Dealth
Joseph Cummins
She was only eight
and thought air was coming out of the pores of her body, as if she were a slowly deflating tire. She asked him how long it would take her to die if she
was covered all over by tiny cuts. She begged him to listen to her heart. “Tell
me the truth—is it too fast?”
She told him she thought her nose had turned blue. He told her, no, absolutely not, and led her to the mirror.
“How can you think it’s blue?”
She didn’t answer, just wrinkled her nose and stared at herself.
One night, while Marta was away on a work trip, Sally began to hiccough. They were lying in bed together watching one of her favorite movies, and she began hiccoughing and she wouldn’t stop. Then she began to cry.
“Daddy,” she told him, “I’m going to keep hiccoughing forever and I won’t be able to breathe and I’m going to die.”
He reassured her, she was not going to die, and she fell asleep next to him, still hiccoughing.
Of course, she was going to die. She would just die in a time and place when he would no longer be around, on her own, outside of his reach and grasp, which was the place to which she was moving anyway. Although she was still deeply tied to him, she came to sit less and less on his lap on the early mornings when Marta had already left for work, and when he kissed her goodbye at the bus stop she, in some impatience, would only offer him the top of her head to buss.
Still, though. She still slipped her hand into his when they walked through parking lots and across the street, still absent-mindedly handed him her candy or gum wrappers to dispose of—something Marta hated and thought was a sign of how spoiled Sally was—still came up behind him and rubbed his lower back gently when it was hurting, which was a good deal of the time.
And sometimes, from the back seat of the Volvo, where she still rode in a booster seat because, although she was eight, she only weighed 48 pounds, she still said, apropos of nothing in particular: “I love you, Daddy.”
Sitting in the tree, waiting for Sally to come out on the little screened-in sleeping porch off her room, as he had done every night this summer, he realized that he had died, but wondered why he had become a ghost. Certainly he was haunted by any number of things, but…more so than any other man? He was coming to understand that ghosts didn’t haunt people. It was the other way around.
He noticed a breath-like movement behind the screen and saw that Sally had arrived on the porch. He could just make out her light-colored t-shirt. She stood, as she generally did, with her hands on the screen, rubbing them lightly against it. Simply staring out with almost no movement at all. Her hair was lightly backlit and she seemed to have a faint halo. He knew for whom she was looking and in his heart he reached out for her, hoping for some connection, some sense of him to touch her.
He jumped down from his tree onto the flat first story roof upon which the sleeping porch rested. Moving quickly over the shingles (he couldn’t help but notice that the gutter cleaners had never arrived to clean out the spring debris, a feckless lot, gutter cleaners, prone to drink, he had gone through so many of them, and, of course, Marta would never call and bug them, would never ever think about the gutters) he knelt in front of Sally, the screen separating them. He put his hands where her hands were, outside the screen, like a man trying to make contact through a Plexiglas shield in jail, and she sighed and removed hers.
Her eyes searched through him, into the warm night air. She was a small child with a large head, like his, so large that it did not quite fit through the neck holes of her t-shirts, and she was always calling him for help in wrestling the things off so that they did not strangle her. Her hair was tousled and dirty blonde. She was doll-like in appearance and her friends loved to pick her up and carry her around, which for the most part she tolerated. But she was not a doll. She was a regular human being who, being eight, had a strange and wondrous mix of emotions.
He wondered at her intense gaze into the night, staring right through him. He could feel her breath, could smell her bedtime toothpaste. When he had first arrived on the sleeping porch, newly dead, he had screamed and shouted, but she never heard him. She merely stared out into the night. Was she seeking him, gone now for two months, as best as he could calculate? Or was it the fairies? She believed intensely in fairy and elf visitations. One day the previous winter, he had found a note she’d written to one of them (she was always leaving notes around the house, as well as small bowls of water and milk and odd bits of food) which she had placed in an obscure area of the attic—a feat of bravery for the child akin to a fabled journey, for the attic was still a place of fear for her—along with a Charms sucker, her favorite kind:
Dear Elves,
Please take this sucker if you want it. I heard that you wanted one so I emeditly brought it and wrote this note. Please don’t hurt me or my friend Cameron or my friend Sydney. My name is Sally. I am small and I have hair that is brownish blond. My friend Cameron has strait hair. My friend Sydney has very curly hair. Don’t hurt my friend Matthew or Emma or Andrew. Matthew is very grumpy and Emma has blond long hair and Andrew has blond hair.
Signed
Sally
(over)
Please write back to me.
Pondering the note up in the musty attic, he had wondered what to do. Her fear was palpable; so was her desire to make a connection. In the end, he had left the note where it was. Sometimes when Marta found one of Sally’s communications she would write back, using her left hand, pretending to be the fairy, but he, with his distinctively dreadful handwriting, could never have gotten away with this.
Now, on the roof, he tried to think of himself as a kind of fairy like the ones who so fascinated her. Or an elf with immense power who could be kind. But then he stopped trying to imagine this. In fact, he had no power left any more, not even to touch her.
Right up close to her, the intensity of her gaze, yet how empty it was. It might be merely his conceit that she was thinking about him. She looked the same way when she watched cartoons or played her Gameboy. The outward gaze….filling herself with whatever was there without screening or censoring it.
She moved abruptly from the window, a sense of finality in her actions. This same suddenness of turning away something her mother did as well, a complete dismissal of what she was seeing, even if it was just….a cobweb floating in the trees. Sally sat down on her bed, then lay down, and pulled the sheet up over her. She stared straight up, blinking slowly.
He turned and sat with his back against the porch, his legs dangling over the broad wooden gutters, and stared off into the summer night, into the trees. Up and down the street there were porch lights on and the houses spread around them, dark presences holding themselves in reserve. Staring out over the street he saw in his mind’s eye a spelling test Sally had failed the previous fall—although she loved to read and write, spelling was not her strong suit. One of the words she had failed to spell correctly was “death.” She had spelled it “dealth.” The teacher had underlined it in red and written “death!” in the margin. But why should Sally know how to spell it? What in the world were they doing putting the word death on a seven year old’s spelling test?
