The Mourning After (3 page)

There was much to absorb about a disease that hinged on digestion.  For the early years of Chloe’s life, she would have to receive a cornstarch injection every two hours.  Even when she was old enough to tolerate drinking the potion on her own during the day, an overnight feeding tube implanted in her stomach allowed for the continuous delivery of glucose while she slept.  This was no reprieve for parents or caregivers who would have to wake up and administer the liquid throughout the night.  They learned that cornstarch can never be mixed in drinks that contain high amounts of ascorbic or citric acid.  If the cornstarch drink were heated, it would be rendered ineffective.  Dr. Gerald recommended Crystal Lite or another sugar-free drink as alternatives to water or milk.  “It may taste better,” he added.

The sinister disease that plagued Chloe and her ability to be like other children her age was incurable and lifelong.  Life, for the Kellers, was now defined in seconds, minutes, and hours.

Levon thought back to the first few years of Chloe’s life, and how time became a race that could end in a premature death.  There was the night when the power went out and the alarm for Chloe’s two a.m. feeding failed to go off.  He was only five then, but he remembered.  His parents were screaming and arguing with each other, their steely voices filtering through the bedroom walls.  He said she was supposed to check the battery-charged radio and alarm clock; she said she did.  The doctors told them if they had slept another minute, Chloe may not have survived. 

And because every year was marked as a miracle and not a milestone, Chloe’s birthdays were testaments and celebrations.  On her third birthday, the family ventured north to Orlando for Chloe’s first vacation from home and a meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Mouse.  But time, that brazen nemesis, flared its wicked head and a five-car pileup closed the highway down for seven hours.  Madeline had only packed enough supplies to get through the three-hour drive.  They were
lucky,
the doctors said, that they arrived at the Fort Drum rest stop when they did.  Lucky, because the most common occurrences—things typically taken for granted without recourse—are death sentences to parents of GSD children.  Indeed, getting stuck in traffic or running out of supplies or oversleeping can cause a child to have a seizure, experience developmental delays, go into a coma, or the unspeakable.

Sally’s southern twang rips him from the exhaustive stroll down memory lane.  “You tell your mom if she needs anything to give me a holler,” she calls out from behind the counter, immune to Levon’s heightened anxiety level.  The rush that accompanied the thought of being so close to death guides him away from her voice.  He maneuvers through the aisles and across rows of dairy and meat until he finds himself in front of his favorite comforts: Nabisco and Keebler.  By the time he reaches the checkout line, the snack bag of chocolate chip cookies is empty—the only evidence of its past occupants, a smattering of crumbs.  He knows his mother will have a fit that he hasn’t adhered to his diet.  He knew with every bite he took, every swallow, he was filling himself with something soothing but wrong.  Maybe if he is lucky, he muses, he could eat and eat and eat, and she won’t notice a mushrooming belly in the wake of the burgeoning sorrow.  But
she
always noticed.  This is a woman who, for the last ten years, restricted two out of her three children’s diets.  Chloe’s diet maintained her good health while Levon’s diet satisfied her right to be pissed.

Sally is ambling toward the checkout.  He does not want another one of her memory’s to pierce him.  He is raw and unable to think clearly.  “You don’t need to pay for the cookies,” she says with a sympathetic wink. The bag of Chloe’s cornstarch is clutched in his hands.  Today, although he finished off a batch of cookies, he has something valuable to bring home, and it gives him a sense of satisfaction.  “Thanks, Sally.”

Levon takes a shortcut home, careful to avoid an altercation with his mother for being away too long. 
How much time does it take to eat a bag  of Chips Ahoy!
? he asks himself.  She knew.  She always knew.

When he reaches his tree-lined street, the cleaning crew is pulling out of the driveway next door.  They had been there all morning, but Levon was too distracted to notice.  Finally, the jerk who had lived next door since Levon was a toddler had moved out.  If not for his brother’s horrendous death, Levon would have been rejoicing in his much-anticipated departure.  He parked his bike on the side of his house, nearby the wooden planks that fenced their home and kept nuisances like Bruce out.  He peered into the window of the now vacant house.  Bruce was a creep by all definitions of the word.  Three years out of high school and he was still living at home with his parents, making everyone’s life miserable, while ostensibly deciding what to do with his own wasteful life.  If it were up to Levon, he’d suggest an incurable and inoperative injury to his larynx that would prohibit him from talking.  Much that came out of his mouth was either rooted in insult or was so derogatory in nature that Levon avoided him at all costs.  You never wanted to be the overweight kid on the receiving end of the master bully.

