Some Hell Read online

  Sometimes he was terrified, alone with his mother, that he might vomit out his confession without warning, with no way to control it. I loaded the gun! his mouth would suddenly say, and there’d be no way to take it back. Thinking of it, he clenched his teeth until his jaw began to ache.

  Paul rocked at the other end of the table. “He needs a shower,” Diane said. “His last one was Sunday night. Shouldn’t have let him go that long, now that he’s older.”

  It embarrassed him, her saying older like that and everything it meant. Colin looked down at the table to hide his blush. “I can set it up for him,” he said. “If you need me to.”

  “Look at his hair. He can’t go anywhere like that. Especially a—not a funeral.”

  “I can put him in the shower,” Colin said, almost at a whisper.

  She was chewing the inside of her cheek. “Alan used to do that.”

  “I can do it.”

  She sighed—so loud it made him flinch. “I guess you’ll have to,” she said. “You’re the only man I can count on now.” It came out almost recited, a line from a movie that had worked its way into her life. With her free hand she reached for his and traced his veins, small and submerged and more lavender than blue. All they heard right then was Paul’s chair continuing to creak and somewhere the rumbling of Heather’s stereo. The ash crept backward, and if it wasn’t for its sudden heat next to Diane’s finger, that might have become their future, sitting there forever like a painting.

  In the bathroom, Colin laid Paul’s pajamas in a neat pile on the counter. He’d gone back to rocking and was staring at the scale opposite the toilet. It felt like he was babysitting a toddler, and he was grateful, at least, that Paul could dress himself once you picked out his clothes. Colin felt the water. When it was hot enough he backed away and put his hand on the counter.

  They could adjust, all of them. They could each learn something new.

  Colin looked away when Paul stood and took off his shirt, but his eyes drifted back when he heard the zipper on Paul’s jeans. More curious than cautious, he let himself watch, and when Paul pulled down his briefs Colin stared at what uncoiled. He hadn’t realized how much time had passed since he’d last seen his brother naked. His heart felt wrung like a rag as he let his eyes snag in all the wrong places. It wasn’t even the same color as his skin, which made it look fake, like a doll’s arm fused to his flesh with a charred, wiry scar. It occurred to him that if he wanted to know what it felt like, if it was as heavy and coarse as it looked, nobody could rat him out. His own, bent painfully in his briefs, felt smaller than ever.

  Paul turned toward the shower. Ringlets of steam fell over his shoulders. With this new part of his brother hidden, Colin felt like life could go on. “Go ahead,” he squeaked, and coughed and said it again, but Paul didn’t move. Colin told him once more that it was okay, it was just a shower, stupid, and when that didn’t work he reached out and placed his hand on Paul’s shoulder to nudge him forward. He was met with a shudder as Paul swung around and drove his fist into his brother’s eye. Colin fell back against the door, and then both of them were screaming. When his mother knocked on the door he felt like a failure.

  “Is everything okay? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know!” Colin shouted. He wiped tears out of his eyes. “He hit me!”

  The doorknob rattled. “Open the door.”

  “But he’s naked.” Paul was hunched over and hugging his knees but Colin could see everything. His cheeks burned on his mother’s behalf.

  “I gave birth to him,” she said. “I’ve seen it all.”

  Colin sighed and got to his feet. With one hand over his eye he unlocked the door. “What happened?” Diane asked as the hallway sucked the steam from the room. He closed the door and leaned against it, happy to have his mother between them like a shield.

  “I told him it was okay to get in the shower and he hit me.” He pressed his hand over his eye and wiped away a tear with the other. “I didn’t even touch him and he hit me!”

  Diane bent down to Paul as he grabbed his elbows and moaned at the floor. “Honey,” she said. “Paul.” She stroked his hair but took her hand away when he screamed. “What’s wrong, Paulie?” She clasped her hands together and they trembled, held out in front of her heart.

