“Did he walk with a cane?” Nate asked.
“Yes,” our mother said, scraping the clogged blades of the Cuisinart with a wooden spoon. “He tried, anyway. He didn’t want a ramp out front. We’d already spent a lot of money on the landscaping.”
“What colour were his glasses?”
“He didn’t wear glasses, Nate. You know that.”
“And what about his eyelashes?” I asked. I felt left out because I mostly remembered a shadow that smelled like Vicks VapoRub. “Did they fall out in clumps?” Nate said that our father had pink eye a lot and sometimes wore sunglasses to watch television.
“This blender.”
The more questions we asked, the more my mother’s face went strange. The bones in her jaw looked like they had softened and stretched. It was uncomfortable to watch her when she talked like that. I felt like we were scaring her, which was the worst thing you could do to a person, in my book. Nate was going on about radiation therapy and its scientific connections to superpowers, and my mother’s face kept shifting, like I was looking at her underwater. She rested the spoon on the stovetop and rolled up the sleeve of her dressy black sweater to pick at the blades, and Nate kept firing question after question: Was our dad ever a Cub Scout? Did he drink kale shakes? Which one of the three of us did he love most?
Nate had once told me that mothers, as much as you might love them, were all the same. He said that if anything happened to my mother, another lady would adopt the two of us, maybe one of our aunts in Philadelphia or Newark. Women loved babies most, he said, but we were still little enough to be okay. “It’s fathers who are the tough ones. Much harder to come by.”
Nate was living proof. I heard the way my mother tucked him into the bunk above me, telling him to close his eyes, sleepy bird, and dream of flying over all the green places on the Earth, but he still had to play the Father-Son Scout Baseball Tournament with Mr. Crisander. Mr. Crisander did up all the buttons on his polo shirts and parted his hair down the middle. At Halloween he gave out toothbrushes. He said Nate could call him Captain as a kind of nickname, but Nate stuck to Mr. Crisander. Mr. Crisander lived alone next door with his pot-bellied pig Mickey, who had been starved by her previous owners to make her small. It had worked, to a point. Now she was about the size of our Aunt Jennifer’s fat beagle, and she came if Mr. Crisander called her, but Mickey was a lot heavier than a dog and had stumpy legs. She couldn’t catch a Frisbee to save her life. She also had a bad skin disease. Her raw, scaly hide showed through her black and white bristles. Sometimes she scratched against the stone pillar near the bottom of our driveway and her back oozed. Still, none of our friends could say they knew a pet pig, and she seemed to like us. Nate and I felt like we had to pet Mickey if we saw her.
“I found Mick through the SPCA,” Mr. Crisander said as Mickey plowed her snout into our limp fingers. “People buy them and think they’ll stay piglets forever.” Mickey seemed like a good enough pig, but it made us uneasy that she rubbed against our legs, shimmying and squealing. She also had a bad habit of rooting in my mother’s garden. “Leave that thing for long enough,” my mother had said, throwing out what was left of her tulips, “and it’ll dig up the dead.” It didn’t help Mickey’s case that our mother told us to wash our hands after we touched her. It made us think certain things about Mickey, and about Mr. Crisander. Nate had recently mentioned he didn’t want to go to Scouts anymore, and my mother said she had been thinking the same thing. “I mean, a father-son baseball game? What are we, Republicans?” Nate went to Science Club now, and he was collecting cans to save money for his own microscope.
My mother didn’t mind that Nate kept a picture of Genevieve taped to the ceiling above his pillow. Genevieve had a big pink flower behind one ear and her nose was sunburned. He didn’t really miss her, he said, because how could you miss someone you didn’t have space for? I felt like I knew what he meant. This was why we didn’t have questions about Genevieve, why her death sounded like a grocery list of events and why we never played the game with her. It was our father who was the hole in our lives.
“Did he die in the morning or at night?”
“Morning.”
“How did you know he was dead?”
“He stopped breathing.”
“Did his heart stop beating, too?”
