Image by Dawn Estrin

There are sleepwalkers who tread the dark rooms of their homes, speaking the dialogue of their dreams, moving through two worlds at once.

My father was one. His heavy footfalls in the hallway woke me before dawn. Eyes closed, I waited for the suction pop and creak of the refrigerator door, the signal that he’d reached his destination. While I drifted back to sleep, Dad ate in his sleep, mining yogurt cups and scooping out curls of sour, slippery white foam. He ate handfuls of sliced hard salami from the meat drawer, a cluster of celery from the hydrator. Dreaming, he drank orange juice, Hi-C, and iced tea from their containers, leaving sticky crayon-colored splashes on the linoleum.

In the morning, I scowled into my yogurt cup. A furrow had been dug across the top, my breakfast violated. I was thirteen. Nothing was ever right.

“How can you eat that stuff?” Dad complained. “It has no flavor.”

“You’re supposed to stick your spoon down into it,” I told him. Somnambulist, he didn’t see the promise of apricot or strawberry.

Only once in his sleep-eating years did my father not return to bed. He lay down instead on the cold floor in front of the open refrigerator. In the morning, Mom almost tripped over him there, curled on his side in the dark, surrounded by carrot tops and Roman Meal bread bags. She poked him with her toe. She was disappointed when he roused.

“I thought he’d had a heart attack,” she told me when I was grown.

I WROTE MY FATHER’S EULOGY on an airplane, my notepad on the tray table. The words came easily, although I’d never written a eulogy, had never imagined writing one. Even though my father had been actively dying for several years, this concluding task had suddenly, surprisingly, fallen to me.

In the years I was small, my father wanted out, to eat a hole to the door, to dig to China with a spoon. When I was nineteen, he got his chance. A job overseas, and a year later, a move to Los Angeles. My mother divorced him. He landed in rural Massachusetts, where he settled into a new life, on a country road with an old car and a new wife. My father lost half a dozen jobs and his first marriage during my teens and twenties. He lost his two youngest children to cancer. He lost me to a truculence that equally matched his.

HIS EULOGY BEGAN LIKE THIS. Good afternoon. Some of you know me; I’m Jack’s daughter, Jessica. The fact that we are today only a few weeks from Father’s Day does not escape me. I rarely sent my father cards on Father’s Day – we had a ‘hit or miss’ relationship for much of our lives.

“I want to hold your gla-a-a-a-ands,” Dad sang along with the Beatles’ first album. That they wanted to hold my hand was clear, but my father, a rock-and-roll fan, seemed to think that they wanted to hold something else, something less sunny and cheerful that I, a first-grader, couldn’t put my finger on.

In fourth grade, I fell for his other favorite joke.

“I’m going to Panama City to speak at a conference about hemorrhoids,” Dad said over dinner. “Want to come along?”

Eager to be his companion, I said yes, not questioning why a lawyer would give a speech about medicine.

“That’s great,” Dad said, “because I will need to show those guys an example of one perfect asshole.”

My mother said, “For Christ’s sake, Jack.” She leaned over to my sister Sarah and helped her cut her food. Sarah was four. Our sister Susie, who would have been nine, had been dead a year.

Eager to perform, seeking the spotlight like a moth seeks flame, Dad heard only his joke, not my silence.

MY FATHER’S LUNG CANCER had been eating at him longer than he knew. It’s likely he suspected cancer growing in him, and kept his eyes closed. Maybe he thought he was willing to die. Dad liked jokes, but he loved drama.

For more than a year, specks the color of dried chili flakes had dotted the corners of his mouth. Red-streaked handkerchiefs dried in the pockets of his khakis. He had been a four-pack-a-day smoker since his teens. Lori, his second wife, saw the omens, heard his lungs groan like a harmonium. Maybe she kept her mouth closed, making cup after cup of chamomile tea for him, making soup, and fudge cookies. Or she urged him to go to the doctor, insisting for months until he made the appointment. He left the house cursing, I’m certain, gunning the engine of his battered black Oldsmobile. I imagine that sparks skittered from the slack tail pipe as he backed over the curb.

My father lived for two years after he learned he would die.

“People die,” my mother said, when I phoned to tell her he had inoperable cancer. She hadn’t known he was sick, and I knew she wouldn’t care. They hadn’t spoken for a decade, and then only terse exchanges at my wedding, an event for which she broke her long silence toward him to write him, call him, cajole him to come and celebrate. “This is not,” she reminded him, “about you.”

In the months before he died, I dug through boxes of family memorabilia looking for items that would entertain him. Among the detritus of other lost parts of life, I found my little lock and key child’s diary.

