He waited for me to speak, but it was all that I could do to hold myself upright in front of him. Another move and he might notice everything wrong with me, and another word and he would realize who I had become.
“You’ve ... you’ve been here?” he asked.
“Sorry?”
“In the house?” He searched my face for a moment before determining that Karl had been wrong in his assumption that I had gone to the bridge. “No, of course you have. Only ... I hadn’t seen you. Have you seen the casket yet?”
I sucked my cheeks in as I shook my head. He nodded.
“Well, why don’t we go down now? They’ll be bringing it over to the funeral home soon, so this will be your last chance ...”
He took my shoulder and steered me from the room before I could tell him that I didn’t want to go: the image of her was too muddled already. Another damaged one would take up too much space and push the pleasant ones out of my mind. But he led me down the stairs and over to the living room before I could pull myself from my reverie, and the waning crowd with unknown faces parted to let us through.
The casket lay open at the back of the room. As my legs weakened, my father’s firm hand on my shoulder pushed me forward towards it instead. My eyes rose very slowly up over the shined black exterior and across the soft white lining before I found her arm, still and folded up over her chest, and then finally moved to look at her face. For a moment I faltered in incomprehension: she looked so beautiful.
The pale, hollowed face was soft and glowing again, the dull hair that had grown matted was now golden and lightly wavy as it fell upon her shoulders, and the bones that had protruded from thin skin were no longer visible. She looked so healthy and well in death that I thought that if I were to reach forward and peel open her eyelid, the irises would be sea-green again and flecked with gentle light. A feeling like a blunt object slammed against my stomach as I looked at her. She looked more alive than she had in years.
And I knew that it was just makeup and prosthetics that had been used to manipulate her frail appearance, and yet I couldn’t get the twisting sensation in my gut to stop. I wanted to reach forward and shake her until she opened her eyes and smiled at me, but the knowledge that she was unwakeable stinging behind my eyes and burning in my throat prevented me from doing so.
“Mr. Lund? Sorry, did you need another moment?”
The staff from the funeral home had come to take her away. My father pulled me back from the casket so that they could close it, and I dug my eyes into her face as I tried to burn the image into my skull. I continued to stare at the black case as they wheeled it from the room, and the want for them to bring it back again and open it up to reveal that it had all been a mistake took hold of me in a childish hope that I couldn’t let go of.
The door shut behind them and she was gone. My father had left my side to show the remaining guests out; their pleasantries flittered through the walls, but couldn’t mask the unmistakable reserve that had come over the house. I listened hard through it, searching for any sign of life within the walls, but it was as though the entire house had died along with its last resident. I strained to hear the sound of piano music, but for once it had not resumed. Though it had always haunted me, it was unbearably empty without it. It was unbearably empty without her.
I shut my eyes on the place where the casket had lain and tried to picture something other than the emptiness it had left behind. The house grew quieter and quieter as more people flitted through the front door, and the chill from the outside came over the furniture and seeped into my skin. I wished that it would burn the flesh off and leave me with nothing but bones so that I could disintegrate like she would, feet beneath the earth and alone in the frozen, dark ground.
“Enim?”
My father’s question was somewhere outside of my thoughts, and I didn’t process that he was beside me again until he reached up to take my shoulders. The touch startled me and I flinched without meaning to. He gave me a strange look with his hand still poised in the air.
“What’s wrong?”
He was eyeing me with such incomprehension that I felt myself shrink away from his gaze. My head jerked to the side and my limbs shook, but I forced myself to reply, “Nothing.”
“You’re not upset, are you?” he asked. “Enim, we knew that this day would come. She held on for longer than any of us imagined ... It’s good that she’s not suffering anymore.”
“No, I know.”
I nodded in an attempt to salvage my reaction, but he could hardly believe me. I wished that I could tie myself up inside tightly enough to ensure that I would never come undone, but the knot in my stomach was still squirming and threatening to unravel.
“Then what’s wrong?”
There were a thousand things, but they had all become so tangled in my mind that it was hard to pick the one that was making me shake so badly. I wished that he would look away from me so that I could compose myself, but his eyes were digging further and further into my façade.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
“Tell you what?”
“What she was sick with.”
His befuddled expression hardened. Straightening his shoulders, he put his hands into his pockets as he looked down at me.
“What are you talking about?”
“She wasn’t just depressed, she was – you know. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Who told you that?”
I shook my head; I couldn’t put the blame on Beringer.
“Someone told you, Enim – who was it?”
“No one. I ... I overheard it.”
My father sighed irritably and ran a hand through his hair.
“Jesus, this is – this is why I didn’t want you to know,” he said. “I knew you’d take it badly.”
“I’m not – I just wanted to know why no one told me.”
“Because it doesn’t matter, Enim. It’s over: what happened happened. Let’s not talk about it anymore.”
“But –”
“Let’s not talk about it anymore, Enim.”
His tone rose and shook the room. In the silence that followed, footsteps creaked near the doorway. Karl was standing just outside in the hall.
