Everything I know about death I learned from a fourteen year old boy.

My stomach growls and I want to laugh at it out loud but when I look to him for the shared amusement he hasn't looked up from the ground. He's sitting on the top step in front of his house and I am marching in small circles around the lawn, crunching leftover piles of snow under my black patent mary janes. My tights are wet up to the ankles and my coat is too short, leaving me to freeze in my Easter dress that is too thin for early spring in Nova Scotia but it's dark blue and that's better than a lighter color on a day like today.

Lochlan's grandfather (who practically raised him while his hippie parents came and went, travelling the world) died four days ago and the funeral was this morning. Now the cars line the streets since everyone came back to their house afterwards for a reception and the boys are wandering around the neighborhood in suits and ties. I take the pins out of my hair. It was in a ballerina bun which makes my head look tiny, baseball-sized. My mother said people with lighter hair should cover or pin it up because these are dark, dreary occasions and then she sighed and looked at my father and asked if I really was old enough to go to this, that maybe nine years old is too soon.

Too soon for what, Mom? I asked her.

Goodbyes. She smiled gently.

No, it's fine. Besides, I'm only going to be floral-support to Lochlan. 

She snorted trying to hold a laugh in as she corrected me. That's moral support, Bridget. 

What do morals have to do with it? I asked but she shooed me out because she had to get ready too.

They are inside with the rest of the grownups drinking coffee and eating church-squares and the boys are at the ball field throwing snow and I am keeping up sentry because I can't imagine being anywhere else. What if he needs me? What if he wants to talk?

You can go. He says abruptly.

Do you miss him? I mean...already? 

Yes. Now go home, Bridgie. 

You think he's still around somewhere? Like hiding? 

No, he's gone. 

Gone where?

To heaven. 

You think there is one? 

Now isn't the time, Bridgie. Go home. 

But I am getting more and more hungry, exasperated and cold. Why can't you just explain what happens so I don't have to keep bugging you every time your grandparents die? 

Because it's not my job! He shouts it and tells me again to go home. It's the first time he's ever scolded me. I don't know what to do with this. He's been a bit of a jerk since he turned fourteen and I don't like it one bit.

I c-can't. My parents are inside your house and I'm h-h-hungry! I start to sniff and my eyes are watering but at the same time I'm attempting to seem like I don't care about his outburst by stomping harder on the snow patches until my slick-bottomed shoes make me wipe out on the lawn. Now my tights have grass-stains, my bum is wet and I'm shivering for real.

He jumps down off the step and picks me up. Come and we'll get some food okay? Then maybe we can watch TV downstairs until everybody goes. 

But the minute we got down to the basement, plates and glasses balanced carefully on a tray which he put on the coffee table, he fell apart. I threw my arms around him and told him I would hold him until he felt better.

That's the thing, Bridget. Death doesn't get better. It's just a hole that's there forever. And every time someone else dies it makes another hole, and another, until there's nothing left of you either. 

I didn't sleep for a week after that. I had this vision of God swinging by and punching a hole in Lochlan with a big apple-corer-type device and I was determined to protect him and yet terrified it might take only one hole to kill him off, and I wondered if that happened if it would make a hole in me.

Burning Van.

She's naked on the phone
Watching them back
No eyes just their stupid grins
They long to be liberal mannequins
And in their tiny room
They eat Chinese food
And they don't call their wives
Cause the girl in the window is
Pressing her breasts
Up against the window pane
The guy they're after
On the floor below her
Is cutting cocaine
Higher than the building

I really really hate it when reality comes in, tripping all over my daydreams that I leave all over the floor (in spite of being asked repeatedly to pick them up and put them away so no one will get hurt) and then starts to bitch and moan about having stubbed toes on the sharp corners of my thoughts and hopes. What the fuck is that? Did you not see the Do Not Disturb sign? Next time at least knock before you interrupt the life I want in favor of the life I have.

Guess who isn't going to Burning Man?

I mean, unless there's a bunch of people here who want to have a burner party with me because I glued LEDS on fucking EVERYTHING and really this wardrobe isn't fit for anywhere else that falls under the heading of reality. Maybe I will wear some of it to the celebrity grocery store. The creepy butcher will like it. I actually stopped going to that store and drive to the Superstore instead these days. They have Japanese candy.

