In the two months since her father’s death, Vidian’s dreams have erupted in electric neon. Cometing bouquets of icy blue anemones, oily ink blots that buzz and glow like the sign for the local strip club, a woman’s body bent into glass. The neon woman lifts and lowers her skirt with each fluorescent blink, light flicking like a page, tantalizing darkness between bubblegum legs. When Vidian wakes, her retinas still pulse ultraviolet, and she tastes smoke on the back of her tongue. The dreams are nonsensical, more color than plot, and for hours they linger in her vision as afterimages, shapes of starless negative space.
Her father’s remains arrive from the funeral home in a cardboard box. Slicing the lid free reveals the ashes themselves, pallid and coarse, wrapped in a plastic baggie with a knot at the top. The bag slumps in a bed of shredded paper.
What should one feel at the death of an estranged parent?
‘Don’t waste your tears,’ Vidian’s mother said, more than a decade ago, after he picked up and moved to another city, after he left them. Some indiscretion had transpired—a compromising text message, a passionate liaison in a sticky motel room, a lengthy affair—Vidian could only guess. Whenever she tried to learn more, her mother tightened her lips. The details were insignificant, she insisted. Betrayal was betrayal. Black and white.
The memories of her father that Vidian replays in her mind are grainy and cool-toned with lines of trailing static. They are preserved in rough cuts of home film from when Vidian was young. Her father doesn’t appear in the tapes themselves. He is just the steady hand directing the camera’s gaze, a faceless narrator.
‘Today is Vidian’s second swimming lesson,’ he says in a conspiratorial tone to an imaginary audience. The camera pans over a crowded community pool before swinging around to focus on seven-year-old Vidian in a hot pink one-piece, perching flamingo-like near the pool’s edge.
‘Where are we?’ the voice prompts. The girl squints back while her mother rubs sunscreen on her shoulders. ‘Smile for the camera.’ The girl reluctantly bares her teeth before tuck-jumping into the water.
This sensation Vidian remembers well: a plunge of rushing bubbles, the sting of chlorine—waves of refracted light race along the pool floor while her body seems to move in slow motion. Her father’s voice now sounds faraway and distorted and liquid, like a gradually diffusing dye.
That night, Vidian puts the box on her closet shelf, just inches below the ceiling, shuts the door, and gets into bed. She lies awake in the dark. She’d been twelve that summer he left. Though no home videos exist to document that time, Vidian remembers how she felt back then, the churn of her stomach as she blasted Sherlock Holmes audiobooks to drown out the sound of her parents’ arguments; the mortification of her lumpy, mismatched breasts; the strange appeal of her boyfriend’s teenage sister’s glossy mouth; and, after her father left, the wondering Why, that thirsty curiosity like swallowing poison, and the slippery, many-hued paranoia. The other woman could have been anyone: Vidian’s English teacher, the saleslady at the department store with the lop-sided false lashes and heady perfume, the woman on the bus with the delicate orchid tattoo behind her ear. Other likely candidates included the dancers at The Library, the local gentlemen’s club. For some reason, as a girl, Vidian’s imagination had fixed upon this possibility, and for years, she had pictured her father, checking out exotic women like used books, inhaling their scent, transported, temporarily, to a fictional world, face buried between the pages. She’d wondered how it had felt.
A neighbor had discovered the body reclined in the driver’s seat of the old Camry. Tests had revealed a high blood-alcohol level at the time of death which meant he had most likely been unconscious as the carbon monoxide permeated the garage. Everyone was calling it an accident.
At a support group meeting, the woman sitting across from Vidian uncrossed her legs, leaned forward. She’d started stripping again, she said. The male counselor, with his clumsy comb-over and gentle voice, seemed at a loss for words.
‘I need a vehicle,’ she explained. ‘It’s good money.’
The group considered this. After a brief pause, another group member asked where she could sign up, would they take curvy ladies?
‘Oh, they take all types,’ the woman reassured. By the time the counselor managed to redirect, she had already scribbled the company’s address on a few palms. Vidian hadn’t offered hers, but the woman had taken it anyway, her grip branded into Vidian’s wrist, the cool ballpoint gliding. By the time the meeting ended, the address was a smear of sweat and ink, illegible.
Now, Vidian can’t sleep. Her eyelids burn. She throws a jacket on over her pajamas, grabs her keys, and as an afterthought, the box of ashes from the closet.
Even this late at night, the parking lot at The Library is packed, heavy bass beats reverberate. The neon woman’s pink light polishes windshields and windows in Mother-of-Pearl, broken glass on dirty asphalt. Vidian parks. Her vision blurs. The dark night is awash in frightful colors and shapes. She stands under the sign and imagines all the women who could have drawn her father away, sees the glint of pink teeth as she spins to scatter the ashes.
Emily Huso is a Filipino-American writer who lives and teaches in Ooltewah, Tennessee. She earned her MFA from the University of Washington. Her work has received support from AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship Program and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and appears in Multicultural Echoes and The Roadrunner Review. You can find Emily at dog parks, on Twitter as @emilyhuso or at www.emilyhuso.com.
Photo by Justin Bautista on Unsplash.