“After a minute, yes.”
“What happened then?”
My mother’s face was sliding out from under her skin. She whacked at the blades with the spoon.
“Fucking blender,” she said.
She flung the spoon across the counter and it smashed into Nate’s shake. We jumped as the glass hit the tiles and the spoon clattered under the dining room table. Gobs of kale splattered onto Nate’s suit pants as the glass broke apart with a barely audible click. The three of us looked at the mess on the floor. I started to cry.
My mother quickly picked up the biggest pieces of glass, the clink of them in her hand like a stunted wind chime. “He was dead, Nate. Nothing happened then.” She wrapped the shards in a sheet of newspaper and threw the package in the garbage. “Don’t cry about the glass, Elaine. If we were Buddhists, we’d already think of it as broken. Now go put your shoes on and wait for me in the car. And don’t pet Mickey if she’s in the driveway.”
The drive was quiet, just the sound of Stevie Wonder from the tape deck. When we got close, our mother sang along softly. Nate and I didn’t look at each other. Instead we watched the people on the sidewalk and tried to guess their names. Nate said the woman with the puppy in her bike basket was a Shirley, but I thought she was a Tory. We agreed that the man with the bundle buggy full of wine bottles was a George. We couldn’t quite decide on the woman with the fabric shopping bags and bunches of sunflowers. A Rebecca, we thought, or maybe a Donna.
“A Genevieve,” my mother said. “You can always tell a Genevieve. Nate, do you feel like telling Elaine the story?” We knew this was her way of asking us to forgive her, which we did right away. It was just a glass.
“She had a blood clot in her lung, which is also called a thrombus,” Nate started, and the story went from there.
The cemetery roadways were narrow and our mother drove slowly in case a car came from the other way, which it almost never did. The grass was neatly mowed. Any fresh mounds of dirt were covered with strips of bright green sod, making it look like the newer graves had more life in them. Some of the headstones, usually the ones with carvings of angels or inset pictures of Jesus, even pictures of the person who died, had lots of flowers around them. There were carnations in sturdy vases and votive candles everywhere. Our mother told us that people paid extra to have the cemetery staff come and leave those things once a month, once a week, if you really wanted to, but she said it didn’t matter how many flowers there were, it was the love you left that was important. “Cemetery workers are paid to care,” she shrugged. “Dead people may be dead, but they can still tell the difference. Not that we’re judging.”
We parked the car and Nate got the beach towel out of the trunk. The ground was a little soft and our mother’s high heels sunk into the grass, kicking up lopsided cones of dirt as we headed over to our father’s grave. She started walking on the balls of her feet, knees bent. “God,” she said, “I feel like a praying mantis.” She took off her shoes and hooked one finger into each heel, the toes dangling.
“Praying mantises eat each other when they mate,” Nate said.
“Actually, that’s not true.” My mother tapped the toes of her shoes together. “They only do that in laboratories when people are watching.”
“But we saw them do it in the wild, on TV,” I said.
“Well, somebody had to be holding the camera, don’t you think?”
I helped Nate spread the beach towel lengthwise over our father’s grave. It was yellow and it showed a hot pink flamingo wearing pineapple-shaped sunglasses. Our mother bought it on sale. She said that most people probably found it a bit loud, even for the beach, but that’s wha
t the graveyard needed, wasn’t it? A little colour. “How would you like to live with only grey furniture?” she asked us, pointing at the gravestones. But it didn’t really matter. All the towel had to do was keep our graveyard clothes clean.
Our father’s name was carved into a large polished piece of granite, and then below that it said, “Son, Husband, Father, Caregiver.” When Nate was younger, he had asked our mother if our father worked in schools or office buildings.
“That’s a caretaker, Nate. A janitor. Your father was a doctor.”
“So why couldn’t he make himself better?”
“Why can’t pigs fly?”
“They’re mammals.”
“So was your dad.”
