Aftermath of Dreaming(112)

“Florida somewhere, a few months ago, I think. Heart attack on the kitchen floor. That woman called to tell me.” Suzanne doesn’t have to tell me who she means. Ever since Cousin Elsie called Momma to say she saw Daddy in Sarasota, she has been referred to as “that woman.”

“Said it had taken her weeks to find me,” Suzanne continues. “She wanted to know how Momma died, but I wouldn’t say. What a ghoul that woman is—forever calling and bearing bad news.”

“Oh, God, oh, God, no. Now I’ll never…” The silent scream inside me pierces through my skin. I can barely feel my tears. I try to breathe around the panic and fear and dread that are taking all the room inside. Only small areas of my body—fingertips, elbows, heels—have room for my breath to enter and leave. I gasp air in while dispelling sobs, but the two collide. Oxygen squeezes by, just enough to keep me alive. My body is screaming against this information, fighting with punches and hooks and jabs not to know what it has heard.

The silence on the phone is thunderous. If my sister had been speaking, I wouldn’t have heard it so clearly.

“I need to finish driving home.”

“Are you okay to do that? Maybe you should wait. Where are you anyway?”

I assure her that I’m fine by regulating my breathing to coincide with emitting words—a task so monumental that I have new found awe for our ability to do it without thinking.

I just need to get off the 10, I tell myself as I punch the button to end the call and pull my truck back into the flow of traffic. If I can get home and call her from there, I am sure this news will have changed. A fluke is what it was, like an accident on the highway that will be all cleared up by the time I reach home, the updated report from Suzanne assuring me of Daddy’s noninjury.

I immediately listen to my messages again when I get home. I hear Suzanne’s first dreadful one that I hung up on without erasing, then I wait to hear a “Call me back; the news I told you was wrong” message from her, but it isn’t there. I take the towel off my lip and open it up. The ice has mostly melted; small chips of it are stuck in the white thread among specks of my blood. My lip feels pillowy large, but hard. The pain is forming a concrete mass inside. I dial Suzanne’s phone number with a mixture of hope and dread. She picks up on the first ring.

“Good, you made it; I was worried.”

I wait for her to say something else, but she doesn’t. The news about our father hasn’t changed.

“Should we go home?” Then I immediately realize that was dumb.

“Home? Where and to what? He’s not there anyway. Who knows what plot of land in Florida he’s buried in.”

Oh, God. The body. My father’s body is no longer him, hasn’t been since he died God knows when, yet that is what I want. The body to bury, to watch it go in, to throw myself on it one last time, one last contact since when? To honor it at its end, a goodbye to his physical self. The self that I derive from. I have no idea where my father’s spirit is, nor where what it inhabited is. He is displaced in his death from me, just like in life, but I guess not for him and that feels even worse.

“I’m gonna go.”

“Do you want us to come over? You don’t sound good. Or want to come stay here?”

I can’t bear to see Suzanne’s face, to see any likeness of him, the likeness I always delighted in: his nose, the shape of his eyes, a certain grin. I can’t see them on her, so alive and well, knowing that those on him have been set loose like homing pigeons never to reach their intended end. “No, I’ll be fine. I’ll call you, okay?”

After a few minutes of convincing my sister that I’ll be okay, and assuring her that I am keeping ice on my lip—which I’m not because what’s one small injury on my body when my daddy’s body is dead?—I call Reggie. My sadness-terror rushes forward to meet him when the phone stops ringing. I’m reassured to hear his voice, but crushed that it’s his machine.

“Reggie, it’s Yvette.” There is small comfort in the facts of our names, though I worry he won’t be able to understand my lip-busted speech. I realize I’ll have to enunciate each word, and just thinking of that is painful on every level. “My…” I can’t continue. “Daddydied” has become one word. “My…” My mouth twists out to make the next sound, but a noiseless sob catches it, distorting it from saying what I can’t. “Dead.” Okay, that’s part of it. I gulp some air. It hits my lungs for the first time in what feels like years. “Dad.” I try to get the “dy” out. I’ve always hated the word “Dad.” It sounds so done with, so obligatorily child-of. I have never wanted to call my father that ever and definitely not now. The “dy” comes out as “me.” But at least sounds are escaping, if I pause and say nothing Reggie’s machine will cut me off, and I know I won’t be able to start this message all over again. “Will you call me?” There is meager relief in getting a full sentence out and the routine sounds of that one helped. “Maybe you could come over or I could come there?” I am begging and hate that I am, but I feel a kind of all encompassing insecurity that I never before have. And he did come over when Momma died. “Please call me, okay? Okay, bye.”

I hang up the phone reluctantly. I wish I could just stay on his answering machine, connected to him via the phone line until he comes home and picks it up, then will come here and be with me. But the phone is in its cradle and I am sitting on my couch alone. The clock reads nine-fifteen. What a truly horrendous time to find out my father is gone from this earth. It is too early in the evening for me to know what I know. I am certain that earlier in the day or later at night would have made this manageable somehow.