The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  Yeah. I’m working on getting everything settled with my dad’s condo too. I slosh back more wine as I say this, and Holly nods at me encouragingly.

  Lying suddenly seems kind of fun. It’s interesting to hear what I would sound like if I actually had my shit together. The sad truth is that I’ve been waiting for someone to do exactly what Holly is doing, to step in and intervene before it’s too late, but now that it’s happening I can’t help backpedaling.

  A busboy clears our plates and Kevin asks for the bill. The waitress comes and marks off a line on the giant wine bottle, tallying up the total on her little pad.

  I’m putting you down for fourteen glasses, she says.

  Whoa, Ryan says. I didn’t think we had that much.

  Me neither, says Kevin.

  I only had a couple of glasses, Holly says.

  Me too, I mumble, even though I know the waitress is right and that most of the glasses belong to me. I’m just hoping none of them notice how much I’m slurring.

  The waitress shrugs at us, dropping the bill in the center of the table.

  Whatever, Holly says. I’ve always thought this whole bottle thing was kind of a scam anyway.

  Ryan and I part ways with Kevin and Holly on the sidewalk. After they’re gone I look in the direction of the beach. I can’t tell if the streetlights look hazy because I’ve had too much to drink or if it’s just from the ocean air.

  I turn back to Ryan, and we begin walking along Washington Boulevard. We’ve only been dating for a couple of months, but after I moved to Venice we started spending most nights of the week together.

  Ryan is a writer. He has just finished the first draft of a novel and works as a reality television producer. He’s easily the smartest person I’ve ever met, almost to a fault.

  Ryan has memorized every presidential team that ever existed. You can name a date—say 1883—and he will tell you who was serving in the White House, and often even more about that particular year in politics. It’s the same with baseball. Strings of statistics and numbers spill out of his mouth like ticker tape at the merest prompting.

  Ryan is the opposite of Colin. It wouldn’t even occur to Ryan to put bars around me, to create rules about who I am supposed to be. After years of Colin doing just that, being with Ryan feels like freedom in the finest form.

  Do you want to come over tonight?

  Ryan shakes his head. I have to be at the office early tomorrow.

  Okay.

  I try to hide my disappointment, but Ryan doesn’t seem to notice anyway. He’s already talking about something that happened at work today. As I listen I try to keep my steps steady. I am drunker than I realized.

  I don’t want to go home. I just want to keep walking. I don’t want tomorrow to come. Or the day after that. The thought of another perfect, sunny LA day spent not cleaning out my father’s condo makes me want to vomit. Nonetheless Ryan walks me to the gate at the bottom of the steps that lead up to my apartment. He kisses me goodnight and walks away into the night, and I am suddenly alone again.

  I’m crying before I even walk in the door. I stand in the middle of the dark living room, a tidal wave of fear and anger washing over me.

  I don’t want to be here.

  I don’t want to be alone.

  I can’t do this.

  I can’t do this.

  The only response to my silent pleas is the sound of blood rushing in my ears.

  I suck in deep, ragged breaths and look wildly around the room. I’m not sure what I’m looking for until I see the dark space underneath my desk.

  I drop to my hands and knees and crawl there, tucking my head, and hunching my back under the frame. I pull the chair in against me, pinning myself to the wall. I close my eyes finally, breathing.

  A few years from now I’ll see a movie about Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who used to lock herself into cattle-holding stalls in an effort to feel secure and contained. I don’t realize it now, but that’s exactly what I’m doing.

  Finding some way, however desperate, to hold on to myself.

  THE NEXT MORNING I park in the carport of my father’s condominium complex and walk up to his front door. I pause for a moment, unable to bring myself to unlock it yet.

  A breeze blows around a corner of the building, and I close my eyes for a moment. It’s another balmy, Southern California day and the temperature hovers around seventy-four degrees.

  My father has been dead for three months.

  Finally I push the key into the lock and turn the doorknob, making my way inside. I take two steps into the living room and then I just stand there, breathing in the stale air.

  The blinds are pulled on every window, and the living room is dark. Everything is exactly as it was when my father still lived here. The dishes sit quietly in the cupboard, the cable is still connected and my father’s dentures sit in their little plastic case on the bathroom counter.

  I begin to walk around the condo, turning on lights here and there but leaving the blinds closed. The air is old, the rooms quiet. I lean against the door to my father’s room, letting the memories wash over me.

