What We All Want

by Michelle Berry

  Billy stumbles when he’s outside.

  “I’ll drive,” Tess says.

  “No, no, no,” Billy says. “You’re sick.”

  “You’re drunk. Which of us is more dangerous, do you think?”

  Billy watches his wife get into the driver’s side of the car and he climbs in beside her. The half-empty Scotch bottle rolls out from under her seat when Tess turns the corner, the windshield wipers thumping noisily. She looks down at it. Billy doesn’t notice. He is leaned up against the window, staring out.

  “Tonight is my mother’s funeral,” he says.

  “You never drink Scotch.Why does it smell in the car? It smells like pee. Did you have a dog in here?”

  “We’re burying her in the backyard.”

  “Our backyard?” Tess glances at her husband.

  “Her backyard. They dug all night. How are we going to sell the house now?”

  “Dug? They?”

  “Sometimes I drink Scotch. Just when I’m in the mood. Besides, there was no beer at Becka’s house.”

  “Who’s digging?”

  “Jonathan, Thomas, and Hilary dug Becka’s grave in the backyard of her house last night. We are burying her tonight. I don’t think you should question me about my drinking.”

  “Who’s Jonathan?” Tess stops at a red light. Her stomach aches. She is so very hungry. “God, it stinks in here.”

  “I’m not an alcoholic.”

  “You’re not?” Tess whispers. She sees a drive-through donut store. She wants to pull the car up to the window and order a six-pack of donuts, all mixed. “Who’s Jonathan?” she says again.

  “Thomas’s friend. He’s black.”

  “Black?”

  “Something funny between them. You can see it in the way they look at each other. It makes me feel sick somehow.”

  They drive towards home. Billy watches Tess. It is still snowing heavily.

  Sue is standing on the front steps when they get home. She is crying.

  “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “Blood,” says Sue. “Lots of blood.”

  Billy looks around, he searches the new snow, looking for blood. He can’t focus. He feels bleary eyed and tired.

  “Where?”

  “Oh God,” Tess says. “The baby.”

  Sue sits on the top stair in the snow. She is shaking. She has her arms wrapped around her tight black clothing. A tear hesitates on her nose ring and then falls to her lap.

  “Where?” Billy asks, knowing he’s asking the wrong thing but not being able to focus. “Where’s the baby?”

  “Come inside,” Tess says. She helps Sue up. “Come out of the cold.”

  Sue and Tess limp together into the house.

  “I don’t want to lose the baby,” Sue cries. “I never wanted to lose the baby.”

  Billy looks up the stairs at his wife and daughter as they disappear into the bathroom. He hangs up his coat and takes off his boots. He roots in the fridge for beer but there isn’t any and so he puts his coat and boots back on, walks to the car, and retrieves the half-empty bottle of Scotch. He mixes it with water to make it last. He drinks all of it. He falls asleep in front of the TV and he doesn’t wake up when Tess shakes him half an hour later, when she shakes him hard to tell him that she’s taking Sue to the hospital. He doesn’t wake up when the front door slams, when the car starts, when a fire truck passes the house, siren wailing. Billy sleeps for several hours.

  He finally wakes up when Sue and Tess come home. The clock on the VCR glows three o’clock. Tess’s face is white from strain and exhaustion, Sue’s face is red from crying. Blood, Billy thinks. He looks up into their faces and he thinks he sees something there, something far away and sad and loving. He reaches his hand up and tries to touch them but they fade in and out of view and his head splits and then they are gone. To bed. They both go to bed to have a nap.

  “Wake us when we have to go to the funeral,” Tess says to Billy. Her voice is distant and controlled. “It was close but she didn’t lose the baby.”

  Billy tries to open the door to his bedroom but Tess has locked it. He can hear the mumble of her voice as she talks on the telephone to one of her friends. He sits down by the door and stares at the hallway around him. He stares at the carpet and the staircase, at Sue’s closed door and the open door of the bathroom. He knocks his head against the wall quietly, carefully, in rhythm with the pounding he can hear, the thump of his heart, his blood.

