The Morbid and Sultry Tales of Genevieve Clare (5 page)

I grinned into the phone. “I’ve been standing here for a while. I did get out of the car and Rocky’s here—”

“Dad!” Ahren yelled so loud I had to hold the phone from my ear. Before I could ask him anything else, I heard the familiar sound of tires screeching and then… nothing.

****

I stared out the windows at the rain that just seemed to keep coming. I came into work on Tuesday, like nothing had changed. Rocky watched as I checked the machine for messages. Dad knew it was an old-fashioned way of doing things. Mom suggested he arrange a message service. He argued,
that’s what I was there for. I kept the website updated with properties, took photos of new listings, but honestly, there really wasn’t a reason for me to work there at all. I was drifting through my young life, taking classes I thought were interesting at the community college in Santa Rosa. There were a variety of things I was good at, but nothing at which I actually excelled. I could have gone for my real estate license, which was dad’s dream for us, but I didn’t enjoy selling, especially if I didn’t like the house. I told Dad it made me feel like a prostitute. I would come to learn as I became hardened by life, we’re all prostitutes in one way or another. 

The city council wanted to install a traffic light at the intersection that led into town. Some argued it was a waste of money. Others thought it was about time. I had to turn right at the four-way stop five days a week. I’d almost been hit so many times. The other direction of traffic came into town down an incline, which led to a blind curve before the intersection. I knew the feeling of adrenaline when the car picks up speed, powering down that small hill, straight onto Main Street in downtown Greer’s Rest.

The hill, the speed, the unknown around that bend, it was too much temptation for some. Especially if you weren’t a local.

Dad made the turn into town with my mom and Gran as passengers. He was going the speed limit. The other driver wasn’t. The street was wet that late October day, and when the other driver slammed on his breaks, he rear-ended Dad’s car.

I heard the unique sound of crashing metal, almost like experiencing an earthquake; it feels like it goes and goes and goes. The sound of the crash seemed to go on forever. I ran out the door, my cell phone ready to call Chad Healy from the police department. We’d gone to high school together, but as soon as I made it to the street corner, I watched Rocky running toward me. Guava was pacing in front of her shop which was up on the next block. She had a front row seat to the carnage. I kept thinking, “God, please don’t let anybody be hurt.” But Rocky’s face…

She took my hand and pulled. Her grip on me was so tight, my fingers protested, but I didn’t break her hold on me. I knew, deep down, I knew. Dad picked up Gran, then took her to Eden Hills so she could visit with Mom for a while, and enjoy her previous home while Dad showered and changed. We were going to this place in Calistoga that had an amazing range of desserts. I was thinking about what I would devour for my birthday dinner. I was thinking about the barn-style restaurant. I was thinking about the earrings with little skulls and crossbones I wanted from Guava’s shop. I was thinking about Tony, how I’d broken his heart only a few weeks before.

And then I stopped.

Chad Healy was already there, and he didn’t walk to me. He ran.

“Ambulance will be here in five minutes…hopefully less, Gen. They were close. That’s good.” Rocky released me and he took over, wrapping his big hand around my small one. He pulled me to the right, on the sidewalk, nowhere near the wreck. I saw his shoes first…one of his shoes. Then his jeans. Dad lived in jeans when he wasn’t working. Then the blood.

I sat at his side, shaking, not sure if I should touch him. But then he turned his head. “My Gen.” He smiled weakly. “My Gen,” he repeated.

“Daddy,” I whimpered. “Chad said the ambulance will be here any minute.” I heard the sirens as the words left my mouth.

“Granny and Mom… Honey…we all love you.” He closed his eyes, and I begged God for them to open again. “I have to go, honey. You know how your mom doesn’t like it when I make her wait…” His eyes opened once more. “Love you so much, my Gen,” he said, softer than before. “My Gen,” he whispered.

“I love you, too, Daddy.”

It wasn’t until much later, when Chad carried me away, I saw that they’d laid my mother’s body next to my dad. He’d died holding my hand…and hers.

****

I sat in the waiting room of Marin County Hospital. From what they could tell, Adam Finnegan either had a heart attack or a stroke. They couldn’t be sure until the autopsy was carried out. I only half heard what people were telling me, which wasn’t much. I wasn’t family.

Ahren’s cousin, Clark, arrived a few hours after I did. Rocky, always my Rock, sat across from us while he explained what was happening. He said things like, “Touch and go there for a while…” and “induced coma.” Finally, a man in scrubs came in and led Clark and me down a hall. Ahren wasn’t Ahren. He had tubes and machines all around him. His swollen face and head were bandaged. His arm was in some kind of cast thing. And he was unconscious.

Rocky tried to get me to talk, just like Ahren would. He’d made a habit of forcing me to express myself since my family’s funeral. It would have been easy to live in our happy bubble, to just be thankful that he was alive and I was, I definitely was. But something, that thing that had been sitting there inside me in wait to wreak havoc on my happiness… shifted.

They let me stay. I don’t know who called who for permission, but I was allowed to stay for four days. I didn’t shower or change my clothes. I drank coffee and caught naps on a two-seater couch someone had found for me. Sleep was hard to come by. Between the machines doing their thing and the nurses doing theirs, I never had more than a half hour at a time.

Day five.

He woke up.

Day six.

He turned his head and reached for my hand.

Day seven.

“Love you, Gen.”