My father turned and strode away from me. As he reached Karl, he turned to him with a withering glare but brushed past him wordlessly. It wasn’t lost on either of them who I had alluded to overhearing the information from.
He left shortly afterwards under the pretense of checking into his hotel before he lost the reservation; the house was evidently too small to fit the three of us. When he was gone, I slowly made my way up the stairs. At the top I paused and looked at the guestroom door. It was still shut. Had I not known any better, I might have thought that she was still behind it. It felt as though she was. It felt as though the world hadn’t changed at all, and that the houseful of mourners had been mistaken. Because she couldn’t be gone – not yet. There were still things that we had to say to one another, and riddles we had to solve.
I crossed the hall and twisted the doorknob with cold fingers. When the door broke open, I scanned over the floorboards and walls: the machines that had whirred and beeped so continuously had been cleared away, and the bed where she had laid was stripped down to a bare mattress. As I searched the room again, my eyes pooled over each inch of floor and into every corner, certain that I would find her somewhere else instead, sitting and waiting for me to find her. But she wasn’t there. She was gone.
Ch. 18
I heard a car pull into the driveway the next morning but didn’t move from my bed. The sun scattered light over the room through the half-closed curtains and patterned the walls with shapeless streaks. I shut my eyes and longed to fall back asleep so that the day would revert back into nonexistence again, but the world refused to move on without me.
“Enim, get dressed. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
My father opened and closed the door so swiftly that only his voice entere
d the room. I dragged my eyes over to the door too slowly to catch sight of him. My back was stiff from lying in place, and my arms were crossed over my chest as though I, too, would be buried in the ground that day. But though the idea of being shut inside the darkness and made to sleep forever was welcoming, I didn’t deserve the peacefulness that she would soon have.
“Enim – what are you doing? I told you to get dressed.”
He stepped into the room several minutes later at the sight of me still in bed. From the corner of my eye, I could see the pitch-black of his suit hidden beneath his wool overcoat. He leaned over me questioningly.
“Are you tired? Get up.”
“I don’t feel right.”
“Well, that’s hardly unfathomable. Come and have breakfast and we’ll go. You’ll feel better when this is all over.”
I slowly sat up and leaned my arms against my knees. My shoulders shook to keep my head upright.
“No, I ... I don’t feel right about this. About going.”
“It’s your mother’s funeral, Enim. You have to go.”
“But I – I don’t feel right. I don’t want to.”
As his dark eyes fixed on my face, I lowered it to my hands. His expression was both unreadable and unfavorable.
“Enim, this isn’t a choice. I know that this isn’t easy, but you can’t just skip it because you’re upset.”
“But I can’t – I don’t want to go.”
My voice cracked as I spoke, and I turned my head to the wall to hide my face more fully. He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t watch her be lowered into the ground: he didn’t know that I had put her there.
“Enim, please don’t be difficult. Put your suit on.”
“I can’t. I can’t go.”
“Put your suit on. I won’t ask you again.”
He pulled away to go to the door. With his back to me, I could finally look over at him.
“Please, Dad,” I said. “Don’t ... don’t make me go.”
“Enim,” he sighed, “don’t. Don’t be difficult – not right now. Not today. I can’t deal with it.”
“But I can’t –”
“You can. You can go, and you will go!” He slammed his hand against the doorframe as he spoke, enunciating the words with each blow. “Now get up and put your suit on, and come downstairs!”
The anger radiated off of him and boiled onto the floor, and had my feet not been pulled up on the bed it surely would have scorched them as well. But for once his frustration with me wasn’t enough to move me from my spot, if only because it didn’t compare to the resentment I felt at myself for what I had done.
I shook my head.
“No.”
He stared at me in astonishment for a long moment before turning and storming down the hall. His shoes clattered on the stairs as he descended them, and his voice broke through the house angrily as he called to Karl.
“Get him up – I can’t deal with him.”
“What?”
“Get him up, dressed, and over to the church. I won’t be late to my own wife’s funeral.”
The front door slammed before Karl could say anything more. In the silence that followed the shaking hinges and falling snow from the roof, there was the slightest of creaks on the floor below as Karl shifted his weight in uncertainty.
He waited several minutes before coming up to find me. As he took in the sight of me curled up on the mattress, still in my t-shirt and pajama pants, he let out a breath that he seemed to have been holding for a long time.
“Enim ...”
“I can’t go.”
He looked at me closely.
“Alright.”
He left before I realized what he has said, and even when his footsteps disappeared down the stairs I wasn’t certain of the reprieve. I waited for him to reappear to argue or plead with me to go, but he didn’t return. The numbers on the clock flitted through the hour and onto the next, and finally I descended the stairs and stood in the empty hallway. The funeral would be well under way by then, and I wasn’t there.
I moved through the house quietly. Now that it was empty, the feeling of my mother’s absence was even more apparent. The beeping that didn’t sound was just as wrecking as the emptiness of the guestroom, and the piano pushed up in the corner of the living room left a soreness in my chest. I sat down on the bench and stared at the keys. They were covered in dust, just as she would soon be.