On the upside, the boys owe me BIG TIME because I spent five days straight cooking and stocking the RV only to stand aside as it pulled away from the driveway this morning without me.

Without Loch too, who turned and smiled so goofily at me with a big mix of half-relief and full-regret going on I had to laugh. I've seen that look every time the show run ended. He didn't want to go home but he was sick of it all. It's the definition of bittersweet, his face is. 

 We switched our tickets over to Gage and Andrew who are both fucking crazy and will love it, having gone way back in the day. They promised to take a billion pictures and not touch each other in the touchy camps.

August and Sam had this great eleventh hour epiphany about me. That was great. Sam will do fine. They do great independently of one another when it comes to care and feeding of my feeble brain and outward nightmaring, I don't know why they butt heads when they have to do it together but they sort of made up this morning and it was nice to see.

Duncan said it won't be the same without me there. Especially in the touchy camps.

Sigh. I should have gone. 

Look, I'm trying to spin this best I can here. The stars did no align this week, nothing fell into place, it's all jammed into various unsuitable, opposite-shaped positions that do this life no justice at all today.

I didn't even get to see Lamb of God and Slipknot this week. I was supposed to.

I need to start organizing the new plan, which is a joint birthday party for Ruth and Lochlan. A Sweet Sixteen/Grifty Fifty bash. He remains touched but not disappointed by my efforts overall to make fifty something amazingly special.

(Please don't find it weird that I don't gush about Ruth turning sixteen. I'm still following the original plan to not trot out much info about my kids for higher viewcounts.)

Truthfully a whole host of factors kept us off the RV, the most important of which was how hard a time Lochlan has been having breathing in the smoke from the air quality/forest fires all around us (a new feature bug in him since his accident inhaling a shitload of fuel into his lungs while eating flames on his birthday last year ) and how bad the dust would be for him at Burning Man if he's this bad now.

The second factor was the severity with which Caleb came down on my poor little head with just about every ace up his sleeve that he had. I'm not sure exactly why he didn't want me to go, I mean other than the possibility I might touch Duncan, though, NEWSFLASH, I touch Duncan all the time.

Gosh.

I hope Caleb's picturing that. right. now.

I have to say I love Ativans for breakfast though. I'm so level you could hang a picture with me. I'm fine. I'll be asleep in about three minutes. Prime time deliverance indeed.

Thanks, Matthew.

I feel like I'm losing for money
I feel like I'm losing for free
I feel older than the dead angel on my shoulder claims to be

I feel like we're drinking and driving
I feel like we're running into walls
I feel like swimming in your apathy as a kind of parody
For miles and miles, miles

I feel like somebody's missing
I feel like somebody's missing
I think somebody's missing

Matthew Good lives near Lochlan's mother. I ran into him once. We were both walking our dogs. We're the same age. I wanted to grab his sleeve as he passed and he stared at me waiting to see whether I recognized him or not. His gaze was so intense I was staring back nonetheless and since this was almost five years ago I wanted to tell him that I spent the winter previous sitting in the car in the garage with the motor running listening to his songs while tears ran down my face but I don't suppose that's the sort of thing anyone who writes music wants to hear. Even though it wouldn't have gone like you think. It would have gone more like this:

Matthew, could I have a moment of your time?

Of course. Of course. Cute dog.

Thanks! Yours is too. She a Burmese mountain dog?

No, just a mutt (we laugh and the stranger-ice breaks, plunging us into sudden tepid familiarity).

I wanted to thank you for your songwriting. Honestly there were days when your music was the only thing I could feel.

Tell me about it.

I'm a widow twice over. Sometimes it's hard to feel at all anymore and sometimes I feel everything and you have many songs that just seem to reach inside and squeeze my heart in a hug, but a crushing hug that makes my heart bleed at the same time. Like it feels better even as it hurts.

Maybe you should be the one writing songs. I'm sorry for your sadness but I'm glad if I could help somehow. Is it getting better? Are you alright?