STANDING SOLO AT THE PODIUM, I watch my father’s friends. Row after row of metal folding chairs, each cradling a respectful, sorrowful, aging adult. I don’t know most of them. A few small children cling to parents or run to play on the lawn. Early summer in Massachusetts smells green, like fresh cut grass and cool breeze. Something hot and oily bullies through: the hint of a cookout down the street. Here, beside my father’s house in the shadow of October Mountain, the words I pieced together on the plane flow easily.

Giving speeches was my father’s skill before it was mine. When I was nine, he expected me to hold up my half of conversations that were part parry, part dazzle, and all lush, labyrinthine language. Dad introduced me to people well known in the news. I curtsied to the widow of a martyred Civil Rights leader, unsure how to greet her. Black netting hung from her hat. The fact that I could not see her face made me want to look away.

A gaping hole spreads between there and here, this stage from which I have been asked to explain my father, to love my father publicly.

MY FATHER DIED AT HOME, in the minutes when Lori left his side for what she thought would be an insignificant errand. The living room, with its rented hospital bed and oxygen tank, had become his dying room. Lori went to press the repeat button on the CD player, which my father called the hi-fi. Jessye Norman singing Amazing Grace lifted my father into the next world.

That autumn, Dad had announced that he wanted to be cremated. So much more efficient than a plain pine coffin, he said.

“Dad, we’re Jewish,” I said. “Can you even do that?”

We were not even slightly observant Jews. Every Passover, my father intoned “they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat,” before passing loaded dinner plates to my mother, my sisters, and me.

The funeral home carried my father’s body out of his front door in the dead of winter.

Days later, they delivered his body to the cemetery in a brown cardboard box. Lori and I trailed behind in my father’s car. We made small talk—good thing the snow was gone, because she had never gotten around to having chains put on the tires. Glad that Dad had a chance to see this friend or that before, well, you know. She parked at the cemetery and got out. She sat on the hood. I felt crazy-brave, the kind where you’ll do almost anything because for that moment, all the rules are suspended. We were in the country, not far from where my father and I had once pulled over to watch a red fox lope across a field.

Look and see, I told myself.

I peered into the tinted window of the van.

Human Remains, the box read, stamped in black type. This End Up.

My father had been six foot one: the box was narrow and long.

Cardboard boxes that ride a conveyor belt into a fire resemble the cardboard boxes used for shipping refrigerators.

In my diary were breathless comments like ‘Dad chased me with a water gun!’ In these notes is a Dad I had forgotten, who made up bedtime stories, taught me poems, and watched the Beatles at Shea with me on television when I was six.

While I speak, I remember not cardboard, but wood. I had gotten a splinter during one of my visits to my dying father. Seeing me gnaw at my fingertip, Dad asked what was wrong. “Splinter,” I told him, picking at the spot. “Let me try,” he said. My father’s hands shook, from medication or anxiety I didn’t know. I doubted his ability to extract the wood fragment, but I held out my hand. I couldn’t remember the last time my father had held my hand, and the pain in that thought made me look away. I stared at a potted plant while Dad dug at my finger with a tweezers, delivering a thin, dark shred of foreign matter. A spot of blood rose from the tiny hole in my skin.

LORI CALLED Dad’s memorial service a “planting party.” She planted a weeping cherry tree outside her dining room window, and left an open furrow around the roots to receive my father’s ashes. Dad had been delivered back to her in a clear plastic bag, the kind that might have held half a dozen oranges at the Price Chopper market. Lori put the bag away, and waited until spring for the ground to thaw.

On the morning of the planting party, I slipped into the hallway outside the living room. The rented bed was long gone, but the shelves still sagged under my father’s books and music. Lori had put his ashes inside a clay tureen.

I lifted the tureen’s lid.It formed a shape like a gaping mouth.

The voice of Señor Wences and his hand-shaped puppet Pedro emerged from the memory of the black and white television screen of my youth. The tureen’s interior was dark and smooth, the plastic bag stuffed inside, along with, inexplicably, a partially used box of Chanukah candles.

“T’saright?” I thought.

“T’saright,” I heard my father agree.

I unrolled the black twist-tie and pressed the pads of my fingers against the basest form of my father, powder gray as cigarette ash. I bent my fingertips against what had been his bones. They felt gritty, studded with hard, star-shaped flecks. My father’s bones looked like the calcified shards I had picked out of sand dollars at Panama City Beach in the fourth grade.

With fragments of my father under my fingernails, I said the Sh’ma for him, the most basic prayer in Judaism, the only one I knew by heart.

Sh’ma Israel, Adonai Elohaynu, Adonai Echad.

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one.”

My father believed that all Jews know the sh’ma, even those who were never formally taught the prayer.

There is a concept in Judaism called l’dor v’dor, meaning “from one generation to the next.” I am not religious. When I spoke the word “one,” my fingers rubbing something like sand, what I thought of was my father, my sisters, my mother, and myself.

