Here After

by Sean Costello

  And just down the hall, David’s room.

  “I’m not ready yet, Wen. I can’t even tell you when I will be.” Then he was saying it. “If ever. To be honest, if you need to fill the slot, I’d say go ahead and do it. You’ve got some promising recruits, I know that.” He felt an unexpected lightness in his chest. “Maybe you should just go ahead.”

  Silence. Then: “Do you know what you’re saying here, Peter?”

  “I believe I do.”

  “Tell you what. Take a couple more weeks. We’d hate to lose you. If it’s time you need, you should have it. We’ll get by. I’ll check back with you around the middle of June. Okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”

  “I appreciate that. Talk to you soon. And take care.”

  “Shall do. Bye for now.”

  He replaced the handset in its cradle and returned his gaze to the TV, a thirty-two inch flat screen built into the wall unit Dana had loved so much. He’d been half-watching an episode of I Love Lucy on DVD, one of many gifts people had given him in the months since David’s death, all of it thoughtfully designed to lift his spirits. Looking now at the screen—Lucy still frozen in the midst of stomping around in a tub full of grapes—Peter understood that since his son’s death, what he’d been desperately trying to avoid was the pauses, the lulls in the stream of input he’d been exposing himself to through every waking moment, sleep coming only when his eyes could no longer endure the light, his mind the ceaseless chatter. He’d jacked into the tube and let it zombify him. He could lose himself in it, ride it downstream, forever if need be. The pauses were the hard part.

  He thumbed the play button and the chatter resumed, numbing him.

  * * *

  Hunger. That gnaw. There was the animal part of him—bladder, bowels, hunger, thirst, fatigue—and the rest was emptiness, the absence of drive or enthusiasm, the simple baseline energy required to power a life. His friends had been after him to seek counseling, all of them doing their level best to snap him out of it, set him back on the path. But the path to where? What was left after family? His family had been his engine, the center from which all things flowed and into which all of his energies were directed. What was he supposed to do now, pick up and start again? He just couldn’t see it. A family was not a car, an item you simply replaced if it got trashed. It was over and he could see no path.

  His younger brother Colin, a marine biologist with the University of British Columbia, had spent the first two weeks after the funeral here at the house, helping Peter box up all of David’s stuff. After convincing him it was time to deal with David’s possessions, Colin had been firm, telling him to get rid of it all. “The last thing you need,” he’d said, “is stuff like this jumping out at you, breaking your heart all over again.” Colin had been thorough, almost brutally so, moving furniture, running his hand around every seat cushion on the couches and chairs, looking under beds, even touring the grounds for lost balls or toys. Peter had to argue with him and finally insist on keeping the family photos in place. “I managed after Dana died,” he told Colin. “I’ll manage now.” They stored some of it in boxes in the attic, things Peter just wasn’t ready to let go of yet. The rest, clothes and toys mostly, Colin drove to the nearest Salvation Army drop station.

  Like most people who cared about Peter, what concerned Colin most was his apparent suicide attempt. Peter could read the questions in his eyes: Why had he done it? And if left to his own devices, was he at risk for trying it again? One night near the end of Colin’s stay, they sat at the kitchen table and Colin put those very questions to him. And Peter explained that it hadn’t been a suicide attempt, not in the accepted sense—ending his life had not been the point. He’d been trying to accompany his son on his journey into eternity or oblivion or whatever it was that waited for him on the other side. Misguided, perhaps, but he told his brother he felt certain it would have worked. Colin, a realist who believed that once you were dead you were dead and that was the end of it, said he understood and they left it at that.

  Peter swung his legs off the bed, the hunger working on him now, giving him a headache, a familiar throb in his temples. The trigger levels for his biological imperatives had ramped way up. To eat he had to be starving, to relieve himself required a bladder full to bursting. Otherwise he couldn’t be bothered.

  He was starving now.

