A Day In the Death of Walter Zawislak Read online

  Rosie’s hand gripped his and he knew she was weeping. The Clarksons turned in their seats to stare at them in awed accusation—You, their gazes said, you made this?

  Jennifer leaped and bounced and tiptoed and ran through “What Child Is This?” Everyone in the crowd held their breath, waiting for some stumble, some weird crash back to reality, but it never came. She finished with a small trill. Stood for the stunned and thunderous applause, curtseyed, her black patent shoes blinding in their shine, and ran offstage.

  She was four.

  “She was perfect,” Rosie breathed in his ear. Walter nodded and wondered what he was doing in a family like this.

  May 12, 1991

  Salesman of the Year Celebration Chili Supper

  The Zawislak Home

  * * *

  Walter put the bottle of champagne under his arm, switched his briefcase to his right hand, and tried to open the door, but the bottle slipped and he dropped the briefcase against the door with a loud clatter to grab the champagne.

  The storm door opened and Jennifer stared at him through the screen. “It’s just Dad,” she called over her shoulder and walked away, giving him the impression that he was just road kill or something equally beneath her notice.

  “Hello to you, too,” he called after her, kicking his briefcase though the door into the foyer. Rosie said it was a stage, teenage moodiness, nothing but a stage. Walter hoped so. The past year had not been easy; it’s not even like he was the bad guy. It’s that he was no guy. Nothing. She barely noticed him, his little girl who used to sit on his lap and watch Sesame Street.

  “Hey babe!” Rosie yelled from the kitchen.

  “Hey yourself!”

  Tonight, though, nothing was going to get him down. Not his moody daughter. Not the car with the oil leak. Nothing. “Come on out here.”

  Rosie stepped out from the kitchen, a tea towel over her shoulder and her face red from whatever she was cooking. She pushed up the sleeves of her purple sweatshirt. “What’s got into you?” she asked with a laugh.

  “You—” he held out his hands and the champagne bottle “—are looking at the Marsden Plumbing Supplies Salesman of the Year.”

  “What?” she gasped, her brown eyes lighting up. She clapped her hands. “Really?”

  “Yep, really.” She practically jumped over to him and he snatched her up, pressing the champagne bottle against her side and smacking big, wet, sucking kisses on her neck while she laughed and tried to twist away.

  “Oh, sweetheart, that’s such great news.” She pushed away from him and spun toward the living room. “Jennifer, did you hear the good news?”

  “I heard,” she cried back over the sound of the Huxtables on TV.

  “Well, then come in here and say something to your father…”

  “Ros…” he started, hoping to avoid the battles tonight—his night of champagne.

  “No, come on,” she murmured. “I am so tired of her attitude.”

  Jennifer stood in the doorway, a thin wisp of a girl in a denim skirt on that painful far edge of childhood. “Way to go, Dad.”

  “Thanks, Jennifer. Why don’t you come sit down at the table with us?”

  “Come on, can’t we just have dinner in front of the TV?” Her tone of voice was nails on a chalkboard, and Walter wanted to tell her to go to her room, but Rosie squeezed his hand.

  “We’ll have some champagne,” she said.

  Jennifer rolled her eyes like she would rather go to the dentist but she took that lazy shuffle forward and he felt Rosie heave a sigh of relief.

  “I wish we had something fancier than chili.” Rosie ran her hand down Walter’s tie and patted his lapel. She looked at him, a saucy sexy look from the corner of her eyes, and his blood warmed.

  “It’s my favorite.”

  Rosie pressed her forehead against his chest. “You always say that.”

  He kissed the top of her head, right where he could see the pink of her scalp. Thanks, he wanted to say, Thanks for convincing your brother to hire me when my own family had given up.

  “It’s always true,” he said instead. “Whatever you’re making is my favorite.”

  “Are we gonna eat or not?” Jennifer slouched at the table.

  “Celebration chili coming right up.”

