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You can tell, sometimes, that a tidal wave is coming, because the ocean disappears. The shoreline you have always known is unfamiliar, the water vanishing farther and farther away no matter how much you follow it. You shouldn’t follow it. You should run. On the boat on the way home, Lochlan put on his headphones and turned the volume up loud and watched the horizon disappear.
When the cops met them at the airport, it was like a bad movie. The man in a black suit with powdered sugar on his lapels, the small woman in uniform with the gun. Not a real gun, surely, too small and plastic. They aren’t really made of plastic, are they? Timothy ruffles his hair one time, looking off over his shoulder at the planes beetling about on the runway.
“Take care,” he says, and then the woman grabs his arm and he turns away.
“Take care of who?” Lochlan asks, except he can’t remember how to move his mouth. Saxon doubles over, his palm pressed to his lips like he is going to vomit, but no one turns to look at him and after a moment he straightens up again.
Victoria calls for their driver. After three minutes, she comes back, face still creased from sleeping on a folder sweatshirt on the plane, and tells them he has quit. “He said the police questioned him. Leo. Can you believe. He was quite rude about it.”
“Yeah.” Piper starts to roll her eyes. Physically, she is looking at the ceiling, and then her face changes, the sardonic grin dropping away. “Yeah,” she repeats after a minute, tucking her hands into her pockets, “weird.”
The cab declines Victoria’s card. All of them. Eventually Saxon pays on his phone and gives the hard-faced driver an unfamiliar address.
“What?” Victoria blinks, “no. I just want to go home.”
“We can’t go home,” Saxon answers, “there’ll be cops there and. Stuff.”
Unspoken, Lochlan hears it. They aren’t ever going home. His favorite blue quilt that he has had since he was a child, fraying at the edges. The cherry tree outside his window that explodes with velvet-soft blossoms in the spring. Unfinished school assignments scattered across his desk.
“Won’t they freeze your accounts, too?” He asks Saxon in an undertone. They are pressed to gather in the back seat of the taxi, Lochlan squished in the middle as he has been his whole life. Piper is crying softly, staring out the window. Saxon smells like sunscreen and sweat and the antiseptic scent of the plane. He doesn’t respond, not even by glancing at his brother.
“Hey,” Lochlan says, soft and sweet like he used to when he woke Saxon up to ask him to check for monsters under his bed. Saxon always brought his baseball bat, made a show of brandishing it as he stepped into the room, made a poor attempt at ventriloquy as he pretended to scream and then surrender. He always let Lochlan sleep the rest of the night in his bed anyway. Not today. Lochlan clears his throat and says more forcefully “Hey.”
“What?” Saxon snaps at him. It’s how he talks to waiters who mix up his and Piper’s dinner orders, how he talks on the phone to people who miss their deadlines. It’s not how he talks to Lochlan.
“We need to work together,” Lochlan blinks against a sudden onslaught of tears. “To handle this.”
“Me,” Saxon answers, voice cold and hard as ice, “I will handle it. Not you. Baby brother.” he says it and his voice is dripping with scorn, like the nickname is a bad taste in his mouth.
And the thing is, it’s not that Saxon is never mean to him. He is, often. But there’s always something to do. You apologize even if he was the one who lost his temper, you drink the warm beer he has smuggled to you even though you hate the taste, you stop reading and turn to face him and he lights up. And it is all okay. Lochlan doesn’t know what to do now, how to break the spell.
The few people who have seen a beach in advance of a tidal wave have described it, not as beautiful, but as like being on another planet. The floor of the ocean laid bare in a way it was never meant to be.
In Saxon’s two-bedroom apartment, Victoria goes straight to bed—Saxon’s bed—and Saxon locks himself in the guest room with the telephone. Piper and Lochlan stare at each other, and it’s almost like every family trip for the last ten years, mom and dad off working or drinking or fucking and the kids left alone to entertain themselves. They play a few hours of halfhearted Dutch blitz and then, when the sun goes down and no one makes dinner, they drag blankets from the hall closet and set up on Saxon’s enormous faux-leather couch, heads at either end and legs crisscrossing in the middle. Saxon would make a dumb joke about foot fetishists, but neither of them really feel like being Saxon right now, so they lie in silence scrolling through their phones and trying to block out the unfamiliar apartment-building sounds, and eventually Lochlan falls asleep with his neck bent wrong.
