Love & Other Carnivorous Plants

by Florence Gonsalves

  “So what did she want?” I ask, taking a roll from the basket but not quite ready to eat it yet.

  “To make sure that you’re getting three solid meals a day and not spending too much time alone. Janet invited you over for a get-together tonight, and you should go. It’s important for you to be with people who loved Sara and want to remember her with you right now.”

  “I don’t want to remember Sara. I want her to be here,” I say, pushing the bread through the sauce on my plate. “I don’t see how it could help to spend time with all these people I don’t like anymore. Sara wouldn’t want that.”

  Unfortunately, this makes my mother cry, which then makes me feel like the spawn of Satan. “I need for you to be okay,” she semiwails as I help myself to a second serving. “You were doing so well, and I hope this doesn’t ruin everything.”

  “Yeah, I can’t believe Sara would go and die like that,” I say, pushing a piece of impostor beef to the far end of my plate. “Talk about ruining what was otherwise going to be a perfect summer.”

  My mother stiffens and wipes her nose with a napkin. She takes to sarcasm the way I take to therapy, and on top of that can’t stand anyone suggesting she’s being insensitive. Or worse, unmotherly.

  “Danny, I understand that you’re angry right now, but please don’t speak in that tone with me.”

  “Sorry,” I mumble. Of course every mother’s priority is her own child, but is it asking so much that she doesn’t imply that Sara having died is soooo inconvenient for us? “If you want me to go over to Janet and Cal’s for the pre-funeral get-together I will, but I still have to finish this eulogy and they’re probably drinking a lot and I don’t think that’s a good environment for me to be around.”

  “I doubt it’s a big party over there,” my mom says coolly, which goes to show how little she knows Janet. “I’ll go with you, and if it starts to feel unhealthy for you, let me know and I’ll drive you back.”

  “Okay,” I say miserably. I feel too guilty about my sarcasm to tell her I don’t need a bodyguard. At least there will be good snacks.

  I wake up the next morning in my parents’ bed with a major bad-behavior hangover. I also have the chills.

  “Thanks for letting me sleep here,” I say to them a little sheepishly. Acting childishly encourages them to treat me like a child. But if I’m going to suffer all the inconveniences of living with my parents, I might as well reap the rewards too.

  I have more missed texts from Bugg and a text from Stephen that’s all, Hope you’re doing okay, see you soon. I kind of forgot he was coming to the funeral (the problem with Stephen is he’s a little forgettable) but it’ll be nice to see him. It’ll be nice to be with someone who doesn’t remind me of Sara, because every time I remember Sara what I remember is that she’s dead.

  Before breakfast I make one final stab at Sara’s eulogy. With my eyes puffy and head pounding it’s hard to think straight, but these are symptoms of crying too much and not only symptoms of throwing up too much. Every so often a pain extends to my nonphysical body and it’s so intense that I wonder if I’m going to die. When it passes I feel nothing until the pain comes back.

  “Do you feel good about what you wrote?” my dad asks, straightening his tie in the reflection of the microwave and looking very un-Dad-like.

  “Not really. I’m hoping that when I get up there it’ll come to me, like, divine intervention or something.”

  He hands me the mug of coffee that says HARVARD DAD, and I take a sip.

  “You’re going to be great. Just remember how well you did at graduation day.”

  “You mean when I broke out in hives and had to drink a whole bottle of Benadryl?”

  “But it was a great speech,” he points out, hovering over me at the kitchen table. In the wake of everything that’s happened I’ve stopped being mad at him for ignoring me in treatment.

  “It’s sweet of you to try, and thanks for loving me unconditionally, but I’m not a giver of speeches, Dad, and today will probably be no exception.” I reach for the sugar in the center of the table and try to turn my coffee into something palatable. “The good thing is no one will be able to say anything bad about it because Sara is dead and that would make them look like a real asshole.”

  My dad kisses me on the forehead. “You feel warm, Danny. Do you feel okay?”