WOMEN WEARING EMBROIDERED BLOUSES carried pots of flowers to the planting party, setting them on picnic tables before taking seats under the tent. They brought chili, lasagna, homemade three-bean salad. Men with hair like squirrel tails brought poetry and cookies. After the planting, we would eat and make toasts to my father. We would sing “We Shall Overcome” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.” A videotape of Dad’s last birthday before he got sick would roll along in the VCR.

Lori emerged from the kitchen, cradling the tureen. My father’s black dog ran behind her. The screen door banged. Lori drifted barefoot across the lawn. Arriving at the tree, she ladled a scoop of ashes over the upturned earth.

The tureen and ladle made their way around the circle of Dad’s friends. A warm breeze puffed the hem of my dress. A bird flew over. A motorcycle thrummed past on the road. When my turn came, I did what the others had done; dipped the ladle into the gritty ash and upended the contents over the roots. I was embarrassed. This felt like a made-up ceremony from summer camp, not a real funeral.

What I left out of Dad’s eulogy were the three funerals in my life before his. The first was my sister Susie’s, she eight to my ten, on a brittle cold day after her blindingly fast spin with cancer. The second, less shocking only because he was not a child, was the funeral of our father’s father. It was my hand that sprinkled the dirt over his casket. Dad was away, couldn’t be reached, did not come. My father’s ritual task fell to me. And the last funeral, my youngest sister Sarah, dead after twenty-seven years with an unconquerable illness, the lights from the medical examiner’s car and the ambulance spilling into her driveway.

This was our story, the father made empty.

WHEN THE LADLE TRAVELED full circle, we returned to the house to eat. Dad’s friends chuckled at the videotape, filled plates with food, and piled beer bottles on top of the TV set. They were comfortable in this house I couldn’t look at closely, where the ceilings were spotted tobacco-brown from leaking pipes, and chairs were piled deep with unopened mail and unwashed clothes.

In the kitchen, I took a beer from the picnic cooler. The kitchen was empty – just the drip of the faucet, the clunk and whine of the greasy yellow refrigerator, and a long view of the empty road outside.

I wanted that silence, and I wanted something to eat. I picked a wedge of tomato from a puddle of salad oil in the bottom of a wooden bowl. A heel of homemade bread sopped up the oil. I lifted the ladle from a pot of chili.

I knew what I saw. I wanted to look away.

The ladle was familiar, the kind of memory you feel in your muscles before your mind can identify why. This ladle had dispensed my father’s ashes into the earth.

I held it toward the daylight coming from the window. Chili streaked the spoon and the handle. A gray, grainy crust outlined the sauce along the dull metal shoulders of the spoon. The ladle that had served my father’s ashes to the earth had served the chili.

The things my father believed in life—justice, human rights, marvelous language—he gave to me. And the last earthly sign of my father I have is a streak of his ashes on a serving spoon. I remember my mother’s mornings, wondering if she would have to sweep him up from our kitchen floor. You are not, I thought, going to believe what I’m left to clean up now.

A BURST OF LAUGHTER flared from the other room. The phone rang somewhere in the house. I was alone in the kitchen with remnants of my father—he and I, and our horrible secret. I considered throwing the spoon on the counter and running out to my rental car, hitting the door-lock button and rolling up the windows: damsel in a horror movie. Then I imagined holding the spoon close and pressing it to my chest in a belated embrace for my father.

I watched the spoon as if it were an oracle. Do I wash it and return the ladle, clean and dry, to the drawer? Should I stuff it into the trashcan by the back door? That seemed wrong: I would be throwing my father in the garbage. Should I stick the ladle back in the bowl, return to the party, and avert my eyes from every plate? My father has returned from the dead stuck to a spoon.

Dad would laugh. I heard him in my memory, loud and jittery. He would relish the idea that his friends were at that moment pressing specks of him against their palates, assuming, perhaps, that the grit they felt in their mouths was merely roadside gravel, blown into their chili by the wind.

Sounds from the party grew louder; the chipmunk squeaks of the videotape rewinding, the swell and fall of conversation, some Bob Dylan or the Beatles from the hi-fi. These were the sounds of the parties my parents gave when I was a child, when I hung back from the crowd and picked black olives from the hors d’oeuvres tray. The pitted olives fit neatly on my fingertips. My habit was to take one for each finger. Nibbling ten olives, I watched and hungered to be an adult.

What do children believe adults can see that they cannot? Can adults see where the edge lies, the horizon starts, where the answers are found? What fills the holes in their hearts? Children believe that adults know what happens next.  Adults know that they can’t.

I am here to respect my father. Go ahead and look.

