ONE
The morning we buried you, a road flagger danced in the street.
The route from the church to the cemetery took our procession down that two-lane stretch of County Line Road, the one we’d both often complained seemed perpetually under one form of construction or another. The project that day required a bucket truck, crane extended to the top of a leaning transformer, the result of soft ground and high winds from the storm the night before. The truck, long and wide, made travel in the opposite lane impossible and it was our turn to wait.
My car was two behind your hearse, your mother in the car ahead of me, my mother and father in the vehicle behind. I found it odd the road crew had chosen to stop a hearse from making its way through. Maybe they didn’t want to interrupt our caravan when they’d seen just how long it was, knowing they couldn’t keep the other line of traffic waiting much longer without the inevitable horn honking. Or maybe they didn’t care about funeral protocol. When I was a kid, my father had knocked my baseball cap off with a slap to the back of my head when I’d failed to remove my hat as a motorcade passed, its orange flags whipping. I didn’t know how I was supposed to have known any better, but my stinging scalp told me I wouldn’t forget any time soon.
I didn’t see at first that the stop sign at the end of the flagger’s pole was moving, but when I did, I couldn’t look away. Leaning to the side, I could see around Vanessa’s car—is it strange for me to call your mother Vanessa?—I saw the artist in his glory. His one-size-fits-all reflective orange vest draped over an oversized white T-shirt and dark baggy jeans, cuffs spilling over a pair of stained tan Timbs. Thin braids snaked from beneath his construction hat, playing curtain to the wireless earbuds pumping whatever song moved him to moving. He two-stepped back and forth, side to side, pivoting around the pole, lifting and dropping it to the asphalt, a cane in his one-man step show. I envied his obliviousness to the row of hazard lights blinking in front of him, finding fun in what I always thought had to be the most mundane of tasks. But there he was, enjoying himself, not giving a damn how boring I thought his job must have been.
I eyed the empty passenger seat. Your seat. You would have loved him, this dancing man, you would have said, “Homie is getting it in, huh?” Hearing your voice in my head, I stopped obsessing over your seat and stared ahead. Vanessa’s—it is weird, isn’t it?—your mom’s compact car did little to shield the hearse from my view, but though I’d looked away from where you’d once sat, I couldn’t take my eyes off where you now lay.
What if you awakened? What if all the prayers I’d thrown up asking for the miracle of your return were answered right then? You’d rouse to a satin-lined darkness. The vision was so vivid, eyes open or closed, I couldn’t rid myself of it. I imagined your straining to find a swallow of air in that coffin. I hyperventilated. Pressure built in my chest. I whispered between gasps.
“Not now.”
The first panic attack came after the accident. The first, at least, in several years. But now, what should have been a five-minute drive to the grocery store became an evening spent at urgent care. The first time, the nurse practitioner explained to me how a panic attack could feel just like a heart attack, like an elephant sitting on my chest. Was that a baby elephant or a full-grown one, I’d asked. What if it feels like, say, a pygmy hippopotamus? Is that just indigestion? She wasn’t amused. To be honest, neither was I. But why be austere about your mental health and the ramifications of not taking it seriously when you can dismiss it with a joke?
Cars in front of me, cars behind me, cars crawling by in the opposite lane, a steep drop-off where drainage ditches had been dug to channel runoff from heavy rains. I had nowhere to go when an attack came. And one was coming. Maybe it would be quick. Maybe the other line of cars was long, long enough to let the panic pass before it was our turn to go.
The dancer stopped. He pulled a walkie from his belt and spoke into it. Red became orange. “Stop” became “Slow.” The hearse’s brake lights extinguished, followed by your mother’s. And I couldn’t move. Arms straight, elbows locked, skin taut around my knuckles gripping the steering wheel, I braced for a phantom impact, my back pinned to the seat. The patch of skin on the back of my thigh, just below the crease in my right buttock from where they’d taken the graft, itched. So did the pale scar tissue on my cheek. But I couldn’t scratch either place. I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t breathe. I was going to make everyone late.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t sit up.
We’re going to be late.
Please don’t. I know what you’re doing, but it’s not helping.
Then a tap on the windshield. The dancer. He made a rolling motion with his gloved hand. Afraid to let go of the steering wheel lest I fall down this hole and never recover, I pressed my lips together and shook my head. I waited for the annoyance, the muffled shout through the glass to get the hell on. Yet the exasperation I expected at my lack of cooperation never came. Instead, he spoke, loud enough I heard him through the window, but with an unanticipated calm, stretching and contracting his lips around each syllable.
