Things I'm Seeing Without You Page 9

  When she looked at me this time, I wasn’t sure I could keep anything from her.

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, that’s the best advice I can give you. Make sure you and your dad are not compromising. Do things the way you want them to be done. The way that feels important and right to you and your clients. That’s all you have. And it can make a difference. It made one for me.’

  There was a silence after that. And again, I wasn’t sure what to say. I looked at her hands on the desk.

  ‘Is that why you’re not married any more?’ I asked.

  She opened her eyes and looked at her ringless finger.

  ‘He wasn’t exactly supportive of the business.’

  ‘Too morbid?’

  ‘Obsessed is the word he used.’

  Grace seemed slightly calmer now, but her face was still flushed.

  ‘But I think it’s OK to be obsessed for a little while,’ she said. ‘You can’t just run away from your grief. You have to deal with it head-on. No matter how difficult and strange it is.’

  We both took a drink of coffee.

  ‘There are no shortcuts,’ she said. ‘You have to do the hard stuff before it gets any easier.’

  Things I’m Seeing Without You:

  Me: A completely dark bedroom in Minnesota.

  All I have to do is turn on the bedside lamp, stare at it intently for ten seconds, and then switch it off, and I can make everything go away. Poof! When the after-image has wobbled off, there is nothing there but complete blackness.

  Me: Even with my eyes open, I can see nothing. And it feels, for a moment, like I’m part of that nothing. I can’t help asking you, Jonah: is this what being dead feels like? Is it really as dark and empty as we think? Or is it silly for me even to pretend I can know?

  When I was young, I used to pray every night.

  My family’s not religious, so it was kind of a dirty secret. And my prayer was not the regular kind. It was more of a neurotic laundry list. I decided at some point that if I didn’t mention all of my family members and friends in my prayers, they would come to some harm in the night.

  A falling piano would come crashing through their ceiling to squash them. Or God would pick them up and flick them into outer space with his enormous fingers just to punish me for my lack of devotion. I also had to bless the room I was in, object by object (‘And bless you, clothes hamper’) or I couldn’t get to sleep.

  At some point I stopped all of this – I can’t remember when – but the habit of chatting with someone in the dark is a hard one to break. Which is why I was still talking to Jonah in my head, I guess. Even though I could create total blackness in my room, my thoughts always seemed to glow in the dark. And sometimes the only way to get them to dim was to tell them to someone else.

  Which is probably what led me to dig out my phone and dial a number that had been sitting in my ‘recent calls’ box for a few days. I listened to the ringing, so loud in the silence of the night, and when I heard an answer, I didn’t say hello. Instead I said:

  ‘Tell me what he was like.’

  And though it had been days since we had last spoken, and though it was three in the morning, Daniel did not seem angry. He just seemed a little confused.

  ‘I thought we weren’t going to talk again,’ he said.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ I said.

  Daniel sighed.

  ‘I heard you,’ he said. His voice sounded tired. ‘But I’m not sure I can tell you.’

  ‘Because you don’t want to?’

  He dropped one of his signature pauses.

  ‘Because I still don’t know which was the real Jonah. The first one or the last one.’

  I knew by this point that just because Daniel was done speaking for the moment, it didn’t mean he was done speaking for good. And sure enough, this time was no exception.

  ‘I’d like to think that when he was on his medication, that was the real him. That was the best version. But later, when he was off it, I can’t really deny that was him, either. It’s hard to separate them.’

  ‘OK then,’ I said. ‘Start with the one I met.’

  ‘The one you met,’ said Daniel, ‘was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a best friend.’

  He paused for longer than usual this time, so long that I asked: ‘You still there?’

  He was and he started to talk.

  ‘On the first day in our room together, move-in day, Jonah sensed that I was nervous and . . . not very social. Which was true, I guess. I’d never really been in a place like MIT before. My dad was in the Air Force. My mom got a trade degree.

  ‘So, he took me out of our dorm room and we went around knocking on every door in the hall, like Jehovah’s Witnesses. And when people opened up, he said, ‘This is Daniel Torres. He seems really cool. You should probably be his friend.’ I honestly don’t think I would have talked to anyone if he hadn’t done that. And it was so easy for him.

  ‘He didn’t even think of it as doing something nice for me. It was just what he thought he was supposed to do. That night, we played video games until two in the morning and made a frozen pizza. And he told me that he’d had some problems in high school, but he had decided to forget about all that and have an incredible year. And he asked was I willing to join him in that endeavour? That’s what he said, “endeavour”.’

  ‘Sounds nice,’ I said.

  ‘I almost cried. I was worried about college, and who my room-mate was going to be, and I had gotten this guy. It was kind of amazing.’

  ‘How long did it last?’

  ‘A few months. I was never alone when I didn’t want to be. Wherever he was going, it was assumed I would come along. Study sessions. Dinner. Red Sox games. Or just long walks, which is what he liked to do best. When I asked him why, he quoted Thomas Jefferson: “The sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise, and of all the exercises, walking is the best.” Really kind of dorky when you think about it. But he seemed so genuine.’

  ‘And that’s when I met him right? During this time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did he say about me?’

