Page 14 of Secret Triplets, Second Chances
JAKE
I ’ve never looked good in black.
Shelby sits next to me, wearing a stiff, dark dress that looks like it’s pinching her under the armpits. I’ve never even seen her in a dress before, and I’m pretty sure she grabbed this one off the rack without ever trying it on.
“You good?” Shelby asks for what feels like the fiftieth time since the service started. I want to tell her that I’m not her responsibility, that how I feel about our father’s funeral shouldn’t matter more than what she’s feeling, but instead I just turn my head, smile, and shoot her a look.
“I’m good,” I joke, “love wasting time.”
She rolls her eyes at me, but there’s a hint of something else there, something like frustration. For some reason, Shelby never lost that soft spot for our father, caring about him all the way to the end.
I’m pretty sure she was even paying for him. He certainly wasn’t doing any work to pull his own weight by the time he passed.
I’d always thought he’d get liver cancer, and I’d have to go through some period of torture, him pleading for my forgiveness and me refusing to give it.
Or maybe I would have. Maybe, if we both knew that he was going to die, he could have told me why, exactly, he hated my guts, and why drinking himself to death was preferable to us being a real family.
And I could have at least had the closure of understanding, even if we would never be warm and fuzzy with each other again.
Instead, he had a heart attack in the middle of the night. According to Shelby, she said it was so quick he didn’t even have time to make it to his phone. He died peacefully in his sleep, painlessly.
I’m pretty sure that’s a lie the EMTs tell you to make you feel better about what really happened.
Each time I imagine my dad alone and afraid in the middle of the night, unable to call for help, I get a strange feeling in my chest that I can’t and don’t want to name.
“Jake, come on .”
I blink, realizing I’ve been so tied up in my own thoughts that I missed the rest of what the priest said. My father was never really a religious man, so it’s hilarious to see a man of God talking about his path to the afterlife.
But that’s done now, and we’re moving into the part I’ve been dreading.
For the next hour, Shelby and I stand at the front of the room and accept condolences from people I barely remember. Shelby knows all of them, clasps their hands, nods and smiles at them. I shake a few hands, accept a few baseless platitudes about my father.
I expected to be angrier about this whole thing. All these people here acting like he was a great guy now that he’s dead. But instead, I feel something vaguely empty, almost sad.
When it’s finished, I wash my hands twice and go to meet Shelby in the lobby of the funeral home. When she’s not there, I find her sitting on a step in the alley, her head in her hands.
“If I were the kind of person to smoke,” she muttered into her palms, “I’d be smoking right now.”
“There’s always time to develop an addiction,” I joke, dropping down next to her and rubbing a circle on her back.
Without moving, she says into her palms, “How bad is the house, Jake?”
“You haven’t been there?”
Shelby shakes her head, turns and looks at me, the first tears of the day shining in her eyes. “Not since I moved out. I think… I was afraid to see the damage he might have been doing to the place.”
I swallow through the lump in my throat, and the tears in her eyes seem to dry, her gaze turning assessing.
“You haven’t been, have you?”
Two years younger than me, and Shelby can look right through me. I’m supposed to be the older brother who can always tell what she’s thinking, not the other way around.
“Not yet…”
“Jake.” She stands, shakes her head and runs her hands through her hair. “You have to go to the house.”
And so, I do.
Pushing open the front door to the house is like starring in the opening scene of a horror movie.
It swings open slowly, and it feels like the frame is in grayscale as I step inside, glancing around, certain something is going to appear out of the corner and get me.
When I thought about coming back to this house — if I ever did come back to this house — I’d imagined it long abandoned. But Dad passed unexpectedly in his sleep, not after suffering in a hospital bed for ages, and that means his coffee mug is still on the table, newspaper folded next to it.
A blanket is thrown over the recliner in the living room. Half a glass of water sits by the sink, little particles floating through it in the hazy afternoon light. The light from the microwave is on over the oven, casting the room into a strange orange glow.
“Okay,” I say out loud, which only makes me feel worse — concrete evidence that I’m the only person in this house.
That I’ll always be the only person in this house.
Slowly, I force myself to walk down the hallway, eyes travelling everywhere except for the door to my bedroom. I half expect to see the locks still on the ground, wood splinters still strewn over the floor from when he kicked my door in.
But they’re gone, of course. Shelby probably cleaned them up. The door is repaired and re-painted, and it doesn’t even creak when I open it to look inside my old room.
It’s caked in a layer of dust, but looks exactly like it did the day I left for Michigan. I force down the lump of anxiety rising in my throat and bite my lip as I step in, looking around, thinking about the boy I was back when I used to sleep in this room.
Back when I thought those locks on the door were going to be enough to keep him out. Enough to keep me from becoming him.
Turning, I leave my room and explore the rest of the house, not liking the way my heart feels.
Shelby’s room is emptied out, with nothing but a few plastic bins in the corner.
The railing on the staircase is loose, and the plaster in the hallway is cracking.
The paint in the kitchen is peeling; it needs all new appliances.
A few tiles in the bathroom are coming loose, and the color scheme hasn’t been trendy since the eighties.
My father’s room looks exactly like it always did, except, rather than the tight, military corners, the blanket is strewn from the bed, falling to the side.
I wonder if that was from the paramedics pulling him out. I wonder, for the first time, how they figured out he was gone. As far as I know, he wasn’t working construction anymore. Did he ever go out? Did people see him? How long did it take for someone to realize something had happened to him?
Bringing my hand to my chest, I rub at the anxiety balling up there, just next to my heart. What would it be like to know something could happen to you, and the people around you might not know for days?
When I get out onto the front lawn, I heave in a deep breath of the fresh air, the lingering smell of the lilac bush, now only half-blooming, at the end of its season. It takes a few moments for me to calm down enough to think.
Shelby is right, the place needs a lot of work. But the thought of going in there feels like jumping right back into the water after nearly drowning. I can’t do it.
Instead, I jump into my truck, shut the door behind me, and follow the familiar roads. I’m not quite sure where I’m going until I see the familiar sign outside the building and think of evenings coming here to pick my dad up, before things got really bad.
Like I’m in a dream, I walk in through the front door, and the smell of old carpet, ingrained cigarette smoke, decades of fried food all hits me at once.
“Jake?”
I swallow and glance behind the bar, seeing an older bald guy with a gut, holding a glass and looking at me with wide eyes.
“Lawrence,” I say, his name coming out like a breath. He looks much older than the last time I saw him, when he pushed that envelope of cash into my hands. He blinks, then clears his throat and sets the glass down.
“Hey, bud. Why don’t you have a beer on me? Come, sit.”
I can see it there in his eyes — the grief for my father. The knowledge that this was probably one of the last places my father came before dying. That I’m here now, following in his footsteps.
Suddenly feeling claustrophobic and not sure I can handle hearing anyone else’s feelings about the man, I shake my head and turn, pushing through the door before I manage to say, over my shoulder, “Sorry, man. I was just going.”