He heard a sigh and then a kind of tuneless humming, which he recognized as Sally’s self-soothing sound, the one the therapist they took her to in the midst of all her intimations of dealth said was very important to her. It soothed him now, too. The sound of it mixed together with the high pitched creaking of the cicadas in a rhythmic way that made him wish he could sleep. In death he didn’t seem to sleep so much as stop and then get started again. He stared at his legs hanging over the gutter. The wind started up again and he heard the sound of sirens, somewhere in the distance, towards Irvington or Newark.
He had been sitting on the front steps of his house, him alive, with his cell phone in his hand. The siren was coming. It had started out faint but was getting closer and louder, and it was for him, wailing his name. He had just finished calling Marta at work to tell her he thought he was having symptoms and he had called a friend to tell her to pick up Sally and was feeling a little ridiculous when the fire department ambulance came careening up in front of the house and two young paramedics hurried up his walk.
“We’re here for—oh, it is you?” one of them said.
And he had said, yes, me. Really, probably nothing.
And then he was lying in the ambulance staring up at these two young medics. The ambulance growled and took off. One of them put a blood pressure cuff on him and inflated it. He whistled.
“170/110,” he said. “You have a problem with high blood pressure?”
And he said, yes he did, but not that high, but, see, he had been having chest pains and….here the young medic punched him in the chest, hard, over and over again.
Hey, he tried to say, but the man was sitting on him, he was in some kind of careening room, someone was yelling about a code. He heard the siren start its wailing. There was a mask on his face, as if he were being forced into disguise, and he saw a glimpse, just a glimpse, of the rolling sky and trees through the back windows.
Then he was in a very bright room surrounded by men and women in mobcaps, that’s how they looked, 18th century mobcaps, and he was flat on a table and there was a high machine over him, looking almost like a stamping press about to come down. Into the room walked a man in one of the same long gowns and mobcaps, snapping on gloves. He had a fierce black moustache and even blacker eyes and he walked right up and peered down into Ben’s face.
“You okay, sir? You had a cardiac event.”
Like a dinner party? The man had a thick Spanish or Cuban accent.
Um. He tried to talk. Finally it came out. He was not afraid—in fact, felt very comfortable—but he wanted to know: “Am I going to live?”
The man chortled, a thick high chortle, sounding like Desi Arnez. “Oho—are you going to live? Chure, you’re gonna live!”
In fact, he had lived. For a time. Dr. Alvarez had placed a stent in his 100% clogged right artery and, two weeks later, another in his only 70% clogged left anterior descending artery. After each stent, he was home the next day. He was in good shape. The heart attack had done minimal damage. He was on a chorus of drugs which sang daily to his blood—anti-coagulants, aspirin, beta blockers, statins—which he took each morning, gulping them down with orange juice, he who had never taken a pill in his life.
And he had begun walking and going back to running, although the running, he had to admit to himself, wasn’t the same. He couldn’t quite get loose, found himself listened to his chest, waiting the pressure he had felt that day, that awful punch of God.
His heart attack had been in mid-March. As far as he could tell, he had died on Memorial Day weekend, probably on Saturday afternoon.
He now heard Sally snoring softly and he turned to peek through the screen at her. She had thrown herself with utter abandon into sleep, with her arms tossed above her head, the way she slept when she was really exhausted. That was good—she should sleep deep and long, until he discovered how to come back to her. Or went away entirely.
The door to the sleeping porch opened and he saw Marta standing there in her sleeping shorts and t-shirt. She did not like Sally sleeping on the porch, never had, but had finally acquiesced, the previous year, although she frequently got up from their bed to check on her. Now he watched as Marta gathered Sally up in her arms, the sleeping child making a slight protest—“Shush, shush now,” Marta said, “Mommy’s got you”—and then took her back inside. Crawling up the roof, he peered into what had once been their bedroom. Marta put Sally down in the high, four-poster bed. And then lay down beside the child.
Crouched at the window, he watched them sleep together. He desperately wanted to be there with Sally, but with Marta, he wasn’t so sure. Their last few months together had not been happy. After the emergency angioplasty, she had been all angry efficiency, showing up at the ER and grasping his hand, holding back fierce tears as Alvarez explained the good news. Chure, he would live! But soon it was if the heart attack had never happened and she was yelling at him for the things she usually yelled at him for—for leaving an open jar out on the counter, for not closing the cereal box tightly enough, for letting Sally get away with eating only frozen waffles for breakfast.
Marta was tall and thin and when she was angry with him fierce red spots appeared in her cheeks and her hair hung lank around her head, as if poisoned by rage.
“How many times have I told you—oh, what’s the use? What’s the fucking use!” she said to him on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, the day he assumed he had died. She was standing in the kitchen of their house, the old Victorian that, coming from Brooklyn, they had fallen in love with but which was now a cluttered mess, one bathroom short of having any true re-sale value. Marta, who had once loved the kitchen’s tin ceiling and red sink, now complained constantly about the dated they were.
“Mom, you said the “F” word,” Sally called from the living room, where she was watching television.
They both ignored her. Marta was holding up a saucepan, a saucepan he had just washed—it had contained the pasta he had made Sally for lunch—and which Marta had plucked from the dish rack. She locked eyes ferociously with him and he backed away and stood arms folded over his fragile heart.
Marta lowered her voice. “By what stretch of the imagination is this all right? In what world is it okay to allow our daughter to eat out of a pan like this?”
He cleared his throat. “Hon, she didn’t eat out of it, number one. Her pasta is in a bowl, like it always is. Number, two, I washed it---“
“You washed it?”
