I ^{Am Nothing Without You
by Naomi Leimsider}

Last December, during what is usually a slow news week - the one between Christmas and New Year’s - was the week that Dena Moore, the most popular girl in my high school, was raped and murdered behind the gym. It also turned out to be the week that my father told me my mother didn’t want to come home anymore. She just didn’t love us. In the end, he said. She just doesn’t love us.

She left him at the annual late-in-the-season holiday party given by their friends, Sandy and Ed Bring. My parents attended every year. My mother said Ed drank too much during the holidays and flirted outrageously with her, but she, of course, was not interested.

The papers didn’t go into too much detail about Dena Moore, but they did report that she was raped and left to die. They interviewed some of her neighbors who all agreed wholeheartedly that this was a tragedy beyond description. Her parents were thin and gray and they sobbed when a young woman from a news program asked them questions about Dena’s short life. There was a rumor going around that Matt Spillman, one of Dena’s ex-boyfriends, was the one who wrote “the bitch whore deserved it” on the dirty white walls of the boy’s bathroom. Matt Spillman had a reputation for being more than a little crazy.

I can’t believe this happened, Anna, my father said to me and for a moment I wasn’t sure which event he was refering to.

Sandy Bring called a couple of days after Christmas looking for my mother, looking for her husband. She thought maybe they were having an affair and she wanted me to tell her they weren’t. That it was just something lonely wives like her thought about when they had too much time on their hands - it wasn’t reality. Christmas Day was beautiful, she said as if the memory would change the current situation. For once, all of her suspicions melted away. They had a nice holiday meal, gave each other presents - bracelet for her, necktie and belt set for him. They even had sex, which they hardly ever did anymore, and it was actually pretty good, it was nice - you know? (No, Sandy, I wanted to tell her. Really, I don’t. I’m a goddamned teen-ager who has never had sex. And I don’t want you to tell me about it either.) She told me they spent an hour or so dozing on the loveseat by the Christmas tree. But she woke up in the morning alone wrapped in red and green holiday sheets on their brand new California King-sized bed. Empty closet. All his personal belongings gone. My mother stayed for the holiday too. She sat at the kitchen table with us while my father sliced the roast beef, served his famous mashed potatoes and butternut squash. She bought me a new dress with sequins that she knows I’ll never wear. Hugged and kissed me. It was their plan, I suppose, to let us have this last holiday. After all, it is rude to walk out on Christmas Day.

I’m sorry, I said. My father and I don’t know where they went.

Okay, Sandy said, her voice small, hardly there.

Last year was my senior year and I was in love with a boy who was in love with Dena Moore. This was not unusual. All the boys, at one time or another, were in love her. It had been four long years since I first realized what a serious situation this could be. It started out as a crush when I was a freshman, but my feelings for him deepened over time. I have to admit the initial fire dulled a bit by the time I was a senior, not as intense maybe, but I’m good for the long haul -- my father always told me not to be a quitter. He said I am made of stronger stuff than that. I fantasized about this boy when I saw him trying to get Dena’s attention in the hallway. In the daydream he’d buy me flowers and we’d take long walks by a lake he found somewhere because he’s the kind of boy that can make things happen. He knows how to kiss and he’d take the time to teach me. He wouldn’t feel sorry for me because I was such a late bloomer (that’s what my mother always said about me when she thought I was out of earshot -- Anna’s a late bloomer, not much to her yet, and - what she said all the time to her friends - that daughter of mine has a wet noodle personality). My boy would write me slow songs about my beautiful smile. He’d be so romantic and loving and trustworthy. He looked like what my father called a “stand-up” person (my father had always refered to Sandy and Ed Bring as “stand-up” people). He had an honest face.

