Morning After
Imust have fallen asleep at some point. When I woke up—morning now—my head was throbbing. A deep red circle stained my thousand-thread-count sheets. In all this time I still hadn’t managed to locate a sanitary napkin.
There are occasions when something terrible has happened and you wake up the next morning and for a moment you don’t remember what it was that happened the day before.
The not-remembering part only lasts a few seconds, and when it passes, and it comes to you what you’d forgotten, it’s as if you have to live through the terrible discovery all over again.
For a moment, I thought I’d dreamed the whole thing. Only I knew I hadn’t.
From the stairs, as I approached the kitchen, I heard voices.
One was Forrest, who probably hadn’t slept at all that night.
The other was my father, who’d just pulled in after driving almost eight hours through the night from New Jersey to pick me up.
I could tell from the sound of his voice as he greeted Forrest that he hadn’t heard the news.
He was saying something to Forrest about a tollbooth and a song that came on the radio as he was crossing the border into Maine that reminded him of a time when the two of them had hitchhiked to the Catskills with a couple of girlfriends and someone’s pet bird.
Forrest interrupted him. “Hank,” he said.
Even my father, as absorbed as he generally was in the events of his own life, must have recognized something on Forrest’s face.
“Oh god,” my father said. “Regina?”
The two of them were sitting at the kitchen counter. Forrest had his head in his hands. My father had his arm around him—the kind of gesture I’d been the recipient of from him only once or twice, myself, ever.
“I know you loved her, Howie,” my father said. He was Howie again. He’d never stopped being Howie, was the truth.