  It is late afternoon. The white sky is darkening. Billy stands and walks downstairs. He finds the empty bottle of Scotch and places it beside the front door. He settles in front of the TV. He will take the empty Scotch to the funeral and he will bury it next to his mother. He will get rid of his habit, bury it with her. And then, later tonight, he will tell Tess about Grace and they will try and sort things out. He will try and find another job. And if they don’t sort things out, then Billy will face the consequences of his actions. He will accept his fate and somehow life will go on. It always does.

  The TV glares harshly before him. There is a man on the screen, his arms up, his trench coat waving out in the wind. He is calling for someone (Billy can’t hear who because he has the sound off), and his face is contorted, sorrowful. Billy watches his face, watches his hands, the way his feet are placed. Billy forgets that the whole thing is staged, that the man is acting, and Billy feels the man’s pain, senses his loss. He turns on the volume and settles into his chair.

  “There’s the piece,” Hilary says. She bends down and picks up a puzzle piece from the floor of her mother’s closet. “I’ve been looking for this piece. You must be good luck.” It is the side of the Madonna’s face and half the nose. “Now I just need the mouth with the chin.”

  “Let me see,” Jonathan says. He is looking through Hilary’s mother’s drawers. They were watching TV when they decided to see if Becka left anything, any notes to do with her funeral service. Hilary didn’t think so but Jonathan never passes up the opportunity to snoop. “It must have been lying under one of her shoes. I guess when I vacuumed I moved everything around. “When he was vacuuming Jonathan sucked up quite a few of the smaller rocks in the living room. He is hoping Hilary won’t notice. “Why was it in her room?”

  Hilary shrugs. “She never did puzzles in her room.”

  “She’s a strange-looking one, isn’t she?” Jonathan says when they go down to the dining room to put the piece in the puzzle.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her face is all flat, there’s no dimension to it.”

  “You’d look strange too if —”

  “If what?”

  “If you were just told you were having God’s baby.”

  “Yes,” Jonathan says. “I guess you’re right.” He laughs.

  Hilary and Jonathan sit back down in the living room. They found nothing of interest in Becka’s room and being in there makes Hilary feel shaky and tense.

  Thomas comes into the living room. He has been upstairs in his bedroom going through boxes of his things that he dragged down from the attic.

  “What did you find up there?” Jonathan asks.

  “So many things. She kept every piece of artwork I think I ever did. My trophies, my yearbooks, my photo albums. She kept everything.”

  Hilary goes into the dining room. She smoothes the puzzle down, touching the trees and the angel and the angel’s wings. Everything is coming together, she thinks. Everything is finding its own place. She moves back into the living room and looks out the window.

  “Mother packed boxes like that for each of us.You should take it home with you.”

  “When is everyone coming?” Jonathan asks.

  “Soon,” Thomas says.

  “It’s snowing out,” Hilary says. “It’s coming down hard.” She thinks of her mother, in a matter of hours, lying deep under the cold ground Hilary has missed her terribly, has ached at the emptiness the house holds. Even though Thomas and Jonathan are here it still seems as if somethin
g is missing, as if her mother’s presence is needed to make this house a home.

  Thomas walks back upstairs. He enters his room again and sits on the bed with his boxes of life. He wanted Jonathan to follow him upstairs, he wanted to share this with Jonathan, but for some reason he didn’t know how to ask him. Thomas takes a stuffed teddy bear out of a box. He carried that bear around for years. It is full of holes and musty smelling. He takes out several model airplanes, pieces missing, a toy car his father gave him, a compass, a thermos with Batman on it, and a troll doll with purple hair. These small things mean nothing to him really. But the fact that his mother put them there, placed them together in these boxes, knew which items were his, that means all the world to Thomas. Again, for the hundredth time since he walked off the airplane, he wishes that he had come home to say goodbye to her before she died. And for the millionth time he wonders why he didn’t come home. What was it that made him stay away? Is he really that selfish?

