In Nightmares We're Alone (14 page)

He gives me the finger. I push his hand down, but I can’t help laughing. “Don’t do that, Martin.” I take a hundred dollar bill out of my pocket and hand it to him. “There’s your cut. I’d say that’s fair.”

He pockets the money.

For a long time I’ve felt like quick cash and good meals are the only reason Martin will do anything with me. I don’t think he enjoys being home with his mother, or at school, or really anywhere. I have trouble figuring out what he does enjoy anymore other than movies, but I think I’m getting better at speaking his language. A few more days like today and I might just win him back.

“Hey sport,” I say as he gets out of the car. He gives me a look like he’s asking how dare I call him sport. “I had a lot of fun hanging out today.”

He stands there for a second, says nothing, and then shuts the door. Still no optimism. That wall of indifference can’t be cracked easily, but I think I poked a hole at lunch and that’s enough to get me through the day.
 

And it’s true. Something about being alive, having removed the source of pain from my foot, and being a good father to my son, I feel really good for a second.

Just for a second.

* * * * *

That sycamore.

Its firm, slender body. Its proud, tall stature. The way its roots penetrate the earth.

You never think about it, how much of a tree is roots. That’s a huge part of the tree, spread out three times the width of what you see. And all of it is a secret, buried six inches beneath the soil. You see the beauty, the romance. But if you dug down, you’d find the ugliness the tree keeps hidden, you’d see how it stretches wider than the beauty.

But take away the roots and the tree can’t live. Cut out the ugliness and the beauty dies with it. Vices feed virtues. Our pain fuels our love.

My imperfections are my own. Without them I am not me.

Maybe that’s the source of my attraction. Maybe I’m drawn to it because I can relate. That makes sense. It doesn’t explain why I turned the lights off so I could touch myself while I looked at it from the window, but at least it’s a theory on the root of what’s happening.

Root. Ha.

Christ this house is lonely. I’m cleaning semen off a sliding glass door in a darkened kitchen and dreaming of being with a tree. I need a woman in my life.

Not Daphne or Bibi. Not a piece of ass who comes and goes every few days and makes me promise to call even though she knows I won’t. Not nutrients in the soil I can suck up and forget.

Back when a wife and son were in this house, back when Martin was doing homework in the living room or we were watching cartoons or Rose was sculpting or telling me about a new play we should see, back then I didn’t even know we
had
a sycamore.

I reach for the phone and scroll through my contacts.

For some reason—maybe it’s the fact that my toe is feeling better and my son and I had fun and I feel like I can’t lose today, and maybe it has something to do with growing up, or with the way the sycamore and its roots seem to twist into my soul like it’s leading me to some deep and profound truth—but for some reason I don’t fully understand, I end up calling Elaine after all.

“Hello?” she says, after the fourth ring.

“Hi. Hello. Uh… Ms. Giddings? Elaine, I mean?”

“Yes, this is she. Who’s calling, please?”

“This is Casey. The, uh, the medium. We had a talk earlier this week about your… daughters?”

“Oh. Oh, right. Yes. Hi, Casey. What’s up?”

Yes, Casey. What
is
up?

“Um… Well, I was just… You didn’t schedule a follow-up appointment when you were here because you didn’t… um… know what your schedule would be. And I was wondering if you were still interested in having another session.”

What is this stuttering? Why is this difficult? Since when do I fear talking to people? It’s supposed to be the one thing I’m good at.

“Yes, I am. I almost called you, actually, but there’s been some drama with my youngest and I’ve just been getting pulled every which way.”

I force a laugh. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I really need to make an appointment with you as soon as possible. Maybe tomorrow after work? It’s kind of really important. Is there any way you could squeeze me in?”

Oh Elaine. I’d squeeze you wherever you’d like.

“Sure. I have an opening at three if that would work.”

“That’d be perfect.”

“Okay. Thank you. I… guess I’ll see you then.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“Casey?”

“Yes?”

“I just want to say… thanks for calling me. I’m really glad you did.”

