The Cool Part of His Pillow

Chapter 2: A Seismic Event-2

The beast is tamed, my destructive acts righted. From my bedroom, I look at the steam rising off the sapphire-blue pool. I am a little embarrassed I threw what is commonly called “a fit” and that someone had to fish it all out. Not knowing where everything went, they stacked it. If I scale the pile, lie down, and ask nicely for a light, maybe someone will set the pyre ablaze; I don’t think I have self-immolation in me.

The phone rings. It’s quickly answered.

I hear the doorbell. Friends are making their way, their vehicles lining the driveway and street, consoling one another, carrying bags with banana bread and ranch dressing. We’ve toted the same into the homes of others.

My turn.

I watch the single mallard restlessly pace the pool decking.

“How do you know omens are omens?”

“What omen?” Kerrick asks.

“One duck.”

Faith comes to look out the window. “Omen for what?”

“That I could have delayed Andy. I should have argued more about the puppets’ collars. Or less. I’m not even sure why he was where he was. It’s nowhere near the groomers.”

Dee is trying to kick the 45 And Barely Alive banner under the bed. I hear the grommets clicking. I snatch it from under her sandal and hold it up.

“Talk about prophetic. God made a f*****g sash.” The plastic still smells of Gertie and Noel’s slobber, where their dog teeth scalloped the edges. “And it was for Andy, not for me.”

Another fit is stirring. Faith and Kerrick sense it. They hurriedly take the uncomfortable Italian slipper chairs. Potsy and Dee remain standing. All of them watch me. I watch them. I remember my cellphone camera, passed around to document my birthday night. “Hand me that.” Potsy does, and I press through the photos and carefully inspect.

“Should you be looking at those?” That’s Dee asking.

Many were taken when I was on the rooftop. I find no suspicious shadows, no wispy figures waiting to pounce and guide Andy toward the light, no Grim Reaper unless I count Stan, desperate to keep up with Protégé. The final photograph is my shirtless man in motion, unembarrassed and about to die, about to be hauled away by his embarrassed boyfriend.

“Who told his f****d-up Catholic brood?” Potsy asks.

“I called his twin brother Alexander first. Then Dolores, then Yvonne.”

“Remind us what we’re up against,” Potsy says. “Don’t they all live within a couple miles of each other yet barely speak?”

Andy’s mom was a large woman who grew larger, and diabetic, with twins. Labor brought a massive stroke. Alexander, and then Andrew, were taken via C-section. She died in the emergency room without ever holding her twin boys. Dad blamed the babies for bringing on her death and handed them to Dolores and Yvonne to raise as he drank more than ever. “They just wanted to stay out of his way. He was every bit as rough on them. Worse,” Andy once told me. I never knew what “worse” implied. In Andy’s sophomore year in college, before we’d met, his father died of cirrhosis. I tell them all of this.

“Did the boys resemble Mom or Dad?” Faith asks.

“Mom, from the couple of photos he had.”

Andy had exactly one of his dad: a studio sitting. The rustic portrait is nearly satire: a lower middle-class family, minus the maternal grounding, grazing against baled hay. His father, unbelievably, had a visible toothpick.

Andy rarely spoke of his father. When he did it was consistent: “I never knew the man.” At my nagging, he recalled one sadistic story for me. When the boys were eleven, the father drunkenly ordered everyone into the car. They headed toward stagnant water surrounded by pea gravel, which he called a beach. It was a two-hour, hellishly hot drive, all farmland.

Midway, Andy noticed the gray pavement changing color, to pale green…and moving, rippling. It was zillions of little caterpillars, crossing the road, from one field to the next.

He began yelling at his Dad: “Stop the car so they can cross!”

His dad slowed down, turned off the radio, belched, and told his four children to listen to the pop pop…pop pop pop pop pop pop of them being squashed.

“It’s their world, too! They’ll become butterflies!” Andy protested.

“It sounds like a bubble pack,” Alexander said, his head protruding from the window.

Dolores read her paperback. Yvonne spit on her fingers and rubbed at various skin discolorations.

His dad said pesticides would otherwise get them.

Andy was bawling. “They’re traveling together, they’re looking out for each other!” The road was carpeted by caterpillars, and they were slicing through the thickest pockets of them. Andy said he had visions of them writhing on the hot tailpipe, frying, screaming—if caterpillars scream—and their offal splattering into the trunk, into their cooler, in their potato salad.

“Back up over them,” Alex pleaded.

Their father, still laughing, put the car into reverse for over a mile to hit all he had missed.

And I thought I had it bad when our Impala lost its muffler one morning when my dad dropped me at school.

Kerrick carefully asks me, “Where is Andy now?”

“I’m having him taken to Frey Funeral Home.”

“Having him? Where is he?” Dee asks.

“The county coroner. They weren’t done.”

Something glacial settles over the bedroom as the implication of “they weren’t done” sinks in.

