Among the Dead and Dreaming

by Samuel Ligon

  She laughed, and that threw me off more than anything. How long had it been since I’d heard her laugh like that? Usually there was something biting behind our laughter, something cutting or mocking, but this didn’t sound like that.

  “It’s like they create love where there wasn’t any before,” she said. “Like they’re responsible for all the love in the world.”

  “Huh,” I said, and she said, “I think that’s why people have them today—I mean, with birth control and everything, now that it can be a choice, a decision, which might seem bizarre or unnatural, but maybe that’s a good thing. To be so conscious of wanting them. In the past, they were just byproducts of sex. Now, you’re making this choice to devote yourself, to surrender yourself to all that possibility, all that joy. . . .”

  She squeezed my hand and looked at me, and it seemed like we were different people, like we could still walk together, laughing, like I was already mourning her. Part of me wanted to believe her. All of me wanted to believe her. I smiled back, but I didn’t know how to consider something so cosmic and unknowable—where love comes from—a consideration that seemed far beyond me. For the first time in months, it seemed possible, or even likely, that we would find a way back to each other. I was afraid to talk, to ruin the moment.

  We reached the Sound and Cynthia stopped abruptly, squinting down the shore.

  Marilyn, the neighbor with the murdered husband, was walking on the rocks and gravel above the waterline, the tinsel on her purple muumuu reflecting the setting sun and making bright cuts of light against her body as she picked her steps away from us. I imagined an enormous bird swooping down and carrying her away.

  I turned to Cynthia and another look passed between us.

  I looked back to Marilyn, watching her careful progress until she nearly tripped.

  Cynthia squeezed my hand and let it go as Marilyn righted herself.

  Maybe she would have been a good mother. I never would have believed it until that day. But maybe she would have been.

  Somewhere on the road behind us I heard the accelerating whine of Kyle’s motorcycle as he kicked through the gears. Cynthia and I stood watching Marilyn make her way away from us. I felt such tenderness between us then, all this repair, but we had another horrible fight that night at her apartment, and the next day she was gone to Lake George and I never saw her again alive.

  Now, only a few weeks later, she was still gone, sort of, and I was at her memorial service, unable to shake the feeling that she was everywhere. And nowhere. Meagan Finnegan sang, “I Will Always Love You,” a song Cynthia detested, and I was introduced as the boyfriend and placed by the casket, expected to speak. I’d written some words down and held them shaking on a piece of paper.

  “So,” I said.

  Several hundred people sat looking at me, waiting.

  I had no idea what to tell them. The words I’d written were ridiculous, idiotic. I couldn’t speak.

  “Cynthia,” I finally managed.

  I felt her presence, as if she were still walking with me on that last day, or maybe hovering up near the ceiling.

  “Cynthia,” I said, working my jaw, grinding my teeth.

  All these people in front of me crying and waiting. Strangers, most of them.

  I stood up there until Denys led me back to my seat.

  14

  Nikki

  I take Alina to Tara’s in Port Jeff Station, where we order lobster and sit on the same side of a small table so I can hold her. She seems a little stronger or more aligned with me after the shit with Celia on the boat this afternoon, after I played my money card and failed. I hadn’t meant to bring it up or didn’t know I would, until after Celia dumped the ashes and threw the empty urn into the Sound.

  “Why’d you do that?” Gino said, and Celia said, “What difference does it make?”

  She stormed down the stairs and inside the boat, everyone looking out over the water, embarrassed. Gino glanced back at me and followed her. Alina was still crying and had to throw up again. She leaned over the edge, but there was nothing left. I rubbed her back, whispering in her ear, as she stared down at the water rushing by.

  Later, Gino sat beside me, his face purple gray. I felt such tenderness for him then. I couldn’t imagine losing Alina. She was sort of hiccup crying as she looked down at the water, and I was holding her dress so she wouldn’t even think about going overboard, not that she would, and Gino said, “If there’s anything we can do, Nikki.”

  Gulls floated above and behind us, their greedy cries sounding far away over the motor and water sounds. A minute or so passed. I wouldn’t let go of Alina.

  “There might be something,” I finally said, “that would help a lot. . . .”

  I looked at him looking at me, so much concern in his face.

  “Alina’s school,” I said, thinking I’d start there and see what I could get.

  “What about it?” he said.

  “Maybe you don’t know,” I said. “About Kyle helping us with money for that.”

  “We can help, too,” he said. “Until you get on your feet,” and I didn’t quite understand that, because it wasn’t as if we were going to recover from this experience and somehow end up with money as a result. I said, “She has scholarships and other help. I don’t know what Kyle told you.”

  “Just what Alina told me,” he said. “What you told me. Art school. Will ten thousand be enough?”

  “Ten thousand?” Celia said, hovering behind Gino, her black, flapper dress sausaged over her.

  Gino turned to her. “Don’t, Celia.”

  Alina lifted herself from the edge behind me. I clenched the hem of her dress.

  “I’ve never approved and you know it,” Celia said, looking only at me, her makeup starting to crack. “I told Kyle he was a fool to give you anything.”

