LIT
Jessica Treglia
The
rain stopped the day Mitch died, leaving behind white, white clouds piled in
a blue sky. I went to work at
dawn, loaded my truck with azaleas, hydrangeas, daisies and dahlias. Row upon row of wet, clean blossoms filled the inside of my
trailer. By seven the sun
appeared on the horizon. The
distant line of telephone poles and tilted palms scrolling across the sky
made the proportion of sun to earth a reality.
The world was made small, consumable.
The
sun hung directly in my line of vision, as if there were an imaginary string
from my eyes to its center that held me in place and compelled me look.
When it grew too bright my eyes shut instinctively, orange rings
burning behind closed lids.
While
loading, my cell rang but I didnt get to it in time. It rang again when I got in the truck. My ex-wife was on the other end, saying fuck, fuck, oh my
fucking god over and over. What
is it? I asked. She started
screaming no, no, no. Nat
Barnes, the next door neighbor, took the phone from her and in a very calm
voice said, Mitch committed suicide.
What
hospital? I asked
Hes
at the house, not a hospital.
Is
he conscious?
No.
What
hospital? I asked again.
No
hospital because hes dead.
What
do you mean dead?
He
killed himself this morning in the backyard.
Uh-huh,
but what do you mean dead?
Mitchs
covered body was on a gurney in the driveway when I got home.
A cop tried to stop me as I approached.
I threw him to the ground and then climbed onto the gurney.
Two more cops pulled me off and held me down. I was screaming for
someone to unzip the bag. My
boy dead and I couldnt see his face.
I
stopped fighting when an investigator told me what Mitch had done.
Near
dawn he went into the backyard, took a rusted can of lighter fluid and
poured it over his head. Then
he took a match and lit it. Barnes
saw the flames from his upstairs bathroom and wondered what the hell we were
burning until he saw hands waving, flames scurrying back and forth across
the lawn. He grabbed two towels
and ran over to our yard. But
the flames were no longer moving.
The
investigator said I shouldnt look because there was really nothing to
see.
I
went into the backyard and collapsed on the burnt grass, the smell of smoke
and bark trapped in the damp air. Barnes
sat on a folding chair and waited. The
sky filled with paper clouds that seemed to hold
very still. By high noon, the
sun was directly above me, impossibly distant and small, so small that when
I held my hand out, I could block it entirely.
Somehow
I couldnt separate that sun from Mitch.
My mind returned to a book my father had given me for my 9th
birthday: Our Amazing Solar System.
I pictured the cover with its orange sun and blue-green earth.
Fact:
the sun is 333,400 times more massive than the earth.[i]
Fact:
Mitch was here in this exact spot.
Fact: At the suns core, the temperature is 16 million degrees kelvin (K), sufficient to sustain thermonuclear fusion reactions.
Fact: Mitch is not here now.
Fact:
The total energy radiated is 383 billion trillion kilowatts, equivalent to
the energy generated by 100 billion tons of TNT exploding each second.
Fact:
I dont know where Mitch is.
Soon
it was dark. Barnes folded up
the nylon chair and led me into the house where I sat at the kitchen table
and stared out into the backyard. The
moon was thin, too thin to illuminate the flowers and vines lining the
fence. Even the trees were
hidden in darkness. Through the
open window, I listened to the quiet sound of leaves sweeping air and
thought about those trees, silver dollar eucalyptus growing into the sky.
They were here before this house was ours.
And then I thought about what Mitch had done.
My thoughts circled the instant Mitch struck the match. I replayed the moment over and over. Each time attempting to undo what had been done. And then my mind emptied as if someone had blown a hole through my head. For some time, I couldnt think, couldnt form a mental picture. The world went blank.
The sun came up lighting the charred grass, wet with dew. I threw up in the kitchen sink and went outside. As I unfolded the lawn chair I remembered Brett Hart, a kid I knew in school, and the way he died. The details came back to me as if I thought about them daily.
Over the summer between sixth and seventh grade, I played Marco Polo with Hart at the pool. I could see his face perfectly: thin and angular with wide eyes pulled taut behind hazy goggles. That school year, I sat next to him in 6th period History. Hart was the smartest kid Id ever met. He could rattle off the names, dates and details of every battle fought in WWI and II. Mr. Owings said he had a photographic mind.
