The Mourning After (8 page)

Levon mulled over these questions while he brushed his teeth and got himself ready for school.  His mother and Chloe were in the other room quarreling over her feeding tube, which Chloe felt entitled to be irritated about.  She said it didn’t fit into her clothes, and it was especially annoying when she and her friends went swimming.  Their bodies were changing and maturing.  The girls of ten noticed and talked about things like a plastic tube that protruded from one’s belly button.

Levon half expects to run into David in the hallway that connects their rooms when he steps out of the bathroom.  Always, in the mornings, they would meet by chance—or on purpose—at the top of the stairs, and race down the steps for breakfast.  Instead, Levon is greeted by his mother’s voice wafting through the empty corridor repeating to Chloe the reasons why her feeding tube is essential to her health.  Chloe doesn’t relent until her mother promises to talk to Dr. Gerald about any new developments in gene therapy that might make arguments over the feeding tube moot.  Taking the steps two at a time, Levon greets his father at the breakfast table. 

The kitchen is Levon’s favorite room in the house and not because it’s where he receives his daily ration of food.  The Kellers had recently completed an extensive renovation, and Levon found the newly designed area his favorite place in the house.  This was where they ate all their meals; holidays and special occasions were reserved for the formal dining room. The most noticeable difference is the absence of the wall that had once separated the room in two and has been knocked down, leaving an airy space for the family to gather. 

Madeline had fought Odalys, the designer, and unassuming Odalys won. They were proud of Odalys.  Besides, her eye for architecture and design was spot on, and the room that Levon has grown to love is tied intricately to his fondness for its creator.  During the six-month reformation, she practically lived with them, and her warm disposition always followed her around the house.  It was her idea to fill the room with state of the art appliances, throwing in an antique, leaf-laden chandelier.  And by bordering the space with floor to ceiling windows, she knew she was forever changing the landscape, pulling nature through the glass and allowing sunlight to kiss them each morning. 

The focal point of the room was the butcher-block-topped island, adorned with mahogany wood drawers.  Three wooden stools stood adjacent to the island. No one dared sit in the lone seat reserved for David, choosing instead to have a seat at the custom-made banquette, which spanned the wall and held seating for ten. 

Levon loves the bright view of their backyard from this vantage point, though today the blinds are drawn.  The Ralph Lauren tapestry green cabinets are darker than usual.  When Odalys and his mother chose them, they were intended to catch the light that came in through the windows.

“How are you doing?” his father asks without looking up from the paper. 

The table is too large, he thinks.  Maybe Odalys was wrong.  They would never sit there comfortably again.

“Okay,” he lies.

Levon glimpses the headlines—“Garbage Truck Slams into Hialeah House Killing Family of Four” and “Violent Death of UM Student a Mystery”—as he takes a bite of an apple from the bowl of fruit on the table.  Newspaper headlines, in general, used to appall him, and the
Miami Herald
, with its prolific accounts of the dicey, deplorable truths invading its city doors, is full of frightening captions. Nothing Levon would ever read in the paper would upend him again. Once a tragedy has pierced you, you’re numb to someone else’s pain.

The silence this morning is louder than usual, and Levon studies his father’s fingers on the crisp paper, the stubs of his nails, and the gold band on the third finger of his left hand. 

“Did Grandpa Sid sneeze this morning?” Levon asks.  It’s a private joke they hadn’t shared in over a week, and he hopes it will break the quiet. 

At precisely 6:15 a.m. every morning, while Craig Keller sips his morning java and reads the paper, he has a succession of sneezes—three to be exact—and Levon blesses him, and they giggle at their theory that newspaper ink infiltrates noses and induces sneezing.  They have cited at least seven other people who have been prompted to do the same.

“I haven’t seen him today,” he says, dropping the paper and clasping his hands together.  He waits for Levon to say something, and this only amplifies Levon’s edginess.