Something creaked behind me and I half-turned my head to find Karl standing in the doorframe. Though he was still in his dark suit, he had taken the jacket and tie off.
“You’re not at the funeral?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He stepped further into the room so that he was halfway between me and the door. It wasn’t lost on him how furious my father would be at our absences.
“I didn’t want you to be here alone.”
I looked back down at the piano keys. His fear that I would attempt to kill myself again seemed to have overridden the one of his older brother’s reaction. But even if I had brought another bottle of medication from the stash beneath my mattress, I wouldn’t have taken it. My mother had gone someplace where I couldn’t catch up to her, and what I had done was something I could never escape from.
“I wasn’t going to kill myself, Karl.”
“I know.” He put his hands into his pockets and stared across the dark room at the window. The white winter light was too harsh for the day, and the curtains had been pulled shut to block it out. “But I didn’t want you to be alone.”
I nodded without a proper response. I thought I might have thanked him, but the words were heavy in the base of my throat and I couldn’t lift them up to my tongue. I waited for a long time for him to leave again, but he was rooted in his spot behind me.
“I could ... I could call Beringer, if you’d like. So you have someone to talk to.”
“No.” I stared down at the keys as another wave of silence pushed between us; with just a movement from my hand, and the house would no longer be so silent. “Don’t call him. What you said was true: he only listens to me because he’s paid to.”
Karl’s troubled sigh sank into the air as he recalled telling me as much, but he didn’t bother to negate the statement. A hollowness seemed to have burrowed around my heart at the thought that it was true.
After a lengthy pause, he let out another heavy breath. I turned toward him, but from the piano bench I could only see the blurred outline of his form from the corner of my eye.
“You were right, too,” he said.
“About what?”
“What you said over Christmas. You were right – it was my fault that she jumped.” He seemed to chew the insides of his mouth as he stood there, and he teetered a bit as though he might blow over if I so much as touched him. “And I – I’m sorry, Enim. I’m – I’m so sorry.”
My breathing wouldn’t come. I had waited so long for someone else to admit to the blame that had been crushing me, but now that he had I felt no lighter. We were harboring two very separate streams of guilt – opposite in our responsibility just as we were opposite in everything else – and it pushed between us without allowing either of us any relief.
And though I stared at his broken expression and I knew what my mother had meant to him, it wasn’t enough to admit my own blame out loud. The words wouldn’t come, just as they never would come, and my secret was lost within me.
“Beringer told me,” I said.
“What?”
“About the schizophrenia. I asked him, and he told me. I didn’t overhear it.”
He nodded. Perhaps he had already assumed as much.
“Well, he ... I guess it’s best that you know.”
“Did she ever tell you?”
“That she had it?” Karl asked. “No. I don’t think she believed it herself. Or maybe she did, but she just didn’t want me to know.”
“No, I meant ... Did she ever tell you about the riddle?�
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“From Turandot?”
I nodded, and he mirrored the action with a clouded expression.
“Do you ever think about ... how it would have ended?”
He sighed as he took in my question and ran his hand through his light hair. The smile that came to his face was more of a grimace, and the mention of the opera brought a familiar pain to his eyes.
“I’ve thought about it.”
“What do you think would’ve happened?”
“After the prince tells Turandot to guess his name, and she threatens to kill everyone to find out what it is?” he said. As I was nodding, he added, “And the servant girl kills herself to save his secret?”
He took a step closer and returned his hands to his pockets. In the proximity and without the usual argument to distract us, I was aware that with his light hair and blue eyes he looked just as I would in twenty-five years. But with a strange sadness, I wondered if I would ever see myself as he was then.
“I think ... I think that the prince realized that he had made a mistake, and that he had fallen in love with the wrong person, but that it was too late,” he said quietly. His tone was still as shaken as it had been when he had called me to tell me the news. “But ... but the story couldn’t have gone any further with that, so it can’t be right.”
I turned back to the piano. My palms were moist with sweat, and I rubbed them against my pants to dry them.
“Did you ever tell her that?” I asked.
“No; I didn’t realize it until it was too late.” The ground creaked beneath him again as he took a step closer, and despite the closeness his low voice seemed very far away. “Don’t haunt yourself with the answer, Enim. There is none.”
But there was. She had found it before she had gone, and if I had reached out to stop her then I would have known it, too. And we wouldn’t have been there in the cold, empty house at that moment: we would’ve been on a beach somewhere beneath the warm sun, a thousand miles away from the cold, and the snow, and from death. She would be all right, and I would be all right, and we would think no more of it.
I lifted my hands above the keys and held them there for a long, drawing moment. She had taught the song to me so long ago, and it felt both distant and close all at once. I let my hands drop and play the aria in a broken lamentation, and the notes rose up incorrectly only because the piano was out of tune, for I remembered it perfectly. And I remembered her perfectly, too, and she wasn’t at all what they said she was. At least not to me.
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 30