by Chris Lynch
as we see each other
They don’t notice me, which is the best break I could ask for. As I peer through the small square window into my dad’s room, it looks just unreal enough that I can hold a brief hope that that’s what it is. Everything there is blue lighted, like an aquarium. My two sister fish are fully absorbed in studying the machinery, and the sheets and their wringing hands, to see me. As for the father fish, he has seen all the sights of his life now, and all I can do is hope the good ones are playing on a constant loop in his mind.
I am not going to move until somebody comes and forces me to. I’m trembling, every bit of me, and when I struggle to get a grip on it, it just shakes me harder to teach me a lesson.
Mary is the one to look up first, and she comes dashing right up to look at my face from just the other side of the glass. I genuinely have no idea what to expect from her, and frankly, her noncommittal expression holding fast in the glass is scaring me further out of my wits.
But I don’t think she’s doing it at all deliberately. Her face has no more idea what to do with itself than the rest of us do. Finally she tries a small smile that shatters into weeping before it ever has a chance.
Within seconds I am on the inside, and Mary and I are in a hug-to-the-death. Then I find enough arm to fit Fran in, and here we are. For now, for a fleeting moment, day, two days, too short and for all the wrong reasons, we are us again, and we are great like I knew we were.
I am submerging myself in this for as long as it will hold, this hug, this revisit, this historical reenactment of when love came easy to this family and nobody ever forgot to show it.
But I have already kept the old man waiting too long.
When I step up to the bed, I get a shock far beyond all I had tried to prepare for. The respirator pumps him up and down and hisses at him, through him, toward his children, whose combined hearts would never match up to even that exploded and decommissioned thing he’s got left now.
His was a massive and open and happy heart, and it was every bit about two daughters and one son who became the Grand Project that remained when his first best beloved went and died and the first Great Plan followed her down. We were his life’s work, the source of his limitless warmth as well as the beneficiaries.
For most of those years we didn’t comprehend how much he counted on us. For those early years after Mom, when we needed him most of all, we just took it all as a given. Took him as a given. Took everything that was given. Then when we started preparing for next lives, next grand projects of our own, it became more and more obvious. We found out his big secret, how much he needed us. And we punished him for it.
He is shrunken by so much compared to when I left him alone in the house that last day. This is not just one massive heart attack that did this job.
“Was he starving himself?” I ask. When nobody says anything, I turn around to face them.
Their faces tell the tale. They didn’t know what he was up to those days and weeks and months. No more than I did.
“It’s tomorrow,” Fran says in a whisper. “They’re giving him till tomorrow morning to see if maybe, if there’s some improvement . . .”
“And if not, they are switching off the ventilator midmorning,” Mary says. “To give us all time to get back.”
“Not an issue for me,” I say, slouching myself down into the vinyl upholstered chair near Ray’s beautiful big bear head, the one part of him undiminished.
“I’ll be here,” I say, slipping right into the man-of-the-family coat that is still quite roomy on me.
And there will be improvement.
• • •
When there are no more distractions, the lights are dimmed to almost nothing and I can fight no longer. I crawl up into his bed, work into as close an approximation as possible of the hundreds of times his big burly arm had pulled me in, warmed me up, calmed me down, and drove the demons out.
“I still need you, Ray,” I say to him. I always hated this, in stories, movies, people talking out loud to somebody who’s already kind of busy with the dying. It bothered me enough to want to tackle the talkers and eject them from the poor tired soul’s room.
But now I’m here. I’m here and it’s us and as I am discovering practically every day now, everything is different when you get there yourself. And telling him these things, out loud, was what he was cheated on so badly already. So, not now.
“I need you something fierce. I need you to sit down and eat with me. I need you to play another game of infinity Risk. I need you more than I needed you when I was seven, and I’m terrified ten times as much. I’m ashamed of things I’ve done in the past, and when I think of how you never, ever, ever quit on me, I become so filled up with hate and disgust that I think I could go and do it. I think the big thing that’s the issue, that makes killing yourself so reprehensible most of the time, is the leaving behind that vicious mess for your loved ones. That is what you cannot do.
“But this is it, Dad. After you, there is no such anybody for me to hurt. And don’t think the girls count, because they don’t. I expect not to see them again, once this week is done.
“I’ll shut up now, Ray. I should anyway, shouldn’t I? But not before I tell you that the last truly awful thing I did during your lifetime, I did to you. I pretended I didn’t need you. And then I pretended it was for your good even more than mine. I lied on top of lies and lied about the lying until I got scared that I was losing the last real thing I had, the last lifeline back to myself as I knew me.
“Then I decided that was exactly what I wanted. What I thought I wanted. I don’t know what to do. I don’t belong anywhere, except right there, right inside that big fat heart. It was so big that we had to all pull together just to pull it apart.
“I’ll shut up now. See.”
I lie there, feeling the almost nothingness of my wonderful dear dad’s final breaths that don’t even belong to him as much as to a machine. But my head stays right where it is now, not to miss one single beat of it.
