Chapter One
My sixteenth birthday came and went on June first, when the air was hot and green-smelling, the sun was strong, and my father had been dead exactly three months.
On June second, my mother put aside her concerns regarding the way we’d been quietly ping-ponging through our daily lives, searching for ways to “fill time.” She expressed zero worry about Sammy, who had been using Dad’s favorite pocket square as a washcloth. She did not acknowledge the way her jeans gaped in the back from all the weight she had lost.
Instead she fixated on a new solution, one she was sure would prevent me from being forever scarred by my forgotten birthday: a copy of the three-page stapled printout I’d cast into the recycling bin in the school cafeteria. She held it aloft now, here in our sunny kitchen. The kitchen that smelled the same as it always had: grapefruit cleaner and dish soap. It felt unchanged too; the pale yellow walls, deep gray soapstone countertops, and off-white cabinets hummed with life, warmer than the rest of the house, always, thanks to the late-afternoon greenhouse effect.
But it did not hold two people who were still the same.
I dumped my backpack on the counter. “I’m not going,” I said, working to keep my voice at its normal pitch. Walking faster than I’d meant to, I opened the pantry cabinet and scanned the shelves. There. Two rows up, snug in its reassuring spot behind a bag of chia seeds. Dad’s last sleeve of chocolate chip cookies. Precious, precious cargo, given that he’d decided to check out of Hotel Life on a permanent and unexpected basis. I shut my eyes and drew in a breath to steel myself, then closed the cabinet.
The hope on her face fizzled. “Call-Me-Connie says it’s amazing, Lila.”
My mouth twitched at our family nickname for my school adjustment counselor, Dr. Barbash, who’d talked up the virtues of Camp Bonaventure since maybe mid-April. I’d very intentionally not mentioned the “fantastic opportunity” to spend “eight weeks away with other kids who have lost a family member” to my mother, but apparently my counselor had had other plans.
And now, at the sight of Mom’s dejected expression, my familiar friend Panic stomped into my chest and settled her curvaceous hips into my sternum. My bones opened wide, sending a pang through my lungs.
She was actually considering this. Now? When I’d finally skated into June, finally gotten close enough to the point where I didn’t have to fight every day to keep up an illusion of my old self. When I could finally breathe. Grieve. I blinked three times fast and squared my shoulders. “She also says Madonna is talentless. Plus, Call-Me-Connie is a close talker.” My mother would consider the Madonna statement blasphemy, and close talkers skeeved her out.
“Your counselor’s lack of musical taste and social violation of personal space hardly affect her ability to judge what might help you.”
“This won’t.”
She sucked her lower lip between her teeth, released it. “Sweetheart.”
“Mother.”
“I missed your birthday.”
She hadn’t technically missed it. I’d spent it with her and my younger brother, Sammy, doing the same thing we’d done the previous ninety-two nights. (But who’s counting?) Together we made a show of consuming a family meal: a defrosted dinner from well-meaning neighbors (lots of casseroles), our friends’ moms (lots of carby Italian), or Aunt Shelly (sometimes vegan, sometimes paleo, always bland and über-healthy). Aimless, quiet conversation, punctuated by scraping forks and remember-whens, at the four-seater table with one new vacancy. Then a movie—usually a comedy, so we could pretend to laugh—followed by an early retreat into our respective bedrooms.
But I didn’t say any of that. Instead I said: “You’ve had a lot going on, Mom. Besides, I didn’t feel like celebrating.”
“Oh, Lila,” she said, leaning against the counter. She rolled up the camp application and unfurled it.
Her voice was so foggy with sadness I had to turn away to hide the tears that came to my eyes. Get it together, Cunningham.
“You love your birthday.”
I shrugged. I had loved it. Past-perfect tense for an imperfect past. Every year I looked forward to the double-chocolate cake that would sit right behind where Mom stood now, melty and spongy beneath a Tupperware tower. Easy-to-cut-with-just-a-fork cake. Unbaked this year.