***
Somehow, time passes, just like it always does, even at the end of the world. Saxon is dragged in to talk to the police and smashes his fist into the bathroom mirror when he gets home, and no one says anything and they all keep brushing their teeth while staring at the cracks. Piper and Lochlan defer their respective colleges, because even that limbo feels more manageable that just saying no. Victoria finds a new doctor who doesn’t even ask to see her, just asks what drugs she wants over the phone, and takes over Saxon’s bedroom, and barely comes out except for meals. Lochlan learns how to make pancakes and boil pasta and no one seems to need anything beyond that, so he gets a job selling textbooks and promotional t-shirts at the college he was always going to be too good to attend. Piper bags groceries at an organic food store that sometimes lets her take home expired products and bruised fruit. Saxon talks to lawyers, and visits dad, and picks up an online job writing puff pieces for disgraced celebrities to bury the search results of their latest scandals, and takes calls at a nearby coffee shop and doesn’t come home until its dark out. Lochlan buys a camping roll and Piper gets a sleeping bag from somewhere and every morning they tidy up all evidence of their lives and bundle it into the corners of the room.
And then one day, Lachlan gets home and there is a cop outside the door. Flashbacks to the airport, dad glancing back over his shoulder then turning away, Victoria’s tears. Flashbacks to rubbing his eyes and dragging his carry-on up the flight tunnel and thinking they were for him, that Saxon had said something, that this was his last chance to escape. It’s just one woman, her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, uniform starched smooth and a hat tucked under one arm. As Lochlan approaches, she lifts one hand into a fist and hammers on the door, seven blows in a row, sharp and loud.
“Hi,” Lochlan says, his voice small in his throat, and just for a second the cop flinches. Then she turns, her face smoothing into unreadability.
“Saxon Ratcliff?” She asks, glancing down at the pad in her hand of half a second.
“That’s my brother,” Lochlan finds himself smiling, just for a moment, the way he used to when family friends told him how well Saxon was doing, “aren’t there supposed to be two of you?”
Cops always moved in pairs in the tv shows, the older, gruff one and the idealistic younger partner. Sometimes they were in love. She ignores him.
“Ah,” she consults the pad again, more obvious this time. He wasn’t important enough to memorize, “Lochlan Ratcliff then. And you’re eighteen, correct?”
“Yes,” he should feel proud, like he did on his birthday. Old enough to do big-kid things. Lately, he has been fantasizing in about being four or five again, building a pillow fort in his bedroom, being asleep before the fighting started, “and it’s, um, Ratliff. Like the animal.”
“Like,” she falters, “like the animal?”
“You know,” Lochlan points at the dumpster, overflowing in the alley. She shakes her head, once, like a horse brushing off an annoying fly.
“May I come in? I need to speak to you.”
“Sure,” Lochlan shrugs as he unlocks the door, and they stand in silence as the elevator climbs four, five stories. Always be on the top floor of a building, dad had told them, you’ll never hear anyone above you and that’s good, because no one is above you, and everyone who visits you will know you’re at the top of the heap.
“Is this about dad?” Lochlan asks as he unlocks the apartment door, with its ridiculous key fob that chirps a cheery little tune, whether you are feeling cheery or not, and lets her step into the apartment ahead of him. Saxon and Piper would still be at work, and mom’s door is unexpectedly open, revealing that she, too, is out of the house.
“Has someone already told you?” he voice is sharp, whip-quick.
“What? No, I guess not, just. Well, police. But,” remembering their lawyer, remembering Saxon, “I don’t know anything. I never knew anything about any of it.”
“Is your mother coming home soon?” She looks for a second uncertain, opening and folding closed the pad in her lap.
“No,” Lochlan shakes his head, as though he knows. As though mom tells them where she disappears to for days on end. “You can tell me.”
She opens her mouth and in the split second before she says the words, he wants to take it back. Don’t tell me. Make someone else deal with it. But before he can, she speaks, formal and stilted as though reading a script that she only has partly memorized.