  “Honey, you have to get in the shower.” The toilet gave a clunk when she sat on its lid. “It’s been days and you have to get clean.” She brought her hands up to her face, covering her mouth and the end of her nose. “Please,” she said, her voice muted by her hands. You could tell she had no idea what she was doing.

  Paul moaned again, as though that explained everything.

  When they first walked into the funeral parlor that morning, everyone spent a long time staring. Even though Colin had held the ice to his face until his hand and head both ached, he couldn’t escape the broken blood vessels that left a purple ring around his right eye. At first he wanted to tell people he’d beaten up a kid in his neighborhood—an older kid—but when they didn’t ask, he didn’t offer. Eventually, everyone stopped looking at him, and when the service started they stared straight ahead, at the pastor, at the flowers, at the body.

  Alan’s brother delivered the eulogy. It sounded like all other eulogies ever written, both real and made up—from those who’d died and from movies he’d seen. His uncle choked on the word brother while he told a story from when they were boys, but Colin knew it wasn’t anything like the word father. All he had to do was think it—father—and it rose up in his throat like a poison. His uncle talked about the strong man he knew, almost as if he were trying to persuade them. Colin squeezed his fingers together, thinking of the last time he’d spoken to his father. He could’ve said something, done something—and nobody would have died. Or he could have not loaded the gun, and not killed his father, and nobody would’ve died, his father wouldn’t have died. Father, he thought. He opened his mouth to breathe but with it came a gasp he didn’t expect, a quiet moan, and his mother pulled him into her warmth of smoke and perfume. There he cried not caring who could see or hear.

  After everyone came forward one by one to touch the coffin’s screwed-shut lid, they closed the doors to the main room. Nobody was supposed to notice the parlor’s staff carrying the body out into the hearse. Colin thought about the body, which was supposed to be separate, now, from the soul. His father’s soul was the real thing, a translucent and colorless copy of what he’d looked like on Sunday night. A soul would go to heaven or hell. His grandmother once said how sorry she was that her old friend from grade school had gone to hell after swallowing a bottle of pills: “When you don’t respect life, you have no respect for God.” But was it suicide? Instead it would be his own soul, Colin’s soul, in the years to come, dragged down into the earth’s cracks and fissures, held down by these gaunt hands that looked like shadows but weren’t.

  Colin searched the room for a distraction. His mother was in that chair by the door again, accepting tissues from in-laws and cousins and even young children who understood. To his right, his grandparents were talking. He’d never seen them together before. Their voices weren’t reaching him and he tried to read their lips but couldn’t get through the first sentence. Instead he imagined what they were saying. He knew she’d remarried—he was there when Ron slid a ring over her spotted finger—but, out of an unexpected ache, he hoped. I miss you, he imagined his grandfather saying as he sipped from his paper cup. I miss you too, she’d say, and right then she smiled as though she really had said it. Colin closed his eyes and there in the dark they embraced. When he opened his eyes they stood apart. She shook her head as she looked at the floor. Quentin frowned and picked at a protrusion on the cup.

  Colin went over to his mother. Before he could speak she reached out and pulled him tight. He felt a tear slide down the back of his shirt and seep through the silk. When she released him she began straightening his hair. Then she laughed and touched the spot under his eye. “I can’t believe you’ll l
ook like this, whenever I think back.”

  He wasn’t expecting her to say anything—let alone laugh—so he went through with his plan. “I want to ride with Grandpa Patterson to the cemetery,” he said. The way her face changed made him regret it. Offended—that was how she looked, as though he’d called her something obscene.

  “Colin.”

  “I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

  “You haven’t seen him for most of your life. Why do you have to see him now?”

  He looked at the floor and wiggled his toes in his shoes, watching the light crease and fold back into itself.

  Diane looked over Colin’s shoulder, where he assumed his grandparents were still frowning at the floor between them. Then she shrugged and took up her purse. She dug around inside for the cigarettes she’d inherited. “If it’s that important to you,” she said with a cigarette in her mouth, “I’m not gonna stop you. Just don’t get too used to him.” She turned her attention back to her purse and he reached into his pocket and put his hand forward. The lighter lay in his palm.