  Rosie ran back to the kitchen and brought out the steaming pot and placed it in the middle of the Formica dinette table. She spooned up big bowls and put cheese and sour cream and crackers on them while he pulled the champagne glasses they got for their wedding out of the old hutch in the corner.

  He popped the cork and Jennifer jumped and then laughed, embarrassed.

  Walter filled one of the delicate crystal bowls with the flowers etched on it and put it front of his daughter.

  She sniffed the golden bubbly and turned up her nose.

  “You’ll like it,” he said. “It’s sweet.”

  She took a tentative sip and didn’t roll her eyes or make any puking noises so he guessed it was okay.

  He handed one to his wife, who sat on the edge of her seat beaming in a sweatshirt splattered with tomato sauce. “To my husband,” she said holding the glass aloft. “Salesman of the Year.”

  Jennifer clapped, which surprised all of them, so he took a bow, making a little production. “Thank you, thank you.”

  He sat and Rosie grabbed his hand in one of her own and then stretched across the table to grab one of Jennifer’s.

  He reached out to grab Jennifer’s other hand and they both rolled their eyes while Rosie gave thanks over their food.

  Faithlessness, or maybe it was just scorn for Rosie’s earnest beliefs, was the only thing he and his daughter still had in common.

  “Amen,” Rosie said, and Walter nodded as had become acceptable after years of Rosie trying to get him to pray.

  They dug into their chili, which really was his favorite. The women in his life drank their champagne. And he stared at his, untouched and going flat, out of the corner of his eye. He could taste it—that cloying sweetness on his tongue, the pop and fizz of the bubbles in his nasal cavity—even though he had been fifteen years clean and sober.

  He wasn’t about to ruin fifteen years, not with a sip, not in celebration.

  “Are they gonna throw you a big party?” Jennifer asked.

  Walter shook his head. “They took me out to lunch and gave me this…” He pulled an envelope out of his inside jacket pocket and slid it over to Rosie. “We’ll be able to fix your car and maybe take a trip to the lake this summer.”

  Rosie squealed and leaned over the corner of the table to kiss him. “I’m so proud of you,” she breathed against his mouth, and Walter felt himself blushing.

  She sat back down. “Does this mean you’re going to be traveling less?” Rosie asked, and he knew, despite her even tone and her eyes glued to the stem of her glass—all her mustered nonchalance—that she was desperately hoping so.

  “I think it probably means the opposite,” he said carefully. “My region will probably get bigger and I might be on the road four days a week.”

  Rosie nodded and took a bite of chili, an arctic freeze blowing off of her. He wasn’t happy about it either. Four nights in hotels away from them. But what could he do?

  “But I’ll be back every weekend,” he said. “Al promised.”

  “Well…” Rosie lifted wet eyes but a determined smile. “If Al promises, it must be true. It will be nice to have you home on weekends, won’t it Jennifer?”

  “Sure,” she said and drained her champagne.

  “Whoa!” He and Rosie laughed. “Go easy on that stuff.”

  Jennifer set down her glass, smiled at the two of them, and then lifted her hand to her mouth and giggled. Her high, girlish giggle made Walter feel like he was being tickled and he laughed, too. And then Rosie started in with her snort laugh and soon they were all coughing and snorting and wiping their eyes with their napkins.

  “What’s so funny?” Jennifer asked.

 
And it all started again.

  19

  No yanking this time. No sickening pull through some terrible loophole in his life and memory. He felt light, like if he lifted his feet he would float. And then he was. Caught on some breeze he was dislocated from the table and the laughter and the smell of Rosie’s chili, and he coasted right back into Beth’s backyard.

  His lush purgatory.

  He landed, without the lurch and bounce and crash, on his own two feet. No somersaulting stomach or the belching of bile.

  Just the hot run of tears down his face and the shaking that started in his gut and spread out through his life.

  It was like no time had passed. He was here. He wasn’t and then he was back. Beth finished her last braid and crawled into her mother’s lap.

  Had it been it seconds? Minutes?

  Long enough.

  Walter bit his lips until he tasted blood.

