2
DUO
Calla
-AFTER-
Astoria smells like dying.
At least, it does to me.
Embalming chemicals. Carnations. Roses. Stargazers. These things mix with the sea breeze and pine trees blowing through the open windows, forming an olfactory cocktail that smells like a funeral to me. That’s fitting, I suppose, since I live in a funeral home. And my mother recently died.
Everything reminds me of a funeral because I’m surrounded by death.
Or mortem, as Finn would say. He’s obsessed with learning Latin, and has been for the past two years. I don’t know why, considering it’s a dead language. But then again, I guess that makes total sense around here.
My brother, on the other hand, only makes sense part of the time. We’re supposed to be preparing for college, but all he’s interested in is scribbling in his journal, learning Latin and looking up morbid facts about death.
His journal.
The mere thought of the battered leather book sends a shudder down my spine. It’s tangible proof of how crazy his thoughts can be, and because of that (and the fact that I promised him I wouldn’t), I don’t look into it.
Not anymore.
It scares me too much.
With a sigh, I stare down at him from my bedroom windows, down at the lawns of the funeral home. From here, I can see Finn and my father working on the landscaping, bent over in the early morning Oregon sun as they pull weeds from the flowerbeds that surround the house.
Finn’s arms are skinny, his skin pale as he tugs at the roots, then drops the dusty weeds into a pile of wilted greens. I watch him for a minute, not with the eyes of his sister, but with the objective eyes of someone who might be seeing him for the first time.
My brother is slender and clean-cut, with an array of sandy brown curls haphazardly arranged in a halo. His eyes are pale blue, his smile is wide and bright, and he’s beautiful in an artist kind of way.
You know, the kind of artist who forgets to eat because they’re so passionate about their work… and because they forget to eat, they’re slender and sinewy, all angles and bone. Finn’s handsome though, sweet and quirky.
And I’m not just saying that because we’re twins.
We don’t look anything alike. The only thing we share is skin the color of cream and the same shape of nose, straight, aquiline, with a slight tilt on the end. Otherwise, I have green eyes and dark red hair, just like our mother.
Our mother.
I ignore the lump that forms in my throat when I think about her and I desperately try to put her out of my mind. Immediately. Because whenever I think about her, all I can think about is the hand that I played in her car crash. If I hadn’t called her… if she hadn’t answered…. she’d still be here right now.
Alive and breathing.
But she’s not.
That weight threatens to crush my chest, and so instead of focusing on the guilt that blinds me, I focus on getting dressed. Because focusing on something, concentrating on monotony, sometimes distracts me from the grief.
Sometimes.
I throw some clothes on, yank my hair into a ponytail, and clatter down the gleaming mahogany steps, which incidentally, are the same exact shade as my mother’s casket.
God, Calla. Why does every freaking thing have to come back to that?
I grit my teeth and force my stubborn mind to think of other things, but that’s hard in a funeral home. Especially as I may my way out of the private part of the house and into the public areas.
All I can do is keep my eyes pointed forward.
Because even though no one is here yet today, there are two Viewing Rooms straddling this hall. There’s a body in each one, laid out in their finest for all of their acquaintances to stare at.
They’re dead, of course, with spiked plastic disks inside their eyelids holding them closed and thick pancake makeup smeared on their faces to give them some semblance of living color. It’s a major fail, by the way.
Dead people don’t look like they’re sleeping, as everyone likes to say. They look dead, because they are. Poor things. I refuse to gawk at them. Death strips a person of dignity, but I don’t have to be the one holding the filet knife.
Twelve steps later, I’m out the door and taking a deep breath, replacing the potent funeral home smells with the fresh air of the outdoors. Two steps later and I’m strolling across the dewy grass. My father and Finn both look up, then stop what they’re doing when they see that I’m awake.
“Good morning, men!” I call out with faux cheerfulness. Because something my mother taught me was fake it ‘til you make it. If you don’t feel good, pretend you do because eventually you will. It hasn’t worked yet, but I’m still holding out hope.
Finn smiles, causing the one dimple in his left cheek to deepen. I know he’s faking it too, because none of us really feel like smiling these days.
“Morning, slacker.”
I grin (fake). “It’s a rough life sleeping until ten, but someone’s got to do it. Do you guys want me to run in to the café and get some coffee?”
My father shakes his head. “Those of us who got up at a normal hour are already caffeinated.”
I roll my eyes. “Well, do you want me to take Finn to Group, to make up for my laziness?”
