When I was a child, I’d often close my eyes and feel solace and safety in the darkness of my mind. There were times when I could sit on the plushy sofa next to the living room’s window, my eyes closed tightly, blocking out the world around me. The wind attacking the window pane, whipping at the glass, bits of sand and dirt trying to break through.
I must have been close to eleven years old the last time I had done this. My father’s funeral finally over, I sat on the purple sofa, fingering the golden trim around the arm. I couldn’t hear my relatives talking about how good of a man he was, how much of a provider he had been for his family. All I heard were those tiny bits of sand and dirt being tossed at the window.
Twenty years later, I’m sitting here again. The sofa envelops my body and I’m at ease. Aunt Judi on her deathbed two floors above, the feeling of loss had already gripped the entire house. Put an ear to the chipped paint of the hallway walls, and you could hear the whispers of the dead. My mother used to always say that having a nun in the family was like having God that much closer to us all. “His gentle touch comes through your aunt, Castor. Listen to her,” she would always tell me as a child.
I never agreed, as Judi never embodied anything ‘gentle’ in the slightest sense. My fondest memories of her include a bony finger pressed into my chest, her raspy words being preached into my face. Now, the cancer eating away at her body, she laid two floors above, ready for whatever her maker has planned for her.
Night had fallen and my mother was making dinner in the kitchen. Her brother had just arrived, my cousins unpacking their luggage in the two guest rooms upstairs. No one was comfortable enough to take the second flight of stairs to Judi’s room. My mother was the only one brave enough to visit, along with the nurse, who would come by three times a day. Outside, the spring rain attacked, coming down hours at a time. Gregory and J.C. sat on the couch across from me in silence, casually taking deep breaths and looking outside at the downpour.
My uncle Harold paced back and forth in front of the fireplace. My mother sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of her, today’s newspaper unread. I had been back home for two days, and I was still the only one to sit on the purple sofa next to the window.
“Castor, can you make sure that Judi’s window is closed in her room?” My mother was beginning to flip through the newspaper.
“Sure.”
When Judi was first taken to the house from St. Mary’s Church last week, the convent requested to put her in the guest room on the third floor, which only had a small bathroom and a single window.
They didn’t give us a reason why.
My mother had joked, “She’ll want to spend her final days as close to Heaven as possible.” There was nothing heavenly about the woman.
I opened the door to her room and immediately felt a rush of awkwardness grip my body. A large silver cross hung just above the headboard of the bed, the lone decoration in the most bare of rooms in the house. The small window opposite from Judi’s bed was closed. Pieces of leaves were stuck to the glass, slowly falling down as the rain came down. Judi was sleeping.
Tiptoeing over to her against my better will, the wooden floor creaked with every step. To me, she already looked dead. What was left of her gray hair was pulled back, her face skeletal, cheekbones stretching her skin. My eyes were locked on the cross above her bed.
A few minutes passed, and I left the room. A dull moan echoed through my mind as the door shut behind me. It could have been the rain, or could have been Judi. I did not want to know. When I was seven years old, Judi told my mother that I was not on the path to righteousness. She could see it in my eyes.
From that point on, I hated the fucking woman.
“Castor, how’s everything going at the newspaper?” Harold had his legs crossed, sitting at the kitchen table.
“Things are great. Our readership is up a little bit, and I think it has something to do with the type of stories we’re covering.”
“Good to hear.” He flipped his head down and took a sip of his coffee. He never looked old to me, but I could see the wear in his face. He was tired.
Gregory and J.C. were in the living room, watching an old episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’. Gregory would take deep breaths and run his left hand through the blonde locks on his head. He looked uncomfortable.
J.C. was nodding off. His eyes were halfway closed. A seventeen-year-old would probably have better things to do on a Friday night than sit in a stuffy house with relatives he doesn’t see often, waiting for a nun upstairs to die. I suppose I had better things to do, as well.
“Nancy, will dinner be ready soon?” Harold had finished his coffee and looked bored.
