Life Jacket #2
“Yeah, well. We’re not exactly close enough for me to have brought it up over the laptop charger.
” A small, tired laugh, more breath than sound.
“It was sudden. Aneurysm. She was making dinner and then she wasn’t anymore.
I missed two weeks of the semester, and everyone was so careful around me for about a month.
Then, they just weren’t anymore, which honestly was the part that took me the longest to get used to.
Not the missing her. The world going back to normal around it.
It felt like the world should stop but it just keeps going. ”
“My mom is dead, too.” I did not soften that blow, either.
“Fuck,” Finn muttered the word. “I’m sorry. Then you know how this goes already.”
“No,” I said. “Not really. She died when I was three. I don’t remember her. I don’t remember the after.” I stopped, not sure how to ask the question. “What did you do? After.”
“Nothing impressive,” he said. “I went to my aunt’s for a while.
I watched a lot of bad TV. I didn’t shower for longer than I’m proud of.
” A pause. “But I’m still friends with everybody who loved her.
My aunt, her old coworkers, this one neighbor who used to bring over casseroles like it was her job.
Everybody who loved my mom is still around.
They just got sad for a while, and then they weren’t as sad, and now we just are who we are, except she’s not here.
Nobody died from loving her too much. I know that sounds like a weird thing to say.
But… sometimes it felt like that would happen. ”
I did not say anything. I was looking at the broken coffee mug on the floor.
“I don’t know if that’s helpful,” Finn said, when I didn’t fill the silence. “I’m bad at this. I’m sorry, I know that’s not, like, a real condolence.”
“It’s real,” I said, and I didn’t fully understand why until after I’d already said it out loud. It was honest. Honest is usually real, in my world.
“Oh.” He sounded genuinely surprised. “Okay. Good. I mean, not good. You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.”
Sir Reginald barked somewhere on his end, a small sound, and Finn muttered something away from the phone, and when he came back his voice had eased into something a little more like itself.
“You don’t have to talk to me about any of it,” he said. “I know we’re not… like, I’m not your person for this. I just didn’t want you to think nobody outside of it noticed. That’s all. You can hang up now if this is weird.”
“It’s not weird,” I said, and found, somewhere underneath all the flatness, that it actually wasn’t.
“When did he die?” Finn asked me, and it felt like it should hurt but it did not. His death had become fact and not something imagined or denied. He was dead. My dad is dead.
“Last Sunday,” I told him.
“Oh,” Finn said, like he wasn’t expecting the answer. “He just died, it’s recent.”
I noticed Finn said the words die and death without the lower register. Without the voice dropping, like mine. I guess death was just fact for him, too.
“Yeah,” I sighed.
“Sorry,” he said and I did not know what he was apologizing for. “I just wondered… you know the day, uh, that we met? I asked if you wanted coffee.”
“Sure,” I told him, but the memory was blurry and insignificant. I did not really care enough to think too much about it.
“I was just on the way to meet my boyfriend for lunch, and I saw you sitting there, I guess, and you looked… um, you looked really sad. It’s why I asked you if you wanted coffee. Thought, maybe, something was wrong.”
“Oh,” I said, processing his words. Understanding that Zane and I had misread the situation completely. We held the raspberry to our eyes and decided it was molded without even looking. For a second, I wondered how often we did that.
We did not talk much longer after that. He told me Sir Reginald had eaten part of a sock, and the vet bill was criminal.
I told him, eventually, the bare outline, cancer, eight months, nobody knew, and he didn’t try to make it mean anything.
He just listened, badly, the way someone listens when they’ve never been trained to do it well and are doing it anyway because it matters to them that they try.
When we hung up, I sat on the kitchen floor for a long time, looking at the phone in my lap, turning over the one thing he had said that would not leave me alone.
Nobody died from loving her too much.
It was not profound. It was not even, probably, something he had thought hard about before he said it.
It was just true, reported plainly by someone with no idea he was contradicting the entire architecture I had built in the dirt at my father’s grave.
I did not believe it yet. Not really. Not the way I believed the Dead Sea.
I stood up from the floor. I did not really want to; I liked how it felt against me.
But I stood anyway. I had the urge to haunt, faintly, but not as strong as it usually was.
The house felt familiar to me in the way it did when it was my home.
My dad was rarely here. My mom was always in the ground.
Usually, it had just been me, all alone, existing. Just like now.
My feet walked, but instead of haunting, they led me up the stairs.
I did not avoid my eyes from his room, the way I usually did when I was forced up here in the after.
His bedroom door was open, and the bed was unmade.
I bit my lip as I stared at it, the expensive green sheets pushed around, messy, and not smoothed over.
Zane had made every bed in this house since we got here.
He did not make this one. He did not disturb the scene, the personal bubble that my dad’s essence remained in.
I knew why he didn’t. He knew… he knew. One day, I would need to feel it just how he left it. Zane knew that. As Zane always does.
Today was not that day. My feet led me to my bedroom instead, and to the bathroom attached.
The door clicked shut, isolating me in the small, tiled room.
I let out a breath. My reflection in the mirror was a stranger, pale, hollowed out, with the dust of grief clinging to my skin.
I needed to wash it off. I was not worried about losing it.
My hands twitched slightly as I turned the shower handle.
The water began to hiss against the fiberglass stall.
I dialed it up as hot as I could stand, waiting until the glass fogged over and blurred the rest of the world into soft shapes.
Mechanically, I shed my clothes, leaving them in a discarded heap on the floor like an old skin I was desperate to shed.
When I stepped under the spray, the heat hit my shoulders with a shock that made me gasp. It was exactly what I wanted. The sharp sting brought me back, forcing my mind away from the unmade bed down the hall, away from the ghosts, and brought me into the now.
Closing my eyes, I let the water stream directly over my face.
For a few long minutes, I just stood there, letting the pressure beat against my chest. I reached for the soap, the scent of vanilla and shea butter filling the enclosure.
As I lathered my arms and rinsed away the grime, my tears finally mixed with the water pouring down my cheeks.
I could not tell where the shower ended and my own breaking point began, and for once, that was okay. Here, in the steam, I was not a hummingbird. I did not have to face any eyes. I could just fall apart in secret, letting the drain carry the heaviest pieces away.
And I started to understand that it was not that I didn’t want Zane. I always wanted Zane. But if I was the hummingbird, then I did not want Zane to be me. Standing there, watching me exist and feeling bad for me, in a twisted, extremely lonely sense of self punishment.
I was a hummingbird and I did not want a single pair of human eyes to land on me.