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Wishes

Brian Schulz

    I didn’t tell anyone about your wishes when I found them. Not that I was inclined to initially; I thought you were being melodramatic. You were always good at that, exaggerating the point to make the point. Looking back though, it wasn’t about drama. It never was: you were usually right and I was never good with nuance. You had to make things obvious. But your note, scrawled haltingly on the back of your to-do list right below the plumber’s number, wasn’t melodrama but foreboding.
    I never mentioned your wishes back then. Not to you, that I’d found them. Not to anyone. Why would I? You seemed fine and acted as though this thing wasn’t urgent. And the smudge on that x-ray, I couldn’t make out what it was. I just nodded at the doctor and said “I see.” (You nodded too, but really saw, or knew.) You kept to yourself. Hell, we barely told anyone about this thing at all. You said it would be a bother to folks and I guess I figured we could handle it. Even when you started to change - got so skinny you had no ass and your eyes, so dark and sullen - and then so fast, I still thought we’d smile about it, in relief, some day. It was only when you started staying in bed that you told a few people you might be in trouble.
    You never raised your wishes to me, either, back then. Not once. So why would I have taken them seriously? We didn’t think you would die.
    When you died I didn’t tell anyone about your wishes. I’d put them out of my mind, to be honest. There is a process to death, and your wishes seemed irrelevant, and when they should have been relevant I could think only that you were gone. And that your wishes were not real.
    Who’d have believed that you wanted to have your ashes mingled with your cat’s then sprinkled around that orchid you fretted so much about? All the things I have loved, you wrote. The orchid was blooming when you died.
    Your instructions were precise. You were always specific about things you thought were important and that I might fuck up. I was to clean the vacuum thoroughly, first cutting out the hair (your hair, long and light and fine) from around the rotating brush, removing it all, and then washing the brush with your lavender-scented shampoo, letting it dry in the open air, on the bench, by the herbs. Then I was to wipe the inside walls of the canister clean before putting in the new filter. I was to choose a calm day and put down first the cat’s ashes, and then yours in a circle around them. The orchid you wanted on the shelf by the porch light. No ceremony, you wrote, but you wanted music for a last crazy dervish of a dance. Put on Elvis Costello, the note said, and vacuum up the ashes.
    Then, take a handful of ashes from the vacuum and mix them into the soil in the pot around the Orchid. Carefully.
    I did tell one person, god help me. It was Tommy. He stuck around. I never understood you two, the cockeyed glances and humor you shared. He got smarter when he was with you, and you always let him slide with shit you didn’t let me get away with. I never got it, the way he lingered here, sometimes, in the morning after nights he stayed over, and I had to get to work.
    Anyway, I told only him. It was a Thursday night. It was almost a year since you’d died and I still ached. I’d found your note - the second one with the details - wadded in your jewelry box, and started going through things, in my head. I knew better, but Tommy was over and we’d smoked a blunt and were drinking Jim Beam from the bottle, and I was sad and it just came out:
    “You know, she wanted to be mixed up with the cat? Can you believe it? And spread around that orchid.”
    “What? What are you talking about.”
    “Tina wrote a note. Her ashes. She wanted to get swirled in the vacuum and dumped in with the orchid. Nuts, right? She didn’t mean it.”
    Tommy believed it. That you meant it. He got all quiet and pensive. Sat there stiller than a pond in morning. Sat for a long time just rocking a little, back and forth. Then bam! He slammed his hand flat on the table, shoved himself back and went straight to the mantel. The one you were always nagging me to make from that old gray barn-board you brought home from your grandpa’s in Missouri. Well I built it. Your mantel, where your ash box sat with the cat’s and the orchid. It was blooming, the orchid was.
    Tommy didn’t hesitate at the mantel. He reached up and grabbed your box and smashed it on the hearth. Then the cat’s. He hovered over the orchid, twitched a little, and bowed his head. Then he stomped on you, and on the cat, and kicked the splinters and dust around the room, chortling, eyes glassed over, and I couldn’t tell if it was the dope working or tears, if he was laughing or crying. I listened. He was humming “Watching the Detectives.”
    Then he stopped. Just like that, and flopped himself down, spent, into the ratty old overstuffed velour chair you used to curl up in to watch the fire. He curled up a little. There was no fire. I fetched the vacuum.
    Now you are really gone. I didn’t follow your wishes and I’m sorry. Tommy told me it was selfish, that I should have gone with your wishes. If I loved you I’d have done it. That’s why he did it. That and he was drunk. But I do love you and I was going to have it done. I swear. Just, I wanted to get vacuumed up with you. And the cat. And get spread around the goddamn orchid that I don’t even know where you got and is a pain in the ass to keep going. We’d get sucked up and whirled away together.

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