My mother didn’t answer him. Dinner was eventually served, but conversation was lacking. J.C. openly asked a question about Judi, but no one answered him. Talking about Judi previous to this week was often avoided. The convent had rushed her off to us. They had avoided questions about Judi as well. She was the gray sheep of the family: people either hated her or loved her. On many occasions, she would lambaste members of the family, judging them based on their willingness to be part of the Roman Catholic faith. If you were the niece or nephew that went to church once a year, she probably hated you. I was that great nephew to her. And I heard about her disappointment in me on too many instances.
It was too fitting that we were all congregated here for her death. Her passing was imminent, and I can bet Harold and my mother felt guilty for thinking it was a type of waiting game. I had flown home for this. It wouldn’t be right to leave my mother all alone with her dying aunt. It was bad enough that the church wanted nothing do with Judi’s final days.
“Out of respect for her, we’re going to stick together this week. All we can do is pray for her,” my mother told me after dinner. “That church wanted her out of there as quickly as possible. It’s horrible that they would do something like that after all of those years Judi was involved with God’s work.”
I wasn’t sure of what exactly the doctors had told my mother, but Judi resembled a breathing corpse two floors above. Death was just around the corner, but not a single member of the family knew that it wouldn’t be Judi slipping away.
It would be them.
#
It was early enough in the morning where I considered it still to be part of the night. Darkness everywhere, birds chirping, and the clank of something falling in Judi’s room. My mother was the first to reach the room. Harold was tying up his bathrobe when I finally made it to the room. Rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I could see that my mother was holding the silver cross in her hand. Her eyes were teary, but she made no noise. She placed the cross back up on the wall above the bed.
“She’s fine,” she whispered to the room. Staring straight ahead and clutching the cross in one hand, she pulled Judi’s blanket with the other, over the nun’s chest and touching her chin. Gregory and J.C. never came out of the guest room to see what was going on. I didn’t blame them.
It continued to rain the rest of the day, an ominous gray swooping over the house. I would learn eventually that we would never be free of its death grip. My mother was the only one who actually woke up at a normal hour. She made breakfast in the kitchen, a bandanna keeping her platinum hair out of her face. I heard her knock at my uncle’s door. I lay awake, staring at the ceiling. Deep breath by deep breath, I studied the small water stains above me.
“Castor, breakfast is ready.”
The droplets hit harder outside. I pulled the shade down and went downstairs. Harold poured a glass of tap water and put a neon green straw inside. “I’ll take this upstairs to Judi.” My mother nodded and adjusted the tie on her bandanna. Harold sighed and took off. I poured a cup of apple juice and eased into a chair. I wasn’t hungry, in fact, I hadn’t been since coming back to this house.
“Look at that rain out there. It just makes everything worse, doesn’t it?”
I frowned in agreement and finished my juice.
“Well, I’m going to clean up here and run a few errands. The nurse should be coming by soon.” My mother didn’t seem enthused. “She might stick around for a bit, so make sure you offer her something to eat, Castor.”
I forced a smile. “Not a problem.”
About five minutes had passed and Harold returned to the kitchen. His face was more pale than previously, and his big brown eyes looked as if they wanted to jump out of the sockets and dance on the floor.
“Uncle Harold, everything okay?”
Silence.
“Is Judi alright?” The concern in my voice was surprisingly genuine.
Harold looked at me and for a moment I thought he might burst into tears. He didn’t, but soon turned away and clenched his teeth.
“Harold…what’s wrong? Are you sure Aunt Judi is fine?”
More silence. And then he walked away, into the living room.
“It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right,” he repeated, now sitting in the purple sofa near the living room window. Pacing back and forth, he was now crying, his tears flowing. They fell onto the carpeted floor, lost forever. Something was definitely not right. And now I was wondering if Judi was still alive.
“It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right.” Harold held onto the mantra. His bathrobe opened a little, exposing his pot belly and hairy chest. His pudgy hands gripped the sides of his head, tugging on the hair as he wept. “It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right.”
