In the Middle of Somewhere (44 page)

“I know,” Rex says. “At first I thought he was constantly sleep deprived.”

“Nah, he’s just always keyed up. Then, when he finally relaxes, he just falls asleep before he even notices.”

Rex seems to contemplate this while Ginger takes the whiskey away from me and clears the trash from dinner.

“You guys take the bed,” Ginger says, and Rex immediately protests.

“Oh, stop,” she says. “I’ve slept on this couch a hundred times. It’s fine. No way are the two of you going to fit on it. Unless”—she waggles her eyebrows at Rex—“you want to ditch this sad sack and cuddle up with me.”

“Back off, bitch,” I say, smiling at her. “Thanks, Ginge.” I hug her and she squeezes me just like she always does.

“I’m sorry, babycakes,” she says.

I strip down to my boxers without thinking about it. Nothing Ginger hasn’t seen before. Rex seems uncharacteristically shy, and crawls under the covers before he takes his shirt off, like we’re in high school or a nineteenth-century novel or something.

Ginger’s bed is a safe place, and almost immediately after crawling under the covers, a warm lethargy creeps over me, relaxing me.

“Thank you for bringing me here. For being here with me, I mean,” I say to Rex softly. I can hear Ginger brushing her teeth in the bathroom.

Rex kisses me lingeringly.

“Anything for you,” he says. Then he gathers me against his heat and I drift off to sleep, held in Rex’s arms and Ginger’s familiar bed.

December

R
EX
DRIVES
us to the funeral with one hand on the wheel and the other heavy on my thigh. He’s been so calm this whole time, so steady. I could see it in him the night we met—how solid he was.

T
HIS
MORNING
I woke up to Ginger crawling into bed next to me while Rex was still asleep, one arm thrown above his head.

“He’s gorgeous and awesome,” Ginger said matter-of-factly.

“I know, right?” I whispered back. “What the hell is he doing with me?”

She smacked me lightly and rolled her eyes.

“Listen, Ginge, will you come with us to the funeral? I’m afraid I might murder one of the guys and then the two remaining ones will turn on me, which will make Rex kill them and really I don’t want to be responsible for Rex going to prison on top of all this….”

“Obviously, I’m going to the funeral with you, you idiot,” she said, but she smiled.

Rex ran down to the bodega on the corner and got eggs and bread. After a late breakfast, Ginger called my brothers at my dad’s house to get the specifics of the funeral while Rex and I changed. She figured they wouldn’t be rude to her at least. I don’t know why she’d think that after all these years. She started with the phone on speaker, but after Brian made some disgusting comment and Ginger told him he should go eat a dick and he replied, “Why don’t you get Danielle to do that since it’s his favorite thing to do,” she took it off speaker and went into the kitchen.

Rex let out a controlled breath, shaking his head, and clenched his fists.

“Honestly, Daniel, I’m impressed you can even be in the same room as them,” he said.

“I…. Brian’s not usually so bad. When I was younger, we were—well, not friends, but friendlier? We’d play catch or poker sometimes when he didn’t have anyone else to hang out with. And Sam. He calmed down a lot after he and Liza got married. He never really gave me too much shit because he was so much older.”

I knotted my tie and shrugged into my jacket, which Ginger had taken one look at when I pulled it out of my backpack and immediately hung in the bathroom to steam while we all had our showers. Rex ran his hand down my lapel.

“This is the suit you were wearing the night we met,” he said softly. I couldn’t believe he remembered. I was only wearing it for an hour.

“It’s the only one I have,” I said. “How do you…?”

Rex’s eyes never left mine.

“I remember everything about that night, Daniel.”

He looked like he wanted to say something else, but then he took a deep breath and his eyes skittered away from mine and back to knotting his own tie.

“S
O
,
WHAT
’
S
the deal with this funeral?” Ginger says from the backseat. “I mean, are you all secretly Jewish or something? I thought you guys waited, like, weeks before you buried people so you could do whatever voodoo you do to make bodies that can rise from the grave.”

Rex snorts.

