Awash in the wake

By Robert Mangelsdorf


I wasn't even supposed to be there the night Carmen died, and when Roseanne came downstairs, choked in tears, she let out a startled scream when I poked my head around the corner to see what the commotion was.

She ran back upstairs and shut the door behind her.
I looked at Gary, and he looked back at me blankly.

"What's going on, man?" I asked him. "What's the matter with your mom?"

"It's Carmen," he said flatly, as though he was talking about the weather.
"I think he committed suicide. He's in the garage."

We stepped outside and the smell of exhaust lingered faintly in the cold, still air, intensifying as we neared the old wooden structure. Only the moonlight lit the yard and the grass was already moist with dew.
Gary opened the door to the garage and black smoke billowed out and around our feet. The lights were off inside, but we didn’t bother to turn them on: we held our shirts over our mouths and entered in near darkness.

The door to the Oldsmobile was unlocked. Gary’s step-father was sitting upright in the back seat wearing a winter jacket zipped up to his chin. His arms were crossed and he wore gloves.

I grabbed his wrist with my index and thumb to take his pulse, but there was no need. His skin was cold and waxy, and instantly my brain recognized that whatever it was that I was holding, it wasn't alive.

"Jesus," Gary muttered.

"Did your mom come in here?" I asked him.

"No," he replied. "At least, she said she didn't."

***

Roseanne had become somewhat of a surrogate mother for me after my own mom moved to Vancouver Island a few years earlier. I was in my early 20s, living alone and going to university, so she would invite me over for dinner, often without Gary even knowing. That usually meant he had to share, something of a new experience for him, being an only child.
One time at dinner Carmen made himself a drink using a raspberry vinegar Roseanne had made, mistaking it for cordial.
He winced slightly as he drank it.
"This is delicious Rosie," Carmen said with all earnestness.
He was a lawyer in New Westminster, and worked mainly with legal aid.
After barely five years of marriage, Roseanne told him she wanted a divorce. We learned later that he had stopped taking his anti-depressants.
He left no note. The paramedic said that was a good thing.

***


Gary took charge right away. He consoled his now-widowed mother. He made the phone calls that needed to be made. He put on a pot of tea.
I stood by, dumbstruck, clutching a notepad and a pen.
“You’ll need this,” I offered him. “For… something.”
Roseanne varied between uncontrolled sobbing and seething invectives, and every time our eyes met she burst into tears anew.
The police and ambulance were the first to arrive, along with the victim support workers. Friends and family came in the second wave. With each arrival Roseanne had to tearfully relive what had happened.
“This is so typical of him,” Carmen’s brother said as he walked in the door, his jacket and shoes still on. “He could never finish anything."
More than a dozen bawling strangers crammed into Gary and Roseanne’s tiny kitchen. Every cell in my body wanted to leave that house and never come back.
The sheer amount of grief was overwhelming.
Gary and I went for a walk to escape the chaos.
"I think you should stay," Gary said, handing me a flask of something. 
"Yeah,” I said, taking a pull.
“This is pretty fucked up,” I added.
“Yeah,” he said, taking a drink.
Around two in the morning the crowd in the kitchen began thinning out and Gary and I headed back downstairs to the relative calm of his bedroom.
He immediately sat down at his computer and started typing.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
"Homework,” he said, not turning around from his computer. “I have an assignment due tomorrow and I have to hand it in.”
I picked up a book and started reading.  
Gary turned around and pointed to the picture of the Hindenburg disaster on the cover.
“That’s pretty incredible, eh?” he said with forced enthusiasm. “I can’t believe they actually flew those things. And full of hydrogen too! Of course it exploded."
“I know, right?” I replied. “What were they thinking? Why wouldn’t you use helium?”
We grasped at anything to distract us from what we had witnessed.
Gary played a collection of stand-up comedy on his computer speakers to listen to as we tried to sleep. The comedian screamed and ranted and we laughed, Gary lying in his bed, me on the floor beside him, just out of sight, the two of us in tears.
Later, I thought of Roseanne laying in bed alone, the sound of faint laughter creeping up from the basement, her husband dead but hours.
In the morning, Gary awoke before dawn and began the hour and a half long trek to Langara College on the bus to hand in his journalism assignment. I pretended to sleep, and after he left I slinked out the back door, hopped on my scooter and pushed it down the alley before starting it up.
Days later, they had the car towed away to get the battery charged and the stench of exhaust washed out of the seats. When the mechanic started the car, the radio started playing. It was set to the oldies station.
It was the last thing Carmen had heard.
That exhaust stench still lingered though. Neither Gary or Roseanne ever drove that car again, and within weeks it was sold.
The house too. Gary talked his mom out of leveling the garage, but she never went in there again. Less than a year later she bought a small townhouse in Cloverdale, and parked on the street.

***

I came by the house regularly over the next few days. Gary and I talked at length, but Roseanne and I spoke little and avoided eye contact. She liked having the house filled with people though, the awkward conversations took her mind off what she had been through.
I don't remember much about the funeral, except that it didn't last very long. The service was held in the basement of a church in Maillardville and I sat near the front of the room, across from Gary and Roseanne.
She had aged terribly in the past week. The black dress she wore matched the bags under her eyes. Her skin was pale and when I held her hand it was cold and clammy to the touch. What little rest she'd had was from exhaustion, the kind of fitful sleep you have when your body gives up, but your mind races on.

***

That winter Gary and I spent most nights at a rundown bar downtown that catered to travelers. We both ignored our schoolwork; I dropped out of school, Gary was kicked out.
One night Gary was coming home from a friend’s birthday party, and collapsed in a drunken mess on the sidewalk, all six-foot-five, 300 pounds of him sprawled out on the concrete.
Despite the pleas of his 130-pound girlfriend Saskia, he wouldn’t be moved.
"Just leave me here," he managed to spit out. "I want to die. I want to kill myself."
I was relieved when he told me what happened. For the better part of a year I’d been having suicidal thoughts, and had told no one.
Lying in bed after a drinking binge, I’d visualize my head being blown away with a shotgun, splattering all over my bedroom wall. I’d drive over a bridge after a stressful day at work and imagine myself jumping off of it into the cold, black waters below. I’d scream into my pillow and hyperventilate, but the images would persist.
Knowing that I wasn't alone was a great comfort.
Gary started going to therapy, and we talked about his sessions.
His therapist explained that the brain acts like a scratched record when something traumatic like this happens. It’s trying to make sense of this crazy thing, but it can’t, so the needle can’t move on, and it keeps skipping back.
Over time images and thoughts about the event begin to appear out of context.
Having some sort of knowledge of what was going on in my head was an immense comfort to me. The thoughts persisted, but I understood them now.
"In a way, I'm glad you were there," Gary told me once. 

"Yeah," I told him. "In a way, I am too."