Dad was supposed to drive. He usually did. But he was crying too much to see the road, so Mama made him pull over at a rest stop with a McDonald’s. I asked if we could go in and get a strawberry milkshake, but she said now was not the time for milkshakes. I told her I was hungry. She said that there’d be food after Auntie’s funeral.
Mama gripped the wheel and nervously crunched on Pep-O-Mint Lifesavers, one after the other. She forgot to look when switching lanes twice. Dad had taught her how to drive some. In her village in Poland women didn’t really learn to drive, never mind at sixteen.
My sister, Jane, who had just gotten her Massachusetts driver’s license, was reading Sassy magazine and rhythmically pulling out loose strands from her blonde hair and letting them fall to the carpet. Jane had beautiful hair, the same light texture as cotton candy. She had wanted to dye it pink, but Mama wouldn’t let her.
“Mo-om, would you just let me drive?” she asked when Mama hit the brakes a little too hard.
“You make me too nervous when you drive. We’ll be there soon, Janey. And Owen, will you turn off that Game Boy?” Mama asked me. “You’re going to give us all a conniption.”
I looked to my father sitting in the passenger seat. His face was slick with tears and he was trying to sleep. I was eleven years old and it was the second time I’d seen my father cry. I shut the volume off and watched Donkey Kong avoid fireballs and rivet holes in silence.
A month before Auntie died, Jane and I stayed in her apartment for the weekend because our parents were taking a respite in Nantucket. Auntie and Dad were five years apart, the same as Jane and I. She made a bed for us out of the sofa and taught us how to turn on her television.
“Jane, how’s high school going?” Auntie asked while making us hotdogs for dinner.
“It’s okay,” Jane said. She was trying to pay attention to an episode of the Real World where everyone screamed at each other.
“She wants to be a celebrity writer in Hollywood,” I offered.
“Shut up, Owen,” Jane said. It was April. Kurt Cobain had just killed himself, so Jane was especially sullen.
“Oh, don’t give up on acting, Jane. I thought you were perfect as Anne Frank. And Owen, have you dreamed up any new domino patterns?”
“I’ve learned how to make the dominos fall so that they turn on my K’nex Ferris wheel.”
The next day Auntie sent us out with some pocket money to explore the neighborhood. I was nervous because it was my first time being in Cambridge without a grown-up. Before leaving I said to Auntie, “I know you don’t have any kids, but usually they need some supervision.” She laughed and shook her head.
Jane and I spent most the weekend in a shop called Cheapo Records. We’d return in the evening to listen to our finds. One of the nights Jane and I were lying on the sofa bed, staring at the ceiling fan and listening to the songs Kurt Cobain never thought anyone would hear. He had recorded a few songs on a boom box before he fired a shotgun in his head. The record store owner found it for Jane after she bought In Utero. The song we were listening to sounded tinny and odd.
“It sounds like he’s praying,” I said quietly to Jane. On the day that Jane found out Cobain killed himself, a week before our visit to Auntie’s, she stayed home from school and played his music at top volume. She wore her black Nirvana T-shirt until Mama begged her to wear anything else, even offering up a rare shopping trip. Jane refused. Then she wore it until Mama begged her just to let her wash it for an hour.
“He’s not praying. He’s pleading. He’s asking us to let him go. To wish him night.”
Auntie came into the room and loomed over us, her head fuzzy in the lamplight. “Pretty song,” she said.
“He killed himself,” Jane said.
“I know. I’m sorry,” Auntie said and she seemed to really mean it. Mama and Dad had thought Jane was being a ridiculous fan. I did too.
“It’s not like she knows him,” I said. Jane twisted herself deeper into the sheets.
“No, Owen, I know she’s never met him. But I think Janey knows him better than you or I ever could,” Auntie said and Jane smiled at her.
On the drive to Auntie’s funeral, as I marveled at the power of being in a procession of cars no one could legally cut into, as if we were a thick river of grief, I became painfully aware of what was really making Dad cry that much. Within the span of only a month, my father had held two sets of cold hands while kneeling beside a hospital bed. First was his daughter’s hands, then his older sister’s. Dad had rushed Jane to the hospital after she swallowed pills. Auntie was rushed to the hospital three weeks later, after she suffered a brain aneurysm. She died. Jane lived.
