Mutter
for Rachael
June 30
Amber liquid slopped from the thick-glassed bottle. It pattered in the slanting sun to create Rorschach blots on the hard-pine floor, a chiaroscuro of sunlight and shadow and damp that moved like melancholic jazz on the empty and well-worn wood. His shaking hand lifted a shot, dribbling down his bare chest to soak the denim of his 501s as Jack burned down his throat and thumped his head against the wall he was resting against. The wall was empty, like the room, and had long cracks in its aging plaster. The movers would return soon for him.
He sobbed, once, and the glass fell from his limp fingers, rolling to clink against the proud bottle. His blood-shot blue eyes studied the band of white flesh that encircled his ring finger, and his thumb gently rubbed the unfamiliar, empty space.
July 18
He found himself sitting against the wall and not thinking again. His eyes were open, but his legs had gone to sleep, and his arms were numb; panic began to filter through the cotton enshrouding his brain, and he rolled to his feet. He still couldn�t think, and pure animal instinct sent him to huddle on the couch that smelled of old leather and cigarettes. With arms wrapped around his burning knees, he sank into the cold, stiff leather, and glared sightlessly at the empty bottle resting on their coffee table. The specked and spotted glass dimly reflected the swoosh swoosh movements of his overhead fan, mirroring the frantic cycles of the streaked wood that was raising the hair on his bare, blood-streaked arms.
He�d always adored anniversaries; Sarah could brag to her girlfriends that he never forgot her birthday or the day of their wedding, because he was always ready with a card and flowers and some small, expensive gift.
A thin, sing-song voice started in his midbrain, humming myfaultmyfaultmyfault to a monotone melody. The voice came with the slow return of reasonless thought like a walking bass line, and with the convulsive shudders rippling his skin in arctic sympathy. The thread of some disconnected emotion curled up from the center of his skull, sending him scrabbling for the tiny, gore-flecked bathroom to vomit into cracked porcelain.
He had liked giving her things. It made her happy, and that made him happy. �And so hope springs eternal,� he whispered to the acrid yellow bile, scratching at the fresh stitches raising the tender flesh of his wrists.
He had been happy.
But then, this was a different sort of anniversary altogether.
July 31
Her furniture crowded his new apartment. He couldn�t sleep on the bed, because he could remember her buying it. He couldn�t sleep on the couch, because he could remember her sitting on it, watching tv and eating popcorn or crackerjacks or some other meaningless snack in the hours after dinner. He hated crackerjacks. He couldn�t sit in her chair, and he couldn�t eat off of her plates. He was getting hungry. He couldn�t rest his feet on her coffee table because she�d always hated that, and he couldn�t use the same brand of shampoo because it smelled like he�d smelled when she�d been alive. So he decided to move again.
August 18
Two months. Two months today.
He had stopped drinking three days ago; she�d never approved of liquor, and three days ago he�d stopped hurting enough to care. He stopped cold-turkey, of course, almost relishing the pain that wracked his lean body, hating himself for still being alive and able to feel. And when the cold-sweats and cravings were finally over, he�d staggered into the shower, and briefly entertained the thought of ending his medical leave a few days early. At that moment, skin still flushed from the heat of the shower, returning to work felt like a good idea.
He was making a quick breakfast out of a mostly-ripe banana and Chex cereal when Mutual Insurance called.
Assessment of damages incurred, they called it.
Bullshit, he called it, screaming his opinion at the broken handset, and so easily the day was broken.
The dream seemed to come as soon as he crawled into bed that evening. It rushed him, overwhelmed him like the tide in a swirl of vivid color and sound. He�d never dreamed in sound before, but now he could hear her laughter as though she were in the room with him. He�d fallen in love with her laugh. Nothing else had really mattered to him for a long time; his only goal in life had been to make her laugh.
In the dream she was laughing about one of her gifts. She�d bought him a pair of boxers from The GAP; they were black, with line-drawings of ghosts and vampires and Frankenstein�s monster that glowed in the dark . So of course he wore them the next day, under his suit, and the sound of her laughter followed him out the door and put a grin on his face that lasted until rush-hour traffic.