  Dressed only in his skivvies, he padded into the kitchen. He’d made a survivalist grocery run about a month back, stocking up on canned soups and stews, cereals, snack foods. Empty calories to fill a hole that couldn’t be filled. He opened a can of beef barley soup and popped it into the microwave. When the oven beeped he retrieved the steaming bowl, scalding his fingers as he hustled it toward the nearest counter. The pain made him lurch, the action slopping more soup onto his fingers and the shin of his left leg. Peter screamed and the bowl slipped his grasp, shattering against the ceramic floor tiles, the soup splattering his ankles. He cursed and felt something malign rise up in him, rending its restraints in a single massive pull. By reflex he danced away from the spatters of hot soup and skidded in the puddled liquid, losing his footing and falling backward into the tight space between the microwave and the cook island. His left buttock came down on a jagged shard of bowl and now the fury was loose in him, rampant, and he cursed and thrashed in a slick of cooked barley and fresh blood, cursed and roared and wished for death. Now he rolled onto his side, away from the pain in his backside, and his fist found the metal drawer beneath the oven and pummeled it without pause, blow after senseless blow until blood flowed from his knuckles too.

  And when it seemed his rage could not be tamed, that he would thrash and wail until his body imploded from the force of it, he noticed something under the fridge, cocooned in a dust kitty, just within reach of his fingers. Tears standing in his eyes, he retrieved it and sat up with it in his palm, plucking it free of its shroud. The smile the sight of it brought felt pleasant on his face, a beam of August sunshine in the pit of January cold.

  It was a tiny crystal figurine of a cat he’d bought for David when he was five or six. David had spotted it in a downtown boutique and had all but begged Peter to get it for him. It had seemed to Peter an odd thing for a small, active boy to want, but he’d bought it for him just the same. And David had treasured it, holding it up to the light in the daytime, storing it at night in a toy safe only he knew the combination for. He’d been playing with it one evening some months later and had gotten distracted by an episode of The Simpsons, his favorite TV show. After that it was lost, just...gone, and it had stayed that way until this very moment. How it ended up where it did Peter couldn’t imagine, but the loss of it had broken David’s heart. Even Peter’s offer to replace it with an identical one had failed to mend the blow. “It’s okay, Dad,” David had said. “I’ll keep looking for it.” And he had. Even a year later, Peter would sometimes find his son searching for it. He finally gave up when they bought him the twenty-gallon fish tank that still bubbled away on a stand in the family room. David had wanted just the one fish, a gold, bubble-eyed, genetically engineered monstrosity that waddled around the tank gobbling flake food and shitting on the plastic plants. That stupid creature had outlived its keeper. One of the most devout promises Peter had made to his son before his death was to make sure his fish got fed every day and its water got changed once a month. Not trusting his dad’s memory, David had written the instructions down in an open, carefree script that was just beginning to reflect his personality.

  Peter held the figurine up to the glow of the kitchen window. He saw that one of its ears was missing. He rotated it slowly in the light, as David had done, and a reflected needle of sunlight stung his eye, shattering a floodgate of misery the depth of which Peter would never have imagined possible. Terrible, breathless sobs wracked him, tears as hot as the soup streaming from his eyes, and Peter was swept away by it. In the months since the funeral he had shed barely a tear, letting his anger at
God and Medicine and Lisa Black—the woman who called herself his friend yet sabotaged his only hope of being with his son—sustain him. He had bitten the bullet, stoically plodding on while turning his face from the truth each time it reared its ugly head.

  But all of that was behind him now. He was caught in this undertow of pain and grief and he could no longer summon the fight to escape it.

  He let it come.

  * * *

  Lying on the kitchen floor, the rhythm of his breathing almost normal now, Peter imagined that the way he felt in this moment must be much the way a woman feels following a difficult labor that produces only a stillborn. There is no joy in it, but the relief at having it over with is immeasurable.

  He picked himself up, found a bucket under the sink and mopped up the mess. Then he got in the shower, his hunger gone. The wound in his buttock was still leaking blood and would probably require stitches. This made him think of bio-glue and induced a bout of crazed laughter that scared him a little. The skin on three of his knuckles had peeled off, leaving flaps of tissue he would coax back into place with Band-Aids. The hand hurt like hell.

