The Journey Prize Stories 22 (5 page)

“That's a caretaker, Nate. A janitor. Your father was a doctor.”

“So why couldn't he make himself better?”

“Why can't pigs fly?”

“They're mammals.”

“So was your dad.”

When Nate and I were done smoothing out the towel, my mother laid out a framed picture of us as a family, me in my mother's arms and Nate teetering on one tiny running shoe with his fists around my father's fingers. Beside that she stacked some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. She thought the game worked better if we didn't have low blood sugar. She brushed the dirt off the bottoms of her bare feet and tied her hair back with an elastic band. “Okay, who wants to go first this time?”

The game wasn't the kind that Nate and I played with our friends. The kids we hung out with were mostly into four square and dodgeball and a kind of football that we made up and called Astronaut. Those games had a winner and rules, teams, but the Dead Dad Game didn't have any of that. All we did was lie very still on the beach towel and listen, and to make our mother happy we sometimes made things up when she asked us, “What do you hear?” In a lot of ways it wasn't a game at all, but there was nothing else to call it. My mother said it was a game. It was just something we did.

“Nate, why don't you go?” My mother passed him a cookie. “Take your shoes off before you get on the towel.”

Nate undid the laces of his stiff black shoes and lined them up beside my mother's high heels. He sat down and took a few deep breaths. My mother and I moved closer, perching on the edge of the towel to save our skirts, and Nate closed his eyes. My mother held out her hand to me and then we each took
one of Nate's hands in ours, closing the circle. He wriggled in his suit.

“Wouldn't it be better if we just wore regular clothes?” I asked.

“It's more respectful this way.” My mother squeezed our hands. “And people won't bug us as much if it looks like we came from a church. Now let's be quiet so Nate can listen.”

My mother said that when bodies broke down and turned into grass and soil, there were vibrations. That's all that talking was, vibrations, so being dead didn't mean that you stopped talking, even if it wasn't in the same language. Nate had asked his science club teacher what she thought about that, and she said she hadn't heard the theory before, but there were a lot of things that still needed to be discovered in the world. That was the point of the club. Nate was convinced, or said he was.

“I hear,” he paused, “I hear humming.”

“That makes sense,” my mother said slowly, but I didn't think it made sense at all. Why would our dad's body be humming? Was there that much to hum about when you were dead? Maybe he was just happy to see us, I thought. That was possible. Or maybe Nate was faking. That was possible, too. I faked.

“Can I have a cookie?” I asked.

“In a minute, Elaine,” my mother said. “What else do you hear?”

The three of us closed our eyes and listened hard. I saw our father's vibrations crawling up like earthworms, tickling Nate's back with secret messages about how much he missed us, about the things that had made him afraid and sick. Our
mother said that visualization was an important part of the game, and she always seemed to hear things, grunts or mumbles. I just needed to visualize harder, and then I would hear it too. Faking wasn't lying, it was practicing. Nate was about to say something else, but we heard a car door slam. We dropped our hands and opened our eyes.

It was the red cemetery maintenance truck. Two guys in matching windbreakers and baseball hats were fishing around in the flatbed. One of them grabbed a rake, and the other one hugged a giant bag of garden fertilizer.

“Shit,” my mother said, and the game was over.

Nate balled up the towel and shoved it under his arm. He squashed his feet into his shoes, breaking down the backs. My mother shook out her hair. I packed the picture and cookies into her purse. My mother waved to the men as she hustled us to the car, and the one man raised his rake to us while the other one slit the fertilizer bag with a packing knife. We didn't play the game while other people watched. It didn't work that way, and there had been problems before. My mother told us that a lot of people have pretty un-evolved ideas about things. She had written letters to the cemetery's managing director about the behaviour of his employees.

“Let's not worry about it too much,” she said, pushing play on the stereo. “It's not like your dad won't be here next Sunday. Seat belts.” We drove past Genevieve's grave on the way out. Nate waved.

We were almost home before I asked about the humming. My mother said that the whole universe hummed, that if we heard everybody's heartbeats, all at once, it would sound like the buzzing of a beehive. “We're all connected,” she said.

“But what if you don't have a heartbeat?” I asked. “What about all the dead people?”