  I listened to Daniel take a few breaths and heard him rustle around in his bed.

  ‘He said he had gone to Iowa and fallen in love with a girl who puked at a party. And that he was going to marry her.’

  ‘Did he tell you about our talks after that?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘How did you feel about that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Happy, I guess.’

  ‘Were you jealous?’

  Silence.

  ‘It’s more complicated than that.’

  ‘How? How is it more complicated?’

  I wished I could keep my anger from flaring up just once. But anytime I caught him justifying things, I felt like throwing the phone across the room.

  ‘I was in love with him,’ he said.

  I didn’t hear his breath this time, on the other end. I got the feeling he might be holding it.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘So, you’re gay?’

  ‘No. I mean, not really. I don’t think so.’

  ‘But you were in love with another guy.’

  ‘I know. It wasn’t really sexual, though. I just loved him and I wanted to be part of his life. And so I wanted to love you the way he loved you.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘I don’t know how to explain it. I just cared about him so much that I felt like I cared for you, too, because you were part of him. You were part of that love. I know it’s kind of messed up, but that’s how I felt.’

  He stopped talking, but I found I had nothing to say. I didn’t want to tell him that I understood. Maybe not the creepy part about loving me without meeting me. But just that you loved who you loved, even when it was weird. Maybe because it was weird. Like a person you’d met once at a party. A person you didn’t really know at all.

  ‘When he stopped t
aking his meds and everything started to fall apart, I didn’t want this to fall apart, too. The thing with you. You understand? I wanted to save it.’

  ‘OK. And after you’d saved it, what did you want then?’

  ‘Then, I guess, I wanted to hold on to it.’

  ‘To me, you mean?’

  ‘To you.’

  ‘By lying.’

  ‘Except I didn’t think I was.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You weren’t pretending to be someone else?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘So how were you not lying?’

  ‘What if everything I said felt true?’

  I held the phone tight against my face. Daniel’s voice eventually broke through the semi-darkness.

  ‘I thought you were going to hang up on me,’ he said.

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘What else?’ he said.

  There was a little humour in his voice. Maybe because he knew there were never enough ‘what elses’ to even the score, to forgive what he’d done. No matter how many details I knew about him, how many vulnerable moments he presented to me, there would never be a way to chip away at that first lopsided power dynamic. It couldn’t be erased. Still, I felt the urge to try.

  ‘Your phone takes pictures, right?’ I said.

  ‘It does . . .’ he said. ‘Because I don’t live in 1985.’

  ‘I want you to take your picture and send it to me.’

  ‘It’s a little dark.’

  ‘Turn on a light, genius.’

  ‘Should I send it to you now?’

  ‘I’m going to hang up,’ I said, ‘and then you’re going to send it to me. But there’s one last thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want you to be naked in the picture.’

  More silence.

  ‘It’s only fair. I think you know that.’

  I didn’t wait for a response. I just ended the call. And I fully expected that he would call right back and try to argue his way out of it. But he didn’t do that. And as time passed at a rate of about an hour per second, I wondered maybe if it was better if he didn’t do it.

  It would give me a chance to break contact, to prove that he never really wanted to be on even ground with me. What does a true liar do, after all, when you ask him to stand naked?

  My phone buzzed with a message. There was no text.

  Just an eighteen-year-old boy, naked in the mirror, holding his phone in front of him. I realized as soon as I saw him that he didn’t look the way I thought he might. Despite all Daniel had told me, I had imagined someone thin and rangy with strong facial features. Someone like Jonah. But of course he didn’t look at all like this.

  His skin was light brown, and his body was solid, a little stocky even. Like maybe he used to be overweight as a kid, but he’d worked hard to overcome it. There was dark hair across his chest, arms, legs, and groin. His chest was firm and so were his arms, and a small hard belly protruded just slightly above his penis (which hung, just nudging his right leg). He was looking directly at the mirror with squinty brown eyes and heavy dark brows.

  I can’t describe the shot as sexy. I know the rules of the naked selfie; I had looked at them online occasionally. Usually, the dudes were sitting on the edge of a bed with an erection, pushing their hips up a bit to make themselves look bigger. If not, then they were flexing in the mirror with their lips curled like smirking porn stars.

  Daniel was just there, no affectation. No staging. Not that I’d really given him time for that kind of thing. But the effect was startling. It wasn’t anything like the profile photos of Jonah I’d been looking at for the last year. It was just a naked guy in his room with an imperfect body. And it prompted me, finally, to turn off my phone. But not before another text came in and sat there in the palm of my hand.

  WHAT ELSE?

  The next day, I came downstairs for breakfast and found my dad more animated than I’d seen him in a decade. He was sitting at the table, doing twenty things at once. Looking at the paper, chewing his toast, bouncing his leg. I could barely focus on him. I would have been more concerned if I didn’t recognize the energy. He was excited about a new idea.

  ‘Morning, pardner!’ he said when he saw me.

  In the old days, he used to pitch schemes to my mom before she was even awake. Secretly, I think she found it a little exciting. Until all the ideas failed.

  ‘How many cups of coffee have you had?’ I asked.

