Why Girls Are Weird (16 page)

When you smell a hospital, you know that things are bad. That smell is so tightly linked to Bad Things. Maybe if I had a baby. Maybe then hospitals would smell like We're Gonna Have a Baby. I hadn't been to a hospital often enough to have any good memories attached to the experience. The first time was when I was seven and I fell off a swing trying to look up at the sun during an eclipse. The recess monitor lady screamed at me to stop looking up. I panicked, fell off the swing, and broke my wrist.

The second time was a year later, when I had to say good-bye to my great-aunt, a woman I'd only seen at family reunions. She had a stroke. I hid behind my mother, my face buried deep into her side, as Auntie Moma reached her hand out to me. “Jennifer,” she kept calling me. “Jennifer, give me back my cupcake.”

I thought it was pretty funny, because when you're eight the funniest sentence in the world to come out of an old lady's mouth is “Jennifer, give me back my cupcake.” She was angry with me for laughing and then with everyone else for contradicting her. They eventually had to take me out of the hospital room. My Uncle Sammy took me to McDonald's. I got a Smurf in my Happy Meal.

As the sliding doors opened in front of me and I smelled that hospital smell, I realized that this was the third time. The third real time. I think I'd been every once in a while to visit a friend or get my hearing checked or something, but this was my third emotional experience in a hospital. The smell was soaking into my skin. I felt like I was made out of latex.

I kept weaving around the hallways, afraid to peek into the patient rooms where the doors were open. I was afraid I'd see horrible things inside. Every room held someone sick, someone sad that someone was sick, and someone trying to fix the sick person. There was so much sadness on my father's floor that it felt like the whole building was about to break down into sobs. Other than hearing a few beeping noises, I was surprised at how quiet the place was. Just a heavy sadness and a tense hush like someone was trying to fall asleep. It looked like everyone there was waiting to clean up after the sadness was over.

In the hallway outside of Dad's room, I ran into Shannon. Her eyes were red and she kept wiping away tears with the back of her hand. She grabbed me in surprise. Her breath rushed out of her in a noise that sounded like “Whoa.” She pulled me into a hug. “I'm so sorry,” she moaned.

I hugged her tight and whispered. “It's okay.”

“I'm sorry. He's gone. He's already gone.”

Gone.
The word people use when it's too fresh to say “dead.” Too soon to use real words. Gone. Like lost. Missing. Not there. Gone.

And that was it. The packing, the frantic phone calls, the planning, the changing of plans, the calls to Meredith to say I'd catch a cab so she didn't have to leave the hospital, getting to the airport, reassuring Dale that I was going to be okay, letting him hold me as long as he needed to feel like he had done something, checking my bags, the flight where I couldn't sleep and an Ed Burns movie tortured me from the ceiling of the cabin, the bumpy landing followed by baggage claim, hailing a cab, the silent drive to the hospital as I hoped everything would be okay—all of it was for nothing. Because I'd never get to hear his voice again.

“We tried calling you when we knew it was the end, but you were in the air and we didn't want to leave a voice message.”

Then my tears started. Someone put me in a chair.

I knew my mouth was open. I heard my voice say, “Oh.” But I wasn't controlling anything. I wasn't aware of anything. I was sitting in the corner of the room and what was left of my family watched me cry.

Meredith put her face in my lap. It was a strange move, and she did it so quickly that the smell of hospital whooshed up from her hair and into my face. She put her arms around my waist and held me there. She started rocking as she cried, sounding like she was six again. She cried like she had lost her favorite stuffed animal. I saw myself put my hand on her head and pat it. Like she was my dog.

“He said to tell you that he loved you,” Mom said.

“He woke up? He talked to you?”

“Only for a few minutes.” She said it like another apology, her head down, avoiding eye contact. “He seemed to know. He opened his eyes and said good-bye. That he loved us and he loved you and that he'll miss us.”

“And then he sighed. It seemed very peaceful, Anna,” Shannon said, her voice gravelly from crying. She was holding an unlit cigarette in her hand. I wondered how long she'd been holding it, as it had become wet from the palm of her hand and turned up at the ends.

“How long?”

“Two hours.” My mother smoothed down my hair and wiped her face with her other hand. “Why don't you go and say good-bye? I have to do some paperwork.”

Then I was in there, alone. Just Dad and me. My dead dad. How the hell did all that happen? I didn't have a dead dad yesterday. I didn't have a dead dad two hours ago. Now if someone asked how my dad was, I'd have to say he was dead. I couldn't do that. Dads aren't supposed to die. They sit in living rooms and wait for you to call to discuss books and movies and the state of the economy. They don't die while you're on an airplane.

