The Mourning After (19 page)

Levon hears his father’s footsteps moving toward her.  Heck, he even feels like running to her and throwing his arms around her. 

“I said don’t touch me.  Please, don’t touch me.”

“Mad…”

“And don’t call me that…Don’t touch me and don’t call me that.”

“I’m sorry,” comes out of his foolish mouth. The words crack and split, splintered with humility.  There are too many wrongs to right.

Sadness washes over Levon, inhibiting his ability to stand up.  He wants to find his journal so he can write the poem he is humming in his brain:

Soil, when saturated in water, grows beautiful, tall flowers. 

My human rain, my tears—

I will not sprout powerful leaves or petals. 

I am a weed with no direction or hope.

Words have the ability to move him physically through his bedroom door.  His journal is not where it should be.  He wants to fine-tune the poem.  He’s checked the desk drawer, in his backpack, and it’s not anywhere.  His heart booms at an alarming speed.  A door slams downstairs, and Levon figures his father has taken off. He is searching under his bed, inside drawers, and behind his dresser. He asks himself where he might have inadvertently left it.

The door to his room comes ajar and in walks Lucy.

She is holding the spiral notebook in her hands. 

“Looking for this?”

Levon is speechless; fear has numbed his arms and legs.

He moves toward her and grabs the binder from her hands.

“I didn’t read it,” she says, “although it was tempting.”

Levon is searching the pages for evidence that her nosiness has made her a thief of the very worst kind.

“If you don’t want anyone to read it, you shouldn’t leave it in plain sight.”

“I never leave it in plain sight.”

“I went to get a snack out of your pantry, and it was resting on top of the granola bars.”

“You just walk in my house and go through our pantry?”

“Your dad let me in.  Actually, he flew past me.  I think he let me in.”

Levon is having a bad day. It feels like someone has taken pliers to his forehead and is squeezing. He rubs at his temples with his free hand.

“Sometimes it can be cathartic to talk, Levon.”

He knows she can’t understand why he needs to be so protective of his thoughts. He implores her to leave it alone.

“I think you’re hiding something.”

“What gives you that idea?”

“Why were you driving that night, Levon?”

He drops the notebook on his bed and stands embattled before Lucy.  She has passed through his room and stands before him.  She shows no signs of backing down.  Her glasses rest on the top of her head.

“What are you
talking
about?” he asks, his hands running wildly through his hair.

“You, Mr. Play-by-the-Rules, the boy who lives a repressed life suddenly acts on impulse?  There’s something not right about what happened that night.  You know it, and I know it.  That’s why you treat that notebook like it’s the Hope Diamond.  Come on, Levon.  It’s me.  You can tell me anything.”

Levon is shaking his head from side to side.  Tears are starting to form around his eyes.  “I wish I didn’t have to say no to you.”

“Then don’t,” she says, her crystal green eyes stripping his defiance from within.

“I can’t.  Trust me when I tell you that I can’t.  It’s not for my sake.  It’s for him.  It’s always been about him.”

“No, Levon,” she insists, “that’s bullcrap.  This is about you.”

“It won’t change anything.  He’s gone, and everything is the way it’s supposed to be.”

“With the evil android cursing you, and the remainder of your family falling apart?  This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.”

“I have to protect my brother.”

“Who’s protecting you?” she asks.

Levon is draped across the sectional sofa in their living room, sipping ginger ale and watching Ellen DeGeneres.  Levon loves Ellen.  If there is anyone who can help him escape his life and the darting pain in his stomach, it is Ellen’s irreverent humor and realistic depiction of modern American culture.

The house is quiet.  His grandparents have returned to New York.  His mother is sleeping upstairs, something she is doing even more often since the call from the Blakes. The phone rings; his father’s not making it home in time for dinner.  This, too, has become a norm for their household. Levon slams the phone down on the table with a bang.

Levon remembers a time when family dinners at six o’clock were a requirement, not an option.  The family would discuss their day; it was a time for camaraderie and recaps.  Levon’s mom would cook some tempting recipe she’d gotten off the Internet or from one of her friends, and they would test out new meals like butternut-apple soup and rosemary rigatoni. These days, his mother slept through the dinner hour, and if Levon was unable to scrounge up some leftover take-out or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, he would simply go to bed hungry. 

