This is so one-segment-of-Dr.-Phil recognizable. I’m about to suggest that he try cheating with a flat-screen, when Janine staggers back in, her silhouette breaking up the bar-door sunlight.
WE all shifted when Pickle died. Little Pickle-face, not quite three years old. She was the baby, and was Dad’s chance at redemptive fatherhood. The nearly navy-blue eyes that meant to serve as peacemakers, as liaisons, between Dad and Danny and Janine and me, and which would at last make us a real live, functional family.
Eighteen months my younger sister, her life defined by the Monroe Carell Children’s Hospital at Vandy. She never had a chance to contemplate heaven or hell or the Easter Bunny. Yet somehow, as I look around at all of us, maybe it’s not so bad after alclass="underline" little Pickle’s death.
Shhh.
Maybe, as I think about Janine — thirteen and already destroying her body — I did get off easy. Maybe, when I think about Frank’s incessant degradation of Danny, I got lucky as hell.
Yeah, maybe, just like Janine (but for different reasons), I’m glad Pickle died. Maybe the black circles under her eyelids and her hairless little head, the paper ducks taped to the ward wall, were worth it — just to again become the baby of the household. To escape my father, who after Pickle’s death just gave up on all of it: his wives, his children, his military career. Who turned me over to a brightly pixelated babysitter.
Maybe, just maybe, I was lucky to be parented by the screen. To sit for hours alone, to always look for Pickle, always always always, and to find shards of her on Sesame Street and The Cosby Show and Growing Pains and Laff-A-Lympics and. . To find him there as welclass="underline" Good Ole Dad. Or, rather, Good New Dads. Flawless and nonthreatening, a thousand different men who taught me how to live. Loving me, forgiving my faults. Providing the practical wrap-ups that Janine and Danny never knew.
Janine walks back in from her smoke and plops down on the barstool.
“Sorry, Bobby,” she says. “It’s just a weird, awful day and all.”
“No,” I say. “I’m the one who’s sorry, sis.” I picture the deepest hug I’ve ever watched, and try my best to give her one that eclipses it.
Because yeah, maybe.
Wall
SO,
it used to be that night after night I’d lie dead awake, staring at the street-lit silhouette of lace drape on bedroom wall. Hours of halogen, the silence broken only by the report of low-caliber gunshot on the streets, or by the smashing of bottles in the alley below. Used to be heart arrhythmic, in the gut of anxiety, aphasia, dysthymia, and back-of-throat-scrape reflux. I was home. Honorably discharged. I had transitioned from CHU barracks to a series of moves, south then north, and to this matchbox apartment in the city. A chair and plank of desk. To cracked, cream and cornflower linoleum of kitchenette adjoined to shower-stall bathroom. To gilt-frame picture from before the war. Pens with clotted ink. Fatty rinds trimmed from markdown cutlets graying in the drain-catch. Dress greens with combat ribbons in back of closet, moth cakes in pocket. To tight on sour bourbon, hand-sweeping crumbs and dust from the corners while bent down to recover some dropped object. A bottle top. Fork.
To the questions: Wasn’t there another way? Couldn’t I have chosen not to—? But Father, can’t you understand that—? Chaplain, can you—? Could you—?
No, nobody could. The facts were only fork and bottle top; were a glass and a glass, and dips of shallow sleep, propped up on folded foam pillows to curb the climbing flux. Glances at the red digits of the alarm clock. At the wall stamped with silhouette of lace drape. Streetlight halogen. Ever awake.
SO,
used to be nights and nights, liminal, unending, until one night I heard something new, through the wall. I shot awake. What was that? Heart pound. A knock? Who’s there? Hello? I reached for my weapon and. .
No, it’s nothing, I thought. Just the snag of apnea. It was nothing. Now settle in. Settle down.
I de-cocked the MK, and forced myself back to nourishing thoughts of Supposed-To-Be. (This time, I imagined that instead of enlisting, I’d gone into medical sales, achieving both base salary and commission.) Back to balmy summer, Birmingham, Alabama, and to her premature crow’s-feet and gold-flecked hazel eyes; to a Toyota Tacoma, graphite-black, certified pre-owned; to wood-fenced yard to mow on Sunday; to thinking of getting pregnant, and fifteen-year fixed rate; periodic nightlife of old fraternity buddy in town, and let’s try the new Japanese restaurant near the mall; to grocery store valentine for her, with love, true love, never left you love, fill me up love, spaniel puppy at Christmas, better than yesterday love; in-laws and the bottles of twist-off Merlot they offer; to she and I drive down to the Gulf for the three-day weekend, or maybe San Fran on Southwest for four; my turn to sweep the pubes off of the potpourri scent-filled, one-out-of-two-and-a-half-bathroom tile floors; to the shouts and the fights, and to the hours curled up watching sitcoms; to joke emails at work, and work emails at home, and. .
To your toothy, stuttered laugh so lovely. Let’s please just grow old.
To can’t sleep. So very old. Was that a knock?
Indeed. A knock. And that’s when I began to hear her, through the wall.
I listened to the rip of the packing tape from her boxes, and to the stacking of plates in the cubbies over the sink. I heard her pause to consider her trinkets. Heard her reprimand herself when she dropped something sentimental.
(By accent she is British. Lilting. But broken.)
Side-by-side in our crumbling walk-ups, I knew that the streetlight hit her bedroom wall. Understood the curl of her linoleum. I listened and heard a thousand lovers, a million, hourly wage jobs. City to town, spiraling farther away from home.
She did a lot of late-night, pan-crash cooking. Sang Mozart libretti. I believe there were quick raps on the wall when I snored too loud, or got too drunk. When she was trying to read, or just wondering how she’d gone wrong back in soggy old England. At times, I made out hints of her phone calls: —ther, I can’t believe you’d say that when you know very well he never cared for me, or I don’t have it right now, and I listened to her halfhearted prayers. I fell mad for her vocal tone, which tingled my neck muscles, tickled my cochlea. After hearing her leave, I’d sneak into the hallway and inhale her traces.
AND,
over the weeks, we grew. As if on orders, I made things proper for her. I bought bottled water and lilac-scented candles; some British cookies, called McVitie’s, and double bergamot tea. Marmalade. At the library, I studied: map room to Internet kiosk, Mirror and Sun to BBC News. Così fan tutte in the A/V extension. I found out my Birmingham was named after hers.
I also worried about inadequacies. My god, I must try to stop drowsing into terror, must try to stop drinking, try to smile — well, maybe not smile, but just not frown, not scowl, nor curse so loud. . nor do anything vulgar in the bedroom or she’ll hear me and She’s All I’ve Got type of thoughts, defined and redefined themselves.