When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3)

by Laura Giebfried

  “No, it was fine,” I said cautiously. “I've just been distracted.”

  “With copious amounts of boredom?”

  “He got me a dog.”

  “A dog? Like a stuffed one?”

  “No, like a moving, breathing, barking one,” I said. “It's chewing up my comforter as we speak.”

  Jack cackled.

  “What's he trying to do, torture you?” he asked, clearly more amused by the situation than I was. “What'd you name it?”

  “I haven't,” I said, squinting at it as it pulled apart my neatly-made bed. “And I'm not sure that I will.”

  “I'll name it,” he said.

  “Please don't,” I said, not wanting the poor thing to be saddled with a name like Encyclopedia or Almanac in memory of his cat, Dictionary.

  “Alright, suit yourself. But you'll have to name it eventually, and if you haven't thought of one by the time you come up here, then I'll do it for you.”

  I sighed and leaned back in my seat, still uncertain as to how I would tell him that I wouldn't be visiting him. It was one thing to allow myself to see him and slip back into a few hours of foolhardiness or carelessness, but it was another to go up there under the pretense of looking into another mystery, no matter what the content was.

  “I really don't think I'll be going anywhere for a while, Jack,” I said. “I just don't think I can be away for too long.”

  “Ah, come on, Nim,” he said. “You haven't even heard what it's about, yet.”

  “It's one of your conspiracy theories. That's all I need to know.”

  The dog had lost interest in my bed coverings and had moved on to chewing the bottom row of books lined in my bookshelf. As it pulled out the copy of The Aeneid that I had failed to return to Bickerby after my departure, the song from the opera that Karl had taken me to see two days beforehand floated back to my ears. I cleared my throat and hurried to finish the conversation with Jack.

  “Come on, Nim, you won't just come up here and see what it's about? Where'd your sense of adventure go?”

  “I think it fled somewhere around the time Albertson tried to cut your limbs off with garden sheers.”

  “But this is different than what happened at Bickerby,” he tried. “No serial killers, no missing bodies – promise.”

  “But what's it about, then?”

  “I'll tell you when you come up here.”

  I sighed.

  “I'm not coming up, Jack, especially if you're not telling me what it's about,” I said, not wanting to arrive to find anything that would stir up memories of my mother's death – or worse, Beringer's or Ilona's.

  Seeming to know what I was thinking, Jack sighed and tried again.

  “Come on, Nim: it won't be like that. It's different up here, I'm telling you. It's nothing like Bickerby – and there's no water for miles, either.”

  I switched the phone to my other ear, still uncertain.

  “And it's not just me that can see something's up,” he continued. “Everyone's a little weirded out by the whole thing.”

  “So why aren't the police looking into it?”

  “They have,” he said, but there was a note of dishonesty in his voice as though he was only giving me the partial truth. “But it's complicated. The town's so small that the police force is nearly non-existent.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Come on, Nim, don't be like that. I wouldn't be asking you if I didn't need your help.”

  “But you don't need my help,” I said. He didn't need to get involved with any more mysteries in the first place, and he certainly didn't need my help solving them – he never had. It was just some sort of game to him that he wasn't content to play alone, and I was no longer willing to partake in it.

  “I do,” he said. “You piece things together that no one else does – and you see things differently.”

  “That's the schizophrenia.”

  “That's you,” he countered. “You were always like that – you always saw things differently than everyone else. And you can call it or blame it on whatever you want, but it doesn't make it any less true.”

  A ripping sound came from the other side of the room as the dog tore the binding off of the book and caused the pages to detach and spread out over the floor.

  “Just come up for the weekend,” Jack said quickly, sensing that I was still unconvinced. “Just to see me and catch up. If you want to leave after that, I won't harass you anymore.”

  I scratched the phone against the side of my head, digging it into the temple where a headache was forming. I both wanted to see him and didn't want to set foot outside of the house, fearing that in doing so the world that I had created would somehow collapse in my wake, and that when I returned I would find that the comfortableness that had wedged itself between me and Karl that rendered us capable of living the way that we had would be severed and force us to go our separate ways, just as I had done with Jack.

  “Just for the weekend,” Jack repeated. “Please, Nim? I miss you.”

  He added the last piece for effect, and even though I found it unbelievable, it didn't make it seem any less true.

  “I … alright,” I said lowly. “I guess I could come for just a day or two.”

  “Great – I'll wait for you at the church,” he said, clearly more pleased now that I had agreed. “You can't miss it: it takes up a quarter of the town.”

  “Kipling, right?”

  “One and only. It's a bit past Kingfield and through the valley.”

  I sighed and jotted the directions down to relay to Karl, my uncertainty still gnawing at my throat.

  “And Nim?” Jack said as I made to hang up the phone. “Name the dog before you come.”

  Though I tried, I was unable to do so until an hour or two before going to my father's that Friday, and by that time I was fairly certain that the dog thought that her name was 'no' due to Karl constantly using the word whenever she so much as sniffed at anything in the apartment. Knowing that Ava would be expecting me to tell her what I had called it, though, I finally selected one with halfheartedness before Karl came home from work.