“I’m deeply sorry to have to tell you this, but your father was pronounced dead earlier this morning.”
“What?” There is nothing in Lochlan’s head, not sadness, not anger, just the overwhelming thought that this doesn’t make sense.
“He took his own life.”
She doesn’t look at Lochlan’s face. Maybe this is a kind of privacy, a concession for a boy who hates eye contact, or for the bereaved. Instead, she glances around the room and Lochlan follows her eyes, wishing he had tidied up better in the morning. Running late, he had wedged his sleeping bag half under the couch, and one of Piper’s work shirts is drying by the open window. It’s not like the police haven’t been looking through their dirty laundry, at least figuratively, but suddenly he can’t stand it and bolts up, picks up the still-damp shirt and carefully folds it, pushes past the cop’s legs to grab his sleeping back and opens Saxon’s bedroom door to drop is carefully inside. His eyes catch the unmade bed, sheets and blankets twisted where Saxon had been lying, the faint sweat stain not he pillow. He blinks, and shuts the door.
Taking one steadying breath after another he turns back to the cop. They can still work this out.
“That doesn’t make sense,” he says, and is horrified to find his voice coming out scratched and raw, as if he has been screaming, “his trial was coming up.”
“It’s not,” the cop seems to search her mouth for a word, “uncommon, I’m afraid. Some people can’t stand the thought of a public trial. Or the lifetime in prison.”
Lochlan swallows. Outside, a screech of tires and the long blare of a horn.
“Would you like me to stay and inform your siblings?” Her voice is low.
“No,” Lochlan almost shouts. It’s too much, suddenly, this person in his space. Telling him it’s not uncommon, not strange. He takes a steadying breath. “No. I want you to leave.”
She nods, once, sharply, and gets up off the couch. As she is opening the door, taking half a step back and nearly falling over Piper’s unlaced converse, Lochlan calls after her.
“How? How did he…do it?”
She turns back to him, brow wrinkled. Maybe it’s classified. Maybe it’s gross. Maybe it’s embarrassing. His body, is somewhere, Lochlan realizes, just lying there.
“He got ahold of some glass,” she says after a minute, voice flat, “and cut his own throat.”
The world goes white for a minute, and Lochlan folds over, forehead pressed to his knees. When he finally straightens up again, she is gone and the sun shining its blinding afternoon light in through the blinds. Absently, he gets up and adjusts them, so the light won’t fade the upholstery.
He crosses the small apartment and pours himself a cup of coffee, which he has been trying to avoid after 3pm. He drinks it black, tepid and bitter, and finds that it doesn’t sharpen his thoughts at all. He opens Saxon’s door again, thinking maybe he can find a pad for paper, maybe he can write it down and stick it to the fridge the way they used to do for family announcements like the timing of soccer camp or a school play. Instead, he tumbles into Saxon’s bed, pulls his knees up to his chest. His shoes are still on but he can’t seem to move even to kick them off. The sheets smell like sweat and stale beer, not the comforting, starchy scent of Saxon’s bed as a child.
He presses his eyes shut and rolls the secret around in his mouth. Dead. Throat cut. The strength it would take to plunge a shard of glass into your own skin. Maybe is he keeps it here, in his mouth, then no one else will ever have to know. There are plenty of things Lochlan knows that aren’t true, secrets buried so deep that they no longer exist. Maybe this can just be one more.
***
“He would like this one,” Lochlan gestures at a deep brown wood coffin with a white lining, a soft bottom giving the appearance of luxurious pillows. Comfortable. Opulent.
“We can’t afford that,” Saxon doesn’t even look. He is flipping through the book that the funeral director had handed them of eco-friendly pine boxes. “Besides, he won’t know.”
“Remember how he used to say,” Lochlan persists. His throat hurts from crying, “you know. At Grandpa’s and stuff. That you needed to look your absolute best so people remember you right.”
“Look at this,” Piper points over Saxon’s shoulder to something in the brochure, “it bio-degrades and then they’ll plant a tree on top. And he could be in the tree.”