I watched my boy try to kiss Dena Moore. She’d put her hands over her mouth and push him away. There was no reason to do that, she knew how to kiss. I saw her sucking face with Matt Spillman many times. They were sloppy, always grabbing each other, so noisy. Dena’s best friends, Laura Darling and Vicky Dancy, walked by yelling that’s enough kids! and Matt looked away for a moment to smile at the girls (so wickedly, when Matt smiled he looked like the devil) and then he’d grab Dena by the back of her neck and smash his face against hers. When Dena pulled away from the boy that I loved it only seemed to make him want her more and more. But he was tender and sweet, he was no Matt Spillman, not a beast - my boy was a gentleman. He wrapped his arms around her. Sometimes she let him touch her. He pressed his face into her hair and he looked like he might cry. She always laughed.

My father showed me the wedding vows he wrote for my mother on a napkin from a diner he frequented in the days and weeks before they got married. He said he always played the same song on the beat-up jukebox in the corner. The old country standard - I Am Nothing Without You - sung by that woman with the frosted blonde hair, the one that sings in that rusty voice my father calls bittersweet. He says the song tells the story of how he feels about my mother - his love, his anguish. He wooed her for months before she’d go out with him. This is a variation of the same story he’s told me all my life. My mother chimed in sometimes, correcting his exaggerations, grimacing at what she called his outright lies.

Anna, your mother was the most beautiful girl in Wichita, is how my father started the story.

St. Louis, my mother liked to say. You followed me to St. Louis. I was living in St. Louis then.

Ok, the most beautiful girl in St. Louis, my father would say building up steam, working up a sweat to tell me this story again -- the story of how hard he worked to win my mother over. How she made him suffer before she finally gave in and said yes, she’d marry him.

Oh poor you, my mother always said. Poor you, had to work so hard for little me.

You don’t have any idea, my father would say. Not much has changed.

And then he’d squeeze my hand to remind me once again that it was so true.

The whole school was invited to Dena’s funeral on New Year’s Day. I went through my mother’s walk-in closet looking for an outfit to wear. She didn’t take her old dresses or her old shoes. All of the dresses were hung on identical hangers with belts cinched around the middles as tight as they could go. The shoes were arranged underneath, together, like couples, and all the outfits were complete like that -- ready to go at a moment’s notice.

I pulled some of the dresses off of their soft padded hangers. They resisted at first, as if they didn’t want to go, but then they relented all at once, flying in my face. I attacked the clothes with my hands. I stood on the hems and pulled the arms up towards me. When I didn’t have the strength anymore I got a knife and sliced those awful dresses up the center, splitting them open. I slashed at the dresses and then hung all of the clothes back up so they swayed quietly back and forth over the shoes, just like they were supposed to, as if nothing had ever happened.

At the funeral I sat alone. Dena’s parents insisted on a lavish one. They said they wanted it as expensive and gorgeous as her wedding might have been. The catering hall didn’t have much time to prepare and they rarely held funerals on New Year’s Day, but they bent the rules for Dena Moore. The choir sang the old country standard “I Am Nothing Without You” and I thought about how my father loves that song, how it told the story of how much he loved and had sacrificed for my mother.

We were all gathered in the hall provided by the funeral home. There were flowers everywhere. Hundreds and hundreds of bouquets of flowers. Somebody lowered the lights and we all lowered our heads for a moment. Of course, Matt Spillman was there. But the boy that I loved wasn’t. It wasn’t like him, he was such a sweetheart, he wouldn’t miss Dena’s last good-bye. I decided that my boy was too broken. He must be in deep, deep mourning.

Everyone who wanted to had a chance to speak, all of Dena’s friends had prepared a little story.

How sweet and remarkable she was, Laura Darling said. How loving and kind. What a talented singer she was, Broadway was never going to get a chance to see Dena shine. Remember how she won first prize last year at the junior talent show, she asked and of course everyone remembered. No one was better than her that night. Nobody. She should have had a long and happy life, she was a beautiful special girl - she deserved it, Laura continued and her voice broke, shattering into a million pieces.

Vicky Dancy cried so hard when it was her turn to speak that she choked and choked but no one offered to help her, they just let her stand up there and cry like that. We watched her lean on the podium for support. Everyone was quiet just listening to Vicky cry.