“I watched a show about bees,” Nate said. “If you put a box of them in the freezer, they clump around the queen to keep her warm. After a few hours, you have this pile of dead bees.”

“Were they killer bees?” my mother said. “Good hygiene is as important as a clear conscience.”

My mother spun the steering wheel with the flat of one hand and leaned over to pop out the Stevie Wonder tape as we turned into our driveway. Nate was already unbuckling his seatbelt when my mother – “Oh shit,” she said – swerved and jammed the brakes. The car lurched, hard, and Nate slammed into the back of the passenger seat. There was the hollow thud of metal hitting something softer than itself, and then right away a kind of shriek that at first I thought was Nate, and then I thought was my mother, my mother who wasn't like any other mother, no matter what Nate said, but then the shriek came again, from outside the car, again and again, until it died away and became softer, deeper, more like a humming.

“Oh shit,” my mother said again. She took the keys out of the ignition. We got out of the car.

It wasn't actually a hum at all, once we heard it better. It was more of a phlegmy growl, a snuffling, and it was so steady that it didn't seem to matter if Mickey was breathing in or breathing out, and for a second I didn't think she was doing either. Her back legs were bent towards her tail and her feet were bleeding. Part of one leg was skinned. The muscle was pink and twitchy and looked like the kind of thing my mother refused to buy in chain grocery stores. Our front bumper was fine, but there was a strip of skin hanging underneath the car.

“Nate, get the toboggan,” my mother said calmly, bending down and stroking Mickey's head with two fingers. But Nate stood there, fiddling with the car door handle, staring at Mickey as she groaned and licked my mother's wrist. “Nate.” He slammed the door and took off for the garage. “Elaine, get the towel out of the trunk.”

Nate ran with the toboggan scraping behind him on the asphalt. We lined it up beside Mickey and I laid the towel out over its wooden slats. My mother grabbed Mickey around the chest and hauled her up, letting her legs hang. “Jesus,” she said, doing a power squat. Mickey shook as my mother lowered her onto the toboggan. Mickey's tongue hung out of her mouth. She was shivering and panting. I wrapped her in the towel and her legs felt like bags of loose marbles. The blood leaked through the pink flamingo and turned it orange.

My mother dragged the toboggan to Mr. Crisander's and Nate and I walked beside, each of us with a steadying hand on Mickey to make sure she didn't fall off. Mickey made squeaking noises when we tried to tilt the toboggan up the steps, and we decided that was a bad idea. My mother went up on the porch to ring the doorbell and I sat beside Mickey, keeping her company and whispering in her ear that she was a good girl, such a good girl, while she pawed at my arm with one of her front hooves. Nate got a stick and went back to the car. He started poking gently at the swinging skin. My mother rang the doorbell again and we waited. Then she knocked.

“If he's not home,” she said, “we're going to have to take care of this ourselves.” She watched me stroke gently under Mickey's chin with one finger. “Look at her.”

I patted Mickey, pressing on her chest softly until I felt the fluttering of her heart and she let out a little grunt. This was taking care of her, I thought, wrapping her in a beach towel and keeping her warm so she might stop shivering.

“Elaine.”

I was never going to let her go.

Mr. Crisander opened the door with an apron on and a checkered dish towel over one shoulder. His house smelled like burnt sugar. He patted his belly happily when he saw my mother.

“Natalie, I was ju–” His eyes flicked down to me and Mickey and he stopped. His mouth kept moving but I didn't understand the words that came out. He held his arms out and Mickey snuffled, closing her eyes. The towel was soaked. The words from Mr. Crisander turned into something that sounded like, “Mickey Mick-Mick, Mickey Mick-Mick.” He said it over and over as he drifted down the stairs with his arms out to her, like I was invisible and it was just Mickey he saw, begging for him to hold onto her before she disappeared like a dream he didn't remember. I draped one arm over Mickey and hugged her close.

“Elaine,” my mother said again, more sharply. Mr. Crisander's arms kept gliding towards me, saying, “Mickey, Mick-Mick,” until I felt Mickey shift under me. She made a noise that was almost a honk as Mr. Crisander picked her up. He moved effortlessly, like Mickey weighed nothing at all. He climbed the stairs and went inside without saying anything to us.