“Harold! What is it?!”
I ran up the stairs, passing the closed guest room doors and up to the second flight, gliding two stairs at a time. The door to Judi’s room was cracked open. The only light in the room was the gentle glow of spring’s showers outside. Judi was sleeping. Her chest barely moved up and down. Edging closer to her, I saw the glass of water on its side by the nightstand, the neon green straw still inside. It wasn’t broken, but there was a crack running through its side. I picked it up and leaned closer to Judi. There was nothing wrong with her.
Did she say something to Harold?
Back downstairs, I placed the glass on the kitchen counter, noticing the knife block next to the microwave was on its side. Peeking into the living room, Harold was no longer sitting on the sofa, but his bathrobe was on the floor, next to the ottoman. There were three rooms in the first floor of the house: the kitchen, the living room and small bathroom. Harold wasn’t in any of them. I could hear him muttering when I hit the fourth step of the staircase. When I reached the second floor, I noticed the bathroom door was closed.
“It’ll all come around again. We’ll be judged. It’ll all come around again,” Harold shouted from the bathroom, his voice muffled only by the closed door.
“Harold! Open this door right now!” There were goosebumps on my arm.
“We’ll be judged. It’s coming.”
“May God have mercy on us all.” Harold was still crying.
“Harold, open the fucking door!” It was happening in slow motion. Every forceful jab of my arm seemed to take forever to follow through. Harold’s voice faded away, and now I heard the wind outside gushing in. A thud came next. The sound of the wind was now the only thing I heard. Standing still for a moment, I didn’t know whether to break down the door or run downstairs to call the police.
Gregory stood behind me. I don’t know how long he had been behind me. “Dad! Dad! Open the door!”
We could hear the shower curtains flapping against the porcelain bathtub.
“Dad!”
I pushed Gregory out of the way and barreled into the door, forcing it open. My uncle was on his back, naked. The knife was halfway through his neck. Whatever rain that had been blown in was starting to wash away the blood, dripping onto the blue tiled floor.
Gregory knelt to the ground. “Dad…dad…d-d-d-dad…” Harold’s teeth were still clenched, even in death.
It’ll all come around again.
#
J.C. gripped the collar of his ruffled white t-shirt and leaned against the doorway to the living room. Gregory was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, who held his hand, patting it. The police had just left.
“My father killed himself.” J.C. was not the most emotional of any teenagers, but I knew that soon all he would want was to be in his father’s arms. Losing a father is something you eventually get used to.
“He killed himself.”
“I know, J.C., I know, buddy.” I held onto his hand and he buried his face into my chest. “Castor, he fucking killed himself.”
When I was J.C.’s age, my uncle would playfully punch me in the arm and ask me how many chicks I had slept with. My mother would yell at him. My uncle was now wrapped in a thick black bag, on his way to the morgue. The mortician is probably going to shake his head, wondering why a man would take his own life. He most likely asks these questions everyday. My family does not have to ask these questions, but now we were. And upstairs, Judi was still dying.
#
My mother was sleeping. J.C. and Gregory were packing their things. Harold’s body was going to be flown back to Seattle for the wake and funeral. Gregory slipped his headphones out of his ears when I walked into the room. “Hey Castor,” he sniffled. “Make sure you hook me up with a few issues of your paper. I still haven’t read any of your columns.”
Gregory was still in college, studying journalism. I was glad to see someone was following in those barely noticeable footsteps of mine. “Sure thing. When are you guys flying back?”
He closed his eyes. “I don’t think J.C. is ready to go back home. He’ll fly back tomorrow night. I have a flight in the morning.”
I nodded. “Okay. Well, let me know if you need anything.” Growing up without a father isn’t something you get used to.
J.C. came into the room. “I think I’m going upstairs to see the old woman. Maybe seeing how she is, you know, might make me feel better. Aren’t nuns supposed to have that effect?” He was a great kid, but no one ever said he was the smartest one in the family.