I didn't want to be in that room. I didn't want to be the only living person in that room. I stood with my back against the wall, my father's body in front of me. He was no longer alive in that body. I felt so small it was as if I could crawl inside his mouth and look for him.

I took a step closer and felt a chill. A breeze. Then everything was very still again. I looked up and saw the curtains in the room move just a bit.

My body relaxed, and my breath rushed out of me. “Thanks for waiting, Dad,” I said to the room. I smiled. “I'll miss you.”

My right hand felt warmer. I closed it into a fist, to hold on to whatever it was that was touching me at that moment. I stood quietly and closed my eyes. I breathed in the last moments of my father that lingered in that room.

That's when I was able to really look at him. He was so tiny compared to the last time I saw him. His cheeks had emptied out, and his skin seemed darker, like he had just gotten back from a vacation. His hair was thinner, his skin looser than I remembered. My father was much older than I ever realized he had become. When did all of that happen?

When I walked out a few minutes later, my body felt different. My face, my bones, my back—everything had suddenly aged. I felt much older. I looked at my hands. The skin seemed tighter. Weathered.

It was Thanksgiving morning, and I was thankful that my father's spirit was strong enough to wait for me.

I didn't know just how solitary my family could be until that first day home without Dad. We walked in the house and tossed our luggage in different corners of the living room. All four of us stared at each other, standing in silence. Only Shannon was still crying. We stood in this living room that none of us grew up in. We'd spent only a few holidays there, and it was rare for us to be in that room at the same time. I didn't remember the room being so big before, so full of furniture I didn't remember. It looked like someone else's house. Only Dad's recliner, all hunched and worn in the corner, felt familiar.

Mom spoke first. “I want to be alone. Are you girls going to be okay?” Her voice was different, mechanical. She looked past us toward the stairs.

We nodded, and Mom went up to her bedroom. Every once in a while we could hear her sobs and the sound of moving upstairs.

Meredith went straight to sandwich making. Mere ate all the time, so it wasn't inappropriate for her to pull out some turkey and cheese and ask if we wanted anything.

“I want soup,” Shannon said. She was mostly speaking to the pantry, which contained no soup at all.

“How's school, Shan?” Meredith asked as she cut the crusts off her sandwich.

Shannon was a junior at Rice University in Houston. All three of us spent our high school years in Texas, but only Meredith moved up north a year after my parents did. Mere was always close to my father and openly Dad's favorite, but none of us minded.

“School's school,” Shannon said, as she opened the cabinet where Mom kept the junk food. “Pringles? When did Mom and Dad start liking Pringles?” She opened the can and sat at the kitchen table.

“Who's going to cut the turkey?” Meredith whispered. Shannon and I looked at her.

“Are you kidding?” I asked.

“Can we not right now, Mere? Huh?” Shannon put the lid back on the can of chips and stood up.

“We should probably go to bed,” Meredith mumbled.

“It's daylight,” Shannon said. It was close to ten in the morning. I could still hear my mother weeping upstairs. I knew I wasn't going to be able to sleep. I didn't want to sleep ever again. What would a nightmare feel like in the middle of all this sadness?

“I'm not tired,” I said.

“Me either,” said Shannon.

Meredith got up and hugged Shannon. “Well, I'm going to go to sleep. I'm exhausted. I was at the hospital much longer than you guys were.”

She walked out of the kitchen. Once we had heard her close the upstairs bathroom door, Shannon whirled toward me, whispering feverishly.

“She's such a bitch. Like she worked harder or had a sadder day because she was there longer? We're bad daughters because we couldn't fly in any sooner? Because we're not psychic and didn't come home yesterday?”

“Just ignore it, Shannon.”

“I hate her so much. She's so self-righteous. With her perfect job and her perfect little friends and her perfect little apartment.”

I realized I was drinking coffee out of the mug I bought Dad for Father's Day a very long time ago. It said, “Daddies Are the Best!” The lip of the mug was chipped and I ran my tongue over it.

Shannon pulled back her hair and I saw how much she looked like my mother. Her eyes had that tired look around them, as if she'd been worrying about the entire world all day long. Her hands were older than she was. Shannon was an engineering major at Rice. I really had no idea what she did, but I knew she was good in math and physics. She tried to explain once, but I actually fell asleep while she was talking.

“Let's go smoke,” I said.

“Brilliant.”

We walked into the backyard and sat on the swing set.

“I need to bum one,” Shannon said.