He felt the blood running hot through his veins and tried to remind himself that his coronary arteries were free and clear, that the anticoagulants were thinning his blood, that he, really and truly, was now only eating the healthiest of foods, with a secret Hershey bar or two thrown in, okay. Marta was crouched slightly, shaking the pan, as if she meant to spring at him with it. With the burning he felt in his chest came a desire to laugh.
He reached out his hand. “Give it back. I’ll wash it again.”
Marta lowered her shoulder into him as she moved quickly to stand in front of the sink, knocking him in the chest. “Jesus, Marta,” he exclaimed. Had she done this deliberately? He who had been hit with a heart attack just two months earlier?
“Oh, big fucking baby! Big whiner,” she hissed at him, turning on the water. Scalding steam rose from the sink she scrubbed at the pain. “Always has a fucking problem!”
He walked out of the room feeling short of breath and light-headed. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sally, who was sitting back on the couch with her bowl of buttered ziti—one of basically four meals she would eat—with her feet up on the coffee table. She ignored her fork and ate by inserting her little finger into each piece of ziti and sucking it off. She was wearing blue and red striped pants that looked a lot like pajamas but weren’t, plus a bright blue stripped top and some kind of thick yellow cotton socks. She looked like a tiny clown taking a break. She didn’t look up and he kept on going. He walked right out the front door. One of the reasons they were inside was that Memorial Day weekend was cloudy and actually a little cool this year—so cool that he thought momentarily about going back to get his jacket, he had gotten so fussy about such things lately, but then he thought Marta might notice, that it might make him more of a whiner—and so he just kept on walking, turning uphill when he got to the sidewalk.
The street was pretty much deserted. Spring had been recalcitrant this year. The great oaks, maples and willows of the block had budded late and begrudgingly and their leaves were tiny and pale. He walked up the block, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Marta’s voice rang in his ear, fucking this and fucking that, what a fucked-up guy he was.
How had he come to this? He was forty-eight years old and living in some kind of cartoon, like the kind they used to have in the Sunday comics when he was a kid—the kind where the woman stood there with the rolling pin waving it at the little guy in the circular glasses and meek moustache. It seemed to him that he had fought all his life for some kind of self-esteem, some kind of moment where he could simply feel good about himself, and to this end had given up drinking and smoking, behaved honorably in his business practices as a freelancer writer, wrote seven books, two of them good ones, had tried to do right by his parents before they died, loved his daughter and attempted, albeit imperfectly, to love his wife.
And look, here he was, still an asshole.
He tucked his hands deeper into his pockets and bowed his head against a cool wind. He would now almost certainly catch cold. He stared down at the pavement as he walked up the hill. One thing about the block that he had always liked was the fact that its squares of concrete were so cracked and broken by the roots of the big trees that lined the street. It reminded him of his childhood neighborhood back in Kansas, these unquiet sidewalks in front of each quiet house, the cement buckled as if by the turbulent heart of the earth itself. And, every now and then, a smooth patch with scrawled initials.
The street leveled out at the top of the hill and he could see for perhaps three-quarters of a mile into the distance. He kept on walking, passing house after house after house, all serene on this Saturday afternoon. Here was the house of Robert, his running partner. And on this next block over lived several guys with whom he played poker. Over here was the home, or former home, of poor Stan, their realtor, whose wife had left him for someone she met on the Internet. She had simply informed him that he needed to move out, which he did, and then installed her Internet friend—a young bearded fellow from Massachusetts—in their house.
Ben remembered Stan, whom Marta and her friends secretly thought was gay, earnestly explaining the situation to him outside of Hope Cooperative Preschool, where their kids went at the time: “You can get through these things,” he said, in his halting, reedy voice. “Everybody just has to be civil.” The bearded man stayed in Stan’s home and raised his children, while Stan dropped from view. The last time Ben had seen him was in New York. He had been walking along Seventh Avenue on his way back to Penn Station to catch a train home when he realized that Stan, with his thinning blonde hair and cowlick, was walking right in front of him. As he debated whether to catch up and say hello or peel off down a side street, Stan turned and without a moment’s hesitation went into one of the porn emporiums which still dotted the area, although they were dying out. On the front of the place was a woman with huge breasts. Books! Magazines! Movies! the sign said. The windows were blacked out.
Well, case closed—Stan was not gay. “Unless he knew you were tailing him,” Marta had said.
Continuing up the street, he walked past an old Tudor with faded brickwork and a crumbling stone porch. When he and Marta were first house hunting in Cottagewood they had looked at the house next door to this one. The minute they entered, they knew it was out of the question —the place had been, as Marta put it, “seventies-ized,” with shag carpeting and strange wallpaper and a weird kitchen with brown cupboards—but as they were coming back out, a woman in her late sixties appeared on the porch of the Tudor. Her hair was dyed a jet black and she was wearing toreador pants and a leopard-skin coat, presumably faux, but maybe not. She had scowled on seeing them.
“You won’t like it here,” she shouted over at them. “I came from the city, too, and I regret it. No one walks anywhere, everyone drives. You won’t get to know anyone and time will just go by and your children will leave and suddenly you’re in the suburbs and you’re going to die out here. It’s better in the city. At least you can see people.”
For a short time after they moved to Cottagewood, he had seen this woman around the town, but then no longer. He presumed she had died.
He reached the end of the block, slightly out of breath. Here was the small park where he liked to run early in the mornings, four circuits to a mile, wearing his reflective vest over his fleece. He had to dodge around all sorts of characters, whom he thought of as Cottagewood’s secret people. There was the dog walker who sang a spiritual to her poodle and the tall man on a bike who tinkled the bell and said “Excuse me” in a very loud voice even though no one was near him. Then there was the old drunk, the bald guy in ragged clothes holding a beer can and a cigarette butt, who always seemed to arise from the shadows, muttering, just as he finished his run, scaring the hell out of him. The man had pronounced keloid bumps on his forehead, like nascent horns, that wobbled as he staggered across the grass.
