Death, and the Nothing Life

While washing the dishes, Katerina thought she heard a voice outside the kitchen window. Startled, she dropped a plate. As the shards vibrated on the floor, Katerina felt a light, though compressed, tap on her shoulder.

She sensed a hostile presence in the living room. It reminded her of death—the slow demise associated with festering wounds and loose bowels.

She shut her eyes to block the vision. Then, Katerina fell into a deep sleep.

The telephone rang, waking her. She got to it in time to hear the tail end of the message. Still too groggy to really understand it, she played the tape back on the answering machine. Katerina listened to the message several times until it finally sank in. Even then, she still wasn’t quite sure what she heard was true.

She sat on the floor, rocking back and forth. Mindless movement calmed her, working better than Jack Daniels or antidepressants.

#

The first call was to her thesis director.

“My mom died.”

There was a pause, then a sigh. Katerina knew why.

Finally, Professor Cummings responded. “She is at rest.”

Katerina waited for more, knowing better.

“Katerina, I know this is difficult.”

He isn’t my father, she thought, but for once he was thinking outside the box about the little girl's loneliness inside me. Spare me the expected forced, insincere empathy, and just say something that shows me you have some feelings beyond yourself.

Finally, he spoke, voice cracking through the line. “If you want, Peggy and I can come over later.”

Katerina spoke, croaking a thank you, unsure of herself as to its sincerity, hoping Professor Cummings didn’t suspect, but she recognized otherwise he probably did. He knew her well enough.

“You sure? I know there is a lot for you to deal with. I know you will be alone in this.”

Alone? Sure, I am. Yeah, alone. Since day one. Get me a Dr. Pepper; I am thirsty, Professor Cummings.

“I will be all right. I gotta call my aunt to see if I have to drive to Austin and then to East Texas. I will let you know.”

“Don’t worry. Let me know if you need anything, Katerina. Let me know the arrangements. Also, take some time off when you get back. I will take care of things here.”

“Thank you, sir.” Katerina meekly slipped the words out before bursting again into tears, hanging up the phone before his response.

Katerina drove to Austin for the funeral and the following day on to Kilgore to bury her next to Dad. Her sister Ruth had arrived on an earlier flight and was waiting with Aunt Betty, mom’s sister, at the airport.

#

Ruth was still the same asshole, only older.

She noticed that Ruth had the same hairstyle since childhood, long, uncut, and straight, with no gray, looking like she should have brought an acoustic guitar and pretended to be Laura Nyro.

To finish her off, Ruth’s expression was that blankness of someone wishing she were elsewhere, giving off a miasma of over-the-counter charmlessness.

Ruth gave no hugs either until awkwardly prodded to by Aunt Betty, who had to step away from mourning to grapple with her niece. Katerina returned the lack of enthusiasm.

At the funeral, Ruth talked, as did their mother’s other sisters.

Katerina stood in line with them at the casket, looking at the half-filled room of relatives and friends she barely knew, feeling embarrassed and unsure of what to say. When it came to be her turn, after her big sister spoke, she placed her hand on the polished metal of the casket, cold to the touch, and smiled briefly before stepping down to make her way to her seat without speaking.

Aunt Betty sat next to her and grasped her hand.

Ruth ignored her for the remainder of the service.

Afterward, they drove to the house in MacGavin Heights for a reception that Katerina helped Aunt Betty set up. The two sisters did sit together quietly, uncomfortably, with their aunts and two of the six cousins who showed up, several children, and Mom’s friends, none of whom they knew.

The old friends would be in Kilgore for the burial, along with Bubbe and Papa, who were unwilling to make the drive to Austin. Afterward, the aunts and sisters began going over what remained in the house. Aunt Betty took charge.

Katerina could not decide whether this was her aunt’s way of mourning or of marking a near-lifetime of distance between her and her late sister. There wasn’t an awful lot for them to do or discuss regarding the disposal of Mom’s things, since her instructions were clear. Other than some specific items noted in the closely typed pages Mom had left behind for her attorney sister, Ruth, her remaining belongings were long since sent to St. Vincent’s, and later, when Katerina got into graduate school, she gave away all the old clothes and toys she chose not to take with her.

Ruth never lived in MacGavin Heights, and Katerina’s room served as an ersatz sewing room, filled with unfinished quilts and crocheted stuffed animals at various stages of completion. As Katerina went through them, she realized they were for grandchildren she did not have, or—in Ruth’s case—were unknown to her. Ruth went through a few boxes without comment, sighing audibly as she picked up a headless Snoopy or a robin without wings, before placing them back into the boxes on top of the long school table Mom had used.

Katerina found an orange-and-brown owl with a board and tassel that was clearly evocative and intended for her but was missing its eyes. She searched on the table and found them cut and ready to be sewn on. She sucked in her lips and took a deep breath, placing her eyes on the body, thinking Mom may have been working on that when she died.

A wave of sadness washed over her as she contemplated the owl, thinking why she didn’t do these things when it mattered, when she was a child, a teenager, instead of only after she had left for Houston. Katerina claimed the owl, along with the plastic box containing her needles, and a wooden rack of spools. The remainder of Mom’s craft work went to the senior center.

In Mom’s bedroom, the aunts had laid out several boxes on the bed along with stacks of family photo albums. Ruth took her baby book and several of the older albums dating from her childhood, long books with heavy green covers.