  My father’s hand in mine that last afternoon. His funny, bushy eyebrows. The creases around his mouth.

  The way he was gone so quickly from his body.

  After he took his last breath, I untangled my hand from his and let it drop to his lap. I backed away from the bed. All the blood drained quickly from his face and hands, leaving them a marble white color that I’d never seen before. His eyes were half-open, his mouth a wide, gaping place.

  The hospice nurse drew her hand across his face like they do in the movies, and then his eyes were closed. I stood still a moment longer, taking in the sight of his dead body. It was the first I’d ever seen.

  I turned then and walked outside to the little patio off the living room and lit a cigarette. I picked up the clunky cordless phone, punching in the numbers that would connect me to my half brother Mike.

  He’s gone, I said, sinking down into one of the plastic patio chairs.

  Mike didn’t say anything, but I could almost hear him nodding in response.

  I went back to my father one more time before the funeral home workers arrived to take his body away. The room was unnaturally quiet without the hiss of the oxygen he’d used for the last several years. I stood over the bed and took in the sight of his body. I touched my fingertips to his eyebrows and then held each of his hands in mine. They were already growing cold.

  My father was gone. His body, the familiar house of his self, his limbs that I’d clambered in and out of as a kid—they were just dead, heavy things.

  I turn away from these memories and walk down the hall and into the kitchen. I open the refrigerator, surveying the contents: half-full bottles of mayonnaise and salad dressing, a slim jar of cocktail onions that my dad always put in his martinis, a dented box of baking soda, some congealed ketchup. I had told myself that I would clean out the fridge today.

  I close the door instead and go into the living room, where I lie down on the couch and cry until I fall asleep.

  When I wake up, an hour later, I push myself up and walk outside into the bright afternoon; then I drive the thirty miles north back to my apartment in Venice Beach.

  A FEW WEEKS after my father died I rented this little apartment. It was an immediate relief not to sleep alone in his condo anymore and for the first time in my entire life I began to make a home for just me.

  Venice Beach is an eclectic beach community, completely different from the rest of Los Angeles. My apartment is two blocks from the ocean, nestled into a series of canals built in the 1920s to replicate the real ones in Italy.

  At night ducks quack softly from their perches on the banks and fish slumber under little white bridges that crisscross the canals. Bougainvillea and honeysuckle drip down onto the sidewalks, and when the mist rolls in from the ocean the whole place takes on a dreamlike quality.

  My apartment is a one bedroom above a set
of garages, and from my deck I have a view of one of the bridges. I’ve never lived alone before, and while I love the freedom of it, I’m also lonely. I go out almost every night, meeting friends for drinks or dinner.

  Colin and I broke up only a week before I became parentless. At the time I didn’t know that my dad would be gone so soon, but the intensity of the situation helped propel me out of that relationship.

  It’s the oddest feeling, not to have anyone checking in on me. For the last six years, between my father and Colin, I was either being watched over or doing the watching. Now there is no one to tell me what to do or where to be, what time to get up or how to spend my days.

  No one knows exactly how depressed I am, and there is no one who knows that I spend most of my days trying to sleep.

  When I get home from another failed morning at my father’s condo, I curl into a corner of the couch and try to sleep. I wrap my arms around me and close my eyes to the bright California day. I can hear palm fronds rustling in the breeze and seagulls cawing at one another as they circle overhead.

  Sleep does not come.

  I open my eyes and glance at the clock again: 2:11.

  I look at the wine rack on my kitchen counter and try to determine if it’s too early to have a glass.

  I close my eyes again.

  ONE YEAR AFTER my father’s death I fly to Europe. I spend a week in Sicily with a friend of my parents’ and his three daughters, who are my age. After that I make my way to more family friends in Rome. While I’m there, I scatter some of my father’s ashes.

  After a week in Rome I’m headed to Switzerland, where I plan to stay with one last set of family friends before flying home to Los Angeles. Most of these friends are ones my parents made when I was growing up in Atlanta. They tell me stories about those years, about the late-night dinner parties when we were babies and how they all thought that time would last forever.

  I’m on a train to Zurich when the accident happens. Or I guess it’s not really an accident at all.

  I’m sitting in the first train car. I have just put down my book; something I read made me look up and out the window. I am thinking about my life. Just before I left on this trip I had told Ryan that he could move in with me. I felt uneasy about the situation but I couldn’t come up with an alternative.