What’s this feeling? Guilt? Why am I feeling guilt? Everything I’m telling her is what she wants to hear. She chooses what she wants to believe and this is the means by which she brings light to the darknesses in her life. This is not a crime. If she didn’t want to believe, she would not be coming to me. I have nothing to feel guilty about. White lies. Roots feeding bloomage. Virtue from vice. In the long run, I’m helping the both of us.

“Of course. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

Tomorrow. Three o’clock. For some reason it feels important with this one. I need to figure out what her unborn daughter is going to say. Make it count, Casey.

The question is: Do the dead talk to the living?

And you think you know the answer, but it’s never as easy as that.

Elaine sits there in the chair in front of me and I whisper to her in the voice of her unborn daughter as a tree in my backyard whispers to me, and it whispers in the voice of my father.

“What the hell is wrong with you? Haven’t your mother and I taught you anything? Sex out of wedlock, unprotected sex at that, and you’re not even out of high school? Do you know my parents would have disowned me—disowned me!—if I’d turned out like you.”

I want to have unprotected sex out of wedlock with Elaine. Why? Because it’s in my nature? Because it’s the kind of person I am? Why am I that kind of person? Because I hated my father? Because I wanted nothing less than for him to be proud of me?

Out the window, a squirrel rushes up the trunk of the sycamore with a nut in its mouth and stows it somewhere in the branches. By no fault of the tree’s, it absorbs the nut. The nut becomes a part of the tree.

Elaine twists a pinch of her hair around her finger. I lick my lips and she catches me staring and in the dead fetus’ voice I say, “You have really pretty hair, Mommy.”

Elaine smiles and I reposition my legs to hide my erection. I glance away from her but my eye just lands on the tree again.

“Damn that punk rock,” Dad is saying to Mom in the past. “Everything is pro-greed and anti-parents-and-teachers. They’ve got all these kids thinking it’s ‘cool’ to be irresponsible and self-serving. Gimme a break. If that’s the answer, how come that Cobain kid shot himself? Tell me that?”

Fourteen years old, Cobain’s voice on the stereo in my room, Dad’s voice coming through the wall, and I’m sitting there picking sides. Dad vs. Cobain. Who to listen to?

Now I ask again: Do the dead talk to the living?

And maybe you’re starting to see my point.

Fifteen years old, I’m with Lucy Seltzer in the back of her Mom’s car, my first time, and it’s “Fuck you, Dad” going through my head as I make love to her. Because Dad made me make that promise in church, that ring I’m supposed to wear on my finger. I’m supposed to be the good boy Dad and God and everybody decided I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to go against what I want and what I feel.

This is rebellion. This is an act of resistance against a world set up to make me into something I don’t want to be. This feels… so… fucking… good.

The lights dimmed, the seance in progress, as I pull my eyes away from the tree and they find their way up Elaine’s body, that desire, that lust, is that something Dad put there a dozen years ago? A nut tucked away in my branches I never had a choice but to absorb? Dad, five years dead now, still prodding me, still making me want to rebel?

Do the dead talk to the living?

Come on now. The past speaks louder than the present.

“Are you mad at me, Mommy?” I ask Elaine in the dead girl’s voice.

“Of course not, sweetie. Why would you ask that?”

“Because I made Daddy leave.”

The phrase ‘Don’t try this at home’ comes to mind. If you’re taking notes on how to make the dead speak, stay away from what I’ve just done. I don’t know that Elaine’s miscarriage factored in any way into her matrimonial conflagration. I know the timelines match up and they wouldn’t be the first couple pulled apart by a toilet baby, but maybe the former Mr. Elaine Giddings was caught cheating with the mailman or yorking his dooder to the Christmas tree two weeks before the miscarriage even happened. But I need Elaine. I need her and I take the gamble.

She freezes. “What… What makes you say that, Beth?”

Casey. Casey made me say that.

“I don’t know.”

The heartbroken look she’s studying me with, I brace myself for an explosion of anger. A sharp pain in the tip of my index finger causes me to ball a fist. I wince and my eyes shift to the sliding glass door, to the sycamore.

No!