Sometimes. I won't keep you from your walk but I've awfully glad I got a chance to meet you and thank you in person.

I'm glad I got to meet you too.

He gives me a mega-awkward but very tight hug without anything bleeding except for my mind and then we walk in opposite directions. I look back at the end of the block and he's standing on the corner watching me. I turn and tuck my head down, trying to carry my composure before it falls out onto the sidewalk and when I look back on the next block he is gone.

I should have said something.

(But at the same time interrupting everyone else's life so they can spend a moment feeling bad isn't what I set out to be. These things I am learning, only some of them seem like things I already know.)

Migraine breakfast, narco lunch, bathwater dinner and I'll try again tomorrow.

Well it's full speed baby
In the wrong direction
There's a few more bruises
If that's the way
You insist on heading

Please be honest Mary Jane
Are you happy
Please don't censor your tears

You're the sweet crusader
And you're on your way
You're the last great innocent
And that's why I love you

Softer music on the stereo this morning while I eat a banana and drink coffee, an ice-pack on the back of my neck and another on my forehead. Ben sits with me. I'm maxed out on medication and loath to top up in case I wind up with the cycling rebound pain I get when I take too much too soon. If I were less afraid of everything or less perfect in my personal morality I would snort some coke off the counter and call it a day, sleeping until early in the week as the world reduced itself to undone chores, post-binge filth piling up around me like a photoshoot from VICE. Fake as fuck and yet designed to make everyone currently sober wish they could just let go of their white-knuckle grip on life for five fucking seconds. Only life isn't a magazine, life has teeth and those teeth are sharp if you fall behind long enough for it to catch you and eat you slowly, one limb at a time.

This might be Ben's fault. Reformed junkies addicts rockstars have trouble sleeping and so he wakes me often in the hours where my sleep is deepest. He has to reach way down and fish around in the dark to find me and when he does my head breaks the seal, pain flooding into my skull. He feels bad but he also can't help himself sometimes. Rough as he can be, big as he is, he never leaves marks and so I don't think I mind, I just can't reconcile it with this. This pain. This day wasted on gingerly breathing, feeling my way around for oxygen, functional and yet not functioning. He's suggested we have a blisteringly hot bubble bath when we're done our coffee. That helps a lot, actually. Maybe I can relax enough to fall asleep again later if I can convince Ben and Loch to have a Saturday-nap.

Maybe it will go away. Like Jake. Like Cole. Like the Devil because I pushed back and I'm suddenly glad for these little lightning flashes of courage mixed with exasperation, everything colored with my endless selective integrity that actually makes me laugh even as I'm ashamed of myself most of the time. The keening that never ends inside my brain and seems to get loose all the time anyway, that noise that seeks out affection like a homing beacon, landing on the first savior it sees.

So coke would be better by far. Maybe in one of those edgy magazine photo shoots.

 I don't even recognize myself without sleep any more.

You're still you, Ben confirms upstairs as I look in the mirror and I turn to look at him, putting my back to my own face, which sounds painful in it's own right but it's kind of a relief.

How do you know? 

Because you're always inside out and you make no effort to hide that. Why don't you stay put while I go run the bath? Sit quietly with the ice pack. I'll come get you when it's ready.  

Black Rock doubts.

I'm the first person who will balk at playing Left 4 Dead with the boys and then be the first one rushing into the melee to hack away at zombies without pausing to follow the instructions of the leader.

I'm the one who insisted we stick with the midway, with the rides where it's safe and open and daylight and then dragged Loch behind the curtain into the circus and then the freak show becoming a somewhat extremely-local cult favorite for a few summers there. We had a good run.

I'm the one who tells you I'm not impulsive and then when you blink next I'm hanging off the ledge where I tried to jump because I realized I could so why not?

I'm the one with the fear. Fear of strangers, fear of familiars. Fear of crowds, fear of remote locations. Fear of deserts, fear of the open ocean. Fear of people on drugs because they're checking out on me, fear of those who are sober because they can dial me in.