“He won’t look his best,” Saxon snaps, “he nearly cut his own head off.”
“He could wear a scarf,” Lochlan mutters, “and I don’t think he’d want to be a tree. It’s…dirty.”
“It’s important,” Piper protests, “to be part of something else. To keep going.”
“And what?” Saxon laughs, hard and cold, “so next year he’s a cherry blossom? He’s an apple? Sure. We can bring him home and eat him for thanksgiving dinner.”
Piper flushes, drops her arm and stalks off toward the toilets. She brushes so close to Lochlan that he can feel their shoulders touch, but she doesn’t look at him.
“He should be comfortable,” Lochlan runs his hand over the satin lining, over the wood that the tag says is mahogany. Their grandfather was buried in his best suit, his fingers laden with heavy rings. Timothy’s wedding ring has come back to them in a plastic bag, taken from him the day he was arrested.
“He’s fucking dead.” Saxon swipes a hand over his face, as if he’s crying. but Saxon doesn’t cry, hasn’t since he heard the news. “It’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s going to be dirty. We’re putting him in the fucking ground.”
“Don’t you care?” Lochlan snaps, so suddenly that he doesn’t feel it coming, so completely that he feels untethered from his body, “He died. He told us what he wanted for a funeral, he told us, Sax, are you just going to ignore that?”
“No,” Saxon answers, crushing the brochure is his clenched fist. still, at the word, Lochlan feels a moment of relief until Saxon continues, “No I don’t care. He didn’t, ‘die,’ Lochlan, he killed himself. If he cared about what people did with his body he should have fucking stayed inside it.”
“Maybe,” Lochlan feels like he is shattering, like a porcelain vase lined with cracks, one brush breaking it into a dozen pieces. “Maybe he was too sad.”
“We’re all sad,” Saxon shouts. “he wasn’t special.”
Lochlan drops his eyes, grips the edge of the mahogany coffin with both fists and focuses on the texture of the satin, the way it glides between his fingers. Behind him, he hears Saxon tell the director that they will take the plain, pine coffin. Then, the muffled slam of the door, and in the silence he can hear the dull sound his tears make as they hit the wood.
***
At night, in his sleeping bag with his back resting against the hard edges of the coffee table, Lochlan googles death by slit throat. Piper breathes, easily and steadily, across the room, a soggy tissue still clutched in her fist. Lochlan checks the ‘show me adult content” button and scrolls through photo after phot, some of them obviously faked for movies, some of them showing the waxy skin of a long-dead corpse, some of them still red and oozing blood. He zooms in on the medical diagrams,, the kind that peel back each layer of skin and fat and tissue to show you what is underneath.
A cut deep enough to kill will probably slice through your windpipe, the blood and air mixing on their way down to your lungs, to your heart. Not the slow getting colder and colder and fallings asleep of blood loss but a gasping for breath, a blind panic of suffocation, a drowning in your own blood. A drowning on dry land.
You can make fake blood out of Hershey syrup if you are filming in black and white.
It takes a lot of pressure to cut deep enough to kill.
Lochlan gets up, his limbs aching from sitting in one position, and creeps to their shared bathroom. The phone in his hand reads 2:45am. His siblings are sleeping, his mother passed out drunk. In the bathroom, he shuts the door and flicks on the light, catching sight of his pale face in the mirror, squinting against the sudden light. Opening the medicine cabinet, he finds a jam jar half-full of q-tips and dumps them onto the closed toilet seat. Wrapping the now-empty glass jar in a hand towel, he takes a breath and hits it against the side of the sink. Absolutely nothing happens.
Even when they are committed, most people only manage to cut deep enough to bleed a little, the body’s natural defense against pain kicking in and stilling their hands. He whacks the towel against the basin again, harder this time, and feels the glass shatter beneath his hand.