  He tested those waters, brushed away the dust of those memories, and was flooded. Rosie. Sweet and fine and smiling. Her hair and her breasts, her elegant ankles and her snorting laugh. Her anger and terrible jokes, the dark days after she left. Everything, a wall of Rosie came down on him and he hated it. The pain rippled and shook, and the anger he tried to drink away and forget surged through him. Her beauty, the touch of her hand, the scent of her hair. Those things had faded in his memory and now they were vivid again. Bright and sharp. Real. God, Rosie. His wife. All that love. All the love in the world that he felt for her that he’d spent years trying to purge and dilute with alcohol, it was alive in him. Burning him from the inside.

  But with those things, with those gorgeous blessings in his life, came the grief.

  And the grief tore him apart.

  He’d signed those papers. Broken his promises. Let her go in a cold, cold hospital room. Lost her daughter. Lost himself.

  “Walter?”

  He was broken. Something deep inside that connected him to his body was fractured and he couldn’t get the words out.

  I’m scared.

  He opened his mouth, but there was nothing but the gasping of air, the lingering duty and work of lungs that hadn’t quite realized there was no need for what they could do.

  I’m so scared.

  He was scared of picking the day. Of seeing Rosie and knowing it was the end.

  “Walter? What’d you think? I call it the Jennifer Memory Medley.” Peter walked around him to block his view of Beth and her mother. Beth chose that moment to start singing a Girl Scout song he remembered Rosie singing. The mother laughed and joined in.

  “Oh my darling…”

  The familiar words curled around Walter’s neck, and strangled him. Their sweet high voices slid through the cooling twilight right into the brittle and unused parts of him.

  He pressed his clenched fists into his eye sockets.

  He was so scared of saying goodbye again.

  “Walter, what’s wrong? That wasn’t so bad. Your wife seems quite nice and your daughter…” He shrugged. “A little bit of an attitude problem, but she was pleasant once you got her drunk.”

  Beth and her mother messed up the words and Walter flinched when their laughter cut him like shrapnel.

  “Oh my daaaaarling Clementine…” They shrieked and giggled and Walter had nowhere to hide. No place left in himself to go to and pretend these things weren’t happening.

  Rosie and Jennifer used to sing Rosie’s old Girl Scout songs at the tops of their lungs. They did it at night. While cleaning. On car trips. He used to beg them to stop. Make a big production of holding his hands over his ears and howling like a dog. It made them sing louder and he had liked that. Appreciated being a part of the joke.

  He wondered if, in the silent years between him and his daughter, she ever thought of that.

  “You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry Clementine!” Beth clapped her hands and her mother jostled her on her knees. Walter took tentative steps toward them as if the ground might collapse under his weight.

  He had to stop it. Stop their singing. Their cruel taunting.

  “Walter, I really don’t understand what your holdup is. There doesn’t seem to be much of a contest.” The boy lifted his hands. “The way I see it, you’ve got to pick a day with Rosie, because the rest of your life sucked.”

  “Light she was and like a fairy…” The mother’s voice was cheerful and off-key.

  “Walter!” Peter yelled.

  “Can’t you get them to shut up?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Why are we here with them?” Walter pointed at the women on the porch. “Is this a joke on me? Who the hell are these people?” Walter was screaming, spit flying through the air.

  “Walter you need to relax…”

  “I don’t need to relax. I’m dead.” The women sang on, cheerfully rolling through the verses in which Darling Clementine drowns. They were oblivious to his screams and he wanted to tear out his hair. “Just shut them up!”

  “You know what you have to do to get out of here and…” Peter took a step between him and the girls, as if to protect them from Walter’s ineffective ghostly arms and fists “…leave the girls out of this.”

  “Out of this? They are a part of my deathbed!” Walter was incredulous and angry. “They are my hell.”

  “Hell?” Peter gleamed with an unholy light and Walter wondered if maybe he was right. This was hell and Peter was the devil.

  “I am telling you this is hell for me.”

  “You ungrateful man.”