He knows it is not the most appropriate time to indulge in negative thinking, but when he toys with the idea of Bruce switching places with David, it gives him a gratifying sense of pleasure.  If only David’s absence meant that he had moved out of the house and on to college, something less permanent, less forever.  And Bruce, who will probably never decide the direction and course of his lopsided life, instead, will infiltrate a new neighborhood while the rest of us are left in his wake, scratching our heads in disbelief that the world can be so unfair.

“You’re back,” his mother says, when he opens the door to the house.  She cannot prevent herself from glancing at her watch.  The door closes behind them; she grabs the bag of cornstarch, and before she asks, he answers, “Sally’s dropping off the rest later.  I couldn’t carry the box on my bike.”

It is hard for Levon to watch his mother wince. He hears the chatter coming through the door, the gathering of lingering mourners and realizes he has to go to the bathroom.  Racing through the house, he misses the moving trucks and the black Volvo station wagon that reach his block.  As he lifts the toilet seat, his gaze turns upward toward the window.  He can hear the trucks as they halt in front of the house, their screeching brakes sounding more like whistling steam engines.  Zipping his pants and washing his hands, he takes the few steps to the window and stands on his tiptoes to see his new neighbors.  At the same time, bellowing voices emerge from the hallway outside the bathroom.  The muffled sounds beckon him to turn toward the door and listen.

He recognizes the delicate timbre of his father’s tone against the loud, hurling accusations of his mother.  He can’t make out what they are saying, nor does he try.  If he had his journal with him, he would be able to cite similar exchanges, even dictate the exchange himself.  Lowering himself to the floor, he turns and positions himself backside against the door.  An interruption from their offensive, culpable son would not bode well.  Levon stares at his watch instead.

It wasn’t always this way.

Levon remembered when it was just the two of them, David and him.  To his four-year-old mind, his family seemed really happy.  Then Chloe came along, and life was divided into before and after.  It was impossible to blame Chloe; he loved her madly, though her appearance diffused the balance of a family’s once ordinary veneer.  Levon’s earlier memories were correlated with the bottle of Shalimar that rested on his mother’s vanity.  Whenever his parents would go out for dinner, his mom splashed herself with Shalimar.  It was a scent that Levon first equated with being watched by his favored babysitter Roxy, and later the smell was connected to what they had lost when his sister materialized. 

His mom always looked stunning those evenings with her hair falling on her shoulders, softening her face and eyes.  The
pre-bun era
, Levon thought to himself, was a magical period in all of their lives.  Levon tried hard to remember the precise instant when things went from carefree and wild to contained and suffocating.

Upon her return in the evenings, Levon would stir, jarred awake by the full-bodied smells of his mother’s familiar scent.  And though his eyes were closed, feigning deep sleep, he knew she was smiling, her cheeks ripened with laughter.  At fifteen, Levon distinguished the scents: perfume, wine, a hint of garlic.  At a younger age, the smells were the defining scent of his youth, bottled up in once forgotten familial happiness.  It would be the scintillating mixture of Saturday nights that had come to mean love and trust.

Nestled under the covers, Levon felt her body leaning over his, while strands of her hair tickled his back.  She would whisper things that he hadn’t heard in years: “I love you, Sailor Boy.”  “How’s my monkey?  I missed you tonight.”  “Sweet dreams.”  Levon used to think he was silly for remembering those interludes and phrases reserved for him and him only.  He had scribed the words on paper so many times the pen could write them without the will of his hand.  He foolishly believed that if he wrote them down, they would be real, and the permanence would prove Levon’s worth, verify that he was lovable.