“Fucking Vic,” I say. “He and Sam worked out some kind of deal with his cousin or something. I don’t know. They wouldn’t hear a word against him. Jesus Christ,” I say, running a hand through my hair, “I just hope this doesn’t turn into that scene in that movie you made me watch after you broke up with Stephen.”

“Oh yeah,
Death at the Funeral
,” Ginger says. “Ha, good movie.” Then to Rex she says, “The body falls out of the coffin.”

“Yeah, I saw it,” he says, his hand tightening on my thigh.

“Knowing Vic, he might bury Dad even if he’s not actually dead just to make a buck,” I say, going for levity, but it just comes out a little shaky.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, Dandelion turns morbid when he’s uncomfortable,” Ginger says to Rex, leaning forward to stick her head between our seats. Rex smiles at her in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah, I’m getting that,” he says, rubbing my leg with his warm hand.

“Dude,” I say, “you’re kind of turning me on. Do you
want
me to show up to my father’s funeral with a hard-on?”

Rex shoots me a dark and filthy look that says if he had his way he’d have me showing up everywhere with a hard-on, but he just pats me on the knee and puts both hands on the wheel.

“Brian said there’s going to be some kind of party in the shop?” Ginger continues.

“Yeah. For everyone who can’t make it to the cemetery today. You know my family: it’ll just be a shit-ton of beer and fried chicken and they’ll drink and cry and undoubtedly those creepy twins will smoke in the shop and set a garbage can on fire. There are these friends of my dad’s,” I tell Rex, “who no one can tell apart. Like, sincerely, I don’t even think my dad could tell them apart. He just always calls them The Twins, and no one’s ever seen them when they weren’t together. They’re super skinny so it kind of looks like they’re just one person that got sliced in half.”

Rex’s hand is back on my knee, gently. It’s as if he can hear how fucked-up I feel in everything I say. I feel better than I did on the drive to Philly—seeing Ginger’s helped a lot—but now I feel kind of… sick. Just vaguely nauseated, like I’ve forgotten something important or am about to get in trouble. I shouldn’t have eaten those eggs.

B
ESIDES
ME
,
Rex, and Ginger, my brothers, Liza, Luther, and a few of the other guys who work at the shop are the only ones there. It’s a graveside service, and, credit to Vic and his cousin, my father’s body does not fall out of the coffin. Sam shook my hand when we walked up, and nodded to Rex and Ginger. He looks sharp, in an overcoat I’ve never seen before, and I’d lay money that Liza went out and bought it for him. He holds Liza’s hand the whole time. Brian looked okay when we started, but now he’s crying. He’s trying to stay quiet, but tears and snot are dripping down his face and his sleeve is shiny from wiping them away. He doesn’t have a dress coat and Colin made him take off his Eagles down jacket at the graveside. It’s fucking freezing out here, so now Brian is shaking too.

Colin. It’s the strangest feeling, but Colin looks how I feel. He looks sick. He has circles under his eyes, and his hair, which is usually buzzed, has grown out some and looks crumpled from sleep. His lips are chapped and cracked from the cold and his eyes are puffy. When they lower the coffin into the ground, Colin squeezes his arms around his stomach and I realize I’m doing the same thing. Trying to hold it together from the outside in. Only he’s failing.

I’ve never seen Colin cry. His eyes are scrunched up and his neck is corded and I can tell that he’s nearly puking with the attempt to stay quiet. Sam is crying, Liza holding his arm. Tears are running down Luther’s weathered face and he’s making no attempt to hide them.

I am not crying. I am not sad. I am sick and numb and guilty with not crying.

I haven’t been to a funeral since my mom’s. At that one, everyone put roses on top of her coffin. One of my mom’s friends gave me a rose. White. She told me, “Put it on top of Mommy so she can take a part of you with her.” This—of course—terrified me, and I put the rose next to the grave, hoping no one would notice. One of our neighbors walked up last, and when he turned back after putting his rose on her coffin, he kicked my rose into the grave. For months, I had nightmares where I was just sitting in class or taking a shower and I would feel a tugging in my stomach. I’d look down and see the stem of a rose sticking out of my belly button. Then a hand would reach for it. My mother’s hand. She’d take hold of the stem, thorns cutting her palm, and she’d pull. The stem would slid out of my stomach, ripping its way through, until finally the white bloom, now stained red with my blood, slid out. She would drag me into the darkness, tethered by the stem.

