Pretty Things Don't Break

by Lauren Jayne

  And then, exactly ten days later, he was dead.

  Chapter 22

  The Black Trench

  At the huge round table at Twelve Baskets, a restaurant across the street from the hospital, I sat in a haze of confusion and listened as people talked around me. Dad’s stepbrother, my Uncle Arnie, was my Grandpa Morris’s son. Dad’s birth dad had died when he was five. He’d had a heart condition, and his doctors had told him no vigorous activities and no high elevations. While downhill skiing, he had a heart attack and left Grandma, mother to my dad and Uncle Terry, a widow before she was forty. Morris, the only Grandpa I’d ever known besides Milton, was a hard-working man who was nothing but wonderful to me. But, he was very old fashioned and had my Grandma sell the five-bedroom Victorian house by Balboa Park that she’d raised my dad in, because he didn’t believe in real estate, and had her sell her thriving toy shop since he didn’t really believe that women should work.

  Uncle Arnie was tall with dark brown curly hair and brown eyes; he spoke with an essence of an East Coast accent, as did Grandpa.

  As we all sat around the table in a numbed-out state, he said, “When your dad and I were traveling, selling meatpacking machines, we didn’t have enough money for a hotel room. Your dad would walk straight up to the front desk, introduce himself as an inspector from AAA and without fail, we’d be sitting in the best room in the house with access to any and all amenities.” Uncle Arnie had tears escaping from his eyes as he laughed along with everyone else. “One night, after a long day of sales calls, we were lying side by side in our twin beds. Joel complained it was too loud; he was sensitive to loud noises.”

  I shook out of my numbed state. He was sensitive to loud noises? The man practically screamed every word that ever left his mouth. Had Uncle Arnie ever heard Top Gun blasting on our TV?

  He continued, “So, we are in bed after a long day of listening to your dad tell story after story to all of his new adoring best friends in tiny butcher shops around the state, popping in to sample every butcher’s best shot at their house-smoked sausage. In bed, laughing ‘til we cried about our day, your dad called downstairs, ‘Yes, this is Mr. Winkel, from AAA. Yes, we are enjoying our stay, but the noise level in our room is unacceptable; I can’t sleep here. Well, that is disappointing news.’ They had told him that there simply wasn’t another room in the hotel. Your dad took the mattress from his bed and started to shove it into the window and then, right before my eyes, it flew out the window.”

  Now everyone was laughing so hard they were crying, except Grandma.

  When I scooted onto the side of her chair and held her hand, she looked down at me and said, “Your Dad, he made such a statement in everything he did. I’m sure he never lived one boring moment.”

  I looked at her and gave my best half-smile; I knew her heart was broken.

  “He collapsed on Rosh Hashanah and died exactly ten days later on Yom Kippur. Our Rabbi said that was miraculous.”

  Staring at my Grandma’s bright blue, bloodshot eyes, I had an epiphany and realized that just because my dad was who he was, didn’t mean I was destined to be the same way. She was just as much a part of him as I was, yet she was kind and lovely. And Dad’s brother, Uncle Terry, was one of the coolest guys I’d ever met. Up to that point, I’d thought I’d had a monster living inside me, pulsing through my veins.

  Sitting in the front row at Dad’s funeral, dressed head to toe in black, with a low bun resting on the base of my neck, I stared at his coffin and wondered if he was really in there. I drifted away, onto my island, the only place I could be. Roused out of my hazy state by the laughter that erupted around me, I looked up, and in the distance behind a tree, I saw a woman in a black trench coat, alone. After ten days of sun, it was raining over us while we sat under the canopy with Dad. The lady was buckled over, and I could hear her muffled cries from behind the tree. Looking around her, I thought, where are her people? But we were the only service in the soggy grass that gray day.

  After people spoke and cried, we stood, as neighbors who didn’t really know Dad walked by us with sideways looks and scrunched eyes and hugged me into their squishy shirts. Feeling like running until the heels on my shoes were gone, and my feet bled, I stood and waited.

