She’d died in March.
The dying took three years; it was supposed to last six months. She was the ultimate in Jimmy Hartnelling—it could kill her all it wanted, but Penelope wouldn’t die. When finally she’d succumbed, though, the tyranny started immediately.
From our father we hoped for hope, I think—for courage, and close proximity—like hugging us one by one, or to carry us up from our lowest.
But nothing like that had come:
The police-car pair had left us.
The ambulance swam down the street.
Michael Dunbar came to all of us; toward us, then out, and away. He got to the lawn, and walked on.
There were five of us stranded on the porch.
* * *
—
The funeral was one of those bright-lit things.
The sunny hilltop cemetery.
Our father read a passage from The Iliad: They dragged their ships to the friendly sea.
He wore the suit he’d worn on his wedding day, and the one he’d wear years later, when he’d return and be faced with Achilles. His aqua eyes were lightless.
Henry had made a speech.
He imitated her put-on accent from the kitchen and people laughed, but he had tears in his eyes, and there were at least two hundred kids there, all from Hyperno High, and all in perfect uniform; heavy, and neat, dark green. Boys and girls alike. They talked about the metronome. A few she’d taught to read. The toughest took it hardest, I think. “Bye Miss, bye Miss, bye Miss.” Some of them touched the box as they walked and passed in the light.
The ceremony was outside.
They would take her back in to burn her.
The coffin-slide into the fire.
It was sort of like the piano, really, but the instrument’s homely cousin. You could dress it up all you wanted; it was still just a piece of hardwood, with daisies thrown on top. She’d chosen not to be scattered, or kept like sand in an urn. But we paid for a small memorial—a stone for us to stand and remember by, to watch her above the city.
From the service we carried her away.
On one side was Henry, Clay and me. On the other, Michael, Tommy and Rory—same as our Archer Street football teams—and the woman inside was weightless. The coffin weighed a ton.
She was a feather wrapped up in a chopping block.
* * *
—
At the end of the wake, and its assortment of teas and coffee cakes, we stood outside the building.
All of us in black pants.
All of us in white shirts.
We looked like a bunch of Mormons, but without the generous thoughts: Rory was angry and quiet.
Me, like one more tombstone, but my eyes agleam and burning.
Henry looking outwards.
Tommy still wet with streaks.
And then, of course, there was Clay, who stood, then eased to a crouch. On the day of her death he’d found a peg in his hand, and he clenched it now till it hurt; then returned it soon to his pocket. Not one of us had seen it. It was bright and new—a yellow one—and he flipped it compulsively over. Like all of us he waited for our father, but our father had disappeared. We kicked our hearts around at our feet; like flesh, all soft and bloody. The city lay glittering below us.
“Where the hell is he?”
It was me who’d finally asked, when the wait became two hours.
When he arrived, it was hard to look at us, and us to look at him.
He was bent and broken-postured.
He was a wasteland in a suit.
* * *
—
It’s funny, the time beyond a funeral.
There are bodies and the injured everywhere.
Our lounge room was more like a hospital ward, but one like you’d see in a movie. There were boys all torrid, diagonal. We were molded to whatever we lay on.
The sun not right, but shining.
* * *
—
As for Michael Dunbar, it surprised us how fast the cracks appeared, even given the state of him.
Our father became a half father.
The other half dead with Penny.
One evening, a few days after the funeral, he left again, and the five of us went out looking, and first we tried the cemetery, and then the Naked Arms (our reasoning still to come).
When we did find him, it was a shock to open the garage, and he lay beside an oil stain, since the police had taken her car. The only thing missing was a gallery of Penny Dunbars, but then, he never did paint her, did he?
For a while he still went to work.
The others went back to school.
I’d already been working a long time by then, for a company of floorboards and carpet. I’d even bought the old station wagon, from a guy I sometimes worked with.
* * *
—
Early on, our father was called to the schools, and he was the perfect post-war charlatan: well-dressed, clean-shaven. In control. We’re coping, he’d said, and principals nodded, teachers were fooled; they could never quite see the abyss in him. It was hidden beneath his clothes.
He wasn’t like so many men, who set themselves free with drink, or outbursts and abuse. No, for him it was easier to withdraw; he was there but never there. He sat in the empty garage, with a glass he never drank from. We called him in for dinner, and even Houdini would have been impressed. It was a slow and steady vanishing act.
He left us like that, in increments.
* * *
—
As for us Dunbar boys those first six months, we looked a lot like this: Tommy’s primary school teacher kept an eye on him.
She reported he was doing okay.
For the three of them in high school, they each had to see a teacher, who doubled as a kind of psychologist. There’d also been one previous to this, but that guy had since moved on, replaced by a total sweetheart; the warm-armed Claudia Kirkby. Back then, she was still just twenty-one. She was brown-haired, and quite tall. Not too much makeup, but always wore high heels. In her classroom there were the posters—Jane Austen and her barbell, and MINERVA MCGONAGALL IS GOD. On her desk there were books and projects, in various stages of marking.
Often, at home, after they’d seen her, they had the sort of talks boys seem to have: talks but not talks at all.
Henry: “Good old Claudia, ay?”
Rory: “She’s got a good pair of legs.”
Boxing gloves, legs and breasts.
That’s all they ever bonded with.
Me: “Shut up, for Christ’s sake.”
But I imagined those legs, I had to.
As for Claudia herself, up closer: She had an endearing sunspot on her cheek, right in the middle. Her eyes were kind and brown. She taught a hell of an English unit on Island of the Blue Dolphins and Romeo and Juliet. As a counselor, she smiled a lot, but didn’t have much idea; at university, she’d done one small unit of psychology, which made her qualified for disasters like these. Most likely, she was the newest teacher at the school, and handed the extra work—and probably more out of hope than anything else, if the boys said they were fine, she wanted quite badly to believe them; and two of them actually were fine, given the circumstance, and one was nowhere near it.
* * *
—
And maybe it’s the little things that kill you in the end—as the months dropped down to winter. It was seeing him arrive home from work.
Sitting in his car, sometimes for hours.
His powdery hands at the wheel:
No more Anticols.
Not a single Tic Tac left.
It was me paying the water bill, instead of him.
Then the electricity.
It was the sideline at weekend football games: He watched but didn’t see, then didn’t show up at all.
His arms became uncharged; they were limp and starved of meaning. His concrete stomach mortared. It was death by becoming not him.
He forgot our birthdays; even my eighteenth.
The gateway into adulthood.
He ate with us sometimes, he always did the dishes, but then he’d go outside, back to the garage, or stand below the clothesline, and Clay would go there with him—because Clay knew something we didn’t. It was Clay our father feared.
On one of the rare nights he was home, the boy found him at the piano, staring at the handwritten keys, and he stood there, close behind him. His fingers were stalled, mid-MARRY.
“Dad?”