Is my body still laying in the ground at Washington Memorial?

Dear Trevor,

Would you ever tell Mrs. Henry about our correspondence? Would you ever show her my letters?

I’m not sure I’m helping you. I wonder if the burden of our secret relationship is just one more thing to weigh you down. Secrets, for the most part, are not good for the soul.

Soul. Is that the right word? Is that what I am now? Is my body still laying in the ground at Washington Memorial while my soul is sitting on this cabin porch, staring down the hill into the fog?

I do think you should talk to Mrs. Henry about your struggles with Will Mudgett. I wouldn’t think of it as tattling. You’re just looking for advice. You don’t even have to name names if you don’t want to. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the teachers already knew something sinister was going on between you two. Adults, for the most part, are smarter than kids give them credit for.

Don’t let Mudgett get to you, Trev. He’s just a kid like you. Deep down, he’s probably as scared as you are.

In general, people are scared almost all the time. When you’re a kid, it’s more personal things, by which I mean that you tend to be afraid of what will happen to you, personally. Will a girl like ME? Will a boy beat ME up? Will I fail a test? Will I look stupid? When you become a father, it’s worrying about your family that keeps you up at night. Will my sons find good friends? Will my daughter find a good husband? Will my wife cope after I’m gone.

When the cancer was winning its battle against me, worrying about your mom and you kids just about did me in. While I was alive, I tried pretty hard to provide for you all. I drove your mother crazy with my thriftiness. She went without whole seasons of new clothes so I could buy all the property I could afford that seemed like good investments to me. Thinking about it now, I wished I’d let her buy a few more dresses. I’d trade my cabin for one chance to see her in a red dress, with her hair all done up.

I’m pretty sure most of my speculations were spot on. Those waterfront lots would have turned into serious money if you all had been able to hold onto them. But I knew that as soon as I died, things would get hard for your mom and you kids. She’d have to sell the lots for you all to live on. I told her to do so. I told her the order in which to sell them. In other words, I gave her a bunch of advice. Lying there in bed, trying not to cough up blood, there was nothing else I could do.

That’s how I feel now, in this in-between place, hearing about your struggles. Death has separated me from the ability to provide a solution.

Dad

When a kid with a dead dad says something like that, it always shuts everybody up.

Dear Dad,

Drew just left and I’ve escaped to my room so I don’t have to listen to Mom drill me about what a wonderful guy he is.

He was nice as pie. In fact, he makes me think of a piece of pie. Not homemade like Mom’s, but more of a store-bought pie like other kids’ moms always bring to potlucks. Generally sweet and filling. Drew smiled a lot and told mom what a beautiful home we have, which is basically not true. I mean, it’s fine and everything, but our carpet is old and none of our furniture matches. He was definitely getting carried away.

When we first started talking, Drew seemed excited. He smiled in that store-bought pie kind of way and said he’d found the best verse that explained what happened when you die. It is in Second Corinthians, chapter five. Drew said that it says, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” I looked it up after he left. What it really says is, “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.”

I asked Drew if that was the only verse. He said, “No. Of course not. But it’s the most clear.” It doesn’t seem clear to me, because Dad, you don’t seem to be present with the Lord. I mean, you haven’t seen God, have you?

I pushed Drew to tell me about some other verses and he reluctantly told me about how God says that one day he’ll separate the sheep from the goats, meaning that sheep are good and goats are bad. This made no sense to me, because goats and sheep both seem about the same to me. I mean, goats give milk and sheep give wool. My friend Paul is lactose intolerant and he can only drink goat’s milk. And I always get goat cheese on my gyro at It’s Greek to Me and it’s delicious.

Then he talked about a story called The Rich Man and Lazarus. Jesus tells the story, and in it, a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus both die. The rich man goes to hell, but he can look across this gully and see Lazarus all happy in some place called Abraham’s Bosom, which is weird. Abraham had a bosom? I guess it must mean his lap or something. But it would be weird to spend even a day in Abraham’s lap. I wouldn’t want to be in his lap for eternity. I suppose it’s just symbolic.

The rich man calls across the gully, asking Abraham to send Lazarus over to him with a glass of water. I suppose if I was in hell, I’d want a glass of water, too. But Abraham says that no one can cross the gully.

Here’s probably a stupid question: Are there any gullies up where you are?

When I asked Drew if Abraham’s Bosom was just another word for heaven, he rubbed his eyebrows with his finger and said, “I don’t know. Some people think it’s more of a purgatory.”

He showed me a couple of other weird verses, too, like where a guy was caught up into something called “the third heaven.” He said that in the book of Revelations, it says that heaven is described as a place where Jesus will wipe every tear from your eyes and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. I liked that one quite a bit. Oh, and one other one said, “It is appointed to man once to die and after that the judgment.” That one doesn’t tell you much, but at least it’s pretty straightforward.

