What We All Want

by Michelle Berry

  “Yeah, sure.” Billy really has to pee. He can’t concentrate. “So, is there any chance of getting a job here?”

  Grace turns to look at Billy. She gets out of the car.

  Billy sits in the car and watches Grace walk back into the clubhouse. He should consider himself lucky, he thinks, lucky that she’s not chasing him. Imagine if she came looking for him and Tess found out about everything. Billy shakes his head. He opens his fly. He takes an empty beer bottle and he aims with his penis and tries to pee straight into the bottle. He fills the bottle quickly but can’t stop the flow from coming. He pisses all over his pants and the car. The odour permeates the air. Billy feels sick. He feels as if he’s fallen from a great height, and that he’s getting awfully close to hell.

  It is evening and the house is fairly clean. Jonathan can’t convince Hilary to get rid of any of the preserves although he does manage to better organize them. He carries the preserves in the linen closet down to the basement. He puts the pickles together, the jams side by side. After he has moved the jars he tries to get rid of the mould on the walls in the basement. He scrubs but the job is too big. He organizes the dolls into some sort of haphazard pattern, the newer ones in the living room, the older ones in the other rooms—sitting and standing on shelves and beds and tabletops. He is glad to be finished with the dolls as several of them, when moved, say things like “Mama” and move their eyes independently. Jonathan finds them unnerving. In Becka’s room he cleans up the broken glass under her bed and straightens everything in the room, throwing out the bottles of pills and needles and other medicines.

  Hilary follows Jonathan around. She follows him like a lost puppy. If she had a tail, Jonathan is sure it would be wagging. When Thomas, who has been out grocery shopping, comes back, Jonathan is pleased to see him. He wondered briefly if Thomas had deserted him here and if Hilary, this strange sister, would somehow keep him locked up in her world of dolls, dust, and preserves.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Shopping.”

  “I found her eyes,” Hilary says.

  Thomas looks at Jonathan. Jonathan shrugs. Thomas takes the bags into the kitchen.

  “The Madonna’s eyes. The puzzle. I found it resting on a preserve jar while Jonathan was vacuuming the basement.”

  Thomas looks at Jonathan. “You vacuumed the basement?”

  Jonathan shrugs again. “I even tried to clean the mould.”

  “Lucky me,” Hilary says. She leads Thomas to her puzzle in the dining room and there Thomas sees the strangest pair of eyes he has ever seen looking back at him. They are attached to a bit of the forehead and a touch of hair. The eyes are watchful, uneasy, not quite real. The eyes remind him of something but he doesn’t know what.

  “Now I just need the piece with half of the nose on it and the mouth piece with the chin,” Hilary says.

  “The house looks incredible,” Thomas says.

  “I told you we had the pieces for the face,” Hilary says. Jonathan shrugs. “There’s only so much a person can do. She won’t let me get rid of anything.”

  “No, it’s clean. It’s so much cleaner. The basement?”

  Jonathan smiles. “It’s still pretty gross down there.You’ll have to paint over the mould, I guess. Hide it.”

  “Jonathan’s a saint,” Hilary says and she means it. She really means it. “I don’t know which one, but he is definitely a saint.”

  There are footsteps on the front porch and then the door rattles open and Billy walks in. He is swaying. He is wet. He smells like piss.

  “Christ,” Thomas says. “What happened to you?”

  “Nothing. Who’s this?” Billy asks. He smacks Jonathan on the shoulder.

  “A friend,” Thomas says. “Jonathan, this is Billy, my brother. God, you stink. You smell like piss.”

  “Hello,” Jonathan says. He puts his hand out to shake Billy’s hand but Billy looks away.

  Billy says, “A friend from the Caribbean. The house looks different somehow. Why’s it look different?”

  Jonathan’s been cleaning,” Hilary says. “Now we have to dig the grave.”

  “Jonathan is not from the Caribbean,” Thomas says.

  “Dig the what?” Billy says. “Oh Jesus,” he laughs. “Dick Mortimer told me.You’re joking, aren’t you?”

  “Why do you smell like piss?” Thomas asks.

  “It’s getting late,” Jonathan says. “Shouldn’t we start on that tomorrow?”