He cut through the park and began to loop his way back towards home. Over here was the house of the pretty blonde woman with triplets, except, he remembered, she didn’t live here anymore. She had moved years ago to a fancier town, deeper into New Jersey, when her husband got a better job. He missed seeing her, amiably harried, pushing the kids in their three-seated stroller, two chubby-cheeked blonde girls and a boy.
It was amazing how people disappeared all the time from Cottagewood. The crazy black-haired woman, Stan, the triplets and their mom. Here and then gone. People, constantly shifting, changing. He found it hard to change anything. He had been told by a therapist years before that he formed attachments to people unusually easily. The woman with the triplets, whom he knew only on a superficial, chatting basis, he sometimes missed deeply.
He worried that Sally might suffer in the same way. One time when she was five or six they had been driving someplace and she said from the back seat: “Daddy, promise you won’t tell anyone this?”
“I promise, hon.”
“Sometimes when we’re driving along like this I see a man on the street and I don’t even know who he is but I think I love him.”
“That’s okay, sweetie. That’s natural.”
Looping back towards home, he paused in front of the Hope Cooperative Preschool. He remembered taking Sally’s little three-year-old self up the steps and into the bright, multicolored chaos of the place, one September morning at the beginning of his stint as a stay-at-home dad. She was a little clingy, but not too much, unlike some of the other children there who were wailing and crying as their mothers tried to pull them into the room.
Say what you will about the new era of stay-at-home dads, it was pretty much all women. While there were a few men there, they wore jackets and ties and carried shoulder bags, and were edgy about making their trains into the city. The only other man dressed like him in jeans and polo shirt had been poor fucking Stan—this was shortly after the Internet had intervened in his marriage.
The place was filled with moms, most of whom knew each other, all of whom were at least a decade younger than he. Since this was a co-op, everyone sat down at the tiny round tables to fill in calendars for when they were going to be helping parents in the classroom. It was sitting in his tiny plastic chair that he first met Judy, who happened to sit down next to him. They bumped knees underneath the low table and they both laughed and grimaced. She had reddish hair, freckles, hazel eyes, and a soft, small-breasted body.
“These chairs were not meant for adults,” she told him.
“Definitely not.”
Mundane conversation but then, as simply as if they had known each other all their lives, she had handed him a pencil. That was all, but he, so easily attached, had found himself immensely moved. She had intuited he was looking for something. And she had given it to him. Nothing else was said and in fact he did not speak to her again for another two months, but, holding the pencil in his hand, he sat there waiting for the calendar to pass over to him as if for time itself to wing around the table.
He had returned home, that last day of his life, to find Sally’s half empty bowl of ziti on the table—eight years old and she weighed 48 pounds—and the sound of her and Marta’s voices coming from upstairs. He never knew quite how things were going to be when he came back after one of Marta’s explosions. Sometimes she would simply act as if it had never happened. Sometimes she would whisper “sorry” to him, quietly, and give him a kiss and walk away. Sometimes the anger would still be on her and she wouldn’t speak to him for hours. He climbed their creaking stairs, past the half-a-century-old stained glass window on the landing, practically the reason they had brought the house in the first place, but which the movers had cracked ever-so-slightly with the corner of a bed carrying it up the stairs. They had never had the crack fixed, although he supposed there were numerous skilled glaziers who could do the job. He and Marta were unlike so many of their friends, who were so resourceful—who found out exactly where to get a good babysitter and which pumpkin patch had the best hay rides, and how to get tickets to the finest children’s theater, or discovered that sort of crazy but really talented woman who made children’s sweaters out of recycled blankets.
The voices were coming from his and Marta’s room and he walked up to it and stood at the door. Sally and Marta lay on the big old bed with books around them, reading and talking.
“Hi, Dad,” Sally said.
“Hi, you guys,” he replied. “What’s up?”
“Just reading our books,” Sally replied.
Marta said nothing.
So he wasn’t welcome back. All he wanted to do after his walk through the precincts of town was lie down next to the two of them and listen to them talk and perhaps close his eyes and just sleep.
But this was not to be allowed, he saw, and so instead he turned around and went downstairs, past the cracked pane in the stained glass window. He sat down in the easy chair in the living room and reached, without hope, for the TV remote.
And this was the last living moment he could recall.
And here he was, now, some months but an eternity later, crouched on the roof of his house, the Dead Man, staring at the two of them sleeping in that very same bed. He desired deeply, deeply, to lie between them, to feel their warmth and their living bodies and souls. Of course, the funny thing was, when he was alive, having all three of them in the bed, the times Sally begged to sleep with them, made him restless and claustrophobic. He would sneak downstairs at two in the morning to watch television at low volume, or read a book, or masturbate while sitting in the powder room off the kitchen, staring out at the dark shapes of the trees and the milky mound of the garage, the window cracked so he could smell the fresh air, which made him feel more alive, and to let out the ammoniac smell of his sperm, for as he had aged his come had turned bitter.
Dead Man, where is your true desire? When he had first found himself on the roof and realized he had died, he had tried to enter the house, but was unable to—some force kept him out, away. He could get close. But he couldn’t get in.
He moved away from the window and lay down with his back against the warm shingles, staring up at the explosion of green leaves above him, beyond them bits of the stars twinkling like sparkle glue thrown onto Sally’s construction paper. He stared and—he didn’t sleep, but he went away somewhere—and when he came back it was pre-dawn, the goddamn birds singing loud as could be. Rising and crouching near the window again, he took another look in at Sally and Marta, but could only see the dark, gently rising mounds of their bodies, seemingly breathing in unison, in the dim room.
He traced his fingers over the screen and then walked to the edge of the roof and jumped, something that in life would have netted him a broken leg. Walking out into the middle of Garfield Place, he headed back down the hill towards the cemetery as the first hum of traffic could be heard rising from the Garden State Parkway a mile away. High above him in what was going to be a clear summer sky a plane ascended, red and white lights twinkling, from Newark Airport. He heard footsteps behind him and turned to see one of Cottagewood’s secrets, the old drunk with the beer can and cigarette stub, staggering down the hill.