He shakes his head and smiles, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. Because it’s also fake. Just like mine. Just like Finn’s. Because we’re all fakers.
“Actually,” he eyes me, sizing up me and my mood. “That’d be great. I’ve got someone coming in today, so I’ll be tied up.”
By someone, he means a body to embalm, and by today, he must mean soon because he’s already standing up and wiping off his hands.
I nod quickly, willing to do anything to get out of here.
Years of watching bodies come and go wears on a person. I’ve seen it all… accident victims, elderly people, still-births, kids. The kids are the hardest, but eventually, it’s all hard. Death isn’t something that anyone wants to think about, and no one wants to be surrounded by it all of the time.
My father might’ve chosen his profession, but I certainly didn’t.
Which is why I’d rather take Finn to his therapy any day.
It’s something my mother used to do, because she always insisted that it was better for Finn if someone was there, in case he wanted to ‘talk’ on the way home. He never does, and so I think she just wanted to make sure that he went. Either way, we keep up her tradition.
Because traditions are soothing when everything else has gone to hell.
“Sure. I can go.” I glance at Finn. “But I’m driving.”
Finn smiles at me angelically. “I called it when you were still in bed. It’s the price of being a slacker. Sorry.”
His grin decidedly says Not Sorry. And this time, it isn’t fake.
“Whatever. Do you want a shower?”
He shakes his head again. “I’ll just run in and change. Give me a minute.”
He trots off, and I watch him go, observing for the fiftieth time, how much he looks like our father. Same height, same build, some coloring. Our father looks more like his twin than I do.
Dad watches him walk away, then glances at me.
“Thanks, sweetie. How are you doing today?”
He’s not asking how I’m doing, so much as how I’m feeling. I know that, and I shrug.
“Ok, I guess.”
Except for the freaking lump that won’t go away in my throat. Except for the fact that whenever I look in the mirror, I see my mom so I have to fight off the urge to rip them all from the walls and throw them over the cliffs. Except for those things, I’m fine.
I look at my dad. “Maybe we should become Jewish so that we can sit in Shiva and not have to worry about anything else.”
My dad look stunned for a minute, then smiles slightly. “Well, Shiva only lasts a week. So that wouldn’t do us much good at this point.”
Nothing will do us much good at this point. But I don’t say that.
“Well, I guess I won’t cover up the mirrors then.” Unfortunately.
My father smiles now, and I think it might actually be a little bit real. “Yeah. And you’ll have to keep showering too.” He pauses. “You know, there’s a grief support group that meets at the hospital too. You could poke your head in while you wait for Finn.”
I’m already shaking my head. Screw that. He’s got to give up trying to make me go to one of those. The only thing worse than drowning in grief is sharing a lifeboat with other drowning people. Besides, if anyone needs a grief group, it’s him.
“I think I’ll pass,” I tell him for the hundredth time. “But if I change my mind, I’ll look it up.”
“Ok,” he gives in easily, like he always does. “I understand that, I guess. I don’t want to talk about it, either. But maybe one of these days….”
His voice trails off and I know that he’s filing this under the One Of These Days folder in his head, along with a million other things. Things like cleaning out my mother’s closet, picking her dirty clothes up out of their bathroom, putting away her shoes and her jacket. Things like that.
It’s been six weeks since my mother died, and my father has left her stuff un-touched, like he’s expecting her to come home at any minute. He knows this isn’t the case since he embalmed her body and we buried her in her gleaming mahogany casket, but obviously it would be insensitive to point that out.
Instead, I hug him.
“Love you, dad.”
“Love you, too, Cal.”
Over his shoulder, my gaze freezes on the small ivy covered brick building down the path from the main house, and I stare at it for a minute before I pull away.
“Have you decided about the Carriage House yet?”
He and my mother had converted it into an apartment last year as an investment property, but they’d been in the process of trying to find a renter when mom died. Finn and I have been trying to get dad to let one of us live in it.
He shakes his head now. “You know, it’s not really fair to give it to one or the other of you. I’m going to rent it out, after all.”
I stare at him like he just grew a second head. “Really? But…”
But what a waste of a beautifully renovated space.
My father is unfazed. “You and Finn are going to college in the Fall anyway. It’d be extra income. That was our original plan, anyway.”
I’m still stunned. “Well, good luck finding someone who wants to live here.”
Right next door to a funeral home and crematorium.
“If you know of anyone, please let them know,” my dad continues, ignoring my pessimism. I scoff at that.
