Being Fishkill

by Ruth Lehrer

Air is heavy like water is thick.

  A man as huge as a tractor pulled open a car door that didn’t open the way a car door should.

  Air steals sound like water steals breath. I was deaf.

  I was leaving the world the same way I came into it — in the backseat of a car. It was how a story should end, all tied up neat. All tied up tight.

  Under-air is heavy and slow. I was still.

  I was the right passenger.

  I was dead.

  I woke up in a hospital bed. I saw tubes and machines. I heard beeping and crying. I was breathing air. I was the wrong passenger.

  I remembered Keely’s green pickup coming toward Molly’s car at an impossible angle, like she wanted to ride up and over the middle of our car. I remembered the crash, although the doctors told someone I might not. I didn’t remember sound, just light and color and dark.

  Even though I was lying in the hospital bed, I wanted to ask if I was dead, but I couldn’t make words.

  I could hear Molly on the other side of the curtain, screaming and crying. I had never heard a grown-up cry like that before. If Molly had been stabbed, she couldn’t have screamed or cried louder. Then they must have given her drugs, because soon she was quiet.

  I didn’t hear Duck-Duck.

  I wanted to ask the nurses, what happened? Who was the right passenger? But every time they came near, it was like I was dead. I couldn’t speak or open my eyes.

  I didn’t cry.

  “How are we doing?” someone asked.

  I blinked and opened my eyes a crack. A young nurse with braids all over her head was pulling a cart up to the bed

  “You got pretty banged up, but nothing was broken,” she said cheerfully.

  I tried to focus my eyes on her face. Everything seemed a little blurry.

  “You were asleep the last time I came by. I took your vitals and you barely woke up.” She put the blood-pressure cuff on my arm. “I’m so sorry about your friend,” she said.

  I must have gotten a weird look on my face, because then she said, “Oh, no,” and she ran away.

  I thought she ran away, but maybe I fell asleep again because then suddenly there was a hospital social worker standing next to me. I hit her in the chest, hard, but she just grabbed me and held on.

  “Go away,” I hissed into her cold ear. “Go fuck yourself.”

  All I could hear was Molly screaming.

  When Grandpa fell dead on the Birge Hill kitchen floor, it took us several minutes to get up the courage to go in close enough to check on him. I was sure if I got too close, he would grab me by the neck and squeeze. Keely must have thought so too, because she hung back by the door, clenching and unclenching her fists.

  It was the clock that convinced me he was probably dead. It was suddenly ticking so slowly, so loudly, that I knew if he were still alive, he would have heard it and broken its hands.

  “Grandpa?” I tested, but he didn’t answer. “Grandpa?”

  “Pop?” said Keely. She still didn’t move.

  I took a step toward him and then changed my mind. I grabbed the hitting stick from behind the door instead. I gave him a little poke and Keely jumped. I gave another poke, but still Grandpa didn’t move. I dug the stick into his side and he didn’t even twitch.

  “I think he’s dead,” I said. “We should call nine-one-one.”

  “Why?” said Keely. “What can they do if he’s already dead?”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to do,” I said. “Besides, there’s no way the two of us can pick him up from the kitchen floor.”

  It took us a little while to make the call. Keely kept picking the phone up and putting it down. Finally, I grabbed and dialed.

  “Nine-one-one,” said the lady on the other end. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “I think my grandpa is dead,” I said.

  The lady made me stay on the phone until the ambulance arrived. It wasn’t just the ambulance. The fire truck and the police and the Highway Department man came too. I guess they all wanted to see for themselves if it was true. Grandpa always said people were nosy shits, and I guess he was right.

  Because of the trailer and the ugly fence, the ambulance couldn’t back up to the door, and the emergency people had to walk the stretcher around and across the muddy lawn. One guy stepped into a rut and sprained his ankle.

  They put the stretcher down on the floor and lifted Grandpa onto it. One, two, three, they said, and then they all stood up. I knew he must really be dead, because one of the emergency men was also the guy who worked for the oil company, and Grandpa always fought with him about the bill. Grandpa called him the crap pit in a horse’s ass. He would never have let the oil man touch him if he were still alive.

