Wait—what? Why?
I was more confused than anything else. It was 11:37 p.m. Was something wrong with Mom? The funeral parlor?
“Is something wrong?” Ben asked.
“I—excuse me,” I muttered, dipping out from underneath him and moving away a few feet. It was nothing, I told myself. Just—it was nothing. I quickly pressed her speed-dial number. The phone barely rang once before Mom answered.
“Sweetheart,” she began.
Something was off.
It was off before she said anything.
“It’s your father.”
And then—
“You need to come home.”
The dread in my stomach bloomed into a sickly, cold flower. “Is he okay? What hospital is he at? I can—I can be there on the first flight in tomorrow and—”
“No, sweetheart.” And in those words, I knew. It was the way Mom’s voice dipped. The way it halted suddenly at the end. It was like finding yourself at the edge of a cliff—a sharp drop, and then nothing. My lips were numb, and I still had the memory of Ben’s fingers in my hair, and Dad was— “H-He had a heart attack. We tried . . . the ambulance . . . it was during his poker game and he was winning and . . . Alice and I followed the ambulance but—” Her words were sporadic, trying to piece together an evening of horror while I had gotten tipsy on Dickinson martinis. “They couldn’t—he was gone. He was gone by the time we got there—by—he was . . . he’s gone, darling.”
Gone.
The word was so quiet, I barely heard it. Or maybe my heart, thundering in my ears, was too loud. But whatever it was, the word didn’t register, not really, not for a long, long moment. And then, like the cold wind, it burrowed deep into my bones, and I could feel my heart beginning to crack. Right down the center, breaking off all the pieces of me that were my father, all of the memories—the late nights in the funeral home, when I couldn’t sleep because of a thunderstorm, when the wind howled between the cracks in the house and made them moan, so I’d quietly go down to the kitchen and get myself some milk, and sometimes I’d see Dad there at the kitchen table. He would be sitting there, watching the trees outside of the window bend in the storm.
“Oh, buttercup, can’t sleep?” he’d ask, and when I shook my head, he patted his lap and I climbed up to sit on it.
Lightning lit the skies, making the thin summer trees look like bony skeleton hands reaching up toward the clouds. I curled myself up against my dad, who was sturdy and round and safe. I always felt safe with his arms around me, where nothing bad could ever get me. He was the kind of man who gave the best bear hugs. He put his whole heart into them.
“What’re you doing up?” I had asked, and he’d laughed.
“Listening to the dead sing. Do you hear them?”
I shook my head, because all I heard was the wind howling, and the bushes outside scraping against the side of the house. And it was terrible.
He hugged me tighter. “Your grandma—my mother—told me once that the wind is just the breath of everyone who came before us. All the people who’ve passed on, all the ones who’ve taken a breath—” And he took a breath himself, loud and dramatic, and exhaled. “They’re still in the wind. And they’ll always be in the wind, singing. Until the wind is gone. Do you hear them?”
And he tucked his head down by my ear, and rocked me gently back and forth, humming a strange and soft tune, and when I strained to listen, I could start to hear it, too—the dead singing.
As I shuffled out of the alley to sit on the curb, numb, a breeze swept an empty potato chip bag across the ground. I watched it go, but I didn’t hear any sort of music. I heard my name. “Florence?”