by Liv Wilde
There’s a void in the time that comes after you lose a child. An invisible rift in reality that can only be filled in by a trick of the light wherein you catch her hair in your periphery. The wind whistles too loudly and rings like her laugh late at night when she and her brother would build a blanket fort in the living room and fall asleep inside of it.
“It’s impossible to say whether it was on purpose,” the doctor had muttered quietly while Theresa tried her best to ignore how the fluorescent lights were burning her eyes. “Her blood alcohol level was pretty high, but with her… history, we can’t rule anything out.”
When Theresa steps out of the car, she watches as the sunrise cuts through the blue night sky and bleeds Tuesday morning light over her split-level ranch. A flutter of red wings outside the kitchen window is the only movement throughout the neighborhood. The cardinal chirps a response to the bird perched in the tree next to their driveway, and Theresa lets the brief sense of normalcy swallow her up entirely.
Ryan disappears into the house, shutting the door quieter than he’s done since he hit puberty. She follows him and wonders how the living room can look exactly the same as it did when they rushed out of it at two in the morning.
Lola begged for weeks for the pair of Converse now sitting in a pile of shoes by the door. The bowl from the mac and cheese she’d made herself last night sits in the sink. Ginny the tabby was a Christmas gift the first year Mark had moved out, and now she purrs as she rubs her wet nose against Theresa’s ankle. Height markings glow where they’re carved into doorframes, and school pictures hum where they’re nailed to the wall.
Before the sun rises, reality remains suspended somewhere Theresa doesn’t recognize. The honey-gold illusion of familiarity spills out of every corner and crevice. It’s comfortable, allowing her to pretend that Lola’s sleeping in her bedroom at the end of the hall.
She feels unmoored like never before, lost between the Before and After like one can be lost in the places two oceans meet. Even if there’s a clear line drawn on every map you’ve ever seen, the endless blue expanses that lie before and behind you become one water.
Even if there’s a specific number written on the death certificate, the times before and after you find out your daughter drove her car into a tree on the side of the highway become one time.
Theresa doesn’t change into pajamas as she crawls into bed, watching the rainbow dots of light thrown by the crystal suncatcher that Lola got her for Mother’s Day three years ago dance across the water stains on the ceiling.
She isn’t sure when she falls asleep and isn’t entirely sure when she wakes up, either. Days in the After bleed together, her and Ryan wandering around as if they’re the ghosts here.
The TV plays reruns of game shows and seems to never turn off. Mark floats in and out of the house, and Theresa wonders if his visible discomfort in the space is because he hasn’t lived there in ten years or because the rest of the world isn’t fossilizing Lola’s existence in the same way that this house is. Finally, Mark asks Ryan if he wants to spend the night at his apartment, but the question is never answered, and Mark spends six nights on their couch instead.
Somebody tells the pastor at some point. Then, suddenly, every face Theresa has ever seen in the pews on the odd Sunday morning they went to church is sending a casserole tray full of something or other with a sympathetic sticky note on the foil. The dishes slowly fill the kitchen island, looked at and picked over but never entirely eaten as they gradually collect fuzz atop the food.
It’s Monday morning. Theresa stands with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and stares at the green mold on a chicken parmesan when Mark brings up the funeral.
“I think we should do it at the same place we did your dad’s,” he says quietly, arms crossed, leaning against the counter behind her, “the venue was nice and not that expensive.”
“Expensive,” Theresa mumbles, as though that’s a valuable contribution to the conversation. She hasn’t thought about how many shifts she’s been missing, but she remembers Mark mentioning calling her boss. Worst-case scenario, she contacts the dentist in the next town to see if they need more hygienists.
“I don’t want to be talking about this any more than you do. Lola was my daughter too.”
There’s a sharp stab somewhere behind her ribs. She closes her eyes sharply, inhaling deeply even though the kitchen has begun to reek of rotting food.
“Is.”
“What?”