  The policeman said he would drive us to the hospital, and we went because they seemed to expect us to go. We sat in the waiting room until the doctor came out and said he was Very sorry, but Mr. Jamison was dead on arrival. He signed papers and made Keely sign them too. That was probably when they called the Department of Social Services, because Keely couldn’t answer even simple questions about what to do with the body. Also, all the 911 people had been inside our house, and I could tell they weren’t impressed. I saw the Highway Department man, who hadn’t put even one finger on Grandpa, pull a bottle out of his glove compartment and squirt hand sanitizer on his hands, just like the school nurse did. He rubbed each finger like he had touched a pile of poop.

  The policeman drove us home and asked if we were sure we were okay, and we said Fine, sure, thanks, Officer. Then he left, and we weren’t sure what to do. Keely took a beer out to the porch, and I washed the kitchen floor with bleach. The smell hurt my nose, but somehow it seemed the right thing to do. Dead animals were supposed to be dirty, so dead people probably were too.

  I thought bleach would get rid of the dead feeling that had descended on the house too, but it didn’t.

  Sleep is escape, except when it’s not. Lying on the hospital bed, every time I shut my eyes, I had dreams of green trucks and black rivers. Hands reaching through windows and up out of lakes. Blood flowing from blue rocks. I wondered if Molly had the same dreams, but I couldn’t ask. I heard the nurses whispering about us. Keely had flown straight through the windshield, they said; she hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. Duck-Duck was wearing a seat belt, but in her case, it was more a trap than a help.

  When no one was looking, I left the room and walked around. All I had on was a blue-gray gown and weird little slippers that were really only socks. I touched my finger to the yellow line on the wall, following, following, following, and then I turned around and followed, followed back. Molly was lying still in the other bed. She hadn’t even noticed that I had left.

  After two days, we got a ride home from a lady I didn’t know. Outside the hospital, May flowers had suddenly bloomed as if they had no idea the world was totally different now. The lady did all the hard things: she opened the door, turned on the lights, cleaned up the dishes. But that night, we were alone.

  The first night home was the worst. The thought of sleeping in Duck-Duck’s bedroom made my throat close up like hardened glue. I ended up on the living-room couch. I used my backpack as a pillow, the rough canvas against my cheek. Molly paced the house all night. Mostly she cried. Sometimes she talked to herself. She sounded as out of it as Keely ever did. I started to worry that she was.

  The second night, I saw Molly open the liquor cabinet, and I heard the clink-clink of ice. I got up off the couch. Molly was standing at the counter swirling the glass with her finger, watching the ice go around and around in the clear liquid. She didn’t look up when I walked across the room.

  I picked up her glass and poured the alcohol down the drain. Ice hit the metal sink, and Molly’s head sank onto the counter. I opened the refrigerator and looked for a replacement. There was milk, orange juice, seltzer, and a small bottle of lemonade. I gave her the lemonade since it had sugar, and sugar was good for shock. I read that once. Milk was
healthy, but it wasn’t very good for forgetting things, and Molly wanted to forget things.

  “Drink,” I said, and she did, but then she started crying again as if I’d never given her the lemonade.

  Cry, people always said. You’ll feel better. Don’t bottle it up, they said. Express your feelings, the therapists told us. It helps. Crying didn’t seem to be helping Molly much.

  Nobody cried on Birge Hill. Not me, not Keely, definitely not Grandpa. The Social Service ladies asked if we cried a lot when he died. We didn’t tell them it hadn’t even crossed our minds. Kids at school cried a lot. Girls cried for little reasons. A spilled soda, a sad movie. Boys cried only for big reasons, like being hit in the balls with a bat or getting their foot run over by a lawn mower.

  Maybe there was something on Birge Hill that dried up tears. Keely didn’t cry when Grandpa hit her. She screamed and yelled. She clawed at the floor. I didn’t cry either. Maybe we didn’t know how anymore. Maybe only normal people cried.

