This Is Not Over

by Holly Brown

  I’ve worked hard for everything I have, including Larry. Particularly Larry. He was eyeing more beautiful girls when we got together—the Dawn Thiebolds of the world—but none of them would have made a better wife.

  Would one of them have made a better mother?

  I try to shake that thought off. This isn’t about me, what I have or have not been, where I’ve succeeded or failed. It’s about Dawn and her egregious behavior.

  I was Phi Beta Kappa at Scripps College, the Bryn Mawr of the West. Not that she would have heard of either of those fine schools. Someone like her would never even consider a women’s college, never value the community and camaraderie that only an all-female environment can provide. A woman who looks like her needs male attention at all times. The most beautiful are the most insecure. They require constant tending, like roses, and are just as thorny.

  The woman with the Bernese mountain dog is already coming back this way. Maybe a dog like that can’t run very far. At least I know now that she’s not Dawn. She’s nowhere near as attractive.

  I don’t want to spend my time looking over my shoulder. Not for the city attorney, and certainly not for Dawn.

  One good thing about seeing her picture is that she doesn’t seem quite as threatening. How scary could a toothpaste commercial model be?

  Officer Llewellyn said to do nothing except block her. But I feel like he’s wrong about that. It’s slinking away, showing fear. With bullies, you need to go right at them.

  I start typing.

  I stare for an extra minute, which is an eon in text time. Nothing in it is untrue. The threat is purely implied.

  She has a husband. She has a LinkedIn profile. She has things to lose. This will resonate.

  I will be free of Dawn Thiebold.

  23

  Dawn

  The police have advised me to block you. All further communications should cease.

  Miranda

  There’s some old movie, with some old mobster, and he says with his heavy New York accent something like, “Every time I try to get out, they pull me back in.”

  That’s Miranda, pulling me back in when I really was starting to let go.

  She’s been to see the police about me? Unbelievable! She’s the one who stole my security deposit! She’s the one who was cheating the system in Santa Monica! She’s the one bothering me, time and again. I try to get out and she pulls me back in.

  What does this even mean? Am I in real trouble? Am I going to get some kind of official document, or a visit from an officer, or am I just supposed to take the word of a liar like her?

  I haven’t done anything wrong. I wrote a review to warn other potential consumers, and I turned her in for violating the law, and she’s the one talking to the police? I didn’t even know there was entitlement on this scale. There ought to be a new word for it. Something longer, like “onomatopoeia.”

  As if I need this on top of a dead father, a needy mother, a stalled job search, and an imminent graduation. I’m at a rest area en route to Eureka to see my father’s body, and the only consolation is that my mother is not in the car with us. She’s been chugging along in front, sending up smoke signals in her maroon Ford Escort with one mismatched door. Now she’s in the bathroom, and I’m watching a toy poodle watering the base of a tree. I know how you feel, oak.

  It’s been silent between Rob and me for the past hour. We’re at a stalemate, a tense “agree to disagree” where my father is concerned. Rob still feels like a burial is the right thing to do—the only “humane” thing to do—and that’s only one letter off from “human,” and I feel like if I play this whole thing wrong, he’ll think I’m half a person.

  I spy him exiting the restroom, and I move away, around the building, where he can’t see me. I’m actually running away from my own husband. This is what it’s come to.

  I’ll go with my mother to view the body, then we’ll go to her apartment where I’ll make her tea and tuck her in for the night, and Rob and I will drive back home. If he wants to be generous with our money, we can help her out with next month’s rent. That’s a better use of the cash anyway. For the living, not the dead. Rob will have to see that, won’t he?

  Just the thought of Eureka makes my skin crawl. Nothing good ever happened to me there. It was a geographic accident, as much as I was a biological one, and I want to get back to the Bay Area, where I really belong.

  I’m missing Professor Myerson’s class today, which I resent. My mother shouldn’t have shown up at my door, dragging me into this, dragging me back. Every time I try to get out . . .