  Knowing that Mom would die if I didn’t move back in to take care of her, without much thought, I walked into Dean Witter to tell them I wouldn’t be coming back. I ran into Georgia, an older, well-dressed woman who was an executive assistant to one of the top stockbrokers in our office. As she passed me, looking like I was close to death, with a small box of personal things I’d accumulated over the past year in my hands, she said, “Wasn’t he your step dad? I know you two weren’t close.”

  “He was my dad…and yea.” I pushed the double glass doors out for the last time.

  Falling into my car in the covered garage, I let my head drop onto the steering wheel, and the tears flowed. I couldn’t help thinking if I’d been a normal girl with a normal dad who had suddenly died weeks after her nineteenth birthday, it would have been OK for me to fall apart. But that wasn’t the case.

  This past Father’s Day, Georgia had proudly walked into the break room, flowers from her daddy in hand, and asked, “Have a nice Father’s Day, Lauren? It’s my favorite holiday,” as she fluffed her flowers in the vase. “These are from Daddy; even though it’s Father’s Day, he still likes to thank me for making him a daddy.”

  “I didn’t see my dad. We, um, aren’t that close.”

  Georgia had come up with her own opinion of me and my dad and, when she made that

  comment, it described what I felt everyone was thinking. How could I be so sad to lose the dick dad who hated me?

  Alone in my car, the same dirt on my shoes as I’d shoveled over Dad’s coffin days ago, my body shook as the finality of everything washed over me like a tidal wave. Dad is dead…Dad is dead. Any hopes I’d ever had of having a dad were gone forever. Every stupid word I’d said as I’d held his stupid hand was wasted. My car and the shower were the only places I’d let the tears fall, and the crushing pain take me away. Dad was dead, and my conflicting feelings battled inside of me like a bloody war. When night fell, I’d float away in the dreams of what I’d hoped we’d become and then the memories of Dad as he yelled an inch from my face, “You’re a stupid, ugly whore, and that is all you will ever be!” always found me. Covered in sweat, alone in my dark room, hardly able to breathe, it hit me again and again: it was over, final. Dad was gone, resting in the dirt a few miles from here, and I was drowning in a sea of confusion.

  A few weeks later, under a veil of darkness, my tear-soaked pillow lay beneath my head while I tried to pull myself together enough to open the door of my childhood room. I did my best to keep Mom from dying too. Noah and I packed to go on Mom and Dad’s anniversary trip to Maui. Thankfully, Mom decided last minute to bring her friend Jon from work.

  My eyes still burned like they’d been soaking in salt when we landed the tiny plane on a

  runway without an airport.

  The Hawaiian stewardess with full, wavy black hair, deep, sweet brown eyes, and a childlike voice said, “Aloha, and welcome to Maui. We hope you’ll enjoy your time in paradise. Mahalo.”

  Walking out of the plane, my hand reached up to cover my burning eyes as the bright sun blazed. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I breathed in the sweet, floral, ocean air. Looking down to the bright turquoise water below us and up to the deep green rolling hills behind us, I stumbled down the rest of the stairs. Walking to the edge of the tarmac where the concrete met the red dirt, I fell to my knees, picked up a handful, and let it sift through my fingers and back down onto the ground.

  Looking around to see if Mom, Jon, and Noah were as transfixed as I was, I heard Noah yell over, “You get the bags with Jon, and Mom and I will get the car.”

  Jon had baby blonde hair and was more health conscious than me and all of my girlfriends combined. I couldn’t have been happier that Jon was invited on our �
�Dad’s dead” trip to Maui. Mom had a rule that when she was around other people she was Super Woman: strong, knowledgeable, dedicated and witty. Mom would never break down in front of someone who worked for her and never in front of a man, so having Jon with us meant Mom wouldn’t totally unravel, and I was off-duty. On our way to the condo, Jon asked if we could stop so he could get some of the ingredients he needed for his “eating plan.” As I walked through the market with Jon, I felt so much better about my compulsive problems. He looked over each potato in the mounded pile to find the perfect four for us. He did this with the mangos, the lemons; even the chicken breasts had to be a special cut to pass his inspection. After searching all three grocery stores on the island for the only salad dressing he could eat, Jon volunteered to do all of the cooking.

  My time in Maui was a blur, but Maui wasn’t. I knew I was in love, and I knew someday I’d go back, maybe for forever.