“I’m gonna hold you, Ray, right through. I’m gonna see you off to sleep, see that you go untroubled, just like you always did for me. Because I did learn. I did, and I hope you can feel me now and know.
“And I have no idea how this kind of thing works, how it actually transpires at the very moment it does. But if there is any possibility, and your time comes to close you down, if there is any way you can pull me along as you slip through, I wouldn’t mind that at all.
“Good night, Great Man.”
• • •
He declined to take me with him.
But my father did the next best thing when he let me hold on to him as his life was letting go. It was a quick thing when it decided to happen, and by the time his medical team reached the room, I had ushered him safely beyond their reach. I don’t think I made lifelong friends of the staff by lying there clinging like an overgrown bat to Ray’s corpse. But they allowed me that, and a few more minutes with him alone. We hung on until I could start to feel the cold transaction of my dad’s remains transforming into a chilly, stiff facsimile that had nothing of the man within it at all.
This is when I’m ready. And I leave knowing that the two of us got at least this thing right. The final thing.
wrong and wrong again
Now we know what Ray did to fill up all that extra time once we left him to get on with his life, like the girls had already been doing and I was starting on myself.
He planned for his death.
The funeral is all organized and paid for, as is the lawyer handling the orderly wrapping up of details that would not have a chance to get messy. Messier. The house is being sold immediately and the proceeds divided three ways. Bank accounts, insurance benefits, any remaining scraps of the man’s worldly possessions that have real-world cash value are all likewise to receive the logical, clinical, unsentimental resolution.
In other words, the most un–Ray Sarafian way to go about it.
We all agree this
is sensible, it is for the best, and the way it’s all laid out, we couldn’t fight over anything if we wanted to.
But we don’t want to fight, Mary, Fran, and I. We just want to get going.
• • •
There is no great heaving mass of bereaved humanity at the quick and clean graveside service. Maybe a dozen mourners who might be vaguely recognizable to me from sometime when I was still little and my dad was still big and everybody adored him.
They did. They did. He was adored because he was adorable in the most literal and most authentic sense of the word. I am not making memories do what I want them to. I know this beyond mere knowing, because this ache is far deeper and weightier than any words could possibly reach. To disturb, distort, destroy, as words are ever ready to do.
The minister’s words do none of those things as he murmurs along, but they don’t do anything else, either. I’m grateful for the assembled decent dozen, even if the more I look at them the more I think they are some of those lonely sad souls who come to funerals for the juice they get out of not being dead themselves or out of simply being thoughtful, if morbid, fellow travelers.
It occurs to me that eventually it might not be possible to be thoughtful without also being morbid.
I stand on the opposite side of the grave from my sisters. And just behind them is their roommate, Grace. The sight of her, for the first time since a very different tragic night, shakes me up terribly. I fear for a shaky second that I could fall right into the hole before Dad can even get in and finally rest. I steady myself quickly, though the flash of Grace’s face is almost as upsetting as the event that has thrown us back into each other’s view.
The moment that matters is here anyway, and every one of us—strangers, loved ones, and some combinations of the two—edges up close as Ray is lowered into the ground, into the hole they reopened for him fifteen years after they did it the first time. Slowly down he goes, where she waits to receive him and lie side by side, snug in the dirt. The perfect reward for a guy who lived and died desiring nothing more complicated than a long lie-around with a beloved. And despairing when it couldn’t be as simple as that.
The girls are driving directly from the cemetery back to Norfolk. I’m spending a last night in the house before taking the identical meandering bus route that took me away from here the last time. The same journey, except for an utterly different journeyman.
Mary and Grace are already at the car. Mary and I said our good-byes and regrets honestly, minus the malice but with only traces of what may have once been a finer thing than this. Even the moderate flare-up of shared emotion from the other night has already died down to embers of no glow and very little warmth.
“Are you sure you don’t want to just fly and forget about the stupid, stinking buses?” Fran says as we hug. It is the familiar hug, and we linger in it. It’s a different hug too, and we let go of each other knowing that.
“No, thanks for doing that, though, and getting me here that quickly. I don’t know what I would have done, if I hadn’t been able to—”
She stops me. “We would never have let that happen. Hell or high water.”
“I think I’ve had enough of each to do me for a lifetime.”
“Good,” she says. “I hope so, Keir, for your sake. I want your new place to be a better place. I want to know you are thriving in the real world, the one that’s mostly not going to tell you exactly what you want to hear. And when it tells you what you don’t want to hear, that’s when you need to listen hardest to it, and not to that other voice, the sweet talker that knows you better than you know yourself and that means you nothing but harm.”
She stops herself, crosses her arms, and cocks her head to one side.
“That’s a lot of listening you’re doing there, Sarafian,” she says.
“I’m getting in as much practice as I can. And who better to chew my ears than you?”
She heaves an inconclusive sigh, adding, “You’re talking a good game, anyway. But then, that part was never your problem, was it?”