  “You left it on the table.”

  She smiled, her eyes ringed in light, and wiped away her tears with a disintegrating tissue. “Thank you.” She took the lighter from his palm and examined it before giving it back. “Step out with me for a second. If you’re going to be a gentleman, you might as well light this for me.”

  He might have realized, then, that he and his mother were alone, in their shared way. Knowing just how easy it was for someone you thought was permanent to completely disappear made him want to latch onto her like he’d done as a foolish, wailing boy who couldn’t bear to be dropped off at preschool. They had to trust each other.

  When Colin came back into the parlor, his grandmother was walking away from that private corner. Instead of the grimace or frown he expected, she brushed a white lock of hair from her face. She looked thoughtful, as though she liked whatever it was she was thinking about. She saw Colin as he passed, and as she touched his shoulder her face switched back to that of his grandmother, the woman with a warm distance. He came up to his grandfather and stood behind him until he noticed. “Can I ride with you?”

  Quentin tapped his finger on the side of his cup. “I don’t think your mother would approve.”

  “She said it’s okay. I asked her.”

  He looked past Colin, his eyes searching the room.

  “She’s outside smoking.”

  Quentin took a sip of his coffee. “That’s new. Well, if you don’t mind riding with me and only me, I guess you can. We’re going to Roselawn, correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked down at Colin and pursed his lips, as though he was expected to entertain him or impart some great lesson. “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Just don’t.” Colin shook his head as though it was in there—father—like a gumball machine’s loose coin. He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged, waiting for the procession to get moving, but it wasn’t anything he could fake, right then, and he began to cry. His grandfather was smart enough not to recoil, and when Colin threw himself at him, wrapping his arms around his waist as tight as he could, he was still human enough to wait until it passed.

  For nearly a week the image of his father had been the tangled heap of blood and limbs on the basement floor, half-covered by his overturned chair. This he’d seen for less than a second before his mother pushed him away and screamed at him and Heather to go upstairs. Call 911, she said from inside the office, as though her husband had simply sliced open his thumb or stepped on a nail. Colin imagined the sense she was making of his face, or what was left of his face. He vowed to imagine it forever.

  Now his father was a long, rectangular block of polished wood. Now there was a pastor who stretched out his long vowels in a way Colin hadn’t heard before. Now his father sank like an island into a calm, green sea. Now the clap of a slammed-shut Bible echoed out over Roselawn. Now the sky was blue from treetop to treetop, even though all the funerals he’d seen on television took place on overcast days. Now his father lay where Colin couldn’t touch him, and people he didn’t know were offering roses they’d brought at Diane’s request. Now his mother nodded to the pastor, who signaled the two men behind him. Now a noise was pulled from Colin’s throat as the first mound of dirt hit the coffin. Now the earth was swallowing his father and his blanket of roses. Now the two men packed the dirt with the backs of their spades, and only then did his mother push back her hair and make for the car. Only then did anyone dare move. Now his father was buried.

  When they arrived home that evening, nobody spoke. His mother stood on the deck out back, smoking at the sky, and Heather went to lie on her bed, no music and no magazines. Paul had never been so still, sitting on the carpet in the hallway like something heavy you’d dropped out of exhaustion. Since the burial, the word parasitoid was stuck in Colin’s head. In the living room he read about them online, clicking on article after article until his eyes felt crossed. A common characteristic of the parasitoid is an alteration of host behavior, he read, and he clicked on the example of Sacculina—a word he recognized from his father’s notebook. The Sacculina attaches itself to the male crab’s rear thorax, near the reproductive organs, and begins to molt. Having shed its outer shell, the soft-bodied Sacculina pierces itself into the crab and begins to grow. Over time, the Sacculina secretes a series of hormones that sterilize and castrate the crab, nullifying all reproductive behavior and redirecting any energy wasted in searching for a mate. The crab now exists solely to serve the Sacculina and will care for its eggs, growing inside of the sac, as though they were its own. After the eggs hatch and the larvae emerge, the crab expels them and ensures their survival. Once the larvae are on their own, the crab is no longer needed. Colin couldn’t figure out if this meant it died, was eaten, or just wandered away. When no one was watching he lifted the laptop and reached into his underwear. He felt his testicles as though something might be dissolving them from the inside out. They might have felt bigger than normal, and his continued research led to articles on testicular torsion, cancer, infertility, and hernias. His heart felt like it was crawling out of his throat and he was sweating, a cold drop etching an itch under his arm. His father must have been a genius to put together all this information. And what if he’d observed the rest of them, like a scientist observing his rats or monkeys? How had he judged and classified and taxonomized his family? Colin knew he’d have to read every single one of those notebooks.