  Having left Seattle in the fall, with leaves still clinging to thin trees, we returned to the darkest winter I’d ever seen. Trees stood bare. Streets hid under the black rain. The sky was covered with thick gray clouds as we rolled up to our house. Musk and death were hiding behind our front door; Mom burst into tears and walked, barely able to hold herself up, into her room and closed the door. It was as if she’d used every last bit of energy to appear together for Jon and as soon as he was out of sight, she crumbled like a day-old scone. As she sobbed, I brought up our suitcases, running my finger across the Maui sticker the airport had put on our bags to show that they were safe, and wondering why I ever came back. Behind her closed door, I heard her push the button on the answering machine.

  “Lor, it’s Car. What’s going on? The girls said you moved out. Call me.”

  “Lor, it’s Mandi. Where are you? Call me.”

  “This is Kurt. If Lauren’s there, will you tell her I called?”

  There were a few messages for Mom and Noah and then I heard “messages deleted.”

  Later, I went up to check on Mom, who was in the shower crying so hard I worried she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

  She sobbed over and over again, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.”

  As I walked out of her room, my heart ached for her, and I thought to myself, neither can I. But I did, and she did too. For months, we passed each other in the halls like ships in the night. I’d bring her food and lay on her bed watching MASH with her, and when she’d start crying, I’d do my best to calm her.

  “My business is going to fall apart without me; I’ll lose this house. What am I going to do? Dad and I just figured it out. For the first time in our lives there was no chaos, and now he’s gone. Why? Why? Why?” Then she’d flop her head onto her pillow and sob.

  One night, the same old wind snuck through my metal-rimmed windows as I sat in my quiet, empty room. Then I heard Mom screaming; a death curdling, “Mom is being murdered in her room” kind of scream. I ran down the hall with my heart beating so hard in my chest it was suffocating me.

  Mom was sitting up in her bed, but she wasn’t awake. I tapped her shoulder and she burst into tears. This became part of Mom’s nightly rituals–night terrors. They filled me with so much anxiety that every night when she went to bed I lay in my room and waited; when would it happen, when would she let out a murderous scream and then cry until she fell back to sleep? I started to sleep on the floor next to her bed, thinking if I were there she wouldn’t do it. I’d call 911 and hang up before it rang, so that if her fake screams were ever real ones, I could hit redial while pulling the ax-wielding lunatic off of her. When the sun came up, I’d throw my blanket over my shoulders, pull the blinds in my room and sleep until it was time to make dinner.

  After a few months in solitude, I finally picked up the phone when it rang.

  “Lauren, it’s me, Kurt. Are you OK? I heard about your dad. Ben called from Art School in Arizona and told me you’d moved back. Why would you do that?”

  “Hi Kurt. My mom – she’d die if I didn’t – how could I not?”

  “I want to see you. I’m coming over.”

  “Kurt, I haven’t seen anyone or talked to anyone besides my mom and brother for months. I’m a mess and disgusting; I’ll call you when I feel better.”

  “I’m coming over.”

  When Kurt walked into our house, relief washed over me. Feeling small against his big body after what seemed like an hour of being wrapped in Kurt’s arms, he followed me to my room.

  On my bed, lying side by side, I said, “Kurt, I have to tell you something. My mom has these crazy episodes; they are called night terrors. If she screams like she is being murdered, she isn’t, OK?”

  “I’m not worried about your mom, Lauren.”

  Having Kurt next to me made me feel like a girl again, instead of the old lady I’d felt like lately. Ben was in art school in Phoenix. Before Dad had died, I’d fly out to see him whenever I could. But there was no way I could leave Mom in her current state. Kurt understood that I couldn’t leave to go for a walk with him or meet him with the boys even just for an hour. He tried his best to get me out, but he understood that I couldn’t leave Mom. Night after night, Kurt was either the last person I spoke to before bed or the last person I saw before our eyes got heavy and I quit responding to him as I lay with my head on his chest while he played with my hair.

  When Kurt called to check in on me, my voice was not the same.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I’m OK, Kurt; just a fucked up day.”

  “Is it your mom?”