Each of the funeral home’s rooms were monochromatic. The room with the body was all shades of peach, with some cherry-wood chairs lining the walls. I was too afraid to go in there. I stayed in a pistachio room, sitting on a celadon-colored sofa. If I learned over, to the far right, I could just barely see the casket. It looked like any other casket, and if it had not been for Auntie’s large nose sticking out, I would have thought we were in the wrong place entirely.
My father stood near the casket, next to his father, my Dziadziu. Dad gripped Dziadziu’s shoulder every now and then. His hands had the power to say what his mouth could not.
Dziadzu is the reason my parents met. He and my Babcia came to America when Dad was two. Dad forgot most of his Polish, but his parents kept him involved in community events. He met Mama when they were both eighteen. She was at a bake sale, nibbling on chrusciki and surrounded by fruit pies. She arrived in America only a month prior, and needed an English teacher and a tour guide, and my father found her very beautiful. They married by the sea two years later.
Mama wandered around the parlor, touching people’s elbows, consoling them and offering cups of coffee with condensed milk. I watched Jane wander from room to room, shuffling in her Doc Martens. By that point most family members had heard of her suicide attempt. They regarded her with mild surprise, as if she were not really there. No one knew what to say to her in the few months that followed the attempt, myself included. She had only been out of the psych ward two weeks.
She sat next to me on the couch, taking no care to smooth her baby doll dress as Mama said ladies should.
“Are you going to go in there?” she asked. I shook my head.
“It’s no big deal. It’s not Auntie lying in there. It’s just her body.”
“There’s no difference.”
“Sure there is. You’re such a baby. Here, I’ll go with you.” She snatched my hand and pulled me into the peach room. Dziadzu ruffled my hair and stepped aside so I could kneel at the casket. Jane stood behind me and pushed my head to look down at Auntie.
Her skin seemed papery and she was wearing more blush than she ever would have in life. She looked stiller than sleep and her hands were bound together by a rosary. I had the worst desire to touch her hands so I shoved my own in my suit pockets.
“They put a lens with a metal spike in to keep her eyes closed,” Jane whispered in my ear. “Otherwise they’d keep popping open.”
“I’m out of here,” I said. For the rest of the services I stood outside in the offensively bright sunshine. The ground was too wet for her to be buried that day. Every now and then a friend of Auntie’s from the city came out for a cigarette and told me that she had loved me very much.
I often think of the morning Jane tried to kill herself. Did she walk around that morning with the idea that it’d be her last, wading through the thought like it was the deep end of a swimming pool? Is it why she ate Frosted Flakes with me instead taking the bowl to her room to be with her music?
I remember that it was hot, even for late April. Our parents were upstairs, getting ready, and Jane and I were still in pajamas, eating the cereal. I’m not sure if Jane was actually sad, but now I remember her that way. She was picking at the blue polish on her toenails. I kept shouting, “They’re grrrrreat!” like that tiger. The grains of sugar melted off the wheat and sprayed as I spoke.
“Oh my God, Owen, if you say that one more time, I swear to God,” Jane said. I stayed quiet for a moment, glared at her, and sang even louder, “They’re grrrrreeeeaaaattttt!”
She darted her hand out to my arm and caught a chunk of my lingering baby fat between her fingers.
“You’re so fucking annoying,” she said, pinching as I struggled to pull away. “This is exactly why you have no friends. Just a bunch of dominos.”
“Mooooom,” I began to call, but Jane suctioned her hand to my mouth and stopped pinching. Her hand was warm, and smelled slightly like the bottom of my hamster’s cage.
“Don’t tell Mama. Owen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” Jane said. And then: “Listen, I promise that life will be a lot easier when you just grow up.”
She peeled her hand away, and I didn’t call for Mama. My sister looked at me for a long time, and I know now that she looked at me that way because she thought it would be the last time she’d ever see me.
When I said goodbye to her from the doorway, she said, “You’re a dork, but I love you.” Which was weird because we usually only admitted we loved each other on Christmas.
I caught the bus to day camp, I built a birdhouse, I passed my swim test and I got a sunburn. Dad went to his firm to research a case and met with a client whose story he didn’t believe, and Mama went to the shop to help women buy baby cribs and bedding. That afternoon Jane went into our parent’s pink, porcelain bathroom and swallowed every pill in their medicine cabinet. She washed down everything from the dental surgery codeine to ambiguous-looking vitamins with tap water.
Because life is funny, or because life is a miracle, Dad came home from work a few hours early. His client fired him because he could tell Dad disliked him. He found my sister lying in his clean, dry bathtub, a pink froth bubbling from her nose and mouth.
