It was the end of August. Jennifer lived with her 12-year-old daughter. Her husband stayed on the other side of the city in a house that used to be theirs, but now was his. “He’s late,” Mimi said. She twisted the strings of her blue hoodie in one hand and stared into her cellphone. “He’s never late.” Every Saturday Mimi stayed with him at the house. That had been their agreement. “Don’t worry.” Jennifer soothed her daughter.
Mimi tucked the cellphone into her back pocket and threw a few books into a satchel. Jennifer watched her leave, wondered whether it was excitement or dread that made her daughter stiffen as she turned toward the door. Sometimes Jennifer caught herself wondering whether Mimi blamed her for their separation, but erased the thought, remembered the day Mimi saw their new apartment with trees and plots of red begonias and golden lantana. A miniature waterfall greeted them near the rental office of the development. “It looks like a resort,” said Mimi galloping around. “Ma, it’s so beautiful! I love it!” Ten minutes later, Mimi walked back into the kitchen to find her reading a magazine at the table. “He’s not outside to pick me up.” She repeated her mantra from earlier. “He’s never late.” “Did you call?” Mimi rolled her eyes like that was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. “He’s not answering his phone.” She stomped her foot. “He’s never late. Ever.” Mimi grabbed the magazine from Jennifer’s and shook it in her face. “Don’t worry,” Jennifer said. “It’s his medication. It puts him to sleep. He never gets up until after noon, sometimes later.” Bryan had recently come home from the hospital where the doctors had tried to tell him that if he didn’t stop drinking, he’d kill himself. She’d been trying to tell him that for years. Mimi paced back and forth. “Want me to drive you over?” Mimi nodded, yes, definitely yes. They left together and didn’t say anything. It took ten minutes to get there. Jennifer pulled up to the curb. The plum tree growing in the parking strip was heavy with ripe globes with a mash of red smeared around its trunk. The neighborhood kids enjoyed having plum wars, and threw ripe fruit at each other. Jennifer saw the shadow of a bird’s wing on the pavement. They stepped inside. The air hung dark and dank inside like a clothesline of wet burlap. Jennifer walked into his room with Mimi. Jennifer saw the shape of his bulk beneath the covers. “You see,” she tried to convince herself without sounding self-righteous. “There he is. He’s sleeping.” Mimi backed away and ran into the dining room. “No, he’s dead.” Papers and folders were scattered around his mattress. Jennifer pulled off the covers and touched him gently. “Bryan, it’s us. Jennifer and Mimi,” thinking their names had the power to wake him. His skin felt rubbery. She looked at his fingers, his toes. They were blue, his body inflated. He could be a balloon in a parade, she thought. She felt his shadow escape the bed, not the first time Jennifer had encountered death. The parakeet she’d chased around her parent’s living room, which had flown from molding to molding, and smashed its beak against the wall in a frantic effort to escape. She was horrified to see it motionless and a few beads of blood on the parquet floor. Jennifer had buried the bird in the vacant lot that adjoined their apartment building; later, her father who had died in a hospice center run by nuns, how he warned her as she stood next to the railings of his bedside about a room inside a room as though he was part of an espionage plot, pushing her away with all the strength which cancer had stolen from him. “Get out of here,” he cried. “Before they get you too!” And her mother, whom the doctors had predicted would predecease her father, who had survived one year past his funeral but dehydrated on the way to a beach holiday. Jennifer had felt the jolt of her mother’s death like a branch had been torn away from its trunk. She heard it snap. She and her mother had always missed each other. Jennifer looked at Bryan lying there on his back. He had fallen away into the deep hole of an endless depression. She could not help him.
She rushed outside to find Mimi and hugged her. They had to get out.