The Beautiful Between (16 page)

20

At home, I experience a phenomenon that someday, years later, when I have been to more funerals and have experienced it after every single one, I will call the post-funeral jitters: when almost anything can make you explode into a fit of giggles because you’ve been holding in all this nervousness—you’ve literally just cried yourself silly. Honestly, I have no idea if anyone else experiences the post-funeral jitters, but when we walk in the door, my mother asks me what I want to eat and I think she’s said that the funeral was neat and we can’t stop laughing. The thing that finally makes me stop is the thought that maybe she broke down giggling after my father’s funeral. And I think that the thing that makes her stop is when she realizes that I’m not laughing anymore.

We’ve just walked in the door; we’d been hanging our coats in the hall closet when she’d asked. She closes the closet door and turns back to me.

“Honey, I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” I say, and then I walk into the living room. I’m scared. She thinks I’m acting strangely because of Kate. She doesn’t know what I’m about to do. I think I should work up to it somehow, use Kate as a segue. But I don’t want to use Kate like that, and subtlety has gotten me nowhere so far.

I turn around to face her, and then I say, “Mom, how did my dad die?”

She doesn’t say anything. She sits at the table and I sit across the room, on the sofa. She takes off her shoes and turns in her chair to face me.

“What?”

I repeat the plain question: “How did my dad die?”

“Your father died when you were two.”

“I know.” That’s not the answer to my question. “And I was too young to remember much of anything about it or anything about him.”

My mom sighs. Maybe she thinks that it’s only Kate’s death that has brought this on; maybe she thinks she can still avoid telling me. “What do you want to know?”

My hands are still cold, so I sit on them to warm them. I speak slowly and softly. “Mom, please. How did my dad die?” It’s the third time I’ve said it. Every time, it’s gotten a little easier, like learning a new language.

“You were too young to know.”

“I’m older now.”

“No. You were too young.”

“Mom, look at me, please. We’re not talking about when it happened; that was fourteen years ago. It’s been fourteen years. You can tell me now.” I pause. She is looking at her feet, resting them on top of the shoes she just took off. “You have to tell me now,” I say.

“He was sick,” she says.

“I know; he had cancer.”

She looks up at me, surprised. “I didn’t know you knew that.”

I know she wants me to explain how I knew; I know she’s racking her mind for the ways I might have found out, planning angry phone calls to my grandparents. But I know I have to keep her focused or I will lose this chance.

“But it wasn’t the cancer that killed him, right?”

“He was sick,” she says again.

“How sick?”

“Very sick,” she almost whispers.

“Not just the cancer?”

“No,” she says, staring past me to the window behind me. “Not just the cancer. They thought he would survive the cancer.”

“It was leukemia?”

“Yes. But not like Kate’s. His prognosis was good.” This surprises me. Jeremy had said they had the same kind of cancer.

“What else was he sick with?”

She pauses, and I think she’s going to cry. “Please, Connelly, it doesn’t matter now. It’s been years.”

“It matters to me.”

“Oh God, sweetie, please.” She puts her head in her hands, presses hard on her temples.

My hands are falling asleep beneath me, but I don’t move. “Please just tell me. Just … just get it over with.” I stand up and walk close to her, and take her hand. “I’ll help—he was sick, right? He got sick after the cancer?”

“No,” she says, staring at my hand holding hers. “He had been sick before the cancer. When they began treatment—chemo—he went off his other medicine.”

“And that’s what killed him?”

“Yes,” she says, and I can tell she thinks we’re through. She drops my hand and leans down to pick her shoes up from the floor, stands to go into her bedroom. She’s going to put her shoes away, take off her funeral suit, and change her clothes, just like I will. But not until we’re done.

“What was it?”

She turns and looks at me. “Honey, it’s been a long day. For both of us.” I can hear the desperation in her voice. Her shoes are clutched in her right hand. She is, in her way, begging me to stop. “Let’s rest. I’ll get us some food and we’ll relax and tomorrow we’ll go to the Coles’. This has been a hard day for you.”

I walk to where she’s standing. “Mommy, listen to me. You have to tell me. It’s mine to know. It’s what I’m made out of.” I can’t remember the last time I called her Mommy.

“No,” she says emphatically. “It is not what you’re made out of.” She drops her shoes to the floor with a bang and takes hold of my left arm. “It is not what you’re made out of. You were too young to understand. It hasn’t left a mark on you.”

“Hasn’t left a mark on me?” I say, almost shouting. “Mom, I grew up without a dad. Of course that left a mark on me!”

“Then why does it matter how he died? All that matters is that he’s dead.”

“What did he do, Mom? There’s something you don’t want me to know, something you think you can’t tell me. But you can, and you have to. And I can take it—I promise. What I can’t take is not knowing.” I twist my arm from her grasp and hold her hand instead, gently. “Mommy, please. Please.”

“He was sick,” she whispers, not looking at me.

“How?”

“Very sick. He’d always been sick, but he managed it. When the cancer came, he couldn’t manage it anymore. He wanted to devote himself to the cancer. Or maybe the cancer made it worse. I don’t remember.”

“But what do you remember?”

She lets go of my hand, walks away from me. She sits down on the couch. I follow her and sit down next to her, close. Our sofa is nothing like the one in the Coles’ den, the leather one with buttons all over that creaked when I moved on it. Ours is plush and soft, cozy, with extra pillows bunched in the corners—a feminine couch. For the first time, I realize that ours is a house where only women have lived—that Jeremy has spent more time here than any other man, and I wonder why his maleness never felt invasive here. Just stepping inside this apartment, you’d know it was the home of a girl who didn’t have a father.