He told me this story much later. He told it as if he forgot whom he was talking to. But it was his story, the one he held and recited in his mind endlessly, unwillingly. The one he sometimes just had to say aloud—maybe he hoped that the words would finally disintegrate for good once he let them leave his mouth.
He told me how he stood there in the bathroom with his daughter at his feet for nearly a full minute. How everything was so quiet, so still, that he forced himself to scream just to break through what he thought was the universe collapsing into a pinprick of star. How he went to Jane, searched her neck for a pulse and, once discovered, how he kept the weak, beating plum under his fingertips in wonderment. Snapping out of his awe, he shook her and begged her to wake up. He doesn’t really remember the rest, but he called the ambulance, his hands still coated in Jane’s foamy spit, and rode with her to the hospital. He watched them pump her stomach. He saw the contents laid out on a metal tray; pills misappropriated in his mind as wet jewels.
I knew something was wrong when no one picked me up from camp that day. A boy who doesn’t like me because I couldn’t do the rope course or play flag-football was forced by his mother to offer me a ride home. I used to keep a house key around my neck so I let myself in. Because no one was home I got to eat Pop Tarts for dinner, watch Casper cartoons, and work on my domino patterns without anyone threatening to knock them down.
At seven o’clock when the sun cast the living room in a such a way that it looked like we lived inside a tangerine, Dad called. He hoarsely told me what had happened, and that Auntie would come and stay with me. He and Mama would spend the night at the hospital with Jane.
Auntie arrived an hour later and shook her head a lot, as if the shaking would make her brain figure out Jane’s reasons.
“Did Jane have a boyfriend?” Auntie asked me.
“Sort of.” After the New Year Jane had dated a Shaw’s checkout boy for a few months. Our parents hated him. He skipped class all the time and spit tobacco into soda cans. Jane had loved him, but he left her by the time the snow melted.
“Does she have friends?”
“In a way.” Jane used to be really popular, but then a lot of her friends stopped coming around. She sometimes snuck out for parties with them, though.
I kept the television on but I wasn’t really watching it or thinking about it. I wasn’t thinking about anything, really. I just let the cartoons slip over my eyes. It was still Casper, still ghosts. Auntie told me to go to bed, and I got into bed. And I tried to sleep and I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep.
I went into Jane’s room. Her walls were covered with music posters she had bought at the mall. As I went to the shoebox where she kept her cassette tapes, Lou Reed, Kathleen Hanna, and Iggy Pop stared down at me. I felt as though they were hoping to see Jane instead and I wanted more than anything to be her, for them. Not just for them, but for my parents, too, if ever Jane was truly gone.
I found the Nirvana tape we had listened to at Auntie’s, but I did not want to leave her room just then. It felt like museum—everything was just as she had left it. Her bed kept the shape of her and the pillow smelled like her clover shampoo. The little things on her dresser, crusted nail polishes and chipped unicorn figurines she used to collect, remained lined up. I touched everything carefully, searching for what her fingertips remembered.
Her shoes were not arranged, but scattered about the floor. I found a pair of purple high heels. I put my bare feet into them, left stab marks in the carpet as I went to the mirror. I allowed myself to be fascinated by the reflection for only a few seconds before I leapt from my sister’s shoes.
I took the tape to my room, put it in my old Fischer Price cassette player and planned to listen to that song until I understood everything about Jane, but I fell asleep before that could happen.
For the first week Jane was in the hospital, Mama spoke no English. No one in my family had learned much Polish, so none of us knew what she was saying. It was like a zombie movie; she moved slowly, her skin turned into a dull gray, and she spoke in guttural moans.
Dad told us that, once she came to America twenty years ago, she left her mother tongue in her mother country. She needed, he said, to a draw a line between her two lives. She took classes and read every bit of English she could, everything from Huck Finn to supermarket tabloids. She gave us American names and only spoke Polish when she was mad enough at us that her mind couldn’t keep up with her mouth.
Though she spoke English very well, she could never loose her accent. She was afraid that it spoke louder to Americans than her words. People often smiled politely at her, nodding, waiting for their chance to ask, “So, where did you immigrate from, honey?”