  We’ve been dating for close to a year and have been spending practically every night together. He wants to move forward and so do I, but I can’t shake the feeling that I am not ready to live with someone again. I have only just been starting to feel comfortable about living alone for the very first time in my life.

  We talked about it over Chinese food one afternoon, and Ryan was firm about what he wanted. I remember opening my fortune cookie hoping that it would give me the answer I sought but finding something frivolous there instead.

  Okay, I’d finally agreed, and the timing had worked out so that he would move in while I was traveling. But the uneasy feeling had not abated.

  This is what I’m thinking about while staring out the window. This is what I’m thinking about when the train suddenly decelerates. This is what I’m thinking about when the sound hits my ears.

  It’s a crunching sound, like rocks in a blender.

  The train slides to a complete stop.

  I sit forward in my seat, looking around the car. Everyone else is leaning forward too. We are in the countryside outside of Milan. There is nothing but trees outside the windows.

  The crunching sound replays in my ears. The thought that it might have been a person pops into my head before I quickly dismiss it and scold myself for being morbid.

  Suddenly the conductor rushes past. His face a blanched white. More officials rush back and forth.

  Then suddenly the news branches out through all the cars, reaching each passenger as though we are playing a grown-up game of telephone.

  It was a suicide.

  A MAN HAD THROWN HIMSELF in front of the train. The source of the crunching sound was exactly what I had imagined it to be.

  We stay where we are for hours. I miss my connection. We are not permitted to disembark. The police arrive and we watch them walking alongside the tracks, their backs bent beneath the late afternoon sun as they scour the tracks for remains.

  When we finally inch forward to Milan and are allowed to get off the train, I cannot help following the craned necks of the other passengers as they turn to glance back at the front of the train. Yet I deeply regret seeing the blood that is dried in streams along the nose.

  In Milan I hop aboard a train to Zurich that is literally pulling away from the station even as I am stepping into the very last car. I sink down into my seat, tightening my arms around me and watching the station recede in the distance.

  After a while I don’t want to be alone so I venture into the next car to smoke a cigarette. The car is empty except for a tired-looking train official slumped in a seat and a young man reading a book. I sit opposite the train official and light my cigarette. He looks like I feel, and I watch him for a moment before I speak.

  Were you on the last train? I ask. The one with the suicide?

  He vaguely nods but does not look in my direction. I feel guilty for engaging him, but I already miss the company of passengers who have shared in that experience.

  Suddenly the young man stands up.

  What suicide?

  I let him walk me back to my seat as I describe the accident.

  Patric is uncommonly lovely, with an aristocratic nose, warm brown eyes, and messy blond hair. He is Swiss, on his way home to Zurich. He listens with interest, taking the seat opposite me.

  For me, the suicide had been one of those moments that made me sit forward in my seat, startled not just by the incident itself but by the unexpected depth of life—the way one moment can fling your life in any of a hundred different directions.

  I cannot help but wonder what it means that I was sitting on that train, on that day. That my connection was delayed, that I only just made this one, and that I am here right now, speeding toward Zurich, sitting across from a man I don’t know. Some of the most pivotal points of my life seem to be made up of moments such as these.

  It is a long train ride to Zurich, and Patric and I talk for hours. At one point we venture out to the dining car to buy little bottles of wine, packages of chocolate, and more cigarettes. He is recently out of school and has been traveling, trying to figure things out. It’s easy for us to tell each other all our secrets. We will never see each other again.

  He explains the recent confusion he’s had over a girlfriend, and I reveal my uneasy feeling about Ryan. We blow long, thin streams of cigarette smoke up toward the ceiling and are lulled into even deeper subjects by the rocking of the train car.

  Hours later Patric gets off in Zurich, but I stay on, having to travel a bit farther to reach the town where my parents’ friends live. He stands silently on the platform, one hand raised in good-bye, and I touch my fingers lightly to the glass.

  It’s a simple thing, meeting a stranger and opening yourself up, but it’s not something that happens often. As the train pulls out of the station I think about that night in Vermont with Michel, and then about the night in Spain.

  I lean my forehead against the cool glass and I know something about life—about how even in the moments when you don’t think you are moving forward, you really are.

  WHEN I GET HOME to Los Angeles Ryan has moved in. My dresser is half full of his clothing, his books have been crammed in with mine, and his jackets hang in my closet. I shake my head against the resistance I feel and try to move forward into life.