  ‘I lost count,’ he said. ‘Sit down. I want to tell you a story.’

  I sighed and rubbed the crusty sleep from my eyes. Then I poured some coffee and threw myself down into the chair across from him.

  ‘I want to tell you about this guy I met when I first got started. Irving Breeze.’

  ‘That’s not a real person,’ I said.

  I grabbed a piece of toast from his plate and took a bite.

  ‘Just listen. He owned his own funeral home in South Minneapolis for forty years. And it was incredibly successful, but not because there was anything exceptional about it. He buried people. He cremated people. He gave wakes and viewings. He was, quite literally, your grandmother’s funeral director.’

  ‘Is this going somewhere?’

  ‘The X factor,’ said my dad, ‘was Irv himself. He was a former football player who liked to wink and shake hands, and he was the undisputed champion of the church potluck supper. He subscribed to the newsletters of every congregation in town and he scanned them every week for any event open to the public.

  ‘It didn’t matter what religion. He’d show up clutching a casserole or home-made Rice Krispie cakes in his enormous hands. And on his way out, he’d always leave the man of the cloth with a wink, a donation and a lovely notepad with the name of his parlour stencilled on the top. The next time one of the flock met their maker, guess which funeral home was recommended to the family?’

  ‘Irv the Perv’s?’

  ‘Don’t call him that.’

  His smile momentarily faltered.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m down for crashing potlucks,’ I said, ‘but you don’t know anything about church. They’re going to smell the godlessness on you.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to churches,’ my dad said. ‘There’s a larger message here, Tessie, if you would just listen for it. You can’t just wait around. Sometimes, you have to drum up your own business. Even in the death industry.’

  His leg was bouncing like crazy now. I reached out and took the coffee mug from his hand. Then I waited and listened for the brilliant idea that was surely on its way.

  ‘Nursing homes,’ he said.

  I looked at him.

  ‘Isn’t that a little crass? Even for you?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  I thought he was done speaking. Then he started up again.

  ‘I remember when I was in the hospice with your grandma, one of the nurses was telling me that most of the residents didn’t have a plan. They wanted one, but they weren’t mobile enough to go to parlours. Their needs weren’t being met. They might be our ideal customers, Tess. Practical and quickly approaching their time of need!’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ I said. ‘It sounds kind of tacky.’

  ‘Just give it a chance,’ he said.

  ‘Are you broke again or something?’ I asked.

  ‘I may have had some debts to pay with the Ocala money,’ he said.

  I took a bite of toast and chewed it slowly.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘I made an appointment at Sunrise Commons in an hour.’

  Sunrise Commons, as you might have guessed, was a new senior living place in the deep suburbs. And before we got there, we saw a billboard for it off the side of the highway: an enormous photo of a stylish older couple holding up sparkling wine glasses. Above them, a chandelier hung like an oversized halo. They looked like they were about to have athletic old-person sex any minute. And over their smiling f
aces in five-foot font, the board read: RETIRE . . . BUT NOT FROM LIFE!

  ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘There goes your sales pitch.’

  When we actually got to the place, the grounds looked more like my old boarding school than a nursing home. It was all decorative cornices, porticoes, red-brick chimneys. Maybe, I thought, it was a way to bring the old back to their youth. And sure enough, just after we got there, we were almost mowed down by a golf cart full of giggling octogenarians.

  Inside, we walked past a fireplace bursting with spring flowers. The rest of the room was just as ornamented. Arched doorways. Wainscoting. At the front counter was a petite birdlike woman with dyed blonde hair, and the largest, whitest teeth I’ve seen.

  ‘Welcome to Sunrise Commons,’ she said. ‘How may I brighten your day?’

  ‘We’re here to give the death talk,’ I said.

  The woman’s face fell like it had been hit with a tranquillizer dart.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dad said. ‘I’m Duncan Fowler. I’m giving the presentation about end-of-life care decisions. I believe it’s in the Vanderplank Room.’

  The woman’s shrewd stare was still stuck on my face as she tapped something into a touchscreen on her desk.

  ‘Fowler you said?’

  Dad nodded. More tapping.

  ‘OK. Right. Yes. I see.’

  She examined both of us one more time and rose to her feet.

  ‘Well, I guess you’d better come this way.’

  She set off walking, and my dad gave me a what-the-hell look. His manic energy had now been replaced by a Zen-like focus. We strolled through the main building of the commons, which was a maze of tiled hallways. Finally, we reached a wing in the back of the complex that actually looked and smelt like a real nursing home.

  The decor was plain, and the scent of pureed food lingered in the air, melding with lemony disinfectant. When we stepped through the door of the common room, the assembled audience for Dad’s talk looked like it was composed of the oldest living humans on earth.

  So this was where they kept them.

  Most were in wheelchairs. Some were sitting on couches with throw blankets folded neatly across their laps. The man closest to me wore a pair of glasses with one eye blacked out. Another woman had hair so wispy and delicate it looked like dandelion fluff that might blow away in a strong breeze. Dad turned to his new congregation, cleared his throat, and pulled out a handful of lined yellow notecards.