Chapter Nine
Vienna

The “I love you.” I’ve never heard it. But as I wake it’s Wyland’s voice breaking through the sleepy membrane, saying the words he never has before. It’s also Maya’s.

My niece is a flesh and blood secret we never used to talk about. But then Rosa started working at the home, and she became a real thing, a child toddling up the creaky steps, sketching her name into the dusty glass table under my mother’s portrait before I began to clean. It was like having a small shadow, watching Maya while Rosa painted dead faces in the morgue. 

Maya visits on the weekends sometimes under the guise of learning my father’s trade, but in reality, it’s time spent with our side of the family. There’ s still tension with Rosa’s mother who probably has fashioned a series of voodoo dolls out of my brother’s likeness, which is why we didn’t get to see Maya accept her diploma, and we won’t be going to her graduation party tomorrow. Forcing her to learn the custodial intricacies of running a funeral home is apparently a close second in my father’s book.

“I love you, too, Pop,” loiters up the stairs and into my room. My door is open. I had come home feeling drunk, even though I was sober at the diner, my mind sharp and strong. That word, “strong.” It numbed me when Heather had said it—still does—and even though Maya’s at the home, ready to curve into the crook of my father’s elbow, I’m uncut knowing that’s a place I no longer fit. 

I dress quickly, humming to myself. A dress ripped from the back of my closet, an unmatched set of shoes. I replace them, grab a matching pair, and walk to the small bathroom off my room to face what waits in the mirror.

I do look like a bird. My skin is cream and nestles beneath the bones in my cheeks. My eyes are wide. Round. They’re blue like words saturated in ink. My hair is dark, a shade stronger than the half-moons under my eyes. I cake the soft skin with concealer. A little blush, a fresh glossed pout. My teeth are slightly yellowed, coffee-stained. Malnourished. I feel thirty-five in the face, fifteen in the eyes. The number twenty-nine beats behind my sternum. I am strong. I say it out loud, “I am strong.” I grab my purse, know the phone has bitten hold of Gram’s number—the three, the eight, the nine locked between its teeth. I head out of my room and ignore the clock. I’m ten minutes late.

“Nice of you to join us,” Dad says when I hit the break room. 

Maya nods “Hey.” It’s different from the “Auntie V!” and elbows-out-run I knew after senior graduation when Rosa came back into my life, and Maya swayed no higher than my hip bone. But time and truth have ruined my purity, and all Maya can sense now is a brittle-boned woman who didn’t have the foresight to move out from under her father’s roof.

“Hi, Maya. Ready to tackle the woes of a funeral home desk jockey?” I ask. I feel like my feet are touching nothing. My father is pinned in his chair against the wall. I can imagine the metal sinking deep into his back, the way he’d spring to fasten my feet to the ground if he could.

“Well, Maya and I have been talking a little. She thinks she might want to assist me. In the morgue,” Dad says. The words dance against the black contents of his coffee cup. I want to look at Maya’s face but don’t because I know what I’ll find there. Pity.

“That works. I have a lot to do anyway. Burying the dead, making the bread...” I mumble off. I don’t look at either of them, but Maya’s face is there, stitched in my mind. The girl is physically wrong with blonde hair, dark brown eyes. Her skin is a clean shade of olive, but it’s more than that. It’s Rosa and Troy. Some of my father. But really, she reeks of my mom. 

I walk to the front office, my purse pummeling against my hip. No calls, two emails. One from our casket supplier sending news of a discount, the other from Granddad. I don’t open the message because I never do before Dad does, but I star it so he remembers to check it later. 

I don’t visit him. Granddad. I was never allowed when I was younger, but he never added me to his visitors list even after I turned eighteen. Dad just mentioned it once in passing when I was heading out to meet Wyland at the mall the summer before he left for college.

“Your grandfather loves you, you know.  He just doesn’t want you to see him this way.” There was no follow up explanation, just my father’s back heaving up and down as he climbed the stairs to his room. But I knew what he was talking about all the same. Granddad was ashamed.

My father, on the other hand, visits twice a month. He brings along a care package Loretta whips up and then heads out to make the four-hour round-trip journey to visit his father, forever destined to meet with the man who left him everything and nothing.

I exit out of the home’s email account and log into my personal one. I wait as the page whirs in my mind, serving up a plate of thick cut spam. But my eye isn’t focused on the downloadable Pottery Barn catalog. It’s his name, Wyland’s, in the middle of the stack. I click it, cells barely held together. But then, the message:

We need to talk.

I suppose I have more in common with my father than I’d like to admit.

