Ignoring the cream-sauce-induced apparition, he closed his eyes and imagined himself in his hospital bed, imagined the nubby scratch of the sheets and the steady beep of the monitors. He felt himself surrounded by the warm stuffiness of his hospital room, the smell of overcooked green beans, and disinfectant that didn’t quite overcome the odor of illness and fear. He created the backward spiral toward sleep and then opened his eyes, expecting to see the light of the hallway under the door creating shadows in his hospital room.
Instead, the kid was staring at him, wincing. “You’re not dreaming.”
“I want off these drugs.” Walter pushed up the arm of his bathrobe to rip out IV tubes to stop the pumping of whatever hallucinogenic they had him on, but his arms were unscathed. Empty of open sores or old wounds.
“You aren’t on drugs anymore. There’s no more pain for you. No more heart attacks.”
“I want to go back to my room.”
“You can’t.”
“The hell I can’t.” Walter wrenched open the door and staggered into the hallway. Trick mirrors must have been set up, because all he could see up and down the hall were mirrored reflections of himself stepping out into the bleak passageway.
“What the…?” He swayed on his feet, and the millions of reflections did the same. He lifted his hand and the mirrored manifestations did the same. Bile welled up in the back of his throat and he closed his eyes, shutting out the mirrors. The inevitability he felt creeping up on his blindside.
Dead? Dear God.
“Mr. Zawislak.” Walter felt the boy’s soft touch on his elbow but he didn’t open his eyes in fear that he would get sick. “You’ve died. You are dead. There’s no hospital room to go back to.”
“Where’s my body? If I’m dead why can I feel everything? My heart is beating and I can breathe, full breaths. I haven’t been able to do that in years. And my fingers. I can feel my fingers and my toes aren’t…” He trailed off, abruptly mindful of what all that might mean.
“Where are my glasses?” he yelled. “I can’t see anything!” His poor vision was the only concrete thing he could seem to keep in his brain, everything else was moving too fast, was too fantastic to believe.
“Your eyesight will correct itself in time.”
“Where’s my body?”
“I imagine it’s still in the room. You haven’t been dead long.”
You haven’t been dead long, what a ridiculous thing to say to a man who had to take a leak.
“Show me.”
“Your body?” The boy shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s not allowed.”
“I don’t care what’s allowed. If I’m dead, show me the body. I want to see my body. Show me I’m dead. Prove it.”
The boy pulled his phone out of his pocket and read whatever it was telling him. “Okay. Fine! Apparently it’s okay.” The boy watched him warily. “But you have to calm down. You can’t go in there like this. You’ll only get more upset.”
Walter couldn’t imagine being more worked up, more distressed. His heart fired too fast and his bowels shook.
The boy grabbed the file on the desk. “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s your body. Dead and cold on a bed. It’s not pretty.”
Walter nodded, because speech in the wild cataract of feeling had deserted him.
3
The room was dark and it took him a moment to find himself in his body. He’d been in that bright room, the clouds, the pup—that had been just a second ago. He didn’t walk down any gray hallway or pass the nurses’ station.
A blink and he was here, standing in the shadows of his hospital room.
The air was ripe with the pungency of hospital-grade cleaning solution and beneath that, a fecund, sickly odor.
If I’m dead why can I smell this?
“I’m warning you, Mr. Zawislak,” the boy scolded from somewhere behind him. “If you begin to get too emotional we can leave as fast as we got here.”
Walter wasn’t listening.
He spotted the gleam of his glasses on the bedside table and leaned over to grab them.
“There we go—” he murmured as the world became clear again. He turned and found himself looking down at his own face, a death mask against a flat white pillow.
“Oh my God.” He fell back against the IV, sending it rolling across the floor, unfettered by the tubes that had been attached to him. “Oh my sweet Jesus, what kind of dream is this?”
