November 9: A Novel (29 page)

One of my neighbors, Mr. Mitchell, was here when they left. He told the officer that he would watch over me until my brothers arrived, so I was left in his care. But as soon as they drove away, I told him I would be okay and that I needed to make some phone calls to family members. He told me he needed to run to the post office anyway and that he’d be back to check on me later today.

It was like my puppy had died and he was wanting to tell me it would be okay, that I could get a new one.

I’d get a Yorkie, because that’s exactly what the bloodstain looks like if I cover my right eye and squint.

I wonder if I’m in shock. Is that why I’m not crying?

My mother would be pissed that I’m not crying right now. I’m sure attention played at least a small role in her decision. She loved attention, and not in a bad way. It’s just a fact. And I’m not sure that I’m giving her death enough attention if I’m not even crying yet.

I think I’m mostly just confused. She seemed happy most of my life. Sure, there were days she was sad. Relationships that went south. My mother loved to love, and up until the moment she blew her face off, she was an attractive woman. Lots of men thought so.

But my mother was also smart. And even though a relationship she thought had promise ended a few days ago, she just didn’t seem like the type who would take her life to prove to a man that he should have stuck with her. And she’s never loved a man enough to feel as though she couldn’t live without him. That kind of love isn’t real, anyway. If parents have been able to survive the loss of children, then men and women can easily live with the loss of a relationship.

Fifteen minutes have passed since I began contemplating why she would do this and I’m no closer to an answer than I was before.

I decide to investigate. I feel a little guilty, because she’s my mother and she deserves her privacy. But if a person has time to write out a suicide note, surely they have time to destroy things they would never want their children to find. I spend the next half hour (why isn’t Kyle here yet?) snooping through her stuff.

I scroll through her phone and email. Several text messages and emails later, I’m convinced I know exactly why my mother killed herself.

His name is Donovan O’Neil.

I drop the page with my father’s name on it. It flutters to the floor with some of the other pages I just read.

I push the manuscript off my lap and quickly stand up. I rush to my bedroom and opt for door number one. I take a shower, hoping to calm down enough to continue reading, but I cry the entire time. No sixteen-year-old should have to go through what Ben went through, but it still doesn’t answer all the questions I have about how this relates to me. But now that I know my father was involved with Ben’s mother at some point, I have a feeling I’m getting closer. And I’m not so sure I want to keep reading, but now that I’ve started, I can’t stop. Despite the fact that I feel nauseous, my hands have been trembling for fifteen minutes straight, and I’m too scared to read what my father has to do with any of this, I force myself to forge ahead.

It’s at least an hour later before I have the courage to return to the manuscript. I sit back down on the couch and pick up right where I left off.

Age 16

“When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”

—
Dylan Thomas

Kyle finally made it to the house. So did Ian. We sit around the kitchen table and talk about anything except why our mother hated her life more than she loved us. Kyle tells me I was brave today. He treats me like I’m still twelve, even though I’ve been the man of this house since he left home six months ago.

Ian calls one of those companies that provide cleanup service after a death. One of the officers must have left their business card on the counter, knowing we would need it. I didn’t even know those existed, but Ian mentioned some movie he watched called
Sunshine Cleaning
a few years back about a couple of women who did it for a living.

The company sends two men. One man who doesn’t speak English and one man who doesn’t speak at all. He writes everything down on a pad that he keeps in his front pocket.

When they’re finished, they find me in the kitchen and hand me a note.

Stay out of the bedroom for at least four hours so the carpet can dry. Your total comes to $200.

I find Kyle in the living room. “It costs $200.”

We both look for Ian, but we can’t find him. His car is gone and he’s the only one with that kind of cash. I find my mother’s purse on the kitchen counter. “She has enough cash in her wallet. You think it’s okay if we use it?”

Kyle snatches the money out of my hands and leaves the room to pay the guys.

Ian returns later that afternoon. He and Kyle argue about whether or not he informed us he was going to the police station, because Kyle doesn’t remember Ian leaving and Ian says Kyle just wasn’t paying attention.

No one asks why he went to the police station in the first place. I think maybe he wanted to see the suicide letter, but I don’t ask him about it. After reading how in love she was with this guy Donovan, the last thing I want to read is how she couldn’t live without him. It pisses me off that my mother would allow the breakup over a man to devastate her more than the thought of never seeing her sons again. It shouldn’t even be a tossup.

I can almost see how her decision played out. I imagine her sitting on her bed last night, crying over the pathetic bastard. I imagine her holding a picture of him in her right hand and a picture of me, Kyle, and Ian in the left. She looks back and forth between the pictures, focusing on Donovan.
Do I just end it now so I don’t have to live without this man for one more day?
And then she looks at the picture of us.
Or do I stick out the heartache in order to spend the rest of my life with three men who are grateful to have me as their mother?

What I
can’t
imagine is what would motivate her to choose the picture in her right hand over the picture in her left.

I know that if I don’t see for myself what was so special about this man that it will eat at me. A slow, painful gnawing that will chip away at my bones until I feel as worthless as she felt when she circled her lips around the tip of that gun.

I wait a few hours until Kyle and Ian have gone to their bedrooms and then I walk into her room. I search through all the things I read earlier, the love notes, the arguments, the proof that their relationship was as tumultuous as a hurricane. When I finally locate something with enough information about him on it to Google his address, I leave the house.

I feel odd taking her car. I just turned sixteen four months ago. She was saving up to help me buy my first car, but we hadn’t gotten there yet, so I just used hers when it was available.

It’s a nice car. A Cadillac. I sometimes wondered why she didn’t just sell it so she could afford two cheaper cars, but I felt guilty thinking that. I was a sixteen-year-old kid and she was a single mom who worked hard to get where she was in her career. It wasn’t fair of me to think we even remotely deserved equal things.

