Tiny Little Fractures

I was six years old the day that my father died. I don’t remember a whole lot about that year of my life or much else before then, to be completely honest, but I remember that day as strongly as I remembered yesterday. It’s not easy to forget something like that. No matter how much you might want to. I had been at home with my mother. She worked from home back then. My dad had a full-time job at my grandfather’s construction company. They made extra money from the tri-plex they owned. My mom spent her days collecting rent, updating the books, and taking care of me. I spent every day of my life with her. I would come home from school, and she would make me a snack as I got started on my homework. I remember that the day had been utterly average before the doorbell rang. My mom went to go answer it. I remember her humming a song as she disappeared into the hallway. I didn’t know that I would never hear that sound again. My grandfather was waiting on the front porch. I had peeked out the window to see who was there and rushed into the hallway to greet him when I saw it was him. Usually, when he came to visit, he would bring me a gift. He was known for always having candy, and small toys stashed away in the depths of his pockets. So I ran to him thinking he would have something for me, but he paid no attention as I jumped around his feet, begging for candy. His eyes were glued to my mother’s, and I knew that something was wrong. He asked to speak to my mom in private. They went into a back room, and I could hear their muffled voices as hers steadily got louder. I stepped into the hallway to listen. She was crying, and I could hear my grandpa say, “I’m so sorry, Christine. He’s in a better place.” Over the next few weeks, I heard a lot of things like this from my grandparents. “He’s in a better place.” “You’re still young.” “You’ll find love again.” My mother was never the same. My aunt moved into the spare room in our triplex to stay with us while she recovered, and in some ways, I don’t think she ever did. She just came out of her bedroom one morning and seemed almost her usual self. She went out and got another job, sold the triplex, and then my aunt decided she was well enough to not need her help anymore. I was the only one who actually ever saw her. The way she never concentrated on your face for very long during a conversation. The way her eyes always seemed red and out of focus. She nearly drank herself to death in that first year, and I don’t think she would have kept breathing at all if it wasn’t for me. Then one day she met someone. He started to come to our house a lot until he eventually decided to never leave. Nine months after he moved in I had a new baby half-brother, and then one day my mom told me she was going to marry him. The things my grandfather told my mom stuck with me for a very long time. At first, I thought these were cruel things to say to someone who had just lost the person they loved the most. As I grew up, I realized he had only been trying to comfort her, but he had never known the pain of her loss. He and his wife had been together and strong since their college days. What did he know about grief? I decided to bring it up the day of my mother’s second wedding. I was curious as to whether or not he had been right. She seemed happier. She smiled more. She focused on my face again, but I could still feel that something wasn’t right. It was almost as if she was teetering on the edge of something. I wasn’t supposed to spend the day with her. It was a grown-up thing, I heard my aunt tell her. For some reason, my mom had come to me. She asked me to stay with her as she got ready. Not her sister. Not her mother. No one but me. I didn’t understand it at the time, but unlike everyone else, I saw my mom for who she really was. I knew her the most, and I had shared in that same grief. So I obliged without question. She was applying lipstick when I brought it up. It was a shade of almost nude pink that matched the dress she was wearing. It wasn’t a fancy dress. Just a pale pink skirt with a suit jacket that had puffy shoulders and a rose tucked into the pocket. My mother wanted the wedding to be very short and simple, with family and friends only. She seemed happy, but it was the only wedding I had ever been to. She looked at me in the mirror as she smacked that silky shade onto her lips. My mother always told the truth. She said above all she valued honesty the most. She was always straightforward and never sugarcoated anything to make you happy. I had never been told that Santa or the Easter Bunny existed. She said there was no point in lying to me. “Everything is not okay,” is what she told me. “Why?” I’d asked her, as I stood behind her picking at the embroidered lace roses on my pink dress. “Because this was never supposed to happen.” She was casual as she put the cap back on her tube of lipstick and reached for a can of hairspray. I asked her what she meant by that as she fixed the curls in her thick brown hair. She said it wasn’t that she didn’t love her fiancé, Dave. She loved him very much. He was kind, and he was good to us. He had a stable job, and he was a good father, but he wasn’t MY father. She said she didn’t believe my dad was in a better place. Maybe he really had gone to heaven like some people told us, but she didn’t think that anymore. She said he was too young to die. Heaven or not, people shouldn’t die so young. Not babies or children or adults with families. My brother was supposed to be my brother, not my half-brother. She hadn’t moved on. She said she didn’t think that was possible. She still loved my father, she would always love him, and no matter how happy she was, she would never get over having lost him. When I grew up, I thought about this conversation a lot. I sometimes wondered if my mom had just been trying to make me feel better, but she wasn’t that kind of person. If she wanted to make me feel better, she would have just stuck with the, “He’s in heaven watching over us,” story that I heard from everyone else. My mom told me once that she didn’t believe in heaven. My dad wasn’t in a better place. He just stopped existing. None of us had the lives we were supposed to have. I think that’s why she asked me to stay with her that day as she got ready for her wedding. I was the child of her first love, and she would never say those things to my little brother. She might be honest, but if her words were too harmful, she would keep them to herself. She didn’t love my brother any less than me. My mother was kind to the both of us, but we had different relationships as well as different fathers. I can’t say I believed everything she said to me, though. I might have thought my father was her first love, but I figured that was the result of the belief of soulmates and all of those other sappy things I tried not to buy into. I was nine years