“She is your daughter, even if she’s-”
She cuts herself off, unable to so much as mouth the word. Mark understands the sentiment, coming forward and dropping a heavy hand on her shoulder. She shrugs it off harshly, and Mark doesn’t say anything, shoving idle hands in his pockets.
“I’m surprised you’re even sober enough to be talking about this,” Theresa says. He’s been doing better- she’s seen the chips- but there’s a volatility inside her right now that demands someone else feels just as bad as she does.
“I’m surprised too. I’m learning how to fight that urge, though, ‘cause I know that makes it all about me. I realized I needed to be here, sober, for you guys.”
Theresa wants to scream in his face about how they don’t need him or his self-righteous bullshit. They needed him sober ten years ago, when he slammed doors so hard that the knobs rattled and Ryan would show up in Theresa’s doorway most nights, shaking from a dream about a monster that smelled like cedarwood cologne.
When she first kicked him out, she’d gotten stares from every housewife in the county. Nevertheless, she’d kept her chin up, never leaving room for self-pity or despair. She went to work every morning and made dinner every evening. She sat at the kitchen table every night, sorting which bills could be paid latest while Lola quizzed Ryan on vocab words and asked Theresa for help with multiplication tables.
Now, she staves off the fear that relying on Mark to feed Ginny and take out the trash is somehow going back on all the years she put into making sure they were okay without him. On Wednesday, Theresa finally wakes with a welcome energy in her bones and can clean the kitchen and do a grocery run before the exhaustion catches up to her.
“I’m going back to school tomorrow,” Ryan says over a bowl of cereal, freshly showered in his Batman hoodie and plaid pajama pants.
Life reorients itself soon, Theresa showing up to work to flowers and hugs from concerned coworkers waiting for her. Mark leaves their couch permanently, and Theresa immediately senses a lessening in the tension hanging throughout the quiet rooms. Ryan comes home with a stack of make-up work, and he and Theresa sit at the table for three hours, working their way through geometry and chemistry equations. Even with the funeral nearing, Theresa sleeps easier as the waters below her raft settle ever so slightly.
The night before the funeral, Ryan sleeps at Mark’s house. Theresa doesn’t blame him. She spends the night with the TV on full volume, and still she’s unable to shake the way that the whole house feels underwater, drowned in reminders of Before.
When the rest of the house is dark, Theresa can see the light left on inside Lola’s room and assumes Mark or Ryan were in there while she wasn’t paying attention. She spends an hour on the hallway floor, staring at the light seeping out below the crack in the door like a sailor might watch the burning glow of a lighthouse disappear into the fog as they sail further and further away from it.
She should go in and turn the light off. She shouldn’t waste the electricity– she knows she can’t afford to. Instead, she returns to the living room and lays down on the couch, eyes staring blankly at reruns of The Simpsons.
She remembers vividly how she used to get up in the middle of the night to breastfeed Lola on this very couch, watching the same episodes back when they were airing for the first time. She changes the channel, letting the staticky sound of an old Spanish telenovela lull her to an uneasy sleep.
The funeral home has a back porch, which Theresa knows because she had to bring Ryan here when he wouldn’t stop crying after the shock of seeing Grandpa in a casket. Now she sits on the steps with a cigarette between two trembling fingers, water on the wooden slats soaking her black velvet dress.
Next to her lies a bouquet of white lilies that was handed to her by Laura, Mark’s mother, when she had initially made her way through the main room, nodding her way through condolences and tears from family members that had refused to speak to Theresa since she kicked Mark out.
The color of the sky matches the grey vinyl siding of the building. Heavy rain from earlier that day makes the alley behind the building muddy and wet, the overcast clouds looking like they could open up and downpour again soon. Her sweater isn’t doing much to shield her from the wind, and she rubs her free hand up and down her bare shins, goosebumps cropped up all over her legs.
The back door swings open, and she watches silently as Mark walks out and looks up and down the alley before spotting her on the steps to the side. His suit looks poorly fitted and uncomfortable, stiffness of the fabric visible to anyone looking for it.
Theresa turns back around after they’ve made eye contact. The trees behind the building are bare of leaves, and she watches as two squirrels chase each other through the empty branches.