It wasn�t much of a dream, nothing too momentous, but somehow that made it better, made it real enough that when he woke he was uncertain for a moment which was the dream and which reality. He nearly got drunk again once he was awake enough to reason out the truth, but the pain from his sleep-induced confusion was almost comforting. It was like having her back again. It was like, without the alcohol to numb his brain he could remember to miss her, and not just feel.
August 26
He couldn�t leave the house anymore. He�d actually gone back to work, and had a surprisingly good week; almost no one asked how he was doing, and only one person mentioned his wife. He�d nearly broken down after that conversation, and Steph had had to escort him back to his office and get him a coffee--one cream, no sugar-- while he calmed down.
He went to work, but decisions about transportation and tariff revenues just didn�t seem to matter. At first, the monotony had been comforting. But he could remember her calling him at work, and he could hear her voice on his office phone, on speaker sometimes during meetings, and his coworkers were starting to wonder.
So he stayed home. His boss was understanding, said she�d lost her daughter, and knew how grief could be. He wanted to kill his boss, beat her head in because she didn�t understand, she couldn�t understand, because it wasn�t the same.
So he stayed home. It had been about three days; he�d stopped counting the hours after awhile. He didn�t want to sleep anymore. It hurt. He�d stay up as long as he could, tossing a small basketball into the hoop over his door, listening to his collection of dusty old jazz records, or just watching TV, and finally crawl into bed around four. Then he�d lay there, watching his ceiling and listening to the dark until the sun chased her away.
It wasn�t that he didn�t want to see her. It was how badly he did want to see her that kept him awake into the dawn.
September 2
AM
He finally fell asleep in the hospital. Greg had come to check on him, and found him huddled on the couch, barely breathing. The doctor mentioned malnutrition and dehydration, but he was past listening. Greg had seen the scars on his wrists. He wouldn�t be going back to work.
The dream began, it seemed, as soon as his head hit the pillow.
She came to him, her long, dark hair flowing in a wind that couldn�t touch his still form on the bed. Her eyes were luminous in the dark, and made him want to cry, or scream. She hurt to look at. He missed her.
She moved forward, lips curved in a soft smile, not floating like something out of a Dracula movie but walking, swaying her hips like an autumn�s eve. She wasn�t wearing ghostly robes, either, but a pair of ripped blue jeans and a boat-neck tee. He could even hear the scuffing of her old, worn out Keds.
He could feel the tears pouring down the sharp planes of his cheeks, and her slight weight displacing the mattress, and he reached out to her before he could stop himself. He had thought, somewhere in the back of his mind, that if he ever touched the apparition she would vanish, and disappear forever back into his subconscious.
She took his hand.
She was warm, and soft, and smelled of lavender and lilac and heat. She smelled exactly like his memories. She leaned down, still smiling that Mona Lisa smile, and brushed her cheek against his; he pressed into the feel of her silken skin, breathing in her scent, bringing up his other hand to comb his fingers through her hair.
I love you.
�I love you, too,� he whispered, nuzzling the skin at the base of her neck.
I miss you.
�Miss you so much,� he agreed, drying his tears on her soft, warm skin. He could feel her lips pressing into his hair, and he smiled a bittersweet smile, kissing his way down collarbones that flared like wings beneath the thin-fabricked tee.
She felt real.
September 18
Three months. Three months today.
It still hurt? Yeah. It still hurt.
But then, don�t they always say there�s no formal time-limit to grief?
September 26
He went back to work after all. His boss apparently did understand, and sometimes he caught a look in Devron�s eye like she was missing her daughter as much as he was missing his wife. So that was kind of okay. And he was moved to another department. Human Resources. He was okay with it, even with the additional training required for the move. His boss said she figured talking to actual people all day would be better than �that damn computer�. He told her he thought the company charter forbade cursing within the building.
Things were getting better.
September 28
Except he still missed her.
