Motorcycles

We watched her fall. Or rather, the cars in front of us watched her fall; we just watched her. Her stillness held the fall itself. Her body, limp, and the motorcycle, splintered, lay in the intersection of Shore and St. George. Mom in the passenger seat starts crying and I run the red light so we won’t have to watch her die. Because it looks like she’ll probably die. Mom won’t stop crying, because of motorcycles, she says. “So scary” and “you’re never allowed to ride one.” John tried to teach me once. This was when they first married, when he was trying to appear more as a friend than a father. Mom was out west on business as I pushed the little green Honda around an Episcopal church parking lot.

The woman is swollen, though not from trauma. She’s just fat and dressed in ugly clothes—light washed jeans and a sleeveless shirt. Where her arms should have been peach, they are now a sinful tile white. She just fell. Blood was still on its way to the street. I craned my neck to see if her eyes were open, but she was face down.

Although she was in the intersection, she is only blocking the turn lanes. Cars drive by.

We checked the newspaper the next morning. No article, so she’s okay. Then Mom starts talking about motorcycles again—the dirt bike track that her mother owned while she was in high school. “Just a field out in Deep Creek I guess, looking back.” But kids would come on their spray painted bikes. Cracks of lawnmower engines. No helmets.

“That’s why I never did drugs,” she said. “One night Mom and I came across some kids who had been smoking pot. They were from out of town. One of the them, a tall boy with long hair, got on his 100 cc and drove it straight into an elm tree. The bike flipped back on top of him, its hot pipes burning his legs. The others lost their minds laughing. They never told him they had cut the weed with something, probably PCP. Hunter, I tell you, I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

I sit there, not thinking about PCP or about that broken and dead woman who is now alive again, but only how my mom calls my grandma mom and how she was young once and how she was alive before I was.

On Death

“I will spend my life trying to understand the functioning of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.” —Sans Soleil

“She was so depressed she just walked into the river. Drowned herself right there in the water behind you. You know how bad it must be to convince your body to sink, not float?”

“Yes,” I said, meaning no. “I guess I do.”

Saying you have a lot of deaths in the family is like saying you have a lot of births. But suicides? And how should you remember those who wanted to be forgotten? And when you finally do forget, when their faces are lost to clouds and then just gray, how do you describe what they once were, and what they’ve done since? There are so many types of death—all affect the dead the least. The woman that walked stubbornly into the shallow waters of the Lynnhaven was my great aunt. And this part of the river is shallow. Nothing but reeds and mud for at least fifteen yards.

This happened in 1962, around the time that Princess Anne County was rechristened Virginia Beach. She woke up early one morning and walked into the river. Maybe she never went to sleep the night before. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that forty-five years have come between us, and I don’t know her name. My grandmother, Esther Byrd, has told me, rather quickly and faintly, but it never sticks. What I know is a presence chalked by its absence. Lo, my great aunt’s daughter, took it worst. After her were those in the house that morning—those who called the ambulance, as if speed were a factor with a body that cold. And then nothing happened. For over forty years nobody really spoke of it. I don’t suppose it was a conscious choice; mourning just takes too much energy. Another generation came around. Then a few days before last Christmas my sister was rushed to Virginia Beach General after swallowing a half bottle of Adderall. And people started talking about 1962 again.

In a family that doesn’t believe in God, death is tricky. My grandmother, after watching the slow unraveling of her invalid mother, made us all swear to make her drink rusty nails until she too could walk into the river. She was serious. Death means forgetting. Mourning—remembering. By this, everyday is death. I never knew my father. He’s dead to me, but I can still hope for some Golgotha moment where everything wrong will right itself. My mother has disappeared to the Baghdad desert; she too will be back. But I’ve already started to forget her face. As for 1962, the voluntary death, this makes it harder. I just remember that there was something I wasn’t supposed to forget. Do those who take their own lives want to be mourned? When they get right up close, do they want to go through with it? I read somewhere that with people who commit suicide by jumping, many of the autopsies reveal tears in their shoulder muscles. Because most don’t leap from the window. They lower themselves from a ledge and wait for courage. Only when they change their minds do their arms quiver and fail. And they drop. Like walking into a river. Sink or float.

Introducing H.A.L. author Hunter Braithwaite

Hunter Braithwaite was born in the Philippines and raised in Germany and America. He studied literature at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He’s worked as a travel journalist, arts writer, and dishwasher. Past publications include National Geographic, City Weekend, and Time Out Shanghai. He’s currently working on a collection of short fiction.

Phone Calls (from Groupthink)
Sometimes I work backwards to create premonitory dreams. I look for auguries. Clouds moving quickly or the eye contact of strangers. Omens help because they point to reason. Nothing is tougher than unreasonable loss.

The night the police came I might have been dreaming a banging noise. I think of crunching ice with my teeth, bits of broken ice sliding down my face until they melt. Then my teeth bite stones until they begin to break themselves. The noise brings me back to the real world, the one without symbols, and becomes the sound of a gloved knuckle rapping on our oak door. The doorbell rings too. I went downstairs–I remember the feeling of each one. The carpet mashing beneath my weight, and then springing up again. Continue reading…

On Death
“I will spend my life trying to understand the functioning of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.”—Sans Soleil

“She was so depressed she just walked into the river. Drowned herself right there in the water behind you. You know how bad it must be to convince your body to sink, not float?”

“Yes,” I said, meaning no. “I guess I do.”