“She might be sleeping. And I know she hasn’t said a word since coming here,” I said.
J.C. shook his head. “I know. But maybe I’ll just sit next to her and talk. I remember doing that when I was a kid. She was mostly mean to me, but she always listened.” He went up the stairs, and I went into my room. Gregory put his headphones back in and sat down on one of the guest-room beds.
I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I woke to screaming. Nearly falling off my bed, I ran out of the room and into the hallway.
“It’s coming! It’s coming! It’s coming!” J.C. was screaming at the top of his lungs. His t-shirt was ripped in several places, barely hanging off of him.
“J.C.! What’s wrong?” Gregory was holding his brother, who jetted back and forth, trying to break free. “Tell me!”
“Greg! What the hell is going on?”
He was now holding J.C. from behind, trying to keep him down. “I…don’t know! He came down after seeing…Judi! Calm down, bro!” J.C. was lunging back and forth. “He came down like this, just started screaming.”
His eyes bulging and muscles pumping, J.C. was in hysterics. He broke free of his brother’s grasp and ran away, practically jumping down the entire set of stairs leading to the first floor.
“It’s coming! It’s coming! It’s coming!”
Gregory started down the stairs just before me. J.C. had already pushed the front door open. When I finally got to the bottom of the staircase, the door was flapping back and forth. The rain was relentless.
“J.C.!” Gregory was shouting, his entire body soaked.
The same feeling that crept through my body when Harold started acting crazy had now returned. I leaned against the doorway, the droplets pelting my face. Gregory was now on his knees in the driveway, screaming for his brother. He was screaming for my cousin, the quiet seventeen-year-old that did not want to spend the weekend here. The same seventeen-year-old who was now in the middle of the main road a quarter of a mile from the house, frantically waving his fists in the air, repeating the same phrase: “It’s coming.”
The numbness left my body and soon I was running behind Gregory, who was only a few paces ahead of me. For a miserable day, there were plenty of cars on the road, all of them swerving out of the way of J.C. Each SUV, each jeep, each sedan narrowly missing him.
“It’s coming!”
“J.C.! Get out of the road! Now!” Gregory was crying. His voice cracked and sparkled in the wind.
For a second, J.C. stopped moving. He looked at his brother, then at me. J.C., the reserved teenager, his ragged shirt glued to his wet skin. With a sickening thud, a Cadillac connected with my cousin, his arms flailing forward, sending his torso and waist into a V-shape. The car skidded ahead, while J.C. toppled over and onto the side of the road. Gregory ran over to his brother. Knelt down beside him, he held his cold fingers with one hand and placed the other on his chest.
“J.C.…”
His eyes now nothing but two serene white slivers, J.C.’s body thrashed as he went into shock. Gregory was silent, but his grip was strong. I stood in the rain, barely able to breathe in and out. As J.C. slipped out of this world, I turned and looked back to where we had run from. A mist had begun to circulate from the woods surrounding the road. It danced in the rain.
#
My mother extended a hand to me. My fingers locked within hers, I squeezed. “This has to be a dream. It has to be.” She sighed and laid her head against my shoulder. My heart would never again feel comfortable inside my chest.
“Gregory skipped his flight. He’s in the guest room. He might stay for another day or two.”
All I could do was nod. All I was thinking about was the nun two floors above me, her impending death turning into parallel suffering for the rest of us. Both Harold and J.C. were gone, when it should have been her that slipped away. Both of them talked to her right before their minds turned upside down, and I wanted to know what she said to them. I wasn’t a devout Catholic, but I knew strangling a nun with your bare hands would probably not sit very well with God.
My mother brushed her hair out of her eyes and kissed me on the cheek. “I’m going to check on your cousin. Castor, take a nap. Your eyes are bloodshot.”
The last thing I wanted to do was sleep. “Sure, Mom.”
The past three days felt like an extended dream sequence, one with rain replacing the cold sweat. One with the sting of loss at the end. Judi slept two floors above me. I glanced at the clock on the living room wall. Each second that she lived was another second that any one of us could die, and none of us knew why.
