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My little sister would name every dead animal that we came across. This is not how to grieve. This is not how to behave with animals. Arm’s length. No names. How I like to deal with people.
We’d walk down the street towards the park, and if there was a stiff sparrow on the ground, its legs stretched out and talons open, its beak pointed straight, like a feathered dart or a toy or anything besides a formerly living animal, she would point at it, make us stop and loudly announce “That’s Frank. He’s dead like daddy.” And if there were people walking past their eyes would pop and they would look at me and I would grab her hand and say “Let’s go to the park now, Ellie,” and she would nod and I’d maybe give a shoulder shrug to the people looking at us like Kids say stupid shit, right?
At the park, Ellie liked to go down the slide backwards. She’s five now, so my day at the park consists mainly of sitting on the bench smoking and hoping none of the other parents and baby sitters and nannies notice that my cigarettes always smell wrong, but just slightly. She is very careful with the other kids, gets terrified when one of them falls down. She sits down at the top of the slide, spins onto her stomach and lowers herself halfway down, arms still attached to the base and when she’s already most of the way to the bottom, she lets go. She’ll do this eight or nine times, come over for her baggie full of animal crackers, and go back, doing it over and over until she’s tired and wants to go home.
It was a Tuesday when she sat down next to me on the bench. Not Ellie. Ellie was on the slide, backwards, getting ready to let go. Sitting next to me was a babysitter. Her name was Kim. The boy in the purple knit cap was her… ward? Client? She said this to me without taking her eyes off of him. Just sat down and started talking. I blew my smoke the other way.
“So which one is yours?”
“The one on the slide,” I said, realizing that the ownership of Ellie might cast a certain light on me, though I wasn’t sure what that light was. “She’s my sister.”
Ellie, as if on cue, let herself slide down two and a half feet of slide, having to push herself the rest of the way off of it.
“Cute kid,” she laughed at Ellie.
I felt something. Gut something. Not sure.
“Good brother to take her to the park.”
“Yeah, I’m helping my mom out a bit.”
This is where I can usually get people to stop talking to me. Something that any nineteen year old knows how to do- exploit other people’s limited capacity for empathy.
“My dad just died a couple months back, so she’s kind of worn out.”
“That sucks. Still, good on you for stepping up. Some people are too self-centered for that.”
The typical response is “I’m so sorry” or “That must be hard” or other shit. People who have no idea what things like that mean. I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
Ellie walked up to save me. In her hand was a cricket, small and black, stiff and not moving. She waited for me to hold out my hand to take it.
“This is Dennis,” she said to me.
She turned to face the babysitter. “He’s dead like daddy.”
Then Ellie dropped the cricket into my hands, and walked away, the front of her overalls dirty from the slide, a streak of dirt on her nose and chin.
“She name things a lot?” the babysitter asked.
“Only dead things.”
When Ellie was younger, when I was younger, when my dad was still alive, he bought her a gold fish. He set it up in a bowl with multicolored rocks in the bottom and it swam there like it enjoyed living in our living room. Which is the worst named room in the house. He called Ellie who came waddling over towards us, and—no shit—by the time she reached the table with the bowl on it, my dad standing there, only slightly worse looking than he used to, the fish was belly up. I looked down, he looked down, Ellie looked up, and all of us just saw this brand new fish, now dead.
“Matty.” This was Ellie. Looking at the fish and saying our cousin’s name. “That’s Matty.” She nodded to herself, proud for thinking up such a good name for the fish, such a great pet name. My dad looked at me like What do I do? and I couldn’t think of shit. So we just started to laugh a little. Then a lot. Then we couldn’t control it, because a 3-and-some-change-year-old just named a dead fish after our cousin Matty, which is probably a lot funnier if you know him.
Dad tapped me on the shoulder, then said to Ellie “Well, Matty is sleeping, let’s let him rest,” and she waddled off and he and I jumped in the truck and got a new fish and when he asked Ellie a few days later how Matty was doing she said “Matty’s gone,” and my dad asked what she meant, that Matty was right there in the bowl, and Ellie said “That’s not Matty.” And my dad said who is it, and Ellie answered “A fish.”
At home, after the park, Ellie runs up to our mom, grabs her around the legs and squeeze until it looks like she might pass out from the effort. My mom smiles, her smile breaks, and then she composes herself in time for Ellie to ask “What’s for dinner?” In a week, Ellie is going off to kindergarten, and I start classes at the community college. My mom would have cried even if everything was normal, but I have a feeling it’s going to be a lot more intense now, all things considered. I tell Mom that I’m headed out, that I’ll be back in a bit, that I need to take a drive real quick to clear my head. She nods. It’s her standard mode of communication these days, the head nod.
In the truck, I head down the highway towards the state park, two lanes the whole way, quiet, not too many people. My dad loved driving out this way, and would take me with him just to go cruise, and I would thank him in my teenage way by being a sullen, angsty asshole the whole time. But he didn’t care. He’d open the windows, turn up the radio and say to himself, “Yes, Robert, you’ve done right. Good looking wife, two great kids, and living out here. Look how beautiful life can be.”
Remembering this, thinking about the things that I want back, I roll the window down. I’m driving his truck; I’m sitting in his seat. The radio presets are all the same, so I punch number one, the classic rock station, and as I pass the turn off for the park, I think to myself, he really did do right. Cars are slowing down ahead of me, and as I approach I can see everyone is moving slowly between a deer that tried to cross and the SUV that stopped it.
I look down into the deer’s eyes, all black, open but not seeing, tongue out, and say—to the car, to the road, to the deer, to Ellie, to the ghost of my dad—“That’s Robert. He’s dead like Dad.”
