Cousin Mary
1
The smoke was still rising from the cigarette when the paramedics arrived. Slowly, gently, they lifted Mary out of the couch and placed her somewhere out of sight (my eyes were clogged with tears), then drove away to the Hospital where I was born and where my father was born and where they fixed my legs when I was five and where I was going to die peacefully, gently, spit simmering down my neck, of old age.
I drove away in the other direction.
I was running away from all that happened, though I knew God would never forget to remind me every so often about past tragedies. He always does that.
It was no wonder I got an eye infection the next day, my eyes sore and puffed-up like a melancholy frog. I was never a good driver and with every great sob, my palms slipped across the wheel, which made the car skid crosswise the pavement—it rained the night before (when Mary was still alive) and the asphalt was smitten with puddles.
(A small bottle of pills, broken, lay in pieces on the carpet. Feline, her Siamese cat, was lingering across the kitchen marble, eyes closed with the sinister lord. Two of Mary’s tomato fingers were caressing its breathing fur, and her skeletal wrist slowly rose to the sofa, where her head lay facing the fireplace, covered with a thick blanket of hair. She was graceful even in her death, like a little fallen heart pumping under a thick cascade of water. The slow angle of her feet gave way in a petite twenty degrees, her skirt pressing down on her thighs. Two high windows were wide open, shedding their giddy pale light and sending intuitions of drizzle to Mary’s silent pillow. In her left hand lay the warm cigarette, pulsing with fire, the only thing alive in the tomblike room.)
The rain wouldn’t stop, and my heart was packed with nutty nostalgia, French Pop ringing in the fields of my childhood prairies—running around in bottomless sludge and singing with her, sweet infancy and scraped knees after I pushed her with a child’s rage—clambering out of the sadness that her sweet voice would raise like the echo of stairs. I would hold her tight like a big brother would and call her every now and then, stabbing the numbers with my fingernails and asking for “Mah-ry? Mah-ry, are you there?”
All my tears flooded the car floor and when my eyes were finally dry, I had to wipe them and open the window to feel the wind pat my cheeks, my hair, my eyes.
Her eyes were safe with death’s heaviness, eyes that once crooned indigo and lush.
I knew why she’s done it, but being brought up in a deeply conservative family, my folks always regarded suicide as the worst crime one could commit, excluding sodomy. Her excuse was a terrible one and I was not so sure that it was even authentic, but looking at her full, luxuriant lips I sensed the reality of death, on his majestic throne, ruling the cause of my cousin’s inexistence as “No more rosebushes.”
(Sometimes, I’d think about her and see her as the child of class; she would blow kisses like she blew on French cigarettes, and she sang with a voice like a razor, sharp and strong. When she wasn’t there in front of me, I saw her as a European—but in her living room, on the sofa, with the handful of pills tugging at her stomach, she only looked otherworldly and foreign, with a hint of wistfulness sleeping evilly by her lifeless side.)
She was the affair of my life, and the déjà vu of the pastures and the modest Southern huts made my throat ache oh so much, until I could hear her hissing softly in my ears like a broken kitten, and I—the one who left her to the paramedics—had nothing to drink but shame.
I ran out of gas. I stopped the car on the side of the road and locked myself inside, watching the marble-sized drops disintegrate on the front window of my Cadillac. She loved the rain. Maybe it was good that she died today. It seemed so abrupt, so shocking, and yet—maybe it was designed months ago, years ago?
I didn’t want to think about her, but my affection for her only quadrupled every second that followed her death (which I still could not swallow.) The grasses to my right were washed with wind and rainwater, bowing down like a hundred stooped men holding canes. I (myself) felt so aged and raw, watching the downpour coat the ground and the cars as they sped by, splashing the driver’s door. I had a sudden attack of despair, and the tears flowed out with agonizing blues and greens stirring in my eyes: the rain, the road, the sky, even the meadows surrounding me seemed like a faded cyan-color, so that with drenched eyes everything seemed like a blue-hued fog.
Mirages danced around me, girls with long, golden hair skipping in the mire and crashing into diverted plants, squatting down and hopping around with one leg up, elongated polka-dot dresses swirling about and about, a thousand girls chanting silly hymns carelessly with a distinct innocence that boomed despondently inside the caged Cadillac. One even leaped on top of its hood and tapped, giggling with a wide, white grin at me, naive as the Egrets that sail across the periwinkle skies.
I was awoken from my trance by a man beating against my door, his mouth emitting inaudible words that rose into the air, so that I rolled down my window and looked at him.
“Sir? Are you okay? Do you need any help?”
A pause, and then I said, “Uh…yeah,” but the tears were already gushing out and I could feel my body shaking, embarrassed, but I still couldn’t stop it, and I could hear Mary’s song as it chimed in my ears, which made the tears vacate their premises more rapidly.
“Sir? What…how can I help you, sir? What do you need?”
“Gas,” I sobbed. “I ran out of gas.”