“You know I don’t know anyone.” I don’t go into the depressing state of my social life, which is nonexistent and always has been. It’s always been something that worried my mom and dad, although Finn and I never much cared. We’ve always had each other.
Finn bounds down the stairs, his hair wet, interrupting our conversation.
“Since I smelled like sweaty feet, I took the world’s fastest shower,” he announces as he breezes past us. “You’re welcome.”
“Drive safe!” my father calls out needlessly as he heads inside. Because of the way my mom died, among twisted metal and smoking rubber, my father doesn’t even like to see us in a car, but he knows it’s a necessity of life.
Even still, he doesn’t want to watch it.
It’s ok. We all have little tricks we play on our minds to make life bearable.
I drop into the passenger seat of our car, the one my brother and I share, and stare at Finn.
“How’d you sleep?”
Because he doesn’t usually.
He’s an insufferable insomniac. His mind is naturally more active at night than the average person’s. He can’t figure out how to shut it down. And when he does sleep, he has vivid nightmares so he gets up and crawls into my bed.
Because I’m the one he comes to when he’s afraid.
It’s a twin thing. Although, the kids that used to tease us for being weird would love to know that little tid-bit, I’m sure. Calla and Finn sleep in the same bed sometimes, isn’t that sick?? They’d never understand how we draw comfort just from being near each other. Not that it matters what they think, not anymore. We’ll probably never see any of those a*sholes again.
“I slept like shit. You?”
“Same,” I murmur. Because it’s true. I’m not an insomniac, but I do have nightmares. Vivid ones, of my mother screaming, and broken glass, and of her cellphone in her hand. In every dream, I can hear my own voice, calling out her name, and in every dream, she never answers.
You could say I’m a bit tortured by that.
Finn and I fall into silence, so I press my forehead to the glass and stare out the window as he drives, staring at the scenery that I’ve been surrounded with since I was born.
Despite my internal torment, I have to admit that our mountain is beautiful.
We’re surrounded by all things green and alive, by pine trees and bracken and lush forest greenery. The vibrant green stretches across the vast lawns, through the flowered gardens, and lasts right up until you get to the cliffs, where it finally and abruptly turns reddish and clay.
I guess that’s pretty good symbolism, actually. Green means alive and red means dangerous. Red is jagged cliffs, warning lights, splattered blood. But green… green is trees and apples and clover.
“How do you say green in Latin?” I ask absentmindedly.
“Viridem,” he answers. “Why?”
“No reason.” I glance into the side-mirror at the house, which fades into the distance behind us.
Huge and Victorian, it stands proudly on the top of this mountain, perched on the edge of the cliffs with its spires poking through the clouds. It’s beautiful and graceful, at the same time as it is gothic and dark. It’s a funeral home, after all, at the end of a road on a mountain. It’s a horror movie waiting to happen.
Last Funeral Home on the Left.
Dad will need a miracle to rent the tiny Carriage House out, and I feel a slight pang of guilt. Maybe he really does need the money, and I’ve been pressuring him to give it to Finn or me.
I turn my gaze away from the house, away from my guilt, and out to the ocean. Vast and gray, the water punishes the rocks on the shore, pounding into them over and over. Mist rises from the water, forming fog along the beach. It’s beautiful and eerie, haunting and peaceful.
But it’s also a prison, holding me here beneath the low-hanging cloud cover.
“Do you ever wish we could move away? Like far away?” I muse aloud.
Finn glances at me. “Berkeley isn’t far enough for you?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I’m talking someplace far away. Like Italy. Or Scotland. It’d be nice, I think. To get away from here. From everything we know.”
From the memories.
From the people who think we’re weird.
From everything.
Finn’s face stays expressionless. “Cal, you don’t have to go around the world to re-invent yourself, if that’s what you want. You can do that in California. But you don’t need to change yourself at all. You’re fine the way you are.”
Yeah. Being known as Funeral Home Girl is fine. But he’s right. No one will know that in California. I can get as good a new start there as I can anywhere. I won’t be surrounded by dead people, and people won’t always be asking How are you feeling?
We drift into silence and I continue staring out the window, thinking about college and what my new life there might be like. Since my father has agreed that Finn and I should stay together, there’s nothing scary about it. It’s just exciting. And it will include a lot of expensive shoes and pashminas. I’m not exactly where what pashminas are, but they sound sophisticated, and so I need them.
“Well?”
Finn’s insistent tone brings me out of my thoughts. He’s obviously waiting on an answer to something.
“Well, what?”
“Well, did dad decide? About the carriage house. We could just share it, you know. I’m sick of smelling like formaldehyde all the time.”
