Excerpt: Blue

I remember it in pieces. Sitting up late, drawing on the couch, while Mom and Hannah watched TV. Julia and Paula were playing in the hallway, even though it was past bedtime. Dad was late coming home from work, but no one thought much of it until the phone rang. A moment after answering it, Mom’s voice rose to that certain pitch that shakes you to your roots. The sound of true fear; the kind that spreads the feeling like a flood, all around. The adrenaline makes you feel awake and sickened and terrified.

In panicked tears, we were ordered into the car.
Dad was in the hospital. There had been an accident.

Me and my sisters were silent, as if speaking out of turn might somehow affect the outcome of the situation. Praying that, if we behaved perfectly, it would somehow be alright and over soon. A solemn drive through the night, my stomach twisting into nauseous tangles. I don’t remember much of the hospital once we arrived, besides how bright and cold and bewildering it was. Somewhere in there was my dad, behind the curtains and fake-faced doctors. Hanging onto Hannah’s hand, we all finally ended up in a waiting room, where I stared at the yellow designs in the white tiles of the floor. Those floor tiles are what I remember most. I studied them while we were tortured with waiting, I gazed through them numbly when the doctor spoke to my mother and I listened to her sob, and they finally blurred together when my eyes clouded with tears.

I was cold, inside and out. A gaping hole cracked open in the pit of my heart, too wide and yawning to comprehend. I couldn’t comprehend, it wasn’t real. My father was gone, swallowed up in the belly of the hospital, gone without saying a word.

We stayed at my aunt’s that night and I followed along, lifeless. When we huddled together on the spare bed, after my mom cried with her sister for a long time, it was fearful and alone despite having each other there. I was still waiting for my Dad to come home from work.

I was still waiting when the funeral was planned, when I had put on my good suit, when we drove to the funeral home. I was still waiting, until I finally saw him and said goodbye.

The thought of seeing him was terrifying, despite them all telling me that he was actually in heaven and the body laying there wasn’t ‘really him.’ Maybe that was the very reason I was so scared.

I wanted to see my dad again, tell him things that I knew he would hear, and ask him questions that I could hear him answer. Instead, I only saw an object that looked like my father. Standing there, I stared for a long time, maybe longer than I should have, while my sisters cried and cried. His face was puffy and painted, like the old ladies at our church. Like he was made out of lumps of clay. I touched his hands and they felt like dry plastic; he lay too still to be real.

I said goodbye because they had instructed me too, but inside I was screaming and demanding to know where my dad was. The sounds and words didn’t come out of me, until they started moving me away. My goodbyes had been said, and it was time to go. But they were pulling me away from the last clue to my father that I would ever see, ever touch. All that wailing poured out of me in a torrent then, but they were all so much bigger than me, and I was so much smaller than I felt.

They dragged me away, and I cried with Mom in the car for a long time. I had heard her cry so often though, that all I could hear was myself. Trapped in a car, crying for my father. It was stuffy and I was wet with tears, caught in my mother’s embrace. I had no choice but to surrender and spend all of my my tears there, until I had no strength to continue them.

I felt better after that, but in the exhausted drugged sort of way. Everything had spilled out of me and emptied a hole inside that I could see clearly in my mind’s eye. But I was so tired and numb, I couldn’t care anymore. I went back to following along, holding my big sister’s hand through the rest of the ceremony, until they closed up the box he was lying in and put it in the ground.

I watched my mother cry on and on, but I was done, and would be for a long time.