He had a different dream, for once. It was some stupid, bizarre dream in which his best friend�s mother took him to a bar where they listened to a saxophone player who looked eerily like Charlie Parker and she bought him a martini. He hadn�t seen his best friend since high school. And he hated martinis.
But his wife wasn�t there. And that was almost worse, because the other dream was like having her back, even if it was just for a little while, and even if it hurt like hell the next morning. So he lay there, breathing in sheets that didn�t smell like anyone but himself, wishing for just a whiff of her perfume. Just a glimpse of her hair. Anything but this sullen emptiness.
He thought briefly about trying to kill himself again, but decided his track record was miserable enough, and his insurance probably wouldn�t cover another failure.
October 3
There was a bite to the air, finally. Summer had seemed to drag on forever. He�d decided to hate summer from now on, since she�d.
She�d always loved autumn, though, and it was finally something that he could remember without feeling grief. The heat and grime of her death were nowhere in the pale blue skies and crisp red leaves, the clean scent of wood smoke and just a hint of snow on the air.
He started running again.
October 11
He played a game of pick-up basketball at the gym after work, for the first time in months. Halfway through, he became exceedingly glad that he�d started up running again. Greg smiled at him, for once without that lingering hint of pity. He even wiped the court with Michael, who, though not a champion by any means, could give anyone a run for their money.
He got home late, tired, and sweaty. He was still shy about the scars, self-inflicted and otherwise, and had sweated through the game in a long-sleeved cotton T. He scuffed through his front door, tossing his crumpled suit over his only chair, shuffling past the empty living room to stagger into a cold shower. Even with the threat of snow, the cold felt heavenly on his fevered body.
He had never played basketball with her, so it should have been safe. But the lack of a memory was almost as bad as a battalion, because it reminded him that he was trying to forget her. Even though he didn�t really want to. But sometimes he wished that he could lose his memory, that he�d walk in on a robbery-in-progress and get shot in the head, like Harrison Ford in that movie Sarah had loved. Or maybe he�d get into a car accident. Or fall off a bridge. Stranger things had happened.
October 18
Steph had set him up on a blind date. When she told him, his first impulse was to tackle her and squeeze her neck until his memories went away. But he managed to retreat to the bathroom before he did anything rash, and his anger washed away in a splash of icy water that soaked the collar of his suit and trickled chill fingers down his neck. She sent Greg in after him, and he wasted fifteen minutes in reassuring the man of his good health. He�d stayed on top of buying new suits, so the weight-loss wasn�t readily apparent, and judicious use of a tanning salon kept anyone from remarking on his pallor.
But his wife had died four months ago today, and even the thought of another woman made him physically ill, and reawakened the depression he�d been fighting so hard. As he stared at his own reflection, pallid under the fluorescents even beneath the artificial tan, he wanted to die. He willed himself to die.
That night he dreamed again. Only this time, he dreamed her death.
October 20
He went to work, for all the good that did him. He challenged Greg to a rematch, and they played until the other man pled starvation and headed to the showers; he followed, but only to change into a pair of trunks and dive into the pool. Greg reemerged, his suit crumpled and somewhat damp with the humidity of the locker room, and before leaving spent a few moments watching him swim laps in the far corner of the gym. He didn�t want to go home.
Something was definitely telling him not to go home.
He went home. There was hardly any traffic at nine pm, so at least that was something. He walked up the steps to his apartment, not bounding like he had when she�d been waiting for him, but not trudging, either. He felt okay.
His mail had arrived, and he carried it into the kitchen with him, thinking to prepare a snack while he paid his bills. The insurance people had sent him another letter, and he dropped it to the counter, ignoring it in favor of an apple and a cold beer. The bills were fairly low, and he wrote out the checks while sitting on a stool at his counter, occasionally dropping flecks of apple onto the crisp type-writer paper. She�d always.
No. Good day.
He moved to some junk mail, reading the advertisements for a laugh. There was also a letter from his mother. She wrote that the nursing home was lovely, and suggested that he come for a visit and bring that lovely wife of his. His mother had the beginnings of Alzheimer's. Everything was lovely for her, between spells. He scribbled a reply, knowing that the content wouldn�t matter five seconds after she�d read the words.