“You okay?” I look up and it’s Loretta. A noise rushes through my lips, and I quickly exit out of my email. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Just wondering how you were holding up. Elbert told me last night he was going to see how Maya felt about the morgue. I know you wanted to show her around the office.” It doesn’t surprise me that my father has already planned this. I once watched his face suffer in a blond stranded mess of Maya’s hair. He needs Maya to remember my mother.

“I’m fine. I’m sure she’ll do great in the morgue.” I know the stain is still there, a purpled mass traveling the lines of my face like an ugly birthmark. My beats are off, so I keep moving my hand to my hair then my lips. Why did he email me?

“Are you sure, sweetie? You’ve seemed...” Loretta works her frame around the corner of Elbert’s desk and props a heavy leg onto its wooden top. She’s wearing a long, loose dress with cap sleeves. It’s the color of a messy diaper. “...off.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” I look up and am met with the coiled bangs framing Loretta’s face. 

“Well, let me know if you need anything. Elbert wants me to get started on the open house thing, so I’ll be out getting some more brochures printed,” Loretta says, still unmoving on the desk. I wait. The words stack high at the back of my throat.

“You’ve never had kids, right?” I say. I know the answer, so I spend the gelatinous quiet examining Gram’s framed artwork on the walls. Rough mountains of oil on canvas. Gram’s soul, unequivocal as braille.

“No. You know that.”

“I mean, pregnant.” I look straight ahead at the portrait of my mother. Gram had painted it as a wedding gift, and it used to live in our garage, wedged somewhere between the tools and empty bottles of booze. I had found it searching through the box of our unwanted belongings, saved for a garage sale that never came to fruition. I had wanted my favorite hoodie back. I knew Troy had taken it, hidden it somewhere, and I figured my best bet was looking in the one place discarded clothing always found refuge. 

I had searched until it became hopeless. I went to search somewhere else—the hamper maybe—when the frame caught my eye. It was a new glint, even though I should have seen it a million times over by then. I touched it. I expected it to be hot. Accusing. But when I pulled it out it was only my mother. And I remember thinking that exactly—it’s only my mother.  My hoodie was on the floor, squeezed in the space behind the frame. I had hated my brother immensely. 

Loretta moves her weight, slightly wheezes. The thinking seeps in the three slices between her eyebrows. “Once,” she says, searching me. She comes up empty.

“A friend is. That’s why I asked.” 

“If your friend needs help, I know a place. On Rogers, two streets behind the deli. And if you need someone to talk to, because I know it can be rough, being the friend, you can always talk to me.” I can tell she doesn’t believe me, so I nod at my hands that have reconvened in my lap. I say something that sounds like “thank you,” and Loretta leaves. There’s breathing room now and too much space to think. I open my email. I begin to type.

There are not enough words in the world.

I send it, and my heart chides me. I think it might stop. But then I hear the ping. His response:

Please.

I swallow, write, “Lunch, Monday. 56 Diner at noon” and look away as Louise, prostrate on the wall, watches my fingers dancing.

#

THERE’S NO TIME TO call Gram. I want to during lunch, but the Pattersons will be arriving to pick up Parker. At least that’s what a purple post-it note stuck to the desk tells me. It didn’t take but the five minutes I used to pee like a racehorse for Loretta to forget to use the notebook again. There’s no energy left to remind her, though, because my thoughts of facing the clinic alone, of Saturday afternoon with Heather and lunch with her husband, of hand delivering the remains of a little boy to his family have soldered themselves together and trapped me in the dead space between the bars. I want to step outside and listen to Gram’s hateful voice because for once, it would feel mercifully stingy, like swallowing a gulp of air. 

I don’t want to be staring at Parker’s urn.

The bell trickles and footsteps mock the quiet in the foyer. I only hear one set, so I prepare myself for Mr. Patterson’s strong handshake, but he’s not there. It’s only April, his wife.

“Hi,” she says, sneaking the words in while I lock my fingers together, quieting them.

“Hello, Mrs. Patterson.”

“April,” she says, and I nod. She comes into the office, and maybe it’s the way she looks that throws me off. I’d be okay with stained sweats, eyes puffy, mascara trailing into the soft lines beneath her eyes, but what I’m faced with is navy slacks and hairspray, pearls in her ears.  And then I realize what’s happening here. She’s dressed up for her son.

“My condolences again, April.” I’ve done this before several times—handing off an urn to a grieving family. But this time I’m extraneous and unnecessary. I’m the sixth finger that serves no purpose. She looks at her son like she’s seeing him for the first time.

“I didn’t know what this was supposed to feel like.” She stands completely still between the two guest chairs in front of my father’s desk. Her lips are long and ropey and knit tight together. 