Katerina took hers. They were smaller, squarer, and nearly all in color. What Katerina found interesting was that there were so few photos of them together as children, aside from several pages in one book from when she was a baby and later, when they were in Tyler with Grandma Mildred at the Rose Festival. Katerina asked for one from the latter group to remind her that she had a sister and of Grandma Mildred—one day we will finish this cross together. Also, Ruth was smiling, a rare occurrence, indeed.

The aunts went through the other boxes, asking if there were any the girls wanted, and they found a couple of boxes of loose photos and ephemera, including the box with the old vacation slides and the View-Master disks.

“I want those.” Ruth looked at Katerina, eyes asking a question she couldn’t fully verbalize, which was like her, except she seemed unsure of Katerina’s response, which was not.

“Sure, take them. They’re from your time, but I want this picture of Dad in the Navy.” She held up a photo of their father in his pea coat, standing in front of the ruins of a Roman temple in Libya. Ruth nodded, and they continued through the boxes, saying little while the aunts had a conversation and failed to draw either of them in beyond a few nods.

Katerina mused that they might as well be rag picking at a church sale. There was a lack of wonder.

Katerina watched Ruth’s movements, the dry mechanics of which made it seem to her as if she had all this planned, ritualized, keeping endless to-do lists stuck in her head and crossing them off with each discovered photo album and pair of earrings. She would fill a box, take it into the dining room, and later tape it up and address it.

Katerina passively allowed her big sister to take most of Mom’s jewelry, but grabbed a Hamilton watch pendant she had missed, along with several pairs of earrings. Later, Aunt Betty handed Katerina the purple felt box containing the pearl set Mom received when she graduated from high school. Katerina used to wear those when she played dress up, and when she went to Prom.

Finally, what remained was the furniture. Ruth couldn’t take anything even if she wanted, and punted them over to Katerina, who was uninterested. They stood together in the living room, staring at the twin paintings of each Linsky daughter, finished a decade apart, hanging over the couch. “Used to be over the credenza,” Katerina remarked.

Ruth surprised her with a verbal response, which wasn’t a grunt, saying. “Do you remember sitting for that painter in Beaumont? You started crying so much that he just took a Polaroid and painted from that.”

“Yes, I do remember crying. Cannot recall why. Perhaps I was afraid that the painter was stealing my soul. Yes, I do have one. Somewhere.”

Ruth grimaced. Sighing, Katerina guessed she had given the wrong answer. “Your painting is wonderful. Totally captures your eyes.”

Ruth stiffened and said, “You know, Kat, I resented you since you were born. Let’s have that out.”

Katerina shrugged. “Okay. Well, I knew that all along.”

While living in Beaumont, their lives at home had been more than separate rooms; Katerina and Ruth had been two nations uneasily coexisting in one house, separate states, much like the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and Yugoslavia. They were similar but vastly different people, united by the parental autocracy of shopping with mother, the semi-annual visits to Tyler, Kilgore, and Houston, and the daily party congress of family dinner. They were destined, doomed in fact, to separate eventually.

Katerina looked down at the ground before staring back at Ruth. “Thanks for stating the obvious; it took you long enough. I resented you from the moment I was born. After age ten, I became indifferent. Guess that’s what happens when you are an only child, isn’t it?”

They told Aunt Betty she could have the paintings.

#

That night, the sisters drove to Kilgore separately. The following morning, they buried Mon with Dad without much fanfare other than the aunts crying and each sister sitting beside the other, eyes staring forward, silent in their thoughts and mixed memories.

After the exchange in MacGavin Heights, they had stopped speaking, and after saying goodbye to the aunts at the cemetery, Ruth chose to spend most of the day with Bubbe and Papa while Katerina sat out on the porch, alone.

Papa would come out to keep her company and talk about school and the trip to Yugoslavia.

After lunch, Ruth made ready to leave. Bubbe came out onto the porch. She took several steps forward on the concrete path bisecting the front yard before stopping in front of Ruth, who stood by the rental car, her sunglasses on.

It suddenly struck Katerina that the three of them were in line facing Ruth, unwilling to come further. Katerina looked over at Bubbe. The old woman’s expression was one of controlled anger. Her eyes narrowed, her lips quivering.

“Shalom,” Ruth said, adding something in Hebrew that Katerina didn’t understand, before entering the car and driving off. Papa waved back. Bubbe stood, arms crossed, staring as they watched Ruth take the turn onto Main and disappear.

Papa said to Bubbe, “What did that woman say to you?”

“It is a matter of what she did not say,” Bubbe replied emphatically.

She turned to Katerina, her voice terse yet measured. “To you, she says nothing. To me, she talks, but her words are nothing. I would rather she be silent and leave me alone.”

“Why?”

Bubbe paused.

“She never said, “I love you, Bubbe.”

Bubbe pulled out her Styer automatic from her housecoat. She had the gun since 1934.

“If I didn’t walk through a checkpoint in Vienna with this and later met your grandfather—none of us would exist. Eh, enough of that. Let’s shoot. You look like you need it. I need it.”

Katerina smiled. “May I use the Browning?”

“Yes. If you don’t fall on your fucking ass.”

Poppa chuckled and went inside.

He returned with the Browning 9mm and his old service .45. This was the first time Katerina had seen it.

“Ladies, deal me in.”

They assumed firing stance.

BIO: Mike Lee is an editor, writer, and photographer at a trade union in New York City. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Blood+Honey, The Brussels Review, BULL, Literary Garage, Literally Stories, Mythic Picnic, Bristol Noir, The Airgonaut, and elsewhere. His story collection, The Northern Line, is available in many online booksellers.

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