  Behind the building, there are two little girls running around, one with long braids, the other with her amber-colored hair loose and strands getting caught in her mouth, both in blowing summery dresses, their high-pitched squeals lost to the wind, but their joy unmistakable. If Rob and I have one, then we’re having two, at least. Then they’ll never be alone in the world.

  “. . . cooties!” I can make out that one word, and I smile. I didn’t think “cooties” would stand the test of time.

  When one little girl tackles the other, and they begin to roll around, and the tackled yells out, “Mooooommmm!” and said mom appears, looking harried, I decide it’s my cue to return to the car. I round the building and see that my mother is in Rob’s arms, sobbing again. I want to not mind; I want to be as effortlessly compassionate as Rob is.

  I stand nearby but within her line of sight, should she raise her head, and finally, she does. She looks at me and wipes her eyes. “Sorry. We can hit the road again.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for,” Rob says, and my eyes widen. He thinks he gets to absolve my mother, the woman who has never truly acknowledged the million things she, in fact, should be sorry for. Instead, she always does what she was just doing: She cries, she looks pathetic, she invites pity. Weakness is her justification, always. I used to fall for her tricks, but that’s over. Still, I can’t be upset with Rob; he’s just being a good guy.

  “We should go,” I say, “if we want to get to the morgue before it closes.”

  My mother nods bravely, a little girl afraid of monsters but willing to try sleeping without a night-light, and I get in the driver’s side of our car. Rob glances at me in surprise; he tends to be the default driver. As soon as he’s in the passenger seat, I peel out. “Don’t you want to wait for your mom?” he asks. I don’t answer. “I got you this.” He places a Snickers on my thigh. “You barely ate any breakfast.”

  “Thanks.” I smile, immediately feeling guilty for my momentary annoyance with him. He knows that I only allow myself Snickers on road trips, and cheesy celeb magazines on plane rides. He knows me. He loves what he knows.

  I’m in the fast lane, eager to get some distance between my mother and me. Rob keeps glancing back, looking for her car. He probably thinks we should ride her ass to make sure she’s okay, but he’s being way too cautious. If her car breaks down, she’ll text me. Highways go both ways.

  I see her whizzing up, dodging cars in other lanes, and then she cuts in front of me at what must be ninety miles an hour. I catch a quick glimpse of her face—she’s enjoying herself, showing the world what a Ford Escort with a mismatched door can really do—and I have to laugh at Rob’s obvious surprise. He doesn’t know this side of my mother, that she can be reckless as well as weepy.

  This is the mother who woke me up from a dead sleep when I was nine years old so that we could sit in the car on a stakeout in front of some woman’s house and she could make me her confidante. My father never showed up there, which probably just meant she had the wrong woman, but it was a fool’s errand anyway. No matter what he did, she would stay with him till death did them part, and it finally has. I’m not about to cry for either one of them.

  “I think we should be ready to stay the night,” Rob says. “Your mom doesn’t seem like she should be alone yet.”

  “I’ll ask Aunt Tanya to stay with her.” Aunt Tanya lives in Eureka, too, but one of the n
ice parts.

  He watches my mother’s slightly weaving bumper. “It’s going to be a lot for her, just seeing the body. They were together a long time. If my father . . .” He can’t even finish the sentence. His parents go to the gym together four times a week, and wear pedometers to count their steps, and never put butter on anything, ever. They are united in trying to thwart mortality at every turn. “We should spend the night, and consider maybe bringing her back to stay with us for a while.”

  “Stay in our apartment? For a while?” I infuse each word with maximal incredulity. “On our couch?” He can’t have forgotten that we have a one-bedroom apartment.

  “Not a long while. Once she has a job, she could rent a room somewhere close. Hayward, maybe, or San Leandro. She’d be near family, you know? That’s important, after a loss like hers.” I’ve noticed he keeps referring to it as a loss, rather than a death. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just death.

  “My mom is better off making minimum wage in Eureka, where rents are cheap, than in the Bay Area near us.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he says, but I can tell he thinks he is. “You know, this could be an opportunity for reconciliation. No matter what she’s done or hasn’t done, she’s still your mother.”

