God is in the Pancakes (24 page)

“I didn't know they were planning to do an autopsy,” I reply as coolly as I can.

“I don't think they were,” she responds, “but I'm going to convince Izzy that she needs to have one. With all the questionable medical treatment people get here, it's a wonder if they didn't outright kill Frank, the poor man.”

My heart starts racing. If they do an autopsy, they're sure to find evidence of the pills I gave Mr. Sands. And then they'd be forced to launch an investigation . . . and then the missing report card envelope with trace evidence, which, once I'd heard funeral plans were set, I stopped obsessing over, would come back to haunt me . . . Sweat begins to bead on my upper lip.

“Hello Ronnie, hello Shirley,” Isabelle says when she reenters the room, “so nice of you to come.”

“I'm going to go,” I say to Isabelle quickly.

“Well okay, Grace, thank you again for stopping by.”

“Uh-huh.” I nod, mopping my forehead with my hand and walking to the door.

“Grace, wait,” Isabelle says, and I see her scanning the room for her purse.

“No.” I shake my head at her, silently trying to convey that I desperately don't want to take any of her money.

But she either doesn't understand my signal or is choosing to ignore it. I see her discreetly take a bill from her wallet and crush it in her palm as she walks over to me by the door. “And if not before, can I expect to see you Wednesday afternoon?” she asks, pressing the cash in my hand, without saying the words “at the funeral.”

“I'll be there,” I respond, now wondering if that funeral could also be my own.

I stare at the ceiling in my room and think about the time I broke my wrist. I'd never realized how important my wrist was until suddenly I couldn't use it anymore. I broke it when I tripped in my flip-flops. I'd put out my arm to break the fall and wound up breaking the wrist in two places instead. I wore a fiberglass cast for eight weeks and it was only during that time that I realized how much I'd relied on that wrist and how I'd always just taken it for granted before. When the cast finally came off, the wrist was much scrawnier than my other one since the surrounding muscles had atrophied. But getting that wrist back was like a gift, and for the first few days, I stared at it like it hadn't been a part of my body for my whole life.

My father's presence was also something I took for granted. Until he left. And in Dad's absence was Mr. Sands, who didn't replace him but helped fill the hole. Now that he's gone, too, I'm just left feeling broken, and I could use help picking up the pieces.

Since no one else seems to be answering my messages,
I think, staring at the blank ceiling above, I wonder if it's time to call my father back and tell him he's needed? That I need him. But before I can bring myself to make the call, I lock myself in the bathroom and rehearse what I'm going to say in the mirror. I try to imagine what his face will look like after I've said my piece. My hands shake as I hold the cell phone, but thankfully I have him on speed dial so I won't have to worry about hitting the right keys. Still, even pushing the TALK button takes concentration. On the first ring I remind myself to act cool. By the second, my index finger hovers over the END button. On the third ring he picks up.

“Hullo?”

“Dad, hey, it's me. Grace.” I stare at my face in the mirror and wonder if I would look different to him now, if I've changed at all in the months he's been gone, or in the events of the past few weeks.

“Grace! Hey! Wow, great to hear from you. I've been trying to get in touch with you, you know. Left a lot of messages on your cell phone.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess I never got them.” Hadn't planned to start out with a lie, but I can't seem to help myself.

“Well, that's okay, I've got you now, right? So how are you? How have you been?”

“It's kind of been a tough year.”

Dad pauses. I've caught him off guard, and in the momentary silence I can almost hear him wonder what the best response to my statement will be. “Oh, yeah?” he replies. “Your classes are hard, huh?”

He chose the wrong one. “I guess,” I say.

“So how's your social life? Breaking a lot of hearts, I'll bet.”

Breaking a lot of hearts?
“Yeah, I guess you could say that,” I reply, and Dad laughs too loudly. I'll give him another chance. “So, Dad, I was just wondering, think you'll be coming back home anytime soon?”

Dad stops laughing and I hear him exhale. “Well, that's a tough question, Gracie.”

I want to tell him that he has
no idea
what a tough question is. I want to tell him that he's the adult, so he's supposed to have the answers. Instead I manage, “Yeah. Okay. So?”

“Well, there are a lot of factors. And your mother's probably pretty angry with me, which I can understand.”

“Me too,” I reply, hoping he'll catch both meanings of my response.

“But maybe I can take you and Lolly out to IHOP this week? Whaddya say? I can't believe it's been almost a year since I've seen my girls. I miss you.”

“I don't know, Dad.” This conversation is not going at all in the way I wanted it to. Not that I even knew what that was supposed to be. “I might not be able to.”

“Your mother can't stop me from seeing my daughters,” he says, his voice swelling with righteous indignation.

“No, I just meant I've got some stuff that I'll be dealing with, and I'm not sure I'll be able to make it, that's all.”

“Well, how much more important could the stuff be than seeing your dear old dad, huh? We haven't seen each other in months.”

His words are like the final straw on the load. “It's not like you didn't know where to find us,” I reply, pissed.