“Mr. Zawislak, this is what you wanted. This was your idea.” The boy shrugged. “I wanted to go to your daughter’s sixth birthday but you insisted…”
Transfixed, Walter couldn’t look away from the gray, gaunt face marked with brilliant red scabs from the nose tubes. This man, this body in the bed looked like him, but a version he had never imagined. Ghostly and monstrous and pathetic all at the same time. Thin white scruff covered his cheeks, the bones of his skull pressed against his skin as if trying to get out.
It was him, and he was old and withered and dead.
It’s true. It’s real. His heart thudded and thumped and he could hear it, feel it in his brain and in his belly. The boy, the odor of death…all of it receded, faded away into the white noise of the inconsequential.
He had seen dead bodies in the war, bloated and bloodied, covered in flies and horror. But this… Walter reached out a finger to touch the waxy white hand lying so still on the top of the sheet. His flesh, his dead flesh, was cold and dry.
He jerked his shaking hand back.
When had he gotten so old? The sickness and loneliness had cost him, taken from him more than he had ever realized. When had the picture he had of himself in his head become so different from this walking skeleton?
Walter, trembling and confused, stood and ran a hand over his cheeks and jaw, felt the flesh and fat of health, of too many of Rosie’s casseroles. He felt like he had thirty years ago, not like the man on the bed who had survived on coffee and packaged egg whites and fake bacon.
And suddenly, like a door banging open, he was glad it was over. Sixty-six years and most of it filled with boredom and drink and an anger that embarrassed him now. Done. A life he had tied himself to with routine and habit. Daily efforts to forget the face of his daughter. Monthly trips to a cold grave that had made him feel forsaken and angry. Taking pills. Watching the news. A burger and iced tea on Sunday at Rudy’s. Fighting, every moment, the desire for scotch and bourbon, hell, a light beer would have felt like salvation. Oatmeal in the morning. Soup from a can at night. Tinkering with the old lawn mower so the boy from down the street could use it to butcher his lawn. Wake up. Go to bed. All of it so that he could die alone in a bed at St. Mike’s.
He laughed, once. A dry and brittle and rusty noise from his gut. “Well,” he said. “You’re right. I’m dead.”
He turned to the boy whose back was to the door. “I appreciate you bringing me here. What…” He laughed again, this one looser, lighter. He was filled with an ease, a welcome lightness, as he cast off what remained of his humanness. “What happens next?”
“Well, let’s go over this list—” The boy pulled his fancy contraption out of his pocket and studied it while the door behind him opened. A nurse walked in, standing in the bright yellow slice of light that was cut out of the dark room. Her face folded into sad, resigned lines.
“He passed away forty minutes ago,” the woman said to someone obscured by the door. “I am so sorry for your loss.”
“We should go,” the boy said, but Walter shot him a quelling look.
Someone was coming to see his dead body. He wanted to know who. Mark? From over at Rudy’s. Maybe Rudy? Rudy might get off his fat ass to come and see him. Lord knows he’d spent enough money there over the years to warrant a deathbed visit. And Walter’s brother, according to the last Christmas card he received, was still alive. Maybe The Prince had come to see him dead and buried.
The door pushed open further and the light changed the room, creating dark corners, a radiant pool o
f golden light and a lot of gray space that was the same color as the hallway he’d been in.
A woman walked in. Small and petite with long curly hair touched with fire from the hallway light. She unwound a scarf from her neck and mumbled a thank-you to the nurse.
Something tugged at Walter, a breathless disbelief.
The woman turned and the light fell across her face. A beautiful face. Lined and serious and flushed from cold or tears. A face remarkably similar to her mother’s.
Walter clapped a hand to his mouth and his eyes burned with sudden hot and painful emotion.
“Jennifer,” he breathed.
“Take as long as you need,” the nurse whispered and squeezed Jennifer’s shoulder. The nurse couldn’t see Jennifer’s face crumple in soundless pain but Walter stood right in front of her. And his daughter’s silent shuddering meltdown knifed him.
“Thank you,” Jennifer said, obviously attempting a normal voice, and the nurse was gone and the room was once again cast into shadows. Agitation rolled off his daughter in waves so palpable even her dead father could feel it.