She once found him cute enough to tag him with the name Monkey that combined charm and chunky cheeks.  Back then, his room was hand-painted in the deep hues of the jungle, and the monkeys with their animated poses and childlike smiles often transformed Levon into a world of fantasy.  Then Levon, in what stung like a swift slap of the wrist, had to switch rooms with Chloe so that her room was closer to their parents.  As hastily as his mom had named him Monkey was the rapidity with which the strokes of French pink brushed over his jungle walls.  They never got around to repainting what was
supposed
to have been Chloe’s room, and now was Levon’s.  Yellow was neutral, they claimed, a term they used loosely at the time, and which would later become the cornerstone from which contempt was bred.  After that, whenever Levon would see a monkey at the zoo, he would scream and cry until they stopped going to the zoo altogether.

And Levon had long since given up sailing.  After capsizing three boats, you realize you were never meant to rest your curved bottom on a meager piece of fiberglass and expect it to stay upright. 
Bon voyage, Sailor Boy.

Once Chloe emerged, Madeline and Craig ceased going out for dinner, and Madeline gave up wearing Shalimar.  Levon smelled it sometimes when he would accompany her to Burdines on Lincoln Road.  They would walk through the cosmetics and perfume counters to get to the escalator that would bring them up to the children’s department, and Levon would purposely slow his gait. She would reach for his hand and tug on him with a fervor that signaled to Levon they weren’t stopping for a new bottle.  They were going to ignore what was once normal.  The wish that Levon so often dreamed about remained bottled up, and the only scent that would seep into their house was the kind that didn’t come from a bottle.  Without the elements of color, taste, or touch, it had the capacity to invade all the senses.  It is what becomes of a Shalimar-less existence.  It was unhappiness.

The fights were always the same.  Drenched in sleep deprivation and the genuine prospect of death, accusations turned venomous and hostility burned from the ashes of exhaustion and tears.

“The next feeding’s yours,” Craig would grumble, crawling into bed and taking his position defensively next to his wife.

“I did the last two,” she’d counter.

“I’m meeting a contractor in the morning.”

“This is all your fault,” she stabs at him.

“What the hell does
that
mean?” he asks and adds, “You’re crazy,” as he heads toward Chloe’s room where he will spend another evening on her pink carpeted floor while Levon listens next door.  His father ran a multimillion dollar real estate development company yet he couldn’t tame his size-two, reed-thin wife who could very easily fall over if one sneezed in her direction.  He was sure his great-great-grandfather, having built this house a million years ago, had no idea that the structure made it possible to eavesdrop simply by sitting up in bed.  The air vent near the ceiling above his head spilled out all their secrets, telling him of their suffering.  He once tried closing the silver flaps and woke up that night with beads of sweat trickling down his back, and he stood up on his bed and reopened the vents.

His mom followed his dad into Chloe’s room that same night.  Levon knew this because her voice trailed behind his through the duct.

“Are you kidding me?” she balked.  “What if the boys wake up and find you here? 

“Then they’ll find me here.  I think they already see the fault lines in our marriage.”

“And what’s
that
supposed to mean?” she asked.

“We’re breaking in two.”

This was when his mother became hysterical.  His metaphors always preceded one of her eruptions.  Once, she would brag to her friends about the intellectual genius she married.  Now, his verbiage unnerved her, stripping her of solid footing.  Levon imagined her bobby pins flying across the room and springing off the wall.

“I’m tired,” she started, “I’m so tired.”  The words slipped through the creases of breaths and whimpers.  “Why did this happen to us?”  Her words hung in the air, the thoughts too frightening to say out loud.  Finishing her thought would give credence to the next sentence, the harbinger of what was to come.  “I want it to go away, Craig.  Please make it all go away.”  She was sobbing now, and Levon wasn’t sure what she meant.  Did she want them to disappear?  He thinks his father might have interjected something, but he wasn’t sure—his voice was typically softer and harder to hear.  And then she began again, her cries rising and falling in measure with her despair. “I can’t take it anymore…I just can’t do this.”

“Yes, you can,” his father said, raising his tone as if he intentionally wanted Levon to hear. 

“I’m sick of your certainty,” she screamed.