Three weeks later, he was strong enough to attend his dad’s funeral. Adam Finnegan had bought a double plot for himself and his wife when he worked as a groundskeeper at Evergreen Memorial Park. It was a beautiful place, right on the edge of Mt. Tamalpais, overlooking Marin County on one side and San Francisco Bay on the other. I stood by Ahren the entire time, saying very little, just making sure he was eating, sleeping…breathing.

One month later, exactly four weeks since I’d first sat in his hospital room, Ahren curled me into his side. We were in my bedroom at Eden Hills. His aunts and uncles cleaned his parents’ house and prepared it for sale. Things were labeled, put into boxes, and moved into storage. Ahren said, when he was ready, he’d go through everything, but he’d never step into his childhood home again. I understood that, even though I thought it would help him say goodbye. 

“You know,” he began. “I know you like photography…” I did like it, but I’d only ever taken pictures of houses. “There’s a permanent exhibit, down in The City at the photography museum…and they have all these post-mortem pictures. Turn of the century, I think, something like that. Pictures of kids with their dead baby brother. We should go.”

I moved from his embrace and looked down at him. “I’ve always wanted one of those pictures! They’re called Memento Mori”

He smiled. For the first time in four weeks, he smiled. “Glad I’m here, Gen.” After a long silence, he took a shuddering breath and told me, “You were the last thing I thought about.”

I could have said a million things, but they would’ve all been inadequate.

His head was on the pillow, his left arm still in a sling. I sat to his right and lifted my hands to his cheeks. I don’t know how long I did it, but all I could do was stare and study his handsome face. For three months, I’d battled wildly different emotions. Every day was a tug-of-war between grief and giddy. Grief was like the little devil on my shoulder, taunting me to give in and wallow. Giddy was shouting at grief, calling him an asshole while giving him the finger. Three months, I’d renewed and rekindled a flame that burned brightly for the man who was lying in my bed. I squeezed my eyes closed at the vision of him swollen and bruised. I knew what he was saying to me. I knew what I’d become to him. I’d become what he’d always been to me.

I kissed him softly, not wanting to hurt him. He still winced and moaned in his sleep every night, and every night since his accident, I would lie awake. I’d hear my heartbeat against my pillow, his slow and steady breaths much like my own. I’d stare at the shadows on the ceiling and become aware of every inch of my body. I wouldn’t blink and I wouldn’t breathe. I’d lie there and wonder, is this what will happen when I die? The last thing I’ll see will be the shadows of redwoods near my bedroom window? My mouth will fill with saliva. My eyes will burn because I can no longer blink? These dark thoughts began to eat away at me each night.

But one thought was relentless. What would happen if Ahren had died, too?

When I pulled away and looked at him again, something in me changed. There was a gradual shift that began when I lost my family, the intense, emotional pain that stole my ability to breathe, to think…to feel anything at all. It was too much, and because of those dark thoughts that visited me at night, I knew I could no longer be a comfort to him. Any feelings I had for anything or anyone, even Ahren, had been replaced by ambivalence. I thought I was handling things, able to cope so much better because the man I’d loved for so long was at my side. I had six books on grieving and dealing with loss, and I followed all their advice. But now, all these months later, I suddenly felt…

Nothing.

A month later, I asked him to leave.

And he did.

Ten Years Later

Ahren

Ahren flicked his cigarette off the cliff looking out onto the Pacific. “Fucking fog,” he quipped as he heard footsteps come up from behind. He looked over the headstones of his parents and made a decision. It was time. He loved Genevieve, and time hadn’t changed that. No matter whom he fucked, whom he even dated, he never forgot her. There would never be room in his heart for another woman, because Gen filled it completely. They’d both been broken by grief, essentially useless to each other; they just didn’t realize it at the time. She was healing from her loss, and through it, they were starting a relationship, getting reacquainted. Then his accident changed all of that. He knew she was shutting down, he watched it happen, but he’d also just lost his dad. He wanted to be strong enough for them both and fight to save what they were building, he just didn’t know how.

“Mr. Finnegan?” one of the cemetery staff called behind him. “Your taxi’s here.” He always used the same guy, a former trucker named Jimmy.

“Thanks,” he said to the man’s back as he walked away. “Bye, guys. Thanks for the talk.” He laid his hands on the flat, marble surface and closed his eyes. “I’m done with this shit. I’m gonna get her back. It’d be great if you could talk to your people about making sure death doesn’t come knocking when I do. I’m thinking we should be in our nineties, at least.” He smiled, even though tears fell from his eyes onto the smooth surface below him. “Love you.”

Ahren made his way to the waiting taxi. Jimmy “Hazz” Hazzard had a permanent booking with Ahren the third Saturday of each month. He went to the cemetery and stayed for an hour, sometimes longer and once, he stayed overnight. He’d arrived with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and pale pink roses for his mother in the other. The following day, woken by the sound of sprinklers, he stumbled back to the waiting cab. Jimmy had been there all night and that was when Ahren knew, Jimmy was a friend. He told Ahren that when he was driving a truck, he’d seen abductions, murders and suicides. Driving a cab, the worst he saw were broken hearts and drunks.

Jimmy asked, “Where to?” taking him out of his memory of that drunken day.

“Home,” was all he had to say. Jimmy knew “home” was not the house where Ahren lived. He turned out from the cemetery and headed to the little riverside town of Greer’s Rest.