It's Only Death

by Lee Thompson

  “I heard,” I lied.

  “What else have you heard?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The way you said you heard it sounded to me like that wasn’t all you heard.”

  “I don’t think she loves Robert, she probably never will.”

  “That’s a shame,” my mother said. “Some young women have no sense. They have a good man who loves them, but they instead chase after some troublemaker.”

  “There are a lot of those out there to choose from,” I said. “But maybe she’ll see that Robert is the best thing for her before it’s too late.”

  “We can hope,” my mother said. “I pray for it, actually, sometimes.”

  “Harley told me you’ve become a Christian.”

  “I’m not much of one,” my mother said. “But it’s better to try than to go on being as selfish as I’ve always been.”

  “Do you forgive me?” I said.

  “I don’t know that I can.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe if I saw that you’d beat yourself up over what you did, but I don’t see that at all.”

  “I don’t beat myself up,” I said. “I doubt I ever will.”

  “Doesn’t that make you a monster? Having no remorse? Not even when it was your own father? I can understand it to a degree if it had been a total stranger, or just some other boy who had tried to hurt you, but this, what you’ve done, it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I never loved him, Mom.”

  “Why?”

  “What reason did I have to love him?”

  “He was your father, that should be reason enough.”

  “Did he love me?” I asked.

  “Of course he did, you were his son.”

  “I know that, but did he love me as a person, as another human being?”

  “I don’t think there is any difference,” she said.

  “That’s too bad, because there is.”

  I saw myself as a young boy at that piano, working my fingers to the bone because I loved the sound they made striking the keys and the keys made when they triggered the high-tensioned strings, the hammers inside the piano slapping as hard or as soft as I made them. My dad, who I waited and longed for to tell me that he thought I had talent, would get so frustrated he would rip me off the piano bench by my hair and fling me across the room. When I’d start crying, and my mother would rush in to see what was wrong, he’d be holding me in his lap and he’d pretend to soothe me. He’d tell her it was okay, Daddy was making it all better, and she’d always believe him and wander about the house looking at nothing, hearing nothing.

  She said, “I don’t think your being here is going to do much good. You’re going to end up in prison or the police are going to shoot you.”

  “Probably,” I said. “What does it matter?”

  “Just because I can’t forgive you doesn’t mean I want to see you suffer.”

  “That’s nice. Thank you.”

  “You scare me sometimes,” she said. “You’re almost like something pretending to be human. I noticed it when you were about twelve, and I ignored it. I think things would have been different if I’d had the guts to do something about it then.”

  “I felt something shift in me about that time,” I said.

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know. Just that I didn’t matter much. And maybe that nobody else mattered that much, or at least not as much as we pretended we mattered.”

  “You break my heart, you know that?”

  “I know,” I said. “I break Harley’s heart too.”

  She nodded solemnly, her hands together in her lap and she said without looking at me, “She’d always looked up to you to protect her, but when she saw your face on the news, her at eleven years old, mind you, she thought that she never had a brother. It really damaged her. She had horrible nightmares that she’d wake up to this terrible creature hiding in the corner of her room. It would call to her in your voice, try to draw her into the shadows, but she said she’d never go because she knew it wanted to eat her like it had her daddy.”

  “She never told me that,” I said, shaken a bit.

  “Why would she tell you? She couldn’t trust you. You were the thing that wanted to take her away, take her where you took your father, where nobody would ever see her again.”

  “Will you stop, please?”

  “Oh, does this trouble you? You poor, poor boy.”

  “You’re pretty feisty for somebody who is dying.”

  “It’s the only thing that keeps me going,” she said. “I’ve wanted to tell you all of this for years, every time I had to run into your sister’s room to comfort her and assure her that you weren’t really there, hiding in the shadows, that you were gone as well as your father and you were never coming back if you knew what was good for you.”

  It grew hard to swallow. My eyes felt misty. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried. No, there was one day on the beach, a year after my father died, when the events of that afternoon in the bank played out in my head in a startling realness. I’d downed a bottle of Jack and let the tide wash over me, hoping it would carry me out into the sea.

  I said, “I got you something.” I handed her the package. She asked what it was. I said, “Open it.”

  She did. She pulled out the snow globe. There was one like it on the top of the piano next to the lamp. I’d bought the first one when I was fourteen after getting a job delivering local papers in Kendall. It was caked in dust now. The new one she held looked pristine and she shook it and watched the snow fall, and I was about to smile until she smashed it against the floor.

  I nodded to myself. I found the broom near the refrigerator in the kitchen and a dishtowel and cleaned up the mess while she glared down at me. I dumped the shards in the trash and dried my hands and she and I stared at each other in the living for a few minutes without saying anything before I walked over to the piano and picked up the old snow globe. My mother raised a hand to stop me from breaking it as she had the new one, a look of pain and fear etched into her withered face.