#
The rain struck the living-room window as I awoke from my unplanned nap. Yawning, I eased myself up and looked outside. Night had fallen and I was alone in the room. The light from the kitchen peeked into my vision. My mother was sitting at the table, sipping a cup of tea and reading a book. She was always the one in the family that maintained normalcy in the wake of crisis.
I couldn’t help but think of Harold. Only two years away from retirement. J.C., the youngest person in the family, he was a year away from college. A year away from starting his life. They were both gone. And Judi was here, rotting away upstairs.
My mother smiled as I walked past her. My hand slid against her chair as I left the kitchen to check on Gregory. Gregory, who in the span of two days had lost both his father and brother. I could hear him sobbing in the guest room. I resisted the urge to knock and instead went to my own room.
The bed swallowed my body, welcoming me into its softness. If I went to sleep forever, maybe the reality of this dream would disappear. Maybe it would all go away. Tossing and turning inside the blankets, I knew that checking on Gregory was something I should have done. When I opened the door to my room, I immediately noticed that Gregory’s was open. He wasn’t in the guest room. The door to Judi’s room slammed from above.
She’s going to talk to him.
Shaking my head, I leaned against the hallway wall and slipped down. Sitting on the floor, I was only wondering what was going on between Judi and Gregory. He could be seeking her angelic solace, or she could be whispering the words of the dead into his heartbroken soul.
Ten minutes or so passed, and Gregory slowly walked down the stairs and past me. He muttered not a single word. Not a single phrase. He stared straight ahead and walked into his room, calmly closing the door behind him. I expected to hear screaming. I expected to hear shouting. Instead, I heard nothing but my own thoughts. When the tears started to form in my eyes, the thoughts disappeared. They dripped down my cheeks and into my mouth. My eyelids grew heavy, and soon they fell.
#
I could hear my mother drop the mug of coffee on the floor. She muffled her own screams as I awoke from my slumber in the hallway. She knelt against the guest-room door, crying. Forcing myself to stand up, I tried to take it all in. The scene in front of me was something I expected. Gregory’s body swung from the base of the guest-room’s fan. His face bloated and purple, his swelled cheeks about to burst.
My mother heaved panic breaths of air. My bare feet stuck to the wooden panels of the hallway floor. I felt a slight breeze from my cousin’s swinging body. Gregory had tied the bed sheets into a long, white snake of fabric and used it as a noose. His arms dangled by his side. For some reason, I figured that once he threw himself from the bed, he didn’t grab at his neck. I knelt next to my mother and held her for what felt like hours. The rain ravaged the house. Each drop emanated through our bodies. When we finally stood up, she pointed out a piece of paper crumpled in what was left of the sheets on Gregory’s bed.
We will be judged. It will come. It will come soon.
Gregory’s handwriting was in cursive; perfectly-spun letters detailing an unknown fate for us all. The same two paramedics who took away Harold were the ones bringing away my cousin. Their green jackets sopping wet, they walked into the guest room.
“Jesus…”
When we were kids, whenever one of us accidentally spurted “Jesus Christ” in any context other than prescribed by Judi, she’d grab the offender by the ear and twist it. One of the paramedics pulled my mother aside and gave her a small orange bottle of little blue pills. A few hours after Gregory’s body was taken away, my mother finally closed the door to the guest room. When she got to her room, I imagine that she swallowed two of the Xanax and quickly fell asleep.
I spent the remainder of the night watching the rain hit the living-room window. The moonlight struck the evergreen leaves of our front yard, swaying back and forth in the light breeze of the late hours of the night. When morning hit, I woke my mother.
“I need you to stay away from Judi.” Her blue eyes looked back at me, confused.
“Castor…”
“Don’t go upstairs. When she dies, she dies.”
