Down South
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Late summer.
The streets were paved with hurricane debris; the air alive with the sound of mosquitoes; and Edmond wanted to die with dignity, not with tubes up his nose.
He and I surveyed the muddy mess exposed by the receding Yellow River. His fish camp, and thirty years of his life, resembled a landfill on a busy day, his shack left with no electricity, no drinking water. With all the heart-felt compassion and empathy I could muster for one of a string of former stepfathers, I turned to him.
"Are you out of your effing mind, old man? It'll take months to put your Bohemian hellhole to rights. Get your ass back in the truck. You can rot in the med center for all I care."
But Edmond ignored my tirade. He furiously scribbled on his pad and jammed the paper in my face: That's the price you pay for living in paradise.
We didn't speak much after that.
Most days I cursed myself, the heat, and the bugs, while he wore an expression of grim determination. It was easy for him to do. I was the one who crawled into my sleeping bag each night, aching until my teeth hurt and smelling as if I'd tended camels.
He stayed in his own world, watching me sweat my guts out hauling splintered dock boards, cracked kitchen cabinets, gooey sheetrock and drippy insulation. If I had a free hand, I swatted mosquitoes that vacation brochures failed to mention were the size of toy poodles.
One muggy morning a half-drowned cat adopted us. I kept him around to chase the snakes the flood waters had forced to higher ground.
We became a team, that cat and me. Along with itchy welts and layers of pink calamine, I wore high boots and thick gloves and stirred piles with a rake before I picked them up and moved them outside.
Edmond fed the cat and shuffled around the trash in thread-bare khaki shorts and boat shoes.
I expected no thanks and Edmond spared me none.
He had monologues, not conversation, posting to-do notes for me to find. I flexed my burning back when I saw him plaster a sticky note above the water mark on the front door frame: squeegee the baseball.
His scrawl, borne of painkillers and meds I couldn't pronounce, stumped me, before I decided sheetrock then baseboard was what he meant.
Until I got his shack cleared out, we bivouacked in my truck camper. I would power up a portable generator for Edmond's breathing device, settle in to another can of cold tuna, and ignore tree frogs bellowing over the drone of his machine. Edmond slept sitting up.
I kept in touch with Mother by cell phone. She had a penchant for pruning the family tree, and Edmond ranked too many husbands down the food chain to warrant direct contact any more. Each call she'd ask what I was looking for, why I stayed.
I had no ready answer for her.
"Be a dear," she said, "and promise me you'll come to Monte Carlo?"
"Mother, have I ever missed one of your weddings?"
"Only the first one, darling," she said, and I heard the smile in her voice, the clink of ice cubes hitting expensive crystal. She paused, then quietly ventured, "Does he ask about me?"
"He can't talk, sweetheart, but we manage."
"I see," she said. "Well, all the same, don't let him browbeat you. He can be self-righteous, self-centered, self-indulgent—"
"Remember your blood pressure," I said. "Don't upset yourself."
"—and he will walk all over you, if you let him."
"So why on earth did you ever marry him?"
"Don't ask impertinent questions."
"You're right. I'm sorry."
She wanted me to call again in a few days, so I said I would; of course, I would. Didn't I always stay in touch?
A few moments later, I checked on Edmond. He slept, troubled in his rest, judging by the note I slipped from between his boney fingers: Sylvia?
He knew he was twenty years too late, even if he couldn't say the words.
Anger rose in me then, that same nameless sense that sat at the edge of my mind and had prodded me to come back here, a sense too vague to capture, but refusing to go away.
By the end of the second week, I quit aching in every muscle. We moved in to the shack that was stripped to concrete floor, and Edmond could no longer eat.
The Red Cross supplied us with army cots, so I bought an ice chest that I filled with sandwich meant, lettuce, and beef-steak tomatoes. Edmond took my homey efforts in stride.
Now that I no longer had exhaustion to lull me, something disturbed my rest, something more than trying to sleep in air as thick as a wet blanket. Silence surrounded me, total silence – no metallic sounds, no car motors, radios, planes landing, trains passing – sounds of my world that I was never aware existed.
I padded to the front porch, where stars flooded the sky without the haze of manmade lights to dim their glow. The scent of night-blooming jasmine wafted across my face on a moist breeze that sighed through the moss-draped oak branches. The river rambled nearby.
Cleaned up, the fish camp looked calm, inviting, deceptively serene, but I knew behind the lazy quiet lay an unspoken secret between the land and me.
I smiled.
Cavaliers once waltzed their ladies through such sultry nights. And it was on such a night I saw mother, her hair Gypsy wild and no makeup, dancing barefoot with Edmond in the moonlight, in a time before the arguments, the fights, the endless tears.
He took to his bed the next day, too weak to move about. I bathed the cold sweat from his face, his eyes speaking to me of lingering secrets and yielding fears.
"I do this for me, old man," I said, "not for you."
He nodded, milky depths entreating me with the weight of his own sins and imploring my forgiveness until I thought the heaviness in my chest would burst.
"You got the short end when you married Mother," I whispered. "The difference between us is, I can't walk away. For good or bad, I'll stick with her."
Edmond got agitated then, gestured, as if he wanted to write, so I handed him his pencil and note pad. But after he worked to get the words down, I couldn't decipher his scrawl: Remove smigma with cat butter.
The oncologist had explained in a soothing voice that Edmond would die in his sleep, and I had convinced myself he would go that simply.
The reality was far different. For two days, his life burned away from a body wracked with fevers that soared to 107 degrees, before he drowned in the fluid that filled his lungs, laboring through a stringy death rattle I would hear in all my nightmares.
Finally, cold and shrunken, he stopped, and we both knew the first peace we'd had in years. As if he never existed except in my fantasies, he looked lost amid the green army blanket, his body creating hardly a ripple under the cover.
I called Mother with the news.
"You'll be coming here, then?" she said.
"Not yet," I said, and knew I meant it. "I'll stick around here for a while. There are things I need to finish."
She muttered about the humidity and the insects, and I replied they weren't that bad. Then she blurted out, "Did he ask for me?"
"Yes, sweetheart," I said. "He wrote you a note," which wasn't a lie. Not really. Then I told her what she'd wanted—no, what she'd waited years—to hear.
And for long moments I simply held the phone while Mother broke down and sobbed.
* * * * *
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Story 5
Sweet Denial
flash fiction