Miss You Love You Hate You Bye Page 3

  “Wait—that can’t be right. Did he tell you? Did he say…” I didn’t know how to finish this sentence. Zoe just let me peter out. I’d never heard Zoe talk like this about her dad before. I knew he was a little too charming with the ladies. We all did. It was part of his persona. Zoe and I usually laughed it off—even when we heard him and Alli arguing about how long he looked at a waitress or why he loved his female dentist so much. Sometimes I felt like he was even flirting with me. Especially when he pulled out his guitar for us and sang these low, mournful tunes about losses too sad to remember. His lyrics melted into one another and typically involved a speck of stardust or a bottle of Jack.

  I never thought Travis would actually do anything to break up his marriage though. I thought he loved his little family too much. Or at least his darling Zoe.

  “Pretty amazing, huh?” Zoe scoffed. Her voice was so low and raspy, she sounded like she’d seen it all.

  I stood there earning the award for New Heights of Awkwardness before summoning up the balls to say, “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” she said through a tight smile. “I mean, it’s not fine at all. It’s ridonkulous and horrible and Alli has some crazy idea that she’s gonna sweep out this place and then we can remake our reality in a decluttered geodesic dome or something. I mean, that’s our second dumpster already. I swear. We’ve been home for four days and all we’ve been doing is cleaning.”

  “You’ve been home for four days?” I gulped. I knew it wasn’t big in the grand scheme of things—famine, nuclear war, the return of high-waisted jeans. But I faked a sneeze, just to have something to do instead of pity myself.

  Again, Zoe read my mind. “Please don’t make this into something, Hank. I was gonna go straight to your house, I swear. But Alli was a wreck and Travis was texting nonstop and then she wanted us to join this gym and you were calling and I just couldn’t. I mean, that’s why this cat was like this miracle. Because he just gives unconditional love and snuggles, you know?”

  I nodded, even though I couldn’t say I actually knew. Zoe leaned into me and kissed my shoulder. “Do you know I love you more than anyone on this whole stupid planet?” she asked.

  I nodded faster, blinking back my simmering jealousy.

  “Do you?” Zoe poked me in the ribs this time.

  “I do,” I answered. “And I love—”

  “Nope!” She cut me off. “I said it first!” Then she licked my cheek and sprinted up the big rock at the edge of her backyard. Or at least it used to be big. When we were little, we called it Mount Snooji and whenever it snowed we slid down it until our tailbones were bruised and the neighbors told us to go home. It took me a minute to catch up to her. By the time I did, she was hopping up and down with her cell phone, chanting, “No freaken way! No freak-en way!”

  “No freaken way what?”

  “I cannot believe this.” She was panting and giggling now, her head still tucked into her phone. “Did I tell you about the account we started for Pepe le Meowsers?” she said without looking up.

  “We?” I asked.

  “Me and Alli. It’s kind of like a video diary of how our lives have changed since we brought him home.”

  I watched as she swiped through roughly two thousand pictures of Pepe le Meowsers. Pepe sleeping, Pepe licking his paw, Pepe stretching on a towel, even Pepe taking a dump. There was a whole series of Zoe smiling and nuzzling Pepe too. Then there was a video of Zoe walking by the duck pond behind Dunkin’ Donuts, singing to her furry companion.

  “So stupid, right?” said Zoe. “I think it was this one of him in the basket that got the most attention. Look how many people started following us after that!”

  “Wow,” I said. Only I wasn’t looking at the pictures anymore. I was too fixated on another cluster of angry scratches, this time on the inside of Zoe’s left wrist. They were carved so neatly in three lines. Almost identical to the ones I’d seen on her upper arm. “Maybe he should be declawed though, huh?” I added.

  “What?” Zoe followed my gaze and then balled up her hand into a fist so quickly that for a split second I thought she was going to punch me. “Aw, crazy cat,” she said, and shook her head just as her phone buzzed yet again.

  The kitchen door banged open and Alli came running out. “Zoo!” she yelled. “Zoo, did you see?!”