  Time was moving in a funny way. Every moment ticked by slowly, like slogging-through-the-cold-river slow. Then later in the afternoon, I had to try hard to remember what had happened in the morning.

  I had forgotten Molly had a sister. Our third day home from the hospital, Patricia arrived from California. Patricia didn’t have big shoulders or spiky hair. She had long reddish-brown hair that curled up at the ends. She had a green purse and shoes that matched. She had red lipstick and she had a pad for lists. Somehow I ended up on the list.

  “We have to go shopping,” she said to me, and then we were in her red rental car, driving to the supermarket and the bakery, and then we were in the department store, “because, even under the best of circumstances, Molly is so shopping impaired.”

  Patricia cried too, but when we went shopping, she stopped. She reminded me of Duck-Duck’s description of how to learn math: she was focused.

  “How about this?” Patricia held up a gray itchy dress against me. “I guess we’re not going to the royal wedding in that one,” she said, though all I had done was shudder.

  Then she picked out black pants that felt like velvet and a blue jacket that was really just a shirt with a round turn-down collar and a little frill at the waist. She made me go try it on, and then she bought a bunch of underwear and socks and threw in two pairs of jeans, “as long as we’re here.”

  She bought me a new pair of shoes to go with the velvet pants: black, with laces.

  “You want sneakers too?” she asked, and then she just started going through racks because I couldn’t answer.

  If I had been with Duck-Duck, I would have picked out a pair with flashing lights, but now I couldn’t even look at them. I picked a white pair with red Velcro.

  It was a good thing Patricia kept grabbing my hand as we walked down aisles. I felt like I couldn’t see so well, and I seemed unable to walk quickly anymore. When we got home, she made me take a shower, and then she cut my hair, right there in the kitchen. It was the first time since the accident that I had seen Molly almost smile.

  “Don’t fight it, Fishy,” she said. “Patty is a force of nature.”

  Molly didn’t eat for days. In the hospital, I could hear the nurses telling her, Just eat a little piece of toast, or Just a little Jell-O, honey. She only drank tea.

  In the hospital, I ate whatever they brought me, but I couldn’t taste it. It was as if I were there lying in bed but the food was on television. I would look at the tray and see the empty plate and the opened pudding container and know I had chewed and swallowed, but I couldn’t remember tasting any of it.

  A day later, people started coming over. Almost all of them were women. Big women with broad shoulders and spiky hair. Small women with strong arms. Fat women with large breasts and pocketbooks. They brought casseroles and sandwiches. They brought tan-colored cookies and something called Soybean Surprise. They brought salads and peanuts. The food piled up in the refrigerator and the freezer. The women would label everything carefully and rotate the dishes, but Molly still didn’t eat. She lay in bed or she sat on the couch, staring at the wall. Sometimes she would cry, and one of the women would pat her and cry too. I met Ellen that week. I was surprised because she and Molly hugged and kissed and cried as if they hadn’t been divorced at all.

  “Has Molly eaten anything today?” Ellen asked me. She had ducked into the kitchen to get me alone.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I didn’t say she hadn’t eaten anything that I knew of since the accident.

  Ellen came over and put her hand on my shoulder. She had short brown hair and muscles like a baseball player. “See if you can get her to have some dinner,” she said. “I bet you can do that.” Then she smiled at me, and I knew why Molly had liked her.

  “You’re tough like Molly,” she said, and then she left.

  But Molly wouldn’t eat dinner. All the women left for the evening and Patricia went to bed, complaining of jet lag. Molly drank a cup of tea and fell asleep on her bed. She didn’t even get under the sheets. I slept a little in the living-room chair, but then I woke up. The house was so quiet, you could tell there weren’t enough people breathing in it. The clock said midnight.

  Duck-Duck had said if you could read, you could cook. I pulled out the cookbooks with the prettiest pictures and read. I read about French meat; I read about Italian birds. I read about Cornish hens and Spanish oxtails. I read about chickens with little potatoes inside. I read about fishes laid out whole on platters with their eyes still in their heads. I read about blancmange, just like in Little Women. I read about mousse and puddings and flan.