  Jonathan is standing in the doorway. “How are you doing?” “Do you think,” Thomas asks him, “that I didn’t come home because I’m gay? Do you think that I avoided her because of my sexuality? She probably would have accepted me, don’t you think? Why didn’t I come home?”

  “I always thought,” Jonathan says, “it was because you are afraid to fly.” He walks over to the bed and pulls Thomas’s head to his chest. This is the second time this week that someone has hugged Thomas this way.

  “Maybe,” Thomas says, muffled in Jonathan’s shirt, “maybe I’m more afraid to land.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe getting here is not the problem. It’s being stuck here, like I was as a child. It’s landing. Landing the plane. You wouldn’t believe all the responsibility that comes crashing down on me when I walk into this house, Jonathan. I always had to take care of everything. I feel overwhelmed here.”

  “Even with everyone grown up? Even with your mother dead? You still feel that way?”

  “Yes, even with all that. I still feel the burden.”

  “I think,” Jonathan says carefully, “that if you really look at the big picture, Hilary should feel the burden. She’s the one who has spent a lifetime in this house.”

  14. Burying Becka

  Jonathan leaves Thomas in his bedroom and convinces Hilary to decorate the house for the funeral.

  “I’ve been to enough funerals,” Jonathan says. “They are always lacking in decorations.”

  They blow up balloons and leave them floating throughout the house. Hilary then gets ready for the funeral. She wears her mother’s red dress again. There is a dirt stain on the knee area from when she crouched in the bushes outside of the funeral home, but she thinks no one will notice.

  Thomas waits upstairs. He is lying on his bed looking at his collection of old comic books and wondering if they could be worth anything now.

  Jonathan stands in the dining room, awkwardly shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He was sitting in the living room but he was gradually becoming afraid to move, suddenly afraid he would break his ankles on the rocks. He stares at Hilary’s puzzle. Without the lips and chin, the Madonna looks silly. Or sad.

  Jonathan can’t decide which.

  In the dining room and bedrooms they all wait for Billy and Tess and Sue and they wait for Dick Mortimer in the hearse which will carry the body of Rebecca Hilary Mount through the snow, through suburbia, to the house.

  At the funeral home Dick pushes and heaves and rolls Rebecca Mount’s closed casket out the back doors of the building and into a waiting hearse. His hands and shoulders ache. Everyone at the funeral home has gone home and, besides, he has to do this alone. Top secret. Dick feels stealthy, he feels invincible. He feels like a teenager again. He wonders what his assistant will say tomorrow, he wonders if Darren will notice that a body is missing and if he will dare question Dick about it. Dick locks the back of the hearse and then walks up the stairs to his apartment, his stomach sucked in, his shoulders high. He strips naked, takes a warm shower, shaves, puts on his mourning suit, all dressed in black, white, and grey, a new man. Dick whistles. He climbs into the front seat of the hearse, starts the engine, and turns on the headlights.

  “Lucky,” he says out loud, to Rebecca Mount lying shut up in the back, as he drives slowly through the snow.

  At Billy’s house they are getting ready. They put on their best clothes. Tess is amazed at how loose her dresses have become, amazed that in such a short time she could lose over ten pounds, that the weight must be just dripping off of her. Mostly amazed that ten pounds can make such a difference. Sue says she’s losing water from the intravenous, not fat, but what does Sue know. Tess is encouraged with the weight loss, it seems easy so far. She wants to start on a new path in life, regain the years she has lost to overeating, to Billy. She isn’t even hungry. A large part of Tess would like to leave Billy, lose weight, be pencil-thin like Sue, and get a job. She imagines herself in a business suit behind a desk somewhere. Tess has never had a job. She moved straight from her mother’s house into Billy’s life, pregnant with Sue. It’s time she got out, saw more of the world.

  Billy tries to wake himself up in the shower. He uses more cold water than hot. He lets the water stream down over his face. He tries to think clearly.