  Zoe’s “Will you be my pussyyyyy … cat?” video was now trending on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook Live, and a pawful of cat-loving sites. In the few minutes we’d been outside, it had gotten liked and reliked, tweeted, posted, quoted, and hashtagged over and over again.

  Someone named Rebro775 had commented that it was Revolutionary.

  Manplan89 called it Validating in this depraved, misogynistic society.

  A bunch of people had just written in variations on the word Hot.

  And the one that made me squirm most was a DrNumNum who wrote, I want some.

  “So freaken stupid,” Zoe kept repeating. But she was obviously thrilled. I could feel her trembling next to me as we watched her phone flicker with adoration. Little red hearts winking at us. Gathering all the fanatical fandom from the ether and putting it in the palm of her hand.

  Her screen almost blocking out that patch of open skin.

  CHAPTER 3

  spinal freedom

  Not that I wanted to sift through more of Zoe’s pussyyyyy … cat comments or was prepared to go to Bernardo’s seven fifteen FitBidness class with Alli and Zoe at their new gym, but as soon as I turned the corner back onto my street, I felt a knot of loneliness lodge in my chest. I could smell the ecofriendly briquettes and the rack of tempeh or whatever it was that Elan had promised to come over and grill for us. It was Labor Day after all. And Elan loved anything involving tempeh or my mom.

  Ugh, Elan.

  He wasn’t a bad guy. He wasn’t mean or abusive or addicted to juggling puppies and knives. His biggest “vice” was sticking wheatgrass in his coffee. He also loved to tell us about the time he got caught by a park ranger going off trail in Oregon so he could photograph a rare mountain lion. Elan loved hiking. He also loved running, swimming, Rollerblading (gross), making his own cashew milk, and recycling old mason jars to turn them into mossy terrariums.

  He just wasn’t—nor ever could be—my dad.

  My dad died almost nine years ago. A heart attack just after he got on the 7:29 A.M. train from Meadowlake, New Jersey, to Penn Station. It was all over in one startling, horrific minute. Mom told me later that someone from his advertising firm was on that same train and tried to give him CPR. You had to wonder what that felt like, to lock lips and puff all your morning breath and hope into someone’s dying lungs. Then there were sirens and paramedics, heroic efforts, gasping commuters, and a lost briefcase that would get marched up to our front door eight months later, as if it mattered.

  Still, nobody could undead him.

  I know there’s supposedly a rhyme and a reason for everything (except maybe canned sardines). But I’d like to register a complaint to the Ministries of Mysteriously Poor Timing because my dad’s death was really not well-planned.

  First off, David Ernest Levinstein was only forty-seven years old when he stopped existing, and he left behind an adoring wife (my mom) and two incredible children under the age of ten (me and Gus), both of whom were going about their day as his pulmonary artery seized, his life flashed before his eyes or at least hopefully he got a whiff of the angels at the end of the tunnel, and then he collapsed.

  Second, there was that unreturned call to his mom (Grandma Dot) about her not-so-adjustable curtain rod; that suit he’d never picked up from the dry cleaner’s; the leaky gutter; mortgage refinancing; and that we were only halfway through reading the Harry Potter series together.

  Third, I had really practiced hard for this day. As in, memorizing and rehearsing my speech about Native American warriorhood eleven times into my Hello Kitty pocket mirror before it was my turn to present to my second-grade class.

  There was only a smatteri
ng of applause, even though I’d gotten through the whole thing without a single stop. Looking back, I’d easily call my Oneida Tribe Warriors oration the peak of my performing career. But my teacher, Ms. Dennison, wasn’t even paying attention. She was standing by the door with Principal Connell doing that thing where her eyes were on me, but her head was tilted toward him as he said something in her ear. Probably the fact that my dad was dead and my mom was in his office shaking and nobody had enough lollipops to make this better.

  “Thank you so much for that thorough presentation, Hannah,” Ms. Dennison said. “And now I believe Mr. Connell would like to talk to you for a…”

  Poor Ms. Dennison. She ran out of breath and bit her lower lip nervously. Connell thanked her profusely and told the class he was so impressed with our investigative skills.