  I dusted off the globe with my sleeve. I shook it and snow fell over a quiet little village fast asleep and dreaming of Christmas morning. I wound the mechanism on the bottom and “Oh, Holy Night” played in a tinny rendition that still seemed beautiful in its own way. I set the globe back in its place and stared at my mother, who had tears in her eyes.

  I said, “Can I use your bathroom?”

  “You remember where it is.”

  I nodded and walked toward the hall slowly, wondering if when she looked at me, she saw a man who looked a little too much like his father, or if she saw what Harley had seen in her nightmares, or a combination of both. I didn’t know how to make things up to her, being sorry was never enough, even if I could have faked it enough to convince her. What really bothered me was that Harley had been terrified of me. She still was, it was plain as day now that our mother had forced me to see it. She didn’t worry about Lincoln or his biker buddies hurting me, she worried about me killing them and feeling about as much as a normal person would feel swatting a fly. And maybe there was something to that, because I doubted I’d feel any sadness to watch any of those men die. There was something wrong with me. It had started like my mother had said, around the time I turned twelve. But I had always convinced myself that it wasn’t me that was broken, it was everybody else, many of whom so clearly only pretended to care about other people, even their own families. And I’d always taken great pride in not pretending. Too much pride. I’d ostracized myself with it more times than I was willing to count.

  I went into the bathroom and blew my nose. My eyes burned and I wrote it off as a lack of sleep. I hadn’t been getting much rest the past month since Harley emailed me to tell me that our mother was on her way out. I’d looked back through the emails I’d received from her over the years and there were only two. One when some guy had taken her virginity at fourteen and she’d felt as if he’d stolen
something from her, and the other when she’d graduated high school and was trying to figure out what to do now that her life was beginning. I had never replied to either message because I didn’t have any advice to give her.

  I threw the soiled tissue in the wastebasket next to the sink. I avoided my reflection in the mirror and turned to go back out to the living room to tell my mother it was nice to see her, when I heard the front door open. I instinctively pulled the Buck knife, thinking that it could be Don Gray coming over to see if my mother had died yet so he could settle his old score, or it could have been Lincoln and his good ole boys with their heavy boots and their tattoos and their lazy manner that said the world didn’t faze them a bit.

  But I heard my sister in the other room. She was crying. I entered the hall and slipped closer to the living room, my heart pounding because I was afraid I’d look in there and see that one of those assholes had cut her face wide open because of what I’d done to their motorcycles, and she’d be wearing a big bandage, and beneath it would be the stitches, and beneath that the little girl who knew her older brother was a curse on their family.

  I peeked into the living room and saw Harley kneeling on the floor in front of our mother’s chair, her head in our mother’s lap, crying as if she truly were only eleven years old again. She held her balled fists over her eyes. My mother stroked her hair and cooed, whispering, “It’s all right, Harley May, it’s all right, Momma has you safe in her lap, there’s nothing to fear…”

  Then our mother noticed me watching them and she raised her other hand and waved me away, banishing me from witnessing my sister’s breakdown, telling me that it was none of my business, or simply that I was of no use to them now.

  I nodded at her and tried to smile, knowing that Harley had to see the car she rented for me outside, and part of me wondering if her whole deal with our mother was an act.

  I felt a little bit guilty for assuming that. Her tears seemed genuine. But I’ve known a lot of women and I’ve seen a lot of them fall back on weeping to get what they want. I should have felt horrible for coming back into their lives and opening old wounds that, even with a decade to heal, hadn’t. The car was stuffy and I rolled down the windows and sat there for a few minutes, deciding if I should wait for Harley to come back out so I could ask her if what our mother said about her nightmares had been true.

  But there was an uneasiness in me that hadn’t been there before, so I put the key in the ignition and started the engine and drove away from the house I’d grown up in, part of me wondering if it was the last time I’d ever see it.

  * * *

  I cruised the streets in Kendall for an hour, unsure where I should go or what I should do with the rest of my night. I was in the habit of sleeping when I was tired and idling the day or night away when I wasn’t. There wasn’t anybody in town who would want me to drop by. For the first time in my life, I felt kind of alone. It hadn’t really occurred to me before.

  I drove to South Beach and parked and watched the stars for a couple of hours and listened to the soft lull of the waves and had the urge for a cigarette even though I gave up that habit almost three years ago. I whispered to the night wind, “What now?”

  I wondered where Robert Stevens lived. I needed something to do. I let my mind wander. I considered becoming a superhero, an avenger of the night. It didn’t suit me. They had principles they lived by. They worried constantly about total strangers and their lives were always in jeopardy. And what did they, the superheroes, do with all of their free time? Train for mortal combat? Watch the stars the same way I was and feel all the cold beauty of the universe around them, the limitless space of which they possessed only one-trillionth of?

  Speculation was sometimes pointless.

  Things are, I thought, and then they aren’t. It wasn’t such a big mystery. We just had to put so much meaning on every little thing that was part of our existence, and how important of a place we hold. The stones and trees didn’t worry. They just lived, they were happy to be themselves, I figured. What a nice way to be.

