Gifts for the One Who Comes After

by Gifts for the One Who Comes After (v5. 0) (epub)

  “Okay, buddy,” his dad said.

  They finished the meal in silence.

  Danny hardly looked at the sky anymore.

  When Danny put his eye to the spyglass, he kept the notebook his dad had given him beside him. He adjusted the dial methodically, checked the numbers, made a mark with his pencil. Adjusted the dial again.

  It was easy once you got the hang of it. No different than what they had been doing in math class, making bar graphs. Charting out the stagger of datasets on grid paper under Mrs. Pembridge’s sharp-nippled guidance.

  Danny licked his lips. He turned the dial. The window swam into focus. There was the teapot. The brown and tan duvet. He waited, but there were no figures in the circle of vision. He tried again, vision blurring and resolving, blurring and resolving. There. His mom standing by the mirror of the dresser, a finger pulling back errant strands of hair behind her ear.

  Danny made a note in his book. Turned the dial. Turned the dial again until he found her propped up on pillows with a paperback. She licked her index finger and turned the page. She seemed happy enough, Danny thought, content. He made a note. He turned the dial.

  Danny spent the night like this. The next as well. The next after that. He ignored when his dad knocked at the door, learned to turn up the volume on his radio, ate dinner silently, sullenly. Worked. The images went by, smearing across his vision, one superimposed on the next, on the next, on the next. Danny found it strange, captivating, the gradual progression backwards, watching his mom’s cheeks smooth out like the skin of an apple until there were only the faintest of lines where the wrinkles would later net at the corner of her eyes and mouth.

  Sometimes Danny recorded the moments when she was with his dad, the grey streaks at his temple receding like a tide as the image changed again and again. He was smoking now. Danny watched his arms thicken, his back straighten from its fishhook slump. Danny watched the distance close between them, the way they touched each other, the casual kisses in the morning, the way his dad might run his palms across the side of her face, curving around her ears. The way she would lean into him, sometimes, when she was very tired in the evening.

  But mostly Danny watched his mom. Watched the years lift off her, the thick, invisible weight of them peeling off as he turned back the dial click by tiny click.

  Slut, he wanted to think. Whore, he wanted to think.

  But then sometimes there he was in the room too. Seven years old. Five years old. Four years old. Vibrating like a puppy, hands in her makeup drawer, interfering, until she would scoop him up underneath his armpits and sit him down on the bed as she got ready for work. Sliding the studs of pearls into her ears. Rouging her cheeks.

  Three years old. Two years old. He watched himself shrink smaller and smaller, the mass of him disappearing into thin air. Where am I going? Danny would think. Fingers whittling down to the length of crayons. Of baby carrots. Pudgy baby hands still grasping at the hem of mommy’s dress as she swept by him and landed a quick kiss on his forehead.

  And then he was the size of a football, and she would keep him swaddled in a blue blanket, torpedo-shaped, legs vanished to a single vertex. They would keep him between them, his mom and his dad, their bodies pressed close but not too close. His dad slept uneasily in those months. Danny would catch him waking in the night, a look on his face like he was afraid he had rolled the wrong way and smothered the little lump of his son.

  Smaller and smaller until baby Danny disappeared entirely into her body, and there was just that hot-air-balloon bulge in the stomach and the breasts pillowed above, and then that shrunk too, smoothed over, the mountain becoming a molehill under her navel.

  It took Danny nine days to chart out the length of his lifespan. He charted it in smiles. He charted it in touches. He charted it in wrinkles and haircuts and naptimes and workdays.

  Slut, he wanted to think. Mommy, he wanted to think.

  Danny did not watch for his dad. It was that other thing he watched for. Whatever it was that had come between them, that must have started earlier, mustn’t it? Something like that couldn’t simply arrive without warning. Without being anticipated. Expected.

  So Danny watched for it. Watched for Henry Croydon or someone like him. Charted out twelve years back into the past, and then another nine months. He watched for that other thing. He waited for his mom to become the slut he knew she would become.

