Phone rings
“Are you sitting down?”
“What is it?”
“Tina’s gone. Her father found her this morning. She’s dead.”
Air out. An empty whole. Silence.
“Are you there?”
Breathe deep. A shudder. Hollow. Silence.
“You hear what I said? I’m coming home. Are you going to be there when I arrive?”
Broken. “Yeah.” A whisper.
In the days after, mechanical habits eat time, mask shock and terror. The day becomes Friday, nine a.m. Fuller funeral home. A last chance to see her. To know the unbelievable is real, find something about myself and the last of her.
Somber music turns on at nine, just another working day for some. A blond-haired woman in black, high heels, white skin, inviting, motions to pass through the door.
“You can come in now.”
I approach a coffin. Pink flowers on a closed right half. The other is open. She lies with a picture of herself as a young girl. A scroll of writing from her brother is resting by her side. I look into her forty year face. It is her, but out of focus.
To be sure, I look long at her right arm, exposed. A tattooed vine of green leaves pattern bottom to top hiding the cigarette burn marks she inflicted on herself years ago. Her dress is ornate, complicated, Asian, provocative as she was. The total effect is a work of art. Held in fleeting time.
I will touch her one last time.
Reaching out my hand I caress her cold and leathery cheek. It is hard, when she was soft. It is stiff while her skin used to move. Now she is a bloated wax work unanimated.
My mind wonders off.
I feel her body warm and athletic bounding on mine as she collapses into my arms. I pick her up; spin her, her smile becoming sound as we sing a chorus of “Bear hug.”
In her mind she does not hear bear hug, when she is alone. It is replaced with, “Kill yourself.” a conversation with the voices in her head begin:
“You shut up. I won’t listen to you.”
A male voice. “You should kill yourself. You are forty, it is time to go.”
“Remember what happened the last time. I burned you with my cigarette. Do you want that again or worse?”
Another male voice. “You didn’t hurt us, you only hurt yourself. And you painted over it. They sent you to the state hospital because you did things like that. You told them about us. Do you want to go back there? Do you want to be another failure like when we made you leave Harvard, before you finished your PhD? Kill yourself. It is the only way.”
“Don’t push me. If I die you die.”
“You don’t have the guts.”
“You tried ten times before. You didn’t do it then. You are a coward.”
“This time I’m determined. Both of you won’t last till next sunlight.
Snap back to me.
Turning from Tina I see her two brothers hold each other, their long hair intertwined, high cries float in the room like birds. Her mother and father stand to help, hands out with nothing to do, nothing to offer, but disbelief.
I leave her body before she is burned, cremated. I won’t see the last of her light go out. I wonder. In life, was she trying to talk with her clothes, shoes, hair, smile and energy. “Look at me. I’m a work of art. I will be an original, an image you have never seen. A welcome diversion to the everyday.”
But, isn’t this our everyday? Houses, clothes, cars, words. A construct of art, artifice, to enclose fragile lives until our lights go out.