He spreads out the uneven pieces on the tiled floor like treasure, chooses one that is straight and flat and sharp, and presses it to the soft flesh on the inside of his arm. It stings, sharp and cold, like jumping into icy water. He takes one deep breath and draws it across his skin. The pain is instant and blinding. He gasps from it. A moment of terror, eyes pressed closed, he had wanted to know if he could do it but what if he can, what is he has? He can’t tell Saxon, or mom, or anyone. No one will come and save him. He opens his eyes. A thin trail of red bisects his arm, beaded like rubies. Not much blood at all. He wipes it away with a tissue, which he buries at the bottom of the small trash can, and examines the thin cut along his arm. Almost nothing. He had tried as hard as he could and barely broken the skin.
***
“We should ask father Monty to do the service,” Victoria says over dinner. They are eating hamburgers still wrapped in greasy paper. The illicit thrill has worn off, and the plasticky bun sticks to the roof of Lochlan’s mouth. Piper picks at a wilted salad, having refused even the French fries since Lochlan told her they are probably fried in pork grease. He regretted it immediately, but sometimes his mouth just says things. It’s hard to have all this knowledge in his head and still remember that no one wants to know.
“Who?” Saxon’s asks, mouth full. Victoria purses her lips but doesn’t say anything. Lochlan remembers how they used to sit when dad was out of town, which was often in the early days, Victoria at one end of the table dishing out food that she had carried in, but not cooked, and Saxon at the other end, the man of the house even at fourteen, sixteen.
“You know. He baptized you. All of you.”
“Hmm.” Saxon shakes his head, voice cold, “no I don’t remember that.”
It’s a lie. True for his own, maybe, but mom used to tell a story about ten-year-old Saxon pitching a fit when dad asked someone else to be Lochlan’s godfather. That’s my job, Saxon had whined, then burst into tears when the adults laughed at him. Instead, dad had asked his former business partner, a man who hasn’t spoken to the family since they returned from Thailand but whose name littered the damning statements they had been sent by dad’s lawyers, back when it mattered. My little man, mom would say, her eyes gleaming in a way they never did for Piper or Lochlan. Now, though, she sighs and fusses with her napkin and Saxon answers her comments sharply, if at all, eyes looking away.
“He’s our family’s priest,” Victoria continues, twisting the napkin between her hands, “always has been. He should usher your father, you know, onwards.”
Piper snorts and repeats “onwards” under her breath, half a glance at Lochlan. He gives her a tiny smile, even though his throat feels tight.
“The church doesn’t do suicides,” Saxon says. “it’s against God. he won’t touch us.”
Victoria makes a choked little moan.
“That’s not right,” Piper isn’t smiling anymore. “That’s not fair.”
“Yeah,” Saxon has this gleam in his eye, the one that Lochlan used to look forward to because it came moments before Saxon leaned forward and whispered some damning comment in his ear, some secret gossip or a cutting remark, something to separate them from the others. Their own team. Lochlan hasn’t felt like he is one of the team, recently. “He’s not going to heaven, you know.”
“Of course your father is in Heaven,” Victoria gasps, then claps her hand over her eyes. She stands up from the table and walks unsteadily to the kitchen counter, pours herself a large gin. Piper shoots Saxon a glare across the table but he just shrugs at her. Not my problem.
“That’s what they say,” Saxon calls after her, “your precious priest.” Victoria drains her glass and pours another, then crosses the room and shuts her bedroom door sharply behind her. The siblings glance at each other, uncertain in the silence, and then Saxon reaches out, grabs Victoria’s unfinished burger, and takes a vicious bite.
Piper sets down her fork, plastic because Saxon hates doing unnecessary dishes, stands up and pulls on her coat, and yanks open the door. Standing int he doorway, she looks back at Lochlan, a silent invitation. He avoids her eyes, looking out the window until he hears the door shut and her footsteps fading.
***
At night, Piper sobs into her hands, her face pressed into a pillow that hardly muffles the sound. Lochlan sits up, reaches out a hand to touch her shoulder, and then stops. There was a time when he would sit on Piper’s bed after a bad day at school, would cry in front of her easily and let her stroke his hair and tell him that the other kids just didn’t appreciate him, that he was special and good and things would get better. Then, sometime in her late teens, Piper started keeping them door closed when she was in her room, stopped eating meat and started contradicting their father over dinner. Started curling her hair and getting popular at school and when Lochlan started high school, tall and clumsy and friendless at fourteen, she would half-wave at him in the cafeteria but never invited him to sit with her friends. Once, he caught her sneaking back in her window at 3am and asked why she hand’t told him, he could have helped, and she had rolled her eyes and laughed so hard she couldn’t breathe. In Thailand, maybe, it felt like things were getting back to normal. Except when he tried to whisper to her that night at the monetary, she had pretended to fall asleep. Except, when he wanted to stay with her, she told him no. He lets his hand fall back to his side, lies down with his back to her and puts his hands flat over his ears, and tries to sleep.