My mother continues, slowly. “He was taking so many pills. I didn’t notice, because there were so many others. He was always taking pills; I assumed he was taking all of his pills.”

“What kind of pills did he stop taking?”

“Antidepressants,” she whispers.

“He was depressed?”

“Yes, but he managed it.”

“And then he didn’t?”

“And then he didn’t. I thought he was just, well, sad because of the cancer. I thought that was normal; I thought he and his doctors were taking care of everything, managing both. And he was a doctor. I always trusted him to know what was best, because he’d always been so responsible about it in the past, so determined to be well and have this life that we were making. He even gave me some antianxiety pills because I was so tense over the cancer. I wondered, later, if he did that so I could keep calm—” She pauses, and she doesn’t finish the sentence. She’s crying hard now and I want to cry too, but I try not to let that show because I’m worried that if I reveal any weakness, she’ll stop telling me.

“We put him back on the pills, the antidepressants, as soon as I found out. I insisted and I trusted him, but maybe he wasn’t taking them, or maybe he started and they made it worse. I was sure all those pills would fix everything. They’d always worked before.”

I think I understand, but I need to say it out loud.

“He killed himself.”

She nods. Her head moves so shakily, I think it will fall off her neck.

“By taking pills.”

“Yes.”

“How did he get them?”

She laughs, and it comes out like a cackle. “Sweetheart, that man had more pills than a Duane Reade. He had access to pills; he had extra pills; he was never at a loss for pills. His life had been run by pills since before I knew him—pills to control the depression, pills for migraines, pills to sleep at night.” It occurs to me that I inherited my migraines from him. I’d always assumed it, since my mother doesn’t get them, but she’d never said anything.

“Jesus Christ,” she adds angrily, standing up now to pace. “He was a bloody anesthesiologist. He knew exactly how to overdose. He’d made a career out of preventing overdoses.” I never knew what kind of doctor he was. No wonder his oncologist remembered him; even if they hadn’t worked together, this is, like Jeremy said he said, the kind of story you don’t forget.

“And you didn’t want me to know.”

“Of course not. Oh God, when you were in first grade, do you remember, you asked me why you didn’t have a daddy. I couldn’t, I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t want you to think he left you like that.”

“It was third grade,” I say quietly.

“It would have been the only thing you remembered him for.”

“You didn’t give me anything else to remember!” I shout, standing up too now. “I pretended my parents were divorced ever since then—since that day in third grade. I told everyone he left us to move to Arizona.”

She looks shocked, like it never occurred to her that
not
knowing made me different, made me have to create some better story, some easier explanation.

“You never told me stories about him, never told me about the things that we did together before he died. Maybe I could have had some memories if you’d helped me.”

She doesn’t say anything. I keep digging for information. “And so no one outside the family knew, then. Everyone figured it was the cancer.”

“Yes. In that case, the cancer was a convenience.”

“I’m glad it was convenient for you,” I say, and I hate how nasty I sound.

She looks straight at me now, and her expression is devastating. I immediately regret being cruel, having shouted. “You said you were old enough now,” she says softly. “You said you could take it. No one outside the family knows, and no one should. This is a”—she chokes on the word—“a
private
matter.”

I nod. “Yes, Mom, it is a private matter, a matter for family. But I’m just as much a part of this family as you are, and you didn’t trust me with it.”

“Well, you have it now. What are you going to do with it?” She looks frightened.

This question stops me cold. I’d been so concerned with getting the facts that I never gave any thought to what I’d do once I had them. I sit back down on the couch, lowering myself onto it without turning to look and make sure it’s there. “I don’t know. I’m just—I’m going to live with it. I’m going to figure out how you live with it.”

She nods.

I look up at her and ask: “How have you lived with it?”

She sits down next to me.

“It’s not as hard as you think,” she exhales. “You just … get used to it.”

“I’ve been used to living without a father for a long time.”

“Yes, but now you have to be used to living with a father who took himself away from you.”

As if she can hear me thinking the word “abandon,” my mother shakes her head.

“I was mad at him for so long. He knew what he was doing. He put his affairs in order and made sure that you and I were taken care of. It was his idea that I sell our townhouse. I remember thinking he was nuts to want to move when he was still sick, but he did, and so I said okay. After he died, I figured out what he was doing: he’d wanted me to have the money; he knew we wouldn’t need such a big place; I think he even knew me well enough to know that I’d want to move in with my mother. He set up a trust for you, for me—everything. I was so mad at him for that.”

“Why?”

“At least if he’d left things a mess, I could have believed that he’d lost control somehow. But he planned it all perfectly, just like he did everything else.” She presses her hair back from her forehead. Her eyes are very bright, but she keeps talking to me. “Connelly, you know, I just loved him so much. I thought I made him happy. I hated being apart from him even for a day—I always wanted to be near him. I thought he felt the same way about us. I was so mad that you and I weren’t enough for him to live for.”

She sighs; traces her lips with her finger, thinking; and her voice is different, softer, when she continues. “But eventually you stop being mad; eventually you realize that being mad is worse than what he did. Eventually you understand that he tried his best to live and he couldn’t.”

I’m not entirely sure she believes what she’s saying. It sounds too much like something you’d read in a book about how to get over your husband’s suicide. And I can’t help noticing that it’s ironic that I invented a father who abandoned us, because she was scared that if I knew the truth, I would always think that my father did abandon us.

“But I didn’t think you could understand. You’re still so young, and you didn’t know him like I did. And I just didn’t want you to think that your father didn’t love us, didn’t love you, enough.”

“I don’t think that.”