“Aren’t you dead yet?” he said to the man, but the man didn’t listen and continued on his way.
She told him she thought her nose had turned blue. He told her, no, absolutely not, and led her to the mirror.
“How can you think it’s blue?”
She didn’t answer, just wrinkled her nose and stared at herself.
One night, while Marta was away on a work trip, Sally began to hiccough. They were lying in bed together watching one of her favorite movies, and she began hiccoughing and she wouldn’t stop. Then she began to cry.
“Daddy,” she told him, “I’m going to keep hiccoughing forever and I won’t be able to breathe and I’m going to die.”
He reassured her, she was not going to die, and she fell asleep next to him, still hiccoughing.
Of course, she was going to die. She would just die in a time and place when he would no longer be around, on her own, outside of his reach and grasp, which was the place to which she was moving anyway. Although she was still deeply tied to him, she came to sit less and less on his lap on the early mornings when Marta had already left for work, and when he kissed her goodbye at the bus stop she, in some impatience, would only offer him the top of her head to buss.
Still, though. She still slipped her hand into his when they walked through parking lots and across the street, still absent-mindedly handed him her candy or gum wrappers to dispose of—something Marta hated and thought was a sign of how spoiled Sally was—still came up behind him and rubbed his lower back gently when it was hurting, which was a good deal of the time.
And sometimes, from the back seat of the Volvo, where she still rode in a booster seat because, although she was eight, she only weighed 48 pounds, she still said, apropos of nothing in particular: “I love you, Daddy.”
Sitting in the tree, waiting for Sally to come out on the little screened-in sleeping porch off her room, as he had done every night this summer, he realized that he had died, but wondered why he had become a ghost. Certainly he was haunted by any number of things, but…more so than any other man? He was coming to understand that ghosts didn’t haunt people. It was the other way around.
He noticed a breath-like movement behind the screen and saw that Sally had arrived on the porch. He could just make out her light-colored t-shirt. She stood, as she generally did, with her hands on the screen, rubbing them lightly against it. Simply staring out with almost no movement at all. Her hair was lightly backlit and she seemed to have a faint halo. He knew for whom she was looking and in his heart he reached out for her, hoping for some connection, some sense of him to touch her.
He jumped down from his tree onto the flat first story roof upon which the sleeping porch rested. Moving quickly over the shingles (he couldn’t help but notice that the gutter cleaners had never arrived to clean out the spring debris, a feckless lot, gutter cleaners, prone to drink, he had gone through so many of them, and, of course, Marta would never call and bug them, would never ever think about the gutters) he knelt in front of Sally, the screen separating them. He put his hands where her hands were, outside the screen, like a man trying to make contact through a Plexiglas shield in jail, and she sighed and removed hers.
Her eyes searched through him, into the warm night air. She was a small child with a large head, like his, so large that it did not quite fit through the neck holes of her t-shirts, and she was always calling him for help in wrestling the things off so that they did not strangle her. Her hair was tousled and dirty blonde. She was doll-like in appearance and her friends loved to pick her up and carry her around, which for the most part she tolerated. But she was not a doll. She was a regular human being who, being eight, had a strange and wondrous mix of emotions.
He wondered at her intense gaze into the night, staring right through him. He could feel her breath, could smell her bedtime toothpaste. When he had first arrived on the sleeping porch, newly dead, he had screamed and shouted, but she never heard him. She merely stared out into the night. Was she seeking him, gone now for two months, as best as he could calculate? Or was it the fairies? She believed intensely in fairy and elf visitations. One day the previous winter, he had found a note she’d written to one of them (she was always leaving notes around the house, as well as small bowls of water and milk and odd bits of food) which she had placed in an obscure area of the attic—a feat of bravery for the child akin to a fabled journey, for the attic was still a place of fear for her—along with a Charms sucker, her favorite kind:
Dear Elves,
Please take this sucker if you want it. I heard that you wanted one so I emeditly brought it and wrote this note. Please don’t hurt me or my friend Cameron or my friend Sydney. My name is Sally. I am small and I have hair that is brownish blond. My friend Cameron has strait hair. My friend Sydney has very curly hair. Don’t hurt my friend Matthew or Emma or Andrew. Matthew is very grumpy and Emma has blond long hair and Andrew has blond hair.
Signed
Sally
(over)
Please write back to me.
Pondering the note up in the musty attic, he had wondered what to do. Her fear was palpable; so was her desire to make a connection. In the end, he had left the note where it was. Sometimes when Marta found one of Sally’s communications she would write back, using her left hand, pretending to be the fairy, but he, with his distinctively dreadful handwriting, could never have gotten away with this.
Now, on the roof, he tried to think of himself as a kind of fairy like the ones who so fascinated her. Or an elf with immense power who could be kind. But then he stopped trying to imagine this. In fact, he had no power left any more, not even to touch her.
Right up close to her, the intensity of her gaze, yet how empty it was. It might be merely his conceit that she was thinking about him. She looked the same way when she watched cartoons or played her Gameboy. The outward gaze….filling herself with whatever was there without screening or censoring it.
She moved abruptly from the window, a sense of finality in her actions. This same suddenness of turning away something her mother did as well, a complete dismissal of what she was seeing, even if it was just….a cobweb floating in the trees. Sally sat down on her bed, then lay down, and pulled the sheet up over her. She stared straight up, blinking slowly.
He turned and sat with his back against the porch, his legs dangling over the broad wooden gutters, and stared off into the summer night, into the trees. Up and down the street there were porch lights on and the houses spread around them, dark presences holding themselves in reserve. Staring out over the street he saw in his mind’s eye a spelling test Sally had failed the previous fall—although she loved to read and write, spelling was not her strong suit. One of the words she had failed to spell correctly was “death.” She had spelled it “dealth.” The teacher had underlined it in red and written “death!” in the margin. But why should Sally know how to spell it? What in the world were they doing putting the word death on a seven year old’s spelling test?