  He watched. It had to be there. Something had to be there.

  It wasn’t.

  “I want to live with Mom,” Danny said at the dinner table that night, the hot, damp of July having crept into the apartment almost overnight, soaking armpits and crotches with sweat. They were eating Rice-A-Roni mixed with slices of chicken breast.

  “What?” his dad asked. He was serving himself a big spoonful from the pot. A glob broke off and landed on the morning newspaper, which had been used as a makeshift placemat. “I want to live with Mom. I want to move back. I don’t like it here.” With you, he wanted to say. I don’t like it here with you.

  “But, Danny. You can’t.” He paused, stricken. “I mean. Danny, please. We had an agreement. Your mom needs time. We all need some time.”

  “I can have my old room back,” Danny said.

  “C’mon, buddy, I know it’s been rough here, but it’s not that bad, is it? I mean, we’re all upset. I know it’s not ideal, but I’ve been trying. Look, I’ve been trying, you know I’ve been trying.”

  “Mom said I could have my room back. Mom said it wouldn’t have to be an office if I lived there.”

  “You can’t, Danny. Please. I’ll do better, I’ll make us something better tomorrow. Chicken fingers, huh? How about that? How about hamburgers and French fries? You love hamburgers and French fries. You can help me in the kitchen, that’d be fun, wouldn’t it? Danny?”

  “I hate,” Danny said delicately, “hamburgers and French fries. I hate this apartment. I hate you. I’m going, okay? I’m going.”

  Before his dad could get up from the table, before he could even stand, Danny was at the door, Danny was slipping on his sneakers, he was in the hallway, he was on the street, he was racing across it and entering the code. He was standing in front of the elevator. The elevator door opened. He stabbed at the button for the seventh floor. The elevator door closed. His heart beat like the wings of a hummingbird in his chest, individual thumps turned to a steady buzz.

  Danny listened to the sound of the floor passing, the tinny chime as another one sped beneath him. He imagined his dad at the table, still staring at that stupid spoonful of Rice-A-Roni. Still eating mechanically as if nothing had happened. As if you could simply keep going like nothing had ever happened.

  He wondered if he had called his mom. Danny didn’t care.

  The elevator door slid open, and Danny stepped out, turned left and walked through the overbright hallway to unit 24. He knocked.

  He imagined his dad finding the journal. He imagined his dad reading the journal. Wondered if he would understand it.

  The door opened. Sarah Englemont’s door. Sarah Englemont’s apartment.

  “Danny,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  She was beautiful. She was twenty-three and beautiful, her hair flowing in loose, delicate curls around her shoulders, hair the colour of honey, hair the colour of champagne, skin sweet-smelling, sweet like his dad had smelled.

  “You’re not supposed to be here, Danny,” Sarah Englemont said. “Does your mom know you’re here?”

  “No,” said Danny.

  “I can’t let you in,” she said to him. “Your mom would be so mad, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “But you have to,” Danny said. “Please.”

  She shifted her weight from foot to foot, but her slender arms continued to block the door. This wasn’t right, Danny thought. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was supposed to let him in. She needed to let him in.


  “I can’t, little guy. I’m not even supposed to talk to you. I’ve given notice.” She bit her bottom lip, leaving a faint trace of lip gloss on her front teeth. “I’ll be out at the end of the month but it took some time to find a new place. Longer than I thought it would. Will you tell your mom that? I didn’t mean to talk to you. I’m, just, I’m so sorry, okay?”

  Her mouth was curled up into a tight little knot.

  “Look, Danny, I have to go, okay? You can’t stay here. Just go back downstairs, will you?”

  A look came over her face.

  “Oh, Christ, Richard. I didn’t know he was going to come over. He just showed up.”

  Danny turned, took in the details of his dad’s face in a moment, the flushed skin, the thin slot of his mouth. His eyes were wide.

  “It’s okay, Sarah,” his dad said. His voice was strained, strangled. His hand fit over Danny’s, and the skin was hot and dry. “This isn’t your fault. Your problem to deal with. I’ll take him home.” The hand jerked. Danny followed it, only pausing for a moment to look back.

