Ghosts #4
“Okay,” I nodded. He got up. He left. Just me and my dad’s dead body.
I stood there, my hand still resting against the cold skin of his wrist, and I did what my brain had spent three years practicing in the quiet hours of Tuesday afternoons: I tracked the lines.
I looked at his nose, the sharp, narrow bridge that had always made him look like he was looking down at a contract even when he was looking at his daughter.
I looked at the graying hair at his temples.
I looked at the deep, permanent lines around his eyes, tracing the exact depth of the shadows that the lights could not reach.
I did not look at them to grieve. I looked at them to inventory them, pressing the image into the fear-based part of my mind like a stamp into hot wax.
This was the last time my eyes would ever land on this face. Once the transport arrived, the portrait was going into a box, and I would never be let into that room again.
My mind did not offer any warm memories.
There were no grainy photographs of first birthdays or long summer drives.
Instead, the thoughts looped back to the sharp edges of expensive wool in the dining room, the sound of a conference call interrupting a middle school graduation, and the suffocating silence that used to live between us like a monument.
It was an imperfect, bruised history, but it was the only one we had built.
“I thought we had more time,” I shook my head as I spoke. “I… don’t know. I thought I had more time to be the daughter you wanted. I thought you had more time to be the father I needed.”
My exhale felt like it should be frosted. “I thought I had more time.”
“Goodbye, Dad,” I could barely force the words to come out. I let go of his wrist. I did not want to. I did anyway.
When I turned toward the door, Zane was already there. “Seren,” he murmured. “Let’s go to my parents’ place. It’s ten minutes. My mom is there. We can let everything settle. Get some sleep. Figure things out tomorrow.”
“No,” I said. My voice was a straight line. “I want to go home.”
“The apartment is two hours back, baby. The highway in the fog—”
“Not the apartment,” I interrupted, looking past his shoulder at the walls of the corridor. “His house. I want to go to his house.”
Zane did not argue. He did not offer a lecture about the traps waiting for me inside those walls, or how the town was never good to me.
He just ran his thumb across my knuckles once, a validation of my choice, and guided me back through the automatic sliding doors.
I left the hospital and I could only understand that I was walking away from my father and I was never going to see him again.
Every step I took was making it more permanent.
Each time my footstep landed he became more dead.
The drive to the colonial house took six minutes. I did not speak. My fingers locked around the unopened granola bar in my lap. The house looked the same as it had on Friday. Zane unlocked the wooden front door, and it felt like a museum that had been closed in the middle of a shift.
I did not look at his phone sitting face-down on the granite counter. I walked straight to the sofa and pulled the heavy plaid blanket off the back cushion, the one with the rough, frayed edges. I wrapped it around my shoulders and walked out onto the large porch off the back door.
The morning air was still thick with fog, the first gray light of dawn just beginning to crawl over the overgrown hydrangeas in the backyard. But I did not care about the sun. That was not my motivation for being here. The light and I have never really been friends.
I sat down on the wooden bench; my knees pulled tight against my chest and fixed my eyes on the sturdy hook hanging from the porch railing.
The blue hummingbird feeder hung there in the gray light, perfectly still.
The paint was peeling, the tin roof dull from decades of rainstorms, but the liquid inside was clear, bright, and filled to the absolute brim.
A promise kept for twenty-one years. The man who made it lay flat on a metal table six minutes away.
The last thing he said was my mother’s name. Anwen. I had not heard it spoken for as long as I can remember. My memories of that name all live in the graveyard, reading it engraved in old stone, over and over again. Now, I would do the same thing with the name Tom. I guess.
For the first time in a year, all I could think about was a pack of cigarettes. I could feel the urge to light one creeping around in my stomach. The need for the head rush that follows the harsh inhale of chemicals.
After all, I am the sea. I have changed but I am the same.
My mother is dead. My father is dead now, too. His ghost joins her in the haunting of me.
Have you ever read about the Dead Sea? I remember my dad telling me about it once when I was a kid. He said the salt content was so high, you could float on your back and feel weightless. I did not feel weightless. I felt poisonous.
I am the Dead Sea. I am so full, but I am so fucking empty. And everything that tries to exist inside of me… dies.