W H A T  W A S  I N  M E

​By Jack Neary

The day after my mother killed herself I went to the gym to train. It was leg day. Heavy squats, full ones where you break parallel. Heavy days called for the power rack. It’s a steel apparatus that allows you to adjust two crossbars that catch the weight if you fail and collapse. That way you can squat alone without spotters.

Between sets I sat on a bench going through the events of the day before. I pictured how she was when I found her – purple-faced on a pile of laundry, purple from the blood that had pooled on the inside of her face. The paramedic called this livor mortis, the colour of death. “She’s too far gone to revive,” he said. “You can always tell by the colouring.” He had pointed at her cheek as if choosing a cut of meat at the butcher. I was unmoved. In a gym thrumming with other teenaged boys, where even the strongest men whimpered from the exertion, my keel was even, my eyes were dry. And this worried me. I had questions. Where was the tumult of emotion? The rent heart and the aching hollowness? I wondered if I should be back at the house, soon to fill with aunts and uncles. They’d be bringing baked dainties and laying these out around large urns of coffee and tea. They’d cluck in soft voices as my father tried to explain things. There’d be no mention, of course, of her previous threats to kill herself, of that earlier attempt in the garage. This would invite prying.

​Maybe that’s why I was at the gym working out. Working it out. I added more weight to the Olympic bar and did another set. Then the doubting resumed. Dorothy was dead. She’d finally done it. Poor Dorothy. That’s how my father had put it – poor Dorothy. From my basement bedroom that morning I heard him place one call after another to her sisters, heard the tears in his voice. I lay on my bed and looked at the pictures pinned to the walls, prizefighters torn from boxing magazines, and asked: Is this what grief is?

I thought I knew something of grief. I’d seen it on the television news – coffins draped in flags returning from war, bereaved families sobbing on the tarmac’s edge, faces buried into shoulders, hands clawing at hair. That was how it was done. I regarded grief like it was a technique, an exercise.

Did I even look like I was grieving?

I caught myself in a wall-wide mirror; I saw my entire nineteen year-old body. Behind me others went about their business, sizing up their reflections, lost in thought, perhaps involved in that conversation with themselves which always begins, “What’ve I got in me today?”​

I did another set of squats.

And then I recalled an evening thirteen years before, when I was six: I am alone in a hospital room after the car accident. It’s dark. I’m strung up in traction. A ten-pound iron plate is tied to the end of a cable to keep my leg in position while it heals. Dorothy comes in and sits on the edge of my bed. Dorothy is not my mother, not yet. She’s my aunt, my mother’s twin sister. She is building up to something, there is news she says, but I know even before she says it what the announcement will be. She tries to spoon-feed me what death means in a way a six-year-old will understand. I don’t need that. I saw everything. I was in the car, the only one conscious in all that destruction. The force of the impact – sudden and implosive – flung me to the floor below the glove compartment. I remember my tongue pushing loose teeth around in my mouth, the metallic taste of blood, and sticking out from my jeans, something white: a fractured bone. Cold wind flutters the torn fabric of the roof lining. There is the confusing softness of snowflakes on my cheek. I lift my head. Outside, beyond a web of shattered glass, in the morning light, a pink light made weak by winter, I see another car fifty feet away. It’s the car we’d hit head-on. I turn and my father’s head hangs over the broken steering wheel. Behind me, on the back seat, my little brother is unconscious, yet he’s standing up. How is this possible? Beside him my mother – my first mother – slumps in a corner, her face covered with blood. That is why I don’t need Dorothy to tell me that my parents are dead. I know. She breaks it to me anyway and together we weep together for a long time. The tears are never-ending. They flood my face and soak Dorothy’s dress through to her skin. I remembered how close that made me feel to Dorothy, to the woman who’d become my mother for the next thirteen years. What happened to all that?

I didn’t want to apologize for going to the gym, for doing something so self-absorbed. It was good to get out of the house, to lift and sweat and feel drained. Maybe there was comfort in the routine, the mindless repetition. I couldn’t say. There was no training manual for this. It was June; the windows were open and the lilacs in bloom. I inhaled their scent. Were these little pleasures allowed?

Someone across the gym cried, “One more,” to his training partner and this pulled me out of myself.

I felt strong. I’d worked my way up to three-hundred-fifteen pounds for six reps. I had more in me. I wanted to go heavier. Squats are hard. They force the air out of you until it feels your chest will cave in. You squeeze out the reps, your thighs burn from the build-up of lactic acid, and then comes the rush of blood – the pump – into the quads, adductors and glutes. You feel your legs grow, the skin getting taut. Squats are not a time for sorting out what a suicide means. Not when you’re trembling beneath more than three-hundred pounds. You see yourself in the mirror behind the power rack and you look small under all that weight, the dead weight of two mothers combined. Squats are about trying to stay conscious, about not blacking out. You pause between reps to gather yourself. Others might stop what they’re doing to watch you, to call out a few words of encouragement. You gauge if there’s another rep in you. You can never be sure. And then you drop, brace and push. You push until it feels as if your knees will buckle and the insides of your ass might fall out. After, your rubber legs fold and you collapse onto a bench. You sit and heave and watch the little stars float in the corners of your eyes. Your mothers could be dead for a hundred years for all it matters.

I rested and thought about my next set. A large man came by and asked if he could work in with me. He was one of the pro wrestlers who trained there. His warm-up weights were near to my maximum. I said this would be my last set; I’d be through in a few minutes. Yes, I’d go for a single rep at four-hundred-five pounds. I’d done four-thirteen in competition. I knew I could handle the weight.

I slid another plate on each end of the bar, tightened the collars, lowered my head and stepped in under the load. The bar was behind my neck. I shimmed about, placing it just so below my traps. And then I lifted it enough to step back away from the rack. Baby steps. There were four big plates on each end. I saw in the mirror the bar bow a little. A face stared back at me. A face flushed red with the blood behind it. The weight stacks shuddered and clattered. I inhaled and let the bar take me down, controlling the speed. I felt the plane of my femur break parallel and I exploded upwards. My torso yawed, my knees bent inwards and for a moment I stalled. Had someone added more weight? I had a sense of time slowing. And I saw, in the mirror, in there behind the plate of skull, another face – Dorothy’s face.

Fuck you, Dorothy.

I needed that. I pressed up and my knees locked. I stood unable to breathe. Somewhere off to the side, the wrestler in small alarm moved towards me.

“Are you alright?” he asked. “You’re bleeding.”

I nursed the bar back onto the stoppers and noticed only then in the mirror the trickle of blood coming from my nose. I wiped at it and looked at my fingers smeared with red.

This is what I had in me.