The Journey Prize Stories 28 (20 page)

Either way, I will be ready. / cmb

M
y brother and I tried to divvy up the depressing tasks ahead of us. He told me I should fetch our mother, who had all but given up the English language for Ukrainian. My brother thought that because I worked with more Ukrainians at the security agency than he did at his bank, I spoke it more frequently and could better articulate the reasons why she should come to our father's funeral. In exchange, he would tell our uncle he wasn't allowed to attend the service.

“He mostly speaks Ukrainian too,” I said, balancing the phone between my chin and shoulder. In the mirror, my reflection tried to figure out the best way to tie a Windsor knot.

“He'll be angry, and I'm bigger than you. He'll break your skull.”

Our uncle Joseph had been a boxer once. My brother wrestled in college, at his peak placing third in the Pac-10 conference's one-hundred-and-seventy-four-pound category. The idea was that they could cancel each other out.

Joseph wasn't welcome because our mother claimed he'd done terrible things to her when she was little, before they emigrated from Ukraine. Nobody in the family knew what to think, whether he did or didn't. Our mother's mental illness made it difficult to judge. For our father, there was no ambiguity. A year before he died, he drove me to a steak house and, after we ate, showed me a gun he bought, which he intended to use on Joseph.

“I'm going to go to his house and blow his fucking brains out.”

One can see why my father's heart exploded. Though technically the product of calcium and protein and fat forming a brick of plaque in his aorta, his end represented the metastasizing of years of suffering, the day his body could no longer host his sadness.

In addition to not speaking English, our mother hardly ever left the house. Her apartment was in a dreary part of Toronto, in the neighbourhood we all used to live in. Her entire floor was filled with Ukrainians. One storey down, mostly Sudanese. Upstairs, Mexicans. The property managers liked to rent whole floors to families who knew each other, so that if one tenant couldn't pay rent, the others would chip in. It was communism on a microscopic scale.

I knew she wouldn't let anyone in, so I used the key I found on Dad's keychain. I had the black mourning dress my brother bought for her draped over my shoulder, encased in a skin of crinkly plastic.

“Hello?” I said, opening the door just wide enough to slip in.

The apartment smelled the way my mother smelled: like smoke and some sort of vinegar. Eucalyptus plants, steroid creams for an imagined skin condition, the bleach she used on the linoleum of the kitchen to keep it chemical-white.

“I'm not leaving,” my mother said in Ukrainian. I traced her voice to the dining room, where she was drinking coffee and having a cigarette, crocheting a complicated pattern into a doily.

“You need to get ready.”

“Are you dead?”

Instead of answering, I took the dress and set it on the chair next to her.

“Nicolas bought this for you. I think it's your size. Try it on.”

She shook her head.

“Your father and I hadn't spoken in months. The last thing he said to me was that he was selling our
Encyclopoedia Britannica.”
The doily had the look of a jellyfish in her hands. “There's coffee over there. Some left for you.”

Pouring myself a cup, I marvelled at the artifacts of my childhood that still hung on the walls. It was like being in a museum with a wing dedicated to myself. Pictures of my brother in his wrestling singlet, performing an arm-drag takedown on a weaker opponent. Peacock feathers we collected during a family trip to the zoo, arranged in a petrified fan shape. And there we were in a sepia-toned photo, a family. My brother, me, our parents, circa mid-eighties; tan lines, Dad's glacially receding hairline, surrounded by a frame made of cherry-coloured mahogany, the gilding a brassy yellow.

“You need to go,” I told her. “He was your husband. You never got a divorce.”

“A technicality.”

“Your wedding ring is still on.”

She looked down. “I've gotten too fat to take it off.”

Sighing, I went to the bathroom and called my brother. Without much thought, I rifled through the medications behind the mirror, silently noting unfamiliar names. My brother answered.

“How are things on your end?”

“She's not coming.”

“Why not? Did you show her the dress?”

I asked if he wanted to talk to her. “You can try to convince her.”