“You’ve been missing for over half an hour,” Marks’s voice says, his voice closer. Then, finally, she looks up directly and sees him standing over her. She searches deep down for the anger that she knows is there, but even the shreds of annoyance that had been there a week ago slip through her fingers like sand.
“If I had to deal with watching your mother cry for another second, I would’ve fuckin’ hit her. She’s probably in there telling people everything that happened is somehow my fault. Probably making up stories about Lola as a baby, as if she wasn’t off her ass on Valium that whole decade.”
Mark bristles. Since Theresa started coming around Mark’s place when they were still teenagers, Laura had been making comments and snide remarks about her. Mark had never understood their disdain for each other. Then again, Theresa had never told Mark about how Laura pulled her aside one night after Mark found out about the baby and implied heavily that she wanted Theresa to get rid of it before anyone else found out.
When she refused, Laura announced that she would have a grandchild at the next Sunday service. It had taken Theresa over an hour to escape the probing hands and questions from women in the congregation, and she refused to talk to Mark for three days after.
“She planned a lot of this, you know,” Mark says testily, “I don’t know what your problem with her is, but she was a huge help.”
“I’m sure she was, and she won’t let anyone forget it for the next year.”
Mark sighs heavily, and Theresa knows the sound of that sigh. Ten years ago, she’d be scrambling to soothe his temper. Now, though, she figures fighting with him would, at the very least, feel normal. He drops down to sit on the stairs next to her.
“Lola hated white lilies, by the way,” Theresa mutters. “When my dad died, she talked the whole car ride home about how funerals would be much better if the flowers were colorful. Less depressing.”
“You should’ve mentioned that two weeks ago,” Mark replies curtly.
“Nobody asked me what I wanted for her.”
“You were barely fucking functional, Reese. We weren’t going to be banging your door down about fucking floral arrangements.”
“No, you didn’t ask me because you knew I would’ve said I didn’t want your mother here. Or the gaggle of bitches she brought here from her book club.”
“They’re all from the church.”
“They didn’t know Lola. You think I don’t know what they used to say about her? That she was a burnout slut, just like her mother? That she’d probably end up pregnant at nineteen too?”
“Jesus Christ, Theresa.”
“This is all a show. It’s all bullshit.”
It sounds dramatic, even to her own ears. Still, even with everything she and Mark have been through, she’s never had a reason to be anything but honest with him. She doesn’t trust him much, but she trusts him to be honest with her too.
“You always do this,” Mark starts, stubby fingernails digging into his palms. “You make stuff all about yourself. People send food and come to support us, and somehow it’s because they’re all out to get you.”
“This is about me,” Theresa says, raising her voice, “my fucking daughter is dead!”
“She was my daughter too!” Mark shouts. The silence after the words is heated, and Mark looks back to ensure the door it’s shut behind them. “They’re both my kids as much as they’re yours.”
Biologically, he’s right. The legal system says the same. Still, pride rears its ugly head in Theresa’s chest, and the words are out before she can stop them.
“You’re a pathetic excuse for a father.” She can see his teeth grinding where he’s sitting. A reckless part of Theresa wants to push his limits and see where it gets her.
“You didn’t take them to school,” she continues, “you didn’t make them pancakes on Saturdays or show them how to build a snowman. You were a drunk piece of shit. Now you’re just a piece of shit.”
“I didn’t have custody of them because you wouldn’t let me!”
“You didn’t have custody ‘cause you couldn’t stay sober long enough to see your own kids!” Theresa yells, standing up. Mark follows, face inches from hers as he screams.
“At least I can sleep at night knowing my daughter didn’t die hating me!”
For a second the world tilts on its axis five degrees, his words as dizzying as the riptide you don’t notice until you’re already too disoriented to fight your way to the surface.
