Everything You Are(6)

“Ten-four. Loud and clear.” He chases memories into shadowy corners looking for a name and a face to connect with the voice and finally finds it. The face is tight lipped, hard eyed, clearly disapproving of anything and everything Braden. Even back then, when he was the golden boy, beloved of the gods, and not a down-and-out bum trying to drink himself to death in a shit-hole apartment.

Lilian’s sister, Alexandra. Allie’s godmother. He’d argued against naming his daughter after her. Even Lilian wasn’t overly fond of the name, but he couldn’t argue with her reasons. “Alexandra is family, Braden. The only sister I have.” And that ended his resistance because he knew, all too well, that family is a fact that refuses alteration.

“We have a situation,” Alexandra says now. “Please tell me you’re sober.”

“I am never sober, thank God. Where is Lilian and why on earth are you calling me?”

A lie. He is momentarily and temporarily sober, the one problem for which he has a solution. But he doesn’t reach to fill his empty glass. Not just yet.

Alexandra makes a strangled gasping sound that from any other human might be a sob. He’s still trying to picture that emotion on her when she finally says the thing she’s called him to say.

“Lilian has gone to be with Jesus.”

Braden waits for these words to arrange themselves into a meaningful sequence. Clearly, Alexandra doesn’t mean to use the euphemism for death. Lilian has never been marked for death, she is beyond and above it. So “gone to be with Jesus” must mean she’s becoming a nun, or going on a religious retreat, maybe attending an intensive Pentecostal camp meeting.

“Braden?”

“I don’t think I heard you.”

“Lilian has passed on to the other side. She’s singing with the angels now.”

Braden fills his glass, watching his hand lift the bottle and pour as if it doesn’t belong to him, as if he is a bystander whose heart will not be shattered by the next thing Alexandra is going to say.

“There was a car accident. A crash. They think she fell asleep.”

He notices, from a vantage point up near the ceiling, that he can’t breathe, that his heart is running off with a rhythm of its own. Watches himself slide down the cabinets to the tacky, unwashed kitchenette floor. Words are expected, and he utters the first ones that come into his head.

“When? How are the kids?”

“Monday.”

Braden does the math, the number of days from Monday to Thursday divided by the distance between him and the drink he just poured, multiplied by the enormity of his failure and loss. All the calculations come out to the same answer: he is a miserable excuse for a human being.

Monday.

The day he started drinking again after nearly six months of sobriety.

Monday.

The day he was supposed to meet his daughter face-to-face after eleven years of absence.

If Lilian had to leave this world and abandon the kids, why did it have to be on that particular Monday, of all the days in the year?

“Braden! Are you listening?”

“I hear you.”

“I need you to sign some papers. I just flew in this morning and—”

“Three days?” He’s still stuck on the time frame. If Lilian dead is incomprehensible, the idea of time, of the kids alone for not only hours but days, is a concept beyond his grasp. Just one more minute, and he thinks he’s going to be angry about that. Someone, namely Alexandra, could have tried harder to reach him.

“Allie stayed with a friend, but she can’t stay there forever. You need to sign papers so she can come home with me.”

Braden closes his eyes, listens to the sound of his own breathing, the music swirling in the room. Not the first time he’s heard the cello in a quiet room, as clearly as if someone is playing right next to him. The Bach in C Minor this time, only it’s discordant and wrong, tuned flat so it grates on his eardrums. His throat contracts around the words stuck sideways in his throat. It takes three tries before he can spit them out.

“Where is Trey?”

Silence.

“You keep saying Allie. What about Trey?”

“Trey was in the car.”

“Is he hurt? How badly? Which hospital?”

If Lilian is dead—still an if, a big one—if Lilian is dead, the embargo is over. He can go home. He will go to Allie, and to Trey, he will— “Trey didn’t make it. He’s gone.”

Braden can’t feel his body anymore, at all, not the restricted breathing or the erratic heart rate or the sinking in his belly; the whole thing has gone as numb as his goddamn hands. He bangs the back of his head against the cabinet, seeking sensation.

Thud.

A starburst of pain behind his eyes. Better.

Thud.

The pain clears him, puts his soul back in his body. Sensation comes flooding back, and with it come words and the anger that has been waiting for the cue to come onstage.

“Allie has been alone with this? For three fucking days? Jesus Christ, Alexandra. You should have called me!”

“Do me a favor and keep your profanity to yourself. I didn’t have your number, and Allie wouldn’t give it to me or to the social worker. She was very clear. She doesn’t want you.”

Of course she doesn’t want him. He left her, and then he stood her up, and then her mother and her brother died. The only surprise in all of this is the amount of pain carried by those precise words, “she doesn’t want you.”