I'm the one insisting we pack dried fruit and vitamins while the rest of them expect to exist on an unsteady diet of pickles (pickles? What?) and frozen tacos. Lochlan wants to bring whiskey. I say that's a bad idea with August and Duncan in the program. I'm the one wondering if I'm too old for this or maybe too uptight and August keeps telling me I'll be fine 'once I'm there'.

He's right.

I'm always fine once in the middle of everything. I am always okay. Sometimes I turn out to be legendary in my shift from hesitant wallflower to impulsive, direct centre of the known universe.

I suppose this is a bad thing, but I'll call it a good thing right now. It gives me comfort for what is an incredibly daunting endeavor: trying to bring a baked birthday cake all the way from Vancouver to Reno in a smallish RV that is already packed to the rafters with ten days of food for four people. Too much food but I'm a just-in-caser.

I'm excited as fuck. And now that we have the food sorted out and cooking planned for half of next week it's time to figure out what the heck I'm going to wear. Loch opened our bags on the bed and then looked at them for several minutes before heading to the closet and taking out one of his top hats,  putting it beside the bags.

There's the important stuff, he said and I could see that the fear is a little bit contagious. 

I'll give you a crown.

Loch and I rewatched Sense8 over the past few days. He's holding on tight but I'm holding on tighter. I'm disgusted by myself and sad that the little girl from the Midway is a puppy following the wrong owner half the time, only because she was busy looking at the backs of his heels thinking it was the right one without ever once looking up to see that the hair was the wrong color and this wasn't her owner after all.

(Oh, here, I'll save you the trouble of sending me those gentle, condescending emails reminding me no one 'owns' me. I know this. It's a perfect metaphor, though, don't you think?)

For this television show I'm always vaguely disturbed and mildly horrified by the birthing montage, with its graphic shots of babies crowning. I've only seen that in real life with cows and I'm not sorry about that. Lochlan said it's amazing to see a baby come into the world that way and then take a breath for the first time. I bet it is. I had two cesarean sections, nothing pretty, beautiful or profound about any of it but I actually don't harbour any real sadness or lingering regret over any of it because it was necessary for survival and so there you have it. I'm fighting tooth and nail to be here because I'm a goddamned fucking masochist.

He downplayed it and said I'm just messed up.

God love this man for he's perfect. He's ripped everyone else's face off but left mine intact so that he'll still recognize me and on we go. We can't figure out how to make life easier so we're going to be reborn in the desert next week (with the bugs, yes I saw the news) and then hopefully we can start over.

Again.

We're good at that.

Lunch.

I am a magnet for all kinds of deeper wonderment
I am a wunderkind
And I lift the envelope pushed far enough to believe this
I am a princess on the way to my throne

Destined to serve, destined to roam

Oh ominous place spellbound and unchild-proofed
My least favorite chill to bare alone
Compatriots in place they'd cringe if I told you
Our best back-pocket secret our bond full-blown

I arrive late and the champagne is warm. The Devil apologizes for this, saying he thought I would be on time. I was going to apologize but then I asked myself why and out loud I asked, Why champagne? What are we celebrating? Violence? Stockholm syndrome?

He looked at the floor for several moments before picking up his glass, drinking the contents and refilling it for himself. Then he passed me a glass as well and said we were celebrating his realization that he has a problem. That he thought all along that he was only leaving marks on me if he broke the skin when he bit me, that he is horrified, destroyed by this.

I let go of the glass and it shatters on the floor. Champagne goes everywhere. I shake my head once as if I haven't heard him properly. No way could I have heard him properly.

What is it? 

You're 'destroyed' because you leave bruises on me and didn't realize it? How could you not see the damage you've been doing since I was a little girl? Who's destroyed here again, exactly?

You come to me willingly.

You threatened to take my son away! You always use what means most. You started with Loch and moved on to Cole, then Jake and then the kids. What am I supposed to do, defy you? Then what? What happens if I don't do everything you order me to? Tell me because I'll take it now, whatever punishment you think you can dish out. Let's get it over with RIGHT NOW. 

I never had a plan, Bridget. I just wanted to be with you but you keep passing me over for someone else. Anyone else. Everyone else. The only way to control you is by exploiting your worst fears. 

At what point would a sane person have realized that someone doesn't want to be with them and move on?