He heard a sigh and then a kind of tuneless humming, which he recognized as Sally’s self-soothing sound, the one the therapist they took her to in the midst of all her intimations of dealth said was very important to her. It soothed him now, too. The sound of it mixed together with the high pitched creaking of the cicadas in a rhythmic way that made him wish he could sleep. In death he didn’t seem to sleep so much as stop and then get started again. He stared at his legs hanging over the gutter. The wind started up again and he heard the sound of sirens, somewhere in the distance, towards Irvington or Newark.
He had been sitting on the front steps of his house, him alive, with his cell phone in his hand. The siren was coming. It had started out faint but was getting closer and louder, and it was for him, wailing his name. He had just finished calling Marta at work to tell her he thought he was having symptoms and he had called a friend to tell her to pick up Sally and was feeling a little ridiculous when the fire department ambulance came careening up in front of the house and two young paramedics hurried up his walk.
“We’re here for—oh, it is you?” one of them said.
And he had said, yes, me. Really, probably nothing.
And then he was lying in the ambulance staring up at these two young medics. The ambulance growled and took off. One of them put a blood pressure cuff on him and inflated it. He whistled.
“170/110,” he said. “You have a problem with high blood pressure?”
And he said, yes he did, but not that high, but, see, he had been having chest pains and….here the young medic punched him in the chest, hard, over and over again.
Hey, he tried to say, but the man was sitting on him, he was in some kind of careening room, someone was yelling about a code. He heard the siren start its wailing. There was a mask on his face, as if he were being forced into disguise, and he saw a glimpse, just a glimpse, of the rolling sky and trees through the back windows.
Then he was in a very bright room surrounded by men and women in mobcaps, that’s how they looked, 18th century mobcaps, and he was flat on a table and there was a high machine over him, looking almost like a stamping press about to come down. Into the room walked a man in one of the same long gowns and mobcaps, snapping on gloves. He had a fierce black moustache and even blacker eyes and he walked right up and peered down into Ben’s face.
“You okay, sir? You had a cardiac event.”
Like a dinner party? The man had a thick Spanish or Cuban accent.
Um. He tried to talk. Finally it came out. He was not afraid—in fact, felt very comfortable—but he wanted to know: “Am I going to live?”
The man chortled, a thick high chortle, sounding like Desi Arnez. “Oho—are you going to live? Chure, you’re gonna live!”
In fact, he had lived. For a time. Dr. Alvarez had placed a stent in his 100% clogged right artery and, two weeks later, another in his only 70% clogged left anterior descending artery. After each stent, he was home the next day. He was in good shape. The heart attack had done minimal damage. He was on a chorus of drugs which sang daily to his blood—anti-coagulants, aspirin, beta blockers, statins—which he took each morning, gulping them down with orange juice, he who had never taken a pill in his life.
And he had begun walking and going back to running, although the running, he had to admit to himself, wasn’t the same. He couldn’t quite get loose, found himself listened to his chest, waiting the pressure he had felt that day, that awful punch of God.
His heart attack had been in mid-March. As far as he could tell, he had died on Memorial Day weekend, probably on Saturday afternoon.
He now heard Sally snoring softly and he turned to peek through the screen at her. She had thrown herself with utter abandon into sleep, with her arms tossed above her head, the way she slept when she was really exhausted. That was good—she should sleep deep and long, until he discovered how to come back to her. Or went away entirely.
The door to the sleeping porch opened and he saw Marta standing there in her sleeping shorts and t-shirt. She did not like Sally sleeping on the porch, never had, but had finally acquiesced, the previous year, although she frequently got up from their bed to check on her. Now he watched as Marta gathered Sally up in her arms, the sleeping child making a slight protest—“Shush, shush now,” Marta said, “Mommy’s got you”—and then took her back inside. Crawling up the roof, he peered into what had once been their bedroom. Marta put Sally down in the high, four-poster bed. And then lay down beside the child.
Crouched at the window, he watched them sleep together. He desperately wanted to be there with Sally, but with Marta, he wasn’t so sure. Their last few months together had not been happy. After the emergency angioplasty, she had been all angry efficiency, showing up at the ER and grasping his hand, holding back fierce tears as Alvarez explained the good news. Chure, he would live! But soon it was if the heart attack had never happened and she was yelling at him for the things she usually yelled at him for—for leaving an open jar out on the counter, for not closing the cereal box tightly enough, for letting Sally get away with eating only frozen waffles for breakfast.
Marta was tall and thin and when she was angry with him fierce red spots appeared in her cheeks and her hair hung lank around her head, as if poisoned by rage.
“How many times have I told you—oh, what’s the use? What’s the fucking use!” she said to him on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, the day he assumed he had died. She was standing in the kitchen of their house, the old Victorian that, coming from Brooklyn, they had fallen in love with but which was now a cluttered mess, one bathroom short of having any true re-sale value. Marta, who had once loved the kitchen’s tin ceiling and red sink, now complained constantly about the dated they were.
“Mom, you said the “F” word,” Sally called from the living room, where she was watching television.
They both ignored her. Marta was holding up a saucepan, a saucepan he had just washed—it had contained the pasta he had made Sally for lunch—and which Marta had plucked from the dish rack. She locked eyes ferociously with him and he backed away and stood arms folded over his fragile heart.
Marta lowered her voice. “By what stretch of the imagination is this all right? In what world is it okay to allow our daughter to eat out of a pan like this?”
He cleared his throat. “Hon, she didn’t eat out of it, number one. Her pasta is in a bowl, like it always is. Number, two, I washed it---“
“You washed it?”
He felt the blood running hot through his veins and tried to remind himself that his coronary arteries were free and clear, that the anticoagulants were thinning his blood, that he, really and truly, was now only eating the healthiest of foods, with a secret Hershey bar or two thrown in, okay. Marta was crouched slightly, shaking the pan, as if she meant to spring at him with it. With the burning he felt in his chest came a desire to laugh.
