d still rather love Alan, fear and all.”

  “Elaina, why didn’t you ever tell me any of this? About you being an orphan, about your brother?”

  The shrug is perfect, almost profound.

  “I don’t know. I suppose I spent so much time not letting it define me that I forgot to tell the story when I should have. I did think of it once, when you were in the hospital, but I decided against telling you then.”

  “Why?”

  “You love me, Smoky. It would have added to your pain more than it would have helped.”

  She’s right, I realize.

  Elaina smiles, a smile of many colors. The smile of a wife who knows she’s lucky to have a husband she actually loves, of a mother who never had a child of her own, of a bald Rapunzel who’s happy to be alive.

  Callie appears with Bonnie at her side. They’re both appraising me. Looking for the cracks, I imagine.

  “Are we ready to get this show on the road?” Callie asks.

  I force a smile. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Explain what it is we’re doing,” Elaina says.

  I gather myself up into an imaginary fist and will it to hold on to the slippery, quivery parts of me. “It’s been a year since Matt and Alexa died. A lot has happened since then.” I look at Bonnie, smile. “Not just for me. I still miss them, and I know I always will. But…” I use the same phrase I gave to Bonnie earlier today. “They don’t live here anymore. I’m not talking about erasing their memories. I’m keeping every picture, every home movie. I’m talking about the practical things that don’t have use anymore. Clothes. Aftershave. Golf clubs. The things that would only get used if they were here.”