And hour later, he stands up and pads to the bathroom. He thinks he sees Piper move in the darkness, her sobs ceasing for a second as she catches her breath, but h doesn’t look at her. He splashes water on his face, swishes some in his mouth against the inexplicably bad taste he always seems to wake up with when he sleeps on the floor. If he doesn’t sleep, he’ll be useless at work tomorrow. they’ll fire him and he will have to come home and tell everyone. Taking a breath, he knocks three times softly on Saxon’s door and, without waiting for a response, turns the doorknob. It sticks for a moment, and he wonders, briefly, if things have gotten so bad that Saxon locks his door at night. If its because of him. And then the knob squeaks and the door swings open so suddenly that Lochlan stumbles a little bit over the threshold.
“Can I come in here?” Lochlan whispers, standing over the bed. Saxon is a lumpy shape in the dark, barely stirring, and Lochlan’s hands ghost over the objects on his bedside table as he waits, fingertips brushing an alarm clock and a glass of water. Not a bottle like Lochlan always has, but an open-topped glass, because Saxon claims it wakes him up too much to have to unscrew a cap. “Piper’s crying and I can’t sleep.”
“Mmm,” Saxon says, and rolls over so there towards the other side of the bed, burying his face in a pillow. Lochlan picks up an incongruous box of matches and shakes them lightly as he tried to figure out if it is an invitation. He lets his fingers dip into the water glass, startlingly cold. Then he shrugs and crawls in beside Saxon, pulling the covers up to his chin and settling on his back.
The softness of the mattress is a shock after his usual setup, the comforter airy and loose compared to the confines of his sleeping bag. It’s uncanny, in a way, like how sleeping in a different bed on vacation makes you feel, just a little bit, like a different person.
“Are you awake?” Lochlan whispers, eyes open in the dark. Light from the street lamps peeks around the edges of Saxon’s blackout curtains. Trust Saxon to cover his windows and then wake up to a natural-light alarm clock, its dull numbers reading just slightly the wrong time. Long fingers of light crawl across the floor, reaching out towards them. lochlan curls a little farther towards the middle of the bed, inexplicably afraid that if the light touches him, something bad will happen. As if something bad hasn’t already happened. As if, maybe, he is afraid of dying after all.
Saxon sighs and crooks over, planted himself to Lochlan’s back and wraps warm arms around his stomach. Presses his Face into the back of Lochlan’s neck, his hot, bitter breath curling across his cheek.
“Are you awake?” Lochlan asks again, but Saxon does nothing except keep breathing, long and slow.
It’s like being three again, or six. Like calling Saxon in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep for fear of long, crooked fingers snaking around his closet door. When mom and dad were holding a party downstairs and he couldn’t stop thinking about one of the guests accidentally brushing too close to one of his moms cotton-scented candles and forgetting to stop, drop, and roll. When he couldn’t stop wondering heather it would be safer to jump out of his bedroom window or try to take the stairs, and who was going to get Piper in her room on the third floor, and which of is favorite toys he would carry in his arms to save them from the flames.
It’s like being eight again, ten. Saxon sneaking in from a night our partying, the sickly-sweet smell of beer on his breath, climbing through Lochlan’s windows because you could get there by crawling across the roof of the garage and then falling asleep in his bed, hot, sticky, hands, skin smelling of alcohol and sweat and other mysterious, adult things.
It’s like being in Thailand, Saxon grinning at him through the haze of the drugs, Saxon’s face twisted in pleasure as he comes, Saxon’s eyes locking on his in the dark, pupils blown wide. When Chloe had stood up and gone to the bathroom, and he had curled up against Saxon’s chest, and the air smelled like sex and salt water.