  No, she’s not.

  If my father hadn’t died, she wouldn’t have tried to fix our relationship. That’s not what she’s here for. She wants to use me, and I’m not going to let that happen. Rob’s too quick to smudge out my past.

  Besides, I can’t focus on any of that when I’m some sort of fugitive from justice. I bet Miranda’s got the police on her side already. She lives in Beverly Hills with her doctor husband, and she probably showed up at the precinct in a mink stole or something.

  Rob and I should be talking about Miranda’s e-mail right now, making a game plan. An impending visit from the police is a lot more pressing than my father’s death. But he thought I should have put the Miranda stuff to bed a long time ago, and I don’t want to see the look on his face when he learns about this latest turn of events.

  Better not to mention it until there’s really something to mention. After all, I didn’t break the law, she did.

  I turn on the radio and hum along to the first song I know. Rob and I don’t talk until we’re pulling into the hospital parking lot.

  “I’ll go in first,” he says. “I’ll get everything arranged, and then come back out for you and your mom.”

  He stops by my mother’s Escort in the adjacent space. She rolls her window down by hand. I leave my windows up so I don’t have to hear them, though I see by his gestures that he’s turned his graciousness on her, full-force, a fire hose of solicitude.

  I stare straight ahead. I’m not going to her car. If she wants to talk, she’ll have to come over here. Rob is doing enough caretaking for both of us. It’s probably what she wished she’d gotten from my father all those years, but then again, if she had, she might have gone looking for some other jerk. My dad’s formula of 80 percent callousness/20 percent love worked like a charm. It might have even been more like 90/10.

  I play Candy Crush on my phone until Rob gets back, and my mother doesn’t leave her car until Rob opens the door for her. He’s keeping up a running monologue as we walk into the hospital and take the elevator down to the basement. “We have to decide by tomorrow what we’re going to do. They gave me a list of funeral homes we could use if we go that route. If they cremate him, you can still pick up the ashes for $450”—the distaste on Rob’s face is evident—“so that’s an option. But we have time, that’s my point, a little more time, and that’s good because . . .” I tune him out.

  The morgue attendant is waiting for us in hospital scrubs and a white lab coat, an expression of perma-sympathy on his broad face. The morgue is just a numbered room, like any other.

  The attendant escorts us inside, his voice a soothing drone. The room is a little cold but not frigid, with white linoleum floors and pale mint walls, and there are those stacked steel drawers that I’ve seen on Law & Order and CSI. There’s a wall of fans humming faintly. On a stainless steel cart in the center of the room with a sheet over it is what must be my father’s body. I’m filled with the fear that I’ll feel nothing when I see him, or that I’ll be overtaken once again with the slow-burning anger I’ve tried to outrun. Every time I try to get out . . .

  The attendant is asking a question, I can tell by his intonation if not by the actual words, so I nod. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. My mother is leaning against Rob, and I’m standing on my own, moving forward, somehow. The sheet is drawn back, and there he is, looking pretty much as he did three years ago. His pallor wasn’t healthy then, he had a certain greenish cast at my wedding, but then, he was drinking heavily. He doesn’t look peaceful, exactly, but he’s not tormented either.

  He should have suffered more.

  I hear my mother wailing, and Rob is holding her up, but all I can do is stare. So this is death. A lot like life, isn’t it? At least at this stage, a day into the whole thing. That’s my father, formerly good-looking, increasingly jowly, his hair long and a little greasy in defiance of his receding hairline. That’s him, passed out. Sleeping. No, dead.

  It’s good to have the confirmation. This is over. He’s over.

  We’re back in the parking lot, and I’m in some sort of fugue state, the state of trying not to remember. All that indifference for all those years, and then when he finally noticed me, when he finally paid attention, it was so much worse.

