Chapter If It Would Bring Her Back
If It Would Bring
Her Back
I hate to bother you, Dane types into his phone. Can you help me?
His thumb trembles over the “send” button. Maisie told him, ordered him to text anytime. Any hour of any day. She will be there.
Won’t she?
He grits his teeth against the doubt and sends the text.
Immediately an automated reply pops up: Can’t talk, I’m driving!
“Fuck,” Dane says through his teeth. He’s exhausted. It’s been one of the worse days, and now Saskia is melting down. Dane finds her by the living room windows, sobbing into the curtains.
“I miss Mammu so much,” she sobs, distraught and irrational. “And I miss Ethan.”
“Come here…” Dane puts arms around her from behind, holds onto the quaking body.
“I just wish he’d come back.” Her voice is both rising in anger and regressing into a childlike petulance. “I want him to come home.”
“I know,” Dane says, feeling his grip on the world slide free, one finger at a time. His left eye is twitching at the corner.
This is a lot, Diane says nervously. I think we need help.
Saskia is inconsolable now. “I’m getting in love with him and I want him to come home.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“It’s not fair.”
“I know. I know…”
Dane does his best to calm her down, but her anxiety only seems to increase as the hours go by, while Dane is slowly consumed by a fog of incompetence verging on apathy. He’s starting not to care. Diane is right. He needs help.
His phone pings.
Hey, it’s Huff. Maze is driving. What’s up?
Dane stares, at a loss. Enough time for another text to come in.
You there? What’s going on?
Dane hesitates, then types. It’s a bad day. Saskia is falling apart and I just feel like I… I don’t know.
You need backup?
I need another adult in the room. Saskia needs a rational voice that isn’t mine.
Got it, Huff replies. We were heading home from friends. Turning around. Be there soon. Hang tight.
Dane exhales. Thank you.
No worries. Just hang on.
They walk in fifteen minutes later. Maisie gives Dane a quick hug, then asks “Where is she?”
Dane points toward the kitchen. Maisie sets off, shedding her jacket and laying it over the back of the couch. She barely disturbs the atoms as she slides onto the chair next to Saskia and takes her hands.
“Hey, baby,” she says.
“Something’s wrong with me,” Saskia says. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve been having a nonstop panic attack all day. I can’t… I don’t know where I am…”
“Tell me,” Maisie says, putting a palm on the girl’s cheek. “Tell me everything.”
“My heart is racing. I can’t catch my breath. I can’t eat anything.”
Huff puts his flat palms on her shoulder blades. “Say more.”
“I feel like I’m outside myself. I’m here but I’m not here. My brain is so fuzzy. Every thought is just…outside myself. I can’t explain.”
“You’re explaining fine. Keep going.”
“I’m going around doing things but I’m not here. I hear myself talk and it’s not even me.”
Maisie ran a hand back along Saskia’s hair, then a thumb under each of her streaming eyes.
“What’s wrong with me?” Saskia cries.
“Your brain is protecting you,” Huff says. “It’s put up a veil between you and reality so you don’t get overwhelmed.”
“I think I’m going crazy.”
“You’re not,” Maisie says.
Saskia’s eyes are wild as she looks up at Huff. “Do I need to go to the hospital?”
“No,” he says firmly.
“Something’s wrong with me.”
“It’s okay. I promise,” Maisie says. “Nothing is wrong with you. We’re going to stay here and help you through this.”
“I want my mother,” Saskia says hoarsely. “I want my mother so bad.”
Maisie throws a shrewd look toward Huff and Dane, and a small tilt of her head that asks, Can you give us the room?
“Let’s get some air,” Huff says. He gets two beers from the fridge and leads Dane out onto the kitchen’s porch.
Through a fog, Dane looks back through the screen door to see Saskia throw arms around Maisie and cry like she’s coughing up a lung.
Both hands in a white-knuckled clench on Maisie’s shirt. Sobs like screams.
From the empty, bleeding abyss in his brain, Dane regards his daughter with no opinion, simply knowing she’s flinging the ugliest of her cries onto Maisie to protect her father.
“Are you all right?” Huff says.
“I don’t know. Today sucked. I got nothing in the tank. I miss my wife, I’m so angry with Ethan I can’t see straight, and I can’t help my daughter.”
“Then you were right to call us. We’ll stay as long as you need.”
Dane rubs his face. “I’m so tired.”
“Sit down.”
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
“You’re going to sit down. Then you’re going to drink your beer. In between sips, you will breathe.”
Laid low, Dane chooses to sit on the porch floor, leaning against the railing. Huff sits on the steps. They drink their beers and, out of nowhere, start telling funny Nomi stories.
“Remember she made the beef tenderloin for your fortieth birthday party,” Huff says. “And it bombed?”
“It was a fifty-dollar cut of meat. The recipe was supposed to be a no-brainer.”
