A Symphony of Cicadas Read online

  “Sam, I asked you a question,” John said, the curiosities about Lacey now evaporating against the heat rising up inside of him. There was nothing that made him angrier than when Sam shut down like this, losing any outward displays of emotion as he ignored whoever was speaking to him. It was the game he played whenever John acted as someone with more authority than a roommate who fed Sam and paid all the bills. Instead of fighting his father, Sam would just keep his mouth shut and react as if no one were speaking to him at all.

  ****

  “I don’t think he can hear you,” I said in bewilderment the first time it had happened. Sam remained tightlipped and calm while his father reddened in the face, repeating several times what he had said. It had been dinnertime then, too, the only time Sam was ever around us. Other than mealtimes, he would lock himself in his room with his videogames or hang out with his friends until moments before it was time to eat. I had been dating John for just a couple of months, but I was beginning to see that Sam was fighting against any kind of parental control. He wasn’t a bad kid, and as far as I could tell he wasn’t rebelling in any major way. He just didn’t like to be told what to do.

  On this particular occasion John was merely asking him what his plans were for the weekend. We all sat in silence as we waited for his answer, and I thought I saw just the hint of a smirk as he got up to put his plate in the sink. Beside me Joey ate his dinner as if nothing were amiss, though he watched in silent curiosity to see how things would unfold.

  “Sam, your father is asking you what you are up to this weekend,” I said to him. Sam looked at me with a calm demeanor, as if I were a child who didn’t understand the way things worked.

  “I heard him,” he said.

  “Then why aren’t you answering him?” I asked. “Are you mad at him?”

  “No, I just don’t feel like talking,” he said, and he turned to walk out of the room before anyone could say anything else.

  ****

  “Sam, don’t start this shit again,” John said, setting his fork on the table and looking at his fifteen year old son as they sat alone at the table we had once shared as a mixed up family.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sam mumbled. “I’m not doing anything.”

  “Then why aren’t you speaking when I talk to you?” I could feel the heat of John’s infuriation simmer inside of him, threatening to explode as he did his best to keep things under control.

  “I don’t have to talk just because you spoke to me, Dad. I can talk when I want,” Sam said, sitting up out of his slouch and looking his dad straight in the eye.

  “You see, that’s where you’re wrong, Sam. If you don’t want to talk about something, I’ll give you that. But tell me that. Tell me you’d rather not talk about her, or whatever it is you’re feeling. But to blatantly disregard me is rude. And if we go down this road again, I’m just going to give you much of the same and forget to feed you or drive you wherever it is you need to go.” John sat back in his chair and folded his arms in front of him, confident his last word would sink in with Sam. But Sam looked at him with blazing eyes, standing up and glaring down at John.

  “What the fuck do you think has been going on the past couple of months?” he shouted. “Have you been feeding me, driving me anywhere, or even talking to me? You’ve been ignoring me ever since Rachel died. So don’t tell me how to act around you when you can’t even do the same shit for me!” With that he picked up his plate with food still on it and threw it into the sink with enough force that it split into three separate pieces. He started to go back up the stairs to his room, but realized that was expected of him. In a split-second decision he opened the front door to the apartment and slammed it behind him as he left.

  John sat in silence at the table, numb as a flurry of emotions shot through him in a passionate fight to be center stage. Sam was right. He’d been absent as a father as he mourned the dead and forgot about the living. I danced in his swirling thoughts as he remembered that first week I was gone and how I was everywhere. I was in the smell of my hair that still lingered on my pillow. I was in the photographs that beamed out at him from every corner of the house. I was in the books stacked upon my dresser waiting to be read, whose resolutions I would never know.

  He had spent that first week finding everything that reminded him of me and hiding it in Joey’s room, shutting the door on the past several years that made up the best parts of his life. But he’d paused when he came to my wedding dress, hidden within an opaque garment bag. I peered into his memory as he unzipped the bag with halting fingers, letting the creamy silk spill out onto my side of the bed as he looked at the dress he’d never see me wear for him. He took in the way it ruffled at my imaginary waist, hugging my curves and flowing into a subtle bell where my feet would be. One of my stray hairs remained on the dress, and he lifted it off with care, touching the fabric with his calloused hands and remembering the softness of my skin. I sat in silence in the corner of this memory as he lifted the dress to his face and sobbed into it with muffled cries. I stood next to John at the dinner table as he relived this very first cry. It was the one that opened the floodgates, leading to weeks of staying in his room and sobbing in secret. So ashamed of this weakness that possessed him, he left Sam to fend for himself, a temporary solution that soon became a habitual practice. And I was everywhere, haunting the apartment in his memories despite the fact that every part of me was locked up tight in Joey’s room.

  In time, John tore himself away from the wedding dress, hanging it in Joey’s closet after maneuvering around the piles of boxes that took up every inch of space. Seeing it hang there, shining its promise within the darkened room, he was stuck between closing the door on it forever and the fear of forgetting me once he abandoned the dress to the room of memories. The idea was still formulating in his mind when he walked back to his room and grabbed the pair of shears that sat up straight in the cup of pens on his desk. He hesitated for only a moment before he began cutting into the fabric, taking a square piece of material and putting it in his pocket before closing the door of the room for the last time.