I kept trying to interrupt him and ask him about what actually happens when you die, like on a minute-by-minute basis. He said no one knows that. He said that since the Bible doesn’t have much to say about it, he doesn’t think it’s the point.

“It is to me,” I said. “And I bet it would be to you if your dad had died.” I knew that would shut him up and it did. When a kid with a dead dad says something like that, it always shuts everybody up.

After a minute of silence, he asked me if I was worried if you were in heaven or not. I said that yes, I was. He asked me if you’d asked Jesus into your heart. I said I’d already told him that Mom said you did. He said, “Then you don’t have anything to worry about.” Then he recited John 3:16 to me, about how if you believe in Jesus you have everlasting life.

“Yeah,” I said, “but is it a good life or a bad life? Because if you have everlasting life that’s bad, isn’t that basically hell?”

Drew said he had to go, but that he’d be happy to keep talking to me about this, which I thought was nice, considering how much he’d kept rubbing his forehead the whole time he’d been there.

Personally, I’m more confused than ever. I guess I think that maybe I know more about what happens when you die than Drew does. Not because I’m smarter than him, but just because of your letters.

Even with your letters, I still don’t really get what’s going on where you are. Isn’t there someone you can ask?

Your son,

Trevor

P.S. What do you mean when you say “my unbearable shame?” I thought we were being honest here. Can you please just explain it to me?

It’s better than watching one of Mom’s dumb PBS shows.

Dear Dad –

I looked up the definitions of psychologists and psychiatrists. I’m not sure I really understand the difference. The dictionary says that a psychiatrist is an M.D. and a psychologist is a Ph.D. I don’t know if that will help Dr. Jones. I could look up more if you want me to.

Your story about Mom freaked me out. I guess I forget that she misses you, too. She always seems to be keeping it all together. I mean, she’s not perfect or anything. She can get really cranky sometimes and some of the stuff she does drives me crazy.

Almost every night she falls asleep on the couch in front of the TV. She snores in this annoying, snuffly way, more of a gargle than a snore. If I change the channel, she opens her eyes and yells, “I’m watching that!” If Rhonda or I tell her she’s asleep, she’ll yell, “I’m just resting my eyes!” Then she’ll nod off again and start snoring away.

Rhonda’s pretty skilled at changing the channel. She slowly lowers the sound so that Mom doesn’t wake up, then switches it over to something she wants to watch, then slowly raises the sound, but not as loud as it was before. She and I have to sit close to the TV to hear it, but it’s better than watching one of Mom’s dumb PBS shows.

Mom tells lots of stories about you. I like to hear them, but they get all mixed up with my memories. I can’t figure out if my memories of you are real or if I’m just remembering a story Mom told me.

She tells this one story about this camping trailer you made. The whole thing was made of plywood, built from plans you bought from Popular Mechanics. She says you were too cheap to buy a regular tent trailer. The trailer you made folded flat so you could tow it behind a car and then was supposed to fold out into the size of a regular camper once you got to your destination. The first time you went out to try it, Mom says, the whole family drove for hours and arrived at the campground right as it was getting dark. Then just as you began to fold out the trailer, you threw out your back. Mom had to set the whole thing up with you groaning on the ground in pain, barking instructions at her.

I don’t know if she ever managed to get the camper setup, but she says you never used it again. I wish I’d seen it. It sounds pretty cool to me.

Oh, I finally heard back from Drew—Misty Lee’s pastor who promised to find out what the Bible said happens to us when we die. He was wondering if he could get together with me in person to share what he found. I thought that would be kind of weird, so I asked if he could just tell me over the phone. He said that would be fine, but that he’d have to call me back the next day when he had more time to talk. I told Mom about it when I hung up the phone and she called him right back and invited him over. So now he’s coming over and Mom is all excited that I’m interested in something about the Bible. This freaks me out, too.

Anyway, he’ll be here tomorrow so I’ll let you know what he has to say.

Your son,

Trevor

As you get older, you get more comfortable being uncomfortable.

Dear Trevor,

Was it hard to be me? It IS hard to be me. The only wisdom I have for you is that I think it’s hard for each person to be themselves. As you get older, you get more comfortable being uncomfortable.

There’s another guy who lives up here that goes by the name of Dr. Jones. He’s not sure if that’s his real name, but he thinks it is. He was either a psychologist or a psychiatrist when he was where you are. He can’t remember which and he can’t remember the difference between the two. In fact, if you could look that up and let me know, I could pass the information on to him. I bet old Jones would appreciate it.

