All This Life

THE FUNERAL WAS a fist. It had tear ducts. The funeral was held in a lung, clammy and loud with mourners plucking clumsy ballads on heartstrings and razor wire. Grief felt tight to the body, like a wetsuit, squeezing Noah911’s anatomy into a tangle of pall and regret. He could smell this funeral a mile away, pungent with feral, barnyard odors. People sat on platitudes with prayers that sounded like this: Why why why, Noah911? or a slow gurgling croon of No no no. .

Everyone was numb and drunk.

Everyone was alive and dead.

And Noah911 was having trouble breathing from the broken rib. He was alone, might as well have been on a witness stand, everybody else jammed in a jury box, the minister banging a gavel on his Bible and belting out, “Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!”

THERE WAS A reception afterward. Platters of deli meat and bottled beer, homemade cookies and condolences. Noah911 was avoiding people, or they steered clear of him. It was his beaten-up face, his rumpled blazer. It was a two-day-old shave. It was nothing.

He watched people rally around his mother and father, watched all the pity and sympathy being expressed. He stood in a corner trying not to get wasted, hadn’t eaten since a pastrami sandwich in O’Hare and this first vodka on the rocks went straight to his concussion.

His cousins were no better than his parents’ friends. Both sets of grandparents were dead, so there was no one to shroud him in unconditional support. This whole room was full of rubberneckers looking at Noah911.

We live in a society of second chances, he thinks. Should I confess? Should I tell all these leeches what they want to hear? Should I scream in all their faces, “I did it. It was me. I threw her off the fucking bridge”?

Instead, he made small talk with the smattering of people who approached him. He drank too much vodka, though he didn’t get loud or crass. They expressed feelings. Noah911 faked his. They stared at his injuries and excused themselves from his company at the first lull in the awkward conversations.

Even his favorite aunt — his mother’s sister — said to him, “We need to know what really happened, sweetie.”

“Me too.”

“You know more of the story than we do. Or you should.”

“I should. You’re right about that.”

Noah911 said he had to use the bathroom but went in a different room. Tracey’s. The crafting studio. He stood in the sour smell of new paint, surrounded by these things bought to cover up his sister’s absence. He pulled out his phone and switched his return flight so he’d leave later tonight. Catch the nine o’clock to Denver, and from there connect back to his new life.

ALL OF THESE events contributed to the pattern of escalating invasions. All of these were the worst part of the trip, a whole festival of betrayals.

But now Noah911 is in the kitchen by himself, eating an omelet. His mom is taking a nap; his father is finishing the assembly of that chair. It’s 5 pm, the service and reception over, the friends and relations on their way back to their own miseries. The house is quiet again, and he hasn’t told his parents that he’s leaving tonight. He can call a cab, slip out, and be free of this place and its insinuations before anyone misses him — if anyone would miss him.

He cooked the omelet on too high a heat. The outside of it is patterned in scorched creases of egg, while the inside is runny and gelatinous, cheese barely melted in places. But this isn’t about taste. He slops a piece of toast through the snot and hopes this helps soak up some vodka.

“Here,” says his father.

He puts a Ziploc bag on the kitchen table.

To Noah911, it looks filled with instant oatmeal.

“What’s this?” he says.

“We want you to have these.”

His father picks the Ziploc bag up and thrusts them at him. A joust. A retaliation that means if you can’t protect her alive, try this. Try carting this around. Never forget what you did, Noah911.

“I don’t want that,” he says to his dad.

“Why?” he asks, shaking the bag furiously at his son. “Why don’t you want these?”

“Please stop.”

“It’s not all of her. We’re keeping some. But this is your share.”

“I can’t.”

“Take them, god damn it.”

Noah911 imagines his dad divvying her up, like a drug dealer, weighing out bags of powder, and for the first time since she died, Noah911 cries. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s your mess.”

“Don’t say that.”

His father drops the Ziploc bag onto Noah911’s plate, right onto the runny eggs, then walks out of the room. Noah911 sits there staring at the ashes, scared of them. Finally, after thirty seconds or so, he runs a sponge under the faucet and then dabs the baggy clean, like he’s caring for wildlife after an oil spill.