“Honey?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you as okay as you can be?”
It was what we said now, because after a family’s father/husband went behind their collective backs, lying to his wife and children for their entire lives and then electing to die, no one could truthfully answer that they were plain-old okay. What I wanted to say was, for the seventy thousandth time, Can you please just explain why Dad’s gone?
Anger flared in my throat, surging through me like I’d touched a live wire. It zipped along, charging into my head and shoulders, until it evaporated. I fought as hard as I could to tamp down the quaver that threatened my voice. “I’m fine. I’ll start dinner.”
“Great. There’s stuff in the freezer.” She rolled up the application one more time. “I’ll be in my office for a bit. Shout if you need anything.”
I nodded, swallowing hard. I never used to cry. But these days, I cried myself to sleep. I cried in the shower every day until the hot water ran out. And I cried each time I opened his office, which still smelled like him: Barbasol shaving cream, coffee, and a tiny tinge of something metallic, like sweat.
* * *
Thirty-five minutes and four hundred degrees later, I pulled a casserole from the oven. Outside, our neighbors had fired up their grills, peppering the air with that early-summer barbecue scent. Mom emerged from her office, grinning.
“Guess what?” Her tone was high and warm.
I didn’t enjoy the sound of it. “I don’t like guessing.”
She clapped her hands together. “Fine. It’s meant to be.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What is?”
“Camp.”
“Why?”
“The owner waived the late-registration fee.”
Sammy wandered into the kitchen, rolling a basketball under the table and kicking his sneakers into a corner. Unlike Mom and me, my brother still flopped and crashed and flailed, carried by the momentum of his twelve-year-old movement.
I peeled back the foil from the steaming dish and sniffed. Salmon-quinoa mash: an Aunt Shelly specialty. I handed Sammy a plate. “One sob story and one waived fee doesn’t exactly scream fate, Mom.”
She shook her head. “It’s not like that.”
“Like how you upgraded Dad’s coffin to walnut for free?” Sammy scooped the mash onto the plate and sat down at the table.
“Not quite.” Mom ladled dinner onto two more plates. She handed one to me and whispered, “I chose the upgrade over the BOGO deal.”
Buy one get one … for coffins? I met her eyes. “The funeral director tried giving you a BOGO deal?”
Mom wore a wry smile. “Affirmative.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Nope. The pamphlet marketed it with words like eternity and everlasting love displayed in flowery script.”
I choked back a laugh. “Anything for a dollar,” I said, but the image of Dad’s placeholder headstone—stuck in the freshly turned soil, too new for grass regrowth—flitted into my mind. Daily life without Dad was one thing, but the science and ceremony behind his actual death were another. Every time I thought about it, my heartbeat would slow down, my blood pressure tanking until my vision blurred. I felt as empty as Mom’s unpurchased BOGO to-be-used-upon-her-death plot beside Dad’s.
Sammy looked up. “What’s a BOGO deal?”
“Never mind,” Mom said.
“Did you get one for camp?”
Mom reached over the table and ruffled his hair. “I wish, buddy. You’ll love camp. It’ll be a good thing for all of us. A healing thing.”
“A healing thing,” Sammy repeated, doubt masking his face. “Like Aunt Shelly and her yoga?”
Mom sat down. “No. A healing thing like you get to hang out with a bunch of other kids who have gone through something like what you and your sister experienced. A healing thing like you get to play basketball and talk to people who make you feel better.”
“Done,” Sammy said. “You had me at basketball.” He held up his fork to write his John Hancock in the air. “Sign me up.”
I swallowed. “But we can’t afford—”
Mom shook her head. “Stop right there. Not your concern.”
No, no, no. I switched tactics. “I don’t get how sending me to Dead Parent Camp for eight weeks is a good thing. Or why you’d even want to get rid of us for the summer. Or…” I paused, trying to keep my voice neutral. “Or, more than anything, why Dad did what he did.”
