Totally and Completely Fine(7)

I just wanted to be okay again.

I was pretty sure I never would be.

Gabe just hummed and nodded. What else could he do?

I’d done the same when we’d tried to talk about his drinking for all those years. Gabe might have been the professional actor, but everyone in our family was pretty good at pretending like we were just fine. Totally fine. Completely fine.

If my dad’s death had been the trial run, well, then Spencer’s death was the marathon.

Except I’d be running forever. There was no finish line. Just the constant ache of your muscles and your shortness of breath and the thirst for something you couldn’t have and the voice that said “You can’t stop.”

You can never stop.

Teddy was in the window of the rental when we pulled up. I could see her tail wagging furiously.

The car had just barely halted when Lena leapt from it.

Gabe tossed her the keys as she bolted down the driveway, and she didn’t catch them, but didn’t seem to care that she fumbled as she snatched them up and got the door open.

“Teddy!” she cried, opening her arms to greet the furry mutt that plowed right into her and began licking her face as if she were made of sausage.

“Well,” Gabe said, pulling her bag out of the car, “at least she’s glad to see one of us.”

Chapter 5

Then

It got harder and harder to pretend that things were okay when they shaved Dad’s head. When he came home with a big, bulky bandage that eventually revealed a long, jagged scar across his skull. That’s when everyone knew something was wrong. When people would come up to Mom in the middle of the grocery store, their eyes shining with unshed tears.

“You must be heartbroken,” they’d say.

Or: “I can’t imagine what this must be like for you.”

Or: “How can you bear it?”

Or: “I knew someone who was sick like that, and he’s fine. Have faith.”

Or: “We’ll pray for you.”

Or: “He was such a nice man.”

He’d still been alive at that point. But it didn’t really matter—as far as the town was concerned, he was going to die and therefore was already dead in a way. Easier to get through the mourning process if you did it preemptively, or something like that.

The doctor said that his hair would come back and cover the scar, but Dad didn’t live long enough for that to happen.

The funeral was the first time I met Spencer’s mother, Diana.

Cooper was a small town, so there were a couple of things I knew about her. She was a churchgoing woman. She wasn’t divorced but her husband—Spencer’s dad—wasn’t around. Details varied when it came to what had happened. Some people said he was a drunk who just took off one night. Or he was a drug addict. Or a gambling addict.

The basic gist was that Diana was a saint and her husband was unreliable and troubled.

Spencer never spoke about him. Never spoke about his family at all.

At least, not to me.

It surprised me how much she cried. I sat in the front row with Jessica, our hands intertwined. I didn’t want to cry at all, but I couldn’t help it, everything mixing together as it came down, tears, snot, blubbering sobs as some guy in a suit talked about how great my dad had been. How’d they’d had so much fun in college and how he was going to miss him so much.

I resented him. Resented anyone who thought they knew what it meant to lose my dad. And I hated listening to a woman I’d never met wail and keen in the back row. Even Spencer had looked embarrassed when I caught his eye as we walked out of the funeral home.

“Did she ever meet Dad?” I asked Gabe.

She’d barely been able to get a single sentence out, she’d been wailing so violently. It had scared me a little.

“I don’t think so,” Gabe said.

“Some people are very emotional,” Mom said. “Their hearts are too tender.”

I didn’t like that explanation—or the crying—but I couldn’t explain why.

I just knew that I was angry. All the time. At everyone.

After the funeral, it was as if my father had never existed. No one spoke about him. We never saw that college friend of his again. We didn’t get stopped on the street anymore. We just got those sad, poor-you looks as people hurried away from us as if grief were contagious. As if mentioning my father would kill him all over again.

The collective consensus was that it would be better if we all moved on. That the funeral had been the period on the end of that sentence.

That it was our responsibility—to the community, to the world, to ourselves—to be okay now. To just get over it.

I kept waiting for the anger to disappear, to feel that kind of peace that movies and TV and books seemed to tell me would come, but didn’t. I waited for the acceptance of my father’s death. For it to be real. For it to be done. But that didn’t happen. I was still angry. And that only seemed to get worse.

Chapter 6

Now

I made Lena do the dishes after dinner. She pouted but put her headphones in and went from ignoring us across the table to ignoring us from the kitchen.

Gabe ran a hand over his face, which bore all the telltale wrinkles of worry. Wrinkles that were considered sexy and stately on a man of his age but horrifying on any woman over twenty-five.