The day he died, I cheated off his test and got an A.
After class Hart walked home alone, his shoes wet with snow and mud. His mother, curled on the sofa, wrote out Christmas cards. She didnt look up until after he passed, seeing the backside of his jeans, the way they hung loosely from his boyishly-thin body and those muddy sneakers. Shoes off, youre tracking mud everywhere. Her last words before falling asleep, a stack of cards piled neatly on the coffee table.
She didnt hear her son walk through the kitchen, down the steps into the mudroom where he took off his shoes and socks, or the car engine turn over, the hum of the gold-green Buick pumping gas and fumes.
She woke, heard the car running and thought it strange. Walking into the kitchen, the dirty footprints infuriated her. She followed them down four steps to where the muddied shoes sat, unattended. She opened the door and saw Harts hands closed around the wheel at ten and two.
As a kid Harts death proved to be campfire fiction, the kind of tale that scares the hell out of your buddies. I probably told his story a hundred times. And I always laughed when I got to the part about Harts mom going mad, out-of-her-mind crazy, after someone wiped up the muddied prints. I didnt get it. Hart was really dead.
Months passed without a single image of Mitch not on a gurney.
Sitting in a hotel bar waiting for an old friend, I remembered something about my boy. Around the time Mitch was learning to walk, a crow built a nest near our chimney. In the early mornings wed hear it cawing. One morning the high pitched shrills of its babies fractured the crows deep cry. When Mitch heard them he tapped on the glass door and answered, coo, coohis laughter filling the room.
My
friend, in town on business, didnt know about Mitch and I knew nothing
else, creating a sense of urgency in me to tell him what my boy had done.
We sat side by side on bar stools and between shots, I told him
everything. I even told him
about Hart, explaining how my mind instinctually, as lungs filling with air,
returned to the image of his mother opening that door to find her son, a
suicide.
We
sat silent for a long time.
This
is my moment, I said. The thing
that changes everything.
Look
at me, he said.
I
stared at the bottles behind the bar. He
watched me until our eyes met.
You
need help.
I
laughed and scanned the row of bottles, stopping on Crown Royal, blue capped
amber glass.
You
need help. He touched my
shoulder.
You
cocky, son-of-a-bitch. This
isnt about me, I said.
Let me make a few calls. See
what I can do.
You
dont get it, do you? Its happened. Nothing changes that.
Theres got to be someone who can help.
Screw
you, I said before getting up to leave.
Not
long after the cards, casseroles and phone calls stopped, Barnes made his
way to my door. I hid in the
bedroom and watched him through the blinds.
He knocked, waited. Then
he got up on his tiptoes and looked through the small, square windows on the
door. The TV was on. He knocked again. After
a while he opened the mailbox, dropped something inside and went away.
Later
I heard Barnes car start. I
opened the front door and watched his piece of shit Datsun disappear down
the street. The narrow block
lined with slanted palms and identical houses seemed so small and tentative,
like cardboard models built to scale. In
my mailbox was a pamphlet picturing a tiny sailboat on an open sea, a
caption scrolling across the waves read, Together we grieve. Together we
survive. Inside its pages were
two suicide stories written by their respective survivors and a meeting
schedule listing the dates, times and locations of grief groups called
Survivors of Suicide (S.O.S.).
I
sat on the steps and read the first story in the pamphlet. The survivor-guy claimed he was not shocked when he found his
wife in the bathtub. He knew
she was unwell. She had a mind
made of glass, the loveliest of things because of its tendency to shatter.
And so it is, he said, regret consumes and prevents grief.
That
night I dreamed for the first time since Mitch died, a dream that repeated
itself over the next few months. In
the dream I sit in an oversized recliner inside an unfamiliar house.
I hear a faint sound, like stones dropped into a deep well.
Intuitively, I understand the house to be very old and the sound,
innocuous drops of water. I
write a letter, fold laundry, flip through channels on the TV until I feel
the soggy carpet and look down at my feet, submerged.
I panic as my mind scrambles to account for the rising water, but
soon I forget and continue to write or fold or flip until the next time I
hear the sound. Each
consecutive time I reenter the event, the water has risen higher.
