Calamity (20 page)

“I’m
not
yelling.” He stopped, took a breath. “I’m just pissed. You can appreciate that, can’t you?”

“Yes, but you need to appreciate what I went through, too. I really like you, Tyler, and when you asked me out I was so excited. I spent, like, six hours picking out an outfit, and when you showed so much interest . . . you were so eager and it felt so good that I didn’t
want
to stop you. I just didn’t think you wert fhink yoe going to do what you did, that’s all. I was really confused. I’m not anymore.”

“That last time I saw you, you were naked on your floor with your mother chanting over you.”

“I know, I know, but . . .”

“But?”

“My mother isn’t right.”

“No shit.”

“I mean, she’s a wonderful mother. She’s taken great care of me, but after my father was killed, she kind of came unhinged. You know?”

Unhinged
. What a perfect word to describe a modern-day witch. “Wait,” he said. “Your father was killed?”

She paused and if he could see her, Tyler knew she was probably staring off into space the way Brendan had moments ago. Was she formulating a lie or contemplating the structure of her truth, though weren’t those two things pretty much the same?

“It was traumatic,” she said. “I don’t want to go into all the details because they’re not important.”

He doubted that but said nothing. It was one of those things you held onto for later when you were trying to piece together a puzzle.

“My mother just hasn’t been the same since he died. She blamed herself, I think. I guess most people do.”

Pill-popping, comatose Mom
. “Yeah,” Tyler said.

“She got weird. That’s the only way to explain it. She spent hours on-line looking at these sites about witchcraft and voodoo and ancient African curses and who knows what else. One day, I scrolled through her Internet history and found a site about raising the dead.”

Tyler almost asked for the URL. Raising the dead could come in really handy right about now.

“Then she was going to meetings with other people who believed, that’s what she said--they
believed
. I told her she was nuts more than a million times but . . . I had to stop.”

“Why?”

“We had an argument one night last year about all her meetings and her Internet searches. She created that altar in our downstairs. You saw it. I flipped out. Said she was out of her fucking mind and that I’d wish she’d of died instead of Dad.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. So, she sliced her wrists.”

“Jesus.”

“Not too deep, but deep enough. Took me a few days to get the blood out of the carpet. I destroyed her altar, kicked it into pieces. She was in the hospital for three weeks. They did a psych evaluation.”

“And?”

“My mother may be crazy but she can play sane with the best of them. She answered their questions, admitted to some stress and some depression from my dad’s death, and calmed everybody’s fears. I even started to believe she was better. Until she came back home and reconstructed the altar. She apologized for what happened and then went on with her ceremonies or whatever.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone? A guidance counselor. Somebody.”

“So I could be alone? Go into foster care? When I’m eighteen and can be on my own, I will tell someone, I’ll get her some help. But right now, I need to just ride it out.”

“My mother has a doctor. He gives her a lot d ts her aof pills. She’s asleep most of the day, but she’s not worshipping any evil gods or anything.”

“Neither is mine. She’s just confused, like everybody.”

“I’m just saying . . .”

“I’m not drugging my mother.”

“What if she slices her wrists again?”

“She won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because she thinks I believe the witchcraft stuff, too.”

“You willingly got naked and . . . laid before me?”

Another pause. When she spoke again she was defensive. “I’m not proud of it, Tyler, but I did what I had to, to make my mother think she was helping.”

“You tricked me into coming to your house so she could throw blood on me? Does that sound like help?”

“She got the blood from a farmer. It’s not poisonous or anything.”

“You’re just going to make excuses for her?”

“
She’s my mother!
”

Tyler let the vibrating cords of her shout dissipate. Though he felt more awake than he had only a few minutes ago, his eyes were beginning to cash it in for the night. Beneath him, in the garage, the faint strains of music tickled at the floor like the slight vibrations bugs make on a puddle of water. What was Dad doing?

“Look,” he said, “what do you want from me?”

“To understand, to not hate me, to not be scared.”

“Scared? Your mother throws blood in my face, raises a knife over your naked body and you don’t want me to be scared?”

“It’s all for show.”

“I don’t want to be involved in any more of this
show
, okay?”

“My mother is not a real witch. She thinks she is and she thinks she can help, that’s all. What’s so wrong about that?”

He laughed, unable to find the words to explain why it was so wrong.

“My mother is harmless.”

“Slicing her wrists is harmless?”

“She did that to
herself
. It only happened once.”

“What a relief.”

“Please don’t be like this.”

“Like what, a rational fucking person?”

“I know I should have told you this sooner but I started to, I don’t know, believe what my mother was doing might actually work.”

“You’re a witch, too?”

“No, but . . . She believes so strongly and it started to give me hope, you know? I went along with it and . . . here we are.”

“Yeah, here we are--nowhere.”

“Tyler, please.”

He saw himself throwing the cellphone across the room, saw it shatter into a million pieces. If all this witchcraft stuff was for show, like make-believe, then there never was any curse, and Delaney’s death was just some freak accident. That idea only fueled his anger.

“Don’t
please
me, Sasha. I’m the victim here, okay. Maybe ghtokay. Myou’re mother is crazy and she’s doing all that witchcraft shit because she’s delusional but maybe there’s something to it, too. You just said you started to believe it. My sister is dead. The day after you claimed I raped you, my sister is killed. Maybe that’s coincidence and maybe it’s not. I don’t know what to think, but I’ll tell you this: if your mother put a curse on me and my family in some pathetic attempt to punish me or help you win me back, she better take it off now or there will be some really bad shit going down. You understand?”

She said nothing.