  “Ungrate—”

  “Do you realize the rules I have bent? The never-ending smorgasbord of samples I have given you? The infinite god damn patience I have shown? Do you think that’s easy?” Peter stepped close and seemed to grow. And maybe at the beginning of this sickening little trip Walter might have been unnerved or intimidated. But he was unmoved, mired as he was in the rising swamp of his sorrow. “I have every authority to assign you a day—to just pick one, and the way you keep pissing me off, it’s not going to be a nice one!”

  “Fine. Better that it’s a bad day,” Walter whispered.

  “What is wrong with you? You have a chance to go back and live!”

  “Send me to the day Rosie died. The day we put her in the ground. That’s the day I deserve.”

  “Deserve…?” Peter looked lost. “Why? Because you were a soldier doing what soldiers do? Because you signed the papers to get her off the respirator? Because you drank too much?”

  “Because I had everything!” Walter yelled. “I had everything and I lost it. I didn’t hold on to it. I didn’t take care of it. I made promises to people and I never kept a single one. The only thing I ever gave anyone was pain and disappointment. That’s why I don’t ever want to go back, because there is nothing worse than having it all and ruining it. Leave me here.” He threw his arms out to encompass the yard and the women. “Leave me in my hell.”

  “This isn’t your hell,” Peter yelled.

  “Then what the hell is it?”

  “It’s my yard you self-absorbed corpse!”

  Walter staggered backward, got tangled in his own legs, and sat down hard on the porch.

  “Your yard?”

  Peter sighed and looked heavenward before collapsing onto a swing. “I am going to get fired. You—” he sent a pointed look at Walter “—are going to get me fired. I should have let Ravi have you.”

  “What do you mean this is your yard?”

  “Well, obviously, should be my yard.” Peter wrapped his arms around the chains and gazed up at the dark house.

  “You said you didn’t know these people…”

  “I don’t. I’m dead.”

  Walter tried to remember if he had ever seen a father or heard one inside the house. He hadn’t.

  “Oh no, Peter.” Walter stared at the mother who was whispering things Walter could not hear into her daughter’s hair. “The little girl...she’s your daughter.”

  “Daughter?” P
eter laughed.

  “But it’s always just the girls and I never see…”

  “I think he works a lot,” Peter said. “They argue about it. Sometimes at night he comes out here and smokes a cigar.”

  “So…” Walter was more confused than ever. “Who are these people to you?”

  Peter stood up from the swing and floated six inches above the ground staring at the house. “Up in the attic—” he pointed at the small window in the triangular eaves “—way over in the far corner, there’s a box with a blue receiving blanket and a wristband from Mt. Sinai and a baseball mitt. There’s a couple of other things, some cards and a little silver drinking cup. The box is labeled Peter.”

  Walter felt an awful stillness, a pain in his chest as realization seeped into his body.

  “That’s my box. All that they kept of me. All they really had of me.” Peter shrugged and turned. “I lived for exactly four minutes and eight seconds. She’s not my daughter. She’s my sister.”

  “Peter,” Walter swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

  “You think you’re being tortured?” Peter eyes turned hot and red and Walter felt fear. Real fear. “You think it’s hard having to pick one day of your miserable gorgeous life to go back to? Try not having the option! Try watching someone deny all that was given them.”

  “Sam?” The woman called over her shoulder, and Peter and Walter stopped their fight and stared at the girls between them. Beth was asleep in her mother’s arms. A tall, slim man who looked exactly like Peter, only older, appeared in the sliding glass door, smiling at his wife.

  “Need some help?” he murmured, walking out into the night.

  “She’s just gotten so big. I can’t lift her anymore.”

  Sam leaned over and slid his arms underneath the sleeping girl, pressing a long, sweet kiss to the woman’s mouth while he was down there. He stood, cradling Beth against his chest, her black hair like dark clouds on his sweatshirt.

  “Did you hear us singing?” the woman asked.

  Sam nodded and headed toward the door. “I taped it.”