Saying you have a lot of deaths in the family is like saying you have a lot of births. But suicides? And how should you remember those who wanted to be forgotten? And when you finally do forget, when their faces are lost to clouds and then just gray, how do you describe what they once were, and what they’ve done since? There are so many types of death—all affect the dead the least. The woman that walked stubbornly into the shallow waters of the Lynnhaven was my great aunt. And this part of the river is shallow. Nothing but reeds and mud for at least fifteen yards. Continue reading…

Motorcycles
We watched her fall. Or rather, the cars in front of us watched her fall; we just watched her. Her stillness held the fall itself. Her body, limp, and the motorcycle, splintered, lay in the intersection of Shore and St. George. Mom in the passenger seat starts crying and I run the red light so we won’t have to watch her die. Because it looks like she’ll probably die. Mom won’t stop crying, because of motorcycles, she says. “So scary” and “you’re never allowed to ride one.” John tried to teach me once. This was when they first married, when he was trying to appear more as a friend than a father. Mom was out west on business as I pushed the little green Honda around an Episcopal church parking lot. Continue reading…

Phone Calls

by Hunter Braithwaite

1.

Sometimes I work backwards to create premonitory dreams. I look for auguries. Clouds moving quickly or the eye contact of strangers. Omens help because they point to reason. Nothing is tougher than unreasonable loss.

The night the police came I might have been dreaming a banging noise. I think of crunching ice with my teeth, bits of broken ice sliding down my face until they melt. Then my teeth bite stones until they begin to break themselves. The noise brings me back to the real world, the one without symbols, and becomes the sound of a gloved knuckle rapping on our oak door. The doorbell rings too. I went downstairs–I remember the feeling of each one. The carpet mashing beneath my weight, and then springing up again.

“There’s been an accident.” My breath coagulated, began sticking to my lungs like thick mucus. I devoted most of my energy, my trembling 3am sentience to moving the air through my body. I invited the guests in. The officers, a patrolman that I didn’t recognize, and a chaplain told me what had happened.

The car carrying my nephew Riley had been navigated around a turn too sharply and, after a graceful spiral through the air, came to rest on a fire hydrant. The hydrant made its way through the passenger window and crushed his head and neck. A final indignity came when the shock of impact split the hydrant and filled the cabin with a tide of sewer water.

The water must have diluted the blood. A blush pond surrounding an upturned car. Broken glass looks like ice. Melting. Broken teeth. The glow of the streetlight.

Now how do you make sense of that?

My wife came down the stairs in her nightgown. She’s always been a heavy sleeper.

You don’t. It shakes you so deeply that you’ll never make sense of anything again.

The order of things gets mixed up here. The men said the body they found, head pushed in and dripping, belonged to Riley. It pains me now, but I was relieved that it wasn’t Jake, my boy, who was dead. I turned to Caroline and said that there had been an accident. Riley had been killed. I worry that my voice betrayed a deep sense of relief. I’m sure the police noticed. Caroline said there was a mistake. Walking downstairs she had passed Riley’s bedroom. He had left the light on and was asleep. She turned it off and came down to see what the commotion was. So there must be a mistake. I began to laugh.

The Chaplain produced Riley’s drivers license. But Riley was there in his bed. I ran to his room and punched him hard in the stomach. He’d loaned Jake his drivers license so he could buy beer for his idiot friends.

And so we had two bedrooms and one body.

2.

We went to the police station, then the morgue. There we saw Jake. He had a series of hickies on his neck and shoulders, although the bruising might have been from the seat belt. I’ll believe hickies. His last night spent with a young girl—caught up, unable and unwilling to see anything else. These young kids, they don’t know.

The hydrant had crushed his face pretty much completely. My son was just an eggshell. Caroline couldn’t look at him like this; she turned into me and shook without noise. But I couldn’t stop looking.

It was the last time I’d see him when he wasn’t looking. The true glimpses of our babies happen with their guard down.

I remember the sonogram. His face looked like the moon in the sky. Something that will always be tethered to me; something with shadows I’ll never really understand. Lunar Maria, that’s the name of the shadows. Lunar Seas. If we had a girl, she would have been Maria. But we were given a boy, and his name was Jacob.

Over a decade later I walked in on him masturbating. He was before a mirror, admiring himself. I stood and watched him for longer than I should have. It’s unfair, I remember thinking, that parents shouldn’t be able to see their children grow in those ways. I was thinking about myself at his age. We looked exactly the same. He turned and saw me, kicked the door shut with his foot, and we never mentioned it. Not at dinner or anytime after.

Caroline and I signed the death certificate and drove home. Dawn, a paraplegic struggling up the road.

3.

We live our lives like a toddler swinging his arms, trying to get someone’s attention. Then a jolt comes and the shoulder gives. It hangs stiff and loose, if that makes sense, like a tree limb coated in ice. Our arm dislocated, we shake in pain and yet marvel at our own fragility.

Blame helps for the time being.

To be clear, I’d never really cared for my nephew, but you have to compromise sometimes. Sharon drank. That was her occupation and her hobby rolled into one. If not for the broken furniture and the subpoenas, her life would have been one of contentment and satisfaction. But that’s just wishful thinking.

Sharon came and visited once. This was ’03. She looked bad. Her second DUI had her in jail for thirty days, with another ninety days suspended. Normal people look at the suspended time as a faint remembrance. The shaky morning after a nightmare. But for Sharon, who’d wake up drunk and covered in burns, that ninety was debit.

I felt like we were punished for wishing death on Riley. But I also felt that Riley bought his life with Jake’s death. I kicked him out of the house. Never heard from him again. Caroline never forgave me for this. She left too. My crackup followed, I’ll admit it.

I started sleeping in Jake’s bedroom. I looked at the pictures on his computer. I began to wear his clothing. I went through his phone and invented details for the text messages. One night I kept drinking until past midnight and then started calling numbers. There were some answers, girls mainly, whispering into the mouthpiece of their phone. They knew that Jake was gone, but in the darkness of their bedrooms, that didn’t matter. Sometimes I would weep. Other times, I’d shout until the line went dead.