“No one ever knows,” I say. No one ever does. After the dead are gone—buried or burned and the cap is screwed shut—there is a rush of feeling and there is a void of it. It’s the dealing with that sort of sensation, the running your fingers through its loose and grainy scraps that can rip the human part right out of a person.

April sits in one of the chairs, slumps into it so she’s more sound than movement. “I didn’t know really, what birth would be like. The physical part, pain, the pushing—you know, that wasn’t what got me. What really hurt was holding him and not feeling him. Not loving him yet.” She looks up at me, and I don’t know what she wants or needs. So, I listen. “And it happened again when he died. Like I couldn’t really...I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t allow myself to understand it. And I know all of them, our friends, our family think I’m insane because I haven’t cried yet. Oh, I just...” She stops, and that’s when she takes him—her boy—and works him gently into the nook of her arm. She cries, and this time she’s all movement. All sound. I couldn’t understand it before, the losing him again all over to the fire and keeping his remains within arm’s reach. But I know it now because I can see it. I can see how letting go is a forever thing. 

I wait, and then I nod when my father comes to the doorway. He moves soft, and I can always give that to my dad, the way he moves feather light when all else becomes its weight. She doesn’t startle when Dad cups her elbow and helps her to her feet. She doesn’t look at me anymore, only him—only Parker—and I watch the two of them slow their waltz to the foyer.

I call Mrs. Patterson a cab, and then I count the sharp stabs of my broken heart.

#

IN THE VIEWING ROOM, I’ve counted all the way to a million, and the pain is still vulgar and aware of itself. I don’t give into it, though, because there’s showing Maya the chemical list. There’s trying to ignore the way my niece clips her consonants like Mom always did.

“Cadisol. What’s that?” 

“Dries, disinfects. You’ll have to talk to your grandfather about the details. I do my best to ignore them.” We’re in the viewing room, side-by-side in a wooden pew. Dad has finished his lesson with his reluctant pupil, and Rosa has come and gone, kissing Maya on the forehead. I was air to her. 

I nodded at the balled-up tissues, the programs that are rendered useless on the floor after the funeral for Mrs. Lennox an hour before, when Rosa asked if she’d see me tomorrow and her voice tore inside of me. “I’ll be busy,” I said. “I’m helping Heather clean out her mother’s place,” because I run on power now, but it tastes more like brutality. Disappointment, and the small beginnings of a head shake before she caught Maya’s eye and smiled. Rosa walked away from me, and I can’t feel the nauseous rhythm lining the walls because the music is dead.

“Ew. I mean I find it interesting, but still. Ew.” Maya’s ankle is dancing against her shin. Her legs are crossed. Grossly grown up. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her, studied her.  School and work and our shattering pasts have kept me away as well as the sadness knowing it shouldn’t at all be like this.

“No, you’re right. Ew.” I look and can see Maya’s half-face, the other side shielded by Mom’s blonde hair. It’s hard to handle her singularly, and instead, I watch through her like a piece of stained glass. “How have you been?” Maya stops rustling the thickly stapled sheets of papers, the ones that know how to de-naturalize the dead. She licks her lower lip.

“Good.” She goes back to the rustling, her eyes twisting knots through “Flex” and “For-Jey.” 

“Oh, well, how are things at home with Rosa? Your mom.” The clarifier is a rock rubbing a blister on my tongue. I feel the sweat beads lining up to push through my pores. I’ve forgotten to take my meds. When I close my eyes, I see an urn.

“Dating. He’s a loser.”

“What? She is?” Now the chill. It works at my skin, pursuing my blood. Why didn’t she tell me she’s dating? The abandonment is settling in all over again, and I can’t stop the tumor of hate that’s lumped in my stomach since she got pregnant with Maya in the sixth grade and left me for a world I’m barely entering now.

“He’s just...corny. She could do better,” Maya says and looks up at the dead space where a casket should be. “Do you ever see my father?” I can feel the chill slipping into my bloodstream.  I’m physically shaking, only slightly. I rub both arms to gain some authority.

“Yeah,” I say. Maya turns her head. The eyes are brown, Rosa’s gift. “I saw him Wednesday.”

“What’s he like?” Maya asks. I rub harder. I imagine feeling my own bones. I can’t imagine anyone not knowing what Troy is like.

“He’s wrong. All wrong. But wonderful, too.” I can feel the snags in the calcium. I scratch at a renegade blood vessel. “He’s made me realize it’s not always the worst thing in the world to feel so messed up. But it is the worst thing if nobody’s willing to feel that way with you.” And then the core. It’s cold and unyielding. I imagine what my pills would taste like in my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I say, looking at Maya. My niece nods. That’s the best thing.

