Eleven Twenty-Three (14 page)

But my father didn’t say anything else. He
simply stood over me for almost a full minute before finally
withdrawing, backing away, retreating from my life, until he
reached the emergency exit door and paused. I glanced up from my
hideous plate of dead fish and eyed him contemptuously. He waited
by the door for just a moment longer, as if anticipating something
from me that would never come, before finally giving up and
slipping out into the spring rain outside. For one second, I was
worried that an alarm would sound from the emergency door being
opened.

It didn’t. Nothing happened. The restaurant
was quiet. And I never saw him again.

Every time I play back the memory from that
final meeting, it becomes more and more hazy, distant and painful,
like the last glimpse of a fatally wounded man as he rolls away on
the gurney. I never mentioned that last argument to my mother, and
only replied that I didn’t much feel like speaking to him every
time she asked afterward. Something tells me that, even amid all of
her contempt and loss, she would have looked down on me for the way
I treated him that night. And so I don’t speak of it to anyone, and
only think about it with a head full of drugs and a résumé of
regret in my heart.

After nearly an hour and a half of sullen
hallucinations and grim, chemically skewed memories of my father
and everything after, I finally clench my eyes shut and rouse the
strength to stand. I stumble down the hallway toward the flickering
orange candlelight coming from the back bedroom. The brown panel
walls frown and contort as I pass them, and when one of the panels
scoffs at my desolation, I punch it. The dilapidated house quakes.
My knuckles turn red and my hands age by decades as I stare at
them.

“What the hell are you doing out there,
Layne?” Hajime calls from the room. “You’re not destroying my
house, are you?”

“The wall was giving me a hard time,” I
laugh. “But we’re okay now. The hatchet is buried and we’re
starting over again.”

When I take a detour from the hallway and go
to the bathroom, Hajime’s hanging hand towel sighs and flutters.
The floor wobbles beneath me and I lose my balance and pee all over
the seat. When I move my feet, the sound they make on the tile
resembles pebbles being grated against the floor of a cave. I wish
to myself that this would stop. I was always warned not to ever ask
for this, though, because the moment you truly wish for the descent
to end, it veers left and the vacuum surrounds you and sometimes
you never find your way out again. So, I compromise and merely hope
for the trip to weaken in its intensity.

After I find my way back out into the hall, I
fumble about and slowly enter the bedroom, where the four of them
are hunched around a barely discernible board on the carpet.

“What’s going on in here?” I ask the group.
“The living room is intense tonight—”

“
Shh
,” someone hisses. It sounds like
Jasmine’s prick boyfriend, which immediately pisses me off.

“You’ll break the energy up,” Jasmine
whispers, as if she can sense my mounting rage. “We’re trying to
concentrate.”

I obey the rules of the room and stand over
the four people, watching their activities. It appears that Hajime
and Jasmine have contacted something from the ethereal plane, and
Jasmine asks everyone to concentrate. Their flesh glows menacingly
in the candlelight.

“I just had the weirdest memory out
there—”

“Layne, you’ve got to be quiet, baby,” Tara
warns as soothingly as possible. “We’re in the middle of a great
session here. We’re convinced we’re talking to a young person who
just recently died.”

“Definitely,” Hajime whispers. “I’d say no
older than seventeen, tops.”

“How can you be so sure?” I ask. “Did it tell
you?”

“We didn’t ask it that because we thought
it’d be too presumptuous and rude,” Michael mutters.

“So how do you know?”

“Well…”

Before anyone can explain further, Hajime and
Jasmine’s hands twitch over the white plastic planchette. It inches
along the board, passing the R, the S, and the T.

“Concentrate,” Jasmine murmurs, and I recall
now that she is an astrology nerd, always blaming her flat tires
and lackluster scores in grad school on Jupiter aligning with
Neptune and her last boyfriend cheating on her because his moon was
in Scorpio. I had a crush on her when I was nineteen.

The Ouija board spells out WTF.

“Did that board just say WTF?” I ask,
stunned.

“Yeah,” Hajime laughs nervously. “It just
said ‘What the Fuck?’”