This is my imagination. I have pried out the sapling and the wound has scabbed over. The fear in my mind is hypochondria,
beyond
hypochondria. The fear that a head cold might be pneumonia is hypochondria. The fear that a sharp pain in your finger might be Evil Plant Disease is… is…

“Insanity!” says Dad when I tell him I don’t believe in God anymore. “How did this all happen then, chance? Maybe paint fell on the canvas and the Mona Lisa happened. Maybe everything happened by accident.”

“Sweetheart,” says Elaine, snapping my eyes away from the tree after so long a pause I’ve nearly forgotten what we’re doing here. “Daddy left because he and Mommy were different people than they were when they met. It was about a lot more things than just you. None of what happened was your fault, okay? Life just changes people and they grow together or they grow apart.

Elaine gets what Dad didn’t get. Dad, who more or less parted ways with me after that argument on determinism because I was a godless, nihilistic fornicator. We both lost that argument because neither of us would budge, and maybe if one of us had been a different person at the moment, everything would have worked out for me and Rose and Martin.

Different animals in the tree, different nuts, different winds, different climate, the whole thing grows into something else. Give him my upbringing and maybe Da Vinci would’ve ended up like me. Maybe he wouldn’t have seen anything worth painting in that model. But he did.

So you see, Dad, paint
did
just fall on the canvas.

“It’s okay, Mommy. It wasn’t your fault either. And I know you think of me every day.”

“I do, honey. I really do.” And just as I gain back my will and I’m about to steer the conversation where I need it to go, to love and romance and togetherness, Elaine says, “Sweetheart, I want to ask you about the doll. You know the one I named after you?”

Jesus. Again with the goddamn doll. “She’s so beautiful,” I say. “I like it when you hold her and talk to me.”

She bows her head and a sigh escapes. “I thought you might. I love her too.” She pauses. “Your sister told me she doesn’t want me to keep that doll. She doesn’t like it.”

My finger aches again. Nerves, probably. A manifestation of frustration. Strictly psychological, my conscious mind insists.

But I’ve been down this road before.
If it still hurts tomorrow,
I said,
I’ll go to a doctor.

“Oh…?” I say, not sure what territory we’re in anymore.

“Do you think… I mean… If we got a new one to name after you or something… Do you think it would… Do you think you would like it as much as this one?”

I have an image of Elaine standing in a locked room with a hundred dolls, cradling one of them and talking to her dead daughter while her living ones yearn for her attention. Jesus. People and their weird bullshit.

“You’re one to talk,” the sycamore tells me.

Too true. We’re all just trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with us.

I grab the conversational gunwale.

“I like that doll a lot, but I understand if you need to get rid of it. I like it when you talk to me, but I like when my sister is happy too.”

“That’s such a sweet thing to say.”

“I think it’s difficult for her only having one parent, and I think she feels lonely sometimes,” I say, and I wonder if I’m talking to her or to my father. “That’s why she acts out. You should try not to get too angry with her. She just wants your attention.”

Elaine nods in that way women do when they’re holding back tears. “I know, baby. I will. I’ll be nicer.”

“Heather too,” I say. The dead kid says. “She acts independent, but I think she still needs her mommy.”

“I know she does.”

“You should try not to feel so stressed. I think when you get old and we get to be together, it’s the happy times you’ll remember, so you should try to make lots of them.”

“Okay.” She smiles. This seems to have quite an impact.

Self-help book stuff. It’s more useful than you’d think. These hollow sweet-nothings we whisper to ourselves for a burst of euphoria and forget a moment later when the gas bill comes. That endorphin buzz is our addiction. Nothing is missing when we feel it, but it’s so hard a thing to feel. Trigger it in another person more times than a couple, provide that artificial solace, make them feel fulfilled for a second or an hour or a week, and I swear to you, you will become their addiction. They will fall in love.

I may be one of seven billion, but I am also one in seven billion.

Catchy, right? That’s one of my favorites.

“Mommy, are you happy?” Hold tight, mateys. We sail now for stormy waters.

“Sure I am. Why?”

“Sometimes when you hold me and we talk, I feel like you’re lonely since I went away.” That touches a nerve, and I hope it’s the one I’m looking for.

“Life is hard. I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

“Do you ever wish I never happened and you still had Daddy?”