“I’ve come to a decision,” the judge had yelled during their final court date, loud enough to be heard over Theresa and Mark screaming at each other across the courtroom. “After listening to both of your cases, I’m going to rule in favor of Mrs. Murphy. Mr. Murphy, alcoholism deems you unfit to parent-”
“That’s bullshit!” Mark had screamed. Theresa grit her teeth and pretended that the raspy sound of him yelling hadn’t send a jolt of anxiety through her. She knew that she was completely safe, two security guards at the front and back of the room, but fear was a white hot iron rod driven a little deeper into her stomach everytime Mark’s nostrils would flare on a harsh exhale.
She looked down at her hands spread across the mess of paper on the table. They were shaking.
“-Let me finish, sir. The sentencing will be reconsidered if you can complete a full year of AA and return to court with the proof.”
“They’re my kids!”
“My mind is made up. Mrs. Murphy will be granted full custody of both children. If you’d like to oppose this ruling, come back sober.”
The room was silent other than Mark kicking the chair over and stomping out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Theresa and the judge watched.
“I’ve seen this before,” the judge muttered, “he’s going to tell the kids you took them away from him.”
Theresa hesitated for a moment, packing the papers spread across the table in her bag; copies of drunk and disorderly police reports and a DUI, both with Mark’s name on them.
“I’m going to let them think I took them away.”
“Really? You’re not worried they’ll hate you?”
“He’s their father,” Theresa said, more confident in her decision as she continued, “hell, Lola practically worships him. I’d rather them hate me for taking him away than know he’d had the chance to get custody of them and didn’t take it.”
Ryan had taken it just fine, content to stay in the house he grew up in with the parent that didn’t scare him. Lola had vowed to never speak to Theresa again, holing herself in her room until low blood sugar made her head spin.
Theresa never regretted the decision once, even if the following years were spent being the sole target of all of Lola’s bad moods. Instead, she told herself that Lola could hate her all she pleased as long as Theresa knew she was safe.
The irony makes her want to laugh.
“You never told her the truth, did you?” Mark asks. Theresa quietly longs for a life where the cards had fallen in their favor, knowing that fighting with him would be easier if she could still step into his open chest and breathe in his cedarwood scent when it was over.
“It felt… dirty. The longer I went without telling the truth, the less relevant it became. Even if Lola used to hate me because I took her away from her favorite parent, it eventually became that she just hated me.”
“I’m sure that’s not true-”
“I don’t need that,” Theresa cuts in, “I don’t need to be comforted by her idol. You could’ve told her the truth too. You never did because you liked being the parent she liked more and didn’t want to lose that.”
“Hey, I got sober, just like you wanted-”
“You didn’t do it for me-”
“I did it for them. Both of them. I was sober that first year when I still could’ve fought the custody agreement. It didn’t stick long after that, but I did the year.”
This is news to Theresa, the uncomfortable weight of this truth lodged in her throat like a bitter pill of truth she’s spent years trying to dry-swallow.
“You never fought the custody agreement. Why?”
Mark fidgets uncomfortably for a moment. She’d always assumed he had been unable to get sober. She tries to figure out why he wouldn’t fight it if he wasn’t drinking anymore and comes up blank.
“You won’t believe me if I told you.”
“There’s a lot I can’t believe right now,” Theresa mutters, one hand running through her stringy, box-blonde hair.
“Ryan. I went to his school one day to pick him up, the day I was going to go to the courthouse and argue the ruling.”
“They could’ve called the police on you for that,” Theresa says quietly.
“Nobody ever changed the list of approved pick-ups since they were kids, so they let me take him. There was still an hour till the junior high got out, so we went to McDonald’s before picking up Lola.”
Mark seems nervous telling her this. He has good reason, she figures. Contacting the kids was unallowed by the court, and if the situation were different, Theresa might consider dragging him to the police.
“Ryan used to break into your filing cabinet, apparently. He knew about the court ruling. He didn’t tell Lola. God knows why. He’s kind of ruthless, that kid,” Mark huffs, “told me he was glad you got full custody.
”
Theresa laughs wetly, and it’s just then that she realizes her eyes are burning with tears. They’re not the first tears she’s shed since that night, but they’re the first ones that feel remotely cathartic.