“Go ahead, play dumb. I don’t ever want to see you again. Stop spreading lies about us at school. I don’t like you. I don’t want anything to do with you. Fuck it, I hate you. You got that? Now, go tell your psycho-bitch of a mother that if she managed, somehow managed, to actually cast a spell against me, she better reverse it
now
.”

He expected tears and pleading but got only silence. Until, that was, she opened her mouth and ruined everything.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

8

Anthony barely paid attention to the words the priest offered or the hymns the congregation sang or the string of sobbing teenage girls who spoke fondly of Delaney and then kissed her coffin. He wasn’t in shock the way most of the mourners believed when they saw him sitting frozen in the front pew, his unconscious wife next to him sleeping against her sister’s neck. Anthony was in the middle of a vast emptiness and a million miles before him sparkled the glimmer of a sunrise. That glimmer was hope.

The flier from the First Church of Jesus Christ the Empowered was tucked into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He had read it over more times than was probably healthy (though health issues ceased to matter much at all these days) and had even Mapquested the address. The church was right where he figured it would be on Broadway in Newburgh, though he still couldn't believe it. He had not, up until last Saturday, heard of any Church of Jesus Christ the Empowered and he a found it difficult to accept that an organization open enough to knock on doors seeking parishioners could exist so surreptitiously. Still, there was the address, confirmed by the trustworthy people of wherever who ran MapQuest.

A rundown building, no doubt
. Even so, he was still going to check it out. He had to. After the incident in his car (
That was for you Dad
), he needed to know if he was losing his mind, as likely a possibility as any, or had actually experienced a genuine otherworldly encounter. He could accept the former, but he wanted to believe the latter. Insanity might eventually bring comfort, yet only a true religious experience could offer succor for his ailing heart.

Throughout the service, Anthony reached inside his jacket and touched the flier as if it were a talisman that might ease his grief or even transport him far from this place where people cried over his dead daughter. This was not where he wanted to be--no parent would ever want to be in this place, either. He needed to be in a place that offered answers and hope, hope most of all. Without hope, what was the point of continuing? Not to put too fine a point on it, he could die this minute and everything would be fine. Tyler would look after Brendan; Stephanie, her sister. There was a
Twilight Zone
episode about a librarian who had become obsolete, and a futuristic ruling council declared it over and over again:
Obsolete! Obsolete!
That image had g ct imagestuck with him perhaps for this very moment.

When it was time for him to speak, Anthony walked slowly to Delaney’s coffin, over which her friends had draped a make-shift mural of photos of her taped to a sheet with their yearbook style comments interspersed--
We miss you! Goodbye and good luck. We love you
. What the hell did she need with good-luck wishes now?

He caressed the only part of the wood top still showing as he might the head of a kitten. Scattered sniffles echoed in the church. Someone in the back coughed. Programs (The Final Rites of One of God’s Children) crumpled. Someone else dropped a hymnal; the vibrating
thwap
was like a shouted curse, and someone else, probably an old lady, gasped.

No one would care if he didn’t say anything; he knew that. This was a tender, private moment between father and dead daughter that hundreds of people could witness. They might understand his complete silence, but people always wanted a show. Some words,
any
words, would do. They just wanted an excuse to open another tissue.

He wouldn’t say goodbye, no; that was too much. He had read a poem in college that was, according to his professor, very popular at funerals, in which the speaker espoused that the newly departed is not gone, no, he or she is merely away. He wished he had found that poem; that would have assured not a dry eye in the house. People would have remarked about the beautiful poem afterward, even asked for copies.

He could scream
Obsolete!
at the top of his lungs--that would throw the crowd for a loop. This was all bullshit, just a way to distract from the horrible fact that his hand was on his daughter’s coffin. It didn’t matter what anyone crammed in the pews in their dress clothes thought. Delaney was his daughter goddammit. Fuck them if they thought he wasn’t giving the proper showmanship required for a funeral. Fuck them for even being here. Delaney wasn’t their daughter; she was his,
mine, you stupid sons of bitches and if I want to stand silent like this for hours I’ll do it because this is my loss and the rest of you can shove it up your asses for all I care
.

He reached into his pocket, withdrew the flier, and pressed it against the top of the coffin. Jesus’ mournful face widened as he flattened the paper with both hands. Jesus’ eyes seemed to spill out of the paper. He must have been in such pain while he dangled on that cross waiting to die. Endured so much misery. And he did it all for us, if the Bible, and all the preachers out there, are to be believed. Why, though? To show how such misery can be endured? That was pathetic. People have suffered far worse fates than the Savior. He got to die and go back to His father, and where was Delaney? Was she headed up to Him as well? He wasn’t her father--that was Anthony, so fuck God, too, for taking his darling baby girl--damn God to hell.

He laughed. He couldn’t help it. The chuckle just came out and echoed through the church like the last cry of a dying animal. The old woman didn’t gasp; perhaps she had fainted. That thought almost brought out another chuckle, almost ushered out a complete slew of cackles, in fact, but he held it in check, squeezing his open hands on the coffin.

Jesus hadn’t suffered his fate as proof of misery; he had endured as evidence of hope. Of empowerment. Without turning the pamphlet over, Anthony recalled the writing on the back:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Listen to Jesus and let Him empowll et Him er you
.

I have a burden
.
Boy, do I. And if you can’t help me, fuck, I might just take some pills and join my wife in her perpetual coma
.

He didn’t say that, of course. A laugh was one thing, an actual expletive
and
a surrender to pain on top of that would be equivalent to burning the place down. Instead, he folded the flier, tucked it back into his jacket pocket, and appreciated the audience for a moment. For that is what they were: spectators to grief.