Cemetery Street by John Zunski (free ebook reader for ipad .txt) 📕

your mother?” Menace lurked in his voice.
“I didn’t call her nothing,” I squirmed. Tears of shock filled my eyes.
“James. so help me God I’ll knock your teeth out. We’re in a hospital, if you’re lucky they’ll be able to save them.”
My father stood in front of us. He didn’t say or do anything.
“I didn’t say...”
His eyes flamed, “James, Tell me!”
I swallowed hard and closed my eyes. “A bitch.” The hit I expected never came. With a soft voice he asked, “Your mother just lost a baby, she may die. I know you have your problems, but why, why today would you call her a bitch? I never thought you could be so cruel. Maybe your mother is right, maybe you are a miserable self-centered snot nose.”
His words hit me harder than his fist ever could. I exploded into uncontrollable sobs.
“Stop it.” He commanded. “Your mother is fighting for her life and your crying over a scolding. Stop it.”
I struggled to stop.
“Shut up Damn it! Grow up.”
Fury seared my bones. I despised him worse than my mother. Despite my anger, I was ashamed – I let my hero down. For him to be so angry I had to have done something terribly wrong. I was confused. “Why aren’t you mad at her?” I asked between sobs.
The question startled him. “Why would I be mad your mother?”
“You said she had an abortion. That’s why you wouldn’t let me go into the bathroom. She had an abortion in the bathroom. She decided she didn’t want the baby and got rid of it.”
“Oh James,” he whispered. He brushed my hair back from my forehead. “Oh God no. Your mother didn’t have an abortion. She didn’t choose to get rid of the baby. The baby spontaneously aborted. It’s like a miscarriage. Something went wrong.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“The Doctors don’t know,” I repeated my grandfather’s words to Shannie and Diane later that day.
The Ortolan’s picked me up at the hospital that afternoon. I spent the rest of Thanksgiving with them.
“Have you spoken to her yet?” Diane asked.
“She’s been sedated all day.”
“Poor girl,” Diane replied.
Shannie scowled at her mother before glancing out the window. She was in what Diane called a navel gazing mood. In those moods, Shannie was cold and introspective.
“Cut the shit, Who are you kidding?” Shannie said when we returned to Cemetery Street. I protested her idea of checking out the bathroom. “You know you want to.”
“For the fifty-second time, I don’t have my keys.”
“We don’t need them, I know a way in.”
“Great. Now you want me to break in to my own house.”
“We’re using an alternative entry method.”
“Wait a minute. How do you know how to get into my house?”
“Experience is a wonderful thing,” she said.
“But what if they come home while we’re in there?”
“Geezus Pete James,” Shannie rolled her eyes.
“Diane, we’re going for a walk,” Shannie said. Behind the rhododendrons guarding my front porch, she instructed me to lift the lattice. I smiled at her. I had crawled behind those bushes countless times and never thought I could get into the house this way. “Your dad did a great job on the basement,” she said after we slipped in. “The old owner was a slob.”
“It’s locked,” I said trying the basement door.
Shannie pointed to a key hanging from a nail on the doorframe. “That should do it.” Awkward didn’t quite describe my feeling. Shannie knew my house better than me. She replaced the key and led the way across the creaky floor. Gray seeped through the aging windowpanes.
The air was heavy on my shoulders. Stillness rang in my ears. The house felt as if it was brooding, mourning the loss of an occupant. The idea gave me the shivers, my hands broke into a cold sweat. My curiosity waned. I didn’t want to look behind the bathroom door. Fear of Shannie’s scorn kept me going.
At the top of the stairs I told her I didn’t want to look. “Suite yourself Just James,” excitement sparkled in her eyes.
Droplets of blood led from my parent’s room into the bathroom. They returned my stare - taunting me with visions of the flashing red lights and my mother’s cries. Without warning my stomach erupted, bile rushed into my mouth. Force of will prevented me from drawing a gruesome collage with my dead brother’s blood. Hand to mouth I took three steps at a time, racing my stomach tremors. I lost my Thanksgiving meal in the kitchen sink.
“You Okay?” Shannie asked from behind when I finished.
“You satisfied?” I barked, head buried in the sink. My voice acidic. Tears rushed down my face - sweat soaked my body. “You just had to see it.”
“Where does she keep the Pine-sol?” Shannie asked.
“Are you happy,” I continued. “I bet this made your day.”
“I need a bucket. Where does she keep it?”
“What do you care?”
She stared at me for a second. “If you want to be a drama queen go ahead. It’s okay with me. But someone has to clean up the mess. It would really be cruel if your father or your grandfather. God forbid if your mother got stuck doing it. Seeing how things are done around here, that wouldn’t surprise me.” Her words were razor sharp. “If you don’t want to help me, at least get the fuck out of my way.”
I pointed beneath the sink as I stepped aside.
“Good.”
Times like these Shannie seemed an old spirit. In the blink of an eye, she transformed from giddy teenager to a I’m going to twist the nads off life mentality. Maybe it was the navel gazing mood - maybe it was PMS. As she fished under the sink for the supplies, I thought of that Sunday she faced the onrushing train – God, I loved her composure.