“He told me that you two fought more than you talked,” Mark continues, “but he said that if I got custody, that would never get better. Lola would leave your place so fast she’d set the damn carpet on fire, then never look back.”
“I thought that was what you wanted.”
Mark gives her a look and, in an instant, Theresa regrets trying to take out so much of her hurt on him. It strikes her that he’s been able to be more stable throughout this ordeal because this isn’t really the first time he’s lost a child.
She wonders if he felt as lost as she does when he moved out, his boat unmoored in the middle of the water, his family behind him and stormy waters ahead.
She studies Mark’s slouched posture. She pictures him in his one-bedroom apartment, making dinner in silence, drunk and alone. For the first time, the thought doesn’t bring her any vindictive joy. It doesn’t make her feel guilty either, just sad. It’s a sadness wrapped in bitterness and anger, but a sadness all the same.
“I can say a lot of shitty things about you, Reese, all of which are true. But, still, there’s nothing I can say that’s more true than that you love our kids with every bit of you. He didn’t say it, but Ryan knew as much as I did that you didn’t deserve to lose her just ‘cause she was too young to understand that the fun parent isn’t the better parent.”
“Thank you,” Theresa says quietly. Mark takes her shaking hand in his own, and it’s not as comforting as she would’ve hoped.
“You’re freezing. We should get back inside.”
She follows him through the back door, grey carpet and sterile white walls making her stomach stir. A sea of black dresses and dress pants await her when she enters the main hall, and the thought of what Lola would say about the situation makes her smile.
“Monochrome is so gross,” Lola had complained on the car ride home when her band teacher had told her if she didn’t wear all black for the eighth-grade band recital, she wouldn’t be allowed to play. “There’s no better way to broadcast to the world that you have no fucking personality.”
Theresa had scolded her for her language and attitude but brought her to Walmart after to help her pick out the darkest maroon and navy-blue items she could find. It had been one of her funniest personal contradictions– a girl full of unbridled and perpetual anger that would rather drop dead than wear black.
“People are speaking,” Mark says, nodding to where most of the guests were gathered around the casket. The two of them approach, Theresa trying her best not to shrug comforting hands off her shoulders.
Instead, she searches the crowd until she sees Ryan, standing between the two friends he brought. When he meets Theresa’s gaze, his eyes are as red as hers are bound to be. His brows furrow slightly, glancing to where Mark is standing to the side of her. She gives Ryan a tight half-smile, and he nods, glacing between the two of them once more before going back to watching the eulogy from the aunt that hadn’t seen Lola in ten years.
She knows that what she’s seeing is another boat, another person, stuck between the Before and the After. Being lost is difficult, but it’s a small comfort to know that she’s not alone.
She starts paying attention to what’s being said when she feels Mark brush her shoulder as he pushes past her, reaching out for the microphone when it’s handed to him. He stands still for a moment, clearing his throat when his eyes flicker up to meet Theresa’s.
“Theresa and I were nineteen when we brought Lola into the world. That was our choice. She was seventeen when she took herself out of it. Whether she did it on purpose or just chose to drive after having too much to drink… that was her choice.
“I had a whole speech planned, about God and family and shit, but now that I’m up here, all I can say is that I know a lot about choices. I know a lot about bad decisions. It’s easy to say Lola chose to do what she did. To put it all on her. That isn’t the whole truth, though.
“Lola wasn’t one to listen to other people… that’s for sure. Hated feeling controlled. Hell, one time when she was eleven, she got a shirt from her favorite show, something about pirates, and refused to take it off for two weeks, not even to let anybody wash it. She–”
“Ninjas.”
Mark pauses at the interruption, and Theresa blinks, looking around to see who it was that interrupted the man’s speech. To her surprise it’s Ryan that steps forward, all the eyes in the room drawn toward him.
“The show was about ninjas,” Ryan continues, “and you only know about this because I told you about it a few weeks ago. Mom got her the shirt for her eleventh birthday. That year, you missed her birthday and called two days later.”