“Walter?” The boy’s voice was disembodied in the darkness. “Remember, it’s not good for the recently deceased to get too worked up. Takes everything longer to process.”
Walter didn’t listen. When Jennifer turned on the bedside lamp Walter was right beside her. When the tears began to roll off her chin onto his dead fingers, Walter’s hands twitched, his arms and body and skin spasmed with the desperate need to touch her.
“Jenny,” he groaned. “Jenny, what are you doing here?”
He couldn’t take in all the changes the years had made. He had last seen her twenty years ago—a stone pillar of rage and blame. The woman who stood before him, tears dripping off her chin, was beautiful, delicate and fragile around the edges, like gold rubbed thin.
“Jennifer?” The boy appeared at Walter’s shoulder, holding his elaborate phone. He tapped at the screen with his finger. “This is your daughter?” His voice was a high squeak.
Walter nodded, his gaze never leaving her as she stood shaking and sobbing over his dead body.
“Listen, you have to come with me.” The boy put his hands on Walter’s shoulder. “You’re too new, it’s all too fluid. It’s going to hurt. You’re not ready—”
Walter felt an odd chasm open up beneath him. Or was it in him? There was a draw on his body, a suck and flush, a dizzying rip, and he sprang loose from this place and time and fell, or thought he fell, backward and the day—that day—the day Jennifer left lay waiting to catch him.
May 11, 1992
The Zawislak Home
314 North Main Street
Beaverton, Wisconsin
* * *
Walter jerked awake, disoriented and sick. What happened? His stomach did a slimy twist. Where am I? He groaned and put his head in his hands. The rough, worn fabric of his recliner centered him. He’d fallen asleep in his chair. Again.
There was another knock at the door and Walter stumbled to his feet, tripping over a dirty plate and the bottle of bourbon he kept handy for those occasions when nothing but Old Grand-Dad would do.
And those occasions had been one long stretch of nights. He couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t rocked himself to sleep with help from that bottle.
“Hold on,” he croaked. “Just a second.” He tucked in his shirt, a waft of his own sour stink rising up from his body. He slicked back the greasy, unwashed hair dangling into his eyes.
Gotta look good for visitors.
He almost laughed.
Hoping it wasn’t going to be Abby from the church, he eased open the door. She had come last week and he’d made promises of attendance he had no intention of keeping. Rosie had been the churchgoer, not him. Rosie had yearned for some sort of peaceful afterlife. He just wanted some peace in the here and now.
“Abby, if this is about church…”
His daughter stood on the step. It was raining.
Both were a surprise.
“Hey, Dad,” Jennifer said after a long silence. Raindrops spangled her hair, like diamonds or stars in a night sky.
“Why’d you knock?”
She looked down at her hands, fisted and white-knuckled in front of her. “I don’t know.”
He did. He knew. The place seemed like a stranger’s house to him, too. And he lived here. He stepped aside and she walked in, and Walter wished he were a little more drunk so that he wouldn’t burn with embarrassment at the current state of his housekeeping and hygiene.
“I wish you’d let me know you were coming.” He ran a hand over his shirt again, the thin smear of his hair.
“It smells in here, Dad.”
“I…ah…I was just going to…” Her gaze, blue and direct like Rosie’s, dissected him and he shut up, even hung his head like a guilty dog.
“I’ve been calling.” She shrugged out of her raincoat.
“Phone’s broke.”
The phone sat on the little table Rosie bought a million years ago at the church bazaar. It didn’t work because the old phone was in pieces.
He had smashed it after a brief but fiery conversation with a bill collector. But when was that? Yesterday? A month ago?
“I was getting worried,” she said.
There was nothing he could say to that. Not to this woman. This daughter who was like a foreign language. Without Rosie as a translator, he couldn’t understand her silences, couldn’t read the look in her eye and the tone of her voice.