  He lingered under the stinging spray until it started to chill, watching the pink water swirl down the drain, then toweled himself off and attended to his wounds, using the bathroom mirror to guide the repair on his backside, drawing the jagged wound edges together with Steri-strips he’d pilfered from work. If the sticky strips held, he might get away without stitches. He dressed in T-shirt and jeans, tucked the crystal kitty into his pocket and went out the front door for the first time in three weeks.

  * * *

  The street was slick from an earlier rain, the blacktop steaming in the sun, and it occurred to Peter as he focused on the day that he’d missed the part of spring he enjoyed most, that sudden, abundant renewal after months of sub-zero temperatures. He’d moved to Sudbury from Ottawa thirteen years ago, the winters so cold here he sometimes worried there would be no spring, that nothing could survive such relentless, barren cold. The day three weeks ago that he’d last left the house—he couldn’t even remember what had taken him out on that day—there had still been isolated mounds of snow in the yard and not a leaf or a new blade of grass in sight. Now, in this brilliant sunshine with everything freshly scrubbed, it seemed a different world, a world in which his son might still be alive, and for a moment he half expected David to come romping around the corner of the house, smiling and saying, “Hey, Dad, what a day...”

  He leaned against the porch railing and took the crystal kitty out of his pocket, standing it upright in his palm. He supposed there would be moments like this for the rest of his life, instants in which holes appeared in the fabric of reality and anything seemed possible. In these moments his son could be alive, all that had come before just a grinding nightmare extinguished at last by a beautiful day or a treasured object; his first instinct upon finding the kitty had been to run tell David about it, knowing how delighted he would be, even now, all these precious years later.

  He pocketed the figurine and looked down the street. He lived in a quiet, upscale neighborhood in the Moonglow subdivision, elegant homes built shoulder to shoulder, the crab-apple trees the city had planted on each lawn just beginning to blossom. As he watched, a school bus chuffed to a stop across the street and a group of kids piled out, laughing and chatting, backpacks stuffed with books and empty lunch pails. One of them was David’s best chum, Thomas, a rail-thin redhead with ears like jug handles. He broke off from the pack to tag along with a tall girl named Sophie. Thomas and David had both been a little sweet on Sophie, an eleven-year-old who won math contests and played the saxophone, her nightly practice sessions setting the neighborhood dogs howling. The two of them were giggling about something and Thomas happened to glance Peter’s way. Their eyes met and Peter saw the boy’s happy expression flee his face; it seemed to actually shear away, the change so abrupt it stole Peter’s breath. Thomas jerked his gaze away and now Sophie’s eyes found him, and she looked away too. Stricken, the kids quickened their pace, heads bowed in silence, until they reached Sophie’s house and hurried into the open garage. The experience heightened Peter’s dread of returning to work, the awkwardness of the whole process of bereavement, the culture’s total lack of meaningful words or interactions in approaching those left behind. In a way, the kids’ reaction had been the more genuine one. No one wanted to face it. The bereaved was someone you hoped to avoid, but realized that ultimately, particularly where friends or co-workers were concerned, you simply could not. So you had to come up with something, some statement, some thoughtful gesture. Peter was not looking forward to it. He worked with more than a hundred people at different times and was acquainted with a couple hundred more. And however well intentioned their efforts might be, each encounter would be a fresh kick in the stomach.

  He made his way gingerly down the steps, the puncture wound in his butt starting to throb, and eased into his gray Corolla.

  * * *

  Peter was a lapsed Catholic, but when the issue of where to bury his wife had come up, he hadn’t objected to her parents’ wish that it be consecrated ground. Saint John’s was a well maintained, isolated cemetery near the town of Warren, where Dana had grown up and her mother still lived. When Peter purchased the plot, the funeral director suggested he reserve an adjacent one for himself, which he had. It had never occurred to him he’d be using it for his son. In making David’s arrangements, he’d reserved a third plot for himself.

  He parked in the empty lot and limped along a cobbled path toward a gaudy mausoleum, since 1973 the final resting place of one Donald Brushwood Jr., who had once been mayor of Warren. During David’s funeral, Peter had absently noticed it, deciding it was a perfect landmark in this hilly suburb of the dead, David and Dana’s graves almost in its shadow. The last thing he wanted was to end up wandering around this dreadful place in search of his family.

