What We All Want

by Michelle Berry

  Becka pulled Thomas out of his bedroom and he remembers being cold in the darkness of the hallway, shivering in his pyjamas. He could hear Hilary sighing under her covers across the hall, almost snoring. He could hear Billy breathing heavily. Everything seemed to stand still and thus become magnified. Sounds echoed. His footsteps on the floor. Becka’s shuffling, slipping walk.

  “I don’t really want to get up. It’s cold out here.”

  A roller fell out of Becka’s hair and the noise was like the pop of a BB gun. She giggled.

  “Let go of my hand. I want to go back to bed.”

  “Come on. Let’s dance.” Becka lightly tugged Thomas down the stairs into the living room and she turned on the radio and began to dance. “Please.” Thomas watched. He hugged himself to keep warm in his flannel super-hero pyjamas. Becka danced a waltz, grabbed a doll and pretended to lead. “No one ever dances with me any more.”

  “You’re crazy,” he remembers suddenly shouting. “You’re stupid and crazy. Leave me alone.”

  Becka stopped dancing and looked at him. “Why won’t you dance with me?” she asked.

  But Thomas heard laughter—he felt as if people were always laughing behind his back. He heard it in his ears. All the time.

  She extended her hand for Thomas.

  Thomas ran out of the room, up to his bedroom, left her there, alone, by herself, staring at the doll in her arms.

  He always left her. Just turned and ran away.

  Why wouldn’t he dance with her?

  Now, still in his wet clothes, Thomas closes his eyes as he lies on his old bed surrounded by his childhood. He is so ashamed of himself, angry at the way he treated her.

  And outside, in the cold, dark rain, Hilary begins to dig her mother’s grave. Tess is right. Cremation isn’t something Hilary would want either. Burning her body. The thought of hot fire on her mother’s cold skin, bubbling it, melting it, makes her weak at the knees. At first Hilary uses a small garden trowel to dig the hole but the ground is too hard. Then she finds a shovel at the side of the house, half under the porch. The shovel is covered with spider-webs and dead gnats. Hilary grabs hold of it and, in her father’s muddy running shoes, she marches with it out into the black garden and continues to dig.

  She is angry because she couldn’t find the Madonna’s face. She spent the afternoon putting the puzzle together and she looked everywhere for the last couple of pieces that would complete the face. It infuriated her. She couldn’t find the pieces. She wonders if her mother hid them somewhere.

  The rain jets down around her, washes through her hair and eyes. Hilary can’t tell if she’s crying or if it’s just rain on her face. The water stings the small cuts she made on her cheeks Hilary digs at the surface of the ground until her muscles ache, feel stretched and raw, until her hands are blistered. She barely makes a dent in the soil and what she does happen to move turns quickly to mud and the mud fills the small hole she has created. Hilary digs out the muddy water, only to see more water fill the spot.

  She has lost her mother.

  All she wants is to get her mother buried good and deep somewhere as close to home as possible. All she wants is peace of mind, knowing she did the right thing.

  Hilary stops digging and looks up at the dark sky and thick clouds. There is an intense ache in her gut, a feeling of emotional tenseness, every nerve on end. She drops the shovel and holds her stomach, she caresses just under her belly button. She feels the emptiness, the flatness.

  Hilary picks up the shovel and digs again.

  The Madonna lies faceless on the kitchen table.

  Finally Hilary stops digging and looks down into the small, muddy hole. Her head feels thick with emotion, tight, awkward. It feels too big for her shoulders, for her neck. Hilary imagines her neck will break with the strain of holding her head up and so she lies sideways on the muddy ground and rests her ear to it, listens to the ping of the rain falling down, listens to the silence of a world under water.

  Who is going to kiss her good night? Who is going to say “I love you”? Who will Hilary hold in her arms? The sudden knowledge that no one will touch her again makes Hilary’s skin feel burned and raw. She gasps.

  Thomas gets up from his bed. He wanders down the stairs, looking for Hilary. He sees her outside in the rain, lying in the mud. Thomas blinks his eyes. He opens the door and calls out quietly, so the neighbours won’t hear, “Hilary, come in.”

