Hudson House [Now available for the Kindle]

Chapter 4

-CHAPTER 4-

His mother had bought him the black suit with the padded shoulders because his grandmother was almost eighty and probably wouldn't last much longer. Grandma had kept on living, however, and Eric's mother hadn't.

Grandma entered the small room in the funeral home where Eric's mother lay in an open casket a few feet off the ground, surrounded by flowers. Grandma spotted someone she recognized, someone she hadn't seen for a long time; this kept her diverted from her dead daughter at the front of the room. What did it feel like to be so old, so close to death, and have to bury your daughter?

His grandmother chatted with the woman, embraced her, cried with her, and laughed. Laughing seemed out of place, almost belittling, but at any given moment someone was laughing. Eric wanted to tell the laughing people to shut up. How could anyone laugh when they knew this woman's son had discovered her dead in the kitchen a few evenings past, her face buried in blood?

Eric's father had said it was an aneurism, something in her brain stopped working, and he had accepted that on the surface at least, but he knew something worse had happened. Brains didn't simply stop functioning. After returning from the hospital, his father had dropped to his knees beside the lake of congealing blood on the kitchen floor and wept loud, fierce tears. He told Eric to stay away, go back to his room, not come out until later, much later, and his father had mopped the kitchen for hours-the mop squeaking-and when he finally left his room, Eric found his father sprawled on the kitchen floor in almost the same position his mother had been. Eric left him alone. His father's cries echoed through the house all night.

The next day, Eric found a clump of scalp and hair wedged into one of the handles of the cabinets beneath the kitchen counter. Long, thin wisps of brown hair curled out of the glob, which felt soft and mushy like Play Dough. Something had gone wrong in his mother's brain-something had exploded out of it. This wedge of scalp and hair proved it. He did not show it to his father.

He fingered the piece of scalp in the front pocket of his suit jacket, which was too tight across his shoulders and itched the back of his neck. The fragment of his mother's head had hardened over the past day and now resembled a piece of dried mud. He had intended to put it back, like the final piece in a puzzle, but when his father brought him up to the edge of the coffin and he peered in at his mother, Eric didn't see any missing segments of her head, any gaps in her hair. The people who prepared her body must have covered it up. He'd slip it into her coffin later. It wouldn't be right to bury her when she wasn't whole.

For now, he sat in an uncomfortable chair, caressing the piece of his mother's head, and staring at her still body. He didn't take his eyes from her and she was only blocked when people approached the coffin or stopped in front of him to say they felt so sorry, so bad for him, that she was such a wonderful woman, that she'd be missed for a long time.

These people perused the flowers crowding around the coffin. They pointed at particular bunches and remarked how so-and-so had sent quite a nice arrangement. These flowers of vibrant white, green, yellow and orange were supposed to be a tribute-one of them had a ribbon wrapped around it that read: A Life Celebrated. These were not a tribute; they were a living insult to a woman who could no longer live. The flowers were meant to brighten up the room with its thick, faded red curtains that killed any shred of light trying to come through the windows. The flowers were meant to sweeten the stale stench of a place where corpses laid out for hours, maybe days. The flowers were meant to distract people from the dead woman in the box.

Eric didn't know when exactly it started, but at some point his mother's chest began to gently rise and fall.

He almost stood, started screaming that she wasn't dead, they could stop this stupid nonsense with the tears and laughter and flowers and organ music and he could go back home with things the way they used to be. No one else noticed. If Eric started shouting about his mother breathing, everyone would bow their heads and murmur how difficult this must be for such a young boy. They wouldn't believe him because it wasn't true.