  Then he turned to me and said ominously, “Bring all your things. I doubt you’ll be coming back to class today.”

  “Oh dawg,” said Nicholas Pratt as I stuffed my notebook into my backpack.

  I’m hoping he still regrets that stupid statement. I made sure to growl at him on the way out.

  As Mr. Connell and I walked down the corridor he started firing questions at me:

  “How did you learn all of those things about Native Americans? Were they hard to memorize?”

  I hated when adults made up stupid stuff to talk about. Though looking back, I could tell he was really scrambling to keep me engaged. When we got outside his office, he just stood there. I wondered if he needed help opening the door. Talk about embarrassing. After an eon of silence, he said, “Sorry. Your mom will explain.”

  Mom actually couldn’t explain anything. She was a mess. She was wearing her long winter coat and purple sunglasses and I didn’t know if she was trying to be a spy or was running from the law. She pulled me into her sweaty chest and rocked me back and forth, back and forth. Humming into my hair.

  When she did talk, she said a bunch of vague things about poor diet and cholesterol and how she had begged Daddy to slow down and stop eating so much cheese. (He had been pretty overweight. But I loved banging on his belly like a drum.) I still didn’t know that my dad was dead and my life was changed forever. Mom never said the words dead or gone. She just kept babbling about how she should’ve known something was wrong and how he was rushing that morning and that he hadn’t even taken off the tags on his new dress shirt. Then my little brother, Gus, came into the office with his kindergarten teacher and told us a story about a dinosaur trying on hats. Gus loved to tell long stories. And that day nobody stopped him.

  I didn’t really get what was going on until we got home, and Gus asked for apple juice, but we didn’t have any more apple juice, so he said, “Go get some at the store!” and Mom started weeping, “I can’t. I can’t.”

  That’s when it became undeniably clear. Because going to the store for juice was nothing to cry about and Mom wouldn’t stop. She kept getting shriller and wailier too. I’d never heard a sound this ugly. It made me sad and mad and, above all, scared. Mom’s sobs grew and swelled. Soaking through the carpets and pressing against the walls and I felt like I needed to shut all the windows even though it was so hot out, especially for October. Meanwhile, Gus was still whining about being so thirsty he was going to “dehydronate.”

  “Dehydrate,” I told him sharply. I pushed him into the kitchen and grabbed an orange ice pop from the freezer; unwrapped it, and stuck it in a bowl. One minute on HIGH in the microwave and it melted into juice. We passed it back and forth, taking small sips. I felt guilty that I wasn’t crying too, but I couldn’t make anything come out. When I squeezed my eyes to make tears, there was nothing but static.

  Mom did stop crying. Eventually. Or maybe she just got blotted out by all the new voices and footsteps, the doors and cupboards opening and closing, the house phone ringing, and the hushed messages being passed around.

  Out of the blue.

  Total shock.

  Maybe cholesterol, but who really knows?

  Service at B’nai Israel on Wednesday at nine thirty.

  What a tragedy.

  “Do we get to see him at all?” I remember asking Mom. “Like his … body?”

  “We can see him in our minds,” Mom whispered.

  “So he’s…”

  Mom shook her head, so I knew not to say anything more.

  All I could see in my mind was the fold in my dad’s neck where a line of white aftershave always got caught. If I plugged my ears, I could maybe remember the gravelly voice he used to read me books at night. But besides that, it felt like I was always trying to grab scraps of Dad memories from pictures or dreams and tape them together. I was only eight, after all.

  The funeral was awful—not that I was expecting a laugh riot. Gus kept pulling at his tie because it was too tight and he felt like he had to burp. Grandma Dot told me over and over again that it was too much, and she was going to die too, which didn’t seem fair since it was Dad’s day to be dead. I barely saw Mom the whole day—she was just passed from one shoulder to another, dropping tissues along the way. Afterward, lots of people came back to our house to eat bagels and blow their noses. They all said something like, You’re in my prayers and Let me know what I can do—as if that were my job. The worst was the rabbi telling us to hold a special place in our hearts for him. A noble goal, but couldn’t he have changed the wording so it wasn’t a cardiac pun?

