How High We Go in the Dark(39)
“I don’t know why you deserve this call,” he said. Everything after that sounded like it came from the bottom of a well. When he stopped talking, I thought about hanging up, wallowing in the purgatorial red lights of some strip club or bar. I stared at the body on the gurney in front of me—a man named Bobby whose three grandchildren had visited him the other night. I’d heard them singing, laughing, celebrating a life, when I came to his room to deliver their chicken tenders. The children had been reading bedtime stories, nestled in beside their grandfather. I hovered the phone several inches from my ear, half listening as Bryan switched back and forth between explaining how our mom had died and yelling at me. Finally, there was a lull. He asked if I had anything to say for myself.
“I don’t need you talking to me like you’re in charge,” I said. “I’m a fuckup, okay? But please let me take care of things for Mom. Just give me this.” I saw my mother standing at the door of my teenage bedroom, me telling her I was sorry. I waited for my brother to hang up, still holding the phone away from my ear, sure he was about to really dig in. But he didn’t hang up and he didn’t yell because he had always been better than me.
By the following afternoon, my mother had been moved from the hospital morgue to our presidential suite. It would cost me my stipend for the next two years even after factoring in my employee discount. When I walked into the room, my brother was already there. He had been busy, decorating the walls with family photos, replacing the bedspread with a quilt our grandmother had made. On every conceivable surface, he had placed a vase of flowers. I sat next to him on a love seat near the edge of the bed. He was watching some travel show about Rome and crying into a glass of pinot noir.
“I never really did anything for her either, Den,” he said. “She never went anywhere. It’s not like I didn’t have the money. This is probably the nicest place she’s ever stayed.”
“Remember those KOA campsites on our family road trips?” I said. “Helping Dad pitch the tents, waiting for Mom to come back from the grocery store because we always forgot something.”
“Mom hated those trips,” Bryan said. “She slept in the car because Dad never thought it was necessary to buy sleeping pads.”
“It wasn’t all bad,” I said, thinking about my brother and me creeping through the forest with flashlights, waiting for our father to jump out at us in his ghillie suit.
Bryan shook his head and poured me a glass of wine.
My mother looked like she was taking a nap. The mortician had done a nice job. I could picture her getting up, asking us what was on the agenda for the day. Shall we go to Alcatraz? I’ve never been. Can we get some hot chocolate and ride the Powell Street cable car? Or more likely: You’re still on my shit list, Dennis, but I want to have fun for once in my damn life. Whatever you want, I’d say. I’m so sorry, I’d say. In this fantasy, I hold my mother’s hands as we stroll Ocean Beach collecting shells, roasting marshmallows over a bonfire. I ask her about her trip around the world that was cut short when she stumbled upon my father backpacking in Greece, her friends who’ve mostly passed, the old camcorder tapes I found as a kid that showed her kissing a man who looked a lot like David Hasselhoff. I never really tried to know her at all. In two days, I will cart my mother to the basement and watch her be reduced to ash. I will present our top-of-the-line urn to my brother. By the following evening, we will be joined by relatives and family friends. I’ll retreat to the shadows after the awkward handshakes and niceties and feel unworthy of being there. For now, though, I walk over to the bed, surrounded by candles and flowers and photos of the small but remarkable life that I never really knew. I thank her for everything she and my father gave me and that I never appreciated—the karate lessons and birthday cakes, the many second chances. I drape myself over her body, an ear where her heartbeat should be. I tell her I’m sorry. I tell her I love her. I wait for her embrace.
Speak, Fetch, Say I Love You
I’m sifting through a nearly empty bin of spare parts, trying to repair my neighbor’s robo-dog, yelling to my son to ask if he’s seen any second-generation leg servos, when a customer walks through the door, a little girl carrying a PupPal 3.0 Pomeranian model in a bright pink tote bag.
“Aki,” I yell. “Aki, I need help.” I message him on his phone. I’m about to go search for him when he finally emerges from his room wearing headphones, giving me that same look he gave me when he said he wished the plague had taken me instead of his mother. He’s become a master of emotional manipulation, saying anything to hurt me, to avoid being punished for bad behavior: staying out late, getting caught with alcohol and cigarettes in his bedroom. I’m not worried necessarily. It isn’t like he’s going to run out and join the yakuza. Mostly he just spends hours in his room trying to cover pop songs with his mother’s shamisen, while her old robo-dog shimmies at his feet and plays recordings of her singing in the hospital, the only original record we have of what she sounded like.
“What is it?” he says.
“We have a customer,” I say. “I thought we had a deal. You help me and you get pocket money.” Of course, he used to help me for free, but these days I’m willing to bribe the kid for face time.
“No, you have a customer,” he says. He goes into the kitchen, pours himself an orange juice, grabs a rice ball wrapped in plastic wrap.