“Look, Grace, I am sorry you haven't gotten my calls, but I have been trying to get in touch,” he offers. Insufficiently.

“Is your new life better, Dad?”

“You're angry.”

“You think?” I reply, noticing the red flare in my cheeks in the mirror. “I'm not even sure why I called. I just thought, in case you started hearing things—maybe that I'd done something some people might consider bad—I wanted you to know I did it for the right reasons.”

“Grace, I'm not really following you,” Dad says.

“I know,” I reply, “I'm probably not making much sense, but I just wanted you to know that I did what I did because I thought it was the right thing. And I'm not sorry about that.”

“Honey,” he says, his voice softening now, “that's how I always tried to raise you, to be a good Christian and to do the right thing . . . What did you do, Grace?”

“I gotta go, Dad.”

“Well, can I call you again another time?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“And you'll actually pick up when you see it's me?” He laughs.

“Probably.”

“Thank you,” he says, then, “You know I love you, right?”

“Okay, bye, Dad,” I reply, and hit END.

 

I toss and turn the whole night. My eyes burn open every few minutes, drawn to the bright green numbers on the clock, which seem to be mocking me. It's as if I'm being told I don't deserve sleep. Innocent people get to sleep, but this is how the guilty conscience is punished.
No sleep for the wicked,
isn't that how it goes? I try to bargain my way into it somehow: “Let me fall asleep now and I'll be good—I'll be a better student. I'll be nicer to my mother. I'll make sure Isabelle is always comfortable. I won't do anything wrong again.”

No deal.

But why should I be surprised? Who am I even trying to bargain with? I've put in a lot of requests over the past few weeks and it's not like I've gotten any evidence that anyone's out there. Or listening. Or giving a damn. So what's the point?

When it's absolutely clear to me that regardless of how tired I am, I won't be able to sink into oblivion, I get out of bed. It's so early it's still dark outside, and for some reason it occurs to me that I should go for a run—
clearly I'm not in my right head
. But maybe it'll let me feel like I'm leaving my problems behind at least temporarily.

I put on a T-shirt, sweats, and since I don't have proper running shoes, I just lace up my Pumas extra tight before heading out the door. When I get to the end of the block, I realize I should have brought my music with me, but I'm not going to go back for it, because I'll probably just stop if I don't keep running.

So that's what I do: I keep up my pace and I keep moving, one foot in front of the other until I can hear myself breathing heavily. It doesn't take long before I get a stabbing pain in my left side, but I run through it. At least the pain is something for me to focus on outside my head.

I don't have a destination in mind, but when I see the hill at the far side of the community park, I know that's where I'll head. The grass in the park is still wet with dew and I kick up some of the water and mud against my calves. I can feel myself gaining speed as I take the hill, and though pain is radiating up my shins, I have no intention of slowing down. I push myself to get to the top and when I do, sweating, out of breath, and with pinpricks of pain shooting through my legs, I look across the horizon.

I stare at the orangey ball of sun that is now rising through the tree line in front of me. I bend over, dropping my hands to my knees without taking my eyes off the sight before me. I don't remember ever having been present at a sunrise before, and as I watch the fog start to burn off and the air clearing in front of me, it's hard not to be taken with the absolute beauty of a new day dawning. I've never really pondered the sunrise before. But standing here now, watching it happen, it's amazing and it's powerful, and it happens every single day with or without us. That's when it strikes me that if you have nothing else to believe in, there's always this. This is universal. This is something to be thankful for. Whatever else you accept as true—God or no God—this can't be denied, and it's the same for all of us, which means even in our darkest hours, we are all connected; we are not alone. I don't know if this is what having faith means, but I get the feeling that wherever Mr. Sands is, he remains with me, part of the dawn.

T
here's a quiet hum in the air Wednesday afternoon, like that slightly electrical feeling that remains in the atmosphere after a summer thunderstorm. I never understood the phrase “quiet after the storm,” since things are never perfectly quiet really. Quiet by comparison, maybe, but there's always some splashing around, tree limbs falling, animals shaking off their coats. I think what people are really talking about is the sound of things settling. That's what I'm hearing inside my own head right now. And as I walk to the Bartel Funeral Home to attend the service of Frank Sands, I don't think I've ever heard such an eerie non-sound before.

The service is taking place in the home's main chapel, and I sit at the end of one of the pews a few rows from the back. I examine the packed crowd but barely recognize any of the faces.
Who are all these people?
Sure it's great that so many of them showed up, but why did so few visit Mr. Sands at Hanover House while he was still alive? I don't even know if I should be here. Yes, Isabelle asked me to come, but if I'd confessed and told her what I'd done—that I'm the one responsible for this day—I'm sure she'd hate the thought of me sitting in this room with her and her family.

Isabelle sits in the front row, flanked by her daughters. She's wearing large dark sunglasses that cover half her face, so it's impossible to tell what she's focusing on right now. I can't help but think that she's not just mourning the loss of her husband here. As the person left behind, she must also be mourning her own life. The life she knew died with him.