When Nate and I were done smoothing out the towel, my mother laid out a framed picture of us as a family, me in my mother’s arms and Nate teetering on one tiny running shoe with his fists around my father’s fingers. Beside that she stacked some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. She thought the game worked better if we didn’t have low blood sugar. She brushed the dirt off the bottoms of her bare feet and tied her hair back with an elastic band. “Okay, who wants to go first this time?”
The game wasn’t the kind that Nate and I played with our friends. The kids we hung out with were mostly into four-square and dodge ball and a kind of football that we made up and called Astronaut. Those games had a winner and rules, teams, but the Dead Dad Game didn’t have any of that. All we did was lie very still on the beach towel and listen, and to make our mother happy we sometimes made things up when she asked us, “What do you hear?” In a lot of ways it wasn’t a game at all, but there was nothing else to call it. My mother said it was a game. It was just something we did.
“Nate, why don’t you go?” My mother passed him a cookie. “Take your shoes off before you get on the towel.”
Nate undid the laces of his stiff black shoes and lined them up beside my mother’s high heels. He sat down and took a few deep breaths. My mother and I moved closer, perching on the edge of the towel to save our skirts, and Nate closed his eyes. My mother held out her hand to me and then we each took one of Nate’s hands in ours, closing the circle. He wriggled in his suit.
“Wouldn’t it be better if we just wore regular clothes?” I asked.
“It’s more respectful this way.” My mother squeezed our hands. “And people won’t bug us as much if it looks like we came from a church. Now let’s be quiet so Nate can listen.”
My mother said that when bodies broke down and turned into grass and soil, there were vibrations. That’s all that talking was, vibrations, so being dead didn’t mean that you stopped talking, even if it wasn’t in the same language. Nate had asked his Science Club teacher what she thought about that, and she said she hadn’t heard the theory before, but there were a lot of things that still needed to be discovered in the world. That was the point of the club. Nate was convinced, or said he was.
“I hear,” he paused, “I hear humming.”
“That makes sense,” my mother said slowly, but I didn’t think it made sense at all. Why would our dad’s body be humming? Was there that much to hum about when you were dead? Maybe he was just happy to see us, I thought. That was possible. Or maybe Nate was faking. That was possible, too. I faked.
“Can I have a cookie?” I asked.
“In a minute, Elaine.” my mother said. “What else do you hear?”
The three of us closed our eyes and listened hard. I saw our father’s vibrations crawling up like earthworms, tickling Nate’s back with secret messages about how much he missed us, about the things that had made him afraid and sick. Our mother said that visualization was an important part of the game, and she always seemed to hear things, grunts or mumbles. I just needed to visualize harder, and then I would hear it too. Faking wasn’t lying, it was practicing. Nate was about to say something else, but we heard a car door slam. We dropped our hands and opened our eyes.
It was the red cemetery maintenance truck. Two guys in matching windbreakers and baseball hats were fishing around in the flatbed. One of them grabbed a rake, and the other one hugged a giant bag of garden fertilizer.
“Shit,” my mother said, and the game was over.
Nate balled up the towel and shoved it under his arm. He squashed his feet into his shoes, breaking down the backs. My mother shook out her hair. I packed the picture and cookies into her purse. My mother waved to the men as she hustled us to the car, and the one man raised his rake to us while the other one slit the fertilizer bag with a packing knife. We didn’t play the game while other people watched. It didn’t work that way, and there had been problems before. My mother told us that a lot of people have pretty un-evolved ideas about things. She had written letters to the cemetery’s managing director about the behaviour of his employees.
“Let’s not worry about it too much,” she said, pushing play on the stereo. “It’s not like your dad won’t be here next Sunday. Seatbelts.” We drove past Genevieve’s grave on the way out. Nate waved.
We were almost home before I asked about the humming. My mother said that the whole universe hummed, that if we heard everybody’s heartbeats, all at once, it would sound like the buzzing of a beehive. “We’re all connected,” she said.
“But what if you don’t have a heartbeat?” I asked. “What about all the dead people?”
