Tainted

I can remember dodging cracks on the sidewalk, in the hope that I wouldn’t break my mother’s back. I remember my brother sitting in our grandmother’s driveway, trying to burn ants in a pool of light beneath his magnifying glass. I remember the grass stains on my favourite pair of jeans.

I do not remember the house where I spent the first six years of my life, only the small-carpeted room that my brother and I used to build forts in. I do not remember the sound of my father’s voice, whispering goodnight into the darkness of my room. I do not remember what he was wearing the day that I found him hanging from a beam in our unfinished basement.

When I was a kid, I would close my eyes at night and try to recall the life I once had, before suicide was given a meaning and my mother started wearing black, but maybe those memories were never meant to stay with me.

I decided to believe that the silly things we remember in life, like setting fire to ants and a ruined pair of jeans, were all somehow important. I imagined that in the moment before my death they would all add up, and those unimportant memories would have great meaning. I wanted to believe that moments like those could be life changing.

I was wrong. In the moment before my death, only one single thing crossed my mind.

***

My wife was the most beautiful woman I had ever met. I was 21, with my pants unzipped, peeing to a urinal when I heard a woman’s laughter coming through the open door of a men’s washroom. You’re not supposed to meet your wife while taking a piss and smelling of rum. You’re supposed to meet her in college at a coffee shop or approach her in the bookstore as she reads a Jane Austen novel. But my wife hated coffee and never liked the music in bookstores.

In the entrance to a crowded bar bathroom with graffiti covered walls and pee stained floors, stood the brightest blue eyes I had ever seen, contrasted against a mess of jet-black hair. Not the colour of blue that you find in the sky, or painted on your bathroom walls, but the colour that fills the oceans in the magazines trying to sell you a beach vacation.

Rather than being surprised at the sight of a man peeing in a urinal, she winked at me. That was the first form of communication my wife and I ever had; a 19-year-old girl winking at an adult boy with his pants half down.

The bar was crowded that night with a sea of green t-shits celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. My roommate left early to hook up with the girl he had been in love with since middle school, and my other roommate spent most of the night ordering drinks for a group of older ladies with green pom poms sewn onto their mini-skirts. I saved my money while unsuccessfully searching for the girl with the blue eyes instead.

I took the 2am bus back to our dorm, crowded with those that had just minutes ago occupied the dance floor before realizing that they had to catch the last bus of the night. Behind me stood an underage kid with a beer soaked t-shirt and green lipstick smeared across his face. I searched the crowd for a familiar face, unsure of where my roommate had ended up, but instead I found a pair of blue eyes staring right into mine from across the bus. She waved, then gently nudged a group of shirtless boys in front of her to begin making her way to over to me.

“Sorry for walking in on you in the washroom. I guess that wasn’t cool.”

She had her nose scrunched and head tilted to the right, an image so beautiful that I couldn’t not forgive.

“I had to pee so bad that I almost soaked the dance floor in urine. It was urgent. You’d understand if you’ve ever been into a ladies’ washroom on a night like this. We get drunk and complement each other’s cleavage. And that really wasn’t an option for me, not tonight, not after three tequila shots and zero visits the bathroom.”

She paused to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear before continuing.

“So obviously I picked the less crowded bathroom. Any sane person would have done that.”

I laughed again, lost in her eyes and unable to find the right words. I could tell that she was uncomfortable by my silence, so she introduced herself, Lilly.

“I would shake your hand, but I noticed that you didn’t wash up after that visit to the washroom.”

Again another laugh from me, finally followed by words. I told her it was probably best, that I’ll make sure to wash my hands before the next time we meet. I said not to worry about the bathroom incident, that she’d be surprised at the amount of times that exact situation has happened to me before. She laughed at my attempt of sarcasm, then wrote her number on a slip of paper and disappeared into the crowded bus reeking of alcohol and vomit.

On our first date, we drank chai tea and talked about politics and where we wanted to be in five years’ time. On our second date, I told her about my father’s funeral, and she told me about the day she found her own mother’s lifeless body in an overflowing bathtub. On our third date, I bought her a ring at the gift shop down the street and suggested that we spend the rest of our lives together.

Five years later we got married. On our wedding day, she surprised me with a carrier pigeon that flew from one side of Sunningdale’s Golf and Country Club to the other, delivering the most romantic of all notes that read: I can’t wait to marry you. Thank you for not eloping with me when I suggested it in Vegas last year. This is better. And below that, in much smaller letters Don’t forget to feed the fish when we get home. The “i” was dotted with a tiny heart.

Four years later we had our first child, a baby boy with dark hair like hers and dark eyes like mine. Lilly and I wrote him a letter the day he was born and decided to give it to him on his 18th birthday.

Three years later our second and third children were born 7 minutes apart from each other, two little girls whose faces were as pink as the candy strawberries that my curious son was sucking on.