  Hilary starts and then gets up quickly, shaking the rain out of her hair like a dog. She walks towards Thomas, her eyes swollen and red.

  “What the hell are you doing out there? You’ll catch pneumonia.”

  Thomas leads Hilary to the bathroom where she washes her hands and face and tries to comb the mud out of her hair. She wraps her hair in a towel like a turban and then she takes off her muddy clothes and puts on her mother’s old bathrobe.

  “What were you doing out there?” Thomas asks. He is sitting at the kitchen table when she comes into the room. “What’s going on, Hilary? You’ve scratched your face.”

  Hilary drinks water from the sink using a soup can that is sitting on the counter, taking care not to cut her mouth. Hilary feels inside the pocket of the bathrobe and finds several of her mother’s used Kleenexes. She fingers them. They are hard and dry. Crusted. The rain has stopped outside.

  “Hilary.”

  “What?”

  “What were you doing in the backyard? What were you ­digging?”

  Hilary sneezes. “I think I’ve got a cold now.”

  “Of course you do. What were you digging?”

  “I was just digging.” Hilary looks out the kitchen window at the muddy backyard. Her small hole is filling up with mud and water. “What were you digging for?”

  “For?”

  “Hilary.”

  “For Mother.”

  Thomas pauses. He takes a deep breath. “Do you want to see a doctor?”

  “Maybe I should,” Hilary says. “You’re right. It might be pneumonia.” Hilary coughs a little and then looks at her hands. “Don’t you cough up blood with pneumonia? I’m not coughing up blood.”

  “I’m not talking about that. Do you want to see someone? Talk to someone professional?”

  “Professional? I’m talking to you, Thomas. Don’t be silly.” Thomas has a headache.

  “Listen to me, Thomas,” Hilary says.

  Thomas nods.

  “I want to bury Mother in the backyard. Right over there. I think that that is the best place for her. In her garden.”

  “But Billy and Tess don’t want to cremate her.”

  “No, in a casket. Bury her body.”

  Thomas stands up quickly. Then he smiles. This is a joke, he thinks. He laughs.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Hilary, that’s crazy. It’s illegal, for one thing.You can’t bury a body in a backyard in the suburbs.You just can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s the law.”

  “No one has to know.”

  “No, Hilary.”

  “Thomas.”

  “No.”

  Thomas remembers Becka in the garden. Cigarettes dangling from her lips or fingers, hair pulled back in a knot. He remembers her straw, floppy hat, the garden blooming behind her. He pictures that dead body he saw at the funeral home lying there on the grass and then he sees it melt down into the ground.

  “Can’t you see that it’s the only place?” Hilary says. “You didn’t come back to say goodbye, Thomas. You owe her something. Bury her in the right place.”

  “Don’t give me that. You can’t guilt me into doing something illegal.”

  Hilary says,”Can’t you understand? I want to do something that will ease my heart.”

  Thomas takes the bottle of Scotch he bought off the shelf over the kitchen sink. He unscrews the cap and pours himself a drink. “Do you want one?”

  Hilary shakes her head.

  “Just suppose we could do it,�
� Thomas says. “Suppose that it was legal. How would we sell the house then? You’d have to live here forever.” Thomas pauses. “That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t want to move.”

  “I didn’t even think about that,” Hilary says. “But yes, that’s an advantage. I could take care of her here. I could grow flowers for her.”

  “This is morbid, Hilary.”

  “I’ll do it by myself then. There’s nothing you can do. You can’t stop me.”

  Thomas sees Hilary as a girl, standing on a stool to fix their dinner, carrying a tray up to their mother as she lay in bed mourning the loss of their father. Once Hilary singed her eyebrows and eyelashes on the stove. Once she severely burned her palm on a casserole pan.

  It would be easier to agree with Hilary. In the dark of the night it seems so simple, really. They could bury Becka in the backyard, quickly and quietly, and Hilary could stay living in the house and Thomas could go home and life would go on. It would be as if nothing had happened, as if no one was missing from the picture. Hilary would still be living with Becka. Death didn’t happen. Thomas wouldn’t have to say goodbye.