  Sarah framed in the doorway, hand smoothing the curl of her hair. The smell of sweetness on the air.

  “You can’t do that, Danny,” his dad said. Angry? Scared? Some other emotion you got when you turned forty? The elevator dropped beneath them and Danny felt his stomach go with it. “You can’t run out like that. You can’t bother Sarah.”

  Danny said nothing.

  “Please,” his dad said. “I’m so sorry, Danny, but please don’t talk to her again. Your mom would kill me.”

  “Why?” Danny asked.

  “Because,” his dad said, voice quiet, so very, very small. “I’m sorry I did this to you, Danny,” he said. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean for it to happen.” Then his voice disappeared entirely inside him.

  Danny let the world drop away from him, felt it rushing by outside, floor after identical floor.

  He looked at his dad. It seemed as if the lines on his face had been drawn on heavy with a magic marker. Danny imagined them getting darker and darker, the skin sagging, coming apart in weighted folds. At the eyes first. Around the mouth. Ginny Crowther smoking at the window, the thin plumes breathing out between her lips. His dad’s body folding up inside itself, the muscle receding to straw bones, the back hooking and humping, the hair gone grey and brittle as grass.

  He had seen it. Danny had seen that. He could look through the Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass, train it on his dad while he slept, and turn the dial forward. Again. And again. And again. Watch his dad waste away. Watch the wallpaper peel behind him, watch Danny grow up, go away to university, come back once. Twice. A young man. A man growing older. Watch the way he never hugged his father anymore, watch that space between them, become a pregnant thing that grew and grew and grew.

  “Okay,” Danny whispered, child’s hand hot in his dad’s. “It’s okay. Let’s go.”

  “His smile has many teeth to it and some of them are baby teeth, which are less frightening, and some of them are shark’s teeth, which are more frightening.”

  DEATH AND THE GIRL FROM

  PI DELTA ZETA

  Carissa first sees Death at the Pan-Hellenic Graffiti mixer where he is circled by the guys from Sigma Rho. They can’t seem to help crowding him even though they clearly don’t want to be there. She has gone with several of the Sig-Rho boys. All of them have. But she has never gone with anyone like Death before.

  Death is wearing a black track jacket, with a black t-shirt on beneath and faded black jeans. Carissa, like all the other girls, is wearing a white cotton tank top with the letters Pi Delta Zeta embroidered in dark pink. She is also carrying a marker. The boys from Sig-Rho have already begun to make use of the marker to write things around her breasts and stomach and neck, things like “Sig-Rho 4Evr” and “Love your body” and “Kevin likes it with mittens on.”

  The guy with the black t-shirt and black jeans doesn’t call himself Death though. This is what he says.

  “Hi,” says Death. “My name is David.”

  “Hi,” says Carissa. She wants to say more but Logan Frees has grabbed her in a big, meaty, underarm embrace so that he can write “Occupy my crotch” on the small of her back, except he is drunk so it comes out as “Occupy my crouch,” which doesn’t make any sense.

  It is only later that Marelaine points him out to her.

  “There,” says Marelaine. “On the couch. That’s Death.”

  “Oh,” says Carissa. “He said his name was David. How do you know that’s really Death?”

  “Death is like a movie star: he can’t just tell you his real name. He has to go incognito. But you can tell anyway.” Marelaine punctuates this with a sniff. Marelaine is the former Miss Texas Polestar. Her talents include trick-shooting, world change through bake sales, and getting what she wants. She has mastered the sniff. She has also mastered the ponytail flip, the high-gloss lipstick pout, and the cross-body cleavage thrust. Only Sydney, from the third floor, has a better cross-body cleavage thrust.

  Carissa is concentrating on the pitch and execution of Marelaine’s sniff. She misses what she is saying.

  “What?” asks Carissa.

  “You know, when that Phi Lamb girl died last term. Staci. Or Traci. Or Christy. Whatever. He was there. When you’ve seen him once, you always recognize him. He’s Death.”