  As he lay in bed, the two images coalesced—his father in the wooden box and his father alone in the basement, writing at his desk. The palimpsest morphed into his father buried alive, his fists pounding against the wood as the groundskeepers dumped their shovelfuls of bad dirt into the grave. There was nothing after that darkness but waiting. How long would it take someone—a grown man like his father—to use up thirty cubic feet of oxygen? Colin knew it depended on how scared you were, how desperate each breath. He shivered in his bed and tried to force the idea out of his mind. My dad is dead, he told himself. He shot himself in the head on Monday, October 13, in his office, in this house. It occurred to him that something might have changed his father’s behavior, a creature that had perhaps attached itself inside of him and was controlling him. Or it controlled Colin. Perhaps a parasitoid had given him the impulse to load that gun, to ruin a life, a family of lives. His father was now three things—a man writing, a man bloody on the floor, and Colin’s own reflection hanging from the ceiling as he touched the coffin’s cold surface, a woman in line behind him muttering an oh that cracked in her throat before he let go and shied away. What was living inside of him? Colin tried to listen to his heart, to his breathing, to his blood. He touched his eyes, his ears, and put a finger in each nostril. Was something using him? Would something hatch? Perhaps that was how he’d die—the three years Heather warned him about. Something would crawl its way out of him, and by then h
e would have long been under its control.

  He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. In the nightlight’s glow he looked barely there, but when he took off his shirt the light of his skin made the room brighter. Nothing seemed attached to him. Nothing was burrowing its way inside. He touched each armpit, the space behind his ears. He listened to the house, and when it seemed quiet enough he slid his pajama bottoms to the floor. Slowly, he crawled up onto the counter and stood right up against the mirror. Everything was still there, all in the right place. He couldn’t tell if anything hurt or if he was just making it up. Nothing seemed wrong. He’d never watched it get hard before, and as it grew in the mirror he didn’t feel pain, exactly, but it wasn’t the same as always. He knew he should get dressed and go back to bed. He knew this was the wrong thing to be doing. He’d always hidden his body, even from his brother, with whom he’d shared a bedroom his entire life. Nobody’s seen this, he thought as he held his erection in his hand, and somehow his fist knew to tighten, his legs knew to straighten, his knees knew to lock. His heart knew to pound, right then, and his body knew what it was doing. Everything was in working order.

  Diane sighed as she looked over the waiting room. Even the sign above the reception desk—Jacobson Family Therapy—was sans serif and without color. It was hard not to answer sarcastically as she filled out the insurance forms, signed the privacy policy, put an x adjacent to Struggling With The Loss Of A Loved One. She returned the clipboard and smoothed the wrinkles out of her vest. Against what, she wanted to know, was she supposed to be struggling?

  In the beginning, she thought she could handle it. Winter had helped, settling in soon after his death. Winter even found its way into their house, the snow quieting not only the yard and the street but also the living room, where she slept, and the bedrooms at the other end of the house. Colin did well in school. Heather did poorly. Paul rocked when the teachers spoke to him. It was as if nothing had changed, especially when you imagined that Alan had simply banished himself downstairs, back to writing more nonsense in those notebooks.