For the next ten minutes, I listened to her switch from English to Ukrainian, shouting sometimes, turning away from me so I couldn't hear what she was saying to my brother. I went to the living room, turned on the television, and watched some soap opera without the sound on. The plastic cover of the dress I'd brought crinkled, and I turned to see she was holding it up.

“It's dowdy,” she said.

She sighed, pulling the zipper of the dress down. She held it to her chest, the bottom half falling past her kneecaps.

In the car, she asked me if I was still dating Maria Teodorowycz, the daughter of someone on Mom's floor in the apartment building. Maria was a geologist who measured the levels of chemicals in soil that corporations sent her. She and I had gone on three dates, had sex on the last one, and then…I don't know.

“Doesn't Tina have a friend you can see?” Mom said.

Tina, Nicholas's wife, wanted nothing to do with me.

We drove in silence for a bit. She put her hand to her face and blew on the window until a patch of condensation formed on the glass.

“Did he feel pain?” she asked, turning down the radio. “Do you know?”

I repeated what Nicholas had told me.

“The doctors said it was slower than most people imagine. That he probably felt everything breaking down.” Some urge to punish her made me pause before adding, “Like he was having a stick of dynamite going off inside of him.”

She looked at me, her makeup starting to smear.

“Why would you say something like that?”

Nicholas was the first person the hospital called, Dad's primary contact. I remember what I was doing when he called me in the same way I remember what I was doing when the first airplane crashed into the twin towers.

I was making rounds as security for a computer-parts warehouse. Normally I didn't answer my phone, since it could get me fired. All it would take would be one blink on the security cameras. But my brother rarely called me.

“Dad's had it,” he'd said, just like that. Not, Are you sitting down? Not, Are you ready for catastrophe? “Arterial thrombosis. Think of taking a baseball bat to the heart.”

I stopped walking around the warehouse and turned off my flashlight, which left me alone in a blurry half black. My father had a very gentle appearance, the sort of soft, smudgy face that had the peach hint of a child's pastels. He never drank and never smoked. How does a heart go like that? These are things you think about.

He had been driving a truck of anti-freeze and felt his heart tighten, and when he felt the life of him being squeezed like a balloon in a fist, he pulled over.

“They said if he hadn't pulled over,” Nicholas told me, “he could've killed a lot of people.”

That night I had a dream where Dad was an infant and I was holding him, in the apartment from our childhood years. That he melted to death right in my arms, and that I tried to contain him as he became liquid, slipping out of my grasp but leaving no wetness behind.

In the car, Mom popped in the electric cigarette lighter, wiping her eyes on her arms and on the nice new dress Nicholas had bought her.

“You know, he had one testicle,” she said, snorting the pain back through her nose and into herself. “Did you know that?”

“Can we not talk for a while?”

“No, no, listen. In a way, you and Nicholas being born was a miracle. The doctors said he had a better chance of being eaten by a shark after getting struck by lightning. You know, when I got pregnant, I thought I had cancer of the ovaries or something. Even when they did the…what is it…the ultrasound, I didn't believe it.” She lit a cigarette. “They had to cut you two out of me, since my uterus had a funny shape. So it's two strikes against you, and here you are anyway.”

The funeral home was also run by Ukrainians. Everyone we knew who died ended up having their viewing there. My best friend got a brain tumour after high school and ballooned up with water from the drugs. He'd been put to rest in this funeral home. And then the old woman who'd lived at the
end of the hall, who nobody was related to, who blessed pregnancies and told everyone she had been the first woman bicycle champion in Europe.

We pulled up and Nicholas was standing in the front with Tina, who hung on him, dripping with beauty and perfection. She waved when she saw us.

Mom and I stared at her through the car window, through the caked blots of velocity-crushed insects. I looked over and saw that Mom's hand was white, gripping the door handle the way she did whenever she was in a turning vehicle. We were combating the same gravity, the same physics.