Anyway, Dr. Jones does occasionally remember some really specific things about his area of expertise. A while ago, he was telling me about this idea of his—that we’re all at the center of our own universes. And that feeling of being the center—of having the whole of existence focused on us—is strongest during adolescence, because that’s when we’re most focused on our identity.

Stick with me here.

Jones said that right about at your age, two feelings occur. The first one he called “imaginary audience.” That is the feeling that everyone you know is intimately interested in just about everything you do. This is why when I was a teenager, I used to get so upset when I got a zit, because I thought that the whole world noticed. Nobody did. Why? Because each person is so focused on their own faces that they rarely notice flaws in others.

The other idea is what Jones called “imaginary fable,” which is that no one—not even any of these people interested in your zits—ever understand you. No one does. They don’t know what you’re going through. How could your parents or teachers understand you? They’re so old, right?

I don’t mean to get in the least bit preachy—what right have I?—but you are not alone in your experiences—in your suffering. Life is hard for everyone. Hell, even this existence I have is hard for everyone up here, including me. Even now I struggle with the stupidest of vanities. So I check my kitchen-shear-chopped hair before I venture out. I sweep off my porch in case of visitors. I check my breath before I visit Sung-Hee at the Laughing Gull and Sung-Hee is just about the manliest, most sexless woman I have ever met.

Even someone as foreign to you as—dare I say it?—your mother, probably understands what you’re going through far more than you would guess. She was a girl once, who worried about what boys thought of her. Once upon a time, a million years ago, she moved to a new school and put up with all the uneasy stares of other kids.

I know your mom tends to try to make everything all right. I know she wants you to always look on the bright side. Believe me, there is more value to that outlook than you may understand right now. But believe me about another thing as well: your mom understands pain. She understands hard times. She understands loneliness.

There was a day there at the end, when I was at my weakest. I’d finished a round of chemo and had come back home. We were in the middle of a conversation. I was talking to your mom about a piece of real estate property we owned—down the dead end road on the end of our street. I was giving her advice on how long to hold it before selling it, when I just nodded off to sleep right in the middle of a sentence. Of course, I don’t remember going to sleep or much at all about the conversation, but I do remember waking up and seeing your mom there. She was bawling. What I mean is she wasn’t just crying. She was racked with sobs, shaking away. Her face was all puffy. Her hands were buried in her hair and she was hanging on by the roots.

When she noticed me awake, she quickly wiped her face with a sopping wet Kleenex, pulled her hair back into place and tried to smile at me. She apologized for crying and asked if she could get me a glass of water or a sandwich.

When I try to remember what your mom looked like, I see her at a dozen different ages. I see her when we first met, when she was still in high school and skinny as a fencepost. I see her in her wedding dress, with the little pillbox hat and the veil that came even with her chin. I see her in a pair of clam diggers down on the beach, with your sister pulling her by the hand as they turned over rocks, looking for families of crabs. And I see her sitting on the side of the bed, sobbing away when she thought I couldn’t hear. I don’t mind the image, because she was feeling so much and now I understand how much feeling matters—how much I miss it. Your mom let it all loose, all alone when she thought no one was watching.

Would you ever open up to your mom, the way you’ve opened up to me in these letters? I never did with my mom, your grandma. And if you did, I have no idea how she’d react. She’d probably want to pray for you.

If she did, you’d survive just fine.

Dad

The boat was called Violence.

Dear Trevor,

Misty Lee is definitely not doing it right. But give her a chance. She’s in seventh grade. She’s a beginner. At least she’s enthusiastic. You should go to school tomorrow. You should kiss her. Kiss her once for me.

Sung-Hee would probably give me free meals for a month if I shared your letters with her. Especially if she knew they covered the subject of French kissing. No one likes a bit of steamy gossip as much as Sung-Hee, and there is so little to gossip about around here, steamy or otherwise.

Before she moved here, Sung-Hee ran a hamburger joint off the Interstate, between Centralia and Rochester. It was basically a drive-up stand and she took orders, flipped burgers and tried to pedal teriyaki to the rednecks. Now she does the same thing, plus waits tables, with lousy fish instead of lousy burgers, but like she says, at least she’s indoors. And there are chairs for the customers instead of just a walk-up counter.

What was it like to die? I don’t know. I don’t think of myself as having died, because nothing stopped. I just moved from one place to another. It felt more like moving—like changing jobs and houses—than it felt like anything even close to dying. Dying sounds so final. I don’t feel like anything final has happened.

Before the move, as I’ll call it, I remember having a couple of rough days at home. Evelyn—your mom–relocated me from our upstairs room down to the bedroom on the main floor. The one right next to the one you shared with Rhett. I was back in the original bedroom your Mom and I shared before we had the second story added to the house. God, I miss that drafty old place. I especially liked that downstairs room, because the windows faced west and I could see the sunset behind the Olympics through most of the spring and summer.