He reached out his hand. “Give it back. I’ll wash it again.”
Marta lowered her shoulder into him as she moved quickly to stand in front of the sink, knocking him in the chest. “Jesus, Marta,” he exclaimed. Had she done this deliberately? He who had been hit with a heart attack just two months earlier?
“Oh, big fucking baby! Big whiner,” she hissed at him, turning on the water. Scalding steam rose from the sink she scrubbed at the pain. “Always has a fucking problem!”
He walked out of the room feeling short of breath and light-headed. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sally, who was sitting back on the couch with her bowl of buttered ziti—one of basically four meals she would eat—with her feet up on the coffee table. She ignored her fork and ate by inserting her little finger into each piece of ziti and sucking it off. She was wearing blue and red striped pants that looked a lot like pajamas but weren’t, plus a bright blue stripped top and some kind of thick yellow cotton socks. She looked like a tiny clown taking a break. She didn’t look up and he kept on going. He walked right out the front door. One of the reasons they were inside was that Memorial Day weekend was cloudy and actually a little cool this year—so cool that he thought momentarily about going back to get his jacket, he had gotten so fussy about such things lately, but then he thought Marta might notice, that it might make him more of a whiner—and so he just kept on walking, turning uphill when he got to the sidewalk.
The street was pretty much deserted. Spring had been recalcitrant this year. The great oaks, maples and willows of the block had budded late and begrudgingly and their leaves were tiny and pale. He walked up the block, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Marta’s voice rang in his ear, fucking this and fucking that, what a fucked-up guy he was.
How had he come to this? He was forty-eight years old and living in some kind of cartoon, like the kind they used to have in the Sunday comics when he was a kid—the kind where the woman stood there with the rolling pin waving it at the little guy in the circular glasses and meek moustache. It seemed to him that he had fought all his life for some kind of self-esteem, some kind of moment where he could simply feel good about himself, and to this end had given up drinking and smoking, behaved honorably in his business practices as a freelancer writer, wrote seven books, two of them good ones, had tried to do right by his parents before they died, loved his daughter and attempted, albeit imperfectly, to love his wife.
And look, here he was, still an asshole.
He tucked his hands deeper into his pockets and bowed his head against a cool wind. He would now almost certainly catch cold. He stared down at the pavement as he walked up the hill. One thing about the block that he had always liked was the fact that its squares of concrete were so cracked and broken by the roots of the big trees that lined the street. It reminded him of his childhood neighborhood back in Kansas, these unquiet sidewalks in front of each quiet house, the cement buckled as if by the turbulent heart of the earth itself. And, every now and then, a smooth patch with scrawled initials.
The street leveled out at the top of the hill and he could see for perhaps three-quarters of a mile into the distance. He kept on walking, passing house after house after house, all serene on this Saturday afternoon. Here was the house of Robert, his running partner. And on this next block over lived several guys with whom he played poker. Over here was the home, or former home, of poor Stan, their realtor, whose wife had left him for someone she met on the Internet. She had simply informed him that he needed to move out, which he did, and then installed her Internet friend—a young bearded fellow from Massachusetts—in their house.
Ben remembered Stan, whom Marta and her friends secretly thought was gay, earnestly explaining the situation to him outside of Hope Cooperative Preschool, where their kids went at the time: “You can get through these things,” he said, in his halting, reedy voice. “Everybody just has to be civil.” The bearded man stayed in Stan’s home and raised his children, while Stan dropped from view. The last time Ben had seen him was in New York. He had been walking along Seventh Avenue on his way back to Penn Station to catch a train home when he realized that Stan, with his thinning blonde hair and cowlick, was walking right in front of him. As he debated whether to catch up and say hello or peel off down a side street, Stan turned and without a moment’s hesitation went into one of the porn emporiums which still dotted the area, although they were dying out. On the front of the place was a woman with huge breasts. Books! Magazines! Movies! the sign said. The windows were blacked out.
Well, case closed—Stan was not gay. “Unless he knew you were tailing him,” Marta had said.
Continuing up the street, he walked past an old Tudor with faded brickwork and a crumbling stone porch. When he and Marta were first house hunting in Cottagewood they had looked at the house next door to this one. The minute they entered, they knew it was out of the question —the place had been, as Marta put it, “seventies-ized,” with shag carpeting and strange wallpaper and a weird kitchen with brown cupboards—but as they were coming back out, a woman in her late sixties appeared on the porch of the Tudor. Her hair was dyed a jet black and she was wearing toreador pants and a leopard-skin coat, presumably faux, but maybe not. She had scowled on seeing them.
“You won’t like it here,” she shouted over at them. “I came from the city, too, and I regret it. No one walks anywhere, everyone drives. You won’t get to know anyone and time will just go by and your children will leave and suddenly you’re in the suburbs and you’re going to die out here. It’s better in the city. At least you can see people.”
For a short time after they moved to Cottagewood, he had seen this woman around the town, but then no longer. He presumed she had died.
He reached the end of the block, slightly out of breath. Here was the small park where he liked to run early in the mornings, four circuits to a mile, wearing his reflective vest over his fleece. He had to dodge around all sorts of characters, whom he thought of as Cottagewood’s secret people. There was the dog walker who sang a spiritual to her poodle and the tall man on a bike who tinkled the bell and said “Excuse me” in a very loud voice even though no one was near him. Then there was the old drunk, the bald guy in ragged clothes holding a beer can and a cigarette butt, who always seemed to arise from the shadows, muttering, just as he finished his run, scaring the hell out of him. The man had pronounced keloid bumps on his forehead, like nascent horns, that wobbled as he staggered across the grass.
He cut through the park and began to loop his way back towards home. Over here was the house of the pretty blonde woman with triplets, except, he remembered, she didn’t live here anymore. She had moved years ago to a fancier town, deeper into New Jersey, when her husband got a better job. He missed seeing her, amiably harried, pushing the kids in their three-seated stroller, two chubby-cheeked blonde girls and a boy.