  “I think he’s kind of cute,” says Carissa.

  “If you like that type,” says Marelaine. This time her sniff is deadly.

  Death’s face is smooth and white as marble. His eyes are the colour of pigeon feathers. His smile has many teeth to it and some of them are baby teeth, which are less frightening, and some of them are shark’s teeth, which are more frightening.

  This is what Death looks like, except Death looks nothing like this at all.

  His hair is cowlicked, brown with flecks of gold at the temples. His chin has a stylishly faint shadow of stubble. His cheeks curve into dimples when he smiles, which he does often, and it is not frightening at all.

  Marelaine is watching as Carissa approaches Death, and Carissa knows that Marelaine is watching. She wonders if she should attempt the three-ounce vodka flounce or try for something more subtle. She has an apple-flavoured cooler beading droplets of water in one hand. She taps Death on the shoulder with the other.

  “Have we met?” asks Carissa.

  “Not the way you mean,” says Death. He is smiling at her with that dimpled smile. “I don’t come out to these things very much.”

  “Why is that?” asks Carissa.

  “People make me nervous,” Death answers. “I’m only here for work.” He laughs at this, and his laughter is not what she expects it to be. It is cool and soft. It has the texture of velvet. It is intelligent laughter, and Carissa feels charmed by it, by its simplicity, its brevity, the way it sounds nothing like church gates yawning, the way it doesn’t smack of eternity. She decides she likes talking to someone as famous as Death.

  “That’s a pity,” says Carissa, and her fingers brush her white cotton top, pulling it tighter around her breasts. “Would you like to give it a go?” She hands him the marker.

  “What do you want me to write?”

  “Write me a magic word,” says Carissa.

  Death’s writing is easy and graceful. There are many loops to it. He chooses a place somewhere near her left shoulder blade, and when he bends over to do it Carissa can feel the warmth of him, even though his skin is so white it is bloodless. He writes, “Abracadabra” first, and then “Open up” and then “I know you’re in there” and signs it with a D.

  Carissa smiles at him.

  Later they play Spin the Bottle and every time Death sends the vodka twenty-sixer whirling it points at Carissa. Carissa wonders if she should try the closed-mouth kiss, the single-lip kiss or the tongue-flick kiss. She knows she is best at the tongue-flick kiss, or at least that is what she has been told
by the Sig-Rho boys. She tries the tongue-flick kiss but finds, unexpectedly, that she has transitioned first into a bottom-lip nibble and next into the deeper and more complex one-inch tongue glide.

  At the end, Carissa smiles at Death, and Death smiles back at Carissa.

  “Don’t eat the lemon squares,” he whispers with a wink. And then he carefully writes his number on the hem of her tank top.

  Carissa thinks Marelaine would be proud of her for this, but then, reconsidering, thinks she probably wouldn’t be after all. Soon she stops thinking about Marelaine, and instead thinks about the feel of Death’s teeth, both the smoothed, tiny pearls and the sharp, jagged ones.

  Carissa waits a week after Sydney’s funeral before she gets up the nerve to call.

  Death takes Carissa to a fancy restaurant, somewhere where they serve French food and French wine and all the entrees have French names she can’t pronounce. Death has a certain celebrity status, and they are shown to the table immediately.

  At one point one of the other diners comes to their table. Carissa is eating the poulet à la Provençale which is delicious, and Death is most of the way through his filet de boeuf sauce au poivre.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” The man is sweating. Damp patches have bloomed at his armpits.

  “Yes,” says Death.

  “I bet you don’t remember, but you were there when my wife died.” The man pauses. “I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you so much. She was in such pain.” He plucks at his moustache nervously. “Could I get an autograph?”

  Death is gracious. He signs the napkin in large, looping letters.

  “Thank you,” the man says. “Thank you for taking such good care of her.”

  Death smiles.

  Afterwards, Death is walking Carissa back to the house, and they laugh about it. “Does that really happen all the time?”