Her friends couldn’t say enough about how generous she was with her time, with her money, with her boyfriends (ha ha - everyone was allowed to have a good laugh). When it was Matt’s turn to speak he stood up on the stage and silenced the clapping that started when he jumped out of his seat with a small movement of his hands. Matt started stamping his feet and slapping his hands against his thighs to keep the beat. And then everyone was following his lead yelling Dee-na! Dee-na! over and over again as if they were hoping maybe she’d answer.

Good lord, Matt said when the chanting died down to mostly murmurs with just a few people still shouting. What a funeral, huh? If she didn’t know before, she knows now how much we love her. She can feel it. We won’t forget her. We loved her so much.

Dena’s parents cried big sloppy tears.

My mother is beautiful. Say what you want about her - my father often teased her like that in front of their good friends, Sandy and Ed Bring. Say what you want, my wife is a beauty. I’m a movie star trapped in a housewife, my mother would say and she’d run from room to room screaming and laughing and waving her arms - let me out! let me out! Ed always thought this was so funny because it was no secret that my mother turned many heads, including his. Once, when I was allowed to sit and drink cocktails with them, (I was given a syrupy red drink that my father said would “put hair on my chest” ) Sandy told my mother to be careful that she didn’t run through the sliding glass door in the kitchen trying to let her inner glamour girl out. I heard the snip in her voice and I smiled at her, looking at her so she knew I was with her on this one - we could bond . The ugly daughter understands her pain. But she rejected my glances, she refused to catch my eye. She just smiled while my father and Ed roared with boozy laughter.

On January second we went back to school. The auditorium was all dressed up for Valentine’s Day; the school pushing us to the next holiday since the last one had been such a disaster. It was as if Christmas had never existed. There were red hearts cut from construction paper and distorted store-bought Cupid faces. There was free chocolate everywhere. The boxes were ripped open and attacked by the end of first period, the empty carcasses lying all over the hallways.

My boy wasn’t in school. He was still in mourning. He must be, how could such a sensitive boy face everyday life without her after what happened? I floated through the school looking for him. Past huge bouquets of pink and yellow roses brought over from the funeral home, past the teachers yelling at us to get back to work, if we let up now, in the second half of our senior year, we will ruin everything we have worked so hard for. Past the principal in his new suit handing out schedules of when the school psychologist will be available this semester. It was early January and the sky was gray. The clouds were moving fast. My mother always said that the winter sky seemed anxious.

Unstable, she said. Gray and unstable and waiting for an excuse to blow.

The papers started reporting facts about Dena Moore’s murder, they wanted everything new to be a break in the case. They also started publishing stories about what they claimed was the real Dena: Raped and Murdered Teen-ager Was a Real Bitch! There were candid interviews with anonymous sophmores and juniors telling tales about Dena’s party habits, her nasty disposition, her uncanny ability to steal anyone’s boyfriend. Not only did the police find a thumb print on her lacy little panties, but someone on the basketball team stepped forward to tell a story about the time when she wore those lacy little panties just for him. Dena’s thin and gray parents cried on the local news, they didn’t want their daughter’s image destroyed in this fashion. Their daughter was a bitch whore, a rugby player who didn’t want his name revealed told the news when they asked what he thought of the late Dena Moore.

And the stories kept coming: There was one about a freshman girl who lunged at Dena with half of a broken test tube and a hot Bunsen burner. Someone told her that Dena had been seen with the girl’s boyfriend the night before. Dena threw the girl on the floor and Laura Darling and Vicky Dancy kept her still with their high-heeled boots firmly ground into her back. Then she brought down the full weight of the unabridged version of Introducing Organic Chemistry on her head again and again until the distraught science lab instructor, a young woman with freckles and glasses, started yelling for Dena to stop and then she started sobbing that she didn’t like her job and she couldn’t take another second as a schoolteacher.

