Aftersight (10 page)

"Yes," his voice cracked. And then something happened I was completely unprepared for. This large tough guy, with fists the size of pigeons, broke down in sobs. Not merely a manful tear, the Latino man truly became unhinged, blubbering into his huge hands uncontrollably. Something about seeing the big man's release of emotion made my own eyes fill and overflow.

One of the Latino man's neighbors handed him a handkerchief. He took it and wiped his face. The session continued. Apparently, Jorge's mother had been sickly, even before he was born. Carrying Jorge had been too much for her fragile little body. She died of bone cancer when Jorge was five. Jorge's father, a heavy drinker even in good times, didn't take Maria's death well. Recognizing his shortcomings, he placed Jorge in the care of his grandmother. Within two years he had drunk himself to death.

The reading intensified when Jorge's father stepped in and continued his mother's apologies, admitting to everything that he could and should have done for Jorge while he was alive. Like the first phantom female voice, I heard a second male one whispering information just before Catalina interpreted it. Catalina didn't repeat everything word for word. She seemed to be getting information nonverbally — psychically? — as well as the direct communication I was hearing. All the while Jorge stood there, sometimes standing manfully at attention and other times sobbing into the by-now drenched handkerchief.

Despite the impressive display, Mom was kind of acting like a jerk. Her skeptical mouth-twitches were really getting on my nerves. One by one, Catalina went around the room as more deceased friends and relatives made themselves known, sometimes with very specific information that each of their living counterparts confirmed. A teenage boy came through whose loved ones had suspected of committing suicide, revealing that it had been an accident. He had fallen while climbing the bridge his body was found under. There was the husband who gave detailed information to his widowed wife about where to find his life insurance policy. And there had been a little boy who came to his mom and dad, a couple who by now were old enough to be grandparents. The boy had passed after a fall down some stairs and was appearing now to his parents — who'd never had other children — to tell them that he was okay.

Each time I heard their ghostly voices from somewhere nearby before Catalina even provided the information. But with each new display, Mom shook her head and fidgeted. I whispered to Gwen that bringing Mom had been a mistake, but Gwen was insistent. "It's important," she'd said when we'd been making plans. "Your mom is supposed to be there. I don't know why."

"Look who's psychic all of a sudden," I'd replied, but now I knew. Mom was going to humiliate me.

"Is there a Kathy here?" Catalina asked after a very long pause. "Kathy?"

I felt Mom stiffen next to me, but she said nothing.

"Kathy?"

Gwen and I looked at her. "Mom." I poked her, but she refused to move.

"
Ask for Bunny."

"I've been told to ask for Bunny?" Catalina repeated after a few beats.

Finally, Mom stood. Her mascara was already pooling beneath her eyes.

"Yes. That's me."

It was my Great Nana Mary, my mom's grandma, who, unbeknownst to anyone in the room — including me — had called Mom "Bunny." Now there could be no denials, as Nana Mary told about the times she and Mom had spent alone together when Mom was a kid, the stories she'd told her at bedtime, the cookies they baked together, the walks they'd taken. Mom acknowledged each bit of information as it came, otherwise mute, the only signs of any emotion the black tears that streaked down her otherwise frozen face.

I'd been hearing everything Catalina was relating directly from my Nana Mary. At first Nana seemed to stand up at the front of the room, near Catalina, but after a while I felt her get closer, until she seemed to be standing right behind me, off to the side where Mom was sitting.

"
It's all right, Becca, everything is going to be all right."
My nana's voice, whispered directly in my ear. Memories of my near-death experience flooded through me, the two of us walking together in that beautiful place, ancient trees and the pretty mansions and that indescribable sense of love. I'd been crying before but now the waterworks were going full blast.

"Pay attention,"
she went on.
"This is very important. You must listen to the han
d
some older gentleman in the back of the room. He's safe. You can trust him."

My Great Nana Mary, who had all my life looked out after me, even if I hadn't known it, was looking out after me still.

Cali

Sacramento, California

December 16

The kitchen was a flipping disaster.