“No. I get that. I wish Mom would let me meet him. I wish he wanted to meet me.”

“He wants that more than anything in the world.” I can’t help myself. I’ve said it to the mirror, written it down so many times it’s a part of me like nerves in my skeleton. Ever since that night when Dad stormed into Troy’s room and started packing.

“You are ruining your life,” I heard from Troy’s doorway seventeen years ago. My fifteen-year-old brother had his arms at his sides, his palms facing me. The universal stance of losing.

“You think? I thought this was just a practice run.” Even then his mouth was smart. He winked at me winding around the doorframe. I did my best to smile.

“She’s pregnant, Troy, and still, everything’s a joke.” Things weren’t so funny for Dad, for any of us really. Mom’s death was only three months stale. The house was rocked with a collective shudder—our shock packed in boxes, sprawled out in the corners. We were moving. Dad was in the process of buying the funeral home with Loretta’s savings and the pitiful amount Manor Market gave him to save face. Granddad was already sitting in a barred room, and Gram had moved to an apartment in Blythesville with a bathtub filled with bills. Her hate was festering. It was sprouting feelers, reaching out for all of us. I had never felt smaller.

“It’s not funny. But it was our decision,” Troy said. His face was straight, no smirk. Just a clean scratch where his mouth should be. 

“Your decision? Let me guess, you in all your wisdom, thought it was a good ‘decision’ to knock up a thirteen-year-old?” Dad’s fingers left quotations in the air. I imagined smoke where the marks should have been. “I gotta say, Troy, it does seem to have your signature on it.” Dad tangoed through the room with his sleeve numbing his nostrils. His feet pirouetted around mounds of clothes, CD cases, stinking piles that were once likely edible. I knew the cat hearts were still there under the bed even two years later. The stench had procreated with itself. 

“What else was I supposed to do? Mom kicked the bucket, and you started getting handsy with the cat freak. That reminds me, if you’re thinking of rounding the bases, let me fill you in on the condoms you shouldn’t use—” Troy didn’t make himself stop talking, our father’s hand did. The sound was painted by number with my trembling lip, my dad’s aching knuckles. My brother’s loss for words.

“You will not talk to me like that. You hear me? You don’t know anything.” My father’s back was blocking my view of Troy. I couldn’t see Dad’s face either, but I knew they both were crying because change, it couldn’t keep from wronging the both of them.   

“You pack your stuff. I talked to your grandmother. Can you imagine that? I talked to the one woman on the planet who’d rather see me dead, my own freaking mother,” Elbert shouted. The sound plucked and tugged the woven threads in the room. I thought my vision was failing me.   

“I talked to her about you, Troy. And she’s agreed to take care of you. The woman can’t pay her own bills, and she’s so angry everyone can taste it, but she feels sorry for you, Troy. She loves you. But you know what?” Dad paused. He was wearing a white undershirt, pajama bottoms with stains on the crotch. But none of that sobered me. His hair was quartered, divided, seeking every wall in the room. “I don’t feel a thing.” It was a whisper, and the sound of it was worse than the slap. Nobody moved. We simply disappeared.

“You were his decision, too,” I say to Maya, and I’m startled to find I’m no longer wrapped in Troy’s old room.

“Do you think I’ll get to see him again?” Maya asks. The list of chemicals tubes in her hands. The pages flicker and wear at me.

“I really hope so,” I say, giving a non-answer. “I don’t like asking you to keep secrets from your mom but don’t mention this conversation to her. All right?” Maya nods in my peripheral. 

“You all set, Sport?” Dad says. I almost say “yes” but catch myself. Maya follows him out into the foyer where Loretta is standing, holding Maya’s bag. “Thought we’d take our newest student out to celebrate graduating and her first day of learning the family business.” He smiles at Maya, and Maya smiles back as slowly as her lips will allow. “Wanna come?” he asks, and I realize the afterthought is directed at me.

“Oh, no. I have a few things to finish up here.”

“All right, suit yourself,” Dad says. Loretta turns back as Dad and Maya walk out onto the covered porch. 

“Let’s talk later. About the open house. Okay?” she asks. My “sure” metastasizes and is scalpeled from my mouth.

With the door closed, I run for my bag in the office. I take my phone out and head upstairs, jolts of life surging with every step. I check my email, read Wyland’s “Okay,” and sort through the disappointment, the excitement, the regret, the pain that burdens intestinally keeping a secret from Heather, from Rosa, too. I scroll through my contacts, find Gram’s number and press “call.”

I think of Troy.