And the stories got stranger and stranger: There was one about sleepover parties at Dena’s house on nights when her parents weren’t home. Everybody invited had to cut their fingertips with straight razors and suck out the first few drops of blood from the fingers of the person sitting next to them. Matt Spillman said that it wasn’t entirely true, it was just a rumor they started to scare the new girls, the gullible and vulnerable freshmen.

There were rumors that Dena knew who murdered her. There was a story going around that she had a premonition, that two weeks before she dreamed of blood draining out her faster that she ever imagined possible and there was no way to stop it. Matt Spillman told the papers, sadly, with tears in his eyes, that this wasn’t true. Dena wasn’t some kind of prophet - she didn’t have any idea.

Laura Darling went on television stating for the record that neither she nor her friends were vampires.

We’re teen-agers, she said. We’re into kissing and parties and clothes. How could Dena have possibly gotten away with hitting a freshman girl on the head repeatedly in front of a teacher? It’s crazy, it could never happen.

The police were filmed hugging Dena’s friends - Laura Darling who never cried, she was always poised and in control, and Vicky Dancy, who always cried - she could never keep it together for the cameras.

We’re working hard, the police said. This one is a doozy.

By February my father no longer thought it was necessary to turn on the lights or the heat in our house. He started smoking cigarettes - said all he needed now was the smoke to keep him warm and the burning end to help him see. He had never smoked in his life, never been tempted, never crossed his mind. But now it seemed like a good idea, necessary even, in the face of such a loss. He learned quickly how to inhale and exhale, his chest constricting and releasing.

It feels good, he said when he thought he had the hang of it. It feels very good. My head is light and my lungs are tight and then it all releases so slowly. I love the way it sizzles. How come it took me so long to find this?

They spend a lot of money at school trying to convince us not to smoke, I said.

Why don’t they do something useful at your school, he said. Like maybe find the person who murdered that girl.

The police say they’re on the case, I said. They’re always in the hallways looking for clues.

Of course they are, he said drawing deep on his cigarette. Looking for clues -- yes, that’s important.

My father started smoking with all the zealousness of a convert. He’d seen the light and knew he’d never be able to find his way back to who he was before he learned what he told me was the dirty little secret about smoking. He said it was erasing his memory, it was easing his pain, he was pushing all negative thoughts out of his body everytime he exhaled. And he didn’t seem to even need a sweater sitting in the ice cold kitchen in the collapsible chairs he had picked out to match the table with the wooden leaf. (It’s important to have flexible furniture, he said. What if you suddenly have guests coming for dinner or you just remembered that you’ll be eating by yourself? The table can be set accordingly. Brilliant, my father said. He always liked it when things like furniture made sense.) He seemed completely immune to the weather and the dark. When I asked him about the lights he shrugged as if it wasn’t important enough to discuss.

The only way I know you’re here is if I see the lit end of your cigarette, I said.

I’m a man consumed by fire, he said and he laughed and laughed.

The boy I was in love with seemed to be missing. Nobody had seen him since Dena Moore was murdered. There were already jokes about finding him on the back of a milk carton or at the bottom of a lake, even though there isn’t a lake around here for miles in any direction. But the fact was that no one knew what had happened to him.

I was lost. My day was structured around him - he was at his locker after first period and by the pool before lunch. He followed Dena from the girl’s bathroom to math, the only class I shared with the popular girls. I sat behind Laura Darling and once she asked me if she could borrow a pen. We had been getting to the point where we were starting to get to know each other - me and my boy. The week before Dena was murdered he said hello to me. He was leaning against the door to advanced math, blocking it with his body so I couldn’t get in without brushing by him, (and I wanted to, was shaking with anticipation walking up to my classroom, seeing him there pressed up against Dena and Dena was smiling at him for once and they were engaged in some kind of conversation, but all I could really concentrate on was the fact that I was finally going to come in contact with his body) and then he moved at the last minute. He saw me and smiled, stepped away from the door and pushed it open for me like the sweetheart that he is - such a gentleman. Hello there, he said. I said hello too. It was a croak of a hello, but it was enough to make him nod in response before he kissed Dena on the cheek and shut the door behind me. I was moved - on the verge of ... something. I sat down and waited for the feeling to pass.