  “No,” Hilary says. “We have to start tonight. It’s going to snow tomorrow. I can feel it in my ankle.”

  “In your ankle?”

  “You’ve got to be joking,” Billy says. “You aren’t burying my mother in the backyard. How the hell will we sell the house if there’s a dead body in the backyard?”

  “Billy, go take a shower. Clean yourself up. You can borrow some of my clothes.”

  “Fuck,” Billy says. “I forgot to go back and visit Tess. What time is it? I should go now” He looks at his watch.

  “You can’t go there like this, Billy,” Thomas says. “Take a shower. Or lie down. Why don’t you lie down on the couch.”

  “Why?”

  “Not until he showers,” Jonathan says. “We just cleaned.” “Just do it.”

  Thomas takes Billy’s arm and leads him into the living room. Billy stumbles on the rocks, knocking them around, twisting his ankle slightly. But he doesn’t feel the pain. Thomas puts a blanket under Billy and Billy lies down on it.

  “Do you ever think about him, Thomas?” Billy says.

  “Who?”

  “Dad?”

  Thomas doesn’t say anything

  “Because I do. I sometimes think about him a lot.” Billy rests his head and closes his eyes. “I almost hit an old man on the road and I thought about Dad coming to watch my baseball games. Just like that.”

  “He should have showered first,” Jonathan says.

  Hilary leans down and straightens her rocks, puts them back in place. “He smells horrible.”

  “We’ll get the blanket dry cleaned,” Thomas says. He turns to Jonathan. “I’m sorry about this.”

  Jonathan smiles. “I’ve been black all my life. I’m used to it.” Hilary says, “I think you’re beautiful.” She says it quietly, testing it on her tongue.

  Jonathan takes her hand. “I think you’re beautiful too.”

  “Really?”

  Thomas is staring at Billy’s sleeping figure.

  “We need shovels,” Hilary says. “There are several of them in the shed out back.”

  When, Thomas thinks, rubbing his eyes, did life get so complicated? He wants to go home with Jonathan. He wants to go to work and design buildings. He wants to live a peaceful, ordinary life.

  “I think about him,” Hilary says suddenly. “I think about Daddy all the time. Do you?”

  They dig most of the night.

  The cold ground keeps collapsing around them in chunks “Sand,” Jonathan mutters. “It’s all sand. And it’s frozen stiff.” Hilary thinks, after several hours, to remind Thomas about the supports he should build.

  “Something has to hold up the walls,” she says.

  “What are we going to use?” Thomas’s hands are numb with cold.

  “Wood?” Thomas follows Hilary past Billy, who is still sleeping, down into the basement. From the window Hilary can see Jonathan still digging in the backyard. She helps Thomas rummage for rotten lumber in the basement. She tries not to look at the mould, she tries not to breathe very much.

  “What’s this from?” Thomas asks.

  “The tree house Daddy was going to build.”

  “He was going to build a tree house?”

  “We were going to have picnics in it. We were going to have a club. I was going to be the only girl allowed in.”

  Thomas sits on a box. He looks at his sister. “You remember the good things,” he says. “I mostly remember the bad.”

  “I remember the bad too,” Hilary says.
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br />   “Wasn’t it all bad?”

  “No,” Hilary says. “Not everything.”

  Thomas carries the lumber, piece by piece, up the stairs. He brings up a saw. They use the pieces of the chair that Thomas broke when he first arrived, the pieces that were piled in the dining room, near the buffet. Thomas goes back to the basement for rusty nails and hammers, his father’s unused tools. Jonathan helps as Thomas measures out the space and builds supports. Billy sleeps on. The night is black and cold.

  “What are you doing?”

  Hilary looks up. The neighbour is standing on the ladder he used to trim his tree. He is peering over the fence.

  “Building,” Hilary says.

  “In the dark?”

  Hilary has never spoken to this neighbour. He is new to the neighbourhood. The house was sold about a year ago and the young family that lived there before moved out and this single man moved in.

  “It’s the only time we had to build anything,” Thomas says. He tries to laugh. He looks down at the hole and the supports. It looks just the right size for a dead body, he thinks. Surely the man will know what is going on.

  “What are you building?”