“I guess not,” I say, and quickly draw the envelope out of my pocket and stick it in her hand.
“You’ve missed my birthday by six weeks, Keir.”
“I have to ask a favor,” I plead.
Mary punches the car horn twice. Fran waves to acknowledge her but stays looking at me, and the card, and finally at me.
“Grace sees her still, doesn’t she?”
She steps back like I’ve suddenly turned radioactive. “Oh . . . oh, Keir, what are you asking me to do here? Things are only just starting to lose that constant, miserable edginess that you started. I can’t be a messenger for you. I can’t do that, and you can’t ask me to. Do you forget? Do you still forget, that easily and willfully, that I do not accept your version of certain events? And that I have had to come a long way just to be able to relate, on any level, to you since that horrible time?”
“Things do change sometimes,” I say cautiously.
“Some things don’t,” she says, and shoves the card back at me. “And my position on this has not changed one bit.”
“Read it,” I say, and notice the instant startle in her eyes, across all the muscles of her face. “I left it unsealed because I wanted you to know what was in there so you could decide what to do. Actually, whatever you decide to do, I very much want you to read it anyway.”
Mary beeps again, four times this time, and spurs an already frazzled Fran into fumbling the envelope into releasing the card. Her hands shake as she reads it, and mine shake while I wait.
A straight and simple outcome here was never going to happen. But the parade of all the spirits of all the human emotions playing rapidly across Fran’s articulate features is close to horrifying for me to witness.
Finally she just fits the card, with some difficulty, back into the envelope.
Then she seals it.
She grabs me fearsomely in a final hug around my neck that is intended to inflict pain on me in equal parts with better intentions as well. But in the end, yet again, it’s the words that will linger.
“Do you know what a tragedy you have been for everybody?” she says, and pushes off me to run to the idling car, which barely waits for the door to slam before peeling away.
• • •
I make my solitary way back, covering the streets and blocks of my hometown, between my parents’ final resting place together and their original one they built and maintained for us all to be happy in. I make the walk at a crawl, taking note of every familiar sidewalk crack, every shop, every ballfield.
I reach the house that’s Forever Ray but tomorrow is for sale and tonight is for myself.
I have actually had this planned, since the moment I realized I would have this night, this once-only opportunity to pay a tiny fraction of all due respects.
It’s a farewell tour, and it doesn’t take long to scan it all in once more for the details, and then bank it for a lifetime.
“So long, kids,” I say as I poke my head into the girls’ old room. In this vision, the weights are not yet there, but the girls still are. Fran screeches like a police whistle, “You have to knock!” and Mary hurls herself so hard at the door that my head gets battered on either side, smashed between the sharp edges of the door and the frame.
I go into my parents’ short-term heaven room and Ray’s long-term widower’s roost. I walk up and touch the bed, the left side facing the window onto the silver maple tree. It was my mother’s side of the bed and then it became my retreat from every fear known, and I knew them all. It was not likely a coincidence that the fears and the visits came timely enough that I could still fit myself into my mother’s impression pressed like a mold into the mattress. I felt it, I know I did. And the first few times some of her body warmth was still there too.
The place where Ray never talked me out of being afraid. His strategy was that we would talk about the fear right in front of its face until it eventually got bored or ashamed enough to leave
us alone.
I stroll into the kitchen like I have a thousand times before. But it’s a first to find it scrubbed and sanitized of the faintest hint of any meal cooked here in the recent past. I get a distinct whiff, however, of the sage, peppercorns, and Worcestershire sauce of a meat loaf that marked the final day of my eighth-grade year.
I pass through the living room, where so much of everything happened that I’ll be editing that film in my head for years before the narrative reveals itself clearly. But the piano that lost its music when we lost the lady who loved it needs no narrative. Her picture perched on top could still bring Ray to tears. The dining table stops me cold.
The game, our game. Risk, which we played for probably five complete years of my life, is laid out on the table, ready to launch.
Christ. As if he could have been waiting for me. Waiting and ready for me to come through the door and play with him like always.
The tour is over. It is all over, completely, well and truly, over.
• • •
I lie on my bed, the blue bed I can still remember helping Ray put together for me. I thought this bed was so tremendous, I couldn’t sleep the first two nights just knowing he actually went out and bought the right one and it was under me every time I opened my eyes.
I try for several hours, but I’m returned to that day. I’m returned to not being able to sleep in the blue bed. Mostly because the blue bed is inside the house, and I cannot sleep in this house anymore.
• • •
When the relentlessness of the knocking at the door finally pulls me to my senses, I realize exactly where I am. I have no recollection of coming to this spot, but I am in my tiny wooden hideaway chair in the cellar, wedged next to the archaic bulky furnace the new owner is going to need to replace immediately. Serves him right, whoever he is. Usurper.
The knocking continues as I mount the creaky steps, go through the door to the kitchen, and say “All right, all right,” right up till I open the door.
“What the hell?” I say.