Chapter Thirty One
As Shap pedaled into G.O.D.’s parking lot, with Mike on the back of the bike, Rico walked through the front door of Helen’s house and called her name. It was rare Helen wasn’t sitting in the living room waiting to greet him, and when he received no reply he ran into the kitchen thinking she might have fallen asleep in her favorite chair. She’d grown very fond of staring at the lightning struck tree that sat a half dozen feet from her kitchen window. He found her chair empty.
Her father, who had flown in a couple days prior, spoke from the back of the house, “She’s sleeping. She didn’t get out of bed today.”
Helen’s father joined him in the kitchen, and Rico pulled a couple of beers from the fridge and opened them. They stood opposite each other. Her father spoke first, “This is the end, isn’t it?”
“I think so. She’s never spent an entire day in bed.”
“I couldn’t wake her.”
“What would be the point?”
“Could I impose on you to drive me to the church up the street? I’d like a little time to myself.”
“Of course, anything I can do.” Rico finished his beer in a single pull and set the empty bottle in the sink.
Dropping her father at the empty church, Rico waited until he was certain the church doors opened and then called out, “I’ll be back in an hour, if you’re not outside I’ll come back an hour after that. You know the house number if you need to call.” Helen’s father disappeared into the church. He looked shrunken, and smaller than Rico remembered him to be.
Back at the house Rico found a dollar bill on the kitchen table. It wasn’t there when he had left; at least he didn’t remember it being there. When he saw the dollar, a sadness he didn’t know existed welled up within him and he ran to the bedroom, hoping against all logic that Helen was awake. He found their room as he’d left it in the morning.
Her clothes were in the closet, shoes scattered throughout the floor. She didn’t need them any longer. Weeks earlier she’d asked him to donate her clothes to a local charity. She’d started to stuff everything she owned into trash bags to make it easier for Rico, but he’d begged her to stop. It was too sad to bear, and he promised he’d see her wishes carried out. On the bed, at peace at last, lay Helen. She had lost the bet and died alone in the house. Men tend to die with their families surrounding them, and women when no one is around. Helen was no exception. Rico sat and held her hand as it grew cold. Finally, the phone rang. He’d forgotten to pick up her father.
“Forget about me?”
“I’m sorry, I’ll be right there. I have some bad news.” Rico had no idea how to soften the blow, “Helen passed.” He pulled the sheet up to cover Helen.
Helen’s father cried openly. He didn’t ask any details.
Rico hung up the phone, too numb to cry. For today he was all cried out and knew if he lay on the couch it’d be months before he got on with his life, at which time he’d surely be unemployed. His health benefits didn’t recognize the grief of losing his best friend, and he’d never felt this alone in his life. He drove to pick up her father and called Hospice when they got back to the house.
Hospice coordinated the pick-up of her body, and its cremation. After Helen was loaded in the hearse, her father left for the airport and last flight home. He wanted to tell his wife, Helen’s mother, in person. He’d call Rico with details about the memorial service, when the arrangements were final.
Alone, Rico returned to the kitchen and fell heavily into her favorite chair. The silence was deafening, and the tinnitus that he never seemed to notice when Helen was around rang uncomfortably. Tiredness overcame him, making the smallest of tasks feel insurmountable. He sat with his elbow on the table, and his head crookedly balanced against the fist of his right hand. He hurt to his core from heartache. As he stared out the window, a thousand yards in the distance, he pondered the unanswerable question, “What were the odds he’d finally fall in love and the girl would die a year after they met?” For the last couple of weeks he longed to talk to her, but the disease had taken away his mischievous, fun loving Helen. For the past half a week, she was unable to answer yes, or no, to the simplest of questions during the few hours a day she was awake.
Later, anxious and uncomfortable at being alone, and without the energy to cook, Rico stood in the kitchen eating dinner; crackers from the box. Afterwards, in a sorry attempt to manage his grief, he returned to the kitchen table and sat drinking beer he couldn’t taste. He’d quit smoking pot a few weeks before. He couldn’t handle getting stoned when Helen fought to remember the simplest of words or carry on the most elementary of conversations.
In a fog he walked into the next room, uncased his guitar, and returned to the kitchen table. To distract himself he sat and worked on his music. He spent a long time working out the lyrics and chords which best expressed his overwhelmingly sad emotions. In the middle of the night, as he finished the song he’d started the first time he met Helen, he heard a strange noise coming from the backyard.
Sitting in the lightning struck tree, and hooting at the window, was an Arctic owl. Rico stood, guitar in hand, and looked at the owl a long time. Uncertain if the bird would fly away Rico figured he would open the window slightly and play the song he’d just finished writing. The owl hooted wildly, and Rico played that song, and a handful of other songs he’d recently written, the rest of the night. Around four in the morning, at the first tell of daybreak, the owl flew away.
With the sun fully raised, Rico grew concerned that sitting in Helen’s house alone all day would lead to unhealthy choices. As miserable as his job was it would keep him occupied and he decided it was in his best interest to go to work. On the drive in he made a resolution. He was done with G.O.D. Life was short and fickle and he’d been treating music as an avocation for years, his music career stuck in neutral as life went by. He was going to commit to being a musician and see where it would take him. At work he reconnected with his agent, with whom he’d been notably remiss in staying in touch as Helen’s condition worsened, and asked him to book him into whatever he could. Where and when didn’t matter.
At day’s end, Rico returned to the table where he’d spent the last night. A little after sundown, after having dozed off in the kitchen chair, he was again woken by the owl which sat, as it had the night before, in the tree. Rico worked through the night penning and refining his songs, voicing and re-voicing the chords, modifying the progressions, laboring over the verses, framing the chorus and bridges. As daybreak approached he opened the window and played the magical owl the seven new songs he’d worked out. The owl hooted wildly, and like the night before flew off as dawn approached. Without intending to, Rico dozed off for a few hours as the sun slowly rose in the sky.
Rico returned to work, forty eight hours after Helen’s passing, absent a shower and dressed in the previous day’s clothes. Early in the afternoon his agent called back and let him know he’d booked him as a replacement for a like act that had quit at the last minute. Elaborating on why, the agent explained the poor man was suffering from, ‘exhaustion,’ and had to check into, ‘the nervous hospital’.
Rico would be playing a twenty seven show tour across the country. It wouldn’t be arenas, but state fairs and street festivals. Among the stops was the infamous Toad Suck Daze in Arkansas; aptly named for the locals that stood around sucking down booze until they swelled up like toads. Around six o’clock, Rico woke to found he’d fallen asleep with his head on the keyboard; hundreds of pages of the letter K unintentionally typed on the computer screen. He hurriedly gathered his things and began the drive back to Helen’s.
As Rico pulled onto Helen’s street, a utility company truck pulled from her driveway. Inside the truck, the workers were covered in wood chips. Rico ran into the house, looked out the kitchen window, and saw that the lightning struck tree had been cut down.