Some trick of light gave the house an unfinished appearance, as if caught in a dream between night and day. I half expected my mother to come through the door, calling me home for dinner. As the light brought it into focus, the house took on a more welcoming character, its windows losing their menacing stare, its door less and less like a hungry mouth. I stepped out of the forest and onto the lawn, leaving a dark wake behind me on the wet grass. The door swung open suddenly, petrifying me on the spot. A man came down the stairs, pausing on the next-to-bottom step to light a cigarette. Wrapped in a blue robe, the figure took one step forward, then lifted his foot, startled by the moisture. He laughed and cursed softly.
The specter still did not notice me, though we faced each other—he at the edge of the house, and I at the edge of the forest. I wanted to turn around and see what he was looking for, but I stood frozen as a hare as the daybreak lifted around us. From the lawn, a chill rose in wisps of fog. He drew closer, and I held my breath. Not a dozen steps between us, he stopped. The cigarette fell from his fingers. He took one more step toward me. His brow creased with worry. His thin hair blew in the breeze. An eternity passed as his eyes danced in their sockets. His lips trembled when he opened his mouth to speak.
“And we? Envy?”
The words coming to me did not make sense.
“Is a chew? Atchoo? Can a bee, Houston?”
The sounds he made hurt my ears. At that moment, I wished to be sleeping in Speck’s arms again. He knelt on the damp grass and spread out his arms as if he expected me to run to him. But I was confused and did not know if he meant me harm, so I turned and sprinted, as fast as I could go. The monstrous gargle from his throat followed me deep into the forest until, as suddenly, the strange words stopped, yet I kept running all the way home.
? CHAPTER 13 ?
The ringing phone began to sound like a mad song before someone mercifully answered. Far down the hall, I was in my dorm room that night with a coed, trying to stay focused on her bare skin. Moments later, a rap on my door, a curious pause, and then the knock intensified to a thundering, which scared the poor girl so that she nearly fell off of me.
“What is it? I’m busy. Can’t you see the necktie on the doorknob?”
“Henry Day?” On the other side of the door, a voice cracked and trembled. “It’s your mother on the telephone.”
“Tell her I’m out.”
The voice lowered an octave. “I’m really sorry, Henry, but you need to take this call.”
I pulled on pants and a sweater, opened the door, and brushed past the boy, who was staring at the floor. “Someone better’ve died.”
It was my father. My mother mentioned the car, so naturally, in my shock, I assumed there had been an accident. Upon returning home, I learned the real story through a word here, raised eyebrows, and innuendo. He had shot himself in the head, sitting in the car at a stoplight not four blocks away from the college. There was no note, nothing explained. Only my name and dorm room number on the back of a business card tucked in a cigarette pack with one remaining Camel.
I spent the days before the funeral trying to make sense of the suicide. Since that awful morning when he saw something in the yard, he drank more heavily, though alcoholics, in my experience, prefer the long and slow pour rather than the quick and irreversible bang. It wasn’t the drink that killed him, but something else. While he may have had suspicions, he could not have figured out the truth about me. My deceptions were too careful and clever, yet in my infrequent encounters with the man since leaving for college, he had acted cold, distant, and unyielding. Some private demons plagued him, but I felt no compassion. With one bullet, he had abandoned my mother and sisters, and I could never forgive him. Those few days leading up to the funeral, and the service itself, hardened my opinion that his selfishness had rotted our family to the roots.
With good grace, my mother, more confused than distraught, bore the brunt of making arrangements. She convinced the local priest, no doubt abetted by her weekly contributions over many years, to allow my father to be buried in the church’s graveyard despite the suicide. There could be no Mass, of course, and for this she bore some resentment, but her anger shielded her from other emotions. The twins, now fourteen, were more prone to tears, and at the funeral home they keened like two banshees over the closed coffin. I would not cry for him. He was not my father, after all, and coming as it did in the spring semester of my sophomore year, his death was supremely ill-timed. I cursed the fair weather of the day we buried him, and a throng of people who came from miles around to pay their respects astonished me.
As was the custom in our town, we walked from the mortuary to the church along the length of Main Street. A bright new hearse crawled ahead of us, and a cortege of more than a hundred people trailed behind. My mother and sisters and I led the grim parade.
“Who are all these people?” I whispered to my mother.