Cackle(12)

I call Sam.

“Hey,” he says, “it’s the expat.”

“I’m upstate, not in Helsinki.”

“Where is Helsinki? Finland?”

“Yes.”

“Ever been?”

“When would I have ever been to Helsinki?” I ask him. I wonder if I’m slurring.

“As a small child. Maybe you went but don’t remember.”

“I mean, it’s possible,” I say. “Highly unlikely, but possible.”

“Could always ask Pat,” he says.

This conversation is officially not fun anymore.

“Mm.”

“Have you talked to Pat recently?”

“Have you?”

Pat is my dad. He likes Sam better than he does me. I’m not sure why. It’d be easier, less painful, to attribute it to the facts that Sam is a guy and that my being a girl was always a great inconvenience to my father, but I know that’s not it. At least, not all of it.

My mother died when I was five years old, and my early years of bows and lace dresses, tea parties and dolls, died with her. My dad is a former soldier who worked construction and didn’t have the time or patience for a daughter, especially one with such “feminine” interests. No taking me to my beloved ballet lessons. No Barbies. No makeup. It was school, microwave dinners in front of the TV to avoid conversation, chores, sleep. I did the dishes, the laundry, all of the cleaning. I could watch sports with him on the weekends, but I couldn’t comment, and if his team lost, I knew to get out of his way.

It sounds worse than it was. He wasn’t stern or unfriendly. He mostly didn’t know what to do with me or what to say. I’m sure his grief was a contributing factor. My grandparents always spoke about how much he loved my mother, what a beautiful angel she was. But for some reason I could never buy into that story completely. I wanted to, but what else could they say? She was dead. Narratives change when someone dies, especially young and tragically. Their history transforms. It transcends reality, into something more romantic.

Maybe my parents were hopelessly in love. Maybe she was the most incredible woman who ever walked this earth, but I used to wish someone would tell me about all the ways she was human. About her struggles and her suffering. Did she hate losing at board games like I do? Did she always fuck up the laundry? Was she the type to be early or late? Did she break out before big events, put toothpaste on zits and sleep with her fingers crossed?

“I didn’t mean to press a button,” Sam says.

“No,” I say, “it’s fine.”

The germ of quiet festers into a lingering silence.

When I can no longer stand it, my mouth decides to make the specific and terrible decision to say, “Miss you.”

The nothing that follows is devastating.

Eventually, he clears his throat. “When does school start again?”

It’s a brutal nonresponse. I would almost rather he said, You miss me? Really? That’s weird. I don’t miss you at all. Almost a decade together and nada!

“Thursday,” I say. “But I have to go in for meetings.”

“Right,” he says.

“I should let you go,” I say. The words hang there, slow and bloated as an uncle after Thanksgiving dinner. They don’t move, don’t dissipate. They’re too heavy, too full of meaning.

“All right,” he says. “Talk soon.”

“Yep,” I say. “Bye.”

I hang up and throw my phone across the couch. I reach over and cover it with a pillow.

It’s a new kind of sadness. Who knew it came in so many varieties? That it had such range? I’d call this one “the anvil of understanding.”

Our friendship won’t survive. It can’t. No more inside jokes. No more long conversations about nothing. No more hanging out. Hating the same movies. Loving the same music. None of that. It’s over. It’s done.

I was deluding myself into thinking it could be salvaged. I picture those people rummaging through their houses after a natural disaster. A tornado, a hurricane, an earthquake.

I cry into the couch. I use it like a giant tissue.

It’s an intense, drunken cry. Theatrical. I exhaust myself, and I must fall asleep, because when I open my eyes, they’re crusty and sensitive to the light, and there’s a shallow puddle of drool slowly soaking into the couch cushion.

My eyelids are heavy. I have a dull headache. I yawn and go back to sleep.

It’s only when I open my eyes the second time that I realize I’m not waking up on my own.

Something is waking me.

There’s a sound coming from the staircase. Like footsteps. Like someone is coming up the stairs.

I sit up, ripped from the fog of sleep.

I wait for the sound to come again, to prove itself.

It doesn’t.

It was loud enough for me to trust that I actually heard it, that it wasn’t imagined. I tiptoe into the kitchen, where I pick up a frying pan to use as a potential weapon, like I’m an old Italian woman. I walk back into the living room.

I press my ear to the door.

I hear nothing but the whistle of my own breathing through clogged nostrils.

“Hello?” I say through the door.

I wait.

Still nothing.

I open the door, pan held high just in case.