I set the ladle in the sink beside coffee cups and a wine cork. The grit of my father circled in eddies of water, finally settling in the dark.

Jessica Handler’s first book, Invisible Sisters: A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2009) is one of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Eight Great Southern Books in 2009” and Atlanta Magazine’s “Best Memoir of 2009,” as well as one of the “Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read” for 2010. Her nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, Brevity, More Magazine, Southern Arts Journal, and Ars Medica, and is forthcoming in New South and Defunct Magazine. She received the 2009 Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, and a special mention for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. Handler teaches creative writing in Atlanta, Georgia.

Image by Dawn Estrin

…about the summer of ‘77 is that in June after graduation from high school Kerry and I shared a double bed in her parents’ home as we had nearly every night of our senior year.

Her father joked about claiming me as a tax deduction. My mother, distracted by a new life with a new husband, would have put up little argument. Kerry was the sister I never had; I was the sister she wished hers had been. Sheila had let her down by getting pregnant during our sophomore year and marrying the boy their father warned them about. Sheila moved out of the house, out of Kerry’s bedroom, out of her life, leaving a hole for me to fill.

Neither of us cared about college back then. We were planning to share an apartment at the end of the summer. Kerry worked in customer service at a department store. I worked as a veterinarian’s assistant and for six months had cleaned dog cages, assisted in surgeries, and enjoyed sex romps with the vet, who was ten years older with a pregnant wife.

After work, Kerry would race home to hear about my day at the clinic and I would describe things like the large animal call at a dairy farm the vet, Billy, had taken me to. How the black-and-white Holsteins were lined head to tail in a narrow pen. How I leaned against a fence post, watching Billy roll his sleeve above his thick forearm, listening to him discuss with the farmer the weather and the alfalfa until Billy’s bare arm disappeared into the vagina of a cow, all this reminding me of my first pap smear three months earlier, the humiliating chitchat of doctor and nurse between my open legs.

And after palpating thirty-some cows, Billy had driven us to an inn for turnip greens and cornbread. The drive back included a stop for missionary sex on a scratchy wool blanket in a meadow off the Blue Ridge Parkway, just beyond the view of tourists and my mother who traveled the Parkway every evening on her way home from work. The day before, sex had been over the grooming table at the clinic. Two days earlier, in a bed at the Motel 6. But Kerry knew all this. I was sharing everything with her.

Kerry was still a virgin, although she’d come close one night in May with the lead drummer in our high school band. She blamed herself for Bruce joining the army instead of sticking around to take her to the senior prom, so I canceled my prom date to spend the night with her. While our classmates partied in hotel rooms with bathtubs filled with gin and tonic, we got drunk on Malt Duck and drove recklessly through peach orchards, dodging trees as if they were demons on our trail.

One Saturday, we bought Cosmopolitan, candy bars, and Mt. Dews. Kerry dangled her bubblegum pink toenails out the window in time with KC and the Sunshine Band. I was driving the ’61 Ford Falcon, the one I had just learned to shift in the pasture behind my mother’s mobile home, stalling in the ruts, nearly throwing us through the windshield.

In Kerry’s backyard, we spread her grandmother’s patchwork quilt. Our bodies, oiled with cocoa butter, turned and basted on the half hour. We flipped through magazine pages, Kerry preferring ads that revealed the best lip-gloss while I read articles about becoming a worldly, sexy Cosmo Girl.

Her father was weeding the vegetable patch and caught my eye. Hi, Mr. Jones! Kerry’s father liked me; I made him laugh, like scolding him for voting for Carter because, on a tip from the Marine recruiter when I’d sneaked downtown to check out my options, Everyone knows Democrats start wars. I liked her father’s deep chuckle, this man who slept every night in the back of his pick-up truck under the camper shell, rather than in the bedroom with Kerry’s mother, this man who was so right about Sheila’s boyfriend, but who could never be right enough for his wife.

Kerry and I discussed sex, Billy, and his wife: the other woman. Correction. I was the other woman. Have you seen her lately? I told Kerry how she had dropped in at the clinic. Don’t you feel funny around her? Strange, I said, but seeing her never bothered me. She just…is, I had said; I just…am. And I explained about how sex was about, well, sex, and how marriage was about the commitment stuff, like with her parents. Kerry quietly mulled this over. But don’t you think about how things are when he’s not with you? Doesn’t it drive you crazy? Above us, clouds were forming into shapes my mind was refusing to recognize. I closed my eyes. Yeah, I said, sometimes it bothers me a lot.

Wednesday was Ladies Night at the Holiday Inn near the airport, and that June Kerry and I dressed in halter-tops, clingy nylon skirts, and high platform heels. Salesmen bought us whiskey sours and asked to dance. Kerry never said yes; I never said no. I caressed lined necks, ran my fingers through thinning hair, and sometimes went so far as to nibble on an ear lobe. How can you do that? Kerry asked.