  I nod, but I feel pretty lousy. When he leaves the room I rummage around in the cabinets and find a few doughnuts in a paper bag. I don’t know who was in charge of that operation, but unfortunately they’re all cinnamon powdered. A few minutes later, my parents come in all ready to go.

  “Sweetheart?” my mom says in a careful voice. She’s putting tissues, breath mints, and other practical things into her pocketbook. Leave it to my mother to use a funeral as an opportunity to be overprepared.

  “Yes?” I wipe some of the powder from my mouth and pour myself a glass of real milk, which hopefully doesn’t have cow pus in it (it’s organic).

  “Are you almost ready?”

  Do I look almost ready? Stained T-shirt, greasy hair, doughnut bits around my mouth… “I just need to shower.”

  “Go do that and I’ll make you a real breakfast. We need to leave in twenty.”

  “Doughnuts are a real breakfast,” I snap and stomp to the bathroom. I feel bad for the people around me, but I can’t help it if my temper is suddenly on a half-inch fuse.

  After I shower, my parents herd me into the car with a hard-boiled egg and a piece of toast.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I say from the back seat. We’re already turning onto the main road.

  “What’d you say, sweetie?” my mom asks. I can hear her typing away on her BlackBerry.

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  She turns around to look at me. “Do you need us to pull over?”

  I nod. I have to throw up, like, stomach-bug throw up. My dad pulls over and I open the door just in time to heave onto the curb. My mom is out of the car so fast you’d think we were doing a fire drill. She holds my hair back even though there’s nothing left in my stomach. My dad leaves the car running and squats down beside her.

  “There’s bile in there,” he says in his professor tone, as if he got a PhD in the subtleties of puke. I’m worried he’s going to figure me out and ship me back to You-Know-Where, so I try to think of a way to explain that I’m regular sick, not Danny sick.

  “I think I have some sort of food poisoning.”

  “Yes, that food was out all day at Janet and Cal’s yesterday and then we ate some of it. No wonder you’re sick. Poor baby.” My mom strokes my hair, which feels both comforting and gross since it’s still wet from the shower. My dad doesn’t say anything, just asks my mom to take over and gets in the back seat with me. I put my head in his lap while my mom drives. His hand feels delightfully cool on my face.

  “You are warm,” he says finally, and I feel confident that I’ve assuaged any suspicion. “I should’ve checked if you had a fever before we left.”

  It wouldn’t have changed anything, but it’d be nice to know how many degrees I’m deviating from normal.

  When we get to the church, there’s a black puddle of people outside waiting for the doors to open. I hold my mother’s hand at first but feel silly when I see Liz and Kate in their long black dresses and big sunglasses. They look chic and mature, while I look like I thought it was Halloween and thus dressed up as a black curtain.

  We make our rounds and say hello to people, the worst people being Janet and Cal. I try not to cry because it seems like everyone has been coming up to them and crying, then Janet and Cal have to console them, which is a screwed-up order of things. It’s so obvious that people are crying less for Sara and more for themselves.

  The church bells strike nine, and the hundreds of people outside stop talking. The silence makes me feel woozy, but there’s nothing good left to talk about, I guess. When the doors finally open people rush in for a good seat, which seems kind of f
unny to me because it’s so inappropriate, so I turn to Liz and whisper, “Jeez, it’s like Black Friday up in here.” I want her to laugh. I wish someone would. But her face is steel. “Because everyone’s stampeding each other? Plus, er, wearing black?” Jokes lose their funniness real quick when you have to explain them to people as thick-skulled as Liz, who could be Kate, given their identical attire and identical stupidity.

  “That was out of line,” she finally says. “Can’t you take this one thing seriously?” But she sounds more scared than anything else.

  I realize, as I shuffle behind the pew, that a) Liz has always been a fun suck and b) funerals are quite dependent on formalities. No one likes a code-breaker when things are already too spooky. And that’s the only way to describe how I feel: spooked. I always figured the world was a math equation, albeit a long and complicated one, but one with predictable outcomes. Now it seems more like a strange and wild machine, prone to combustion and general mayhem.