Craig Keller has always been a handsome, youthful man with a strong face and clear, gray eyes.  Even though his thick ebony hair has patches of silver woven throughout, his smile and charm shave years off his age. One of the things that really gets his mother’s goat is when people assume they are the same age.  Ten years divide them. A week after David’s death it shows.  Today, Levon’s father is a ghost of what he was last week.  Deep, dark hollowed-out holes have taken the place of his vibrant eyes, and the golden hue of his cheeks and forehead is faded. Accompanying him at the overgrown table and going through the motions of normalcy has got to be the most excruciating task Levon’s father has ever undertaken.

“Are you going to work today?” Levon asks.

His father shakes his head no and throws him a sidelong glance.

This is my fault,
he tells himself.
This is not my fault
he counters.  The inner debate persists.  Even if David independently crashed the car while Levon slept innocently in his bed, there would be no making sense of the aftermath. Having someone to blame was much easier than allowing the crushing truth to sink in—he was never coming back.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Levon whispers and before the words escape his lips, he knows they are insufficient.

A tear drips down his father’s left cheek.  He doesn’t wipe it off.  It continues until it lands on the newspaper in a splotch of black ink.

“I know you are, son,” he says.

Levon wants to remind him, “
I’m here.  I’m alive.”
but he decides it’s best he not draw any more attention to himself.

His father rests on his elbows and hides his face behind lean fingers.

Levon says, “I miss him.  Everyone’s so angry.  If I could change anything about that night, you know I would.” 

“Levon…” Craig slowly lifts his head.

“When is she going to stop punishing me?  When are you all going to stop punishing me?”

“Levon,” he says it again, “it’s been a week.  Give her some time.  Give me some time.  This isn’t easy for any of us.”

“And what about me?” he asks, his voice rising with each unanswered question.  “What about me who’s going to school today, and everyone will be looking at me like I’m some kind of murderer?”

He flinches at this.  The word, which had lain dormant, made the atmosphere around them boil.

“We told you, you don’t have to go if you’re not ready.”

“I have to go,” he says.  “I have to get out of here.”

“It’s not going to be easy.”

“Maybe,” he agrees, “but I can’t sit in this house one more day with the two of you loathing me.”

This is the point in their exchange when Levon’s father slowly comes undone.  The timing is apropos because Chloe and his mother are stepping into the room.

“You should have thought of that,” he scolds Levon in a controlled, quiet voice that breaks under the pressure of emotion.  As the accusation floats around them, so, too, does his anger.  “You should have thought of that before you took the wheel of a car without a driver’s license and risked your brother’s life as well as the lives of other people on the road.  Hell, you’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself.  How would it have made you feel leaving your mother and me to bury two sons?”

“It was a mistake,” Levon shouts, “a mistake I’ll live with the rest of my life.”  He stops to catch his breath.  “Don’t you think I know that?  Don’t you think never seeing David again is punishment enough?”

Madeline is bawling into the palms of her hands, and Chloe has shrunk into the corner of the room.

“You should have never left this house…you should have never left your sister!” his father hollers at him, the disdain coloring his words.  “What were you thinking?  What the hell were you thinking?”

“You did bury two sons,” Levon interrupts, his voice hoarse and shrill, caught between a cry and a shriek. “I’m here, but you treat me like I’m not.  I may as well have died in the accident.  I was trying to help David that night.  He needed me, and I was trying to help.  I would never hurt David…”

“Help him?” his mother wails.  “Help him?”

“Mommy,” Chloe screams, “Daddy, please stop.  Please stop yelling at Levon.”  Her hands are covering her ears, and she has closed her eyes to shut out the sounds of their shouting.

His mom is in a state that borders on complete loss of control.  She is shriveled up in a ball on their porcelain floor.  Chloe is begging for her to stop.  Craig is staring at Levon, as if to say,
See what you’ve done.  See what you’ve done to us.

She is calling out his name, screaming
David
as if her pleading will bring him back, make him appear.  The long week of suffering has come to a close, and what she has held back in the company of family and friends is exploding on the brand new marble tiles. 
I want my baby back, I want my baby.  Please God, bring him back to me, please bring him home.
  She is punching the floor and shaking and writhing.  Her hair is scattered in clumps, hiding the tears that are staining her face.

“Mommy, stop it,” Chloe cries, before running to Levon and throwing her arms around him.  “Daddy, make her stop.”