See the pleasure it brings them, the way their eyes flutter half-shut. Later that evening while she slept, I’d make up stories in my head—a carryover from childhood when I would sit in the rocking chair beside my bedroom window and imagine the lives of all the people driving past. After Ladies Nights, I imagined salesmen in their upstairs hotel rooms, fantasizing about me.

In the lounge, though, Kerry was wrinkling her face. She said the smell of Jim Beam breath turned her off; I said it reminded me of my father, who I had not seen in more than three years, not since he smashed his way through the front door Christmas Eve after the divorce, drunk, splattering blood on the walls, ripping the telephone from the wall and hurling it at my mother.

After work one night, Kerry squealed over a letter her drummer-turned-soldier boyfriend, Bruce, had written from boot camp. He loves me! Says he wants to see me when he gets home on leave. This time, she said, I’ll get the sex thing right.

That night, we lay in her double bed and wrestled with apprehension. The fan in the bedroom window drew in the night air. Kerry reached for the sheet and brought it and her face close to mine. What if I can’t do it right? I could nearly taste her mint toothpaste. I remember giggling, thinking no one could do it wrong if they actually did it at all, but I said reassuringly, You’ll do it right.

July

On the Fourth, temperatures in the Appalachian valley were climbing. Kerry was giddy about meeting Bruce that afternoon in a motel room. Billy had plans for me, too, at a motel on the outskirts of town while his wife lay in the hospital from premature labor with their son.

You’d think Billy would have initiated the end of our affair. He was nearing thirty with everything to lose, yet seemed addicted to risk. I wasn’t much better. I was telling myself that I was using him and this enabled me to cope with the self-hatred. By July, however, I was tired of sneaking in and out of motel rooms and tired of having sex in orchards at night with peach pits pressing into my kidneys as he tried too hard to fill an empty well.

Everyone in town knew Mill Mountain offered the best view of the city’s fireworks display. I arrived early with beer and a blanket, waiting for Kerry under the giant electric star that on nights when someone died in a car accident, flashed red; white if all were safe. On the Fourth, it was flashing red, white, and blue.

At dusk, I spotted Kerry weaving around lawn chairs, family picnics, and a couple throwing a Frisbee. I remember searching her face and body for a signal that she was no longer a virgin, imagining I would find the answer to what it was about my appearance that seemed to give me away to men like Billy. Kerry looked the same, though. Happy, but the same.

At the clinic I took reservations to board pets during family stints to the beach or the mountains. The surgery list was light: a spay for a calico cat; a broken leg on a hound-mix that had tangled with oncoming traffic; on a boxer a suspicious cyst that required removal and lab testing. I was preparing surgical instruments for sterilization when Billy announced an emergency call at another farm.

The drive took us over bumpy back roads. Billy pulled me close and drove with one hand; the other moved up and down the inside of my thigh and under the hem of my shorts. The farmer was waiting at the end of his driveway, not at the barn as we‘d expected, and when Billy shouted, Move! I jumped to the passenger side with such force I nearly shattered my shoulder.

We followed the farmer through lumpy pastures to a cow tethered to a tree. She was standing, moaning from labor with twin calves. I stood ready to ferry surgical instruments as Billy called for them. Easy, little mama, he said, sliding his right arm to the elbow inside the cow. His eyes closed. He lifted to his toes and balanced his weight against the cow’s haunches.

After a minute or so, he grimaced and broke into a sweat, then relaxed on his heels with his arm still inside the cow. I scurried over and wiped his face. Thank you, he whispered. On his toes again, he pushed his arm deeper inside the cow. Come on little fella, turn for me. What I saw turning was Billy’s arm as it twisted right and then left. Right. Left. The cow moaned and rocked against the slack of the rope that bound her to the tree. Billy looked over his shoulder at the farmer and shook his head. I have a leg. The farmer nodded. Billy turned his gaze toward where I was standing. He stared until I felt an odd weight, as if somewhere in my face lay the map for making all this right.

What emerged first was a tiny hoof and then the shapely pastern and fetlock until finally the entire limb was dangling outside its mother’s body. Billy walked to the truck and pulled out a saw. By the time he returned, the farmer had a two-hand hold on the leg and pulled downward as Billy carved the leg from the body, slicing through muscle and bone until it dropped into the farmer’s hands. He tossed it toward the tree. Billy reached back inside the cow and freed another leg. The farmer pulled and Billy sawed. Next, the buttocks were manipulated out, then the body, then the head, then the two front legs.

Billy pulled the second calf headfirst through the birth canal. A stillborn. Fresh blood and afterbirth dumped onto the grass beneath the mother cow and onto Billy’s boots. The summer air felt thick with blood.