For real. I can’t even count how many times I’d hear snide girls at school whispering as I walked past, old tired jokes like, “I smell dead people.” I always wanted to tell them to quit ripping off old movies and come up with something original, but of course I never did. To them, I was Funeral Home Girl. But I never gave them the satisfaction of knowing that their words hurt.
“We don’t smell like formaldehyde,” I assure Finn. We smell like flowers. Funeral flowers. It’s not much better.
“Speak for yourself,” he grumbles. “Can we, or not?”
I shrug.
“Apparently, dad’s going to rent it out, after all.”
Finn stares at me for a second before returning his gaze to the road. “Seriously? I didn’t know we were that hard up. We have mom’s life insurance money, and the money from the funeral home.”
“College is expensive,” I murmur. Because that’s the only explanation I can think of, other than maybe dad just wants to follow through with something that he planned with mom. Finn nods, because it’s an acceptable answer. Obviously, sending two kids is expensive.
We’re quiet as we drive the rest of the way, and still quiet as we walk the sterile halls of the hospital, our Chucks squeaking on the waxed floors.
“I’ll meet you back out here in an hour,” Finn tells me casually, as though he’s going shopping instead of going to talk about his mental illness with other mentally ill people. Like always, Finn carries his cross like a champion.
I nod. “I’ll be here.”
Because I always am.
He walks away without looking back, disappearing into a therapy room. As I watch him go, I can’t help but think, for the millioneth time, that it could’ve just as easily been me born with SAD. It’s a thought that makes me feel panicky and guilty at the same time. Panicky, because sometimes I still worry that I might get it, that it might show up out of the blue. And guilty, because it should’ve been me in the first place. Finn is a better person than I am.
I’m the one who was born first, the one born bigger, the one born stronger…regardless of the fact that Finn really is better. He’s funny and witty and smart, and his soul is as gentle as they come. He’s the one who deserved to be healthy.
Not me. I’m the snarky, sarcastic one.
Mother Nature is a bitch sometimes.
I find a nearby bench in the sky-lit atrium, and curl up beneath an abstract bird painting, pulling out a book to read. Having my nose buried in a book accomplishes two things.
1. It lets people know I’m not in the mood to be talked to. Honestly, I seldom am. And 2. It kills the boredom while I wait.
The sounds of the hospital fade into a buzzing backdrop, while I immerse myself in blissful fiction. Fiction is best served alone. It’s how I survived my school years, reading through lunches and awkward classes when no one talked to me, and fiction is how I survive waiting for Finn during long hours in the hospital psych wing. It’s how I can ignore the shrill, multi-pitched yells that drift down the hallways. Because honestly, I don’t want to know what they’re yelling about.
I stay suspended in my pretend world for God knows how long, until I feel someone staring at me.
When I say feel, I literally feel it, just like someone is reaching out and touching my face with their fingers.
Glancing up, I suck my breath in when I find dark eyes connected to mine, eyes so dark they’re almost black, and the energy in them is enough to freeze me in place.
A boy is attached to the dark gaze.
A man.
He’s probably no more than twenty or twenty-one, but everything about him screams man. There’s no boy in him. That part of him is very clearly gone. I see it in his eyes, in the way he holds himself, in the perceptive way he takes in his surroundings, then stares at me with singular focus, like we’re somehow connected by a tether. He’s got a million contradictions in his eyes….aloofness, warmth, mystery, charm, and something else I can’t define.
He’s muscular, tall, and wearing a tattered black sweatshirt that says Irony is lost on you in orange letters. His dark jeans are belted with black leather, and a silver band encircles his middle finger.
Dark hair tumbles into his face and a hand with long fingers impatiently brushes it back, all the while his eyes are still connected with mine. His jaw is strong and masculine, with the barest hint of stubble.
His gaze is still connected to mine, like a livewire, or a lightning bolt. I can feel the charge of it racing along my skin, like a million tiny fingers, flushing my cheeks. My lungs flutter and I swallow hard.
And then, he smiles at me.
At me.
Because I don’t know him and he doesn’t know better.
“Cal? You ready?”
Finn’s voice breaks my concentration, and with it, the moment. I glance up at my brother, almost in confusion, to find that he’s waiting for me. The hour has already passed and I didn’t even realize it. I scramble to get up, feeling for all the world like I’m rattled, but don’t know why.
Although I do know.
As I walk away with Finn, I glance over my shoulder.
The sexy stranger with the dark, dark gaze is gone.