Lucy showed up one night with a bowl of spaghetti bolognese.  Carol Bell wanted to be sure he was eating, confirming to Levon that the whole world knew his family was in need of help.  Once it would have pained his mother to have the Kellers’ open wound on display—but now there was no way to hide the gash; it was too big.

Ellen is introducing one of his favorite guests, Steve Spangler.  Levon settles back on the cushions hoping the science guy will distract him from the headache that is beginning to hammer away at his temples. He is watching with mild interest as Steve conducts electricity using Ellen’s arm as a conduit, but not until Steve mentions the word “cornstarch” does Levon perk up.  Curious, Levon raises the remote and increases the volume.  He presses the TiVo button and rewinds the last few seconds.

“Water and cornstarch…soupy consistency…put your hand in it…you can punch it, trapping the water between the fragments of starch, and, voila, the cornstarch turns into a solid…”

Sitting upright on the edge of the sofa, Levon pays careful attention to the monitor.  Cornstarch, Chloe’s life-saving mixture, is the climax to Steve Spangler’s electrifying segment.  Ellen is using her fist to punch at a bowl of cornstarch that has been mixed with water.  Spangler explains to the audience how water changes the substance into an unusually dense material that can resist Ellen’s punches.  Conversely, when Ellen sweeps her fingers through the substance, it slips through them.  And if that wasn’t enough to satisfy Ellen’s already fascinated audience, from behind the curtains emerges a giant tub holding
two thousand
boxes of cornstarch mixed in water and the assurance that one lucky member from the studio audience is going to walk across the cornstarch mixture without sinking.

Levon admits the experiment has piqued his interest, and although he’s openly skeptical—body weight is far different from a punch—he can’t shake the idea that those two thousand boxes could treat lots of sick GSD kids.

The ache that was clamoring away at Levon’s forehead minutes ago is now the fuel igniting his thought processes.  Ideas are bouncing around his brain at a ridiculous speed.  He thinks he’s onto something, but has to slow himself down in order to put together a plan.

The producers have chosen a young, bubbly woman from their studio audience to complete the imminent feat.  She springs onto the stage and is instructed to remove her shoes.  Levon is watching intently, admiring how the woman traipses over to Ellen as though they are old friends who are sharing coffee in Ellen’s private living room and not being watched by gazillions of viewers.  If he were in the studio audience, he would be the person praying he didn’t get picked.  Levon hates to be the center of any type of attention.  So why was he hatching a plan that would bring attention to himself and to his sister’s disease?

“Levon?”  It is his mother.

Looking up from the television, he sees the ghost of her former self.  She is dressed—out of the bathrobe that had become her fashion staple—and clad in black slacks and a black silk blouse.  Her hair falls down the sides of her face, tousled and matted from sleep.  She’s makeup free, and there are splotches covering her pale cheeks, which used to glow naturally from the sun.  Flesh and bones give the illusion that he’s looking at a skeleton.  Where her pearl necklace once rested daintily around her neck, the oversized balls stampede across her clavicle.  Her mouth is moving, though Levon can’t make out the words.  In one rapid click of the remote, he mutes Ellen as she cheers the woman across the tub of cornstarch.

She gazes at her watch. “I’m going to temple.”

This perplexes Levon.

“I can’t sit here anymore…The rabbi said…” 

She is unable to finish as a tumult of tears pool in her eyes.  She paces the floor in front of him and hides her face in shame.  He has never seen his mother so frail and defenseless. Her steely arrogance has always signified strength to him, and this dismal, fragile apparition makes Levon very afraid. 

“Do you ever feel him around you?” she asks in a whisper.  “They said I would feel him.  I haven’t felt him.”

He didn’t have to ask who she was talking about.  Maybe he should run to her.  Maybe he should offer her his shoulder as a symbol of the olive branch.  The urge is familiar, yet her rejection has worn him out.  His brain is telling him to get up, but the synapse responsible for transmitting signals to his arms and legs has disconnected—grown weary—and his body fails him.