old when she got married again. I was ten when I met Jonathan Sharpe. My mom said she knew right away that she would love my dad for the rest of her life. They met in a park where my mom had been walking dogs for extra cash, and my dad was jogging. They'd passed right by each other before my dad skidded to a halt and immediately asked her on a date before bothering to even ask her name. She said she usually wouldn’t have agreed, but there was something of a sparkle in his brown eyes, and something shouted inside of her to accept his offer. So she did, and they were married two years later. It wasn’t like that for Jon and me. It wasn’t anything special at all. At least not at first. Did he stand out more than other boys? No. Did his blue eyes sparkle? No. Did something shout at me from the inside? Absolutely not. Was there anything remotely different about him that made me think I could spend the rest of my life with him? No. It was just convenience that brought him into my life. It was love that made him stay. When my mom married her second husband, they packed up and moved us to a small house in Long Beach. The women in our neighborhood had started a carpool chain to take all the kids that lived in the area to school in the morning. When we moved, my mother agreed to join the chain since we had a big enough car and she was eager to meet new people. That’s how Jon and I met. It was the first time we carpooled to school together. I was sitting in the back of the van already when he hopped inside. He was small then. Tiny. With curly blond hair, too many freckles, and an oversized band shirt he’d stolen from his older sister’s boyfriend. A friendship was born. Nothing much at first. I didn’t have any friends yet, and he knew some people who might like me. We didn’t seem to have anything in common, but he was the charitable type. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t alone or left out. So he introduced me to a few kids that he knew. Our relationship was sickly sweet. The kind of sweet that almost makes you gag when you remember how disgustingly cute and cliché you were. How you legitimately feared that someone would overhear or find out about the words you’d whispered in his ear. We shared our first kiss at age twelve, had s*x with each other for the first time a few years later. It was a hard kind of love. Where you fall so fast you see the ground rushing up at you, and you have no time to catch yourself. You anticipate the moment you know you’re going to hit the ground, knowing that it will be the kind of love that leaves you bruised and bleeding and in serious pain. That was what we had. We fell fast and hard. I knew the moment I first decided I was in love with him, that it was going to hurt like hell when I finally hit the ground. The pain was far worse than anything I could have imagined. I loved him, and you can say that without meaning it. I loved music. I loved beer. I loved sleeping in on Sunday mornings. I loved the way the rain smelled. I loved the scent of old libraries. But if you lose those things, what do you really miss? Sure, on occasion you might think, “Man, I really miss the rain. Man, I wish I could sleep in tomorrow.” But it’s no real loss to you. You don’t wake up every morning with an aching in every cell of your body for a library visit. It’s not real love. Real love was Jon. I loved the way his skin felt against mine and how his body fit with me. I loved the way he scrunched up his nose when he laughed so that his teeth were exposed and it sometimes looked more like a grimace than a smile. I loved the way his hair looked when he cut it short. I loved his sarcasm and the way he would try to make silly jokes out of whatever I said. I especially loved it when they didn't make sense. He always seemed to know when I needed those jokes. Those were the things I missed the most. Not the special days. Like our wedding or anniversary. Or the birthday we spent volunteering at the zoo. It was the days in-between all of the big ones. When I would hear a song on the radio and think of the numerous times he’d ridden in the driver’s seat of his first car, singing at the top of his lungs and out of key. Then I would be struck with the pain all over again. It was a stab right in the solar plexus; a pain that ebbed out and filled all of those empty cells again like tiny little fractures. I especially hated sleeping. It would make more sense to want to sleep when you miss someone so much. Essentially, dreaming was an escape. I could go to a world where he would be waiting for me, or I could go to one where he didn’t exist at all. I didn’t have nightmares. Not a single one. They were all good dreams. Sometimes they were so good that I would suddenly realize I was dreaming and I would wake up in a panic and find myself all alone. It would bring the crushing pain back all over again. That was when I finally understood what my mother told me all those years ago. You never get over it. You never move on. You don’t believe for one second that they’re in a better place. A better place is with you. They’re just gone. Too young. Too soon. I wasn’t there that night. I hated myself for not going with him. I promised that I would, and I backed out at the last minute. I made up a story about not feeling well, and he went to the charity ball without me. I hated going to those things. I didn’t want to get all dressed up to go out and mingle with people who didn’t really care. Sure, the idea of it was wonderful. They were raising money for something great. Jon was really into those kinds of things. I used to joke that he was too charitable and it would backfire someday when he got arrested for giving away the clothes off his back and walking around naked. But the people that showed up to those kinds of parties weren’t like Jon. They didn’t care about the charity or the sick children. They only spoke about the cause in low whispers and spent the money as a tax write-off. They came to make themselves look good to other assholes. Jon knew that, and he agreed with me, but he did it for the kids. It didn’t matter who showed up or their reason for doing so. Just that it benefitted the kids. I told Jon that was why I didn’t want to go, but he didn’t buy it. So I faked the flu and pretended to be sick. He knew I was faking it because he had known me for so long. He always knew, and he was going to make me pay for it. He babied me all afternoon and promised to bring something back from the party. His mom had made fried shrimp balls, and I was really hoping to get my hands on them. But it was more likely that he was going to bring back the most disgusting medicine on the market and make me take it. It would have been worth it. I would have taken the medicine even though I didn’t need it. I would have eaten the generic soup and let him baby me. I would have taken all of that over what I got. He just never came home.