10 Things I Can See from Here

by Carrie Mac

  I felt too dizzy to sit.

  It was ridiculous. There was no way to conjure a heart attack. Superstition. Voodoo dolls. Magical incantations. Spells with a strand of hair and a torn picture. It couldn’t be.

  It couldn’t be.

  No.

  Impossible.

  But I couldn’t shake the idea.

  What if it was true? If so many people could believe in a power they couldn’t see and call it God or Allah or whatever, and if all those people believed that God could make things happen or not happen, maybe this was no different.

  I wouldn’t have believed it before.

  But now I did.

  I set my pencil down and lowered myself to the floor, where I lay on my back and squeezed my eyes shut. My heart—healthy, galloping, robust—thudded faster and faster. It had no right to. No right at all. The drawing of the heart glowed in the small circle of light from the lamp. I stared at it so long that it started to pulse, right there on the page. Terrified, I lunged for the lamp and switched it off, plunging the room into that extra-black darkness that happens at first. After a few moments I could see, but the shadows in the room were even worse. Large and looming and strange.

  “Maeve?” Owen’s small voice, exquisitely alive, and tremulous.

  “Yeah?” I flicked the light back on.

  “I wet the bed.”

  I almost laughed. It was such a living-person thing to do that I didn’t mind how gross it was. I didn’t even mind the smell. It was just so basic and real, and had everything to do with being alive. Not like Mrs. Patel, whose bladder had relaxed when she died, releasing one last, passive flood of urine, soaking her nightie and the carpet underneath.

  Owen had wet the bed. Normally, I would’ve been so disgusted. Normally, I wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with cleaning it up, but right then I was just so glad I could actually do something to help.

  “It’s okay.” I turned the overhead light on too. No more shadows. “It’s okay.” He blinked against the brightness, and I helped him out of bed. I gathered up the soaked sheets and the blanket. I handed him his owl, which was still dry. Owen followed me silently to the washing machine. I stripped off his pajamas while he stood there. He yawned and shivered while I loaded the washer. I found one of Dad’s T-shirts in the dryer and helped Owen into it. It made him look even smaller, the sleeves draping down to his elbows, his knobby knees, pale, peeking out. “Better?”

  He nodded, yawning again.

  I couldn’t find any linens, but there were sleeping bags in the closet at the end of the hall, so I collected two of those and steered Owen back to bed. I unrolled the bags, a blue one with glow-in-the-dark stars on the inside for Owen, and a musty old green one for me. I settled Owen into his and zipped him up, and then I crawled into mine beside him and turned off the light.

  “I’m sorry,” Owen whispered, his voice thick with sleep.

  “It’s okay,” I said, when I really meant thank you. But he wouldn’t understand how much he’d helped me. He’d pushed away Mrs. Patel and the bloody hearts and the pulsing heart on the page. Not far, but enough that I could finally fall asleep, to the throbbing of my own pulse, angry and exhausted.

  I slept for an hour. An hour filled with wretched dreams featuring too much blood and too many samosas and a very loud soap-opera soundtrack. While I was lying awake, trying to go back to sleep, I heard the unmistakable sound of a key in the front door.

  It was Dad, coming home at last. At almost four a.m.

  I still wanted to see him. I still wanted him to hold me and tell me that everything would be all right. What I really wanted was for him to tell me that it wasn’t my fault, but even just a hug would do. I hurried upstairs to catch him before he went to bed, but I stopped short at the top when I heard him and Claire talking.

  “You just threw five years of sobriety down the toilet?”

  “Whoosh.”

  “This isn’t a joke. Fuck, Billy. Five years!”

  “You know the sayings. ‘Keep coming back,’ ” Dad said. “ ‘One day at a time.’ ”

  “Maeve needed you, Billy. We needed you!”

  “My phone was in my truck.”

  “And where was your truck?”

  I sat on the second step, the wall hiding me. There was a pause. A long pause.