  “No, it’s Ben. But I’m OK.”

  “What happened? Let me come and get you; we’ll go to the lake, and you can tell me what happened.”

  “He asked me to go to his house and pick up his notebook, so I did. I opened it, really just wanting to see some of Ben’s art again.”

  “And?”

  “And I saw a list of names on the front flap: Jen, Amanda, Elle, Lauren, Jeni, Astrid…”

  “OK, what’s the list about?”

  “I know who Jen is, and Amanda and Elle; they are the girls he had sex with before me. And Jeni is the girl in your grade who always stared at me. I had no idea who Astrid was until I called Ben.”

  “Oh, my God,” Kurt said, sounding disgusted.

  “And here’s the worst part. I called Ben to ask him about the list, and he started to cry and tell me how much he loved me and that I know how he is with sex and when I was in treatment Jeni had come over after school and had told him about her dad. ‘He’s bad to her, Lauren.’ Like that was supposed to excuse him from fucking her when I was locked up because her dad was an asshole. Then I said, ‘and Astrid, who’s Astrid?’ He said, ‘You know Scupa; he’s so good looking, he can have any girl he wants, and these two hot Swedish girls came up to us in the bar, and the hotter one chose me.’ I couldn’t believe Ben was telling me this like I was supposed to high five him or something. I told him he was free to have sex with anyone on the planet besides me, and he cried and said, ‘I need you and your letters and your love. I’m all alone here, and I love you more than anything, and it didn’t mean anything; nothing means anything but you.’

  I told Kurt I had to go, and I’d call him in a few days.

  An hour or so later, feeling like there was no more life in my body, I heard a tap on our front door. Walking downstairs, too tired to be scared, I opened the door to find Kurt.

  “Sorry, I was out with the boys and on my way home. I turned right instead of left and I’m here now.”

  He came in, and we quietly crept up to my room. Lying on his chest while we talked like we’d done countless times before, I looked up at Kurt’s beautiful sweet brown eyes. He kissed my forehead, then my cheek, and as I smiled at him he brought his perfect lips to mine. Running his fingers through my hair and across my cheeks, Kurt lifted me up to him. Our lips never parting, he gently bit my lower lip, and we kissed in my bed until he had to leave for work in the morning. That was the first night f
ear and sadness hadn’t found me in the dark for months.

  Kurt became a regular at my house after that night. One night, cradling my face in one hand and letting his other hand warmly glide over every inch of my body, Kurt’s hand slid under my jammie pants for the first time. My body stiffened and I sat up in my bed, caught off guard and sad that even in Kurt’s gentle arms, when his hand touched my bare stomach with my eyes closed, in my mind he was my dad. Kurt sat up next to me and asked what was wrong.

  “I’m OK, I promise.”

  Being as in tune with me and my body as anyone ever had been, Kurt knew where the imaginary line was on my body and did his best not to cross it. As I lay on Kurt’s shirtless body, looking at his golden skin, I was in awe of him. Every square inch of him wrapped in flawless brown skin, his deep dark eyes drenched me in love. The way he looked at me and touched me was like nothing I’d ever known. He’d say when he kissed me, “You always taste like an angel.” Then he’d lift the covers and smell my body and say, “How is it that you always smell like – like – you’re my favorite smell.”

  Every touch, every kiss, every word from Kurt’s mouth was sincere and felt like it was coming right from his open heart. Even though we were just friends, with him I felt beautiful, understood and protected. While I felt like the ugliest animal on the planet without a lick of makeup, hair in a bun and dressed in sweats, Kurt looked at me like I was a supermodel. While all my strength went into making sure Mom didn’t die, Kurt wanted to know how I was. Without Kurt, I would have drifted away on my island, and no one would have ever noticed.

  Chapter 23

  Field of Dreams

  Watching Field of Dreams on my couch in my dark cave, I was completely immersed in the movie. Movies were my escape; they transformed me, grabbed me, loved me, and certain movies never left me. That night I had a dream, and when I prayed that night, I heard, “Go.” I dreamt that I was in Maui again, but it didn’t feel like a dream; I wasn’t on vacation this time – I lived there – in paradise. I woke up feeling energized.