Dishes were piled in the sink and on every surface of the chipped tile countertop. Empty milk cartons stood guarding discarded pizza boxes, frozen food wrappers, and dirty glasses fogged with milk. Liquor bottles, drained of their insides, huddled around a trashcan stacked high with garbage. On the kitchen table, between ashtrays full of stubbed-out cigarettes, sat the room's only hint of the holidays — a plate of Christmas cookies delivered by a neighbor, its surface picked clean of everything but thick slices of fruitcake. And, suspended over it all, the stink of food gone bad.

As I surveyed the damage, I gazed beyond the kitchen counter to the living room, where Dad sat catatonic in the darkness, the ghostly light of the mute television washing over his face in a constantly shifting grey light. He'd been like this for almost two weeks now, ever since his girlfriend, Tammy, had blown him off. He did little now but stare at the TV, drink, and smoke. I didn't even see him go to bed anymore. He just closed his eyes and dozed in his chair.

With Tammy gone, Dad had gone through some sort of meltdown, refusing to answer questions or even acknowledge me. His indifference and the steadily growing mess in the kitchen was an echo of the entire house, which I'd come to think of as an abandoned ship, drifting out of control and gradually sinking. All this will be at the bottom of the ocean soon, I thought, wondering if Dad was beyond hauling into a lifeboat. I didn't know how much time we had before we were evicted, but it couldn't be more than a few weeks; maybe, if we were lucky, the end of January.

I bit nervously at my lip ring, trying to figure out where to start on the mess. I chose the garbage, emptying the trashcan, collecting the bottles and taking them out to the recycle bin, gathering the stray rubbish in large black plastic bags and exiling them to the back porch. That made a dent in the carnage, but there were still pans and dishes with petrified crud imprinted on their metallic and porcelain surfaces. I cleared the sink just to have an unsullied zone to start the scrubbing, but when I opened the dishwasher, I was hit with a sickly sweet reek, like rancid tar, that made me retch.

"Did you want me to fix you some dinner?" I called out when the dishwasher was humming on its first cycle and newly rinsed plates, pans, and flatware sat dripping on the counter, awaiting the next load. "I can make spaghetti and garlic bread."

Dad continued to stare at the television, unresponsive, marinating in his own filth. I filled a pot with water and reached into the pantry for a jar of spaghetti sauce. Maybe the smell of spaghetti sauce would bring him back to the world of the living. It made me think back to dinners in this very kitchen, with Mom presiding over a large bowl of pasta, the aroma of basil and rosemary filling the warm space.

We'd been a family then, Dad sitting at the head of the table, poking at his latest elaborate cell phone; Chris at the far end, cradling a stuffed animal in his lap; Mom asking everyone about our days while our dog, Bruno, circled the table, hoping for stray scraps. It had been so dorky; I'd hated it. Yet sometimes at night when I was lying in bed, I'd pretend I was back there before the iceberg had been struck and the ship started to take on water. But whenever it got too real, the pain stabbing into my heart like jagged shards of ice would force me to drown any lingering notes of sappiness. I was rearranging deck chairs and I knew it.

"Come on, Dad," I said, forcing cheerfulness into my voice. "Let's sit at the table and have a meal together." The thought of us alone next to those two empty chairs suddenly smacked me with a wave of sadness. Was this as hopeless as it seemed? Maybe I couldn't save him, but I had to try.

I leaned against the kitchen counter and peered into the family room. "You'd feel better if you ate," I added, realizing how much I sounded like Mom. "Come on, Dad, you might as well join me. I'm going to make dinner whether you eat it or not."

Dad swallowed and slowly swiveled his head so his eyes met mine, acknowledging me for the first time in weeks. "I really don't care what you do," he said expressionlessly, turning back to stare at the television. Within seconds he was comatose again.

A molten ball of liquid hate filled me to my core and for just a second I considered grasping the pot full of still-cold spaghetti water and sending it into The Loser's face. Instead, I banged both fists hard on the countertop and opened and closed the cupboard doors so violently that the drinking glasses inside shattered with a spectacular cascading racket. Sprinting down the hall to my bedroom, I slammed the door with a noticeable sense of finality. Now I understood how Mom felt. This was the last flipping straw! Loser! I was done with him.