With the same composure she put my grandfather in his place. When he and dad returned from the hospital, he yelled: “James, get your ass down here, now!” He seen the bathroom light from the road. “I told you to say out of the bathroom,” he continued. The floorboards creaked under his impatient footfalls. Not waiting for me he started up the steps.
“Let me handle this,” Shannie said.
“Hi Stan,” she perked stepping into the hallway. “How’s Mary doing?” The stairs fell silent under him.
“Oh,” he paused. “Shannie it’s you.”
“In the flesh,” she answered.
“She’s stable.”
“I’m sorry about the baby.”
“Thank you. Mary will appreciate the sentiments. Where’s that grandson of mine?”
Paralyzed with fear, I stopped scrubbing the tile.
“Do the doctors know what happened?” Shannie’s voice peppered with concern. Her drama classes were paying off.
“Placentia Abruptus,” he said.
“What’s that?” Shannie asked.
Thick silence filled the air. I could almost here my grandfather’s thoughts: how the hell do I know, I know is I lost a grandchild today and almost lost my daughter. What he said was, “The doctor said something about something and then something happened. I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry.” She paused. I held my breath. “How are you holding up?”
“As well as can be expected. But I’m a little perturbed with my grandson. I told him not to go into the bathroom. He’s with you?”
“Yup.”
“James, get out here,” he said.
I crept out of the bathroom and stood next to Shannie. My grandfather looked like he aged ten years. He looked tired and frail. His ponytail seemed out of place.
“It was my idea. James didn’t want to do it, really. I talked him into it. You all had a bad day, I figured cleaning the bathroom was the least I could do.”
That’s my Bug, I thought, never at a loss.
“Never-the-less,” he continued.
“Really Stan, I’m not covering for him. It was my idea.”
“Is that so?” he stared at me, daring me to let a girl take the fall.
“Yes,” I told him. She deflected my grandfather’s anger.
My grandfather fell in love with Shannie that Thanksgiving night. After diffusing the situation, she invited him for dinner. “I’m too tired dear,” he said. I thought he would jump at meeting Diane. When I told Shannie this, she said. “Geezus Pete James, where’s your sense of priorities. Diane can wait.”
“You weren’t there,” I wanted to tell Shannie of his second night in town - his reaction when caught me looking out my bedroom window. “What’s so interesting Punk?” he asked standing next to me. Diane gazed at her reflection in her dresser mirror as she brushed her hair. Her eyes focused on the brush cleaving through her locks. I barely noticed him. Without a word I turned my head towards him and nodded towards Diane. “Holy Shit,” he whispered - the sweet smell of alcohol enveloped us. We watched in silence until Diane finished and turned off her lights. Without another word he patted my back and let himself out of my bedroom. We never spoke of it.

“You’re going to have to be more sensitive to mom’s needs,” my father said. We were on the way to the hospital the morning my mother was to be released.
Like I’m not, I didn’t say. My father’s words further cast the pall I felt that holiday season. Like you are, I thought gazing out the window. You lumbered around the last few months half alive, lost in your own world while fate dealt mother cards from the bottom of the deck. Maybe if you were around she wouldn’t have taken her frustrations out on me. You could have saved me my own trip to the hospital. Sensitive, what about you, you prick? Don’t tell me you didn’t breath a sigh of relief in the hospital, I saw it with my eyes, your head may have hung low, but your feet were floating.
“You’re right,” I answered. I watched myself in the window’s reflection.
“It’s time we put Christ in Christmas,” mother preached from her hospital bed. “No more materialism. No more forgetting the real meaning of Christmas.” She summoned me to her side. Placing her IV laden arm around me she continued. “We lost a baby, as hard as it is for us to understand, God is using us. It’s God’s will, I know it; I feel it. It’s his reminder that we still have each other. We may have our disagreements, but we have each other. We should thank God for that. Really thank him.”
Oh shit, my lips quivered. I can kiss the Nintendo goodbye. Damn it, what did I do to deserve this?
“Just go with it,” Shannie told me over the phone. “She’s been traumatized. You and God are the only ones she can trust. Look on the bright side, you’re in good company.”
Good company would be to live with you and Diane, I thought. If I can’t live with them at least I can live next to them. Sanity was a bedroom’s window view away.
The first Saturday after mother came home she reminded us not to wander too far, confession was that evening and she expected dad and I to celebrate the sacrament with her. “Since when is confession a celebration?” I asked my father. He shrugged.
“What do I have to confess about?” I questioned Shannie as images of Diane flooded my mind. I felt my face warm.
“Whatever making you blush,” Shannie teased.
“I’m not blushing.”
“You are to.”
“Am not.”
“Geezus Pete. You’re impossible.”
“I think it would be cool to confess,” Shannie continued.
“You would say that.”
“Absolving yourself. It’s like starting with a clean slate halfway through the game.”
“Easy for you to say you never had to do it. It sucks and it’s creepy. You sit in that little dark closet and tell the priest your darkest