“John,” my mother started, “if there's something –” but the door was already closed. Nate crouched by the tire. My
cemetery blouse had pig blood on it, and my mother held her arms out in front of her, her wrists limp.

“Let's go wash our hands,” she said.

It was a surprise to all of us that Mickey didn't die. She was back a few days later, lying in the bay window of Mr. Crisander's living room on a new and very plush white bed. Her back end was wrapped in gauze and an adult diaper with a hole cut out for her tail. Mr. Crisander changed her diaper every few hours, and it must have hurt her for him to do it; as soon as he started to unfasten the sticky tabs at the sides, Mickey's mouth opened and closed and we knew she was crying. My mother told us that she heard Mr. Crisander had taken a leave of absence from his job at the Veterans' Hospital. She tried phoning him, but he hung up as soon as she said, “John, it's Natalie.” Nate and I left cards on the front porch, addressed to Mickey, but we saw them unopened in the recycling bin on garbage day. Mr. Crisander fed Mickey with a dinner spoon out of a large bowl and gave her water with an eyedropper. He did that for weeks, but Mickey's legs didn't seem to get any better.

On weekends Nate and I sat on the sidewalk outside Mr. Crisander's house and watched Mickey blink at us erratically. Sometimes we blinked back. Mickey didn't seem all that bad, we said. My mother agreed. “Some of the patchier parts of her skin look better,” she noticed when she came to get us for dinner. Mr. Crisander ignored us, but he talked to Mickey a lot. Sometimes he turned her bed around so she was able to see the television while he watched old westerns. He even hung a cat toy from the ceiling for her, and Mickey batted it around and looked happy.

It was July before Mr. Crisander let us apologize. We were playing outside his house in our cemetery clothes. The sidewalk was cool, even though the sun was starting to steam the dew off the brown grass. It was getting hot and soon it would be scorching. Our mother was going to stripe our noses with neon green zinc, no matter what we had to say about it. If we didn't want skin cancer, she said, we were just going to have to put up with looking like idiots once in a while.

Nate leaned back on his elbows and watched Mickey blink. I drew pictures of pigs with sidewalk chalk. I made dozens of Mickeys, some with legs and some without, but all of them with big smiles on their faces and little noise lines coming off of them like they were alarm clocks. I was working on a very large and purple Mickey when Nate tapped my arm with his foot.

“Elaine,” he said. “He's looking.”

Mr. Crisander stood in the window and crossed his arms. He was wearing a bathrobe, and he had Mickey's bowl in one of his hands. Mickey was stretching her leg out at the food, but Mr. Crisander just kept staring at us. We had been waiting for this. We were sorry. My mother said that acceptance was the last stage of grief and we couldn't rush Mr. Crisander. We could only make offerings to him, and to Mickey. “Sidewalk chalk is good,” she said. “If he's only made it as far as the anger stage and he flips out, I can just stretch the garden hose over. Sometimes guys like him flip out.”

Nate and I stood up and waved to Mr. Crisander. He didn't wave back. Nate shouted, “Our thoughts are with you and Mickey at this difficult time.” I pointed to the Mickeys on the
sidewalk, their smiling faces like blue and green and purple suns, glowing, and their sound lines speaking to me: Hi, Elaine. I see you.

Mr. Crisander drew the curtains.

“Anger stage,” Nate said.

I drew a few more chalk pigs and Nate watched the Mickey-shaped shadow behind the sheers. We were hopeful.

Mr. Crisander came out onto the porch. He had changed into bright blue jeans and a white T-shirt with sleeves that went past his elbows. He started for the sidewalk. Nate buttoned his suit jacket and I brushed the chalk off my hands. Mr. Crisander stood on his lawn and studied the upside-down chalk Mickeys.

“Do you know where pigs like Mickey come from?” he asked.

We didn't.

“Vietnam,” he said. His eyes paused on the giant purple Mickey. “My son lives there.”

“You have a son?” Nate was surprised. Mr. Crisander was terrible at baseball. “What's he doing in Vietnam?”

“Does Mickey ever get homesick?” I asked.