My room was dark, lit only by the feeble white light from the lamppost outside. I gazed at my reflection in the mirror over the dresser, swallowing, refusing the tears that threatened to barrel me over. In the faint light my thick black mascara made my eyes look like two shadowy sockets, like a skull whose insides had been eaten away. I felt hollow; insubstantial. Something in my stomach shimmered and pulsated, showering down into my legs like the vibrations that came before my out-of-body projections.

I opened the top dresser drawer and fished through my underclothes until I found it: a bottle of blue sleeping pills. Opening the container, I dry-swallowed a few. They had been my talisman against the out-of-body experiences for the past three weeks. While I wasn't sure if they did anything to keep spirit glued to flesh, they did seem to reduce the memory of my nightly excursions to all but a few broken images and feelings. I liked to think that if I didn't remember them that they weren't really happening.

Plopping on the bed, I tugged my rust-colored afghan over me, trying to press out the cold. A dizzy sense of vertigo twirled through my middle, as if my insides were corkscrewing into the mattress and down through the floor. I clutched the sides of the bed to steady myself and after a minute, the sense of swaying faded away.

I had six more weeks until finals and enough credits to graduate from high school. For the past year I'd pooled all my energy into making that finish line — eighteen years old with diploma in hand, Derrick and I could get away and never look back. I was so close I could taste it! And yet now I lacked the energy to fight anymore. The Universe was telling me I didn't belong here, that continued struggle was useless. I had to get out, right away, even if it meant giving up everything I'd worked so hard for.

I tried to convince myself that all would be better once we were in Vancouver. What would Derrick say when I told him I wanted to get away as soon as possible? All this time I'd begged him to wait until I could graduate. He'd be torqued off that I was giving up in sight of my goal. I didn't like the way we'd been bickering lately. It made me think of my mom and dad in the months after Chris died, when everything had fallen apart.

The last day of Chris's life, that nightmarish afternoon that I'd been looking after him, was stained on my brain like a bug smear on a fender that you could never quite scrape off. Chris had been lying on the floor of the family room, watching cartoons and clutching Kitty Cat, his favorite stuffed animal. I'd been in my room on the phone, talking to the guy
du jour
. I was only on the phone for maybe twenty minutes, but when I toddled back into the family room to check on Chris I found my five-year-old little brother on the floor, blue, cold, and unresponsive. I'd never forget the way his dead weight felt, the strain on my arms when I squeezed him, trying to pull out whatever it was that prevented him from breathing as the 911 operator's tinny voice coached me over my cell phone.

It turned out there wasn't anything I could have done to save him. Chris was always putting whatever was handy into his mouth and that afternoon it had been a quarter from the pile of spare change Dad had left on the coffee table. When he swallowed it accidentally, it might still have come loose when I tried to dig it out except Chris had evidently reached into his mouth to pull it free and in his panic had wedged it farther down his throat. He died before the paramedics had even arrived.

Chris's passing triggered a living nightmare that none of us could wake from. My parents still functioned somehow, moving about as vacantly as zombies, unable to square our previous life with the horror show that was our new existence. Dad, who'd been a recreational drug user in his wild high school days, quickly sank back into his old habits. For months he was more or less permanently stoned and that's not really cool if you want to have a job. When he lost that, we were up the creek without a paddle, a spoon, or a straw.

Mom blamed Dad for leaving his pocket change within Chris's easy reach; Dad blamed Mom for the garden show that had driven them out of the house that day. While neither of them said it, I was sure they both secretly blamed me for not watching Chris closely enough in the first place and not being able to save him in the second. I missed Chris so much it ached until my bones throbbed. I'd let everyone down and now I was unanimously despised. Yeah, I got crock-faced myself a few times, but every time I came out of it there was Dad — The Loser — checked out and washed up. Unless I wanted to be a universal screw-up like him, I'd have to pull myself together.