Finally the insurance letter was the only one left; it was opened one-handed, as he struggled with stove-settings and a frozen pizza while drinking yet another beer. He took a long swig, set the pizza on a cookie sheet and in the oven, and looked down at the surprisingly small sheet of paper.
It was a check.
They�d finally paid him for killing his wife.
October 21
He decided to have a nervous breakdown.
He went to work, played some one-on-one with Greg, and even deposited the dot-printed check, misspelled name and all.
But inside, he was dying. He could feel it. Day after day in Human Resources, listening to people complain about coworkers, kids, and their marriages, he could feel a scream building inside of him. How dare they complain about something they had? How dare they take something so precious for granted? How could he have done so, when she was alive?
They�d never even discussed kids.
It was taken for granted that kids would come, eventually.
But sometimes, there isn�t an eventually to wait for.
October 29
He kept forgetting to eat.
She�d come to him in his dreams, realer and realer every night. And every morning he�d run out of his apartment in a pair of cut off sweats and an old t-shirt to play basketball by himself until the sun came up. Every now and then some punk would hassle him for money, but he never even had his keys on him. Forgotten, they would mock him from his kitchen counter as he waited for one of his neighbors to let him in.
They were getting used to his strange habits.
November 3
At work, when he went to work, he was a zombie. A battered, shattered shell of his former self. He couldn�t work in Human Resources anymore. Their puling complaints had finally gotten to him.
It took Security a good hour to get him �calmed down'.
He was pink-slipped by five pm. Turns out his boss� boss wasn�t quite so understanding.
Of course, he still had the insurance money. They�d had a very good policy, and money from her parents and his father, so he didn�t actually have to work any more. In fact, he debated, briefly, whether to ever leave his apartment again.
Staying won within five minutes.
November 18
He had kept a box of her things. Out of everything he had thrown away, he�d kept a few mementos, just in case. The plan was to bury them in the back of his closet until he was happy again, and then remember her fondly. Only the loneliness was so bad that he was beginning to think he�d try anything to get her back, and it was looking like he�d never reach happy. Calmly suicidal would have to do.
First was her diary. It was written in German, the language of her childhood, so he couldn�t read the words; but its pages were also filled with pen sketches and drawings, and the occasional water color. Their house. Their first car. Their border collie, given to a good home during his hospitalization and never reclaimed. The view from their window. Her garden. Her parents. Him. Her.
Second was a pair of her earrings. A cliche thing to keep, but she only ever wore the one pair. She hated earrings, and only wore them when he took her to dinner, or the opera. The smoothly rounded black stones, set in pewter-rinse silver, had complemented her hair and her eyes. The coroner had been kind enough to retrieve them.
Third was a deck of cards. She didn�t know many games or tricks, but they would play go fish or gin rummy in front of a fire on cold winter days, drinking cocoa and betting for marshmallows. The rubber band holding the cards together had a piece of her hair tangled in its strands.
Fourth was a dried, fuzzy green peach bud, like a scrap of old velvet. They used to walk in the park near their apartment, and in the springtime, when the peach trees bloomed, she had walked their dog every afternoon, plucking peach blossoms as she went. The bud was an accident, but she�d laughed, and said that it was beautiful, too.
The box was still fairly full, but midnight had come and gone, and he was still alone.
Memories wouldn�t bring her back.
She wasn�t coming back.
So he went to seek her in his dreams.
remembering
June 18
� . . . and could you believe the look on his face? I thought the poor git was going to have a heart attack!� Sarah laughed, leaning into the shoulder strap of her seatbelt, eyes bright and happy; her velvet evening bag had fallen to the floor beside her feet. His eyes caught the motion, but it didn�t really register against her.
�The �67?!� he mocked in a fake-snooty voice, cutting his eyes away from the road to watch her reaction; he lived to make her laugh.
�And when he saw what you�d done to your lobster. Oh, baby, you are too much.� Her laughter had died to a few hiccups, and he could see her looking at him, smiling quietly now. It wasn�t raining.
