Stay Awake Page 20

  And yet we still crossed his mind. Despite the ten years passed and despite himself he would find himself dialing the old home number (disconnected), looking through some boxes of old papers, bills mostly, thinking he might come across a photograph.

  He was going through a little gloomy period, not depression necessarily though there was some insomnia involved, difficulty concentrating, that sort of thing.

  But he got up that morning as usual. As he did every morning, no matter how blue he was. Coffee, funny pages, cigarettes. He packed himself a lunch, and when Skully honked in the driveway Daddy came out smiling; he laughed at Skully’s dirty-joke-book jokes as they set up the ladders and spread the tarps and set up the circular saw. He had never missed a day of work in his life.

  They were listening to a rock-’n’-roll station on the radio. Bruce Springsteen, Creedence, rock-’n’-roll oldies, the DJ said, and Daddy was uncomfortably aware that he was almost forty-four years of age. Forty-four! The recent birthday, that was a part of his moodiness, probably, though he would never admit it. He imagined the wry way his ex-wife might call these moods a “midlife crisis,” and the notion made him actually blush. Crisis: a neurotic, effeminate word.

  For a while after the divorce he had imagined that he might get married again, that he might have more children, new daughters to replace the ones who he had been separated from for so long.

  So why didn’t he? What was stopping him?

  From the top of the ladder, he sang softly along with the radio as he worked and reflected and remembered and suffered hangover, “Badlands,” he sang, and “Green River,” and Skully told his joke about the rich farmer with the three beautiful daughters, the red-haired daughters with the pale hands and freckled cheeks, and

  yes, there we were. He could see us through the window, he stood on the ladder outside the third-floor window of the empty house and when he glanced through the glass there we were in our bedroom, in our beds, with our pink lamp on our nightstand and our toys put away and the covers pulled up to our necks. Faces sunk into pillows. Eyes closed. Waiting to be kissed.

  and one minute Daddy was on the ladder and then almost in the same second he’d hit the ground and

  Skully came running

  Oh my God,

  oh my God, he said, and Skully was actually weeping a little because he assumed that Daddy was dead. Daddy’s hand was bleeding, his finger was gone, it must have gotten hooked on something and pulled itself right off his hand, what happened to his finger? Oh my God! Skully took off his T-shirt and bent over Daddy and wrapped the shirt around Daddy’s hand where blood was bubbling out steadily.

  That was the part of the anecdote that Daddy liked to tell later. Poor Skully crying and then the two of them trying to find that damned finger in the grass. Looking everywhere but finally heading off to the hospital without it. Possibly it was carried off by a dog or a bird or something. He will say this later, half joking, just because it makes a good ending to the story.

  On the other hand, he’ll never tell anyone about what he’d seen up there, glimpsed, not exactly supernatural not something you would talk about

  3

  We have been apart for a long time. Eden is a graduate student in Ohio and Sydney lives with her husband in New Hampshire and Brooke works at a restaurant in Portland and the last time we were together was for our mother’s funeral.

  Is it Brooke who is the most lonely? She sometimes believes so, leaving the restaurant at two in the morning, in the city, in the rain, and the barred metal grates have been pulled down over the front of the nearby liquor store. Her sisters don’t miss her as much as she misses them, she thinks, everyone else has things, no one ever thinks about her with this kind of longing, they will not ever be on such a poorly lit side street where every window is dark and sleet taps hesitantly on the canopy of the umbrella.

  She only wants to make her way to a decent street where there are cars, where she can catch a taxi back to her apartment but the water has accumulated and she is wearing her nice new shoes. It is such slow going. Such winding, careful steps. In the puddles on the sidewalk are dozens upon dozens of earthworms. Most of them are dead, but some are still alive, writhing weakly, trying apparently to swim. Brooke is staring down at her feet, trying not to step on them.

  The wind makes her raincoat fly back and ripple like a sheet on a clothesline. Abruptly, the wind catches her scarf and carries it up into the sky like a leaf or a flap of newspaper.