So I’d moved down there, partly because I couldn’t do the stairs anymore and partly so your mom didn’t have to keep walking up and down them all day every time I needed a glass or water or had to pee. I’d been there for a couple of weeks and Dr. Bruell—is he still alive?—finally convinced me I wasn’t going to pull out. Then the pain got so bad that I went from wanting to survive to wanting to die. Pain can be your friend in that way. It can help you come to terms with passing. Pain is your final friend on earth. It’s funny, but now that I’m up here in this foggy land where I feel next to nothing, I miss that pain almost as much as I miss your mom. O to feel something! Anything!

I remember having one really bad night. Your mom had to help me out of bed to go to the bathroom, and with one good grunt I filled the toilet bowl with blood. I flushed it quick so Evelyn wouldn’t see it, but I wasn’t quick enough and she started crying. She cleaned me up and helped me back to the bed. I remember that we laid there together as I struggled to catch my breath. I cussed a couple of times and she asked me to stop. Your mom never could stomach rough language. So I gritted my teeth and said nothing and fell asleep like that.

When I woke up, your mom was gone. The house was gone. I suppose I was gone, because I was at the airport here, walking up the jetway toward the terminal as if I’d just gotten off a plane. I had no luggage and I was wearing the same clothes I’m wearing right now. A white, short-sleeve dress shirt from JC Penney, a pair of dark brown slacks, dark brown dress socks, brown shoes and brown belt. I don’t know where the clothes came from and don’t know how I got from my bed to the jetway, but there you have it. Maybe it was magical or maybe I just don’t remember.

I followed the crowd down to a shuttle bus that took us just a few hundred yards to a train platform, where we boarded the train. I got on the train with everyone else. All the other passengers looked just as confused as I did, except for the Crazies. There were probably 25 of us on that train and five of those were Crazies. Of course, I didn’t think of them that way at the time. They looked as calm as they could be and stared out the window as if they were in the most wonderful place imaginable.

The train rode along for about 20 minutes and then stopped here in our little berg. I stepped off and followed the Crazies through town and down to the dock. I figured we went from the plane to the bus to the train, so why not to the boat? But when I saw the boat, I stopped.

It was the most rundown fishing boat you’ve ever seen. It sat low in the water and leaned so far to one side that sea water actually came over the starboard rail. Its nets were torn and patched and torn and patched again. The surfaces that weren’t covered in seaweed or barnacles or gear were all stained with blood. There was blood on the bow hatch and blood on the bridge and blood on the windshield and blood along the portside rail.

I read the name dug into the bow. It was called Violence. And there was no way in hell I was getting onboard.

I wandered in a bit of a daze into the Laughing Gull and Sung-Hee set me down and gave me a cup of her miserable coffee which was as bad then as it is now. Not bad enough to be interesting, but not good enough to be enjoyable. I drank a cup and asked her about the boat.

“No one knows nothing about the boat,” she said. “The lady captain can’t or won’t talk—not a word—and none of them passengers ever come back. I’ve been here for—oh, I don’t know how long, but I never met no one who knows nothing about the boat.”

“What about those people lined up to get on board?” I asked her, pointing to the five people who I’d come with on the train.

“Ya can’t trust what them people say,” Sung-Hee said. “They’re Crazies. That’s what we call ‘em. Look at the way they stare at the boat, as if was beautiful.”

Sung-Hee was right. I finished my coffee and wandered back out to the dock. The Crazies looked like they were waiting to get onboard a cruise ship. They cooed and pointed and stared, with their mouths hanging open and hungry.

“Look at the blood,” said the woman closest to me, with a voice full of wonder. “Look at all the beautiful blood.” She was an older black woman, dressed for church or for a fancy night out. She had on a bright red dress and red hat, finished with a pink veil that would have hung over her eyes, but she kept flipping the veil up so she could see unobstructed.

“Where’s the boat go?” I asked.

The woman looked at me with a startled smile, as if a toddler had asked her how breathing works. My question was too basic for her. She understood the boat at such an elementary level that she’d never had to articulate its purpose or its destination.

“Why child,” she said, in a very gentle voice. “It goes onward.”

“Onward where?” I asked. When she realized that I really didn’t know, her joy-filled face broke. A tear formed quickly and ran down her cheek.

“You poor, ignorant creature. I’m sorry,” she said. “I am so, so sorry.”

But as soon as she turned her head back toward the boat, her joy returned and she forgot about me. Tears of joy overwhelmed the other lone tear and washed it off her chin.

I haven’t thought about that day or that first meeting for a long time. Now the coming and going of the train and boat seem so much like the regular rhythm of this place that I don’t consider them much. They come out of the fog and return into it. The fog remains, like me.

Write again, please. I depend on your letters now.

Dad