  Rob has gotten my mother buckled into the passenger seat of her car. He literally kneeled beside her and pinned her in with the safety harness, and I assume he’ll be driving her home. I’m milling around, seeing all the people entering and exiting, an ambulance pulling up into its bay. I may be shaking, just a little.

  Rob grabs me to him, hard, and I know that he wants me to feel the right something. I’m full of some chemical I’ve never felt before. It’s not adrenaline; it’s itchy, and antsy. I want to dispel it, so I say the first thing that comes to me.

  “Burn him up,” I tell Rob. He pushes me away from him, just as hard as he pulled me in a minute before, and it’s involuntary, I know. It’s uncontrolled repulsion.

  He takes my arm and leads me away, to the pavement in front of the hospital. He doesn’t want my mother to hear the rest of this conversation.

  “Burn him up,” I say again, as if I like his horror. Translation: This is me. Go ahead and leave if you want to.

  But I don’t want him to. Oh, God, I don’t want that.

  “You’re in shock.”

  I feel like I’m on a slalom, I can’t stop sliding down. “Let the state pay for it, and then we’ll pay the four hundred or whatever, and I’ll spring for a little urn so my mother can keep him with her always.”

  “This isn’t you. For the past twenty-four hours, you haven’t been yourself. Let’s go get something to eat, then we’ll sleep on it. No decisions until tomorrow. That seems like a good rule.”

  “I don’t want to stay in their apartment. I want to get as far away as I can, as fast as I can. We need to go home.”

  But Rob doesn’t understand, and I can’t tell him.

  “We can’t always do what we want,” he says carefully. “Sometimes we have to take care of other people.”

  “It’s my job to take care of her?” I quit that a long time ago.

  “Unless you think she should burn in hell, too.”

  “You’re putting words in my mouth.”

  But there’s no explaining further, so I let him take control. I let him pick up food that no one eats, and I let him fawn over my mother, and I let him lay out a makeshift bed on my mother’s grungy living room floor amid the thrift store furniture, and I let him spoon me in the darkness. I try to fall asleep to the sound of the kitchen faucet dripping and my mother’s keening behind her closed bedroom door. It’s as if she wants to throw herself on a funeral pyre. I’d always assumed that to be the misogynistic practice of a p
atriarchal culture; I’d never before thought of that as a custom that benefits the widow, a form of euthanasia.

  “What if our kids disappoint you?” Rob says into the darkness.

  So he still thinks kids are an inevitability. He hasn’t changed his mind about me based on what he’s witnessed today. That’s good news. The problem is, lately I’ve been changing my mind about them. Instead of seeming like future kids, they seem more like hypothetical ones.

  I married Rob to have babies. What’ll happen if I decide against them? Will I still want Rob? Will he still want me?

  “What if our kids aren’t who you want them to be?” he continues. “Will you turn your back on them so completely you don’t even care if they’re dead, if they rest in earth or burn to ash?”

  “No kid could ever be as disappointing as my parents.”

  “Say they manage to be. Let’s say they let you down again and again. They appear to have no redeeming qualities.”

  “I’ll try to love them,” I say, “no matter what.”

  “You’ll try?”

  He’s scared, that’s what this is all about, and I can’t blame him for that. From his perspective, I’ve been frighteningly cold where my dad’s death is concerned, cold as his body on the slab. “I’ll love them,” I tell Rob, “because I’ll choose to. Every day.”

  “It’s not about choice. It’s not an act of willpower. You love your kids because you can’t help it. You can’t do anything else.”

  “Why do you assume that love is going to come so easily to you, no matter what kind of people they turn out to be? That’s pretty arrogant.”

  “It’s arrogant to assume that I’m going to love my kids?”

  “Under all conditions, in every circumstance, yes.”

  “It’s what parents do.”

  We are so very far apart. “You’re a good son, with good parents. Your family has never been tested. So if you face adversity with our kids, you might be the one to crumble. You might be the one to question God: ‘Why did you give me these rotten kids, when I’m such an awesome person?’ But me, I’ll handle it, like I’ve handled everything.”