  “Oh!” Brooke cries, with frustration, grasping too late after her scarf. The moment she reaches out her hand, her umbrella is wrenched inside out. “Oh!” she says. “Goddamn it!”

  There are more worms now, the sidewalk is thick with them, and she can barely put a foot down. Before she can avoid it, she feels the soft, slick mass of a night crawler squashing beneath the toe of her shoe.

  She stands there, motionless, holding her inside-out umbrella as the flecks of icy rain catch in her hair. Above her, some birds are clustered on a telephone wire, looking down. Blackbirds, grackles maybe, ravens?

  They seem to regard her for a moment. Then they begin to lift up from their perch, flapping off into the darkened sky one by one until the wire is just a bare line above Brooke’s head.

  It is not like a premonition of death.

  It is as if she died a long time ago, and she just remembered it.

  4

  Midnight and Daddy was on his way home to kill us all.

  We were asleep in our beds and Mother was curled on the couch in the living room with the television going, dozing a little, exhausted after the past week and now a hot humid night in late June, the ceiling fan going on high so that the steady whirring practically covered the voices on the TV.

  Mother opened her eyes partway when Daddy’s truck crept up the driveway with his headlights turned off, the crackle of gravel beneath his tires, the flutter of sparrows in the hedge, stirring then settling. She closed her eyes and he came through the gate and stood there in the backyard in the moonlight, under the apple tree. He looked up and there was the darkened window of our room

  5

  In the basement of Sydney’s new house is a little room that is about the size and shape of a coffin. Sydney and her husband discover it a few days after they have moved in. There is an old, heavy door that they hadn’t noticed when they were touring the house with the Realtor. There is a doorknob, and one of those iconic keyholes like in cartoons, with a real skeleton key in it! They unlock it.

  Behind the door is a space just big enough for a little man to stand in. The walls are cement and plaster, the corners are curved rather than straight. It smells like a cave.

  “I think this is possibly the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Sydney’s husband says, and Sydney looks at him sternly.

  “It’s a closet,” Sydney says.

  “No it’s not a closet,” her husband says. “There’s nothing to hang things on.”

  “Maybe it’s a fruit cellar,” Sydney says. “They probably kept their sacks of potatoes in there. To keep them cool.”

  It is cool in there, her husband concedes. “It’s like something you’d store a dead body in,” her husband says. “That’s what it’s like.”

  Sydney sighs. “Look,” she says. “This was a great bargain. I hope you’re not planning on getting into one of your superstitious things.”

  “I’m not,” her husband says. “I’m just speaking metaphorically.” And they both glance over to where the washer and dryer are lined up, mute, open-mouthed, on the opposite wall. They will have to have their exposed backs to this dreadful coffin-door every time they put a load of clothes into one of the machines, they are both realizing.

  Metaphorically. And she has an uncomfortable flicker, a little thought that swallows itself before it actually makes it to the forefront of her mind. “In the farmer’s basement was a little room where he kept his gold,” she thinks briefly, a line from a story she read once as a child. Her mouth hardens.

>   Metaphorical. And she watches her husband turn the key in the lock of the coffinlike door.

  Metaphorical for what?

  6

  Without him for years now we talk on the phone and there is some agreement that we won’t mention certain aspects of the past.

  Which one of us said: Do you ever wonder where he is?

  Which one said: He’s alive somewhere, living somewhere, and I don’t know why we shouldn’t try, after all these years

  There were a few moments of silence. Our mother rose up out of her grave and stepped delicately through the headstones in the cemetery toward the little pub where we were sitting at a table with our beers, and outside the rain had begun to turn into sleet. This was the little bar next to the movie theater and we had been planning to go see a film that was a comedy about three sisters who lived in Manhattan and who were all struggling with the vagaries of love and life in a contemporary setting.

  The spirit of our dead mother had begun to move swiftly toward us,

  gliding now through the night over the fields and interstates and rivers of the Midwest toward the city where we were having our little gathering. Sister Conference, we called it.