She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “The past few days have been a nightmare, honey, I know. This entire thing feels like a dream. But it has nothing to do with Aunt Judi. We see Harold and his boys once or twice a year. They could have problems that we don’t know about. Problems that we shouldn’t know about.”
“Mom, we’ve spent a week in Hell.”
“We can’t undo what happened, Castor. My heart is split into pieces, baby, believe me. When the nurse comes by today, we’re going to find out how Judi is doing. It’s a miracle she’s been with us this long.”
I clenched my teeth.
“You need sleep.” She swung her legs over and sat up on the sofa. “I’m going to make some coffee before the nurse gets here.”
She left the bottle of Xanax on the coffee table. When she left the living room, I took two and felt at home on the plush purple sofa against the window.
#
The storm continued to beat down the world outside. The church’s appointed nurse rifled through the dishwasher. My head nestled in the corner of the sofa, I forced myself to drift back into consciousness. It was only a matter of seconds before I was sitting up, about to walk into the kitchen.
“Mister Hallaway, how are you?” I think her name was Betty, or Bobbi. It began with a “b,” I was sure of.
“It’s been a rough week.”
“I know, sweetie.” She pinched my cheek and smiled. Her slender finger turned my skin a light shade of pink.
Bobbi, or Betty, zipped up her leather trench coat. “I’m sure your mother was going to tell you, but…your aunt doesn’t have very long left to live. Her heart rate is very low. There’s nothing else we can do. She might not make it through the next 48 hours.”
“Tell your mom I said bye, and that I’ll be by in the morning.”
“Where is she?”
“Your mother? She came into the room as soon as I finished up. She’s been talking to Judi for the past fifteen minutes.”
Talking…to Judi.
The front door slammed and my heart sank. I ran up both flights of stairs, only pausing once approaching the door to Judi’s room. It took me minutes to grip the doorknob and turn it. The room was bathed in faint light coming in from the grey sky outside. The window was opened and rain was dripping in, slipping down the wall and onto the floor. My mother was curled up next to the bed, her head underneath the bed-frame. I took small steps to her, all-the-while staring at Judi, her body lain out as it had been for the past week. This past week, one of misery, one of tragedy. One of death.
As I reached the bed, I looked above Judi’s dying body. The silver cross was no longer hanging from the wall. My knees cracked as I bent down to my mother. My fingers gripped the side of her arm as I pulled her closer to me. The long end of the cross was buried deep inside her eye socket, the bulbous tissue sticking to its glimmering sides. Separate trails of blood marked her face, seeping onto her white shirt and the floor below her. Long marks were embedded in the floor around her, pieces of her fingernails still stuck in the wood. There was no smile on her face, no measure of acceptance. One of her big blue eyes was gone, desecrated. A simple world of love pierced open, revealing the gloom within.
The top edge of the cross reflected in the one beam of moonlight leaking into the room. Calmly, I brushed her hair out of her face. Standing up, I pulled the chair beside the bed closer to me and sat down. It creaked as my hands brought it closer to Judi. The nun opened her eyes and I felt my spine lock, my hair standing on end. Her bony hand opened and she smiled. I placed mine into hers, and she grasped it, her cold skin enveloping mine. Judi’s lips parted and the first of her words drifted out.
My mind drifted into the darkness, my soul trying to clutch its safety. Judi opened her eyes, now like little black marbles, my reflection glaring back at me. Something croaked in her throat, a long horrible creaking sound, and my reflection dissipated in a milky white cloud…and I could see it.
I could see what the others saw. Her eyes like crystal balls. Like a filmstrip of the worst day in life that hasn’t happened yet.
And to know this is coming.
With a glimpse of the future in Judi’s eyes, what’s left of my soul, the part that hasn’t withered away…the rest just gives up. Because no matter how bad giving up is, it’s never been this bad. And hanging from the end of a rope doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Running in front of traffic would do the trick. The only thing more heroic than suicide would be to kill everyone else before they see it too.
Because it’s coming. We’ve felt it coming for a long time.
Thank you, Aunt Judi.
It’s here.