It was amazing how people disappeared all the time from Cottagewood. The crazy black-haired woman, Stan, the triplets and their mom. Here and then gone. People, constantly shifting, changing. He found it hard to change anything. He had been told by a therapist years before that he formed attachments to people unusually easily. The woman with the triplets, whom he knew only on a superficial, chatting basis, he sometimes missed deeply.
He worried that Sally might suffer in the same way. One time when she was five or six they had been driving someplace and she said from the back seat: “Daddy, promise you won’t tell anyone this?”
“I promise, hon.”
“Sometimes when we’re driving along like this I see a man on the street and I don’t even know who he is but I think I love him.”
“That’s okay, sweetie. That’s natural.”
Looping back towards home, he paused in front of the Hope Cooperative Preschool. He remembered taking Sally’s little three-year-old self up the steps and into the bright, multicolored chaos of the place, one September morning at the beginning of his stint as a stay-at-home dad. She was a little clingy, but not too much, unlike some of the other children there who were wailing and crying as their mothers tried to pull them into the room.
Say what you will about the new era of stay-at-home dads, it was pretty much all women. While there were a few men there, they wore jackets and ties and carried shoulder bags, and were edgy about making their trains into the city. The only other man dressed like him in jeans and polo shirt had been poor fucking Stan—this was shortly after the Internet had intervened in his marriage.
The place was filled with moms, most of whom knew each other, all of whom were at least a decade younger than he. Since this was a co-op, everyone sat down at the tiny round tables to fill in calendars for when they were going to be helping parents in the classroom. It was sitting in his tiny plastic chair that he first met Judy, who happened to sit down next to him. They bumped knees underneath the low table and they both laughed and grimaced. She had reddish hair, freckles, hazel eyes, and a soft, small-breasted body.
“These chairs were not meant for adults,” she told him.
“Definitely not.”
Mundane conversation but then, as simply as if they had known each other all their lives, she had handed him a pencil. That was all, but he, so easily attached, had found himself immensely moved. She had intuited he was looking for something. And she had given it to him. Nothing else was said and in fact he did not speak to her again for another two months, but, holding the pencil in his hand, he sat there waiting for the calendar to pass over to him as if for time itself to wing around the table.
He had returned home, that last day of his life, to find Sally’s half empty bowl of ziti on the table—eight years old and she weighed 48 pounds—and the sound of her and Marta’s voices coming from upstairs. He never knew quite how things were going to be when he came back after one of Marta’s explosions. Sometimes she would simply act as if it had never happened. Sometimes she would whisper “sorry” to him, quietly, and give him a kiss and walk away. Sometimes the anger would still be on her and she wouldn’t speak to him for hours. He climbed their creaking stairs, past the half-a-century-old stained glass window on the landing, practically the reason they had brought the house in the first place, but which the movers had cracked ever-so-slightly with the corner of a bed carrying it up the stairs. They had never had the crack fixed, although he supposed there were numerous skilled glaziers who could do the job. He and Marta were unlike so many of their friends, who were so resourceful—who found out exactly where to get a good babysitter and which pumpkin patch had the best hay rides, and how to get tickets to the finest children’s theater, or discovered that sort of crazy but really talented woman who made children’s sweaters out of recycled blankets.
The voices were coming from his and Marta’s room and he walked up to it and stood at the door. Sally and Marta lay on the big old bed with books around them, reading and talking.
“Hi, Dad,” Sally said.
“Hi, you guys,” he replied. “What’s up?”
“Just reading our books,” Sally replied.
Marta said nothing.
So he wasn’t welcome back. All he wanted to do after his walk through the precincts of town was lie down next to the two of them and listen to them talk and perhaps close his eyes and just sleep.
But this was not to be allowed, he saw, and so instead he turned around and went downstairs, past the cracked pane in the stained glass window. He sat down in the easy chair in the living room and reached, without hope, for the TV remote.
And this was the last living moment he could recall.
And here he was, now, some months but an eternity later, crouched on the roof of his house, the Dead Man, staring at the two of them sleeping in that very same bed. He desired deeply, deeply, to lie between them, to feel their warmth and their living bodies and souls. Of course, the funny thing was, when he was alive, having all three of them in the bed, the times Sally begged to sleep with them, made him restless and claustrophobic. He would sneak downstairs at two in the morning to watch television at low volume, or read a book, or masturbate while sitting in the powder room off the kitchen, staring out at the dark shapes of the trees and the milky mound of the garage, the window cracked so he could smell the fresh air, which made him feel more alive, and to let out the ammoniac smell of his sperm, for as he had aged his come had turned bitter.
Dead Man, where is your true desire? When he had first found himself on the roof and realized he had died, he had tried to enter the house, but was unable to—some force kept him out, away. He could get close. But he couldn’t get in.
He moved away from the window and lay down with his back against the warm shingles, staring up at the explosion of green leaves above him, beyond them bits of the stars twinkling like sparkle glue thrown onto Sally’s construction paper. He stared and—he didn’t sleep, but he went away somewhere—and when he came back it was pre-dawn, the goddamn birds singing loud as could be. Rising and crouching near the window again, he took another look in at Sally and Marta, but could only see the dark, gently rising mounds of their bodies, seemingly breathing in unison, in the dim room.
He traced his fingers over the screen and then walked to the edge of the roof and jumped, something that in life would have netted him a broken leg. Walking out into the middle of Garfield Place, he headed back down the hill towards the cemetery as the first hum of traffic could be heard rising from the Garden State Parkway a mile away. High above him in what was going to be a clear summer sky a plane ascended, red and white lights twinkling, from Newark Airport. He heard footsteps behind him and turned to see one of Cottagewood’s secrets, the old drunk with the beer can and cigarette stub, staggering down the hill.
“Aren’t you dead yet?” he said to the man, but the man didn’t listen and continued on his way.