The dead, but otherwise perfect calf lay near the scattered parts of its twin. As the farmer and Billy bagged her young ones, the mother brayed toward the limbs of the tree: a sound that rattled marrow from the tip of my tailbone clear to the top of my spine.

Each night that July, Kerry and I met in her double bed to share our secrets. She was in love. Bruce would soon leave for three years in Germany and the closer the date of his departure, the more in love she became. She hoped he would talk about marriage. She planned to say yes if he asked her to run away with him to Germany. And it was in this moment, I discovered I could leave her, after all.

Billy wanted me to run away with him, too, to an overnight veterinarian conference in Raleigh. When he insisted on buying me new clothes for the trip, I accused him of being ashamed of me and my frayed denim shorts, my tank tops and pink bikini with royal blue polka dots, my mile-high platform shoes, and the sneakers I re-dyed white every Saturday morning from a bottle of shoe polish. What little money I earned as his vet assistant, I spent on gas for the Falcon, booze, and frilly underwear.

When we returned from Raleigh, I found Kerry sprawled across our double bed, sobbing. He said he’d write me, that’s all. I handed her tissues, wrapped my arms around her. Just as well, I said, in a half-hearted attempt to make her laugh, I would have said no to your marrying a drummer anyway.

August

What I can tell you now after all these years is that two weeks into August and with no word from Bruce, I finally persuaded Kerry into one last Ladies Night at the Holiday Inn. That night, she dared to dance with strangers. The Holiday Inn became her laboratory of love. She flirted and finally relaxed in the arms of a salesman from Ohio. He was telling her how beautiful she was and she was laughing. Only I knew she wasn’t really laughing…she was aching for Bruce, and this salesman from Cleveland with the greasy hair, long sideburns, and clip-on tie was a lousy substitute no matter how many whiskey sours she’d downed.

When we got home, we crept past her father’s truck where he was sleeping and tiptoed into the basement. Too drunk to lie down and risk the spinning bed, we sat on the sofa. Kerry pulled her knees to her chest and began to cry. I put my arm around her. I miss him so much…why hasn’t he written…God, I need him…. And then she kissed me. I leaned backwards, but she moved for me, pressing her mouth against mine, her tongue searching for mine in a way my mouth had never been explored, then, or since; her lips were soft and full and warm and with the sweetness of the whiskey sour mix still on them. I felt myself leaning into her to lick the sweetness from her mouth, but this appeared to have stung her with the reality of what we were doing and she pushed away from me to the opposite end of the sofa. Not once in all these years did we speak of this.

The last summer Saturday of ‘77, Kerry and I sat in her kitchen, outlining the assets we could take to an apartment. Hung-over from a keg party, we were nibbling on the sausage balls her mother had made for breakfast.

In the left column, Kerry jotted bed, dresser, and hope chest. She drew a question mark by kitchen table and chairs, and mumbled something about a promise from an aunt. My column included bed, dresser, and an old sofa from my mother.

We spent the entire afternoon at Kmart, pricing dishes, silverware, and towels, because I was too chicken to tell Kerry that I had sneaked back downtown to the recruiting office and joined the Marines. That I’d had a hard time, too, convincing the recruiter I wasn’t running from the police. But I was running. I was running to save myself from all the drinking, from the small-town life, from the strangers at the Holiday Inn, from Billy, and from Kerry. I should have guessed that the next night Kerry would sob and say I was just like Bruce who had shipped out on her, just like Sheila who had abandoned her, and that she would wrap her arms around me at the Mill Mountain Look Out Point, city lights winking back, and that I would grow more and more fearful with each second in her arms that she would and wouldn’t kiss me again.

But in the Kmart, I continued to call out prices of dishtowels and shelf paper as Kerry recorded them in her notebook. She helped me pick out a new dress for what would be my last date that night with Billy.

At the restaurant, Billy and I crossed an arched, red wooden bridge that extended over a stream alongside the building. At the top of the bridge, we paused to look at Koi so anxious for food that their mouths broke the plane of water and made soft squishing sounds.

Inside, we sat by a window with a view of the stream and bridge. Billy ordered from the French menu for both of us. He filled my glass with wine and talked about how this had been the best summer of his life. He reached for my hand, turned it over, and dropped a black velvet box into my palm. Now, you’ll have to accept this, because I’m calling it a graduation gift. He was smiling, looking too innocent to hear the news I was about to deliver at the end of our evening. Open it.

Inside was an intricately carved gold ring that supported a black onyx. Billy lifted the ring from the box and read the inscription: summer of ’77.

