Intoxicated

Chapter Three

Choking on tears, I sat up in bed. The room was dark except for a pale streak of moonlight across my desk and bedroom door. I rubbed my tired eyes and wiped the tears from my cheeks with my pajamas sleeves. I'd been dreaming about the funeral. I dreamed about it every night for days after it happened. In my dream the coffin was still open as they lowered Dad into the ground. High above his peaceful face, I stood sobbing. And then he woke up! Magically, he stood beside me and held me in his arms; he rocked me back and forth and whispered that everything was going to be all right. I could smell the newness of his suit and feel its soft texture against my cheek. He wasn't really dead at all. There was no such thing as death. He promised to stay with me, to never, ever leave.

Every night I woke up almost convinced that if I believed hard enough, if I held on to the dream tightly enough, I could make it come true.

Crazy though it was, I had managed to get out of bed, cross the hall, and look into Mom's room. He was not sleeping there, flat on his back with his right arm tucked under his head, breath coming in low, rhythmic snores like the deepest purring of a very happy cat. He would not come to the breakfast table in the morning in shirt sleeves and tie, bringing with him the smell of aftershave — and a fresh supply of bad jokes. "What kind of dinosaur has the biggest vocabulary?" A laugh caught in my throat even as fresh tears formed rivulets down my face.

I walked downstairs. The house seemed dead and empty, even with Hunter thumping and whining on the other side of the kitchen door. I unhooked the latch Dad had installed for the sake of peace between Mom and Hunter and gathered his sleep-induced little body into my arms.

In the first few days after the funeral, my nightly wanderings had found filled ashtrays and emptied coffee cups everywhere, left by the crowd of family and friends who had come to visit. All day long, people had bustled in and out, mostly women Mom knew from her volunteer work, carrying baskets of fruit, cake, pots of coffee, filling the house with perfume, smoke, and chatter. Mom, the tiny depressed center of attention seated on the sofa, gossiped and smiled and only now and then grew misty-eyed as reality weaved its way through holes in the wall of reality. She kept offering to make herself useful, and they kept insisting she just relax and let them handle everything. "I don't want to be a burden," I heard her say.

Somehow we got through Christmas. New Year's Eve came and went quietly. The ashtrays and mugs stayed clean and in the cupboard, Ethan and Olivia went back to Florida, the last of the homemade goods rattled around our refrigerator bin, and it seemed as if Mom, Hunter and I were suddenly alone on the planet, as if we'd been cut off from life itself.

A gust of cold air hit me as I opened the back door to let Hunter out into the yard. He tried to slip back into the kitchen between my legs, but I grabbed him and set him firmly on the porch, closing the door behind him. I pressed my forehead against the cold pane and watched him sniff the frozen ground for an appropriate stopping point. In seconds he was finished and barking to be let back in.

I tucked him inside my robe and went into the living room. Curled up in Hunter's corner of the sofa, we both managed to fall asleep for another hour or two, until the sounds of Mom parading around upstairs woke us up. Slowly unwinding my stiff limbs, I wondered how I would manage to stay awake in school, and then marveled at how oddly removed school life seemed from this new life without Dad. I gave Hunter his morning breakfast and water and brought the paper inside.

"You slept okay?" Mom asked, coming into the kitchen minutes later and surprising me in the middle of The Today Show.

"Uh-huh." No use in mentioning how badly.

I slipped the local section of the paper and passed it to Mom across the counter-top. We read, nibbled toast, and sipped coffee quietly, separate as strangers sharing a table in a restaurant. We were up too early for the usual confusion and panic of getting me ready to school — and Dad off to work. It left us at a loss for getting the day's conversation started.