  Hilary, Thomas, and Jonathan stand still. Jonathan’s hammer is raised, mid-swing.

  “We’re starting an entrance to the basement,” Jonathan says. “We want to be able to get into the basement from the backyard.”

  “An entrance?” Thomas says.

  “Oh,” the man says. “Aren’t you building that awfully far from the house?”

  “We’ll have a tunnel with storage under the ground,” Jonathan says.

  Thomas puts his hands over his eyes.

  The neighbour looks at the three of them standing there. He

  shrugs. “That’s crazy,” he says. “I’ve never heard of that.” “Well,” Hilary says, “we do things differently over here.” “Do you have a permit?”

  “You don’t need a permit to make an entranceway,” Jonathan says.

  Thomas stands still. Speechless. The architect in him wants to argue these facts.

  Jonathan starts to hammer loudly. He drowns out the man’s voice. They continue with the gravesite and the man stands on his ladder and watches. Billy sleeps off the alcohol in the living room. Snow begins to fall softly on the heads and shoulders of Jonathan, Hilary, and Thomas. They don’t notice it. They build and dig until the neighbour goes inside, until the ground holds somehow and the hole is dug and the supports are in place. The final resting place.

  13. Blood

  Dick suddenly can’t wait to see Hilary again. He doesn’t know what’s gotten into him. He can’t wait to see her slender body, her small feet, those lovely eyes. Even her chapped cheeks.

  He feels born again. He feels thrown up into the air. He feels as if his heart has lifted high. Lighter than he’s ever been before. A weight, something heavy, has been taken off his shoulders, his head, his neck, his arms, his legs, and Dick feels he can stand so tall he can touch the tops of the trees.

  He wonders if Hilary feels the same way.

  He can’t stop whistling.

  He whistled while he made up Hilary’s mother (a lovely tune, through flat lips, through his front teeth).

  He whistled in the shower.

  He whistled all day at work yesterday.

  Dick is whistling opera, show tunes, rock ‘n’ roll, even some disco. He’s got ABBA and the Beatles and Vivaldi and Meat Loaf and Ella Fitzgerald and a Spanish guitar song he once heard at an embalming convention pouring out of his soul. Not to mention the prayer-songs and hymns and mournful pieces that are inevitably part of every workday. All jumbled up and tumbling out of Dick Mortimer’s mouth. He can’t help himself.

  Dick whistles one low, long whistle, as if calling for a dog or noticing a lovely woman on the street. He has the urge to spin around, hold his arms out and twirl.

  So he does. A big, hairy, lumbering man, he holds his hands straight out, his arms heavy, and twirls quickly, whistling a tune. He is dizzy. He looks around. It is lunchtime and the staff is at the McDonald’s across the street. No one has seen him. All is quiet in the funeral home.

  Billy drives past the funeral home on the way from his home to pick up Tess at the hospital. The snow is falling heavily, has been falling all night, and the cold streets are sheets of ice. Billy drives slowly. The mat at his feet is wet from where he dumped a pot of hot water on it to wash off last night’s piss. His clothes are in the washing machine at home and he has a fresh shirt and pants on and has showered and shaved.

  This morning he woke up on the couch at his mother’s house to the sound of garbage trucks coming down the street. His ankle was sore from twisting it on the rocks. He limped into the kitchen and rummaged in the cupboards until he found a bottle of Scotch. He drank a glass and then poured some in the bowl of cereal he managed to scrape together. He knows something is happening to him but he isn’t quite sure what.

  Billy is driving to the hospital, sipping the Scotch that is resting between his legs and thinking, Tess knows I tried to sleep with Grace. And Billy reasons in his drunken mind that if Tess knows that he was indiscreet once, just once, then he will be fine, then she will forgive him. But if she finds out that he went back, that he tried to get Grace to have sex with him again when Tess was lying in the hospital, then he thinks Tess will walk out of his life and never come back. Does he really want that? Does he want to be all alone without a job, without a family? Billy doesn’t know. The question is whether to come clean and tell Tess about Sunday night, to confess everything about Grace, or whether to avoid the subject until it all blows over. Just tiptoe around it.

  “Tiptoe,” Billy whispers into the hush of the car. He likes that word. It sounds good on his tongue. “Tiptoe through the tulips.”