If you had ever refused me I would have but you gave in every time. 

Because I was twelve and you told me you would kill Lochlan if I didn't. And then you told him you would kill me if he told! How are we not supposed to take that seriously? We were children. I believed you. I believe everything you've ever told me and so I did I was told to do.

But I didn't have to threaten you every time. Only when you resisted.

That doesn't make you any less scary or give you permission to act surprised that your actions leave permanent damage. Is this just another ploy? 'I've changed, Bridget. You'll see' to keep me home? Well, fuck you. We'll talk when I get home from my trip. We fucking fix one thing and break another and there's no need to keep going in circles. I've done my time. I'd like to be happy now. 

You faked it?

Faked what? 

Your contentment with me. Your peace with our situation. 

I fake everything now. It's the only way I can get through the fucking day, Diabhal. You can clean up your mess. I have to go pack for my trip.

Let me see you.

I shrug and unbutton my dress, letting it fall to the floor. PJ gets up and leaves the room. Matt follows.

Oh, Neamhchiontach.

I shrug.

How do you feel? 

I look at the floor and shrug again. I'm okay. 

This is not okay, Bridget. I didn't realize you were so badly injured. 

I stare at him blankly.

It's not okay, he repeats to the young child.

This is what you do, Diabhal. You and Cole.

I didn't realize my strength. 

You've seen me before. 

Not like this. Not covered with bruises just from my touch. 

Then you've been blind to match my deafness. 

His eyes fill up and he puts his hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. How do you hide them?

I have full coverage body makeup for when I cover my tattoos. It works on these too.

Doesn't it hurt to touch them?

Yes. But that's the game. 

This is not a game, Bridget. 

Sure it is. You bite, you hurt, then you retreat. I'm used to it now. You're like a snake.

Put your clothes back on.

I listen, picking up my dress and shrugging back into it as I button it up at the same time. A modicum of dignity from a man who allows absolutely nothing, ever and suddenly I have his full attention? I don't buy it but then again I don't care anymore. Loch tried to kill him, Ben isn't thinking it's all that big a deal really, the kids are mad that I wrestle with these giants and I just don't even care. I got my Cole-time, I made everyone feel things and yet it backfired because I'm supposed to feel things and I don't. 

Lampblack and baby blue.

Baudelaire said that humans were deluded if they thought they could wash away all their spots with vile tears, but Baudelaire was French and therefore knew nothing about hygiene or shower gel.
    ~The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

I woke up in a daze yesterday morning, staring out the patio doors into the sky, more than a little surprised that he let me come back without a fight. And then Lochlan woke up and looked at me and yelled WHAT THE FUCK, Ben bolted upright and stared at me and then they looked at each other for a whole half a nanosecond before jumping out of bed, throwing on yesterday's clothes and running out the damned door. Loch headed to kill Caleb, and Ben to stop him, or perhaps to help.

Loch doesn't listen. He makes all these concessions to my face and then he goes right over my head.

And then I looked in the mirror. I looked as dazed as I felt. A little small. A little vacant. Perhaps no one is home. I had a nosebleed that stopped just before my lower lip and a strange linear bruise that begins in my hairline, blackens my eye and the bridge of my nose and ends on the opposite cheekbone. I had finger-tip bruises all over my neck and shoulders. My chin had the outline of a single hard bite, not enough to make it bleed, just enough to leave a perfect imprint of the Devil's perfect teeth on his little prizefighter.

I wondered what the rest of me looked like so I took one big step back to look.

Oh my God.

***

No one killed Caleb, but only because they reminded Loch he agreed to my behavior.

I don't have to like it, he growled. Duncan has been sitting on him for the better part of an hour.

If you did, you'd be as sick a fuck as the rest of us, Caleb told him from behind an ice bag. Lochlan had planned to kill him, using his fists to break through his face and then once inside he would have systematically destroyed the rest of the Devil for ever after.

