44
In the days following my mother’s death, our house became the eye of a hurricane. She was so adored in the community that everyone felt the need to come through and pay their respects and check in, days before the official wake and funeral. Emotionless, essentially—gone and alone—I dealt with it. My father was nowhere to be found. Nobody could wrap their mind around that.
“What do you mean he’s not here?”
“Cash, I’m so sorry, my God.”
“He didn’t say anything ? Are you sure?”
“Honey, I’m sure he’ll be back any second.”
Blankly, I nodded and felt nothing. I didn’t care if he came back or not.
The night after I left my mother in the hospital, I went driving.
I left town in search of the place where it happened.
Sure enough, the few remnants of the crash were still there, fresh streaks through ice and snow.
The truck had been towed out of the ditch so there were only bits and pieces of fragmented metal scattered around.
I got out of my car, coatless, and walked down into the ditch.
I hadn’t slept in two days.
The wind ravaged my skin, but I didn’t care.
I wanted to feel what she felt.
I was possessed by numbing anguish.
Slow and steady I walked down into the ditch, the snow swallowing my legs.
I went forward until I was at the bottom.
I buried myself in the snow with all intention of staying there.
I started shaking, hyperventilating, and going mad, and finally started to seize when a car came by.
I heard screaming from the road above.
Some woman I would never see again came and helped pull me out of the snow, which I knew was more than willing to keep me.
Later, in the hammering heat of my car, the woman sat by my side.
I tried to explain myself, but it was pointless.
All I mustered was that my mother had died.
She said she was sorry, and we sat.
Patches of frostbite burned red on my arms.
She didn’t leave me until I was roasting in the car for another hour.
Looking back, I’m sure the whole nightmarish scene had really freaked her out.
Crazy, but I don’t even remember her name.
I still think about that woman and where she was now.
Has she saved anyone else? Without her, I would have been dead.
After she left, I don’t know what stopped me from heading back to the ditch, but I didn’t.
It was pitch black when I made my way home.
I didn’t sleep that night and wouldn’t sleep again really for a year.
If not for my brothers, I would have endured the whole mess all alone. My mother was an only child and her parents had passed the year prior. Both of my father’s parents were long gone too. Leon and Prince never left my side for weeks. I think they were afraid to have me on my own for too long. The day after I waded out to the ditch, the three of us sat in my living room, morbid and delirious, staring down Priest Charles as he spoke to me about God’s love and the relationship he had with my mother, how special and singular he found her to be.
Charles had this red curly hair and donned the biggest square glasses you’d ever seen in your life. He wore the priest garb and was calm and extremely well spoken. Even in despair, I admit, he was full of the holy spirit. I gave credit to the religious folk when they deserved it. My mother had always been fond of him.
Charles sat straight backed, delicate and sad as all hell as he spoke to me about my mother. I could only manage to half listen as he eventually started going over the particulars of the funeral arrangements.
“Cash this is one of the many unfortunate parts of it all. I know it’s the last thing you want to think about.”
“It’s okay.”
“We’ll make it as easy as possible.”
“Okay.”
And he went on and on, talking about St. Mark’s off Main, the only substantial church in town, and how they orchestrated things. Caskets and all else. He was right. It was the last thing I wanted to talk about, or I thought it was anyway, but then he asked.
“Do you know where your father is?”
And there was a flicker of rage, somewhere buried deep in my chest, but I paid it little mind.
“No. I do not.” And I knew Charles had more questions about that, but something must have been threatening on my face. From then on, he assumed my father wouldn’t be around and he was right to assume that.
I was so thoroughly smothered in blinding shock that I couldn’t even process my father missing. Gone. He had left me alone and had bailed on everything at last. I fancied him dead and rotting but I left those thoughts way back in the cracks, hanging crooked on the nails in my skull. I pretended it was all one stupid story someone had told me long ago and convinced myself I never had a father in the first place. My mother had raised me by herself and that’s the way I would tell it from now on.
It’s bizarre, death and shock, priests in living rooms. And it’s even more bizarre housing, in rotation, hundreds of people and their flowers and crying faces while unable to reciprocate their displays of heartbreak. They said sweet things, they really did, though I remember so few of them. All I really remember is they were deeply grieved, sobbing and red faced. I understood and I believed them to be sincere. Still, their mercies fell on me meaningless and deaf. During those days I was a ghost. Stoic and strong in the face of it all. I accepted reality as a dark, mute poison.
Well, that’s all it was. The people of Johnston stopped by and offered their support and occasional questions which I answered, robotic and lifeless. I was hanging on by a thread. I was devoid, completely drained, and broken. I was, quite frankly, barely alive. I had half the mind to drown myself in the bathtub or go back out to the snowbank to suffer freezing in the snow like she had or starve myself to death. I contemplated everything. And I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t. I really couldn’t. Even when I think about it now, it seemed obvious that I could pull the trigger, but people stick around and keep beating, don’t they? Through all hellacious life. In the face of unimaginable loss. We collect our scars and move forward. Life.