  “Sara wouldn’t want this to be a sob-fest. Just because it’s technically a matter of life and death doesn’t mean we have to be so goddamn forlorn,” I hiss at Liz, but I’m not in the right here.

  The organ sounds and we stand up as the casket is carried in… as the coffin is carried in? Everyone is sad while I’m hung up on the difference between a coffin and a casket and whether they can be used interchangeably. Then we do all these prayers, but I don’t know any of them. I always felt sorry for Sara when she had to go to confirmation and stuff, but now I feel a bit like an idiot. I can’t even recite the Our Father, which everyone and their mother seems to know, so I try to average how many calories I’ve absorbed in the last few days. It makes me feel woozy, so instead I listen to all this talk about God receiving another angel, but it’s too obscure to comfort me. Actually, it sounds like a load of crap.

  “And now we will have Sara’s best friend, Danny, say a few words,” the priest says, and my heart does a nosedive.

  I want to ask if I can bring my mom up with me, but I can’t muster the courage, so I shuffle up to the podium and apologize to Whoever for being an atheist, and ask/pray/beg that I please deliver this speech without breaking out into a rash. I take my notes out and clear my throat, but as soon as I read the first sentence to myself I can tell it’s all wrong, so I fold it back up and say what’s already coming out of my mouth.

  “Um, hi, good morning,” I start, running my fingers over the carvings on the podium. “I thought I was going to get up here and say that Sara was a very special person in a world full of special people, and how she and I were practically sisters, and that my favorite memory of her is when we were nine and she meant to fart in the pool but then she pooped in it instead.”

  I wait for the weird chuckling to die down. In the very back of the church I see Bugg smiling and crying, which makes me want to smile and cry too, but I have to finish getting out what it is that I want to get out… which is what, exactly?

  “It’s not that those things aren’t true, but what’s more true is that Sara and I weren’t in the best of places when she died. We were both keeping some pretty big secrets from each other, which I think happens in life all the time. You say you’re going to tell someone something and you keep putting it off and putting it off until you finally woman up and do it.” I stop for a minute because this sounds like a bad confessional on Dr. Phil and whoa, I do not feel good. Not nervous, sick. I’ve never been one to give pep talks so I forge ahead.

  “I didn’t realize that we might not get another opportunity to learn who the other person had become. And that’s a shame. It would’ve been cool for Sara and me to get reacquainted.”

  I have to stop again because the chills are taking over my body, and I’m starting to visibly shake. The church is so quiet I can nearly hear the tears drop. Overall, I would classify the experience as remarkably uncomfortable.

  “So I guess what I’m getting at is,” I say, but then my mouth waters and I have no idea what I’m going to say but I know that if I do open my mouth it’s not words that are going to come out, it’s my breakfast. I put my finger up to the microphone like moms do when they’re on the phone and their kid tries to tell them something important, mainly that they’re sick and could they please have a paper bag because… but it’s too late. I open my mouth and turn my head to the side, throwing up neatly into the tall plant next to the podium. For once my forays in discreet vomiting have paid off, and I wipe my mouth.

  “Excuse me,” I say into the microphone, then descend the stage in a state of shock. Truly this has been the greatest example to date of my total and complete failure to be not only a halfway decent public speaker, but a halfway decent best friend.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “It wasn’t bad at all,” my mom says. We’re in the handicap stall of the church bathroom and I’m staring into the toilet bowl waiting for something to happen. Now that we’re in the appropriate location, though, everything seems hunky-dory down there in my stomach.

  “I hope you’re happy with yourself,” I whisper to it as I smooth out my dress.

  “Sweetie, you couldn’t help getting sick.” My mom flushes the toilet for me even though there’s nothing in it. “It’s no wonder too, what with something so disturbing as this. A lot of times emotional ailments present themselves physically.”

  “I’m super glad you were a hippie once, Mom, but it’s not making me feel like less of an asshole.” I undo the lock and try not to look at myself in the mirror above the sink as I scrub my hands viciously. “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” I deadpan, but apparently my mom doesn’t remember any high school English. Or maybe I’m 10 percent as funny as I think I am.