It’s after ten p.m. when I pull into Donovan’s neighborhood. It’s a much nicer neighborhood than the one we live in. Not that our neighborhood isn’t nice, but this one has a privacy gate. It’s not that private though, because the gate is stuck in the open position. I debate whether or not to turn around, but then I remember what I’m here to do, which is nothing illegal. All I’m doing is scoping out the house of the man responsible for my mother’s suicide.

At first, it’s hard to see the houses. They’re all really long driveways with lots of space between lots. But the further down I drive, the more sparse the trees become. When I close in on the address, my pulse begins to thump in my ears. I feel pathetic that I’m nervous to see a house, but my hand slips on the steering wheel from the sweat on my palm.

When I finally reach the house, I’m instantly unimpressed. It’s just like all the others. Pitched, pointy roofs. Two car garages. Manicured lawns and mailboxes encased in stone that match the houses.

I expected more from Donovan.

I’m impressed with my own bravery when I drive past the house, turn around, and then pull the car over a few houses down so that I can stare at it. I kill the engine and then manually switch off the headlights.

I wonder if he knows?

I’m not sure how he would, unless they have mutual friends.

He probably knows. I’m sure my mother had a multitude of friends and coworkers and a side to her personality I never saw.

I wonder if he cried when he found out. I wonder if he had any regrets. I wonder if he had the choice to go back and unbreak her heart, would he do it?

And now I’m humming Toni Braxton. Fuck you, Donovan O’Neil.

My cell phone vibrates on the seat. It’s a text message from Kyle.

Kyle: Where are you?

Me: I had to run to the store.

Kyle: It’s late. Get back ASAP. We have to be at the funeral home by nine tomorrow morning.

Me: What are you, my mother?

I wait for him to respond with something like
too soon, man
. But he doesn’t. I stare at the phone a little longer, wishing he would respond. I don’t know why I sent that text. I feel bad now. There should be an unsend button.

Great.
Now I’m singing the words
unsend my text
to the tune of unbreak my heart.

Fuck you, Toni Braxton.

I sink down into my seat when I notice headlights coming toward me. I sink even further when I see them pull into Donovan’s house.

I stop singing and I bite the inside of my cheek as I wait for him to get out of the car. I hate that it’s so dark. I want to see if he’s good-looking, at least. Not that his level of attractiveness should have played any part in my mother’s decision to depart this world.

One of his garage doors opens. As he pulls in, the other garage door also begins to open. Fluorescent lights are beaming down on both vehicles in the garage. He kills the engine to the Audi he’s driving and then steps out of the car.

He’s tall.

That’s it. That’s the only thing I gather from this far away. He might have dark brown hair, but I’m not even sure about that.

He pulls the other car out of the driveway. Some kind of classic car, but I know nothing about cars. It’s red and sleek and when he gets out of it, he pops the hood.

I observe him as he toys under the hood for the next several minutes. I make all kinds of observations about him. I know that I don’t like him, that’s a given. I also know that he probably isn’t married. Both cars seem to be cars a man would own and there isn’t room for another car in the garage, so he probably lives alone.

He’s more than likely divorced. My mother probably liked the appeal of his neighborhood and the prospect of moving us in with him so that I could have a father figure in my life. She probably had their lives mapped out and was waiting for him to propose, when instead, he broke her heart.

He spends the next several minutes washing and waxing his car, which I find odd since it’s so late at night. Maybe he’s always gone during the day. That has to be irritating for the neighbors, although the neighboring homes are far enough apart that no one even has to notice what goes on next door if they don’t want to.

He retrieves a gas can from the garage and fills the car with gas. I wonder if it takes a special kind of gas, since he’s not filling it at a fuel station.

He sets the gas can down next to the car in a hurry, and then fishes out his cell phone. He looks at the screen and then brings his phone to his ear.

I wonder who he’s talking to. I wonder if it’s another woman—if that’s why he left my mother.

But then I see it—in the way his hand grips the back of his neck. The way his shoulders droop and the way his head shakes back and forth. He begins pacing, worried, upset.

Whoever is on the other end of that line just told him my mother was dead.

I grip my steering wheel and lean forward, soaking in his every movement. Will he cry? Was she worth dropping to his knees over? Will I be able to hear him scream in agony from here?

He leans against his precious car and ends the call. He stares at the phone for seventeen seconds. Yes, I counted.

He slides the phone back into his pocket and then, in a glorious display of grief, he punches the air.

Don’t punch the air, Donovan. Punch your car, it’ll feel much better.

He grabs the rag he used to dry off his car and he tosses it at the ground.

No, Donovan. Not the rag. Punch your car. Show me you loved her more than you love your car and then maybe I won’t have to hate you as much.

He pulls his foot back and kicks at the gas can, sending it several feet across the grass.

Punch your fucking car, Donovan. She might be watching you right now. Show her that your heart is so broken, you don’t even care about your own life anymore.

Donovan lets us both down when he storms inside his house, never once laying a finger on his car. I feel bad for my mother that he didn’t throw more of a fit. I’m not even sure if he cried, I was too far away to see.

The fluorescent lights go out in the garage.

The garage doors begin to lower.

At least he’s too upset to pull the car inside.

I watch the house for a few more minutes, wondering if he’ll ever come back outside. When he doesn’t, I begin to grow restless. A huge part of me wants to drive away and never think about this man again, but there’s a small part of me that’s growing more and more curious with every second I sit here.

What is so fucking special about that damn car?

Anyone who just received news as devastating as he did would want to lash out at the thing closest to them. Any normal man in love would have bashed their fist onto the hood of the car. Or, depending on how much you loved the woman, maybe even bashed their fist through a windshield. But this asshole grabs a rag to throw on the ground. He chose to get his aggression out on an old, weightless rag.