“You always do.”

We smoked and stared up at the bright blue sky. I squinted against the sunlight glaring off everything around us. My eyelids were heavy from crying. My face felt swollen, my tongue rough. It was cold out, but the cold felt really good, reminding us how crisp life can feel. How opposite of dead we were right then. The irony of smoking a cigarette at that moment made me laugh.

“I miss Dad,” Shannon said quietly. She wasn't crying, just staring at her feet, breathing heavier than normal. I hated feeling so helpless. Worthless. What were we all going to do in that house all weekend? It felt like everyone wanted to be alone to mourn. We were keeping each other from feeling anything.

The swing set creaked under the weight of our bodies, moving back and forth. I could see my breath long after I exhaled the smoke from my cigarette.

“Are you going to write about him?” It almost didn't sound like Shannon. Her voice sounded younger. Soothing.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your webpage. Your journal. Are you going to write about him?”

I stood up.

“It's okay if you don't,” she said. She wiped her nose like she'd been crying, but her eyes were dry.

“How did you know?”

“Oh, please. It's the
Internet
. You know you're one of the more popular journals out there.”

“I am?”

“There are links to your page everywhere. Of course I was going to find it.”

“Wait. When did you find it? What other journals? You read other journals? Why didn't you tell me you'd been reading? I can explain.”

“Calm down. I think it's funny. I was reading some girl's weight-loss journal and she linked to that Billy Blanks thing you did. I read it and laughed and read another entry and you were talking about Ian, and then I knew. I knew I was reading my sister's diary. I totally freaked out.”

“Holy shit.” I sat back down on the swing. “Really?”

“No. Dale was just going to explode if he didn't tell somebody about it. But don't tell him I told you. I promised not to say anything. Anyway, once he told me about it, I read the entire thing that night. I wanted to call you, as if you somehow didn't know other people could see it.”

“I can't believe you didn't tell me.”

“I didn't want to face the wrath of Dale. And it's really none of my business. It's not like you were writing about me. Now the Ian thing's a little weird, that you pretend you're still dating him.”

“I'm starting to feel bad for lying about it.”

“Don't be. Those people don't need to know the truth. You don't owe anyone anything. At least you sound like you. You're not really lying anyway, since you actually dated him. You should see the other journals out there. One girl is writing about how she's a stripper with a drug habit. It's such bullshit. You know she's not, because if she was really doing all of the drugs she was bragging about, then she'd be too blitzed to figure out how to post a webpage. Actually, hers is really more like a blog.”

“What's a blog?” I asked her.

She looked at me, amazed, her eyebrows shooting upward toward her scalp. “You really don't know anything about this, do you? Didn't you read any journals before you started your own? Did you think you were the only one doing this?”

I hadn't even thought of it. “Why would you read something like that, like the stripper website?” I asked her.

“I take study breaks,” Shannon said as she blew out another puff of smoke. “I get bored. They're like soap operas. I can't stop reading some of them. I can't wait to see how they're going to mess up their lives next. There's this one guy who is totally stalking his ex-girlfriend, and he doesn't seem to realize it. He keeps going on about how much he loves her, posting shitty poems, and the next day he's whining about some restraining order she's filed. It's hysterical. I love him because he's so clueless.”

“That sounds awful.”

Shannon kicked up her feet and started swinging slowly. She was wearing a pair of my shoes that I thought I had lost two years ago. “It's so much fun. Either you're reading someone like you, who writes about everything you can identify with, or it's this total train wreck you can't stop reading about. You just read about their pain and thank God you're someone else. It really puts things into perspective knowing you're not some poor bastard fired from his job because of a porn addiction.”

“There's a journal like that?”

“There's a journal like that. And he has a thing for you.”

“Gross.” I wondered how strangers described my journal to their friends and family. Was I one of the train wrecks? What would Shannon think if she knew about LDobler?

Shannon laughed and lit another one of my cigarettes. “Anyway, it's fucked up.”

“Do people feel sorry for me?”

“No. You're one of the other journals. You make people feel better about themselves because you tell them it's okay to dork out. Like your Betty haircut. That entry you wrote about breaking up with her? So funny. Look at me, all proud of my big sister.”

“I get fan mail.”

“I don't doubt it.”

“Thanks.”

“Dad would have been really proud of you, too.”

I smiled. Shannon patted me on the back. “Hey,” she said, leaning in. “Can we scan those baby pictures of Meredith in the bubble bath and put them on your website?”

The turkey was ready just before midnight. It was already carved when Mom brought it to the table.