“It’s because of you, Layne,” Michael says,
and I can feel his lying eyes even in the candlelight. “Be quiet,
please.”

JK, the board says next. Everyone laughs
appreciatively.

“Now you see why we were so certain it was a
young person,” Hajime says. “Apparently the spiritual realm is not
entirely above Internet-speak.”

I watch amusedly for a few more minutes, as
the group takes turns asking the board questions on whether it’s
difficult to contact the corporeal world (YES), whether we should
be afraid of the men who gather at Bohemian Grove in California
every July (BUNKER), what the spirit’s given name was when he was
alive (RAYMOND), if Michael would ever get that job in Tallahassee
and relocate (NO ONE), if Raymond’s alone tonight (GIRL IN LIVING
ROOM), and finally, how old he was when he passed. Jasmine
protested when Hajime ventured into this topic, as it is rude and
invites menacing spiritual activity, she explained. He asked
anyway, and it is a long time before the planchette slowly glides
toward the M, and then the E. It gains speed with each new letter
and abruptly stops in the center of the board once the message is
out:

MEET SOON

No one responds for fifty-five seconds. I
keep count.

“Well, that’s alarming,” Michael finally
says. “Did it just say that, or am I really out of it right
now?”

“If it didn’t, this is one hell of a
collective hallucination,” Hajime whispers.

Before anyone can ask a follow-up question to
the cryptic message, the planchette slides to the T, then spins
around and lands on the T again. Very quickly, the dead boy spells
out TTYL and the session is over. Jasmine and then everyone else
asks if Raymond is still with us, if he is upset, if he wants to be
contacted some other time. Nothing happens. Jasmine finally flips
over the board, whispers a quick pagan prayer of some kind or
other, and Tara stands up and flips on the light switch while
kissing me on the mouth. Hajime blows out the candles and Michael
scratches at his groin.

Tara leans in and kisses me again, this time
open-mouthed and horny. I can taste sour apple on her tongue and
the hint of excessive cigarette smoke on her breath. I back away
and look down at the flipped over Ouija board.

“That looked entertaining,” I say.

“Are you kidding?” Michael asks. “That looked
like me shitting my pants in fear, is what it looked like.”

“The dead sometimes have fun with their
contacts,” Jasmine says. “I wouldn’t freak out too much, guys.
Raymond was probably just messing with us. It’s too bad, though. I
had more questions for him.”

“I wish I had a spirit guide to answer all of
my
worldly questions,” I say. “Because I definitely have a
few this evening.”

“I’m not sure how much wisdom an
Internet-speaking teeny-bopper is going to have to impart,” Hajime
says. “But that was pretty cool, regardless.”

“Do you guys want to try contacting someone
else?” Jasmine asks us. “
Whoa
, the carpet is alive. Why
didn’t someone say something? Did you guys know about this and just
not tell me? I would have asked Raymond about it. Or maybe the girl
in the living room.”

08:00:00 AM

I watch the alarm on Tara’s nightstand turn
over and begin its cacophonous wake-up song. Tara stirs next to me,
and I trudge across the room and fidget with the clock until it
stops making noise. Then I head into the bathroom and take a
scalding hot shower and stare at myself in the mirror for a long
time. After I quickly dress in the early morning quiet, Tara wakes
up and gets ready. Alone in her bedroom, I gaze through the window
at the sporadic drops of rain that coat the yard and street
outside.

Julie comes by the bedroom to wish me a happy
return and condolences about my father. She puts her striking blond
hair up in a bun and gives me a quick hug, asking me to relay the
message to Tara that she will not be home until later. Miranda
comes by a moment afterward and gives me the middle finger. I
believe she has actually gained weight since we left, and her
morning face resembles the way I envisioned it while we were gone.
She makes coffee and goes back to her bedroom, slamming the door. I
smile briefly and go back to staring out the window.

I try not to think of my father, of how he
never even knew about the Olivia Glatz fiasco or that I’d left
America when he died. I try not to think about my experience last
night, either. I try not to think about anything except the rain,
which paints the world the color of finality.