Her teenage years had been a minefield for him; he’d never known which misstep would send their home into explosions and firefights. He had been gone a lot, on the road, and each trip back it had seemed like a different creature greeted him. Never the little girl he remembered. Instead, a woman with a woman’s silences and hidden self. At some point, he’d just stopped trying. He let Rosie navigate their daughter’s troubled waters and he handed out the cash.
She went early to college—seventeen. She got a music scholarship and hightailed it out of Beaverton. And he missed her. His baby. The sweet seven-year-old she’d been. Rosie’s daughter.
“You hungry?” he asked. “I don’t have much, but we could go down to Rudy’s—”
“The bar?”
“They’ve got burgers. We could ask him to do up a tuna melt. You used to love—”
“Dad, Mom’s been gone for almost six months.” She ran a hand across the dining room table and grimaced at the dust. Dust and clutter had affronted Rosie, and she’d waged weekly campaigns against shoes left by the door and dirty laundry hung over bedroom furniture.
The way he lived now would have sent her into a rage of cleaning.
“Have you gone back to work?”
“I’m on a leave of absence,” he lied. He was MIA.
“What about the promotion? Uncle Al—”
“Al said he would hold it. Don’t worry about me.” He tried to laugh, to divert her attention to some other place, away from the regional director’s job that had been given to Ike Broom three weeks ago. That life, his old one, was like a half-forgotten daydream.
Was that him, a salesman? A man with a briefcase and shined-up shoes? His brother-in-law, Al, used to tell him that he had a knack with people. A way with words. Impossible. He was a professional nursemaid, surely. A silent screamer. A drinker. A man paid for his rage and regret with more rage and regret.
It was a full-time occupation being a widower.
“Have you been to a meeting? Have you talked to Barry?”
Walter almost laughed. He was too drunk half the time to drive to the AA meetings. And since all he would get from Barry, his sponsor, was a speech about how this, too, would pass, he didn’t even bother to call. He couldn’t take it, not from a man who’d divorced his wife and cursed her behind her back instead of watching someone lower her coffin into the ground.
This, too, was not going to pass. Ever.
In the end he couldn’t answer his daughter and that was answer
enough.
“What have you been doing?” she finally asked, her tone sharp.
“Umm…well, mostly packing up her clothes and putting things in order.” The truth was just so glaringly obvious that even he, drunk and rotting, could see it.
A lie seemed in order. Just the thing.
Jennifer turned and headed for their bedroom, through the kitchen and up the stairs. Walter followed, stumbling into a chair and knocking the stacks of sympathy cards and junk mail off the table.
Rosie’s clothes covered the bed, unpacked. He had tried, but the clothes still carried her scent and the vague shape of her body in the elbows of sweaters and knees of pants. Her dirty socks, lifeless and pale on the floor, still looked like her feet and he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t box them up to give to strangers. Jennifer scowled and Walter felt a scowl build in him. A headache and an anger.
“You’ve been drinking.” Her voice was icy, but her fingers traced the lace edge of one of Rosie’s slips. It was a pale blue one with blond lace that she’d bought before she got sick. “How long since you’ve eaten anything?”
“I eat.”
“You’re lying.”
Well, there wasn’t much to say about that.
“What would Mom say?” she whispered, and his blood went still.
“She’s dead.”
Jennifer laughed. “Right. I was there, Dad.” She was angry and the unsaid thing between them hovered at the ends of their tongues.
I’m sorry, he thought, and if he could have screamed it, he would have. But it wouldn’t have done any good. There were too many things to be sorry for. Too many people who needed amends.
The back of his head ached and he thought about that bourbon by his chair.
“She would hate that you were drinking again.”
“She’s dead.” His words and vision were sloppy.
God, he wanted a drink. Needed a drink. Jennifer didn’t understand, had never understood. He’d always failed in her eyes, even when she was young. Nothing about him pleased her.
Damn you, he thought and hated himself. Hated her. Hated Rosie for leaving them alone.
A Day In the Death of Walter Zawislak Page 2