For a minute, it seems like nobody dares to so much as breathe. Whatever silent exchange is happening between Mark and Ryan, it’s unknown to Theresa. Surprisingly, this doesn’t bother her. Normally she’d be rushing in to defend Ryan from Mark’s aggression, but the hard look in the boy’s eyes tells her he’s not in need of defense.
Mark’s on the way out before anyone knows what’s going on, the room watching the back of his head until the wooden double doors slam shut behind him. The only person not watching him is Theresa, who’s studying Ryan’s side profile. It’s a face she’s seen every day for the past fifteen years, but for the first time, she doesn’t recognize him at all.
Her eyes pull away and fall on Laura, who’s already staring at her. All traces of condescension are gone from her face. Instead, her features drip with tender understanding. Theresa wonders when it was that Laura stopped recognizing her own son. She wonders if it was the day that her son brought home his pregnant girlfriend, claiming that he’s giving up his lifelong dreams of engineering school, instead getting a job in construction to support the family that she didn’t recognize either.
The rest of the funeral is stiff and uncomfortable, and Theresa is happy to be one of the first to leave. She and Ryan don’t speak immediately in the car, neither mentioning that the route they drive down is eerily similar to the one they took on the drive back from the hospital.
“Your dad told me about the day back in middle school. How you knew about the custody settling.”
Ryan looks at Theresa. He and Lola had often gotten mistaken for twins when they were younger but Theresa never saw the resemblance. Now, however, every similar feature stands out. After his silent argument with Mark, she can’t help but think that there are parts of Lola that have passed on to him like hand-me-down clothes– bits of her that he adopts to keep her close.
“I told him he should last night. I don’t know if Lola knew or not.”
“I hope she didn’t. But, it doesn’t really matter,” Theresa mutters the last part quietly, regretting it the minute she says it.
“You don’t believe that.”
“I guess not.”
There’s a heavy silence, and Theresa turns on the radio before flipping through three channels and turning it back off again.
“I don’t think she really hated you if that makes you feel better. I think you were a safe target for her anger because she knew that no matter how mad you got, you’d never give up on her or anything like that. You never threatened to permanently send us to dad’s, no matter how much easier that would’ve made it for you.”
Theresa doesn’t respond, reaching across the center console and taking Ryan’s cold hand. His words are quiet, but they seem to echo through the car.
“You don’t have to worry about me, baby. I can handle my own feelings.”
“I know,” Ryan says, as comfortingly matter-of-fact as he always is. The slight tremble in his hand when he squeezes hers tells her that no matter how many pieces of his sister he drapes over himself like armor, he’ll never be able to wield her fury as flawlessly as she did. “You can handle anything.”
Theresa isn’t as sure of this as Ryan seems to be. In her eyes, the sea ahead of her still looks as vast and new as it did a month ago when she first found herself in the water, adrift and afraid.
All that’s changed is that now, the glow of a hundred dinghies lights up the black depths, and she wonders how she ever believed she was alone in this. Nobody’s mapped out the After, and everyone’s equally as lost. It’s a different kind of clarity for everyone, that which makes life after this sort of thing bearable.
She entertains the idea of running away and finding out whether her and Ryan’s clarity exists in a two bedroom apartment across the country. It’s a nice thought, shedding this grief like snake skin and emerging baby-skin soft on the other side. There’s a ghost in the backseat, though, that will follow the two of them no matter how far they drive. This haunting, of course, is simply the lingering evidence of seventeen years of unconditional love. Fragments of the Before that don’t disappear just because your daughter does.
Something catches her eye in the rearview mirror, and she looks up quickly. It’s nothing but rays of afternoon sun glinting off the back window but, for a second, Theresa can swear she sees golden blond curls and a rare, wide smile. The illusion flickers away as branches arching over the street block the light, and the backseat is empty once again.
She sighs, both in disappointment and relief, and squeezes Ryan’s hand in return.
Liv Wildeis a previously unpublished fiction and screenwriter. She currently lives in Massachusetts and, when she’s not working on finishing her master’s degree, she likes writing romcoms and family drama fiction.”