  In her bathrobe, her hair up in a turban, Hilary looks a bit like Becka. Thomas feels overwhelmed. She needed so much out of him that he couldn’t give to her. Thomas sits down.

  Hilary leans towards Thomas. “I’ll do it on my own,” she whispers. Then she takes Thomas’s head in her hands and pulls him close to her chest. She strokes his hair. “There, there, Thomas. Everything will be fine.You’ll see.”

  7. The Boat

  Billy is sitting at the kitchen table trying to remember some of the funny times in his life. Times where he almost pissed his pants he laughed so hard.

  When was the last time he really laughed?

  It is Saturday, just before dinner. He’s had quite a few beers. Tess and Sue have been out all day. Separately. No note from Tess and his pregnant daughter skipped past him this morning and rushed out the door into the rain wearing something mildly see-through, something tight. Billy watched her light a cigarette at the corner juggling her umbrella and the lighter. He watched the thickness of her waist. He felt like crying. So now he tries to laugh but it is forced and controlled.

  He got fired from both his jobs for showing up drunk. What’s there to laugh at? Old man Paterson called him into the back of the photo shop, showed him the negatives he destroyed, left too long in the machine, showed him the empty beer bottles he found in Billy’s desk drawers, showed him the list of financial losses Billy has caused the store over the past ten years. Paterson’s face went red, he was embarrassed. Billy stood there smiling because he didn’t know what else to do. And then Billy showed up at his night security job at the parking lot and Fred smelled his breath and said that was one time too many.

  Billy puts his head down on the cool table and pretends that he is anywhere but in his kitchen, with a fat wife (obese, really —she’s getting so heavy), a pregnant high school dropout teenage daughter, and no jobs. God, Christmas is just around the corner. The house is mortgaged up to the rafters. And he has to bury his dead mother.

  His mother married his father just because she was pregnant with Thomas and look how her life turned out. And Billy married Tess because she was pregnant with Sue. Now, seventeen years later, he can’t laugh when he wants to and, to make matters worse, he’s thinking more about that woman at the golf course than he’s thinking about his wife. And his goddamn daughter, with her black hair and painted face, is making his heart collapse. Sometimes he pictures his heart deflating like a slow-leaking balloon.

  Tess comes home, puts some groceries in the fridge, pats Billy on the head, and moves into the living room to sit in front of the TV with a bag of potato chips and a large bottle of Coke. She doesn’t tell him where she has been. He doesn’t ask. Tess is trying to summon up enough energy to make dinner. She watches TV in the gloom, the outside dark from rain clouds. Billy stands in the doorway and watches Tess watch TV. He watches her mouth open and close, watches her chew and swallow. He sits down beside her.

  “Tess,” Billy says.

  “What?”

  “Maybe you should lay off those chips.”

  Tess turns to Billy. She looks at him. “Don’t you tell me to stop eating.”

  “I just don’t want you to get sick.” He rubs his eyes. He can hear the buzz in his head getting louder.

  “Sick? Don’t you mean fat? Fatter?”

  “It’s not good to be so big.” Billy tastes his tongue. It is dry and pasty. Tess turns back to the TV.

  “You used to love my body.”

  She will eat until she blows up, she thinks. Until she explodes all over the living room. She feels like crying, like pounding her fists on the floor, like biting her tongue until it bleeds.

  “You hate me because I’m fat.”

  “What?” Billy shakes his cloudy head. “Hate you? I don’t hate you.”

  “You haven’t slept with me for ages, Billy. You hardly talk to me any more.You just go off and work and drink all the time. You don’t talk to me or Sue and Sue never stops yelling at me.” Tess begins to cry. She puts her potato chip bag on the floor and places her head in her salty, greasy hands. “Oh God. I used to be thin.”

  Billy looks at the floor, at the bag of chips. He looks at his wife. He stands up and goes into the kitchen. He opens a beer, walks back into the living room and hands the beer to Tess. “Do you want a sip?” he asks. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  “Oh, God, Billy. You drink so much.”

  Billy puts the beer up to his lips. “It’s just beer.”

  “You’re always drunk.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Billy suddenly shouts. “I’m never drunk.”