Later that evening, we drove through the city in his Triumph convertible with the top down. The giant star atop Mill Mountain was a white blaze of false security. Above the roar of wind, Billy shouted he was heading toward an orchard on Highway 604 to make love to me under the peach trees. How well I knew that road. My family, before the divorce, had lived in a 1920s bungalow on a hill overlooking the highway. At night, headlights from traffic rounding the curve before our driveway skittered across the walls and ceiling of my bedroom.

As he drove, Billy talked about our future, about setting me up in an apartment of my own, about how we would see each other whenever he could get away. He could not see I was crying from sadness and relief. We were still moments away from lying on a blanket under the peach trees, surrounded by the decay of rotting fruit, and from me telling Billy this was where the summer of ’77 was ending and where real life was beginning. The ring around my finger felt tight, confining. For a moment, I plotted to secretly bury the ring under a peach tree before leaving – it would be dark, he wouldn’t notice as he fumbled for his pants – and then returning in a year to uncover how it had been changed.

He downshifted through the curves, passing one peach orchard, preferring another farther down the highway, and I realized he had chosen the orchard just beyond my childhood home, the peach orchard where Kerry and I, on prom night in May, drunk, had driven wildly among the rows of flowering peach trees as if we were being chased by demons. Billy whizzed past the 1920s bungalow. I looked up the hill toward the bedroom windows that had long ago been mine and wondered what had happened to the little girl who once dreamed up happy stories about the people driving by.

Tracy Crow is a former Marine Corps officer and an award-winning military journalist. Her memoir, EYES RIGHT, about her experiences as a Marine journalist during the groundbreaking 1980s, is forthcoming in 2011 from the University of Nebraska Press. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Puerto del Sol, and others, and have been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes. Her short story, “Natural Selection,” based on events from her life as a Marine, was recently anthologized alongside work from Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, and Kurt Vonnegut in the Press 53 collection, Home of the Brave. Tracy earned her M.F.A. from Queens University of Charlotte, and teaches journalism and creative writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Image by Dawn Estrin, 2010.
(See also “The Impostors” by Sarah Kunstler.)

I didn’t mean to get high.

It started with a twinge in my shoulder. I’ve had bouts of lower back pain brought on by too much exercise after not enough of it, and the discomfort was similar, only this time it was in my shoulder. By the time I got home from work, the twinge had turned into a throb, like the muscles were flexing in the wrong direction. I took some aspirin, camped out on the couch, and waited for the pain to go away. But it didn’t go away. It got worse.

It was the strangest thing. I could move my arm and not feel a thing, but if I twisted it in a certain way, it sent spastic jolts up and down my arm. The weird thing about it was I hadn’t injured my shoulder, exerted myself during exercise, or even slept on it funny.  I thought of one of my late grandfather’s favorite jokes:

A guy goes to the doctor. “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” The doctor looks him over.  “Then don’t do that!”

So I didn’t do that, at least for a little while, but when I tried to get up from the couch the pain was crippling. I called my wife on the phone and told her my symptoms.

“Gee,” she said, “I hope you’re not having a heart attack.”

Oh shit. I thought of all the articles I’d read about guys having heart attacks and not realizing it, and causing all kinds of damage to their aorta in the process. I’d always wondered How can you have a heart attack and not know it? Was this what was happening to me? I didn’t know much about cardiac arrest, but I did know shooting pain in the left arm was one of the symptoms. But a heart attack? Really?

My family had a history of bad tickers. Both of my maternal grandparents died of strokes before my mother turned 16. I thought about the grandparents I never knew. I thought about my new marriage and young daughter and the boatload of money I spend on health insurance. That settled it. When my wife got home, I asked her to take me to the emergency room.

As soon as I stepped inside the hospital, the doubts came creeping back. There’s nothing wrong with me… I shouldn’t be here… The people in the waiting room are much worse off…

Except there was something wrong with me. By this time, I could barely move my arm. I held it pressed to my chest like it was broken. When the nurse who checked me in asked me to rank my pain from one to ten, I said five. Then he offered me some vicodin. I said, No thanks, and told him I’d wait until I saw the doctor. My wife admonished me for downplaying my pain.

I had my reasons. I hadn’t taken a single drug or drop of liquor in exactly nine months. In the time it takes to make a baby, the strongest thing that had passed my lips was a double espresso. I’d gone to countless meetings and listened to hundreds of people give advice on how to stay clean and sober, and there I was in the hospital where they were passing out pills like potato chips. It was a regular party in the ER, and my wife was urging me to jump right in. I felt deeply conflicted about all this, and I didn’t know what to do.

Cardiac cases get top priority at the ER, so before I could re-think my position on the vicodin, a German nurse whisked me away to a bed. After my wife helped me put on the gown, the German nurse came back with a sling for my arm. A Filipina nurse’s aide prepped me for the EKG and hooked me up to the machines. A male Filipino doctor fired questions at me about my symptoms. He was blunt in his assessment:

“I don’t think you’re having a heart attack, but I’m not taking any chances. So I’m going to give you some morphine, okay?”