The Devil can't call the police. I have enough to secure all sorts of worse scenarios if he does. And we're going to work on what instructions I follow and what ones I relay to the others and they changed the code on the alarm and didn't tell me what it was. Now they'll know if I leave, and apparently that makes everyone feel better. Batman called Caleb a coward and a thug and PJ isn't speaking to anyone but the kids again, who were told I had a wrestling match with Ben and fell off the couch and hit the drum kit and they believed us. Ben asked to take this on, taking whatever disappointment they feel as his own penance for whatever it is he thinks he didn't do that wasn't enough.

August and Sam are going to shift their focus working with me from grief to self-worth and familiar-danger. PJ is going to try to be civilized to everyone concerned, the majority of the boys are trying very hard to mind their own business, and Lochlan is going to let this go.

I can't. I see what he did to you and I can't get it out of my head, he tells me.

Good, then you can have a lobotomy too, I tell him. It's always better when you have company.

CXC/This is how they raised me.

Swift punishment yesterday as I was given a time and told to be there or he would make everything go away.

Including Henry.

Including Cole.

He loves to exploit my addictions and my fears, reminding me how fucked I am. That's why we live like this in the first place. It's not only because I can't manage my grief, it's because I can't manage my drive.

I sneak out at two-forty-five and he is waiting by the side door. I'm not even capable of navigating my own driveway now? His concern is that I'd just walk off the wrong side of the cliff instead of facing the consequences for being disrespectful to him and to his brother's memory in front of someone he has to do business with. Big business. It's a smaller, more compact offense if it were a cleaning person or Luke. But he's trying to buy some more property. His reputation has to be flawless.

Good luck with that, I tell him as he grips my elbow and steers me roughly to the boathouse. Once there the door is locked and I am shoved down the hall. The door is locked after we enter his room and for good measure he turns off the lights and ties me down.

Hello, Cole.

He calls me Baby Girl and I realize I don't have to give up a thing, I can still be their sugar baby and I'm not going to be punished so much as rewarded, so much as given a little time with the original number-one ghost and that no one's going to tell me I'm crazy, or making a mistake or wallowing.

Don't hold back from me, Bridget, he instructs and he finally lets me loose. Eyes blue-black, hands rough. In the dark the devil becomes the ghost and the hunted becomes the haunted. Cole looks so beautiful here in the dark. He is predictable and violent. He is affectionate and sick. His moves are deliberate. Just enough to hurt. Just a little bit, building on tolerance, biting back tears. My limbs shake as my hands explore. He smiles in the dark endlessly, as if it's carved upon his face while he encourages me. Just a little more, come on. Do this for me. When I explode into cries of relief he refuses to allow it, covering my whole face with his hand, turning me down and holding me there.

 By the time he is finished with me, ready to go back inside my brain where I keep losing him, I am destroyed and thrilled with it. But he pushes me hard once again and just as I start to break he pushes a little harder, making sure I do and then he backs off and returns to his gentle clasp, slowing to a crawl, affectionate to a degree that might just make me question everything I think I already know.

It isn't punishment, he tells me, shaking his head. Just memories.

He bends my head all the way back to kiss my throat and when he lets go and I look at at him again he has changed back. His hair is darker, eyes are lighter and he is bigger. Reality mixes with dreams and makes the color of night. Hope mixed with faith and buried in selfishness ends any chance of change for any amount of time and he fires up again, this time in flat-out brutal greed. This time when I go to cry out there's no sound, only his harsh breathing in my ear. He slides me back down until I am pressed against his chest and he laments how long six weeks truly was without me this way, in the grand scheme of things and that there most likely isn't anything I could do that could make him love me less, including withholding my love from him.

It isn't love, I tell him, shaking my head. Just memories. 

Even better, Caleb says as he stops smiling in the dark. He leads me back out into the early sunrise, unlocking doors, stopping to turn back and kiss my shoulder, kiss my cheek and then at the door he stops, not planning to go any further but watching to make sure I go the way I'm supposed to.

I turn back. What do I tell them?

Tell them I'm taking care of my brother's wife. 

I turn again to head across the drive. The response is futile but accurate. The fallout will be swift but it's still worth it. You can cut out sugar but it doesn't mean you'll lose your taste for it. I can cut out Cole but I still want him just as much as ever. I guess everyone wishes that could change. Sometimes I do but then again sometimes I don't and I'm fine with things just the way they are.