“I don't think I should be here,” she said, adjusting her seat belt so it held tight against the throat.

“Me neither,” I said. “But here we are.”

Once we got out, Nicholas shook my hand and Tina hugged me, and then they did the same thing with Mom. Tina smelled gorgeous and rekindled that hole of loneliness my therapist said might always be inside me, no matter how I tried to fill it.

“How are you holding up?” Nicholas said in Ukrainian.

“I'm sorry for everything,” Tina added, in a broken parody of the language that made me sick to hear. She sounded like Dad did whenever he tried to speak Ukrainian, his accent, as Mom described it, a stone bouncing around in a washing machine.

We all went as a unit into the funeral home. Even though Dad hadn't been Ukrainian, the priest we got was. He shook our hands and I thought he held on to mine a bit longer than was necessary. He saw Mom and they spoke quickly, in a dialect I couldn't follow.

They stopped and the priest took a deep breath. “It's good to see you, Lena.”

She took a deep breath too. “Let's get this over with.”

Dad told me he wanted to be cremated, and apparently told Nicholas something different. He was dressed in his wedding suit—Nicholas's idea. A lot of the people in the viewing room were new to me, truck drivers and mechanics Dad worked with. Rough-looking people in suits that didn't fit them properly. I felt their discomfort. Also people I passed in the apartment building whenever I visited Mom. Dad had been an only child and our grandparents on both sides were dead, so the only family there was were me, Nicholas, and Mom.

People ambled around. Nicholas gave a speech in English, I gave one in Ukrainian. Mine was short: this was my father, he was a good man, he died something like a hero. Mom wept, and at some time during the speech I gave, I wept too. Tina wept, and in a shameful way her sadness warmed that hole my therapist told me I had, filled it with heat. I was in love with her. Something. It wasn't very important.

We went one by one to see Dad's made-up face, his fantastically gelled hair. He had been carefully shaved and smelled like plastic.

“Is it like a painting?” Mom asked. “Can I touch it?”

“You can touch him,” Nicholas said, putting his arm around her shoulder.

She started touching him as if she were blind and judging the shape of his face, slowly, then spreading her entire hand over his mouth until it was a flattened spider. Someone from the funeral home came over and asked kindly if she could not do that.

“Now you,” I said, patting him gently on the shoulder first, getting harder until I was almost slapping, “you can fuck off and let my mother touch her dead husband.”

Before things escalated, Nicholas stepped in and pulled me outside.

“Can you relax?” he said. “I can't hold it together for everyone. You need to do your part.”

There was a generosity of spirit in the way he said such things, and that generosity extinguished the warmth Tina had kindled in me. I thought: Who was this person, instructing me on being a proper human? Once, our mother had tried to kill herself by taking too much of her medication. Nicholas did nothing. He just started crying. I had to call the hospital and sit on her chest and slap her face so she wouldn't go into a coma.

I related this piece of family history to him. “Do you remember that?”

Nicholas grimaced. “I was seven.”

“I was seven too,” I said. “Now, if situations had been reversed, and you'd been the one trying to keep her alive, would you have had the emotional wherewithal to go to college, get a good job, fight off the world and your personal demons? Would you have your beautiful life, or would you be working in a warehouse and hating yourself?”

He stared at me for a while. Finally he said, “How long have you been waiting to say that?”

“Forever, fuck face.”

“Aren't you just a sad, lonely narcissist.”

Comments like that can only be made by people you love. Only someone you love knows how to make you hurt like that. It's natural to want to hurt them back, and that's what I tried
to do, in a physical way. He put me in one of his wrestling holds and kept me in a sort of homoerotic body lock that made me feel naked and defeated.

“Are you done?” he asked.

“No,” I said, and he squeezed my ribs until a wisp of air forced itself out of my nostrils. “Yes. Please. Put me down.”

It took me a while to regain my composure. The lack of oxygen had made my brain constrict in an unnatural way. I eased myself back into the wall and slid down it like a gob of spit until I reached the ground.