  I was playing the piano when he came in, though the notes were off because the dog was seated on my lap and enjoyed smacking her paw against the keys at random intervals. As Karl came through the main room with a grimace at the discordance of sounds, I finally gave up the attempt and patted the creature's head instead.

  “I was beginning to think you'd lost your touch,” he said, pulling off his jacket and hanging it by the door.

  “No, only my grip on reality.”

  He ignored the poor attempt at humor and went through to the kitchen to put the mail down before returning.

  “It's nice that your father asked you back so soon.”

  “Is it?” I rolled my eyes at the dog, knowing better than to do so to Karl, and shrugged. “I think he's hoping to persuade me to go to college.”

  “Well, it's something to think about.”

  “Not really,” I replied. “Unless there's a course on how not to be schizophrenic.”

  “If it was something that you wanted to do, I'm sure that the university would accommodate you,” he said. “And if it's not, that's fine, as well. You don't need to go anywhere.”

  He said it more as though he was trying to convince me rather than reassure me, and since I knew that he was already concerned about the fact that I was visiting Jack that weekend, I took the opportunity to put his mind at rest.

  “I told him that I'm doing fine here,” I said. “He just finds it hard to believe, I guess.”

  “He thinks that you're that sick of me, does he?”

  “No: that you're sick of me.”

  Karl made a face rather than responding, and quickly changed the subject.

  “So have you thought of what you'll call her yet?” he asked, nodding to the dog.

  “I guess.”

  He waited, but I had taken to smoothing down the patchwork fur to make it as neat as poss
ible and didn't respond for a moment or two.

  “Mea.”

  “May-ah?” he repeated, testing the name out to see how it would sound when he attempted to discipline it. “Is that from an opera?”

  “No, it's Latin.”

  “Like the month?”

  I glanced up at him, unwilling to say the truth.

  “Something like that.”

  He seemed to find it appropriate enough and called the dog over to feed it its dinner. She hopped down from my lap and pattered over to him, clearly learning faster than I had that it was best to just listen to what he said.

  Like Karl, Ava was content to think that the name was some sort of metonymy for the springtime. She gleefully greeted me at the door when I arrived and took the puppy from my arms before I had stepped over the threshold, and I was still stamping my feet out on the welcome mat by the time that she had raced into the other room to announce what it was called to her siblings.

  “So you're adjusting to her, are you?” my father asked, coming into the hall to greet me upon hearing Ava's voice carrying through the house.

  “Mostly.”

  “And Karl?” he said, waiting as I took off my coat and hung it on the hook.

  “He's okay with it.”

  Like the majority of my responsibilities, Karl had taken it upon himself to take care of the dog. He fed it, took it out several times a day, and had successfully trained it not to sit on the furniture or chew through his belongings. To anyone observing the interactions, it would appear that Mea was very much his pet rather than mine, or perhaps just another reminder that I had never been very good at taking care of anything or anyone without rigid guidance.

  “Did you have dinner already?” he asked. “Melinda kept a plate for you just in case.”

  “I ate with Karl.”

  “Oh, good. That's good.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, seeming not to know what to say. As the silence stretched between us, only the sound of Ava's voice carrying over from the other room touched the hallway.

  “Well, why don't you come to my office?” he said at last. “We could … I wanted to tell you something.”

  “Sure.”

  I followed him back there with an indifferent shrug, knowing that the conversation could only be about two things. Our range of communication had lessened so severely over the years that it was difficult to do more than exchange pleasantries or stifled disagreements, and I brought my shoulders back as I prepared to tell him once again that, despite what he thought, my future had little to do with him anymore.

  “How's Karl?”

  I stepped into the office after him and he shut the door. Though the light from the desk lamp was on, the bulb was weak and only sprayed a deep, orangey light over a section of the room. There was only one chair in the room, forcing us to stand facing one another awkwardly, and I pushed my hands into my pockets as I answered.

  “He's fine.”

  “When's he coming back to get you?”

  “Half an hour.” I looked off to my side, unable to keep my gaze on him for too long, and chewed the insides of my mouth. “He's driving me up to Kipling tomorrow, so he didn't think I should stay too late.”

  My father's brow furrowed.

  “Kipling? Where's that?”

  “Maine.”

  He looked both surprised and disgruntled by the news, perhaps thinking, as I had, about how I had fared the last few times I had been in the state.

  “What are you going there for?”

  “I'm visiting Jack,” I said, giving him another shrug. “He lives up there now, remember?”

  “I … must have forgotten,” he replied, but in actuality, I had probably never mentioned it in the past three years. “How long will you be there?”

  “Just for a bit.”

  I had no desire to spend the time talking about my life any more than was necessary. The time when he had been able to ask me about it and feign concern had come and passed, and if he was remotely interested in what or how I was doing, I rather thought that he should have put the effort in when I had needed him to five years earlier.