  David’s marker was beaded with rainwater, striking in its newness next to Dana’s, which had already begun to weather and fade. Peter had decided on a glossy, black marble finish that resembled the lobby floor in a Toronto hotel David had loved staying at, not because of the spacious rooms or the heated pool, but because of that polished floor. Look, Dad, you can see yourself in it. Peter could see himself now, a husk of a man perched on the rim of a rectangle of sod that was slightly sunken, sadly out of place in its smallness. The inscription was rendered in gold, David’s favorite color. It read simply, David Croft, Beloved Son of Dana and Peter. And the dates, February 10, 1998 – February 8, 2008.

  Peter took the tiny figurine out of his pocket, pixies of refracted sunlight capering around it in his palm. He held it up between his fingers.

  “Look, bud,” he said, a curious peace in his heart. “I found it.”

  David’s voice, in his mind. Warm, pleased. Thanks, Dad. Where was it?

  “Under the fridge. Can you believe it? We looked everywhere, didn’t we?” He walked along the edge of the plot to the headstone and set the kitty on top. “I’ll leave it right here, okay?”

  He stood there for a long time, deciding. Then he turned away. Fresh clouds had gathered in the interim, and as he made his way back to the car, fat spits of rain struck the cobblestones around him.

  3

  Monday, June 4

  HE ARRIVED EARLY ON HIS first day of work, intending to change quickly and get to his room, thereby limiting the number of people he ran into. By some strange blessing, the first person he did see was Brent Chamberlain, a chubby guy who smoked too much and worked on the cleaning staff. He and Brent had grown close over the years, sharing an offbeat sense of humor and an abiding love of movies. And though they rarely socialized outside of the hospital, they were always pleased to see one another. At the funeral Brent had approached Peter with tears in his eyes. “I’m only gonna say this once, chum,” he said, “then I’m never gonna talk about it again, unless you tell me you want to, in which case I’m there for you night or day.” He wrappe
d his big hand around Peter’s arm. “This is unbelievably shitty. And if I could, believe me, I’d trade places with your boy this very minute. No man should have to bury his child. I love you, Pete. You’re a good friend. Decent. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” Then he hugged Peter and said, “That’s it.” He’d been the last to leave before Peter, who asked him for some time alone with his boy.

  He met Brent in the hallway outside the Ophthalmology suite, which was located one level down from the main OR, in an older part of the hospital. Wendell had seen to it that Peter got an easy room his first day back. A list of fourteen cataracts was usually finished by one o’clock.

  Brent, who’d been servicing a sterilizer, smiled when he saw Peter coming. “You dog,” he said, gripping Peter’s hand, shaking it hard. “Good to have you back.”

  “Good to be back,” Peter said. “I think.”

  “I hear that,” Brent said. He released Peter’s hand, then, eyes twinkling, told him a goofy joke—something about a Newfie, a leopard skin Speedo and a potato—and Peter lost it. For a moment he feared it would be the same breed of crazed laughter that had possessed him in the shower the other day, but it turned out to be just a good old belly laugh, and he wanted to hug Brent for bringing it out of him.

  Shaking his head, Brent picked up his mop and headed off down the hall. “See you around, Doc,” he said without looking back.

  “You bet,” Peter said and walked into his room, feeling human for the first time since his son got sick.

  * * *

  The staff in Ophthalmology seemed to sense Peter’s apprehension, and each in their own way got it over with quickly: a whispered, “Good to have you back,” an affectionate hug, a brisk handshake and it was done. Surprisingly, the familiar rhythms of routine had a soothing effect. Unlike the numb hours spent in front of the tube, the work brought a sense of purpose, and at times Peter found himself distanced from the pain, a welcome but strangely guilt-inducing sensation. He’d grown so accustomed to the weight of his loss, setting it down even for a moment seemed a betrayal. Still, it was a relief to concentrate on the needs of others for a change. Cataract patients were often elderly, old school in their attitudes, and Peter welcomed their warm expressions of gratitude.