And maybe, finally, things are going to be okay.
He wakes up to the sound of Saxon retching into a small trash can, cradling it in his arms like a child. The fake sunlight from Saxon’s clock turns the air an eerie yellow, the canned birdsong scratching at the back of his mind. Lochlan rubs his eyes and sits up.
“Are you sick?” He asks. Maybe today, Saxon will stay home from work, and Lochlan can stay home with him, bring him cups of ginger ale and blue Gatorade from the gas station down the street. Maybe they will watch a movie, some new action flick that they missed in the theaters.
Saxon turns, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, mouth twisted in disgust. His face is grey.
“What did we do?” His voice breaks, just a bit, on the last syllable.
“Hmm?” Lochlan is still trying to wake up, trying to reconcile his brother’s anger with the softness of his dreams.
“What did we do, last night?” Saxon asks again, then shakes his head. “Maybe I don’t want to know.”
“No,” Lochlan tries to forms his slippery thoughts into words. “Nothing. We didn’t do anything.”
“What?” Saxon blinks at him. “Don’t lie to me. You’re always lying to me. What did I do to you?”
“Nothing,” to you. As if its a crime, as if its a trick. “You let me sleep here because Piper was crying. that’s all.”
“That’s…you mean I didn’t? Anything?”
“You just let me sleep here.” You put your arms around me, Lochlan thinks. You made me think things were better. You made me think you weren’t angry anymore. He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t think he has the words to make Saxon understand. Saxons scrubs his hands over his face, still shaking slightly.
“Don’t do it again,” he snaps. And then gets up and vanishes into the bathroom. When he doesn’t come back for ten, fifteen minutes, Lochlan drags himself out of bed and into the kitchen. Piper raises her eyebrows at him as he emerges from Saxon’s room, and then she must catch something in his expression, because she doesn’t say anything As she hands over a cup of hot coffee. Lochlan stirs in his usual cream and sugar, but when he finally takes a sip, the sweetness makes him sick.
***
The day of the funeral dawns bright and hot. It always rains on Good Friday, he remembers his grandma telling them, because God is crying. It’s always sunny on Easter.
Well, it looks like God is not crying over Timothy Ratliff.
Piper wears the same back sundress she brought on their trip four months ago ago. Something about it turns Lochlan’s stomach. Saxon wears a dark red and purple patterned tie which looks strangely familiar.
“Is that dad’s?” Lochlan asks, as Saxon holds open the door and lets them all file out ahead of him.
“No,” Saxon snaps, shutting the door with more force than necessary. Lochlan doesn’t believe him.
No one comes. It’s all Lochlan can think of as the priest talks, a different one who didn’t baptize any of them, from the small church across town that was within their budget to rent—charity for the disgraced millionaire apparently being in poor taste. He reads out a list of dad’s accomplishments, dates and times and awards delivered in a flat monotone. Piper cries quietly, wiping the tears and snot away with the sleeves of her sweater pulled down over her hands. Victoria cries loudly, so loudly that the priest occasionally pauses and looks up at her, opens his mouth but never manages to speak. Saxon’s jaw is locked closed, the tendons in his neck pulled taught. Easy to cut through, Lochlan thinks for a moment. All that blood.
Lochlan doesn’t cry. he feels like he should, but suddenly he doesn’t know how. He tries screwing up his face, squeezing his eyes closed, and then opening them wide until they start to water. Saxon glances over at him, sharply, his eyebrows raised. Lochlan looks away. He still doesn’t cry.
No one comes. Not dad’s old colleagues, not the friends who used to flock to their parties, sipping champagne int he garden and laughing loudly outside his window at night, bring their children to swim in the in-ground pool, attend mom’s book clubs where no one ever read the book. Mom’s sister sits in the second row with two squirming children and a baby, and hustles them all out half way through the service when the baby starts screaming. The woman from the funeral home stands in the back, tapping on her phone with her bright pink acrylic nails. The priest keeps checking his notes, which someone must have provided, says that he will be missed. Winds down and then shakes each of their hands at the door.