  I said, “I’m at peace with myself,” to see how it sounded.

  It sounded really stupid. I sat on the hood of the car but couldn’t get comfortable so sat on the mound of rocks bordering the lot that looked out over the beach and dark waters. With six billion people out there in the world, I wondered how many of them would do something that mattered. Maybe one percent? What kind of crapshoot was that?

  I said, “I’m displeased with what I’ve done with my life,” to see how it sounded.

  It sounded kind of honest and there was a hollow pang in my heart.

  The moon came out shortly before midnight. I smoked a joint and thought I should let my mother have a few hits, somebody had told me it was good for the dying and those in such deep pain even their bones ached with the knowledge of their impending death. I let my mind drift. A car’s headlights bounced from the road into the parking area. I watched a Jeep park next to me. There were two kids in it. A boy with sandy blond hair hanging in his eyes, a girl in a skimpy bikini, her hair styled the same way as the boy’s. The kid gripped the steering wheel and said, “Nice night.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking back over the water.

  “You have anything to drink?” he said.

  “Like booze?”

  “Sure,” he said, wryly. He glanced at the girl who was on the edge of giggling. They looked as high as I felt. “So?” he said.

  “I don’t have anything.”

  “Would you be a sport and buy us some? There’s a place just down the road.”

  “Do you know Don Gray?” I asked.

  “No,” the boy said. “Who is he?”

  “Just some guy,” I said. “A regular nobody.”

  The girl asked me if I was okay. I said, “I’m fine. You?”

  “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

  “Just enjoying myself. You guys want booze you’re bound to find some somewhere.”

  “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you buy us a six-pack,” he said.

  “I’ve got enough troubles,” I said.

  “It’s not really trouble, though,” he said, “and we’re not going to tell on you or anything, we’re just going to sit on the beach and have a couple and then head home.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “So, you’ll do it?”

  “No, you’re not a very good liar.”

  The girl tossed her hair and said, “You don’t have to be an asshole about it.”

  “I’m not,” I said. Was I?

  The boy chewed on his lower lip. He said, “I’ll give you fifty bucks.”

  “That’s a lot of money for a six-pack.”

  “Easy money for you,” he said.

  “Don’t you have any friends?”

  He said, “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “A friend who has an older brother to buy for you?”

  “Everybody is out of town.”

  “Right,” I said. “Is that your Jeep?”

  He broke into a grin that was almost too charming. The girl said, “So what if we’re on a joyride?”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “It’s not my car you stole.”

  “We wouldn’t steal that,” she said.

  The boy nodded. “Are you out here to kill yourself or something? People do that sometimes here.”

  “It hadn’t occurred to me,” I said. “But it’s an option, I guess.”

  “Well,” he said, “if you’re not going to help us, we’ll let you get to it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate your concern.”

  “Don’t mention it,” the girl said. “I heard drowning is kind of like dreaming.”

  I waved at them and they backed out and roared onto the road and I could hear their laughter, so young and so invincible, over the roar of the ocean and the thudding of my heart. I thought, Those two kind of get it…

  I passed into the third of July with a lightness of heart, knowing
that they were right, I was going to drown and with any luck it would feel kind of like dreaming…

  4

  July 3rd

  I slept on the beach and woke up feeling hungover, my head pounding, chilled, sick to my stomach. There were days like that often and I figured it was probably the consequences of ignoring how I refused to look at the choices I’d made in my life and where they’d brought me.

  I didn’t have a toothbrush so I swung by a dollar store in Kendall and grabbed one, plus deodorant and a tube of Colgate. Feeling refreshed and optimistic after ten minutes in a public restroom, I drove back to Kendall and parked a block away from my mom’s house. I got out and stretched the stiffness from my body. I walked around the block three times. At first I didn’t care if Lincoln appeared, or if my dad’s old partner Don Gray pulled up and drew his service pistol and added a pound of lead to my flesh. I only wanted to be there for my mother but she wasn’t going to let me do a damn thing.

  On my fourth trip around the block, I saw a maroon Chevy Tahoe pull into her drive. Angela Gray climbed out of it. She was about to head to the door when she noticed me standing on the sidewalk to her left, my mouth hanging open, my cheeks flushed with color. She was a dark-haired beauty and her eyes drew yours to them. She was slim and dressed in a loose skirt that ended just above her knees. She had on tan sandals, a loose cotton blouse of pale blue. I waved weakly. I couldn’t find my voice. Angela approached with the confidence she’d had as a young woman. She didn’t look thirty. Maybe twenty-three. Her lips were fuller than they used to be, her hair was lush and radiant, her chin held high.

  She jokingly raised both her hands in mock surrender and said, “Don’t shoot.”

  I shook my head, thought: Jesus Christ, hit me with that right from the start.

  She smiled brightly and then studied my face and frowned. She said, “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.”