  “Where was your truck?” Claire said again. “Where were you? Where were you getting drunk while your daughter found Mrs. Patel’s dead body? Where were you, Billy? Answer me! Where the hell were you?”

  “Stop it, Claire.” His voice was thick, drunk. “You want to know where I was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, here’s a fucking news flash. I don’t have to explain myself,” he slurred. “I’m a grown man. I can do whatever I do without checking with you first, or after. Or ever, for that matter.”

  “You’re a grown man with a family.”

  “You want me to stand here and grovel?” He dropped his keys. When he bent to pick them up, he almost toppled over. “You’d have a comeback for everything, so why bother? I say one thing; you say another. Back and forth and back and forth. Yadda yadda. Blah, blah, blah. I’m wrong. You’re right. Done. Why not just go to bed instead and save ourselves the grief?”

  “Grief?” Claire let out one barking laugh. “Talk to your daughter if you want to know about grief.”

  And then her footsteps, stomping up to the third floor.

  And his stomping across to the couch.

  And me, crouched in the dark, still wanting to talk to him. Still wanting him to take me in his arms and listen to me tell him how awful it was. But I waited too long, and then he was snoring.

  I peeked around the corner. He was sprawled on the couch, his boots still on, one arm covering his eyes. He didn’t care about Mrs. Patel dying. He didn’t care about me finding her. In that drunken, slumbering moment, he didn’t care about anything. He just slept, deep and easy, as if he’d earned it. But he hadn’t. He was just some drunk, insensitive asshole passed out on a couch.

  Ruthie was with her dad when he had an aneurysm and dropped dead in the produce aisle at the Seaside Market, a head of lettuce in one hand and a bag of carrots in the other. We were eleven, and when I saw her at the funeral, she said her mother bought the vegetables he’d been holding, in case some of his spirit was in them now.

  “Which is dumb. That’s not how death works,” Ruthie said. “You’re alive, and then you’re dead. Nothing happens after. Nothing at all. It’s science.”

  But there was a window between when the organs stopped functioning and cells actually began to perish. Only minutes, maybe. But there was a time when the body was dead but the soul remained. When my dog, O’Ryan, died I could tell. Even after half an hour, O’Ryan looked alive, but just very, very still, and yet I didn’t believe that he was actually dead, except that his jaw was slack and his bowels had let go.

  Just like Mrs. Patel.

  With O’Ryan—old and arthritic and riddled with cancer—I didn’t truly believe he was dead until Dan came over with his stethoscope and showed me that there were no heart sounds. No lung sounds. He fit the stethoscope to my ears and placed the bell over O’Ryan’s heart, and it was true.

  There was no guessing with Mrs. Patel. It was obvious that she was dead. And even though it was far-fetched, and even though I tried to tell myself that I was being ridiculous, I just kept thinking that it was my fault. I had wished a heart attack on Raymond, and it had landed on the wrong person. My fault. My fault. The heart attack was my fault. That looped in my head, so loud that I couldn’t make any other sense of it.

  —

  Dad looked rough the next morning. He sat at the table with a piece of dry toast and a mug of strong coffee in front of him and opened his arms to me. I sat awkwardly in his lap and he wrapped his arms around me and leaned his head on me. His hair reeked of alcohol and cigarettes. His face was greasy and bloated.

  “I’m sorry that I wasn’t here for you, kiddo.”
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br />   I didn’t say anything. I glanced at Claire, but she looked away.

  He was talking. He was saying the words, but they were flat and drifting. I wanted to be here. Cell phone in the truck. Out a bit too late. Had no idea. You two were close, I know that. So sorry. I wish I’d been here. No excuse. How awful for you. What do you need, kiddo? Have you called your mom? Can we do anything? Have you called your counselor?