She learned that no matter how many issues of InStyle she read she would never belong here. And so she saw many of the faults with America she hadn’t seen when she was a new bride picking out generic baby names. But the line was drawn and she would not speak Polish. That is, not until her daughter, her daughter who knew only English, who hated polka but loved grunge, hated tales of the village, but loved stories of Kate Moss’ exploits, tried to kill herself. Only when all her visions of the good life had fully disintegrated, could she speak Polish.
She sat at Jane’s bedside, rolling her daughter’s fingers between her own, and letting words pour out more rapidly and surely than she ever could in English. I think that none of us actually knew that she had that many words in her. But of course she did. Of course she did.
“I don’t understand, Mom. I don’t understand,” Jane would repeat, tears welling in her eyes. Even in the pysch ward of the state hospital Jane still lined her eyes in dark kohl.
Dad became the quiet one. I’ve tried to imagine what exactly he felt in that week and the months to come. But I cannot. What it must have been like to not only have the possibility of loosing your child, but to know it was their choice.
And so, wordlessly he filled her room with flowers and teddy bears bought at the hospital gift shop. He bought her Crunch bars and Jujubees. He held her chilly hand, or hugged her gingerly, as if he were afraid of squeezing the weak pieces of life from her.
Jane sat there in the hospital bed, making a coffin of that sweet-smelling room. She looked amazed to still be here and at times her eyes seemed empty. On one of my visits I realized that rather than empty, they were just drinking everything in, savoring all details. Hopeful at my discovery, I talked to her about happy things, in part because I didn’t know what else to say. She nodded and smiled at all the right times. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so like Dad, I held onto hers.
On one of the earlier visits I asked a question no one had yet dared to.
“Why did you do that?”
She was quiet for a long time, and then she said, “Because I’m really, really sad.”
“That’s a stupid reason. Nothing was even wrong with your life.”
“Whatever, you don’t know me,” she said. We were both quiet for a little while, and then I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. I used to cry all the time when I was little, like if I tripped or got picked last for T-ball, and the kids at school called me a baby. So I tried to never cry. And yet.
“Owen, please don’t cry,” Jane said even though she was, too. Some of the black makeup melted away from her eyes in streaks.
“It’s just that, well you know that part of sleep when you’re not having any dreams? That part is the best part and I wanted it to be like that always.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. She shrugged.
My father resumed his position as driver on the way home. Jane had barely spoken all afternoon; she just kept playing with her hair.
Looking out the window, she said, “First, Auntie’s cells will turn into a liquid to feed the bacteria. Bacteria breed more bacteria and she’ll start to smell terrible.”
“Jane, now’s really not the time,” Mama said, shifting in the passenger seat. But Jane continued.
“The bacteria create gas and her body will balloon, getting even fatter. There will be worms and maggots, of course. Everything inside her will be a soup. Her brain will pour out of her ears and mouth.”
“That’s enough, Jane!” Mama shouted. “Is this what they’re teaching you in these schools? Owen, is it?”
“No, Jane’s just a freak.”
“I swear, in America you don’t love your dead, but you love your death! Who ever heard of crying for a dead rock star? Who ever heard of killing yourself for one?” Then, to no one it particular, “This place is going to murder my babies!”
The car was silent for a while.
“Because Auntie was embalmed it will take decades for her bones to disintegrate. But the last organ to go will be her uterus. Funny, she never got use of it in life, either.”
At that my father spun the wheel, bringing the car to the side of the highway. He slammed on the brakes and we all lurched forward and back. Mama and I were both whimpering.
Dad smacked the wheel with the flat of his hand, leaned his head back and cried with no tears. Just his mouth open like a fledgling bird, aching for something.
“Jane, Jane, my Jane, why?” he choked out, his whole body shuddering.
I looked to my sister but she had covered her face with her hands. My father got out of the car and crossed the guardrail into the woods. He looked thin and broken, sad in his wrinkled funeral suit.
Jane got out of the car and went after him.
“Come, Owen. Sit on my lap,” Mama said once the car was empty. I climbed to the front seat, and curled into my mother’s lap, though I was much too big even then. After about ten minutes, we saw Jane and Dad walking up the tree-clogged hill to the car. His arm was around her shoulders. I stayed in Mama’s lap and we drove home that way.
Later, I asked Jane what she said to Dad. I thought maybe she’d talked about how our souls become stars pinpricking the bluish-black sky like in The Lion King. But she said, “I just told him I was sorry for it all and that I love him very much.”
And then she looked at me, with those eyes I used to wish were my own, and said, “I told him I didn't want to die anymore. And he believed me."
