More Happy Than Not

Sure, the nightmare itself is a mind fuck, but knowing I’m okay? That’s what I like. The nightmare I’ve just woken up from started off as a dream.

In it, I was a kid, maybe eight or nine. I was at Jones Beach with Dad, just the two of us. We were throwing a football back and forth. I missed one catch and chased down the ball, but when I turned around Dad was gone. The sand around me exploded like land mines and riding on a wave of red water was my dad’s corpse, and I woke up right after it splashed on me and took me under.

“Good morning,” Mom says.

She’s taking Dad’s college basketball trophies off the window ledge, throwing them into a box stuffed with his old work shirts.

I jump out of bed. “What are you doing?”

“Turning our home back into a home.” She bends over and picks up another box, packed with God knows what. “I’m done watching people lose their lives at the hospital only to come back to this graveyard.”

That’s why she’s home; another patient lost to drug overdoses, abuse, who knows what today.

And I get what she means. I can see a drawing forming in my head now of what it would be like if we could set our home on fire: warped windows, concaved walls, flames eating everything we didn’t want, and then all of us leaving our footprints in the ashes as memories melt and disperse around us. Except I would never draw myself surrounded by black smoke, because I’m not ready to watch it all burn away.

“Why do we have to do this now?”

Eric comes out of her bedroom, pulling himself away from the Stars Wars marathon he planned for himself on his day off. He actually helps Mom out with the boxes. This is the same guy who won’t wash a single dish or fold his own shirts.

“My son, it’s been four months already. What use do we have keeping empty cigarette cartons and unopened mail? It’s too much. I don’t like his ghost around me.”

?

??But he was your husband,” I say. “And our dad.”

“My husband used to bring me ginger ale when I was sick. Your father played with you beautiful boys throughout your childhood. But we didn’t lose that man—he took himself away from us.” Mom chokes on her words and cries as she admits, “Part of me wishes I never knew him.” I think back to the Leteo pamphlets on her bed.

“Maybe there’s something more we should’ve been doing to keep him happy,” I whisper. “You said so yourself a few days ago.”

Eric scoffs. “That’s zombie talk. He’s gone, okay? Just shut it and leave her alone.”

There’s a hole inside me too, and questions in my head I can’t just ignore. I miss the man my mom misses, who laughed when my friends and I were in his car pretending it was a spaceship being chased by alien invaders; who watched cartoons with me whenever I had a nightmare; who made me feel safe when he put me back in bed so he could leave for his night shift at the post office. I don’t like thinking about the man he was right before we lost him.

Mom puts down a box. I think I’ve won, but instead she holds my hand and sobs some more while tracing the raised smile on my wrist. “We’re scarred enough, okay?”

Eric moves some more boxes out into the hallway, where the next stop is the incinerator. I’m completely motionless. Soon all the boxes are gone.

Thomas meets me in front of his building, and we ride the elevator straight up to the rooftop. I ask him if the alarm above the doorway is going to go crazy, but he says it’s been busted for the past couple of years, since some big New Year’s party. He rarely uses this entrance anyway. He prefers the fire escape because of the view and exercise, but we’re on limited time before I have to meet up with Genevieve. The sun is sinking behind the cityscape, and I can already feel the brutal heat dying down.

“. . . so then Eric tells me I’m speaking in zombie talk because I don’t think death is the end of a person,” I say, catching him up on what went down earlier. I spot an orange cord trailing across the ground and follow it to the edge of the roof. “Well, when I say it like that I feel like I should be biting into a brain.”

“Don’t let that ruin your day, Walking Dead. And definitely don’t let it ruin your girl’s day.” He picks up the cord and shakes it. “This connects down to my window and through my bedroom. It’s all set up already, but text me if you have any issues.”

I walk over to the small black-and-gray projector, facing toward an old chimney that’s sealed off with cement. A smile spreads across my face.

“I’m so excited,” Genevieve says. She picks out a pre-fired vase at Clay Land, a pottery studio on 164th Street that doubles as a tattoo parlor after 4:00—just in case someone wants to make a poor life decision after painting mugs for their parents. The pottery sessions cost thirty dollars with the two-for-one coupon, which sort of sucks for my wallet, but we’re creating something that’s lasting, like us. Especially considering her father mistook yesterday for her birthday.

We sit at this table in the corner. Genevieve doesn’t wait for the instructor before she grabs a paintbrush and goes to work. Her hands race around like she’s on a timer with only seconds left, and she traces yellow and pink lines around the vase from a starburst of red.

I paint a happy zombie on the mug I picked out. “I’m sorry we didn’t do this sooner.”

“No sad stuff on my birthday, Aaron.” Genevieve’s smile widens as she trails two fingers soaked in purple around the vase. “I love this more than a bath of Skittles.”

She dropped That Word. Not at me, but about something we’re doing together, and I freak out a bit in my head. And also not freaking out—she didn’t say she loved me—but still freaking out enough that I almost knock over my mug. It might be the paint fumes, but I ask: “Do I make you happy?”

She stops rubbing the neck of the vase and looks up at me. Then she holds out her hand that’s soaked in a blend of paints and when I reach for it, she punches me in the arm and leaves a colorful fist print. “You know you know the answer to that.” She dips her finger in a can of yellow paint and traces a smile over my dark blue shirt. “Stop fishing for compliments, you tall dumb-idiot.”

Genevieve probably thinks I’m finally bringing her to my apartment, something I’ve always avoided since it’s not very girlfriend friendly. It’s always messy and smells like wet socks. We just keep walking past my building, into Thomas’s, and we ride the elevator up to the roof.