The Immediate Aftermath


Freshly scarred, I am a passenger on the ride home from my father and step-mother’s house. The fields of Pennsylvania give way to the grit of Philadelphia and Wilmington. From the back seat, I stare as I-95 rolls into Route 213. We take the bridge over Chesapeake City, hurtle by Dairy Queen, the high school, the liquor store. The car turns right on Town Point Road, more stubbled cornfields hugged by matchstick trees, then passes through the shrinking woods (lions and tigers and bears, oh my, we used to chant). Another right turn and then we pull into my grandfather’s driveway.

Although I saw him at the funeral, I avoid my grandfather’s eyes when he greets me, gets up stiffly from his reclining chair. There is clean-up to be done. Dad drags the bloody mattress to the end of the driveway, has a laugh with my mother at the ancient pack of pilfered Pall-Malls I’d jammed underneath (thank God I hid the empty beer bottles in the boxspring of the other mattress). He and my step-mother hug me, wave good-bye from the car. My mother walks to her bubble down the street. And I settle back into the little house.

I watch television as late as I can stand it, old reruns of Kung Fu and Fantasy Island, taking sips from a warm bottle of Budweiser. I listen for your footsteps, coming up the drive waiting for redemption to appear in the form of my boyfriend, back from college. He usually shows after 1:00 a.m., always under the influence of something, but he cares enough to show, and I feel the familiar mix of love, neglect, and anger, the sharpened axe with the worn wooden handle.

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This night, however, he arrives by 10:00 p.m., bearing bottles of whiskey and Coke. I don’t know it yet, but he found out about the stillbirth through a mutual friend who heard the police dispatch call. He waits for me to tell him – an awkward and halting conversation -- and then he cries as I hold him. My sensitive, neglectful boy asks “Do you wish you had gone through with it?” as though I controlled the outcome.

My mother chooses to believe my lies about why his car is always parked nearby. Everyone chooses to believe that I’m OK, that I would tell them if I wasn’t.