And Then the Gray Heaven Read online

  B is dead later that morning. No one calls me. But I know.

  I officially find out a day and a night later because B’s family contacts our neighbor Tina with the dyed little mermaid hair for a spare key, and our neighbor Tina with the dyed little mermaid hair asks if no one could get a hold of me; and B’s family pretends not to know this “Jules” and then ask Tina again to make sure she doesn’t have a spare key. Tina is confused and a decent human being, so she comes over to the studio to offer her condolences.

  I am a squirrely mess. I have been mostly on the futon for two days and Tina comes and wraps her big sweaty hands around my greasy head and she doesn’t say anything and I cry. Then she says I’m sorry for a while. Probably forever. This is the first non-smalltalk conversation I have ever had with Tina and I think to myself it’s going pretty well, considering.

  After more crying and Tina quick shit-talking B’s family to make me feel better, Tina has to go but says she’ll be back.

  Some darkness. Some light. I sit with Tina and watch the little television with the built-in VCR that’s in B’s studio. The only working tapes that we can find in B’s pile of plastic are All Dogs Go to Heaven, The King and I, and a Christian exercise video that teaches you how to run fast without losing your soul. I remember when we found that video in an estate sale trash pile.

  Let’s do it, Tina says, and we run like hell in place while the angelic video coach repeats Jesus is the breath within me and the wind that moves me. Jesus is the breath...

  Wow, says, Tina. I think I would go to aerobics church.

  I think for a minute and I say, no. You know this is a scam because there is definitely no running in heaven.

  Tina says: What about for like the joy of it? Like when you’re running across the airport to meet somebody you haven’t seen in a long time. Or like when you run to the diving board even though there’s that no running by the pool rule.

  No airports in heaven either.

  But I think heaven is all that part where you run into each other’s arms at the airport and hell is all that part where you wait in the security line.

  So the afterlife is just different parts of the airport?

  Yeah, Tina says. Unless you’re a celebrity.

  Next morning she comes with a gas station breakfast sandwich saying she has to go on a business trip, but she’ll send her sister’s kid—about your age—to check in on me. People have been saying they’d send someone to check in on me my whole life so I don’t think about it too much. Montage. More days eat themselves.

  7

  Blurs are important so I’m not going to pretend I’m not having one. I have this moment maybe a week in where I kind of wake up to myself and I am actually starting to worry I can’t do this on my own. It turns out cry naps are a special kind of nap that can replace everything else in your life. I have done some swimming and have eaten exactly twenty breakfast sandwiches from the gas station. I have swaddled my head in B’s grandmother’s blanket because B’s family would hate that.

  My afternoon activities include cleaning the pool and sacrificing myself to the creature family that lives under the porch. I carefully skim the bugs and the debris off the top of the pool water. I send that little sucker vacuum over the pool floor. I check the chemicals, and now I’m ready. I’ve even smeared some honey on my hands so it doesn’t take too long. Maybe the whole food chain will show up. A real event. I hope a gator will come. I crawl under the porch. Afternoon happens. Cars pass. Voices. Puppet shows. The light is being siphoned out of the sky by some unknowable softness. No sign of life. I lick the honey off of my hands. A little drama is good for loneliness. I think about how my body is my own best catastrophe snack. A dark thought. Darkest. I am my darkest self right now. Everyone else is darkest thems. I crawl out from under the porch and sit on the steps to lick the rest of the honey off my hands.

  That’s when a face blinks into my godforsaken window of view. I squint up for as long as I can to see if I have to do anything. I feel like I’m watching the face floating on a screen, and it gets bigger and bigger until it blots out the sun right in front of me.

  Hey, says the face. So casual.

  Oh hi. I don’t look up.

  Tina said you’d be here. I’m Theo...Adan? They throw on their last name at the end like it’s a clarifying question.

  I am here, I say. I do a quick jazz hands.

  They laugh but in a swallowed way.

  I meet their eyes, and they are kind and jumpy. While they figure out what to say next, I scan them. Good clothes. Bad shoes. Then I realize for the millionth time that I also have a body, and I feel a pang of humiliation followed by a hot wave of grief, and I put my head in my hands because it’s too damn much.

  I’m sorry, says Theo. Do you need anything? Tina said—

  No, thanks, I say. Sorry to be rude, but I think I just want to go to bed.

  But I wonder what Tina did say about me and B and grief and television. I open the front door to the house for the first time in weeks and step right in a tower of mail on the floor built up to the slot, which slides in every direction. I fall down. I don’t try to catch myself, so I fall hard. On the way down I feel free. Theo rushes in behind me, and I feel them push some of the mail out of the way and brace me with their body from behind.

  I’ve got you, Jules.

  So strange to hear my name.

  Is your bedroom up these stairs?

  Sure, I say.

  I flop onto B’s side of the bed and fall asleep before I can even torture myself with the dip in their pillow where their head used to be. In the deepest darkest sleep of my life, I am rescued from dreaming.