If the police had come to me and said, Anna, what do you think? We value your opinion. I’d tell them that I think my boy did it, that I think he’s in hiding - deep undercover. They’d ask: do you think he is capable of such an atrocity? And I’d reply that it doesn’t matter what I think - everyone is capable of everything. The police nod their heads at this bit of naked truth coming from a relatively unattractive, but obviously intelligent and insightful, seventeen year old.

Overcome with emotion, I’d say. Looking for his inner Matt Spillman, his ticket to Dena Moore’s heart. He was inching closer and closer but suddenly, for whatever reason, it wasn’t enough for him - maybe someone told him to be a man, take charge of the situation, make the bitch his if he wanted the bitch. Even if it isn’t in his nature to be Matt Spillman, even if his nature is tender and sweet. He looked deep inside himself and found the rage that had been building up all this time. A slow bubbling boiling rage growing hotter and hotter by the second. He was finally able to bear his teeth. Maybe he had her behind the gym and she was teasing him and laughing at him when he told her he loved her. He tried to kiss her and she pushed him away and up came that rage like a goddamned geyser. He pushed her up against the wall like Matt Spillman used to do, but then he didn’t know when to stop once he started and he just kept going and going. And she was screaming. And he was beating her (it was like the devil was in him, you know? Like it wasn’t really him. Somewhere between Matt Spillman and a demon.) And like the way it happens when the nice young man loses control, his anger subsided quickly, and all he could do was to look around and survey the damage he had done. And she was dead. Bloody and raped and dead.

That’s quite a story, the police would say.

(Would they take me seriously? Could they see how shaken I was by this realization about my boy that I loved? I’d forgive him, but not everybody would. This town wanted a hanging - someone to pay for the horrible death of one of it’s best and brightest.)

In April a beautiful spring was beginning. It was unusually warm and lovely and my father was finally officially fired from his job. He had been told not to bother coming in anymore back in January. Then he used all of his sick days and vacation days and personal days and any other days he had saved up for an emergency (the proverbial “rainy day” he always liked to say before my mother made it rain all the time). They gave him the bad news over the phone since they hadn’t seen him since Christmas.

I never understood exactly what he did for a living - he carried a briefcase and wore what he called a “casual suit”, but he wasn’t very specific about the actual job. He said I’d be so appalled by how monotonous it was, how it ripped apart his soul to get in his car and drive to work every morning. He wanted to save me from understanding what his life was truly like.

That’s what fathers are supposed to do for their daughters, he said. Try and save them from a life of crushing boredom.

After he argued for days on the phone with his former boss and his boss and his boss, he managed to secure what he called a “modest severance package”. He had convinced them that he suffering from a nervous breakdown as a result of abandonment, a condition that one of his supervisors initially doubted because he said my father stated his case so clearly that he couldn’t believe there was anything wrong with him. But then my father cried. He sobbed into the phone so hard and for so long that they finally agreed to compensate him and told him they were praying for him to heal.

They found my boy. He was wrapped in a dirty sleeping bag by the side of the highway leading west out of town. He was disoriented and obviously hungry since he devoured a sandwich he was offered in the police car once they convinced him they were there to help him. The doctors said he had a “break with reality”. He was a sick boy, but he’d get the attention he needed now. They showed him on the evening news wild-eyed and crying. In my professional opinion, the doctor said. A significant trauma caused this terrible tragedy. Everyone suspected that this was the only way his soul could deal with Dena’s tragic death. There was no history of mental illness in his family. His mother said her boy had always been completely sane.

Everyone was discussing the weather -- such a bleak and nasty winter had finally shed it’s skin and become a bright and vibrant spring. The school pushed up the date of the prom to celebrate this new found happiness and everyone was delighted that the clouds were passing - the forecast said only blue skies ahead.