  Months later, the material remained hidden in his pocket. He rubbed it between two fingers as he sat in solitude at the empty dinner table, the slam of the front door echoing over and over through his head as if it were hitting against the vortex of hurts.

  Bang. Rachel and Joey are gone.

  Bang. You will never hear her laugh again.

  Bang. You may even forget what her laugh sounded like.

  Bang. You are losing your son.

  Bang. Rachel was the glue that held this all together.

  Bang. You are a horrible father.

  Bang.

  John stood up and threw his plate at the wall, another porcelain casualty of a war that couldn’t be won. I shrunk down in the corner of the room at the violence in the action, ignoring the nagging thought that I was the cause of it. I couldn’t be. He was still mourning. He’d been suffering without me here. Nothing had changed.

  The plate was the last thing in the house to be broken that night, if I didn’t count John’s heart. He stopped himself at the climax of the action, his breath heavy as he stared at the food that stained the wall, and the pieces of white that were now scattered across the dining room floor. For several moments he stood like that, clenching and unclenching his hands, fighting the urge to grab something else and heave it with a satisfying smash into the wall. His breath came out in forced rushes of air as he worked to expel the anger and rage that was clawing to fight its way out of him. He wanted to shout, to scream at the unfairness of having to be a father even though his whole world had come crashing down around him and he wasn’t sure how to pick up the pieces.

  Six months after my death, and I was still both his waking breath and sweet suffocation.

  We both stayed quiet in that room, his breath slowing to a calm rhythm in the heavy air around us. Without a word, he grabbed the broom and began sweeping up the shards of p
late. Once the floor and sink were free of broken porcelain, the walls without evidence of the earlier actions, and the remaining dinner dishes cleaned and drying in the rack, John sat in a chair in the living room in silence, waiting for Sam to cool down and come home.

  Ten

  Sam never did come home that night. I left John alone in the apartment and found Sam huddled in the poor lighting of a pier a dozen blocks from the apartment. He sat at the edge, tossing tiny rocks one by one into the still water below. They lay gathered in a pile near his crossed legs, collected on his walk towards the bay. It was a fascination he had carried with him from his childhood, gathering rocks in moments of his life, one for each experience to hold onto the memory a little longer. There were rocks in his room that looked to be just ordinary pebbles to the unknowing eye, but held secrets that only he knew every time he looked at them. He could tell where each rock was from and what he was doing in the moment, even years after collecting the insignificant pebble.

  He never felt younger than he did as he sat alone on the pier away from his depressing home. In that moment he was five years old, lost and needing some guidance in the confusing reality of being fifteen. Trying to let go of the hurts that tore at him, he watched as each pebble dropped from his hand, taking its memory into the blackness of the water and disappearing. I was surprised to see my face among the images he included in his tally of life’s unfairness. But at the front of the list was his father, John’s likeness making numerous appearances as the list grew longer and longer until everything disappeared except for him.

  “I don’t even care,” Sam said out loud to no one, trying to convince himself that this was how he felt. He couldn’t fool himself, however, and swiped at the tears that kept spilling from his eyes. He held onto one of the larger rocks and looked behind him to see if his dad was searching for him. No one was there, and the cell phone in his pocket remained unlit. He added that hurt to his rock and dropped it in. “He doesn’t care enough to try and find me,” he whispered as the water accepted the small stone. He picked up another one and thought about the past couple of months.

  He had fended for himself when his dad went under the dark hood of depression. At first he kept up the cleaning, trying to help out his dad because John was so sad.

  “He didn’t even notice,” he whispered as he dropped in another rock.

  He made his own meals and always made sure there were leftovers for his dad to pick at. When his dad did eat from the food Sam prepared, he never thanked him, didn’t even acknowledge how the food got there.

  Another rock fell in.

  He had to remind his dad when to go shopping, making lists so they had enough food. His schoolwork was growing in difficulty, and he was falling behind in several of his classes. His birthday came and went, and all John could muster in celebration was a card with fifty dollars in it, a gift that was gone before the weekend was over when Sam spent it on some experimental weed instead of the videogame he had been trying to save for. The housework was getting to be too much for him to keep up with. So he ceased helping out around the house, testing to see if his father would notice all Sam had been doing, or even start doing something on his own. Neither happened, and the house began to fall apart. A few more rocks tumbled from Sam’s shaking hand.

  And then my face showed up. He tried to push against it, but it became clear that he missed me. He wouldn’t say it aloud, but I could hear it as if he were whispering it to me in my ear.

  With just a simple thought, I saw the part of Sam he kept hidden from me.