  Sue wears a black dress and red cowboy boots. She isn’t wearing makeup and she isn’t wearing jewellery. For just a minute, as Billy carries the empty Scotch bottle to the car, he thinks that Sue looks almost like the little girl he loves so dearly. He feels a knot in his throat. He wants a drink but he pretends that he doesn’t need one. Everyone is silent in the car. There is no fighting. Nothing is said about the empty Scotch bottle rolling beside Sue on the back seat, or the smell in the car, or the near miscarriage, or the blood, or Tess’s heart attack, or Billy’s drinking, or the death of a mother and a grandmother.

  The snow falls thickly.

  Softly.

  And in that snow everyone converges upon Becka Mount’s house in the heart of the suburbs.

  “Watch the road,” Tess says as Billy pulls into his mother’s driveway directly behind Dick Mortimer’s hearse which is clicking as the heat from the engine dies off. “It’s a slippery slope almost, it’s a death trap. Drive careful.”

  Billy comes straight into the kitchen without taking off his shoes, tracking snow through the house. He puts down the empty bottle of Scotch and searches the cupboards for a full one which he finds and opens and pours himself a glass. One hour in the car in traffic with his daughter and his wife, in searing silence, deserves a drink. Or two. Or three. Really quick ones to calm the nerves. He will quit after the funeral. He promises himself this.

  Hilary looks at him.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Billy says. “I can do whatever I want. It’s my mother’s funeral.”

  Tess follows behind Billy, stopping to wipe her feet on the mat, and sits quietly in a chair in the kitchen. She sighs.

  “How are you feeling, Tess?” Hilary asks.

  Dick Mortimer comes in from the backyard where he was standing in the snow looking down into the hole and hoping that it was big enough. He claps his hands together, startling everyone, and shivers. “It’s cold out there. We’re all going to freeze.”

  Dick is introduced to Sue and Jonathan and he smiles politely at everyone. He looks at Hilary and is pleased to see her in the same red dress she wore when they went out. He thinks that must mean something about their relationship, it must mean they have a relationship.

  “Your neighbour,” Dick says, “does he know what’s going on?”

  “No,” Thomas says. “He thinks we are doing renovations.”

  “He’s watching from his upstairs window,” Dick says. “He’ll see everything.”

  Hilary goes to the back door. She looks out at the hole in the ground. She comes back in.

  “We could put a tarp up so he can’t see from his upstairs windows. The fence blocks the downstairs windows. We could pretend we
’re just having a barbecue.”

  “I’ll barbecue throughout the service,” Jonathan says. “You bought hot dogs and hamburgers, right, Thomas? You can hang a tarp from the fence to the tree to cover the hole and everyone standing under. Besides, that will keep the snow off everyone’s head.”

  “What does this black person have to do with planning our mother’s funeral?” Billy asks.

  “Billy;” Tess hisses.

  “Jonathan is my friend,” Thomas says. “He’s trying to help.” “Fuck,” Billy says, gulping down the Scotch.

  “Billy, watch your mouth,” Tess says.

  Billy stares at Jonathan.

  “You might as well tell him, Thomas,” Hilary says.

  “No, I don’t think now is the time —”

  “Billy, Jonathan is Thomas’s gay lover,” Hilary says.

  “What?”

  “His boyfriend? Isn’t that right, Thomas?”

  Thomas’s face turns pink. Jonathan takes a step closer to Thomas. Everyone is silent.

  “Boyfriend?” Billy says. “Boyfriend?” Billy pulls out a chair and sits down. “I knew something fucked up was happening.”

  “Cool,” Sue says. She puts her hand on the knot in her stomach and starts to laugh.

  Tess laughs too. She claps her hands. She looks at Hilary in her red dress, her hair pulled back from her face, and for a minute Tess feels that Hilary is actually attractive. Tess feels that she should try to get to know Hilary a little better, try to see who she really is behind that skinny exterior. She watches the funeral director stare at Hilary. Tess thinks it’s funny that Thomas is a homosexual. And in love with a black man. She thinks that this kind of news is good for Billy. She thinks that he deserves to be knocked over every once in a while. It feels good to laugh with her daughter.