  “I see,” he said. He shifted in his spot slightly, seeming not to know how to proceed. “Well, that will be … It'll be nice when you're back.”

  I shrugged again, though my shoulders were growing stiff and the action was stifled.

  “What'd you want to talk about?” I said, anxious to get it over with.

  “Oh, I ...” He shook his head and cleared his throat, which was still sore from the beginning of the week. “I … I had something that I needed to tell you.”

  I stared at him expectantly, but he didn't go on.

  “Okay,” I said. “Go for it.”

  “It's … It's not an easy thing to say,” he said uncomfortably. “And I'm … I'm not sure how best to do it, really. I haven't told the children, yet.”

  He hesitated again as though waiting for a change in my reaction, but apart from a slight frown that formed over my eyes, my face remained passive.

  “Well, feel free to practice on me,” I said, vaguely wondering what he was so uncertain about. “Not that I'm a prime example of how most people would respond.”

  “No, maybe not,” he said. “But you are my son, so I thought it best to tell you first.”

  I nearly scoffed at the remark, barely managing to cover it with a sigh, before dropping my shoulders again and looking at him closely. From the expression on his face, I could tell that whatever it was that he had to say would not be welcome news, and my only guess as to what it could be carved itself into my mind before I could stop it.

  “Are you leaving again?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Leaving,” I repeated. “Did you get another job somewhere else? Did they ask you to relocate?”

  It fit the scenario quite perfectly, and all at once the birthday present that he had given me and the worry that I would be lonely made more sense. He had been in Connecticut for three years now, the same amount of time that he had been in Holland, and he was undoubtedly growing uneasy of slipping back into the comfort of staying still. He had never been very good at it to begin with, and since my mother's accident he had only grown more restless. I dug the heels of my feet into the floor as I considered it, willing myself to remain as firmly in place as he was unsteady.

  He shook his head.

  “Work? No, no, they're not relocating me,” he said. He cleared his throat again, clearly caught off guard. “Actually, I … I've stepped away from work for now. I don't think that I'll be returning.”

  “You've retired?”

  I raised my eyebrows at the thought. He was still too young to retire – only fifty-nine – and if I had been asked to guess, I would have thought that he would continue working well past the age of retirement solely because he didn't know what else to do with his time.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “I've just … taken a leave of absence, I suppose.”

  “Alright.” I stared at him with more scrutiny. “Why?”

  “Well, it's … it's not easy to say, Enim. I almost wish that I didn't have to, really. In fact, I – I've been holding off on it for a while now, thinking that maybe there was a way around it, but it's fairly clear now that it is what it is, and I … I don't think that I should keep it from you any longer.”

  He paused and let out a breath, his eyes fixed on mine even though I suddenly felt as though I had left the room.

  “I have cancer,” he said, his voice stagnant and straightforward. “Esophageal. The prognosis … isn't good.”

  As soon as he had uttered it, the words seemed to melt into the walls to flee the room, and we were left in a stunned silence that solidified the air and made it difficult to breathe. As the moments clicked by with neither of us speaking, he turned to cough into his elbow, but the sound was inadmissible and far away.

  “Is this a joke?” I said, unable to grasp why he would say such a thing.

  He looked at me s
teadily.

  “No, Enim, it's not a joke. I was diagnosed a few weeks ago, but they caught it too late.”

  I shook my head, still not certain that I understood what he was saying. Whereas he had always been so direct and clear before, he was suddenly quite the opposite, and I couldn't pull apart the words well enough to hear the way that they were supposed to form his sentences. He wasn't sick – that was me – and he wasn't dying – that had been my mother: he was the one who got off freely from all of the troubles that plagued the rest of us, so what he was telling me couldn't be true.

  “Enim? Are you … What are you thinking?”

  I shook my head, still unable to respond.

  “Enim, I … I know that this is a shock. It's why I didn't want to tell you on your birthday – or even at all, really. But I thought that you should know. I thought that you should be … prepared.”

  “Prepared for what?” I said numbly. “You dying?”

  He blinked, evidently as unaccustomed to the thought as I was.

  “Yes, I suppose that's what I mean,” he said.

  I turned away from him and fidgeted with something on his desk, unable to keep my shaking hands still but needing not to let them show. I knew that he was watching me and waiting for me to say something else – something different – but I couldn't begin to think of what that would be.

  “Anyhow, I … I'm glad that I was able to tell you before you leave tomorrow,” he said after a moment. “I wouldn't want you to … Well, I know how you sometimes get carried away with Jack, so I didn't want you to make too many plans without knowing what was going on.”

  I turned back to him slowly.

  “You want me to stay, you mean?” I said.

  “Well, I … I thought it would be better if you were close,” he said. “I don't know how long I have, and if you had been thinking of staying in Maine for a while, I thought it would be best to tell you before you made any lasting decisions.”

  I continued to stare at him, a separate type of disbelief coming over me as I listened to him.

  “You mean you wanted to tell me so that I didn't decide to stay in Kipling for a while,” I reiterated.

  “Yes.”