  And our mother said: He was standing there above your bed with the pistol, and the three of you were asleep and I didn’t know what else to do, I just got down on my knees and I said please don’t kill them please just kill me, just kill me, they didn’t do anything to you, they love you with all their hearts

  And he said it doesn’t matter anymore, nothing matters anymore

  And he pulled the trigger. I thought I would scream, but I didn’t. He pulled the trigger and it was your head, Brooke, and the chamber was empty. And then it was Eden. And then Sydney. Click. Click. Click.

  And then he turned the pistol toward me, as I was kneeling there. Click, at my head. And then he put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger a last time.

  Oh God I prayed there would be a bullet that last time, but there wasn’t.

  Of course we remember all this as we sip our beers, as we sit there, a football game playing on the television above the bar.

  We were asleep and in one universe we didn’t ever wake up, in one version of the story we died and the rest of our lives was just a long dream in which we grew up and became waitresses and housewives and graduate students, an extended extended extended pause before the bullet entered our brains.

  7

  Alone in his apartment, Daddy lights a cigarette, and sits in his chair facing the television, and the dog rests her muzzle sympathetically against his thigh. He is not unhappy, not exactly, though sometimes it occurs to him, sometimes he realizes: This is how his life has ended up.

  Not really what he would have expected.

  He used to spend so much of his time in a state of dreadful anxiety about the future, so worried about the choices he’d made, so terrified

  for example, he could have gone to college, he was smart enough, he thought he would just work for a while and then go, but before he knew it, he was caught up in his contracting business, all the tools and equipment and a new truck and the mistakes he’d made with his taxes, he was so far into debt, there was so much overhead, and he remembers that moment when he saw that he’d never never go to college

  and he was married to his high school girlfriend, in fact the only person he’d ever slept with, and sometimes the guys he worked with would start bragging, ten women, they’d say, dozens of women, and even though he knew the guys were exaggerating he’d blushed inwardly

  and it wasn’t just being married but there were children, the three girls one after the other and he had adored them in some ways but there was also the sense that once they were born he was trapped. He had built his own future brick by brick around himself but there were no doors or windows, at least that was the way it seemed at the time he had thought to himself, I am locked in, it was like one of those ghost stories where you wake up and you are sealed into a coffin

  and you begin to thrash around, thinking, I must escape

  He peers for a time at the television and rests the palm of his hand on the muzzle of Angeline the dog and she nudges it as if to remind the hand to pet, to continue to pet.

  He actually did manage to escape, that’s the thing. He extricated himself. He pulled free

  8

  Eden is the youngest of us, she doesn’t even remember Daddy, really, though there are times when she is in the classroom, when she is teaching her class in remedial composition and there is an older student in the back of the room and she asks them to open their books: What are your reactions to the text? Is the work unified, with all the parts pertaining to a central idea? Is it coherent, with the parts relating clearly to one another?

  The man is in his thirties, she would guess, dark-haired, dark-eyed, a stillness leaking out of him as she speaks to the class about analysis, interpretation, synthesis of texts and he has the face of someone who is passing a terrible accident in his car, trying not to look. He doesn’t seem like someone who is paying attention and so she calls on him: Christopher? she says and he just stares at her with his shaggy tired glare.

  I don’t know, he says. I didn’t get a chance to read it this time, and she feels uncomfortable about her authority in the classroom, and she feels actually shaky and so she speaks sharply, Christopher, talk to me after class, please, and afterward he stands there grimly in his muddy work boots and cheap janitor pants as the other students file out.

  “Christopher,” she says, “I don’t see how you are going to be able to pass this class if you’re not doing the reading and you’re not turning in your work.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Bell,” he says, a broad-shouldered, bearded Yeti of a man, slumped and moody, an odd sort of spittly speech impediment, “I just can’t make sense of what you’re talking about,” he says, “I’ve got to have this class but this is not my thing, I’m not much for analysis,” he says, “I just need the degree or I’m never going to get promoted,” he says, “I’ve got a kid,” he says. “I’m a single father.”