Despite the fact that the sun was shining, my father started refusing to leave the house. He couldn’t think of one good reason anymore.

This is my home, he said. Why would I want to be anywhere else? I’m a family man, the home is where the family is, and it’s where I belong. In the kitchen, just the way it’s always been - cooking for my family.

He prepared feasts for just the two of us - five, six courses for one meal, sending me to the store for an obscure spice or sauce, tasting everything from his top of the line utensils before he served it to me. He was always the cook in my house - my mother made it clear that she had better things to do. My father loved getting his hands dirty - plunging in vats of homemade macaroni salad up to his elbows, gutting fish with expensive knives, baking seven-layer cake with seven perfectly even layers.

We sat down to candle-lit dinners every night -- this was something we only used to do on Christmas Day. Their tradition was that he’d wait at the bottom of the stairs for my mother to appear wearing her holiday finest - the red velvet dress he bought her, cut low, breasts pushed up. She’d walk down slowly -- holding up a corner of the dress, taking each stair one at a time. She was careful, she didn’t want to trip on her high heels. My father whistled and clapped and hooted for her when she twirled around for him after she descended the last stair -- then he grabbed her and kissed her red mouth. It was their ritual. Then we had our Christmas dinner by the light of the candles and the tree. My father sang while he ate, hummed really, it was a habit of his and one my mother hated. But on Christmas she never yelled at him, she just sat stiffly in her tight dress eating the food my father cooked for us and the red velvet cake that was his holiday specialty.

I graduated from high school on a white hot day in May. Laura Darling and Vicky Dancy gave a speech about Dena, how we’ll never forget her, but now we are moving past this critical time in our lives. They were so blonde and sincere.

This has informed my adolescence, she said making a sweeping gesture with her beautiful graceful arm. After all, we’re just kids trying to grow into mature responsible adults.

She put her arm around Vicky.

We are going to try and put this behind us, move on, she said.

Applause. Instant deafening applause and a standing ovation.

I fantasized about my boy appearing at graduation in a beautiful new suit, perhaps using crutches (why crutches? After all, his legs were fine. But maybe he could lean on the crutches for emotional support. Whenever an injured person shows up on crutches you know they are healing, they have bright brave smiles on their faces). He’d be the keynote speaker and he’d be encouraged to tell us stories about those terrible days when he was lost to us, how Dena’s horrible death had destroyed him. He’d tell us that now he was on the long road to a meaningful recovery. He gave us hope. His eyes, soft and moist, his hands trembling before us - he’d been through the worst of it and now we could look to him for guidance and salvation.

He’d be dashing and charming and full of life. Finally, we’d meet after four years of longing. And he’d love me and want me just as I imagined he might if only he had given himself the chance. I’d wait for him while the reporters from the evening news interviewed him, while the newspaper photographers took picture after stunning picture. I’d wait for him and he’d thank me for waiting and I’d thank him for being such a gentleman and we’d kiss (finally!) a deep meaningful kiss full of hope and shooting stars like a romance novel and I’d inhale like I’d never taken such a deep breath before and he’d exhale like he’d been holding his breath his whole life. He’d ask me if I had any plans for the evening or for all eternity and I’d say - Plans? No plans. Except to be with you.

After graduation I went home to be with my father. He was sitting at the kitchen table, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth which was now blistered and rubbed raw from lighting one then falling asleep. The unattended cigarette would burn down to the filter and scar his lips. Next to him was a card with a bouquet of pastel flowers on the cover. My mother had sent us a card.

Happy Thoughts Bloom in Spring, it said. How are you both? Taking care, I hope. Don’t miss me, I’m not worth it. It was signed - Fondly - but where her name should have been it was blank. She didn’t refer to herself as my mother or my father’s wife.

Anna, my father said. Have a seat. Sit with me.

The day grew dark and we sat together in the kitchen -- hands folded, lost in our own thoughts.

My father started humming his favorite song, that old country standard, the one about love and loss.