“Something like setting the oven to a million degrees, putting the roast in, turning the oven off and walking away. Right?”
“Yeah. She had a sign on the oven: Do not open under pain of death.”
“Everyone swore you couldn’t mess it up,” Huff says. “But it came out so well-done, it was unsalvageable. Nomi just laughed, took a bow, put the tray in the yard for the raccoons to eat, and we ordered Chinese food instead.”
“It was one of our best dinner parties.”
“She had so much grace.”
“We had good times,” Dane says. “Memories live forever. I always heard Jewish people say, ‘May their memory be a blessing,’ but I never really got it. Now I get it.”
The words sound trite. Scripted. Like they come from a motivational speaker. He doesn’t believe in them. Huff says nothing either and after a long, uncomfortable pause, Dane glances at him. Huff goes on gazing straight out across the pool, his beautiful face a stone.
“What?” Dane says.
“I’d erase myself from your memory if it would bring her back.”
Now Dane stares, incredulous. Not sure whether to be touched or offended.
Huff looks at him then. “I would.”
“Oh fuck you,” Dane says, and bursts into tears. The nearly empty beer bottle slips from his fingers, bounces down the stairs but doesn’t break. He puts his face in his hands and weeps, coughing up his lungs. Huff slides over, puts arms around him and holds on tight.
“Fuck you,” Dane keeps insisting between sobs, leaning harder against Huff with every garbled curse.
“Dane,” Huff says over and over. “I’d do anything. I swear to God. I’d do anything to get you out of this.”
Dane would, too. But he can do nothing but cry. So viciously, his nose starts to bleed. Huff takes him back into the kitchen. Saskia is sitting in her chair again, not crying anymore, but looking like she was pulled out of a cement truck.
“Huff, dear, we don’t punch people in the face to comfort them,” Maisie says mildly. “We’ve discussed this many times.”
“It’s an extremely effective technique,” Huff says.
“This is how hard you can cry, ladies and gentlemen,” Dane says behind the dishtowel pressed to his nose.
“Jesus, Dad,” Saskia says thickly, then hiccups. She and Dane look at each other and start laughing hysterically. Maniacally.
“I miss her so bad, I’m literally bleeding,” Dane brays.
“Huff, punch me in the face,” she cries. “Please. I’ll feel so much better.”
“Hey…”
Dane took his wet head out of his hands and looked up just as the pool lights flicked on. Liko stood on the deck, wearing just a pair of gym shorts. Hands on hips and expression worried.
“You all right?” he called.
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“I was just…feeling some shit.”
Looking for myself along the poolside, Diane said miserably.
“Same.” Liko stooped and picked up the pile of Dane’s clothes. “Conversation tonight gave us a lot of shit to feel.”
My man, this is a lot, Diane said.
“I heard talking,” Liko said. “Thought someone else was with you.”
“No, just me. Screaming into the abyss.”
“Don’t scream into the abyss, they’re not insured for it. Scream into the void. The abyss is for staring.”
A maniacal, hiccupped laughed came out of Dane’s chest. “Green Man, sometimes I kinda love you.”
“Yeah, well…” Liko crossed his arms. “You want to be left alone or bossed around?”
“I’d like to be punched in the face.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Boss me around, please.”
Liko snapped his fingers. “Out. Now. Free swim is over.”
He took a towel out of the basket, then casually turned his back as Dane got out and dried off. The towel knotted around his waist, he followed Liko inside like a duckling.
“You’re my emotional support Green Man,” he said.
“It’s how I pay rent around here. My bed or yours?”
“Mine.”
Dane pulled on shorts while Liko got his phone and water. He shook a prescription bottle into his palm and handed Dane a pill. “Klonopin,” he said. “One for you, one for me.”
It was all simple and straightforward. They lay down in the king bed, their backs to the center. Turned out their lights.
“You’ll be asleep real soon,” Liko said. “Klonopin’s the shit.”
“Better living through chemistry.”
“No points for style, no shame in tapping out. Whatever we couldn’t feel tonight will keep until morning.”
“Thanks,” Dane said.
Then they were quiet in the dark. No goodnights or last words. Just two sets of long, deep breaths.
This is a lot, Diane said, still fretful.
Yes it is, Dane said, running a hand along her hair, then a thumb beneath each of her blue eyes. It’s all so much.
Life is so much.
But I’m here.
We’re here.
We’re together.
“Thanks,” he said again.
He heard a smooth rustle behind him. A bit of movement. A prickling energy gathering in the center of the mattress. Gingerly, he eased his bottom leg back a bit. Then a little more. His foot touched another foot, the sole warm and rough against his own.
“Green Man power activated,” Liko murmured. “Great Dane locked in?”
“Locked,” Dane said. Thinking, Sole to sole.
The soul wind activates through the soles of the feet.
Stand on your soul.
Go to war for your peace.
He yawned as the edges of his mind softened and blurred, and the night began to erase itself from memory.