  “I sympathize with your situation,” she says, “but you have to do the work,” she says, “you understand that don’t you?”

  “No,” he says, and she stiffens, he’s not threatening in any obvious way but, “I don’t understand. That’s the problem. You’re not a very good teacher, Ms. Bell, I can’t seem to grasp anything you’re talking about,” he says, there is a thick hostility emanating from him and of course she can’t help but imagine the long walk she has to take alone through the parking lot, 10:15 P.M., Monday night, what if he followed her

  and even when she gets home she will be in bed and she closes her eyes and she can imagine Christopher in her room, the heavy shadow of him leaning over her and she turns on the light and opens her book. Outside her window she can see the blurry golden smudge of the moon behind a miasma of clouds, the moon sinking in the west and she wonders where Daddy is right now what he is thinking about

  9

  When he was a boy Daddy’s mother lost custody and for a while he stayed with his grandmother and then after she died he was in foster care for a time.

  He was placed in the home of an old farmer called Mr. Athen, back in Shenandoah, Iowa, and Daddy was sixteen years old, old enough for work, five in the morning and Mr. Athen was bending down to shake Daddy awake Time to get up Mr. Athen said, not mean but not gentle, either. There was no love lost between them. Mr. Athen took in a foster boy to have someone to work for him for free, an indentured servant, that’s what Daddy thought.

  This was on a pig farm. He remembered the smell of it, of course, the noise of the hogs snorting and banging against the metal bars of their pens, the sows in their stalls and farrowing crates. The hazy blue eyes of the piglets, their clean wet nuzzling snouts. He put his fingers in their mouths and let them nurse, cradling them in the crook of his arm. It was a kind of love, he realized later, a certain glimmer. To care for something helpless, knowing it was doomed.

&n
bsp; That morning he was walking through the barn with the farrowing crates, this was one of his jobs, to look for the baby pigs that were lost or had escaped or were in trouble. The piglets were fenced off from their mothers by a grille of bars, they could reach the teats but the sow was in a separate pen so that she could not roll over on her children or step on them or eat the ones she was dissatisfied with, and the piglets were always getting stuck as they tried to reach her or finding little gaps in the pens that they tried to squeeze through and he rescued the ones that he could, sometimes finding the ones that had broken their necks or suffocated and throwing their bodies in a wheelbarrow that he was pushing along.

  That was the morning that his mother died. She hanged herself in the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women in Mitchellville, a convicted drug felon, thirty-four years of age, a little nutty the guards said, always a bit unstable, she had been singing all morning and then the singing stopped.

  Daddy looked up.

  He was in the barn with the piglet in the crook of his arm with his finger in its mouth and it was as if he heard the melody cut off abruptly as her neck broke. It was as if the noisy barn became suddenly silent.

  She was standing down at the end of the barn near the open door and the sunlight made a blur against the dark edges of the wood. His mom. He would never tell anyone about this.

  Later, he wasn’t even sure that he had really seen it, he thought that maybe he had made it up and it seemed so real in his imagination that it turned itself into a memory.

  There she was She stood there dressed neatly in her jeans and her pretty peasant blouse with the orange flowers on it, and she smiled at him in her kindly, teasing way.

  “I couldn’t get out,” she said, “I wanted to leave but I couldn’t get out,” she said, and she turned and of course she never spoke to him again.

  10

  We ourselves have never seen ghosts, though we would like to. Brooke would like to, particularly. She likes to read those stories, True Tales of the Paranormal and Supernatural, that sort of thing. Even today, even as an adult woman she watches the TV show about ghosts and mysteries and anomalies, a segment on a two-headed baby on the Discovery Channel as the sleet patters against the window of her apartment, and she looks anxiously at the room reflected on the windowpanes; there is herself in a wingback chair watching television.