  Or should he just walk out? Just leave and never come back. Why does he want to stay with her? With Sue? With the new baby? Besides, he didn’t do anything. Tess has no right to be as mad as he thinks she will be.

  Today is his mother’s funeral and he is going to help bury her in his own backyard, the yard he hid in when he was just a child, the yard he sometimes watched his mother garden in. He starts to sob. Tears stream down his face. His nose runs. He sips at the Scotch, standing between his legs, and he cries. How could he have judged her? Billy thinks. He didn’t even know her.

  “Look at me now,” Billy says. “Billy Mount. Look at me now Crying all the goddamn time. Like some woman.”

  He pulls into the hospital parking lot and parks beside a large truck. Billy rests his head on the steering wheel and clutches the bottle between his legs.

  “Things are getting worse,” Billy says. “Everything’s falling apart.” He rolls his head back and forth on the steering wheel, relishing the feeling on his forehead.

  “Job, wife, kid, mother,” he says. “At least I have you.” He opens the Scotch again and takes a final swig. He rolls it under his seat. Billy wonders if men hit some sort of menopause, if maybe that is what’s happening to him. Mood swings, sobbing, feeling lost and confused. A mid-life crisis. That’s what it’s called.

  Billy gets out of the car, straightens up slowly, and limps up to the hospital and through the main entrance and straight up the stairs until he is standing in front of Tess’s room.

  “Here goes,” he says to himself. He blows into the palm of his hand, smells the Scotch on his breath, checks his pockets for mints which he doesn’t have, and then enters the room.

  Tess is fully dressed. She is sitting on the side of her bed, her face less swollen (in fact, she is looking less all over somehow), wearing a blue tent-dress and a touch of lipstick. She has brushed her hair and curled it. The candystriper helped her.

  “Nice to go home feeling better and prettier,” the candystriper had said. And Tess thought that maybe half a make-over was better than none.

  Billy stands there looking at her. “Ready to go?”

  “I guess,” Tess says. “You’re wet.”

  �
��It’s snowing. You look nice.”

  “Thanks. Snowing?”

  “She looks like a whore,” Hilda says, coughing, from behind her curtain. “A fat whore.”

  Tess whispers, “It makes me happy that she’s staying here and I’m going home. I dreamt last night that she died.”

  “Just ignore her,” Billy says.

  “I’m going home now,” Tess calls out. “It was lovely to meet you.” “Without some of your major organs and with a cheating husband,” the old woman says. “Lucky you.”

  Billy looks down at his feet. Tess stands. She holds on to the bed to steady herself.

  “Whoopee,” Hilda says.

  Tess walks over to the curtain and pulls it back. Hilda is lying there in bed, a shrivelled, nasty woman, and there are tears coming out of her eyes and wetting her wrinkled cheeks.

  “Poor you,” Tess says. “I think I might even miss you.” She takes Hilda’s hand in her own moist palm. She squeezes. She wipes the old woman’s face with a Kleenex.

  “Go away,” Hilda says. “Get out of my space.”

  Tess pulls the curtain across Hilda’s bed again and walks to the door. Billy carries her overnight bag. He holds out his hand. Tess takes it for balance. She leaves the room and walks down the hall. She feels like a prisoner being released from the death sentence.

  “Why are you limping?”

  “A small accident. I don’t remember really. Hilary’s rocks, I think.” “Where’s Sue?”

  “Didn’t come.”

  Tess swallows hard. When Sue called the ambulance, when Tess heard the fear in her daughter’s voice, she thought that maybe things would change, she thought that perhaps Sue was just pretending to be loveless and cold.

  “I asked her yesterday.”

  “Busy?”

  “Yes.”

  Tess feels as if her heart could break again and she holds her chest, thumps it a bit, tells herself that her daughter really is busy, that coming to the hospital is one chore too many. Tess can smell the liquor coming off Billy. It’s leaking through his pores. But now is not the time to talk about it. Now is not the time for anything but watching one foot lead in front of the other, making its way forward, walking out of the hospital and bringing her back to life. A good life. A bad life. A bit of both. But she’s walking away from her death and now she’s ready for anything.