  When I was alive and first began to know Sam, he did everything he could to push me away. I was the intruder to a life he and his dad shared that, to him, didn’t need fixing. Sam could come and go as he pleased, and never had to worry about spending too much time behind locked doors. He could do what he wanted and was never questioned. It didn’t even occur to John to pry a little bit more into Sam’s life. That had always been Wendy’s department when they were married. But Sam stopped spending as much time at his mom’s house soon after the divorce, limiting his time with her to only a couple days a month and spending the rest of his time in his real home with his dad. He was angry that she even left, giving up without even a fight. But more than that, he knew he had more independence in his dad’s house than under the watchful eye of his mother.

  When I came into the picture before the body of the broken marriage was even cold, Sam was angry. I stood in the way of his mom ever coming back home. With the anger he held against his mother, the conflicting hope for his parents to get back together confused him. But he didn’t argue against it. He only knew he didn’t want me around.

  For the next several years Sam was wary around Joey and me, keeping himself closed off in the bedroom and ignoring my insistence to get to know him better. And then I moved in and wrecked everything all over again. I brought with me this other kid who now had to share his bathroom, his food, his space, and his dad’s attention that was already overwhelmed by me. But even when Sam was at his most brilliant in teenage defiance, I never wavered.

  When I was around, he wasn’t invisible.

  Neither one of us could pinpoint the exact moment when the change took place, when Sam accepted the fact that I was there to stay, that even a defiant teenage boy wouldn’t change that. It took me longer to realize that Sam actually didn’t mind that I was there. However, he still took the time to test me, checking to see if I, too, would get up and walk away like his mom did. He got away with less while I was around, but he stopped caring. In truth, he appreciated that I cared enough to notice, even if it limited his comings and goings.

  ****

  “Where have you been?” I demanded of Sam one evening when he showed up long after dinner was over. I faced him in his bedroom, demanding an answer and getting nowhere as he remained silent, his expression blank.

  Earlier in the evening, Sam’s plate lay untouched as we ate our dinner. John had shrugged it off, though he called his son’s cell phone several times to remind him that dinner was getting cold. I was angry that the meal I cooked lay untouched on Sam’s plate at the table. I announced to John and Joey that someone who couldn’t bother to make it home on time for dinner didn’t deserve to eat, tossing the food down the garbage disposal. When the door slammed and heavy footsteps bounded the stairs, I looked at John.

  “I’ll talk with him,” John said. I could hear them upstairs, Sam’s voice loud against John’s calm reasoning.

  “I’m not even hungry!” I heard Sam yell, and the door slammed. John came down soon after, his face a mixture of fury and frustration.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said in defeat. “If I’m easy on him, he walks all over me. But when I come down hard, he’s impossible. There’s no winning with him!” He helped Joey clear the table, looking at me as if I knew what to say. I didn’t. Joey hadn’t yet reached an age of rebellion, finding it easier to just go along with the flow rather than fight against it. I liked to think that it was because I had raised him a certain way or that he was just a mellower child, but I knew it was more probable he just hadn’t hit the years of testing boundaries and exercising the ability to go against society.

  “I’ll give him a few moments, and then I’ll try my hand with him,” I told him, cooling the urge to knock down his door and give him a piece of my mind in favor of being the anchor to John’s mounting chagrin. John smiled at me in both apology and relief.

  “I hate to have you do it. He’s my kid, I should know how to handle him.”

  “He’s my stepson,” I told him. “And this is our family.”

  He raised his eyebrows at me, but didn’t have to say anything for me to know what he was thinking.

  When I had first moved in, I didn’t even know what to say to Sam. I was terrified of the kid, sensing his anger over his parents’ divorce and assuming he was placing the bulk of the blame on me for how messed up his world had become. I was the stranger in the equation, I was the easy target.

&nb
sp; But I didn’t actually know how Sam felt. While the kid would move sideways when we all moved up and down, he never directed his disdain at me. He’d yell at his dad, slam doors, and leave his belongings all over the place. But when it came to me, my newness to his world caused him to tread with careful steps.

  It didn’t occur to me until later that, in actuality, I had—and should have—authority over him. In the newness of the order of command, I gave him way more leeway than a then-fourteen year old boy should have. As a result, we both ended up moving around each other in an awkward dance of never quite saying what we meant and of choosing words with care.

  I regretted telling John I’d try to get through to him that evening. In the moment I felt like anything was possible. But as the closed door came into view I realized that I had no idea what I was doing. I’d never done this before, and just the act of knocking on his door felt daunting. I raised my hand in hesitation, holding it frozen in front of the door for a few moments as I rehearsed what I was going to say.

  You need to call if you’re going to be late.

  We thought you were dead when we couldn’t reach you.

  Do you have any idea how you’re killing your father?

  Why can’t you just stop being difficult and start joining this family?

  What the hell is wrong with you?

  “What’s wrong with you?” Joey asked as he rounded the corner. I dropped my hand from the door, my face reddening as I realized how much weight I was putting into Sam’s reaction. “I don’t get what the big deal is, Mom. He’s being an asshole. Just knock on the door.” And with that he banged on Sam’s door and then slipped past me, closing the door of his own room before I could grab him.