  “You drink too much and I eat too much,” Tess shouts back. She picks up the potato chip bag and continues to eat. She wipes her tears on her sleeves and stares at the TV.

  Sue slams the front door. She shakes out her umbrella. “Christ,” she says. “I could hear you two fighting from outside.”

  “We aren’t fighting,” Billy says. He looks at his daughter. Her face and neck are coated in white makeup and her eyes are lined with black pencil. Billy shakes his head. “What is that on your face? You look horrible,” he says. “You look like you’re dead.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Don’t talk to your father like that.”

  “Why would you want to look dead all the time? It will happen soon enough.”

  “Billy,” Tess says. “Don’t say that.”

  “He shouldn’t talk to me like that, Mom.”

  Billy looks at Sue’s belly. He can see a small bulge there. A baby growing inside. That just knocks him out. It terrifies him. Billy remembers the day Sue came out of Tess like it was yesterday. He remembers that wet thing, bloody and howling. He held her in his hands, the cord limp and detached, and he whispered into the air around her wet head, “You are so beautiful, my God, you are so beautiful.” He couldn’t stop saying it, over and over.

  And now Billy curses himself for it. It’s all his fault, he knows. If he’d only called her something other than “beautiful,” if he’d only put notions of intelligence in her little mind instead of vanity, if he’d only known what she would do with her life, even called her “sweet” or “cute,” because cute and sweet can be so many things that “beautiful” cannot be. Like not pregnant. Cute can be smart and nice but not pregnant. Beautiful is pregnant. Seventeen and beautiful and pregnant.

  Billy stands up. He stumbles, almost dropping his beer.

  Sue says, “You’re a drunk Jesus fucking Christ. All you do is drink.”

  And Billy raises his hand above her. “Don’t you swear at me.” He wants to slam his hand into her nose ring, break a bone, but a noise from the couch stops him. Tess mews like a cat. She makes a tiny noise that brings him back to reality. He lowers his hand. Sue stands beside him, glaring.

  “Don’t you hit me,” she says. Her eyes are wide in their ­sockets. Bl
ack lines drawn in pencil around her eyes. White face, dipped in powder. Billy is looking the Grim Reaper in the face. He turns awkwardly, almost stumbling. Suddenly his house is much too small. He heads towards the closet in the hall and fumbles for his coat. “Don’t you ever hit me. If you ever hit me, I swear I’ll get you charged.”

  “Don’t leave,” Tess says. “Don’t leave like this.”

  “Like what?” Sue says. “Drunk? If you wait until he’s sober, he’ll never leave the house. Just let him go. He’s being an asshole.”

  “Sue, don’t talk to him like that. Don’t say those things.”

  Billy takes his coat off the hanger, drops the hanger to the floor with a loud clatter, bends to pick it up.

  “Don’t drive, Billy” Tess says. “You’ve been drinking. It’s raining” She tries to rise from the couch but her weight keeps her in place. It’s like there’s a magnet holding her down. It would take all of the energy she has in her body to get up and right now she has no energy left inside of her.

  “I’m just going out for a minute. I’m just going out,” Billy mumbles. He slams the front door behind him and slides down the wet steps to the car.

  Inside, Sue studies her reflection in the hall mirror. “I don’t look dead,” she says. She rubs at the lines around her eyes, smudges them, makes them thicker. “I look good. A little fat. This damn baby.”

  Tess stays on the couch, humped over her potato chip bag. She stares at the TV. Please don’t let him die, she thinks. Please let him be safe. Sue sits down beside her mother and picks a potato chip out of the bag. She holds it up and studies it. Then she licks it. “These are greasy,” she says. “I can only have one.”

  Billy drives slowly, his hands clutching the wheel, peering out the front window between the wipers, to Coco’s, the little bar in the strip mall closest to his house. There are women and men on the dance floor and the tables are packed but the bar stools are free and so Billy plops down upon one and orders a beer. He watches the dancers and he rubs at the label on his beer. He peels it off. He thinks about how much money he has left, he tries to figure out what he’s going to do with his life, but all he comes up with is a big white wall. He drinks his beer.