  Before I left, Nancy had said I could call or email anytime. But I didn’t want to talk to Nancy. I knew what she’d say. I am so, so sorry for the loss of your dear friend, Maeve. This is not your fault. This is just life. It was her time. Now, Maeve, I have names of counselors up there. There’s no need to try to do this alone. What about a grief group? Or she’d recommend Al-Anon again. Nancy, who refused to accept that I would never, ever join a group like that. A bunch of people whining and moaning about their drunk father or mother or sister or boss or kid. All of them in some basement somewhere, shoulders hunched miserably, commiserating, huddling around stale doughnuts after, crying into napkins. A place for you to build relationships. A place to make friends.

  I wanted Ruthie. I wanted one of her pragmatic summaries. Heart-attack curse? Don’t be stupid. The heart dies because of a medical emergency that cannot be fixed in time. That’s what she’d say. Science. It comes down to biology.

  “Have you called your mom yet?” Dad asked again as he got ready to leave for work.

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged.

  “Call her,” he said. “She’ll want to know.”

  So I texted her. Mrs. Patel died.

  That was it. So much had happened. Too much. When she left, she’d said that she wanted to know about everything. She wanted to know the details. She wanted to know how I was feeling. If we keep in touch, nothing will change between us, she’d said. But so much had already changed. There was too much to tell her. There was nowhere to start, because there was nowhere to end.

  When she called, I told her that I didn’t know when Mrs. Patel had died. Or how she’d died. Claire told me, I said. Bandhu had called her. Oh, and Dad came home drunk.

  She said all the right things. And she didn’t ask any of the right questions.

  “Mrs. Patel is in a better place.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Your father has slipped before, and recovered from that. Don’t worry.”

  “I suppose.”

  “What about your date?”

  “My date?”

  “With Salix.” I could tell that she was pleased that she remembered her name.

  “Oh. That.”

  “Yes, that!” She was being excited for me. She was missing the point. “When is it?”

  “Friday.”

  “Well, I want to hear all about it. Let me know how it goes.”

  When we hung up, Haiti seemed even farther away. It was at the edge of the planet. Or I was at the edge of the planet. Either way, someone was going to fall off.

  Of course I was going to cancel the date. I didn’t deserve to go on a date. I didn’t deserve to feel the excited butterflies. I didn’t deserve to think about what to wear, or what to say, or to imagine a first kiss with her.

  I’d killed Mrs. Patel.

  I turned the phone over and over in my hand until I finally sent a text.

  I’m really sorry, but I can’t make it on Friday. Something came up.

  My skin prickled with disappointment, and I almost started to cry. But then I reminded myself that I was the one to blame. I thought of Mrs. Patel on a cold metal gurney in the morgue. Her life had ended because of me. I had no right to be happy.

  “Hindus do death really fast,” Corbin said as he and Owen and I walked up the street to get ice cream a couple of days later. Mrs. Patel’s service was the next day, as soon after the death as possible, according to tradition.

  “When Bobs died, we had a funeral the same day,” Owen said. “Remember? And Dad pretended to be the priest.”

  “It’s stupid to have a funeral for a cat,” Corbin said. “Nana Jenkins says animals don’t have souls.”

  Claire’s mom. Also dead. Fundamentalist Christian who was certain beyond a doubt that she was going to heaven. Died of lung cancer. Smoked for fifty-two years out of sixty-four.

  “To each their own,” I said. The boys looked up, puzzled. “Thoughts. Everyone is entitled to their own ideas about death and what happens after.”

  “Louie in gymnastics died,” Owen said.

  “He wasn’t a kid,” Corbin said. “He was the janitor. He was really old.”

  “Mia Wong died.”

  “Car accident.” Corbin picked up a long, thin stick and stuck it down his cast.

  “Corbin!” I grabbed the stick and tossed it into the street. “You could get an infection.”

  “And die,” Owen said. “We were at Mia Wong’s birthday party just before she died. She had a lion cake. And party hats with polka dots.”

  “I ate too much cake and barfed,” Corbin said.

  “That robin died.”

  “So did the rat.”

  “We buried them,” Owen said. “Is Mrs. Patel going to be buried?”

  “Cremated.” I didn’t want to talk about any of this. And I didn’t want ice cream, either. Mostly, I wanted to throw up.