And where was my father? Where the fuck was my dad?
“We could find the fucking guy,” Prince said, sitting on my couch, leaning over his knees, wringing out his hands in anger. I shrugged.
“I’m serious Cash, how hard could it be?”
“I don’t know, man.”
“We fucking—I don’t know—we ask around at least.”
“We have.”
“We can ask the other towns.”
“Jimmy might know,” Leon suggested.
“Jimmy won’t know shit.”
I ground my teeth. All of a sudden, Prince sprung from the couch and slammed the side of his fist into the wall.
“I’ll kill him. I swear to God, Cash.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“I know man. I’m sorry. I’m just fucking, I don’t know. I’m gonna get some air.”
And head down, jaw clenched, he left the room.
Leon took a long beat.
Then we met eyes.
Decades of life, decades of trouble and joy, tragedy and brotherhood.
Every high and every low.
We didn’t have to say a word, it was all there.
We traced it all back and what was there to say in a time like this? Finally, he sighed and looked down at his hands.
“He’ll come back.”
“I don’t think he will, man.”
“Do you want to look for him?”
“No.”
It wasn’t until the funeral that I became truly furious, standing stoically in my black suit.
Something about the multitudes of crying people, searching for answers, searching for comfort, drove me an inch away from madness.
The grief had pierced my flesh, and I was bleeding on the inside with rage.
My father was still nowhere to be seen, and at the wake I stood by my mother’s side, close casketed, knowing she was in there but also convinced she was not.
And the longest line of sorrow stretched out the building doors and down the street.
All of Johnston was there, the whole entire suffering town.
Much later, I would think back on that and cry.
I’d kiss the feet of Johnston for the rest of my life in gratitude.
For on that day, they had shown me true grace and warmth.
Everyone was there.
For my mother, and for me.
But in the moment, I couldn’t process a thing.
I was out of my mind, running down some harrowed country road of pain and trying to find somewhere to hide.
I was growing vengeful with God and my father.
I wanted to burn the building down, myself along with it.
I wished to disintegrate, to be reduced to ash and be swept up by wind.
There was nothing but the hate for my father beating loudly in my chest.
And with each person that shuffled slowly and despondent through the doors to either hug me or shake my hand, I looked up, like a five year-old boy, hoping for my dad to come home.
But he never did.
He never showed.
And at the foot of my mother’s grave, I knew the heartbreak of life, the truth of its brutality.
I wouldn’t really cry until almost half a year later.
And it happened in the strangest of ways.
All I did was bite into a strawberry.
My mother used to dip them in sugar.
During those months, I would walk out to my front porch and wait for my father.
I believed in my gut he would come back one night, spinning drunk, and I’d fight him.
Month after month, every evening, I would go out to the porch, and I’d wait.
The moon tracking its path in the sky, shining above as it always had.
I thought of my father driving, never stopping, somewhere lost in America, trying to use that moon as a compass.
I asked myself the same questions over and over again.
Where are you now? What have you done?
God, I needed to see his face, and I needed to know.
I had to see it in his eyes before he went all the way.
And what would the punishment be, for me killing my father? These questions haunted me as I reached out to God.
Did he feel guilt or fear? What it must be like to be gone, in a bar in some back town trading nothings with the keep and swilling it down till he pruned.
He wouldn’t be sober a second, I knew that.
And I feared that the smoke and the booze and the regret would put an end to him before I ever got the chance, and yet, the child, the child, the child in my heart still clung to a rope.
Still clutched to the dream of the father, was still seeped in the hope of the American leader who was strong and courageous and loving.
And so on the cold porch I sat, night after night, thinking that on one drunken black evening he’d return.
Shoes worn and vest tattered, flannel faded, he’d step out from his truck and he’d reckon at last with his son.
I sat there and waited for months, but he never showed.
He would never come home.
And so that was my plot still in Johnston, if you asked.
My mother, that house, and waiting for my father.
In the years after, I had made it my own. The place on Woodland Drive was mine, and I kept it alive for my mother.
I knew it had saved me in the years that followed her departure, and for better or worse, I still felt her there. Maybe that’s why I could never leave, not for nothing.
I think about all of this as I rock in my grandfather’s chair.
It’s been a month since I arrived in Cambridge.
I’m figuring it out, one slow day after day in the house I have made whole again.
Nancy told me the spirits are here.
She’s not wrong.
I’ve known that all along.
And still, something’s not done.
I can’t run the clock out quite yet.
I am moving along on this grand perfect web that is spun.