“I watched a show about bees,” Nate said. “If you put a box of them in the freezer, they clump around the queen to keep her warm. After a few hours, you have this pile of dead bees.”
“Were they killer bees?” my mother said. “Good hygiene is as important as a clear conscience.”
My mother spun the steering wheel with the flat of one hand and leaned over to pop out the Stevie Wonder tape as we turned into our driveway. Nate was already unbuckling his seatbelt when my mother—“Oh shit,” she said—swerved and jammed the brakes. The car lurched, hard, and Nate slammed into the back of the passenger seat. There was the hollow thud of metal hitting something softer than itself, and then right away a kind of shriek that at first I thought was Nate, and then I thought was my mother, my mother who wasn’t like any other mother, no matter what Nate said, but then the shriek came again, from outside the car, again and again, until it died away and became softer, deeper, more like a humming.
“Oh shit,” my mother said again. She took the keys out of the ignition. We got out of the car.
It wasn’t actually a hum at all, once we heard it better. It was more of a phlegmy growl, a snuffling, and it was so steady that it didn’t seem to matter if Mickey was breathing in or breathing out, and for a second I didn’t think she was doing either. Her back legs were bent towards her tail and her feet were bleeding. Part of one leg was skinned. The muscle was pink and twitchy and looked like the kind of thing my mother refused to buy in chain grocery stores. Our front bumper was fine, but there was a strip of skin hanging underneath the car.
“Nate, get the toboggan,” my mother said calmly, bending down and stroking Mickey’s head with two fingers. But Nate stood there, fiddling with the car door handle, staring at Mickey as she groaned and licked my mother’s wrist. “Nate.” He slammed the door and took off for the garage. “Elaine, get the towel out of the trunk.”
Nate ran with the toboggan scraping behind him on the asphalt. We lined it up beside Mickey and I laid the towel out over its wooden slats. My mother grabbed Mickey around the chest and hauled her up, letting her legs hang. “Jesus,” she said, doing a power squat. Mickey shook as my mother lowered her onto the toboggan. Mickey’s tongue hung out of her mouth. She was shivering and panting. I wrapped her in the towel and her legs felt like bags of loose marbles. The blood leaked through the pink flamingo and turned it orange.
My mother dragged the toboggan to Mr. Crisander’s and Nate and I walked beside, each of us with a steadying hand on Mickey to make sure she didn’t fall off. Mickey made squeaking noises when we tried to tilt the toboggan up the steps, and we decided that was a bad idea. My mother
went up on the porch to ring the doorbell and I sat beside Mickey, keeping her company and whispering in her ear that she was a good girl, such a good girl, while she pawed at my arm with one of her front hooves. Nate got a stick and went back to the car. He started poking gently at the swinging skin. My mother rang the doorbell again and we waited. Then she knocked.
“If he’s not home,” she said, “we’re going to have to take care of this ourselves.” She watched me stroke gently under Mickey’s chin with one finger. “Look at her.”
I patted Mickey, pressing on her chest softly until I felt the fluttering of her heart and she let out a little grunt. This was taking care of her, I thought, wrapping her in a beach towel and keeping her warm so she might stop shivering.
“Elaine.”
I was never going to let her go.
Mr. Crisander opened the door with an apron on and a checkered dish towel over one shoulder. His house smelled like burnt sugar. He patted his belly happily when he saw my mother.
“Natalie, I was ju—” His eyes flicked down to me and Mickey and he stopped. His mouth kept moving but I didn’t understand the words that came out. He held his arms out and Mickey snuffled, closing her eyes. The towel was soaked. The words from Mr. Crisander turned into something that sounded like, “Mickey Mick-Mick, Mickey Mick-Mick,” and he said it over and over as he drifted down the stairs with his arms out to her, like I was invisible and it was just Mickey he saw, begging for him to hold onto her before she disappeared like a dream he didn’t remember. I draped one arm over Mickey and hugged her close.
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