  We were outside the ice cream shop, and all of a sudden I did not want to go in. Mrs. Patel’s favorite kind of ice cream was mango. She sometimes sent me to buy a small tub of it from here. Not when she was slumped by her chair with her hair sticky with vomit and the soap opera blaring. No! I will never leave you! No matter what you do! I don’t care! Come back! Come back! I love you!

  “You two go ahead.” I gave them my wallet. “Get whatever you want.”

  “When you die, do you want to be buried?” Corbin said. “I want to be burned up.”

  “I want to be buried,” Owen said.

  They looked up at me, waiting for my answer.

  Over two million people died in the US each year.

  That meant about six thousand five hundred people every day.

  Two hundred thousand people died in Canada each year.

  Thirty thousand people died in British Columbia each year.

  That was only eighty-two people a day.

  Should I count myself at risk for the American statistics? Or could I adopt the Canadian risks while I was there?

  “Maeve?” Owen took my hand as Corbin pushed ahead into the store with his good arm. “What kind do you want?”

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  People swerved around us on the sidewalk. A pair of Chihuahuas tied to a parking meter yapped and yapped, straining at their leashes. A car honked. Someone was screaming at a cyclist to get off the goddamn road and use the bike path.

  “If I was dead,” Owen said, “I’d look down on you and hope you had some good ice cream.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “If I was dead, I’d look down on you and hope you’d have some good ice cream too.”

  When we got back to the building, there was a moving truck parked out front and a guy smoking a cigarette while he arranged furniture and boxes in the back. Another two men ferried a couch through the courtyard.

  “That’s Mrs. Patel’s!” Owen waved his arms. “Hey! Stop!”

  The movers carried Mrs. Patel’s tired old couch up the ramp and into the truck.

  “Watch out, kid.” One of the men patted him on the head as they strode by, heading back to Mrs. Patel’s.

  “You can’t take her stuff!” Corbin raised his casted arm like he might clobber them with it.

  “Yes, they can.” I pulled the boys away from the ramp. “Her family probably arranged it.”

  The movers came back again, this time with Mrs. Patel’s china hutch wrapped in blankets.

  “Let’s go inside.” I took the boys’ hands.

  “No!” Corbin pulled away. “I’m not going inside. I’m going to make sure they don’t break anything.
” He faced the truck, hands on his hips. “You better not!”

  “Me too,” Owen said quietly. He sat on the curb and chewed on a finger.

  So I went home by myself, but I didn’t quite get there. One of Mrs. Patel’s sons was sitting on a kitchen chair outside her door, talking on the phone in Hindi. He motioned for me to stop as I walked by.

  “Maeve, hi. Hold on.” He ended the call. “How are you?”

  My hands started to shake so much that I had to shove them in my pockets. “I’m okay.” My voice trembled. The thick weight of guilt I’d felt for days pressed down even harder. I wanted to tell him. I killed her, Bandhu. I loved your mom, and it’s my fault that she’s dead. I deserve to be haunted by the stench of shit, spilled samosas, and blaring soap operas. I love you! Damn it, I love you! And Mrs. Patel slumped on the floor and the vomit and the playing cards scattered all around.

  He was talking. Saying all the things he should. I’m so sorry that you found her like that. Thank you for giving the police my number. It must have been so hard for you. And then he was saying something about her pink cardigan.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s funny that she died in that sweater.” He smiled a little. “But it’s no surprise.”

  How could he smile like that? How could he just stand around and talk on the phone and talk to me and watch the movers take his mother’s things away? And where would those things go? To Goodwill? To the dump? To his house?

  “I gave her a new sweater every year on her birthday,” he said. “And every year she folded it so nicely and put it in her drawer with a piece of tissue between it and the sweater I bought her the year before. She only liked the pink one. That was the first one I bought her. I wasn’t much older than you.”

  I was thinking of gin rummy, and how she never let me win. I was thinking of her slippers, worn right through. I was thinking of her cupboard full of jars of loose tea. I was thinking that it was all my fault.