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It's a dark sort of quiet that hangs heavy on the other end of the line. Forbidding. Dire. The kind of quiet that's thick with truths you'd rather leave unknown, the kind that makes your heart sink fifty feet and your temple pulse with unease.
The silence is broken by a choked sob. And I almost wish we could return to it. Not because that emptiness was better than hearing my mother in pain, but because of the words that follow the sound of her agonizing cries.
“Sweetie, it's your dad.”
* * *
Spontaneous coronary artery dissection.
That's what killed my dad, I’m told.
There’d been no warning, apparently, no indication that it was coming, not even some obscure sign from the universe that something awful was about to happen.
The sun had been shining before he died, children laughing. My parents had spent the day clearing snow from the front yard and had laughed together when Mrs. Patchouli, their elderly neighbor at the house next door, accidentally released a fart that sounded like a squeaking clarinet. It was an unremarkable day, one that would have been forgotten come next week if things had turned out differently.
But that's the thing about death, I've learned. It doesn't care if the sun is shining or the rain is pouring. It doesn't matter if you're having the best day of your life or the worst. If it has decided that it wants you, then it's coming for you regardless.
Mom told me they'd just finished dinner. Lasagna. My grandmother’s recipe. And Dad had gone to sit down while she made him a cup of tea that he'd never get to drink. Five minutes later, she found him lifeless on the living room floor.
He was fifty-one.
Not a young man, but not old enough to die either.
I thought I'd have more time with him, maybe that's why I've wasted so much of it. Not coming home. Often not even returning his calls.I'll call him back tomorrow, I'd think. Our relationship was a complicated one, but now I wish I'd answered the phone as soon as I saw his name flash up on the screen.
But that's another thing I've learned.
Death breeds regret.
As soon as I'd hung up the phone with Mom last night, I'd booked the first available flight back to Tupelo. And now, as I stare out the round window of the plane, I wonder if I'm any closer to Dad up here in the clouds.
The sunrise has painted the sky a glowing orange, almost blinding in its brilliance, and for a moment, despite all the grief and pain and sorrow, my heart feels a little lighter.
Sunrise was always my father's favorite time of day. And this one is especially beautiful.
But even though the tangerine sky makes it easier to pretend that he's still around, the cavity his loss has left in my heart makes it impossible to forget that he's not.
I’ve spent so many years blinded by my resentment that it never occurred to me he wouldn’t be around forever. That he’d die before we worked our shit out.
The plane touches down in Charlotte, then takes off again two hours later. I'm so lost in the thick fog of grief that I barely register the layover and flight change at all. And before I know it, the plane is landing once more, wheels screeching across the runway of Tupelo Regional Airport.
My first breath of Oklahoma air makes me choke, so much so that the woman walking beside me turns to look at me with concern in her jetlagged eyes. But it's been six years since the last time I breathed in the smell of home and my lungs aren't used to it.
Neither is my heart.
It beats a confused sort of rhythm as I collect my luggage from baggage claim and wheel it through the airport. It's still out of sync as I climb into my rental car and drive back to the town I've spent so long pretending doesn't exist for no other reason than because it helps to ease the homesickness.
It doesn't right itself even when I realize that nothing about Tupelo has changed since I've been gone. The stores on Main Street are the same as I remember, the Christmas decorations hung through town the very same as the ones I used to love as a child. And the faces I drive past are familiar, though weather-beaten from the years that have gone by.
I park my car between the Methodist church and the school where I first met Cole. It fills me with...something. Nostalgia, maybe? More regrets? It's hard to tell exactly, but whatever it is makes my eyes burn and my chest ache even worse than it did already.
Every corner of this godforsaken town is haunted now. If not by memories of Cole, then of my dad.
The park where Dad taught me to ride a bike is the very same one where Cole gave me my first kiss and then, two years later, lay with me under the stars on prom night—the night before I left and never returned. The streetlamp I ran into when I wasn't looking because I was laughing at something Dad said. The bench where Cole and I used to sit to eat ice cream and people watch. Even the cobblestones are burdened with memories of my footsteps throughout the years.
God, how I wish I could go back to LA.
I climb out the car and lift my suitcase from the trunk, but the weight of it knocks me off balance a little and I slip, made worse by the black ice glazing the ground beneath my feet.