“Do you remember when he went to sleep away camp that only summer?”

Levon nodded.

“Remember the airport?  He was so quiet.  I knew he didn’t want to go.  Do you remember what he said?”

Levon was eight at the time—David ten—and he remembered exactly what his brother said.  They were about to step out of the airport’s automatic sliding doors when his brother’s whimpering voice called out from behind.  Levon was a spectator in their exchange that afternoon, though the memory struck him with a throbbing force. His mother sunk down to comfort David who was hyperventilating.  The shouts of his counselors flew across the airport.  David was holding onto his mother’s arms with both hands.  When he finally pushed back, he grabbed hold of her eyes. “I’m going to miss you so much,” he said. 

“I’m going to miss you, too.”

Levon refuses to return to that place.  Missing someone who was leaving for a few weeks was entirely different than leaving you forever. 

“Do you want me to call Dad?”

She is trembling, her shoulders rising up and down.  “No, no.”

“Is there something I can do?” he asks, tentatively, slowly opening a door, unsure if he can step through.  When she shakes her head instead of shouting at him and ranting that he’s already done enough, Levon thinks his legs might lift him up, but they are heavy and have no interest in walking.

Levon knows it’s sometime between five and six in the evening, and he wonders why his mother is going to temple without his father.  The only time they ever stepped foot in synagogue was for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  Was she suddenly becoming religious in the wake of David’s death?

“Dad’s not coming home for dinner,” Levon says, his voice trailing.  “What about Chloe?”

“She’s coming with me…” at which Levon turns his head in the direction of the tapping sounds of Chloe’s feet heading down the stairs.  This was clearly an outing to which he was not invited.

His sister appears in the doorway wearing a white dress with red ribbons and sandals that are crying out to be replaced.  Her toes hang over the front, and they are so marred and scuffed that it is hard to identify their natural color.

“Shabbat Shalom, Levon,” Chloe smiles up at him, holding a prayer book under her arm that he has not seen since his Bar Mitzvah. 
Had they all completely lost their minds,
he wonders?  Or is he the culprit, the villain who is in most need of an appointment with God?  The thought preys on Levon—how he might pray and repent and wipe the slate clean—though something tells him his mother’s forgiveness will not come easily, nor should it.  Chloe is unclear on why he isn’t joining them and has the good sense not to ask.  Besides, he is beginning to look forward to having the house to himself.

“Come on, Chloe,” his mother says, reaching for her daughter.  The tears have all but vanished.  Her composure is back.  No one considers how he might amuse himself in their absence.  Levon is certain that if he doesn’t eat, if he runs away, no one will care.

They return from temple with no idea of what I’ve done while they’ve been away.  They leave, they return.

Lucy let herself in after she heard their car pull out of the driveway.  I could tell the veil of mystery shrouding my time spent with Rebecca bothered her as she skirted around the subject, asking and not quite prying.  I was writing a short story about a boy who targets Ellen DeGeneres to save his sick sister.  She grabbed the spiral notebook from my hands and read the pages.

“
This is brilliant,” she told me, her face beaming with Lucy’s famous smile.  And I thought she was referring to the idea—how the lone boy took on a high-powered television celebrity and got her to support his orphaned cause—but she was remarking on my writing, gushing about how talented I am.

“
Really, Levon,” she said, “you have a gift.”

I copied down what she said, verbatim, quotes and all, savoring the highest praise anyone has ever paid me.  By inscribing it onto paper, I can savor it time and time again, and never forget how nice it feels to be good at something.

Lucy and I are nothing alike.  She’s adventurous and wild, while I am timid and afraid.  She’s quirky.  Artistic. Outspoken. Daring.  Those are the words I’d use to describe her. She’s the kind of girl that takes out her contact lenses over a sink of running water.  She’s the kind of girl who puts the earphones from her iPod in the reverse ears.  I am overly detailed and careful, comfortable with following directions.  I wouldn’t be caught dead with the L headphone in my right ear.