“He is, we can only hope, in a better place,” the priest says as he grips Lochlan’s hands, all sweaty palms and body odor. Hope? Shouldn’t he, of all of them, be sure. Isn’t that his job? Lochlan smiles at him, and then wonders if smiling is in poor taste. Wonders how long the will have to wait before it become appropriate to laugh again. He bites down hard on his tongue.
They load the coffin from a rolling dolly into the hearse. The driver walks off for a cigarette break, Saxon and Piper bundling mom into the back seat of their own car, and Lochlan crawls into the bed of their hearse. For a moment, it feels like being a child, like playing a game, like squeezing between the seats of their old minivan to climb into the trunk and scare mom into thinking he had run off, Piper giggling between her hands. Then his knee knocks the coffin and it isn’t funny anymore.
He just wants to see. Just once, for a minute. If they never see the body, then it could be some kind of mistake. And dad doesn’t forgiven mistakes like that, not big ones. He wonders if the embalmers will have done any makeup on his, like the garish red lip gloss and caked on foundation his grandmother had worn at her own burial. if they would have stitched back together the seam in his neck. He grips the edge of the coffin lid, takes a deep breath, and lifts. Nothing happens. He tugs harder, digging his nails into the gap, but the lid is nailed down tight.
From the graveyard, they can hear screams, not of the dead, but from the football stadium down the block. And maybe that’s where everyone is, what they’ve chosen to do instead of saying goodbye to his dad, scream their voices hoarse and get drunk on overpriced beer and cheese pretzels, cheer their team into yet another early-season loss. He’s not sure if that’s better or worse than just not coming at all. He wishes himself there, lost in the crush of the crowd, lost in the noise.
Their names are all carved into the massive headstone, granite with raw, natural-style edges, in birth order. Dad’s at the top, death date clear and fresh. Lochlan’s at the bottom, squeezed a little too close to Piper’s, the surprise third child. All of them lined up, ready to lie in the ground, side by side.
They hear the announcer, calling the downs, the teams neck and neck. Piper hands them each a flower to lay on top top the coffin and then the man in dirty work pants climbs into his excavator and presses a button and the coffin slowly descends into the hole. It’s unreal, the moment in a comedy before the clown jumps out. Dad doesn’t jump out. The coffin hits the bottom of the hole with a thump.
“Most people like to leave for this part,” the man says, voice gruff behind his bushy beard.
“We don’t.” Lochlan responds, and his siblings glance at him. But for once, he feels sure. Mom stumbles back to the car and leaves behind her a silence, deep and wide. The excavator plows dirt into the grave, the sound of it hitting the wood almost like rain. A clean, fresh rain. Lochlan takes a step closer, and feels thee warmth of two bodies pressed in behind him. The machine beeps as it smoothes over the top and Lochlan reaches blindly backwards and feels Saxon and Piper take his hands, interlace their fingers. They watch as the soil is smoothed flat, as the gravedigger climbs down and lies a fresh rectangle of turf on top, watch the place where their father lies disappear into the ground, like it was never there. Like he was never there.
As if in response, the distant crowd cheers, even louder than before.
Saxon pulls out his phone, flicks at the screen with his fingers.
“Duke won,” he says, sounding just a little awed, “they just won.”
The rain starts as soon as they get home, lashing out he windows. Saxon drags in a blanket, sets it up on the sofa and brings them each a cup of hot chocolate. With two marshmallows, like Lochlan likes.
“Maybe God is crying for him after all,” Lochlan says, and no one answers.
Piper switches on the tv, a baking show where contestants can sabotage each other with rubber knives and skim milk. Saxon fusses in the kitchen, and then he comes and stands between them, nudges Lochlan with his foot until he scoots over and Saxon sits down with an arms around each sibling. Piper cuddles into his side and after a moment, Lochlan does, too, tucking up his feet and pressing his cheeks to Saxon’s shoulder, inhaling the smell of his shampoo. Saxon doesn’t push him away. The woman on screen tries to crack an egg only to discovering it is made of plastic. Saxon laughs, loud in the quiet room, and holds him closer. Finally, Lochlan starts to cry.