I tighten my arms around my stomach and Rex pulls me into him.

“You okay?” he asks softly, his mouth next to my ear. I shiver and nod.

It’s just so ridiculous. That something like grief could course through each of these people, desperately contained, as the ritual unfolds, for the sake of… what? And the idea that my father is now a dead body inside a wooden box—absurd.

For a second, my mind wanders to the cholera epidemics, when fear of accidentally burying a family member alive resulted in coffins fitted with strings tied around the toes of their loved ones that led to bells, so that if they awoke, interred, they could signal for help. I’ve taught Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Premature Burial” in classes before and always pictured these suitably dark, crumbling, atmospheric tombs. But it’s 2:00 p.m. and the sun is shining and it’s muddy. There’s a man talking about my father who never met him and never will. My brothers are pillars of grief, mourning a man they adored. And I’m standing here thinking about nineteenth-century American horror stories. It’s too fucking absurd. I make a noise that sounds disturbingly like a giggle.

Colin’s head snaps up and his eyes meet mine. His face is red with pain, his lips bitten to blood. His look is disgusted. Murderous.

My brothers hate me.

Or, at least, don’t care about me.

And I don’t like them.

I’m standing between the only two people in the entire world who give a shit about me, and who the fuck knows how long at least one of them will stick around.

The service ends and Luther and the others walk off after hugging my brothers—manly, aggressive hugs, with back slaps and shoulder squeezes—and nodding uncomfortably at me. Luther shakes my hand.

Liza’s still holding Sam’s arm, but now she takes Brian’s hand too, and he leans into her like a little kid. They stand there gazing at the grave. Colin is nearly vibrating. He’s wearing a suit that’s too short in the arms and a raincoat that I recognize as my dad’s, which is tight in the shoulders. His shoes are worn and polished, now spattered with mud. Colin’s losing his shit. Crying audibly and shaking his head like it’s happening to someone else and he can’t understand it. He takes off toward a copse of trees. I shake off Rex’s arm and walk in the other direction, toward the bathroom, thinking that if I’m going to throw up I may as well do it in a toilet.

I can see Ginger take hold of Rex’s arm to stop him coming after me. Bless her.

My face and ears feel hot and flushed. Once, when I was five, just before my mom died, we went to the Jersey Shore and I played in the water all day. Brian would bury me in the sand and I’d have to break free before a big wave came. I built a sand castle and waded into the waves to pee in the water so I wouldn’t have to leave the beach. It was, I thought at the time, the best day I’d ever had. I got a terrible sunburn and my skin peeled for a week. That’s how I feel now: so full up with heat that my head is throbbing.

I make it to the bathroom and puke into the toilet. I feel like something that’s been lodged in my guts for years has come loose. Everything I said to Ginger and Rex last night was the truth. I do feel a kind of regret that I’ll never be close with my father, a kind of mourning for what could have been. But I’m also so angry that it feels like poison is coursing through my veins.

My head is throbbing and my mouth tastes like puke and I’m making a sound I don’t even recognize. In my head is only screaming. Screaming because you loved my brothers more than me even though, at first, I tried to do everything you wanted—anything to make you smile after Mom died. I tried to put on a play to distract you and you told me that only girls put on plays. I made it onto the track team and you tried to act pleased, but we both knew if it wasn’t football or basketball or hockey then you didn’t care. Screaming because you let my brothers tease me and beat the shit out of me and made me believe that was normal. Screaming because when I told you I was going to college you told me that it was a lot of money to let someone else tell me what to think. Because when I got into grad school you said, “That’s nice, son,” and never mentioned it again. Screaming because when I got my PhD, you didn’t care. Screaming because when I moved away, you couldn’t talk to me about anything except a damn car.

Screaming, screaming, screaming because when I told you I was gay—even if you never said it—you looked like you wished I were dead.

I throw up again, until there’s nothing left to come up. Acid is burning my throat and the back of my nose. I drink a bunch of water from the tap and stuff gum into my mouth that Ginger gave me earlier. She said, “Chew instead of punching.” Smart girl.