  When I was younger, I might have pushed her right off the boat and into the water. I really might have. So maybe I had gotten somewhere.

  “Please don’t do this,” Gino said.

  I knew it was Celia’s money, that anything Gino could give would have to come through her. At least Alina’s tuition was paid through the term. At least I could hide her that long.

  “Kyle was generous to a fault,” Celia said.

  “Celia,” Gino said. “Please.”

  “The free ride’s over,” she said, turning and walking into the boat, and Gino said, “Of course we can help. Will five thousand be enough?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Anything helps.”

  “What was that?” Alina asked as Gino walked away.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  But she brings it up again at Tara’s.

  “Why does Kyle’s mother hate you?”

  “I don’t know, baby.”

  “What did you do?”

  I hand her a cracker she crumbles on the table.

  “I don’t think I did anything.”

  “Then why does she hate you?”

  “Maybe she’s just so sad. Or jealous maybe.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know. Kyle’s love?”

  “Because he loved you more than her?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, because love is never equal and is not about measuring, and I never made any promise. But I did love him, in my way. I did.

  “You don’t know anything,” Alina says.

  “There’s no reason to be nasty.”

  “Maybe there is,” Alina says, and I say, “What reason is that?” and she says, “If you don’t know—” and she starts crying again, but lets me hold her, lets me rub her back, her neck, her hair. She’s just so spent from all the crying and puking, from everything she’s been feeling.

  The lobster arrives, Alina collapsed and sniffling ag
ainst me. They serve it on paper plates and it’s only five bucks because the drinks are so expensive. Alina can’t eat it. Neither can I. We sit looking at it a few minutes.

  Mark

  After the service I rode with Denys and Diana and Beth and Craig in a Rolls limo to the cemetery, where I threw dirt on the coffin, sweating through my best suit. I rode with the same people to the Dayton’s house, where there were hundreds of mourners, Cynthia’s friends, some of our friends from college, but mostly business associates paying respects to Denys. I found myself on a couch, staring into the cleavage of Laurie Franks, a friend of Cynthia’s from work. She told me what a great couple Cynthia and I made. She wrote down her number and put it in my shirt pocket, in case I should ever need to talk.

  I got another drink, even though I was already drunk. I checked my phone and saw two missed calls from my ex-girlfriend, Liz. We’d worked together in Chicago. She’d been leaving messages lately about an old problem that had resurfaced. I had no intention of calling her back.

  At the bar, the Dayton’s neighbor, Marilyn, put her hand on my arm as I picked up my drink. “She was a good girl, Mark,” she said. “You can take comfort in that.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  “Kyle, too,” she said. “Very good people.”

  “Yes,” I said, and she said, “I know a thing or two about loss.”

  I didn’t want to hear about her husband again, but I looked at her face as she told me about Cynthia and Kyle and her murdered husband and everyone else in the world who was gone from us, unreachable. I didn’t dare tell her Cynthia seemed more reachable than she’d been in a long time. Marilyn didn’t want to hear that kind of talk. Nobody would want to hear that kind of talk.

  “Good bye,” I said to her after she ran out of things to say.

  “Good bye,” I said to Denys and Beth and Diana and Laurie Franks.

  “Good bye,” we all said to each other. “Good bye. Good bye.”

  Alina

  I’m not going back. I heard what his mom said on the boat and I’m not going back. So what if it’s paid for, I’m not going back. She takes me to this bar after I’ve thrown up all day and we order lobster. As if I’m going to eat. And she won’t tell me what really happened, why his mother really hates her, though maybe it is jealousy, which makes me so sick because of how much he loved her, and she doesn’t even care, never cared enough, never really earned it. She holds me and pets me and I know she loves me. But why didn’t she love him enough? He’d probably still be alive if she did. He probably never would have gone anywhere with that Cynthia if she’d just been there for him.

  We sit at that place and then we go home.

  We get in her bed together. At least she doesn’t talk. At least she doesn’t ask questions. At least she doesn’t mention school. Because I’m not going back.

  Burke

  From my patio deck in the humid night, I overheard some talk around the pool and ended up with a whore named Cinnamon, who set me up with an eight ball of coke, plus some oxycontins for my back. I hadn’t been with a woman since Connie left, and Cinnamon was as good as any and better than most. She wasn’t all in a rush like most whores are, or fake or bored or distracted. After half the coke was gone, she looked through the polaroids on the bedside table and asked if Nikki was my girlfriend.

  “Was,” I said.

  “She’s pretty,” Cinnamon said, and I said, “Was. She’s dead now.”

  Cinnamon frowned, studying the pictures. “Look how young you were,” she said, confusing Cash and me.

  Later, she asked what Nikki died from.

  I could hear birds outside my patio door, singing.

  “A stabbing,” I told her.

  “Jesus,” Cinnamon said, and I said, “Jesus got nothing to do with it,” thinking of all the ways I’d make her pay, Cinnamon so sweet and careful as she studied me.

  “Who killed her?” she said.

  “Never got caught,” I said.

  I set her up with a bump of coke, then one for myself.

