I Have Lost My Way(63)

So I stayed. And in the end, I found him on that kitchen floor anyway.

Déjà vu.

After the paramedics took Dad away, I waited for the calls to come. After Grandma Mary, that’s what had happened. People came. Her church friends. My cousins. People.

But the only person who called in those two weeks was the coroner giving me the toxicology report, which she called “inconclusive.” There were opioids and benzos in Dad’s blood, not huge amounts, not drug-abuse amounts or amounts that suggested this was intentional, but sometimes, the coroner explained, even small doses interact in unexpected ways. “We’re listing the cause of death as accidental overdose,” she told me.

Inconclusive. Accidental. What did that mean?

“What do you want us to do with the body?” she asked.

I had no idea. When Grandma Mary died, Hector had facilitated everything. He’d called the coroner and looked up her life insurance policy and arranged it with the mortuary. I knew at the time that he was doing something my father should be doing, behaving the way a father should behave.

“Just part of my job,” Hector had said, though I’d recognized this as the kindest sort of lie. He’d stayed until late that night, and he’d returned the next day, even though we weren’t on his rotation anymore. “I’m moving back to New York City at the end of the year,” he told me, pressing his business card into my hand. “But you can call me anytime. I put my personal cell number on the back of the card. You can always get me on that.” I palmed the card, thinking he was being nice, and he was, but in retrospect I understood Hector realized I was a frog in a pot long before I did.

“I don’t know what to do with the body,” I told the coroner.

The coroner explained options, the cheapest of which was cremation. Did my father have life insurance? she wanted to know.

“Was it on purpose?” I asked.

Another pause. “We’re listing the cause as accidental overdose,” she replied. “You should still be able to collect his life insurance if he has it.”

That wasn’t what I was asking.

“Was it on purpose?” I repeated, my voice starting to break. “I need to know.”

“We can’t divine intention, but we are listing it as an accidental overdose.”

“Did he do it on purpose?”

The silence on the phone was terrible because it was so familiar. It was that lag between people asking you if you were okay and waiting to hear that you were fine.

“Sometimes,” she began falteringly, “it’s better to just leave these things be.”

“How do I do that?”

“Well,” she said, “you just do.”

She paused again. I could hear how itchy she was to get off the phone. This wasn’t her job. She was not a grief counselor or a psychologist. She was a coroner calling with the good news that I could collect Dad’s nonexistent life insurance. She wanted me to tell her it was all good. It’s what everyone wanted me to tell them. Though they must’ve known it wasn’t all good. How could it be all good?

“Do you have someone you might call?” she asked.

Who? My mother? The last time we’d spoken was four years ago when I’d told her that I no longer wanted to see her. The reason I gave was not that I’d lost an eye and was afraid she’d make me lose my father but that I didn’t fit in her life and, more to the point, she didn’t fit in mine. She’d cried bitterly, accusing me of always loving my father more. I didn’t disagree. And I hadn’t heard from her since. She didn’t even know that the man with whom she had created me was gone.

Who else should I call? My coach, who’d kicked me off the team? My friends, who, having procured assurances of it being all good, had wasted little time in getting the hell away?

Hector, who had taken pity on me and had seen, in a way few others had, how it was with me and my father? But that was years ago, and anyway, he didn’t live here anymore. And what if he did what the rest had done? Asked me, with impatience in his voice, if I was going to be okay. That I couldn’t bear.

And anyhow, there was only one person I wanted to call.

Tell me something good, he said when I called over and over again.

But I had nothing good to tell.

Just us, buddy.

Not just us. Just me.





10





JUST US



Nathaniel has no idea where to find his father. He has no idea if Hector is right and he’ll find him in that space between life and death, where the departed appear to escort the dying. Or if they’ll meet in the afterlife. If there is an afterlife. Or maybe even in the Undying Lands, one of the many impossible places his father promised they would go together. Will he know the truth in the split second that separates life from death? Will it make a difference?

Will it hurt?

A body coming off this bridge hits the water at eighty miles per hour. Quickest way to die, his father had written in his notes.

God, he hopes so.

He prays it won’t hurt.

He’s hurt enough for one lifetime.

He stands at the edge of the bridge, crying. He’s crying because it’s cold and it’s windy and his head hurts and because he’s scared. He’s crying because his father left him, maybe on purpose, maybe not knowing any better, and now he’s staring into the inky abyss, hoping to find him there, but he sees nothing but more darkness.