Eventually I see my entire self existing under water.
I remain in the recliner and continue folding tiny pairs of socks and
trouserseach movement slower than the last until I can no longer lift my
weighted hands, clothes sized for a child floating around me.
The anniversary of Mitchs death passed and with it, another round of cards and calls. Most gestures of sympathy, however sincere, seemed rote, hurtful. But there was one card I kept: against a pale background stood a winter tree and on its branches, tiny birds cut from gray transparent paper perched like shadows. Inside his math teacher wrote, I think of Mitch often and miss him terribly.
I took the card to Mitchs room, emptied of furniture and clothes. My ex-wife and I argued for days over his bedroom. I wanted to leave it be, at least for a while. But she said it was wrong to pretend he was coming back. When we finished packing, the things I kept filled a single box.
Next to the box was the pamphlet Barnes left. On the back cover were five myths about suicide:
Myth 1: Suicidal individuals are intent on dying.
Myth 2: Suicide happens without warning.
Myth 3: Suicidal individuals are insane.
Myth 4: Suicide is painless.
Myth 5: Every suicide is preventable.
I thought of Mitchs funeral, of the pastor who stood before a
mosaic, a forlorn Jesus nailed to a cross, and spoke of a city made of glass
and gold and winged-creatures.
Within the city there stood a grand mansion with many rooms and
inside was a room for my boy. Mitch,
he insisted, had gone home.
Beyond this life was anothera perpetual day, an unburdened sky
emptied of sun and moon, lit by the Maker himself.
This was the story I wanted to believe.
I shifted from side to side on weighted feet, knowing Id never be
sure if Mitch meant to die. My
body ached from the inside out, whole and complete, every part crying for my
boythe sound of the world, turning.
I
unpacked that goddamned box and arranged his things on the floor.
I did this understanding he wasnt coming home.
Two months later, I attended my first S.O.S. group at the Crystal Cathedral in Orange, room 315, Tower of Hope.
Inside
a narrow room, an old man made a circle out of chairs. I waited in the hall until the seats filled.
There were three sitting togetheran old man, a dressy lady and
redheaded kidchatting and laughing as if waiting on cocktails.
The other seven sat stiff, like toy soldiers.
The
lady was the first to talk. I
pinned her as the ringleader with her lavender heels and matching blouse.
She twisted a strand of pearls around her wrist and said, Im Sally
Butler. June 17, 1975.
My father. She held her
hand in the shape of a gun, put it in her mouth and pretended to pull the
trigger. Her eyes closed. I
found him bent over the kitchen table, she said quietly.
When my turn came I stared at my hands, calloused, cracked with dirty nails and fat knuckles. They waited. After some time the old man said, whenever youre ready.
Just over a year. My boy. Im the father of a suicide, I said.
The room sat quiet, still.
Dead is dead. Who the hell are we kidding? I asked.
Empty faces nodded, agreed.
The redheaded kid, not a day over twenty, began in the manner wed been taught: Two years this September my sister Mia shot herself in the heart. She, too, made a gun with her hand, put it to her chest and fired. It takes time to bleed out, she said. Mia knew she was dying and I dont think she wanted to be, you know, dead. I wake up at night from a sound sleep bawling and, for a split second, I cant remember why. And then I remember the gun. She paused and brushed her hair behind her ear. The gun and then Mia. Everything about her ends with that goddamn gun, right?
That evening I sat in the backyard and read the stories in the pamphlet, realizing the second story belonged to the lady in lavender heels. When I got to the part where she described the gun and the father bent over the table, I imagined her eyes falling shut. I decided then that I liked her, the way she spoke and I regretted not saying more about my boy. Intuitively, I understood memory to be an act of grace.
The sun went down, leaving the sky empty for a time.
I noticed light coming from Barnes upstairs window. I watched him moving about and then I saw his face, looking into my yard. He couldnt see me sitting there in the dark, but it wasnt me he was looking for. Nat Barnes was the last to see Mitch alive, to see him as flame and ash rising into a clean blue sky. Im sorry, I thought, it was you who saw him that day.
With eyes closed I pictured my boys face, lit from the inside.