Two years later we moved back to North Carolina where my grandmother raised me after my own mother disappeared with a bottle of whisky and the guy who stole my guitar. My wife called it a fresh start.

One year later I woke up to find her dead.

One week later I was arrested.

In the weeks that followed the death of my wife, I found myself described as someone I never was; the violent father and husband who stayed out late with his friends, then returned home at 2am and took a quick nap before drunkenly murdering his wife.

My weekly therapy sessions were no longer an attempt to deal with the trauma of my father’s suicide and abandonment of my mother, but a clear indication of the murderous hate I felt towards my family. I watched as my trusted therapist revealed under oath that I had been angry when I had visited his office the week before. Angry at my wife for wrecking the car. Angry at Luca for cracking the front window with his baseball. Angry at the twins for covering our newly finished front deck in finger paint. To the jury, this meant I was angry enough to kill.

The evidence was not enough to convict me of my wife’s murder, and yet, I spent years playing the role of a killer in a town that hated me for a crime I never committed.

My kids left. Luca at 17-years-old when he learned how to play the drums and started smoking weed with his old babysitter. Hailey five years later when she got accepted into her dream college on the other side of the country. Regan stayed until she sat in the passenger seat as her boyfriend drove into a tree one night after celebrating his 28th birthday. Four days later he showed up drunk to her funeral.

I was in a Kwik Mart on a Thursday night buying my sixth pack of cigarettes that week when the lady behind the register congratulated me on my daughter’s marriage. I told her my daughter was dead until I realized that she wasn’t talking about Reagan.

Later that night I signed up for Facebook using an email address I had come up with in high school, and typed Hailey’s name into the search bar. I clicked on the first profile I saw and found photo of my smiling 26-year-old daughter in a white dress, standing beside a man with dark hair and a scar across his left cheek. She looked happy.

I printed it out and slid it into an empty frame to be hung on an empty wall that hadn’t been touched since Lilly’s death.

Today, I took the photo out of its frame and watched it burn in my neglected fireplace. I always thought that maybe one day she would come back. Hailey, who looked so much like her mother, and believed in herself even after I had replaced the love I felt for my children with expensive scotch and a gambling addiction. But I let her brother leave when they were only 13 and let her sister get in a car with a drunk driver who was a decade older than her. She never came back to me.

Today, I am 76-years-old. I have lived 40 years in the home where I found my wife’s dead body twisted in the cotton sheets of our shared bed. Each day I torture myself with the memories of her, of the last day she lived. The question of what I missed.

***

It was raining the morning before I came across the dead body of my wife. June 5th 2015. A Friday.

I got up at 6:30am and made pancakes for our children who would soon wake up. Sprinkled with chocolate chips and icing sugar. For the girls, an added tablespoon of peanut butter on each.

Before leaving to go to work, the twins both woke, wearing identical pyjamas and screaming at identical pitches. Over the barking of the dog, it was difficult to tell whether they were crying or excited. I could hear Lilly’s voice echoing through the hallways of our new home, an eight-minute drive from the old one. Lilly always liked the idea of starting somewhere new.

I didn’t stay to offer help or kiss our kids good morning. Instead, I poured some nearly expired milk into my coffee, added milk to the shopping list that Lilly always kept stuck to our fridge, and left without a goodbye.

The office was no different than the day before; hours spent at my desk typing about business contracts and the mundane, constantly checking the clock and counting down the minutes until my weekend began.

Lilly texted me once to say she loved me. I forgot to text back.

When I arrived home at 6:07pm, my wife’s eyes were red and cheeks stained with tears.

“It’s the onions,” she muttered behind the Kleenex she was using to dry her face. So I dug through the cabinet beneath the counter until I found the onion goggles that she bought as a joke 2 years ago, and had refused to wear since.

“Thanks,” she sniffed.

I offered to help with dinner, but she told me to sit and play her some music instead. So I played Elton John and watched her carefully prepare our son’s favourite meal.

She was tall, her long legs demanding the attention of many young men’s eyes every time I took her out. Her tan face was sprinkled with freckles that she had tried for years to hide until one day I convinced her otherwise. Her hair was much shorter than it had been when I first met her, her eyes more tired, but just as bright.

It was a Friday night and I had plans to attend an old friend’s 35th birthday celebration. Before leaving, I asked Lilly what she’d be doing that night.

“Maybe I’ll finish knitting those blankets for the twins. I think I’d really feel great if I could finish them.”

She asked me not to stay out too late, and I promised her that I wouldn’t.

The last time I ever saw my wife awake and alive was a fleeting image through our cracked front window that wouldn’t be repaired until threatened with the cold of the winter months. I had glanced behind me while walking down our front path to see a beautiful woman sitting on the carpeted floor of our living room, laughing at her daughters’ improvised dance moves. I loved how much she loved them.