“It’s okay.”
I slipped my hand off the steering wheel and accidentally locked the door, unused to the layout of the new car, before I pressed the window button long enough for a sliver of air, wet with a new mist forming, to pass through a small opening, then resumed my grip on the wheel. Ahead, the hearse along with your mother’s car had pulled into the driveway of a real estate office located in a stone façade building. Your mom stood at the driver’s side of the hearse, leaned over at the open window. My eyes darted to the side, catching the movement of the road worker stepping closer to my barely opened window.
“My guy. You good?”
I shook my head again.
“You need an ambulance?”
Another stiff shake.
“Panic attack, huh?” A curt nod. “Yeah. My sister gets them. She says it feels like she going to die when they hit her.” He unclipped his walkie from his belt again. “Let your side through, Joe. We going to be a minute.” Joe’s voice squawked something in protest through the microphone, but the dancer wasn’t having it. “Just let them through, man. Nobody on your side’s going to complain.” He lifted his chin at me. “Right? They the ones getting to move.”
He turned his pole so the “Slow” side faced the other lane and cars crept along again. Though my head stayed facing the road in front of me, my eyes traveled from your mother at the side of the hearse to the passing drivers watching me, probably in wonder, though I convinced myself it was out of pity. Behind, my parents sat, seemingly unbothered, my mother’s face a Parkinsonian mask, my father’s equally expressionless, though not manifest of any malady save a surplus of staidness. None of these things I saw unlocked my hands or arms. Nor did my phone buzzing in the cradle clipped to the air vent. Your mother calling.
“Put your window all the way down, man,” the dancer called out to me. “Get some air.” I shook my head again. “Okay, it’s cool. You tell me when you ready to move. I got you.”
His kindness was a hand on my shoulder, squeezing, not urgent, but comforting. I released the wheel with my left hand, shook it out, let the window all the way down. He was right. The fresh air helped.
“Family?” he said over the passing cars. I cocked my head, and he tilted his toward the hearse. A looser nod this time.
“Son,” I said.
He blew air out through puffed cheeks. “That’s the wrong order, ain’t it?” He squinted at the light gray sky, the sun working its way through the cloud cover. “Don’t know why He does that.”
My grip loosened and blood filled my fingers. Slack returned to my elbows. “Me, either. Can I … I just need another minute.”
He waved me off. “Take your time, man. I don’t hear any horns.”
Though I’d sworn I’d heard impatient honks a moment before, he was right. Nothing but the sound of tires hissing on the wet asphalt. My phone buzzed again. I sat forward, freeing my back from the seat, and took the phone from its cradle.
“I’m coming.” A deep breath. Hers and mine. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay. It’s okay.”
I disconnected and replaced the phone, then released the hand brake. Before I took my foot off the brake, I dipped my head in thanks to the dancer. He returned the nod and spoke into his walkie. Before he spun his pole and signaled for us to move on, he took off his construction hat and held it at his side. We exchanged another nod and I drove to catch up to you.
* * *
A field of black flowers bloomed, umbrellas unfolding against the mist turned light rain pelting their petals. The absence of the church’s walls and roof had done nothing to diminish the overwhelming gathering of classmates, family, and friends who’d come to see you one last time, huddled together, seated in plastic folding chairs sinking further into the wet ground a centimeter at a time.
I’ll be frank, Mal, I was shocked. A kid who hadn’t been an athlete, wasn’t prom king, no chorus, no Key Club, who didn’t belong to any specific clique, instead seemed to belong to them all. The jocks, the nerds, the academics, the artists, the geeks, the goths—they’d streamed in through the doors of the church until some had no choice but to stand behind the final row of pews. I’d seen less attendance at Christmas mass and wondered if they’d ever stop coming. I’d thought such throngs only feasible in films. Never had I suspected you’d known—touched—so many. There’d been so much about you I hadn’t realized.