Morgues, large drawers, dissection. TV is cluttered enough with fictional procedurals that I don’t want my own factual one. I refuse to see the pathology report. I have no need to know what Andy’s spleen weighed. I do not want to know if Andy suffered massive head trauma, internal injuries, suffocated beneath the collapse, or hemorrhaged slowly. I asked that his death certificate, multiples of which I’ll require to sate the death industry, be sealed in envelopes so I don’t have to even touch one.

In the guise of helpfulness, hospital administrators suggested I meet with those who first responded to ColonyScape and extracted Andy. To offer a thanks or a gratuity?

I declined. I already know that everything I could count on drew its last breath when Andy did.

“Had you guys ever made arrangements?” Faith asks.

I nod. “Just general talking. He’d want no formal service, no doves released, no priest, just a meet-and-greet.”

“What about a Life Celebration here at the house? People reflect in a room of his stuff you picked out,” Kerrick explains.

“Like a shrine?” I shake my head. “His first abacus and a pair of ice skates?”

“Will you scatter his ashes here or maybe off a pier down in Key West?” Faith asks.

“He won’t be cremated. Andy always said, ‘I have never smoked—’”

Dee completes this. “‘And in my casket is no place to start.’”

I open a nightstand drawer. “I need to write stuff down while I’m thinking about it. Like any donations should go to the Matthew Shepard Foundation.”

Faith waves a notepad. “I have been. Have you thought about an obituary and a picture of Andy to go with it?”

Oh, God.

We’ve all seen the unfortunate photographs family think best represent the deceased. Over PowerBars, Andy and I would critique the twice-weekly Great Rooms! display ad, b***h about placement, and scowl about competitors. Then we’d turn to the back and share a yuk over the Obituaries grid, more entertaining than any political cartoon. A man holding an accordion in lederhosen. A lifelong librarian wearing a corsage as large as a head of lettuce. A hard woman with frosted hair cleaning a fish dockside. A Shriner in a fez. There were also the heartbreaking photos: a bald child in a gown proudly holding a solved Rubik’s cube, a husband and wife in their sixty-first year of marriage who died seventeen minutes apart. We would chuckle over the quote marks drawing special attention to nicknames like “Bad Boy,” “Polywog,” and “Sherlock”—an obvious detective-novel buff who, in the accompanying photo, holds a magnifying glass to an eye milky with a cataract.

I remember my own father’s. Mom chose the last one taken of him: ashen, haggard after a quadruple bypass at sixty-three, in a tie too wide, trying to stare down death, which came two years after the sitting.

In the end, I’ll settle on a professional photograph from the annual report of Andy’s bank. No one will be able to ridicule it.

“Let’s talk about what you want to be in it. You weren’t legally married,” Faith moves on. “I see ‘special friend’ a lot.”

Potsy sneers. “Sounds like he’s on a porch swing with a banjo.”

“Companion,” Faith supposes.

“Sounds like a Protégé.”

“Partner.”

I jump in. “That sounds like we own a paving company together.”

“Domestic partner,” Kerrick modifies.

“That sounds like I shacked up with the help.”

I walk to the bathroom for Advil. I don’t find it. What I do find, inside the medicine cabinet, is a Happy Birfday! envelope propped on a shelf. I lower to the toilet seat. “Guys, come in here, please.” As they do, I hand it to one of them. “Read me this.”

Faces darken in horror. Potsy opens the card. “Buy yourself a Coke or something. With Pugs & Kisses, Andrew.” He holds up two crisp one-dollar bills. “That Andy. Always extravagant.”

I take them. “Our first shithole was a double. Something was seriously wrong with the slab it sat on. It wasn’t settling, it was sinking. Lay down a ball, it would roll to the other side of the room. We rotated our dinner plate so the gravy wouldn’t run off.” Not wanting to, I cry. “An old lady lived on the other side. We’d take out her trash, and every now and then we’d pick her up a six-pack. Eighty-two, and she still dearly loved her Pabst Blue Ribbon. She found out my birthday and she taped a card to our door. In it were two one-dollar bills, and she wrote ‘Buy yourself a Coke or something.’”

Dee cannot stifle her sob. Faith weeps, too.

“The randomness of the phrase stuck with us,” I continue. “So Andy always puts two ones in my card and writes that. Buy yourself a Coke or something. Kicker is, I only drink Pepsi.” I just broke relationship code, relinquishing one of our little insider jokes. But if I don’t, they die with Andy.

There’s a knock. Even in great sadness, Faith behaves like it’s her office and barks, “Busy!”

Stan, outside the door, whispers, “Barry’s mom just got here.”

As if to underscore his update, which has the same dire urgency as “the SWAT team has this place surrounded,” I hear a wail downstairs.

“Where is he? Where’s my boy?”

I take a tissue. “The dressy sweats, imposter cologne, and Tootsie glasses have arrived. Call the exorcist.”