When I was a kid I was afraid of the dark and one night I thought I saw Jesus standing at the foot of my bed with a baseball bat poised to smash my head in for a lie I’d told Rhonda Henzel that day and forgotten to ask forgiveness for. I ran to my parents’ room and hid under the bed and eventually fell asleep.
When they came to bed I woke up and heard my mom asking my dad where everything had gone and I remember wondering if we’d been robbed. I think I’m losing Tash, she said, and began to cry. And I heard my dad, in his wordless way, shift around in the bed to offer what comfort he could in the form of his arm. I waited for them to fall asleep and then I went back to my bedroom and slept with the light on all night. The next day my dad and I went to church and my mom told him she couldn’t go with him because she wasn’t feeling well. My dad stood staring at the closed bedroom door. I could see his outline in the dark, from the living room. Then he knocked on Tash’s door and said Tash: It’s time to get up. And she told him to go to hell.
If I had a clue as to what constituted an ending I’d say that that day marked the beginning of the end. My dad and I walked to church together holding hands. Afterwards, we walked back home. And I listened while he talked to me about the half-lives of isotopes. Take radon, he told me. For it to break down into its daughter nucleus, polonium 218, requires 3.82 days. Others take only seconds.
I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I felt happy knowing he was happy about something even if it was about something breaking down.
And potassium, on the other hand? he said. To break down into argon?
I’d hum.
Nomi, he’d ask. Are you with me? It takes fifty billion years! Fifty billion years to find a little stability. A molecule’s worth.
I laughed, and then I realized that I had just laughed the type of laugh my mother often laughed. It was the kind of laugh a person laughs before consuming two or three bottles of Aspirin. And I had another thought: that Tash had stopped laughing for a good reason. And that she was the sanest person in our family. But that didn’t make any sense at all.
When someone complimented Tash she’d suck in her cheeks to keep herself from smiling because she enjoyed looking pissed off and dangerous. I liked the way the shadows fell on her face when she did that. She looked like Sophia Loren. When I did it I looked like Alexander Solzhenitsyn after all those years in solitary confinement. Ray had his book.
I went to the garage and sat on the cold cement floor and opened and closed the garage door with a little black box that said STANLEY on it. When we first got the automatic door opener I loved to roll under the door and clear it at the last second. It was fun to think I could be sliced in half if I made even one tiny tactical error, until my sister told me the door was designed to stop as soon as it made the slightest contact with any surface, even flesh. Thanks for ruining my fun. I remember the way her knees looked while she stood on the driveway saying to me as I rolled under the door, don’t let’s be the kind of family that fights about who gets to kill themselves next.
When Tash was four and I was a fat baby, she threw herself out of a tree and broke her elbow in two places. She thought that God had let it happen. My mom told her that God had saved her life. She could just as easily have broken her neck and died. Then she had wanted to throw me out of a tree to test God’s love and my mom said no, there are such things as accidents.
These were simple, barely considered statements that Trudie threw out like confetti and forgot in a second that she’d said but they stuck to me like the kind of wood tick that crawls through your ear into your brain and lays eggs. What did she mean, accidents? What about God knowing how many grains of sand there were on every single beach? What about him knowing what we’ll do before we do it? Obviously if my sister were to throw me out of a tree there would be an ending ordained by God. He’d have known that she was going to do it and he’d also have known what the outcome would be. If Tash felt like throwing me out of a tree, wasn’t that because God was making her feel like throwing me out of a tree, and for her not to follow through on that feeling, wasn’t that a sin? Wasn’t Satan speaking through my mother when she was preventing Tash from throwing me out of a tree and following God’s will? Technically, I should have been thrown from that tree.
I remained in the garage but moved from the floor to the top of the freezer to get away from the ants. I realized while lying down on it that my body could easily fit inside. I imagined Tash walking up to me, in frayed cut-offs with cotton balls between her toes, saying: No, it wouldn’t. It’s designed to hold casseroles and pork chops and things. Don’t let’s be the kind of family discovered in freezers.
My sister once gave me a Valentine’s card that said Jim Jones loves you. It had a rainbow decal inside that I stuck into the exact centre of our large picture window.
When my dad saw it he asked me what it was. A rainbow, I said. He said no…no and shook his head. He gave me a razor blade and a wet cloth. My dad wasn’t big on overt symbols of hope. His famous line was: Let’s not call it a celebration. He said that when his school was planning a twenty-year anniversary thing and the kids were making up the invitations for the general public to come and eat a sandwich and look and marvel at how things hadn’t changed, he suggested they use the words Twenty Years: A Retrospective.
Trudie had said but honey, I think celebration sounds nice and Ray had said yes, it does sound nice. Tash had suggested Twenty Years: A Long, Arduous Journey, which my dad had liked and didn’t realize until later that she’d been joking.
On long drives Tash would be forced to share her thoughts with me in the back seat of the car. Her big thing was noticing things nobody else had, like: Ever noticed how nobody names their kid Cain any more? Ever noticed how Mom and Dad can say open house and come and go and do but never party? We had parents who couldn’t say party. We were in the car on a long, boring trip somewhere. We thought of ways to make them say party.
Okay, said Tash, we’ll do word association. I say birthday, Mom, what do you say? Cake? said my mom. Suit? Then I tried: Okay, Dad, this is more like a fill-in-the-blanks game. I go to a restaurant, the hostess person comes up to me and says how many people in your…? My dad said family? Car? Tash said god and rolled down the window just far enough for her to put her head through it. When my dad said Tash, please don’t do that, please get your head back inside the car, she closed the window even tighter around her neck so it looked like she would eventually pinch it right off and her head would go sailing off into the sky like a lost balloon. Her hair was whipping around wildly and her lips were stretched back and turning blue in the wind and she slowly dug her thumbnail into her arm until she’d engraved in herself a little bleeding crescent moon. That was how badly she needed to hear my parents say party. Finally my dad stopped the car somewhere around the exit to Falcon Lake and we waited for Tash to sit properly in the back seat. That took about five or ten minutes. My mom said: Honey, we were playing along. We were only teasing you. I had to get out of the car and go around to give Tash a sip of my Coke, so she wouldn’t dehydrate in the sun. I don’t know why it meant so much to her. Everything always did. I sometimes wonder if they’d said party that day if things could have been different. Things shouldn’t hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you’re highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and bang, you’re an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that’s kind of relaxing.