It had been pouring when they left the restaurant, but she always had a tiny, compact umbrella in her purse, and they escaped to the car nearly unscathed. She�d kept her arm about his waist through the run, her laughter vibrating through him. He smiled even at the memory of it.
The streets were slick, but he was unconcerned, partly because of his rain-tread Goodyear tires, and partly because no young man ever anticipates death, not in any real sense. She was thumbing through the playbook, reading a synopsis of the lead�s bio; he watched her out of the corner of his eye, and wished briefly that they were going home instead of to the ballet.
�I wanted to take ballet when I was younger,� she said in a wistful, somewhat self-mocking tone. �Of course, every little girl wants to be a ballerina at one point or another. It�s almost genetic, don�t you think? Like horses, and kittens, and everything else we�re supposed to want.�
�I wanted to be GI Joe,� he said, smirking at some formless memory of play forts and muddy, olive-green play soldiers. �My mom wanted me to take ballet.�
�No! Really?� She sounded like she�d discovered some great secret, and was smirking widely, a smile quite different from her usual grin. �How come you never told me before?�
�Never came up,� he shrugged, paying more attention to the road now that traffic had thickened and slowed, briefly regretting that glass of wine he�d had at dinner. �I didn�t actually take the lessons. And she bought me a guitar to make up for it.�
�Acoustic?�
�No, electric.�
�Somehow, I can�t see your parents letting you have an electric guitar in the house, much less buying you one.�
�They didn�t just buy me the guitar. They let my band practice in the garage.�
�You had a band?� Her disbelieving face was nearly as good as her grin, and he smiled, rather smugly, before she continued. �Why don�t you ever play anymore?�
�No reason,� he shrugged, feeling a defensive prickle between his shoulder blades. �I had to sell my guitar, way before I met you, and I just . . . never bought another one.�
�Well,� she said, the brief sadness in her eyes banished by a new smile. �Now I know what to get you for Christmas this year.�
He was about to answer her when a sudden screeching sound ripped his attention to their right, beyond her widening eyes; as if in slow motion, he saw a truck, big and black and emblazoned with the Chevy logo, slide across the intersection between a smaller sedan and a bright red coupe. He could see her pupils dilating, and then he flinched, instinctively, whipping the wheel around as the truck skidded into them, turning it to the left. Away from the truck.
Taking the blow broadside.
He heard her scream.
Then it was dark.
November 19
Baby?
�Sarah?�
March 18
He finally visited her grave.
Someone had been keeping it up; one of her friends must have paid the groundskeeper, since he�d been in the hospital until the week after the funeral and in no shape to even think about her grave for months after that, and they had no living relatives sane enough to take care of her.
There was snow on the ground, but someone had been there to sweep the gravemound clean and dust off the headstone, which he regretted deeply. It was simple, and unadorned, just as she would have liked, and simply spelled out her name, and the date of her death. He would have liked a bit more to remember her by. At least there were flowers, in a little water-filled, disposable bouquet that was most likely frozen. She liked flowers.
He�d gotten another job; not because he needed the money, but because she thought he should. So he started playing again, just small gigs in smoky blues bars and the occasional jazz dive. He actually had a small following, locals who knew his name if not much more. And she loved his playing, so that was another incentive.
The guilt had gotten a little better; that�s really why he�d decided to come to her grave. Not to say goodbye, which would be impossible, but to let go. If you love something, he�d once heard, you have to let it go. And sometimes, it comes back to you.
Baby?
He started up, staring around for her though he knew he wouldn�t see her.
Baby, it�s cold. You need to get inside.
�In a minute,� he said softly, smiling at the thought that she would hear him. �I just have to take care of something.�
He knelt down again, fingering the last item from her trunk; he drew it out, and looked at the tiny peach bud in the weak winter sunlight. After so many years, it was a bit shriveled, but it still felt like a scrap of velvet.
The earth was frozen, so rather than dig a hole he simply rested the bud on a bit of soil, and scraped some snow over it.
I do love you, you know.
�I love you too,� he said, climbing to his feet. �C�mon, let's get back inside.