Cheer Me Up, Nico

Lawrence Cady


 
The dream-like image of the child comes to him upon awakening, a brilliant red-orange sun at the horizon outside the Verig-Brasil airliner window forcing him to wince. It is his brother Emile, four-year-old Emile, standing in their bedroom doorway in his blue-striped pajamas, whimpering, asking his older brother what’s wrong, what’s happened. It is one of those snapshots the mind tends to take under the worst of circumstances, a life-long psychological reminder of the horror of the moment that seems to intensify over time. Nicholas manages, though, to set the remembered images aside for some seconds, and he glances over at Ximena, who is now canted to one side in her seat, her head resting against the airplane fuselage. Beneath her red-tint sunglasses, her lushly made-up eyes are closed, and though it appears she’s all but stopped breathing, the nostrils of her very straight, smallish nose flare to the slow, rhythmic pulse of inhalation-exhalation.
 
Nicholas reclines back in his seat and allows the memory to rise to the surface, as if by not suppressing it, not staving it off with the old notion that it happened more than twenty-five years ago so what did it matter, he is, as Ximena said, keeping Emile from becoming “truly dead.”
 
It happened one heated summer night in the old house that there was a disturbance downstairs, arguing and door banging, curse words audible even in the boys’ second-floor bedroom. Nicholas was the first to awaken, someone—their father Domenico Vicente, he thought—shouting Zahra’s name and something about having respect for the dead.
 
“You don’t treat the dead like that,” Nicholas remembers his father shouting out from somewhere down in the kitchen or maybe the rear entryway. “You just don’t.”
 
The babysitter, Nicholas surmised, was long gone, and Domenico Vicente and the boys’ current stepmother Elizabeth had returned from where ever they’d gone out to, some industry event in Sacramento, if Nicholas had heard correctly. It was obvious by the sounds that had awakened him—the door slamming was percussive, jolting—that Domenico Vicente and Elizabeth were at odds once again, which was commonplace by then. Nicholas went into the corridor and to the top of the big spiral staircase, where he sat on the carpeted floor and watched through the spindled banister as Elizabeth emerged from the dining room and sat on the piano bench, facing away from the piano. She was wearing only a brassiere and half-slip, her bloated form and balloon-like breasts bulging against all that lacy white material. Her hair was no longer pinned up about her head, as she’d had it before they left the house, but was draped over her shoulders and much of her face, and she was panting, leaning forward with her hands on her milk-white thighs, trying to catch her breath. When Domenico Vicente came into the room, still in his tuxedo—a tall, lithe, silver-haired man whose presence could never be ignored—he went to his wife of only two years, took her by the chin, and lifted her head so that she had no choice but to look at him. He said, “You learn, this night, here and now, that you have no say. You have no say.”
 
And then, in a moment Nicholas remembers as a blur, an occurrence that seemed to make little sense, Elizabeth was up and shoving Domenico Vicente backward. And she had what appeared to be a knife in her right hand, a gleaming dagger of steel, which she was slicing wildly through the air and only inches from Domenico Vicente’s strained, disbelieving face. It was as if, for Nicholas, the knife was all that was there, all that mattered, and it wasn’t until the first line of blood appeared across the chest portion of Domenico Vicente’s white shirt that Nicholas realized it wasn’t a knife at all, but an oversized sewing shears Elizabeth had splayed open in her hand.
 
The shouting, the cursing and screeching out—two people locked in the struggle of their lives—all seemed to intensify, reverberate all through the house, after Elizabeth had maneuvered Domenico Vicente into one of the overstuffed chairs and was swinging the open shears at him as if it were a scythe. It was a frantic, dissonant sound Nicholas will never forget, never let go of, Domenico Vicente’s booming assertions that he would kill her, he’d turn that blade on her and slice her to ribbons.
 
But Elizabeth showed no signs of intimidation, not on this night, and she slashed and slashed at him, a low guttural hissing sound emitting from deep within her. In only seconds, Domenico Vicente’s white shirt inside his tuxedo was blood red and he was on the floor, kicking at her with his black polished shoes, telling her to get out, just get out now, while she could.
 
