Authors: Faye McCray
She smiled. “We should.”
I pulled her towards me and kissed her. I knew I didn’t want a relationship, but I wanted to spend more time with her. Being with her felt light and easy and last night… last night was fucking awesome. I stared at her when we pulled away wondering what other tricks she had up her sleeve.
“I’ll see you at work later?”
“Yup,” I said heading down the stairs, turning to take one last look at her before I rushed towards the subway.
***
Allison and I had a connection that I couldn’t quite explain. She could flash me a look at work that would hit my body like an electric volt. We would make out in the stock room and grasp at each other hungrily beneath the dim lights. We’d whisper all the things we planned on doing when we finally got off work and occasionally we’d give in right there – beneath the Cheerios and foot scrubbers. It wasn’t long before our work days started to feel like torturous day-long foreplay. We would explode each night as soon as we found the opportunity to be alone. It wasn’t the love I had with Kerry or the excitement of sneaking around I had with Jayna; it was pure, raw attraction.
Allison really did have crush on me in high school. It wasn’t until she showed me her yearbook photo that I remembered her. A little chubby, matted hair and a daily wardrobe of sweatpants and sneakers. She looked embarrassed when I nodded with recognition.
“It was a difficult time,” she explained closing the yearbook.
Difficult was an understatement.
Allison had spent most of middle and all of high school being shuffled between relatives and foster care. Her mother was in the throes of drug addiction and was in and out of her life. Allison’s parents had her when they were teenagers, and her father’s family moved to California shortly after she was born. He went to college, graduate school, married his college sweetheart and had two kids. The only thing he had ever given her was his last name and a Guyanese heritage she knew nothing about. Allison was a blemish on his past, a reality Allison felt even during the few times he laid eyes on her.
Allison always thought getting to know me would have made things a little easier.
“You just seemed so serious,” she said one night wrapped in my embrace. “You made me feel like I wasn’t the only kid in high school going through something other than what to wear to prom.”
She wasn’t wrong
.
When Allison turned 18, she had to leave the foster home, so she moved back in with her mother. Her mother had just finished a successful stint in rehab and was determined to turn her life around. Allison made peace with her mother but warned her that if she ever caught her using again, she would never hear from her again. Almost two years later and Allison was still around.
Still, Allison’s goal was to save up enough money working at Gristedes to find a place of her own. She toyed with the idea of going back to school and getting a job as an executive assistant. Preferably in a business in downtown Manhattan.
“I think it’d be cool to get all dressed up and sit at a desk on Wall Street,” she said laughing. “Even if my job is to get somebody’s coffee.”
I smiled, remembering my time at the newspaper in college and wondering if I would ever get the opportunity to do something similar. At the moment grocery store management seemed like the direction of my future. A reality that was as depressing as shit.
Whether it was their joint shitty childhoods or their annoying penchant for making fun of me, Natalie and Allison also connected. We would all hang out most evenings after Natalie got off work, eating take out and watching movies. Natalie and I spoke freely around Allison, never really hiding how we grew up or the bumps in our past. Allison had a way of being around us without judgment or expectation that was both comforting and rare.
Whether it was Natalie calling to check on me to make sure I got to work safely, Cole leaping in my arms when I got home or falling asleep most nights with Allison snuggled in my embrace, for the first time in my life, I had started to feel a level of peace. For the first time in my life, I also began to believe that it could last.
Chapter SEVENTEEN
“Place part ‘B’ into ‘C,’ fold wedge, turn counter-clockwise until it snaps,” Allison said again, her voice growing impatient.
“I just did that.” I grabbed the hard piece of red plastic marked with the ‘B.’ I once again attempted to push it into a large piece of black plastic marked ‘C.’ It didn’t fit.
“Oh my God!” Allison threw her hands up in the air in frustration.
It was a Saturday afternoon in January, almost a year since Allison and I had started dating. We had been trying to put together the new wagon we had gotten for Cole for Christmas for close to two hours and had been stuck on Step 4 of the directions for about half of that time.
“Do you just want me to do it?” Allison snapped. I shot her a look and stood up snatching the directions and walking over to the couch. “Whatever,” she said sauntering off into the kitchen.
Natalie walked up beside me and peered over my shoulder at the directions. “I think you forgot to do Step 3c.” She pointed down at the small white box labeled ‘3c.’ “See, screw ’F’ into the base of ‘B’ and place ‘G’ into the base of C.”
Cole began pulling on the body of the dismantled wagon. “I want to w’ide it,” he whined, sticking his bare foot inside the wagon. The phone rang in the distance.
“Not yet,” Natalie said tugging him out of the wagon and rushing to pick up the phone.
Allison walked back in the living room with a bowl of popcorn. She popped a few pieces in her mouth and sat down beside the pile of parts.
“You forgot to read ‘3c,’” I said accusingly, looking for the parts referenced and putting them together.
Allison put her popcorn down on the coffee table and picked up the directions from where I placed them on the floor. Her eyes darted back and forth across the large white paper, growing more and more annoyed. “3c? Why would that be labeled ‘3c’? Why is it in a small box off to the side?” I chuckled as she collapsed back on the couch. “I give up. Wagons don’t need wheels anyway. We can just push him down a steep hill. It’ll slide.”
“I think that’s child abuse, Ally.” I laughed.
She shrugged. I opened my mouth signaling for her to put popcorn in it and she threw a piece towards my mouth, it bounced off my nose and landed on the floor. I picked it up quickly and popped it in my mouth.
“Eww,” she said, her face crumpled in disgust.