The ground squelched and gripped at my shoes, threatened to pull them off my feet as I walked to the front row of seats and took the empty one next to your mother. The rain, though light, came at an angle, driven by occasional gusts, remnants of an earlier squall. Beads of precipitation clung to her lace veil. She remained focused on your remains, her eyes flitting to me a single time in acknowledgment of my presence. I adjusted my umbrella to sit atop hers, a phalanx protecting us both. Her free hand rested on her knee. I slid mine underneath, palm up, and squeezed. She did not return the gesture. I watched our hands not hold each other for a moment, then watched her, hoping she was watching me, too. She wasn’t. She minded your casket, rain rivulets cascading off the gunmetal-gray lid as tears down unfeeling cheeks.
Tears I’d yet to shed.
I wanted to cry for you. I knew I should. I thought certain those tears would come as the priest read the eulogy. He was as warm as he could be, but because he’d not known you—no matter how hard I’d tried to remedy that, and I know this isn’t the time or place—there was no heart hoisting his words. No familiarity. Regret for a life lost, of course, but the loss was not personal. He knew me. He knew your mother, to some extent. He’d not known you other than to know you were our son. If no tears came then, they would come when you were lowered into the ground. Then, certainly, my body would find the faculties to mourn you.
You don’t believe it, either?
The machine’s mechanisms, once activated, caused the coffin a small but sharp lurch upward. Your mother let out a hushed gasp and pulled her hand away from mine, brought it to her chest, her fingers fluttering. Her tears flowed unfettered in that moment as the glistening curve of the casket disappeared below our line of sight. I kneaded her shoulder, but the act seemed to induce tension, not make it recede. There was no comfort to be found in my touch, so I took it away. How familiar that sensation.
Your burial site sat on the cemetery’s hilltop, the incline too steep, the ground too wet for my mother’s wheelchair to make the climb. Despite my entreaties to help them sit by our sides, my father refused. He stood next to my mother at the hill bottom, a large umbrella shielding them from the increasing rain. He returned my solitary wave with a near-imperceptible nod.
I never told you about the one and only time I’d seen my father cry, and how it scared me more than anything I can remember, then and since. He was as old as I am now, and I still have no idea why he was crying. But everything I’d known—everything I’d believed—about him, about his stoicism and strength, crumbled as easily as he did in my mother’s arms as she lowered him to the floor. His body shook with big gulping sobs, childlike in their drama, but if their design was manipulative, I couldn’t see it. My mother soothed him as she would have me in such a crisis, stroking the back of his head, whispering everything would be okay. I wanted to ask what was wrong, what could bring him to such a state, but fear choked the words in my throat and fixed my feet to the foyer floor. My mother opened her eyes and when she saw me, gestured for me to go to my room, freeing me from my paralysis. I was grateful. I fast-walked down the hallway, shut my door behind me, and sat on my bed, bewildered. His sobs carried down the hallway and my eyes stung. I wanted to join him in his misery, despite my ignorance of its origin. But seeing what crying did to him kept my tears at bay—that day, and the many days that followed.
The wheels of the casket hoist clicked their teeth together a final time and you were laid to rest. Returned to the dust from whence you came. Lowered so you could ascend.
Your mother wept. We stood.
I glanced over my shoulder, waiting for one hand to be placed on it while another was thrust forward in offering sincere and heartfelt condolences. But neither happened. All rose from their chairs and, hunched against a summer wind growing ever stronger, left us to our mourning, filing down the hill to where they’d parked. Some paused and offered condolences to your grandparents, then waited in their cars until we led them in ours to the repast at the apartment your mom and I had once shared. No longer a home since I’d left. Since she’d asked me to leave. No longer a home with you gone.
We stood short of the edge of the grave, not close enough to see down into it, as if not seeing made it not so. Her quiet tears fell in tandem with the rain.
“This was good,” I said. “He would have been happy.”
She scoffed and shook her head. “What kind of thing is that to say? Happy?”
“To see how many people he’d touched. I had no idea how many he knew.”
She fixed her regard on the horizon. “You think he didn’t know that when he was alive?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What do you mean? Do you even know?”
“I don’t want to fight, Van.”
“Then don’t say such stupid things. Don’t pretend anything you say like that matters to anyone but you.”
“I only mean that if he could see—”
Now she turned to face me. “But he can’t, can he? He’s not sitting on some cloud, listening to all the nice things people have to say about him. I know that’s what you think. What you believe.”
“You used to, too.”
She rolled her eyes, though her face didn’t betray exasperation. She was exhausted. I was exhausting her.
“Yeah, well, not anymore.” She cleared tears from her lids with her thumb. “He wouldn’t have wanted any of this. But you insisted.”
Copyright © 2024 by John Vercher