Paralyzed.  That’s how they all react to Madeline’s wild outburst.  Levon eyes his father, trusting that he will take the first required step in calming her down, but he sits there, trancelike, not uttering a word. 

Last night must have been a dream. 

“Mom, you’re scaring Chloe.”

This appears to knock some sense into her, or it is the sound of their doorbell cascading through the room and disbanding her torment.  Her screams soften into whispers, and she slowly begins to wind down.  The doorbell rings again and no one moves, afraid that anything might send her back into a state of abandon. After the fifth ring, Levon walks away from his second meeting with disaster in less than two weeks and approaches the double doors leading into their home.  Peering through the peephole, he finds two familiar eyes staring back at him.  He opens the door and greets his grandmother who is dressed in a head to toe neon pink jogging outfit.  His grandfather is not far behind.

“What the heck took you so long, Lev?” 

She is breathless from her morning jog and whips past Levon in a cloud of baby powder, hairspray, and some other pungent odor.  Grandpa Sid is panting, holding onto the doorframe before slinking off to his bedroom.

“God damn dogs.”  She is pulling off her white sneakers with one angry tug.

“What’s wrong, Gram?” Levon asks, although he already knows by the strong scent.

“Dog crap, that’s what’s wrong.  All over the front yard.”

Levon stifles a laugh. 

“What happened to people cleaning up after their animals?  What’s this world coming to?”

Grandma Lyd is a feisty, old devil.  He remembers her most memorable line when she called during Rosh Hashanah.  Levon answered the phone in a blistery tone, and she said, “What’s a matta, someone blow the shofa’ in your ear too loud?” 

Levon silently thanks her for the intrusion.  She is heading for the kitchen, a sneaker in each hand, and Levon follows closely behind.  He knows what she will find when she steps into their new kitchen—his mother on the floor in a ball, Chloe crying in a corner, his dad with his head propped on the table.

“What’s going on?” she asks Levon.

“You’ve just stepped from one pile of shit into another.”

As expected, returning to school is an ordeal.  Levon’s attendance is met with scorn and speculation.  Although his teachers, classmates, and various friends of David’s make admirable attempts to hide their chatter, there is no mistaking it fills the hallways. 

Rebecca is conspicuously absent—her helm outside the gym doors vacant—and it occurs to Levon, in the shadow of the sweeping space, that abandoning his family to return to the social populace may be premature. He walks through the tan hallways in a catatonic daze with his head folded down low and treads his sneakers along the white tiled floors. 

Clusters of students traipse by him, some knocking into him, others clearing a space for him to pass, and though their mouths are moving in audible tempo, Levon can not make out any discernible words.  If they are averting their eyes or if they are whispering into the palms of their hands, he is unaware.  He is focused on the sterile floor in front of him.  With his folders and textbooks held close to the buttons on his shirt, his academic armor buffers him from stares and glares. 

Levon moves from period to period in slow moving, languorous motion. By the time the bell signifies the end of the day, he has a thundering headache and can barely swallow.  It takes all of his strength to push through the metal door leading outside where he is greeted by a plume of warm, fresh air and the realization that David is not there to drive him home.  That David will never be there to drive him home again is the scary truth that marks the unsettling journey on a smelly, city bus. 

He had googled the bus route from school to his neighborhood and knows that the journey is twenty minutes.  Travel had always meant family trips or exotic locations seen on the Travel Channel, not the seven-minute walk, four-tenths of a mile to be exact, from Prairie Avenue to Dade, Meridian, the Miami Beach Convention Center, and the #117 bus.

The air is moist as the bus deposits him on the southeastern corner of Sixtieth Street and Pine Tree Drive.  Levon loves Pine Tree Drive, the street that runs parallel to his own, La Gorce.  The palatial homes on the water have grand entrances with sweeping driveways and countless bedrooms.  His house is only a block and a half away, two-tenths of a mile according to MapQuest, and what awaits him there sends him walking in the opposite direction.  He is not ready to return.  His legs pounce on the unfamiliar footpath, each step a punishment, a vigorous attempt to squash something that Levon wants to dispose of.  His shoulders hunch forward, and his eyes train on the ground below.