  “You’re not an asshole,” she says gently. “Sara would’ve understood.”

  I dry my hands on the cheap paper towels for longer than is necessary, just to hear their crinkling sounds. “Sara would’ve thought it was hilarious, but Sara is dead, and now I’m never going to be able to face any of these people again.”

  Then Bugg comes into the bathroom. “Danny?”

  The sound of her voice nearly triggers the nervous puke response, but I hold it together.

  “How ya doing?” she asks, and the three of us stand there awkwardly. It’s not great timing.

  “Uh, Mom, this is Bugg. From poetry class.”

  “We met the other day,” Bugg says. “Nice to see you again, though unfortunately under terrible circumstances. Anyway, Danny, the ceremony is over. You survived it!” Then she puts her hand to her mouth. “Not that ‘survive’ is a great choice of words or anything.”

  “We should go to the burial, Danny. I’ll pull the car around. It was nice to see you too, Bugg. We’ve heard so much about you,” my mom says warmly as she leaves.

  When it’s the two of us in the bathroom, I clarify, “Not so much,” and Bugg gives me a long hug.

  “You smell like alcohol,” I notice, and her eyes are bloodshot too.

  “I’m fine,” she says quickly, but she’s blushing. “You haven’t been returning my texts.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.”

  “It’s okay. I’m your go-to girl. Even if you just want to be friends for now—”

  She’s interrupted by her phone ringing, and Veronica’s laughing face and blue hair illuminates the screen. It’s such an up-close shot that it feels like she’s in the bathroom with us, having just made a joke at our expense. Bugg pockets the phone after she ignores the call, and collectively we ignore the awkwardness.

  “Like I was saying, even if you just want to be friends—” Bugg starts, but I don’t have the capacity for this conversation right now.

  “This isn’t the greatest time to hammer out the logistics of our relationship.” Despite my fever, my voice is chilly. “I kind of have something more pressing going on.”

  By the look on her face I can tell I’ve hurt her feelings. I wonder what it says about me, that it feels so good to hurt someone I love.
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  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it seem like I wanted you to make a decision right here between the paper towel dispenser and the leaking faucet. And I don’t know why Veronica called—”

  I turn away from her, opening the bathroom door as a tear falls from her face and catches in her hair. “I’ll text you when I’m done further fucking up these funeral arrangements.”

  I leave the bathroom and then the church, too blinded by the eleven a.m. sun to see what’s in front of me.

  The burial is a smooth, sad affair. It’s official. Sara is dead. It’s less official. I’m alive. The difference between “dead” and “alive” is only one syllable, but one I’ve shortened to a tiny utterance that hardly makes a sound. I want to go home and curl up with my journal, but afterward there’s a “celebration” at Janet and Cal’s. Why anyone would want to drag this sort of thing out is beyond me, but they’re calling it a celebration because there’s a slideshow full of happy pictures of Sara’s life, and lots of food and expensive wine. They had a caterer make Sara’s special grilled cheeses, but it’s a shitty thing to have done; Sara is the only one who should be making them.

  I show up with my parents but too many people are here: Ethan and his friends, anyone she ever played tennis with, acquaintances from high school. I am nearly delirious from the crowds, from hugging people and soothing them as they tell me how very sorry they are for my loss. Mothers seem to cry the hardest, overall. I feel bad for the ones who try to get away with regular eye makeup. They end up with clown faces and crumpled Kleenex, then an inevitable “excuse me” as they hightail it to the nearest bathroom. The number of bathrooms in Sara’s house would be convenient under normal circumstances, but as I look at all the food, I feel sorry for myself; this stomach bug has ruined my appetite entirely. I’m almost tempted to try to eat something anyway, but the thing about being truly sick is it’s hard to find even bacon appealing. I feel a hand on my back and I’m about to fake some pre-vomit noises when I turn around and see who it is.