Mom put down her fork and rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. I glanced at the empty wooden chair across from her, thinking about her prized paper calendar, where she penciled in writing assignments in her tiny handwriting, categorized each task with a different color, marked each day’s passing with an infinitesimal green check mark. Yet this year, she hadn’t taken enough care to flip it to June in time, thus missing my birthday and racking up enough mother guilt to bring up this camp in the first place.
“Listen. I know things haven’t been easy. I’m working with my therapist on the right way to talk to you two about everything,” she said, her voice soft. “And I don’t want to ‘get rid of’ you. You’re—we’re—all we’ve got left. I want us to move forward in a way that’s as healthy as we can, and I think this camp is the right place for you to learn how to do that.”
“But that leaves you here. Alone.” I pushed the mash around my plate. “Yeah, no. I’m still not going. But Sammy can go if he wants.”
“C’mon. Basketball? Camp babes? New buddies? I’m not the sharpest spoon in the drawer”—Sammy paused to put another bite into his mouth—“but I think Call-Me-Connie is onto something.”
Before, Dad would have pretended to cut his food with the side of a spoon, doing a hardy-har-har impersonation of Sammy’s line. Before, Dad would have laughed his trademark nearly silent laugh at the patriarchally dated yet lasting family joke we’d had since toddler Sammy first pointed at a baby bird and said, Dad, that chick is such a babe.
But this was not our before. We sat there for a long time, our table’s attendance rate holding steady at 75 percent. This was my family now. After.
Chapter Two
Grief. Sadness. Anger. On one level, I understood that the mix of emotions my family went through was a textbook case of mourning, especially given the cause of death. Suicide.
If I’d had to guess, I’d have said it was that extra element of betrayal that lit my insides on fire. My body rebelled against its loss: Food tasted pale; my eyes were puffy and irritated; my nerve endings sputtered and crackled in protest against everyday stimuli. Dads like mine did not die by suicide, and yet my dad had.
We had been divided, and Mom was determined we would not be conquered. The one thing she couldn’t quite get was that Sammy and I had been left flailing in the dark because we had no idea why the guy we’d always thought we’d known—one of two people we were lucky enough to go to, no matter what, for trust and safety and all the things all kids should have but many don’t—no longer wanted us. We’d been lucky, so lucky, and then our luck had run out. And if she would just tell us, then maybe we could understand. Maybe that could heal us.
Since Dad’s death, most of my teachers had become caricatures of empathy. Whenever I walked into a room, either their eyes squinted in sympathy or their mouths twisted with pity. A couple of them even excused me from homework for the rest of the year. The exception: Mr. Balboni.
He was the sort of teacher who would leap up onto his desk, throw chalk across the room, and draw garish, exaggerated diagrams on the board to illustrate his bio lessons. The school stuck him in the worst classroom in the old wing: stuffy and wood-paneled, the windows crusted shut with one hundred fifteen years of dust. He’d come to my dad’s wake, but since then, he hadn’t treated me any differently. I tried to pay more attention in his class as a quiet thank-you.
The week after Mom detonated the grief-camp bomb, Mr. Balboni passed out old corrected work, so I kept my backpack open at my feet and shoved papers in as they landed on my desk. I was pretty sure the tail end of my junior year would be a skeleton in my academic closet, given the fact that my note-taking now trended toward doodling in the margins of my previous life.
My thumb brushed the pebbled black cover of the Moleskine notebook I’d swiped from Dad’s office. It had been left there, the plastic open but the binding seemingly uncracked, beside the water bill and a confirmation of cable cancellation. It was the same kind of notebook he always bought. After I found it, I paced the floor, mussing the vacuum lines in the carpet, my mouth dry and my hands trembling.
Dad’s phone was password protected. His computer had been confiscated by the university. I wanted so desperately for there to be some kind of explanation that was more than Mom’s refrain, illustrated with an underscore-mark mouth: He struggled with demons.
In the notebook, I wanted to find something tangible that could offer me a warped sense of comforting reassurance, like the cookies in the cupboard.
Copyright © 2021 by Joan F. Smith