I nodded, but on the inside, I felt like a guttersnipe in a Charles Dickens novel, begging thanks and weeping gratitude. Bless you, good sir. God bless you!

A Filipino nurse took my blood, plugged me into the IV, monitored by vitals on the flight deck. Every few minutes he’d come by to see how I was doing. Frankly, I was annoyed. I’d never had morphine before, and I wanted to enjoy the ride, not answer a million questions. It’s not like I’d dropped acid and the LSD was going to come on like gangbusters. And then the morphine came on like gangbusters.

There was nothing gradual about it. I’ve used the word “rush” to describe passing into an altered state, but none of those experiences came close to this. It felt like a wave passing through me, a slow-motion current that flowed through my body and went streaming upward. When it reached my head, I felt flush like a vessel that had been filled to the brim, only the substance was energy and I was overflowing with it.  I expelled the excess through my mouth, nose, and eyeballs, and when that didn’t happen fast enough it took the top of my head clean off.

“Wow.”

“You look better,” my wife said. “How do you feel?”

“High.”

Why lie? My head was feeling amazingly kite-like. I was way, way up there without a hint of turbulence. Yet I could still think rationally, and speak lucidly.

“How does your arm feel?”

Strangely, my arm felt the same. While the rest of my body felt completely relaxed, the pain in my arm continued unabated. If anything, I felt more uncomfortable than before. I passed this information on to the Filipino nurse when he came back for an update. “Hmmm,” he said, “I’ll get you something stronger.”

I mentally retracted my previous annoyance with this very wise and generous man.

A Caucasian male x-ray tech took my x-rays. My brother is an x-ray tech, and I tried to make small talk, but carrying on a conversation was difficult. The words burbled through my head, but getting my mouth to cooperate was a different story. A Latino hospital administrator took my money, and a Latina education officer asked me about my drug use, which was nonexistent. I’d been waiting for someone to ask me this all night, and was eager to out myself.

“I’ve been clean and sober nine months,” which is a weird thing to brag about while loaded on morphine.

“Congratulations,” she said.

The nurse’s aide came back with good news, and by good news I mean Dilaudid.

If the morphine was a wave, the Dilaudid crept in like fog. Sneaky and cat feety. I didn’t feel it working its way through my body the way I’d felt the morphine. I didn’t feel anything at all. The pain didn’t go away. It was just gone.

A television mounted above my bed leaked bullshit, but the screen faced away from me so I didn’t have to watch it. I couldn’t hear the TV either, even though I knew it was on because it captivated my wife’s attention. It reminded me of the time I tried to carry on a conversation with my friends at a bar after drinking way too much cough syrup. I couldn’t hear a word they said, even when they shouted directly into my ear, yet I could discern with perfect clarity the lyrics blasting out of the juke box. Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame, you give love a bad name (a bad name).

At the time, this was undoubtedly true. I did give love a bad name, but now I was focused on the whole shot-through-the-heart thing. I tried to concentrate, but was distracted by the rush of water coursing through invisible pipes, the woman in the next room who sounded like she needed drugs more than I did, nurses coming and going, asking questions, giving instructions, their departure punctuated by the rattle of the curtains that partitioned the rooms. The curtains were fascinating, and worthy of further study. Decorated with gigantic purple dahlias, they undulated in an invisible breeze.

Me: Look at the dahlias, big purple dahlias…

My wife: They’re dandelions.

Me: But they’re so big. And purple.

My wife: They’re not purple, Jim, they’re blue.

I’m not accustomed to winning many arguments with my wife, and the prospect of prevailing while under the influence of morphine and Dilaudid, a combination a friend in Arkansas who has seen the inside of numerous ERs calls the “Snack Pack,” seemed dubious at best. Besides, I didn’t want to argue with my wife, who seemed more beautiful, caring, and patient by the minute. But I took photographs of the curtains, for documentation. (They’re blue.)

The Filipino doctor returned with the data from the EKG:  I wasn’t having a heart attack. My heart was fine. He advised me to make an appointment with my general practitioner, and released me. By the time I signed all the paperwork, and changed back into my street clothes, it was well past three o’clock in the morning.

“How’s your pain?” my wife asked.

“What pain?”

“You are something else.”

With one arm in a sling and another wrapped around my wife, my heart never felt better.

Jim Ruland is the author of the short story collection, Big Lonesome, and the host of the L.A.-based reading series Vermin on the Mount. He lives in San Diego with his wife the visual artist Nuvia Crisol Guerra.“Shot Through the Heart” first appeared in Razorcake Fanzine and is reprinted here with permission.