  When I wake up, I feel hungover and a thousand years old. There is a crying crust in the corners of my eyes and my nose is running. I have definitely been drooling. I’m about to go back downstairs and out to the futon to coil back into B’s grandmother’s blanket, when I hear my name again. Theo is down there saying something else, and I’m rubbing my eyes and thinking what is this person still doing in my house. Now I’m going to have to shower and dress myself. And chat.

  But when you haven’t felt good in awhile, it’s amazing how hot water streaming over your collar bones can be a revelation. I make it so hot I get burned a little down my back and my arms and I love it. I throw on an old Alf Christmas t-shirt B used to wear all the time. Under the fragrance-free completely generic detergent smell, there is a sharp remnant of B’s smell, and I’m out. I don’t mean that I faint, I just mean I’m out on my feet.

  How often do you leave your head like that? Where do you go? What do you see?

  When I was first getting ready to go into foster care, I had some important sessions with the group home therapist to check on my head. She asked me lots of questions about this way of being empty and walking around. She was trying to polish me up for human socializing. Her name was Kim and she was severe, and I think from that same neighborhood where the group home was, which always made me feel close to her despite her being cold as hell, openly manipulative, and oblivious to real danger. She drove a BMW convertible and carried fancy coffees around in a collection of travel mugs, which are the most obvious accessory announcing somebody’s got a real home to go to. She always had an intern with her, Marc, and she was the meanest to him. If she wasn’t around and something bad happened that she could get blamed for, like that time there was a standoff on the second landing between two kids with scissors, it was Marc’s fault. So naturally he overidentified with us, which we used to our advantage to get popsicles or his old Nintendo—or once, this kid Deonte even managed to get him to cosign on a new kind of prepaid phone card someone was offering over the phone.

  So the morning I was scheduled to meet with Kim for another assessment, I was eating Fruit Loops, and Marc came over and poured himself a bowl. He sat next to me and he said something so softly I barely heard him.

  He said, hey, you know this meeting is to figure out if we can place you.

  No, I said
, I didn’t know. You mean, Kim is going to keep me from leaving?

  Well, the things you’ve been telling us about what you see and hear sometimes—we call those hallucinations.

  Like my glitches? I said.

  Yeah, your glitches. And when you go “into the wall of the room” instead of being in the room with everyone else. What you call being “out.” Those are things that would mean you need special treatment, so you might not get placed with a family right now.

  I had no idea. I was just trying to figure out how to get them to let me go white water rafting that weekend even though I didn’t meet the weight requirement, and here was this huge thing I didn’t even know enough to lie about. I think Marc was just trying to prepare me in case I didn’t get what I wanted, but he kicked off a chain reaction in my little tornado alley brain.

  So we’re sitting there eating Fruit Loops and mine are getting soggy, and Marc’s looking at me with that sick pity look I’ve gotten a billion times, and light bulb. Since it may have been my only chance to get out of that place, I needed to be less crazy than I actually was. I got that what was going on inside me was this language no one else could speak, and I was the only translator for miles around. I realized that I could lie. But this kind of lying was more honorable than lying about regular reality, since the lie would bring me closer to other people.

  When I met with Kim and she asked me the questions about my hallucinations, I made a new script. I said something like, “I don’t go anywhere. I just take a long time to think,” and I stuck to that, over and over. In every session, I just talked about it like my head was a chill head, a pleasant head, a totally basic head. I later learned they downgraded my diagnosis to a learning disability (FM told me they told her I wouldn’t amount to much in school), which meant I was probably not a danger. Just like that, I was fit for a family.

  8

  From the bottom of the stairs I can see Theo sitting at the kitchen table with a few small stacks of envelopes.

  Hey, they say to me for the second time in our lives. I hope you don’t mind, I started sorting. Not so treacherous anymore—they nod to the mail heap by the door behind me, the one I had slipped in earlier.

  Thanks. Listen, I appreciate your help and Tina was sweet to send you, but I’m good.

  They just look at me for a second and then blow right through my wall. Yeah, but how are you feeling?

  To my complete surprise, I laugh. Honestly? Like bottomless shit.

  They laugh too. We’re laughing.

  Also, B’s brother Alvin called, Theo says. He’s a charmer.

  B’s name sounds weird too, now coming out of the mouth of someone who never met them. It feels like we’re having kitchen talk in an alternate universe.

  So what’s your deal? Do you just live in the area, or? I squint because what I’m feeling is like not being able to see.

  Um, yeah, kind of. They raise their eyebrows and look around the room uncomfortably.

  I catch myself: sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. I press the pressure point between my thumb and index finger. What, uh, what did Alvin say?

  Well, he said he wants to talk to you about the cremation service.

  What? I say.

  What even is the word cremation. It sounds too much like a dairy farm for people and (I’m maybe going out again). I try to stay, and listen.

  Theo says, I think you should talk to him for the rest, but basically, it’s scheduled for tomorrow.

  Wow way to pull through, Al, I say to no one in particular. All the ways I wasn’t invited to be part of B’s living world, but now that they’ll be disappearing forever, I can come on by.