At one point, Nicholas glanced back in the direction of his bedroom, and that was when he saw Emile, little Emile just five years old, crying, hopping up and down in place. “I don’t like this,” he was saying, on the verge, Nicholas knew, of falling into a heap as he often did when he was at his wits’ end. “I don’t like it, Nico. No no no.”
 
As angered by Emile’s sudden, intrusive appearance as he was the altercation downstairs, Nicholas went over to Emile and shoved him back into the bedroom. “Get in your bed,” Nicholas shouted, pointing toward Emile’s Spiderman bed along the far wall. “Get in your goddamn bed, now. And shut up. Just shut up.”
 
But Emile, sitting on the hardwood floor, was by then overwhelmed, sobbing and frightened, barely able to catch his breath. Nicholas made a sudden, threatening gesture, as if he were going to charge him and haul him to his bed, and Emile ran to the bed and climbed into it, though he sat upright, hands in his lap, his inhalations between sobs a gargantuan effort for his tiny frame. And Emile said, the words jumbled, fragmented, “Cheer me up, Nico. Please . . . Nico . . . cheer me up.”
 
Though he heard what Emile said, heard the words and wondered where they’d come from—cartoons? Elizabeth? maybe the boys’ deceased real mother Zahra?—Nicholas had no intention of meeting Emile’s needs, Emile’s little kid foolishness, and he went back out to the staircase, where he saw that Elizabeth and Domenico Vicente were up against the grand piano now, in what he could only think of as a drunken barroom brawl, the strings inside the piano making an eerie, demonic howling sound that seemed to pervade the entire house. Nicholas covered his ears and cursed at them, shouted out at them that they should just shut up, shut the hell up. But they didn’t stop, they kept battling it out though thankfully they moved away from the piano and the haunting, darkly tuned music came to an end. Nicholas stood and leaned over the banister and spit at them, and then he went back down the corridor and into the bedroom, where Emile was standing beside Nicholas' bed, trembling, trying to catch his breath.
 
And this is the fragment of memory, the series of mental snapshots that, lined up all in a row, are as damning as those of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding shortly after lift off from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Seeing Emile whimpering at his bedside, his face wet with tears, Nicholas summoned up a hate, an almost pathological dislike, and rather than attempt to reassure or talk him down in some way, Nicholas sidestepped this blubbering, babyish kid and flopped down on the bed. And though Emile, convulsing and in a sure meltdown, tried to climb into bed with his older brother, Nicholas let him know with a sure swat across the face that he was not welcome, he was not his responsibility. And then Emile said it again, those words Nicholas would hear in his dreams and his thoughts for decades to come: “Cheer me up, Nico. Can’t you cheer me up?”
 
 
Nicholas looks now all around the first-class cabin, a tall dark-haired stewardess offering some kind of champagne drinks in fluted glasses to those across the aisle. He is racked with guilt, remorse, shame. He has the urge to run to the back of the jetliner, jimmy open the rear door, and leap out into the cold, roaring air, a fitting end his plunging six agonizing miles to his death.
 
How was it, he wonders now, as he’s wondered time and again over the years, he offered Emile no solace that night, none whatsoever? How was it he just closed his eyes and shut Emile out, left him standing there, alone, in the dark, the confrontation downstairs making so much racket it was as if a violent intruder had entered the house and would be upstairs in a matter of minutes?
 
When Emile, still sobbing, climbed into his Spiderman bed and after a time went silent, Nicholas was pleased. He’d inflicted damage, a psychological wound, though he knew, without doubt, that he would burn in hell for all eternity for it.
 
And here I am, he thinks, looking out at that blazing sunset over Brazil’s emerald savannah-like interior. And he imagines what it would be like, plummeting downward, sailing with the force of gravity through the atmosphere, that final jarring impact his fitting due.
 
 
End
 









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About the Author: 
Lawrence Cady's short stories have appeared in Other Voices, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, Portland Review, South 85 Journal, Roanoke Review, among others. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin – Madison and Portland State University, Cady serves as managing editor for the peer-reviewed science journal Astrobiology (Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.).

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