  My dad’s younger brother, Uncle Ricky, came to stay with us for a month. He was in between jobs and in between girlfriends and seemed to have no idea what to do with his life, but he loved playing with me and Gus. Zoe came over a lot too. Uncle Ricky made us all bacon sandwiches and let us have as many potato chips as we wanted, so that was fun. But it also meant that Mom went upstairs and took a lot of naps. Whenever she wasn’t in her room, Uncle Ricky told us to give her space, even though our house seemed to be nothing but space now. It was as if Mom had this outer shell of misery swirling around her, keeping her out of reach. She also kept wearing her long winter coat inside, even as we passed through the holidays and it thawed into spring. Zoe called it her Coat of Grief.

  I still didn’t know how to thank Zoe for getting me through that year. And really every year since. She helped me remember that I was still alive—coming over to my house every day with a floppy sombrero or a giant bar of chocolate. She wiped Gus’s nose when he had a cold and planted whoopee cushions in my bed, determined to make me laugh. When her parents wanted to go to Florida for spring break, she insisted I go with them. And then she picked out a necklace of small pearly shells to bring back for my mom.

  I missed my dad. Especially his laugh that was so big it shook the floor. But to be honest, I missed my mom more. She was just so distant and fragile-looking for so long. She took a leave of absence from her job teaching ESL to migrant workers. I wondered if her students felt abandoned too. She was physically there for me and Gus—she got up in the morning when we left for school and she was there at the bus stop when we got off. But there was all this unaccounted-for time in between when I feared she’d just disappear. Hop a train and take it to the last stop. Maybe that’s what she did during the day while Gus and I were learning our times tables and taking spelling quizzes. Just drifting.

  At home, everything was officially on hold for a long time. The laundry piled up in drifts along the hallway; one of the fire alarms kept chirping to tell us it needed a new battery; the refrigerator stank of forgotten leftovers. One night, the kitchen sink clogged with popcorn kernels, and instead of getting it fixed, Mom suggested rinsing our plates and cups in the bathroom. When I looked up a plumber and called, he said I was very resourceful for a little girl. I told him that he was the first one listed in the phone book with a semidecent customer review. That showed him who was boss.

  Mom’s best friend Diane is the one who finally got her to put on some lipstick and go out. Diane was really into these adult education classes in our town that were apparently teeming with single men. (Diane was
married to a painfully boring man named Al, who rarely spoke. Gus and I constantly caught him farting and then acting like it wasn’t him.) It took Mom more than two years to agree to it, but she and Diane took an eight-week class called Pinot and Pottery and brought home lopsided vases. Then they signed up for DIY Cybersecurity, giving me and Gus lectures about online identities. Finding Your Personal Spinal Freedom was supposed to be just a one-day seminar to help with Mom’s lower-back pain.

  None of us knew it would lead Mom into the arms of one Elan Sayel, doctor of holistic chiropractic sciences.

  Elan specialized in lower-back pain and lumbar breathing techniques—which I guess were sexy words to Mom, because she came home from that seminar a new color of giddy. And I will admit, when she walked through our door that night, her neck looked longer and her hunchback of heartache was already softening.

  Mom and Elan took things slowly. He called to check up on her sciatic nerve or to mention a new article about the soothing effects of coconut oil. One night, Mom got a babysitter and said she and Diane were going out with “some friends.” I camped out in Gus’s room because his window was over the driveway. That way I could see if anyone else was in Diane’s car when she came to pick up Mom. I stayed up until midnight looking at Elan’s website about spiritual redemption by way of arnica salves.

  “If he’s bald, how come he has a full beard?!” I complained to Gus. “And what medical school did he go to?”

  “Uh-huh,” slurred Gus. I knew he just wanted to get some sleep.

  “He’s so not Dad,” I said definitively. Usually I tried not to talk about Dad with Gus because he got sad that he remembered even less than I did. “I guess that’s the whole point, right?”