Tara bundles up and turns my heater on. A
cold front is coming and when we came outside this morning, both of
us dressed in sharp black and gray, we were taken aback by the
chill weather. I begin pulling out of the back yard and around to
the driveway, but remember something. I put the car in Park.

“What are you doing?” she asks. “We’re going
to be late.”

“One second,” I reply, and slither out of the
vehicle and run around back.

When I return, I pop open the trunk of my car
and gingerly place the briefcase between two bags of clothes and a
small box of old photos of my father and me. Tara stares at me
apprehensively when I get back into the driver seat. We leave to go
pick up my mother.

I stop at a gas station to buy some
cigarettes. Inside I ask the gruff attendant with the muttonchops
for three packs of Camel Lights and one of the little packets of
Tylenol that they keep behind the counter.

“It’s going to be cold today,” the man says
to me, taking my money.

“Today is going to be a lot of things,” I
say, mesmerized by one of the donation buckets next to the American
flag lighters, at the picture of the starving boy just above the
coin slot.

When I’m handed my change, I slip the
quarters and nickels and dime into the donation bin and smile a
farewell to the clerk.

“We need to take care of ourselves before we
take care of the rest of the world, don’t you think?” the attendant
asks as I am about to leave the store.

“We
are
the rest of the world,” I say,
but by then I’m outside so it doesn’t matter anyway.

My mother’s graying hair is smooth and
lustrous this morning. Her ashen business suit, something new that
I have not seen before and probably still harboring the store
smell, looks great on her. I am reminded of the way things were, of
her tenure at the college and the students hanging around her
classroom after the lecture, prattling on and on to her about the
plight of women in America, or the depiction of femininity in
Southern film, or about how their boyfriends used to beat them
before they found their inner strength and a Pell Grant and left. I
am reminded of cocktail parties in our old house on Seminole Trace,
the bright pink faces of other professors and deans and bearded men
who knew exactly what was going on in Kosovo, and who listened to
everything she had to say. They were taken aback by her scholarly
radiance and female assertiveness.

“You both look nice this morning,” my mother
says. “Tara, your hair is dazzling, sweetheart. I really like the
color you’ve dyed it.”

“That’s her natural hair color, Mom.”

“Layne, turn down your idiot dial this
morning, please,” Tara says. “It’s not my natural hair color, Ms.
Prescott. And thank you. You look great today, too.”

“It’s too bad we can’t always look as nice as
we do for funerals,” she says sullenly, staring at her door handle
in the back seat. “Or act as polite and caring all the time the way
we do at funerals.”

I am reminded of something Mr. Scott said
that night in the airport bar. Something about funerals.

We pull into the parking lot of the funeral
home, the one with the vermillion door that I was always troubled
by as a kid because I was sure that it was one of the seven earthly
gateways to hell. At the edge of the building, a large crowd of
Dad’s family and the occasional stray friend from the old days at
Nielson & Pickett has congregated, and they stare us down like
birds perched along a power line picking a meal from a trio of
small vermin scampering across the asphalt.

I see my Uncle Stan, who once drunkenly
groped a girl I was seeing at a family reunion when I was
seventeen. Then there is Aunt Linda, who had a coke problem for a
while and indicates she still does by the way she sniffs at the
cold air and stares at everything with yellow-eyed shame. The twin
teenage boys are here, the kind of kids whose births a Greek
soothsayer would prophesize with a sense of absolute terror. Uncle
Oliver is trying to keep things light in front of two of my cousins
and Aunt Helen by telling stories and pretending he hasn’t tried to
commit suicide twice. There are first and second cousins milling
about that I don’t think have names. There are also wives and
girlfriends and husbands and boyfriends who seem to drift in and
out of my relatives’ lives like fluttering scraps of paper in the
wind. My grandparents are standing just inside the breezeway of the
funeral home, both resembling sagging paper bags. They scowl when
they see my mother and I approach.

“Just smile and tell them everything is
fine,” my mother says through gritted teeth. “And Layne—try to
understand what’s really going on here. Okay, baby?”