  “Like that guy on the Island,” Cinnamon said. “Joel something. He killed like twenty girls before they caught him.”

  I reached over and grabbed the photos from the night stand, the top one showing Cash in his stupid cowboy hat, so young and happy and alive.

  “He chopped them up and all kinds of shit.”

  The last time I saw him down at Huntsville I tried to warn him away from prison, told him to go on and get his diploma, even if he didn’t make the NFL. He laughed. I would have slapped his face if I could have, him so young and dumb and full of himself, just like everybody before they get caught. But it meant a lot that he visited. And then our mother writing not a year later that he was killed by a drug gang, that both her boys was lost to her now, as if I was never getting out. It wasn’t that she played favorites—just that her boys didn’t turn out how she hoped. Which was why I tried so hard when I got home.

  “What could make someone that evil?” Cinnamon said.

  Looking at Nikki so young and pretty, I had to remind myself how heartless she was. I flipped through the pictures I’d flipped through a thousand times before. It was all just good luck and bad luck, the guiding hand moving you one way or another, and now I’d be her bad luck and she’d be my good. In some ways, not directly, but somehow, looking back, it seemed like she killed our mother too, because once Cash was gone, she seemed to give up on life, even with me on the straight and narrow them long months at that fucking Denny’s. She just seemed worn out after Cash died, beat, and there was nothing I could do to change it.

  “She’s got that bone structure,” Cinnamon said, pointing at Nikki. “What my mother called breeding.”

  I looked at the top picture, one of the half-naked ones down by the river. I’m not religious, but such a happy girl killing my brother seemed like proof of the devil, which seemed like proof of God, since they were brothers or cousins, whatever they was.

  Cinnamon put her head on my shoulder. “When’d she die?” she said.

  “Long time ago,” I said. “Fifteen years.”

  “And you’re still carrying it?”

  She propped herself up and put her hand on my face, looked into my eyes.

  We were pretty fucking high.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get over her,” I said.

  I took her breast in my mouth.

  “That’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard,” she said.

  15

  Gail

  We had our share of trouble, more than most, and Nikki blamed me for everything, just as her father had, Nikki blaming me for cancer and Michael blaming me for Nikki, though all his blaming stopped once he disappeared, three weeks before she was born. I thought if he just saw the miracle of her eyelids, her hands, he’d come home to us, but I fought that feeling, knowing she was the reason he’d left in the first place. When I told him I was pregnant, he accused me of tricking him, saying I must have stopped taking birth control, which wasn’t true. “So let’s take care of it,” he said, but I wasn’t giving up on her now that I had her. I’d never heard of anyone getting pregnant on the pill—“A miracle,” I told him—but he didn’t care. I knew she was destined for something, given the odds she’d beaten. And what she turned into—ungrateful, spoiled, selfish—I blame on my cancer and her inability to love, Michael’s poisonous gift from Vietnam.

  I never blamed her for him leaving. She was a good girl, obedient, smart, beautiful. I trace my happiest moments back to Michael when we were so young and in love, and to Nikki when she was a little girl, before my twin Patty and I both got so sick. That’s when everything turned—during those horrible months of illness. And when I got better, I still couldn’t pick myself up, and then Patty died of it and mine came back in the other breast. So, yes, those were awful times, I admit as much. But what kind of daughter
abandons her mother? That’s the real question. After everything I did for her, everything I gave, Nikki ran without a word of thanks or goodbye, leaving me alone in that shithole on Spruce Street, my looks gone and everything else gone, too. She sent one letter from Providence, Rhode Island, one letter from Austin, Texas, and then not one word more. What kind of daughter?

  It was Patty’s girl, Melanie, who wrote that Nikki was pregnant, maybe a year after she ran. I was sick again and full of pain medicine, high and dying, but the news of her pregnancy lightened me—spiritually, emotionally, physically—and even though I’d given up on miracles long since Nikki’s birth, the lightness of my spirit took physical form. I began to levitate, first in inches over my bed, then up toward the ceiling, and gradually out over Manchester and across the state to Claremont—where I’d grown up—and then down the valley, looking, I finally realized, for Nikki’s baby. Because the truth I saw gleaming down from heaven was that the baby was mine to save. I sent letters to Nikki, explaining the damage she was doing to the unborn child, offering my assistance, offering the baby a home and a mother, but every letter went unanswered, not even a thank you for the gift I sent, a pink and blue receiving blanket. This is when a girl would want her mother you’d think, but not Nikki. Never Nikki.

  The final letter explaining my condition—that the cancer was back and everywhere—was returned undelivered, no forwarding address, Nikki’s silence proof that she didn’t care whether I lived or died, that I was long since dead to her, and that she didn’t care about her baby either. It was as if I’d done something to deserve such mistreatment, when all I’d done was hold my ground to bring Nikki into this world. She wouldn’t even show me the baby before I died, wouldn’t even acknowledge me. I wrote her that they were my genes in that baby too, that if it wasn’t for me and the stand I took, the baby wouldn’t exist at all, let alone Nikki, who I’d given up everything for. All I wanted was a picture of the baby, a lock of hair, anything. What I got was exactly nothing.