He hung up on me and the wailing sound went away, but the needle-scraping sound stayed with me, chilling me to the bone. Stop your scraping! I screamed to no one. I plugged my ears with the foam peanuts left over from the boxes and the sound of my breathing drowned out the scraping. I sat down on the floor and pulled off the pillows from the brand-new couch and propped them up behind my back. A Catholic funeral, I thought to myself, he would have hated that; he only went to church to appease our adoptive parents, he didn’t really believe in religion, he didn’t believe in anything like that. I turned around and allowed myself to begin sobbing into my roommate Julie’s brand-new leather pillows to muffle the sounds I couldn’t hear anyway, poor little adoptive brother, I sobbed. I must have sobbed for hours. As my sobbing ebbed, I began to search my mind for the cause of his life-taking. Were there clues? There must have been clues. There must have been clues and signs hiding all over the place, the place of his life.
I continued to come up with nothing except an image of his small brown Korean eyes that looked nothing like my Korean eyes, as we were each adopted from different biological families, and I remembered suddenly the last time I saw him, the time he had come all the way from Milwaukee to drop in on me in New York City, the time I tried to give him a hug, he had refused me, he had turned away sharply, muttering something about how he was sick with a bad cold and he didn’t want to infect me. I remembered it was strange then, how he pulled away from me, his one and only adoptive sister. I want to hug you, you silly little man, I might have said. I might have pulled him close to me and hugged him anyway. I was always forcing people to do things they didn’t want to do.
Twenty-nine years old and gone. I went back to my sobbing and then my sobbing turned into a percussive shaking and a small vase with plastic flowers fell off my roommate Julie’s bookshelf, but it didn’t shatter into pieces, it just rolled dumbly across the wooden floor. I began to worry my roommate Julie would walk in and see me staining her new pillows with the fluids of my grieving. The eye is a terrible organ, I thought as I glanced around the apartment for a box of tissues. It took me a while to compose myself. I have always moved at the speed of caves and mountains.
When I finished my mucous-ridden sobbing, I decided firmly that I, Helen Moran, would go to my childhood home in Milwaukee and be a supportive beam of light for my adoptive parents in their despair. You’re the only one left; you will be the one, I decided, and I marched right up to the boxes and put my hands on them to steady myself. Yes, I will go to that house, I said to no one. I pictured in my mind the house at the bottom of the hill, a dark house I had not set foot inside for many years, a house as large and spacious as a medieval fortress, with enough square footage for at least one or two more Catholic families. It was not a cheaply built house, as my adoptive father liked to say. It did not come cheaply built. My parents are somewhat rich, but, like most Midwesterners, they are the cheapest people I have ever known. Despite their lack of financial stress, they are extravagant in their cheapness, their discount-hunting, their coupon-scissoring, their manuals on how to save. It was important, they said, to think about the catastrophic future, to always have a backup account filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars. To think about it too much depressed me. My entire existence was infected by this cheapness, this so-called frugality. Of course, it would be wrong not to acknowledge that these values of cheapness or frugality were what allowed once-orphans like myself and my now-dead adoptive brother to grow up, and to thrive even, in the comfort and security of the not cheaply built house. But there would be no more thriving for us, as one of us was dead.
My brain was working very hard inside the housing of its skull. Was it surprising they themselves didn’t call me? We hadn’t talked in months, so perhaps not. I wasn’t even that upset they didn’t call; I preferred not to talk on the phone, especially under awkward and distressing circumstances. What else could a human being do in this situation? I wondered. When I received the phone call informing me of my adoptive brother’s death, I knew it was imperative that I return to the Catholic fortress, I had no choice but to offer a helping hand to my shell-shocked adoptive parents during what must be a time of severe physical exhaustion and emotional anguish, despite the distance presently between us.
At your service, I imagined myself saying as I bowed to them, like a humble servant. Then I would envelop them in the warmth of my charity and my supportive beam of light. I am a helpfulness virtuoso and it is time to take my talents to my childhood home, I would have to tell my roommate Julie. That’s how it will go, I said to myself. But then, throughout that time of saying to myself how it would go, it dawned upon me: how can I, Helen Moran, help my poor adoptive parents withstand the death of my adoptive brother when I understand nothing regarding the circumstances of the death itself?
I was curious about the abyss. The abyss, round and dark as a child’s mouth. How did he die? I wondered. Was it in a violent manner? Uncle Geoff didn’t specify. Was Uncle Geoff even my uncle at all? Or was he my adoptive mother’s cousin? Then the image of the abyss began to take hold of my thoughts and suddenly, I could not stop thinking about it and saying things to myself as I stood in my shared studio apartment in Manhattan propping my body up against the boxes.