  Theo hands me a little slip of paper with a phone number—he’s still on business, they say. Couldn’t get back in time. I blink in fake disbelief and Theo smiles, and then we both inhale sharply at the same time. I like a kind of discomfort that can be shared. I don’t want Theo to leave while I’m on the phone and all of a sudden am so worried that they will.

  And you’ll be here? I say.

  Of course, Theo says. They lowkey smile.

  In B’s studio, I open the piece of paper I’ve already crumpled with worry and dial the number on my cell. From the window of the studio I can see into the garage. The line rings. I still haven’t been in there. I can see the shorty stepladder set up in the spot where B fell, a single ominous clue in the mystery of what was B doing with the last intention of their life and also how the hell did this happen. Two rings. I crane my neck to see the floor around the ladder. Three rings. Four. I don’t see any blood there, but I imagine it, which is much worse.

  You’ve got Alvin, a voice says.

  No one’s got you, do they Al? I say back.

  He doesn’t know what to do with me. He laughs awkwardly like we’re joking with each other.

  Oh, Jules, he says with a big sigh, which feels real. How are you doing?

  I’m okay, I say. I mean, I’m still here.

  Glad to hear it, he says. Anything I can do for you?

  It takes everything in me not to scream into the phone about how he could call the goddamn hospital weeks ago and give them permission to let me into B’s room. Or maybe he could talk to his family two or five or ten or fifteen years ago about me coming for the holidays or being a totally unthreatening lovely person, who by the way, happens to love someone they love—which you think would be the best thing in the world to bond over. Or maybe he could have paid us back that money we loaned him from B’s work in New York, which we would have then to buy a little bungalow with no garage where B would certainly not have fallen on the concrete floor and smashed their head open. WHO KNOWS?

  I just say: probably not, but thanks.

  I wanted to let you know about the cremation service, he says. Right, I say. Tomorrow?

  Yeah, I’m sorry I can’t go, but I told the family, and I told them, you know...that’s what B would have wanted—for you to be there.

  You know, Al, that’s really thoughtful, I say. My body is shaking, but I am working to keep my voice steady.

  He gives me the address and the time. I’m getting ready to hang up, and he starts saying something that takes him a long time to form, so it’s just sounds for a few seconds.

  I’m sorry, he says. I’m so sorry for your loss. I know how much you—I know B loved you.

  Wow, I say.

  So much, he says quickly.

  I, uh thank you. In the silence between us, I have a fantasy moment in which I wonder if Alvin and I could actually be friends again. Then he says:

  And I’m sorry—about what happened at the hospital. That must have been...really hard.

  He knows about my break-in. I feel sunburned with shame.

  Don’t worry. No one’s going to charge you, he says. We don’t think you, you know, tampered with anything.

  Oh well thank god for that! I say loud and sour. And then I hang up the phone.

  There is no way I am going into the crematory just because they decided I’m allowed. I said goodbye to B in that hospital room, despite everything. I said goodbye.

  9

  Alvin first came to visit B and me when he was eighteen, but carefully watched over, and languishing in the spotlight of that real, attentive parenting. He was on summer break, and B had just a semester before started at FGCU in sculpture. We had a tiny apartment with four roommates and no real kitchen, and a gross pool shared but not so maintained by the apartment complex. B and Alvin would stew in that pool while I worked the night shift at the gas station a few blocks down. The pool was filled with brown palm leaves and dirt and some dead grasshoppers, but neither of them cared. They’d both been swimming in the Atlantic most of their lives and were not sold on the joys of chlorine. At dawn they’d come pick me up from work and we’d slide into a booth at this tiny yellow diner at the front of the trailer park where I would start my next job in an hour or two as a home care assistant. On the night between my two birthdays I managed to call out of both jobs and woke up in the
actual morning next to B, a rare joy. What I remember best about that apartment was our bedroom window facing east. How we moved over each other in the mornings. Those first low orange beams coming under the half-pulled shade. Violins. A drum. Something trilling. A whole orchestra hiding in daylight.

  When Alvin woke up we set the plan for the day: pack lunch for the park, hop in the waterfall, Wonder Gardens, movie, cake #1 at Waffle World (spinning case top shelf, coconut cream), cake #2 one of my home care clients (Roberta, red velvet), cake #3 with roommates (cookie cake, no one could bake).

  Because B had just started building habitats at Everglades Wonder Gardens part-time to pay tuition and materials fees, we went for free and even got special bracelets that gave us behind-the-scenes access to tank checks! feedings! hidden lagoons! science! snake danger! break room snacks! baby animals galore! Even Alvin seemed genuinely thrilled to be there, betraying his regular skater malaise bullshit attitude. He loved the flamingoes in particular, and they loved him. Somewhere I still have a picture of him that day with his arms around a cuddly bunch of fuzzy gray teen flamingoes looking at the camera like he can’t believe it. Alvin was a pretty sweet kid back then, but he had a lot of angst, and that hot anger was something his family seemed eager to sweep behind the blackout curtains of his cleverness. Alvin and I found allies in each other right away: I too was cratered with anger in a way that everyone in my life was always trying to help me ignore. Perhaps that’s why that day, even though we were just getting to know each other, he felt more comfortable bringing his heartbreak to me than B.