Calamity

insurance agent told him, but only after she hit the tree.

The newspaper article from the day after her accident lay on the passenger seat. He had placed it there without thinking much about it, except that he had to get it out of the house but couldn’t throw it in the trash. TEEN DIES IN HORRIFIC HIGHWAY INCIDENT. A picture of the car mashed against the tree with a smaller inset picture of a state trooper holding the bowling ball overlapping in the corner was set in the middle of the page with the text running around it. He hadn’t read the article and didn’t intent to. He knew all he needed to know—his daughter was dead. He hadn’t written her obituary, either, for the same reason—it wouldn’t bring her back. The funeral home pieced one together; it read like an excerpt from a scholarly article. Delaney would have hated it.

The faintest aroma of vanilla and peaches, Delaney’s body lotion, drifted around the heavy stink of blood and sweat. One of her hair clips lay in the passenger foot well. He picked it up and admired it like he might some ancient artifact from a mysterious time past.

He caressed the keys, a metal DW insignia hung from the key ring along with a pink rabbit’s foot. And the irony gets thicker, still. He inserted the key in the ignition and turned. No response, of course. He tried the radio but the battery was dead, probably even gone. He didn’t know what the rescue workers and the police had done to the car. He didn’t ask. Had she been listening to her pop music on K104? Had she even been singing along, swaying her shoulders, tapping the beat on the steering wheel, when the ball met her face? Had she at least been smiling? Please God he hoped for that much. Let her have died while happy. That wasn’t much consolation, but it was better than the alternative. He couldn’t think of her seeing the ball for even a fraction of a second and mustering a panicked, horrified scream before dying. That wasn’t fair.

And Anthony discovered, lo and behold, that God was not fair, for he had sent his angel Misery down to reap from him all that God had bestowed. The reaping was mighty and wrathful. Anthony stood before the emptiness of the world and wept because God is great.

He still held the flier for the First Church of Jesus Christ the Empowered. Weepy, pained Jesus stared at him as if daring him to compare their suffering. I endured more physical torment than you can possibly imagine, Jesus said, so don’t start bitching to me.

Exactly, Anthony thought. Physical pain.

A shiver trickled up his back. It chilled his spine. He shook his arms to get rid of it, but the chill persisted. The hairs on the back of his neck, and all the way down his back for that matter, came alive. This horripilation was from an invisible, frozen electrical current. His mother had told him when he was a little boy that sudden bouts of unexplained coldness and the resulting gooseflesh was from a ghost walking through you. Ghosts could go wherever they wanted, even walk through people. Sometimes, she said, they wanted to walk through you for a reason. He asked what that was, and she told him with a shocked look: To communicate.

The cold chill remained like he had stepped unprotected into the burst of a winter wind. His teeth might even start chattering. With no one around, Anthony knew he could do what no rational person would. He could do it and never speak of it, ignore it outright as the silly delusions that strike all of us in the nighttime.

“Delaney?” he whispered.

The radio came on. The music rocked through the car like a shotgun blast. Instead of her pop station, it was the oldies disk stuck in the player. He wasn’t old enough to have known the oldies, but his parents used to sing to them all the time and so listening to the music was a way to keep them singing.

The song was “Sleepwalk” by Santo & Johnny. Instrumentals used to be very popular at one time in America’s musical history and “Sleepwalk” had been one of the bigger hits in that category. It was a soothing melody that lovers could admire the stars to (and then make out to), or slow dance to, or simply appreciate in the serenity of a dying day as the sun’s light faded to dark.

Delaney and he used to dance (he trying to dance, she mocking his moves) to this tune in particular. She said all the songs on the CD were lame, but she always tolerated them whenever he offered to put on the radio. “You wouldn’t like my music,” she told him. “It’s too cool for you.” Then they’d laugh—always they’d laugh.

The song faded out and the radio died with it. The next song (“You Belong to Me”) didn’t come on, neither did that static that often interrupted his listening—broken speakers. Only the song and then nothing. The light from the radio’s face faded to a glimmer and passed away.

That was for you, Dad.

He would never be sure if he heard Delaney say those words or if he had conjured them himself, but those five words came to him in the post-song quiet and he sobbed. The tears poured out with greater ferocity than they had at the wake or would tomorrow at the funeral. He cried and cried until all the pain had been purged and he was completely numb. He grieved for Delaney, for his family, but mostly for himself.

Sometime later, Anthony got out of the car, headed back inside and stopped. He went back to the car, stood before the destroyed hood. He was challenging faith, whatever of that he even had anymore, but he couldn’t simply walk away. He wished he could go inside, drink a beer and pass out on the couch and always remember his moment in the car with Delaney playing him some song she called lame. That was for you, Dad.

Not fully aware of what he was thinking, Anthony mused, What we want, what we in our deepest hearts truly desire to be true, is not what we seek to discover. We always hunt for the scientific explanation, the true answer that will shine with the stark light of a hot summer sun and confirm for us our cynicism. We ignore our innate belief in the enigmatic; we may want the inscrutable to be true but we do all we can to debunk it, rationalize it, and explain it away. That which cannot be explained is not worth our time, yet these anomalies are glimpses into the atavistic heart of primal man, who knew no difference between ghosts and memories, miracles and thunderstorms.

Anthony opened the hood and stared into the darker corners of our vision where truth is not reality. When it comes to matters of the heart, there is no reality.

The car battery, as he suspected, was gone. The two battery cables hung loose and wide like the yearning arms of a forgotten child.

6

Two guys Brendan didn’t know had dragged his father to the bathroom. Dad had freaked out on the guy in the wrinkled suit who had walked in with his arm over Brendan’s shoulders, practically mutilated the man’s face. Dad had never been violent before, not even an occasional spanking. Tyler never mentioned any well of hidden rage, either, so when Dad started pummeling the guy in the face, Brendan stood back, frozen. Someone pushed him out of the way, saying something about it not being appropriate for him to see Anthony this way. But that concern faded quickly once the bathroom door shut, and the men were safely tucked away in the bathroom. Dad’s screams (rage or pain?) vibrated from inside the bathroom and conjured images in Brendan’s mind of ravaged bodies in a subway tunnel.

An older lady with enough eye shadow to give her huge, hollow orbs for eyes asked him if he was alright and he assured her, whoever she was, that he would be fine, that he just wanted some time with his sister. Mentioning Delaney gave the woman pause; she nodded, said yes of course, and turned away. Instead of going to Delaney, Brendan went to the bleeding guy on the floor, who everybody was ignoring except another guy in an identical suit, but with far fewer wrinkles. This second guy was taller and slimmer, his hair perfectly gelled.

“Are you okay?” Brendan asked.

The stocky guy smiled a crescent of blood. “I’ll be fine.” He sucked away the blood as it started to dribble down his chin.

The tall one was wiping away the blood from a small gash on the guy’s cheek. “He doesn’t need stitches or anything,” the man said. “He’ll be just fine. Your old man’s got a good arm, but he mostly took him by surprise.”

“Why did he hit you?”

“Sometimes God likes to test us,” the injured man said.

The tall one introduced themselves as Dwayne the bleeding one on the floor and Ellis his reluctant helper in this unfortunate turn of events. Dwayne said that if he was so reluctant he could stop wiping his face like he was some baby. Ellis told him that we were all babies in God’s eyes and Dwayne said that God should be the one wiping his chin then.

They were friends, maybe close colleagues, perhaps even lovers. Brendan had never met out-and-out