“Three-second rule,” I said laughing. Just then Natalie walked into the living room clutching the phone in her palm and her other hand gripping the top of her favorite purple arm chair as if she needed balance. I had forgotten she had gone to answer it.
“That was Ms. Rubenstein.” Ms. Rubenstein? The name was very familiar but I couldn’t quite remember why. “Ma’s boss at the nursing home,” she explained. I stopped what I was doing and looked at her. Her face was grim.
“Is everything okay?” Allison asked. I rose and walked over to where Natalie stood.
“Ma passed out at work last night,” Natalie continued, looking into my eyes. “Ms. Rubenstein took her to the hospital...”
“Well, is she okay?” I interrupted.
Natalie shook her head slowly. “She had a stroke.”
“Oh my God,” Allison said slapping her palm into her mouth and rising to stand beside me.
“She’s dead, Nate. Mommy’s dead.”
“I don’t…” I began, the words that came next getting lost in the air. I was sure my heart had stopped mid-beat and for a moment, I might have died too. The texture in the air had changed, suddenly thick and heavy, unable to make its way to my lungs. I stumbled a bit, dizzy, worried I would be unable to maintain my balance. Allison crept her body into mine, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me into her embrace. She said something, but I couldn’t hear her. The air was too thick for the sound to get through. Natalie’s lips were still moving. I tried my best to focus.
“…we have to go pick up her things,” she said. “They haven’t been able to get in touch with our father.” She was distracted by Cole trying to once again crawl inside the wheel-less wagon. “No, Cole,” she said walking towards him.
“I have him,” Allison said gently, picking him up. Cole wrapped his arms around her tight. “You guys just go.”
“Thank you,” Natalie said squeezing Allison’s arm. She walked over to the coat closet and pulled out her jacket. “Nate?” she said looking at me. My legs felt stuck to the carpet. I looked at her, and her eyes softened. “I need you with me.”
I nodded and walked over to the closet. Pulling out my jacket, I followed her out the door.
***
Ma’s final moments began with her cleaning a bed pan in the bathroom of one of the residents. She was bent down over the shower stall, washing the pane vigorously with powdered detergent and a sponge.
“It was a big mess, I’ll spare you the details,” Mrs. Rubenstein said, standing behind us and running her hands up and down our backs with unwelcome affection. “She was cleaning and suddenly she fell forward into the shower wall.”
“I didn’t know how she fell,” Elaine, another nurse’s aide said. Elaine had been helping my mother clean up when it happened. “She was flat as a book on those size 12 feet of hers.”
After she fell, Ma had struggled to rise back up, clutching at the tiled walls of the patient’s bathroom. Elaine offered her an arm to help her up, but she still couldn’t maintain her balance.
“Her legs were like spaghetti,” Elaine explained. “Her eyes got real wide like she seen’t a ghost. She said something that didn’t make no sense. I think she knew it didn’t make no sense and it scared her. Then she just collapsed.”
I imagined my mother hitting the floor flat, the bed pan slipping from her hands, its metal shivering beside her.
“I say, Christine! Christine!” Elaine recounted. “But she didn’t wake up, that’s when I got Ms. Rubenstein, and we called an ambulance.”
Ms. Rubenstein said she thought our mother was just overworked. My mother had been complaining of a headache for weeks, and she told Ms. Rubenstein that her arm kept “giving out.”
“I had no idea she was going to…” she began, her voice cracking. “I am so, so sorry.” She pulled us into an awkward embrace. She smelled like latex and bleach. “Your mother worked here a long time. She was always kind and never complained.”
The doctors said it was a hemorrhagic stroke which caused sudden bleeding in her brain. She’d probably been feeling symptoms for awhile and just didn’t know what it was. The headache and arm giving out?
“Classic,” the doctor had said.
Natalie saw our mother, I didn’t. I walked with her down to the post mortem section of the hospital and waited outside the door as she said what she had to say.
“Where would you like to send the body?” the tall, pale grief specialist asked me while we waited. He had been following us around since we arrived at the hospital. His overweight frame barely managing the narrow hospital corridors, panting softly when we stood still.
“I don’t know,” I replied. He nodded, his eyes dripping with exaggerated empathy.
“I have some pamphlets on local places in my office,” he said, patting me on the back, his fingers lingering on my shoulder blade.
What was it about grief that made people feel like they could touch you?
“We’ll help you through every step of the way,” he finished.
“Every step” turned out to be getting my mother’s body to the funeral home. Once it was in the funeral home, the next step was getting it in the ground.
We didn’t find my father until the day before the funeral. We found him wandering drunk a few blocks from our house, stumbling down the road with a paper bag in his hand. It took him a few moments to figure out who we were when we pulled up beside him in the car.
“Where’s Christine?” he said accusingly when we arrived at their apartment. “Christine!” he yelled tripping from room to room.
Natalie watched him with little emotion. “She’s dead, Nate. She had a stroke over the weekend.”
I looked at her, surprised. Her voice was stale, like any love she had ever felt for him had expired. Everything about her that was ever his daughter seemed to have drained from her pores.
“What do you mean ‘she dead’?” he asked, stomping back into the living room. “I just saw her yesterday, right in there.” He pointed toward the kitchen. “Now get out here Christine and fix me something to eat!” He marched back into the bedroom. “Idiot fucking kids don’t know what the fuck they talking ‘bout,” he muttered under his breath.
We stood still as he rushed back and forth through each room, his sobriety sneaking back in, his senses flooded with reality. His movements became more frantic until he began to pace in front of us, his face distorted in desperation.
“Oh man!” he yelled. “Oh man.” He collapsed in sobs in front of us. Natalie and I stood frozen at the sight.