  Some of the ingredients I didn’t have. Some ingredients I’d never heard of and didn’t even know where a person would buy them.

  I picked the recipe that sounded like what you should eat when your best daughter died and you hadn’t had a real meal in days.

  It was the most delicious mac and cheese I had ever had in my whole life. I tasted it before I made Molly sit down and eat a bowl. The macaroni had pushback, not like the mushy canned stuff the church ladies always gave us. I grated the cheese myself, two different kinds, plus a garlic that I banged with the metal crusher the way Molly did when she made spaghetti sauce. I even put in some mustard with the cream, which the recipe said was the right thing to do. I had my doubts, but in the end I was glad. I kept testing the elbows to see if they were done. I burned my tongue, but when I pulled the mac and cheese out of the oven, it was perfect.

  “Dinnertime,” I said, even though it was two o’clock in the morning. The funny thing was, Molly got up and sat down at the table like I was the mom and she was the kid. “Time to eat,” I said, and she ate. I think it was probably the best mac and cheese she had ever had too, because she ate the whole bowl and then ate a little more.

  The next night I made spaghetti, like Molly had made, but I made white spaghetti and meatballs. I overcooked the sauce a little and it stuck to the bottom of the pan, but it still tasted like a garden. The three of us ate that instead of the chunky yellow refrigerator casseroles.

  Then I baked chocolate-chip cookies, like the ones Duck-Duck and I had made but with walnuts. It was hard not to burn them, because while I waited for them to bake, my brain kept running on about green trucks and blue cars. Then I remembered to set the little egg-shaped timer to remind me about each batch, and they all came out perfect. It was funny how a cookie could be perfect when everything else was not. It was funny how my brain could think about cooking and also not think about cooking, both at the same time.

  The brain was weird. I was waking up in the day — as if I had been asleep, but I hadn’t — realizing that I had been thinking about Grandpa. And it wasn’t really thinking; it was like I was there, like he was here, again. Duck-Duck was gone, Keely was gone, and all my brain could do was live at Birge Hill with Grandpa. It made me mad.

  One afternoon, a visitor named Nancy was in the living room. She worked with Molly as a nurse at the hospital. I could tell from her ID, which was
attached to her coat.

  “How are you girls doing?” she asked when she came in the front door.

  I didn’t really answer her. I just hmmed and let her walk into the living room without me. Molly mostly lay on the living-room couch — when she wasn’t wandering around the house with a Keely-vague look or crying in the bathroom.

  I went into the kitchen to get Nancy a piece of the cherry pie someone had left us in a labeled Tupperware container. The cherry pie was red and hopeful, but somehow it tasted not so hopeful and somewhat slimy. I figured I’d give it to Nancy, since she was probably used to hospital food and might not notice.

  I was in the kitchen, thinking about pie, but then the next minute I was thinking about rabbits.

  There used to be rabbits all over Birge Hill. They ate people’s gardens. They got hunted for dinner.

  Then the coyotes came back from almost extinction. You could hear them yip-howling in the woods.

  When the coyotes came back, the rabbits disappeared.

  In all my life, I only ever saw one rabbit, and Grandpa said it was a hare. It was as big as a raccoon and fat. It ran across the yard and jumped under the fence.

  “A bunny!” I had said.

  “It’s a hare,” said Grandpa.

  I didn’t know there was a difference.

  “The coydogs didn’t get him,” he said, almost sounding amused. “Tough bugger.”

  That might have been the only time I ever heard Grandpa say something nice about anybody.

  I never saw that hare again.

  Like I said, the brain was weird. It made me mad.

  They had asked me if I wanted to cremate or bury Keely’s body. I knew Keely didn’t want to be stuck here forever. She had wanted to float down the river to move on, away from me, but she didn’t make it the first time. She crashed the pickup to try again. Only as ashes would she be able to move on far enough to get away from Grandpa and me.

  “Cremate,” I had said. One-word sentences were still all I could handle at that point.