That night we went out for dinner, ordered drinks, and laughed as the boys recalled stories from high school parties and regrettable hookups. We left the bar around 2am, the latest I had stayed out in years.

At 2:15 am I got home and went immediately to bed. I can remember how my body swayed as I tried to brush my teeth. How I stumbled while trying to pull my jeans off from around my ankles. I remember hurriedly running to the bathroom where that last shot of tequila made its way out of me. I don’t remember if my wife was still breathing.

At 6:18am I woke up to the feeling of her blood soaked into the sheets beside me.

When I called for help, desperately searching for life in the stiff body of my wife, I never stopped to consider the idea that I could be accused as her murderer. I never considered that one day my children would hate me for it.

***

Today, I want to think of my wife. I close my eyes and search for the memories that have stayed with me; a nineteen-year-old girl winking at me in the men’s washroom, a twenty-three-year-old dragging me to the stage on karaoke night, a thirty-one-year-old trying to fit her pregnant belly into a dark red set of lingerie.

But all I can see is a thirty-four-year old laying in a pool of her own blood.

Darkness blends into reality, but my mind is awake with the memory of something new.

She is in the kitchen, blaming her tears on the onions she had been cutting. I believe her without question because of the gentle way she looks at me. But her eyes dart to the ground, scared to meet my own. On the counter in an untouched onion.

The memory fades, and suddenly I am in the car with her, listening to my amazing, alive Lilly, speak about death.

“Sometimes I think our parents knew something that the rest of us don’t. Something about life, or death. Maybe we all have an expiry date. They definitely did.”

She is gorgeous, her tan arm hanging out the window as her hair gently blows in the wind. I laugh and tell her that she’s probably right. I say that I hope that our expiry dates are 80 years from now, to the day, so we’ll never have to spend a day apart.

“Do you mean that? You’d really rather be dead than spend a day without me?”

She looks at me for an answer, but all I can do is smile and think of how lucky I am to be spending my life with her.

The thing about Lilly is that I only ever saw what was beautiful.

My cloudy consciousness brings me to a week before her death, and I am walking into our bedroom to find my wife staring at the ceiling, eyes wide open and hair perfectly spread out against white sheets that have yet to be stained with her blood. Long legs soaked with the sun’s warmth. I loved those legs.

There’s a painful expression in her face. An empty bottle of vodka on the nightstand. A wild look in her eyes when I wish her a good day.

The thing about Lilly is that I only ever saw what was beautiful.

I open my eyes and am pulled back to the present moment, 76-years-old and lying in the dark on my bedroom floor. An empty bottle of prescribed Prozac falls from my hand and rolls across the oak flooring, coming to a stop beside two more emptied bottles of antidepressants. I remember watching them mop my wife’s blood from that floor.

With eyes wide open, my vision fades to darkness. It is wintertime and I am looking at the night sky. I think I see fireworks.

Lilly is telling me that this is the year of no resolutions. She’s scared of resolutions. Scared of herself.

I was buzzed and didn’t understand her riddled words so I nodded and found myself lost in those striking eyes for the thousandth time.

The thing about Lilly is that I only ever saw what was beautiful.

Later that night, I found her crying on the floor in a friend of a friend’s bathroom. She told me how much it hurt. She asked me to help her. I hugged her until she fell asleep.

The next day she woke up and blamed her tears on too much red wine. We kissed then laughed over our choice of a sleeping location.

The thing about Lilly is that I only ever saw what was beautiful.

I am cutting the grass when I hear my wife screaming from upstairs. I sprint inside to find Hailey lying motionless on the bottom step of our staircase. We rushed her to the hospital. My wife kept apologizing, but I never thought to question what for.

The thing about Lilly is that I only ever saw what was beautiful.

The memory fades and I am again aware of oak wood pressing against my back. I can feel myself floating away like a leaf in the autumn wind, with no control of its direction.

This is what death is.

The moment that we spend our lives running from. The moment that we find ourselves narrowly escaping as we cross highways and fall from cliffs too high to be climbing.

And suddenly my life is reduced to the image of my wife and I walking on opposite sides of a train track, me always close enough to admire her beautiful laughter but farther that fear can travel. Two parallel lines that never meet, with one that ends before the other.

I want to reach out so badly, I want to hold her, I want her to hear me when I tell her that it will be okay. I want her to know that I finally understand. But instead, I am dying.

In my final moment, the life I have lived does not flash before my eyes, my memories insignificant. Only one single thing crosses my mind.

My wife’s dead body lying in the bed beside me. The beauty of her eyes hidden in an eternity of darkness. A cry for help woven into the smile that I fell in love with.

In the fridge a milk carton, with and expiry date that read June 6th, 2015.

But I never noticed any of that. Because the thing about Lilly is that I only ever saw what was beautiful.