Saturday morning (Cai)
Cai woke up exhausted, his eyes gritty with sleep and old tears. Straight away, the memories of the day before came back to him, and his stomach sank him down like a rock.
Dom had died yesterday.
He sat up, rubbing the crusty dried tears out of his eyes. Danny was still asleep on the floor, and Cai didn’t want to wake him yet. He needed a moment to himself while he figured out what today was going to be like.
The morning after his mother died, he'd been surrounded by people looking after him. Nonnie and Dom were there, both of them, tag teaming it to get him dressed, fed, watered, and where he needed to be. But he'd been ten. Now he was eighteen.
The rest of the house was quiet, and he tried to pee as quietly as possible to keep it that way. Even though he knew it was going to be empty, he pushed Nonnie and Dom’s bedroom door open. The curtains had been left open overnight and early morning sunlight poured in across the bed, made up neatly. How much of Nonnie’s decision to spend the night at the hospital with Roe was for Roe and how much of it was because she was avoiding sleeping alone in her bed for the first time in Cai didn’t even know how long.
Cai slunk outside to the muddy mess of the back yard. To the ash and bone remains of the shed.
Circling the ruins of it, Cai though blunt, short thoughts. This was my space. This was mine. I helped to build this. It’s gone. Hours and hours and hours of work, years of it, gone. Things he was making for school, gone. Things he’d made for his mother, gone. Zoe had kissed him in that shed, he'd laughed till he was almost sick with Danny in that shed.
The tree above him hissed in the wind, thick and evergreen. Peering up, Cai couldn’t see any sign the fire had touched it, every leaf looked as fresh and green and perfect as the rest of the yard.
It was so much easier to comprehend the loss of the shed than it was to comprehend the loss of Dom. How could it happen so suddenly? Yesterday, Cai had woken up early – he’d woken up early with Zoe - and together they’d tiptoed down the stairs to the kitchen before anyone else could get up and notice them leaving his room together. Cai had worn an apron over his pyjamas and made waffles with the radio on in the background while Zoe made coffee, and then Nonnie and Dom were up and drinking coffee and Nonnie was trying to urge the girls to get out of bed for school.
A normal morning. An elated morning. And now he was sitting on the root of a tree looking at a ruin and crying openly because he would never make Dom waffles again.
When he’d said to Zoe that he’d never even had the chance to tell Dom about her, that hadn’t been entirely true. He’d spoke to Dom a lot about how crazy he was about Zoe. Dom knew. But he hadn’t known how happy Cai had been, the night before Dom died, and if Cai and Zoe had a future, Dom wouldn’t get to see it. He wouldn’t be around when Cai graduated from high school, he wouldn’t be around to see what Cai could do in the world. If there were kids in the future, Dom would never meet them. Dom would never get to be a great-grandfather.
Cai lifted his tearstained face to the sky. Except. Except death wasn’t the end. Zoe once told them all that angels could talk to the dead, that the dead could be watching over them. It had been a shock to find out that his faith in that area was more than religion, but now that Dom was truly dead, all this knowledge was suddenly very pertinent - and now he didn’t know what to do with that information.
He found himself clasping his hands together and praying, his mouth pressed against his interlocked fingers. Praying without words, just trying to feel Dom’s presence still in the world, trying to feel Gods presence, trying to feel his mother’s. Searching for understanding, searching to find where he fit in this suddenly unfamiliar world.
There was an answer out there, somewhere in the cosmos. Cai couldn’t think of it as a reason or a plan but he felt sure there was an answer to be found out there, somewhere. Maybe Dom had already found it; whatever it was, it was out of Cai’s young and mortal reach. But it was enough to know that it was out there.
Cai leaned back against the tree and cried for a while longer, because it was perfectly possible to know that death was not the end and weep for your lost at the same time.
It was Saturday morning. There was so much to do. And so many people to call. Nonnie had made her list last night, and when Cai’s tears had faded back, he got up and slouched back inside to look at it, to see if there was anything he could do. He couldn’t call Faye’s mum or any social workers, he couldn’t call the funeral home before finding out what Nonnie wanted from them. He couldn’t call Nonnie’s family in Chile, since it was five in the morning over there, and it was probably too early to call Dom’s sister even though it was a slightly more respectable eight in the morning in Hull. Was it? Cai looked at the phone for a minute, as if he could peer north and see which members of his extended family would be up.
It took those few minutes for an idea to occur to him: this was probably one of the times where politeness didn’t really matter, that no one was going to think he was rude for calling too early since he was bearing this kind of news.
He took the phone and the list and sat in the window overlooking the street below, and called Dom’s sister, his great aunt Ivory May. Telling her was less difficult, less emotional, than he thought it would be. “Dom had a heart attack,” he told her. “He died yesterday afternoon.”
For a long moment she did not react, and when she did, her reaction was soft, and it was practical, and when she said “And where is Altagracia?” he could hear her judging Nonnie, somewhat, for making Cai make this call. It wasn’t that Ivory was particularly judgmental, but there had always been a touch of pearl-clutching over the fact that Dom’s daughter had a child when she was nineteen and all of Ivory’s daughters managed to keep it in their pants till they were married. Nonnie ignored it entirely; Cai couldn’t help but be a little pissed off. “At the hospital,” he didn’t-quite-snap. “Looking after one of the foster kids.”
Funny that he didn’t want to tell them about the fire.
Ivory asked about funeral plans, but all Cai knew about that was that they were bringing Dom back to the house… sometime. After the autopsy. Did hospitals do autopsies on the weekend? So much he didn’t know.
The call ended with Ivory’s promise that she would spread the news up in Hull, and that she and Cai’s great uncle Henry and as many of their four children and grandchildren as could manage would be down in London by the end of the day.
Cai looked at the phone for a while after they’d hung up. Managed, he thought. I can do this.
He looked at the phone for a bit longer. Huh, he thought. I don’t seem to be doing anything else.
What next?
Ivory and Henry usually stayed in the spare room when they visited, but Liz was there in the moment so he couldn’t get it ready yet.
Breakfast! He thought. Obviously! Soon everyone else would start to wake up and Cai would make sure everyone had a nice breakfast. Not waffles though. Waffles were from a different time, a time when he’d tried to teen-movie Zoe by smearing waffle mixture on her nose, but since he could never compete with her reflexes she’d wrestled his hand, armed with raw waffle, behind his back till he submitted.
Eggs, thought Cai. I’ll make a lot of eggs.
No, thought Cai, a few steps into the kitchen. Not eggs. They used to get all their eggs from next door. He didn’t want to remind Faye of the chickens.
Cai stood in the kitchen and turned a slow circle. What were other breakfast foods? Waffles, eggs… ? There was cereal. He loved cereal. And toast. Also a winner. But they didn’t take very long, and Cai needed something that would take a while.
By the time everyone else started to wake up, Cai was baking a cake. When asked, all he could say was that he didn't know what else he was supposed to do.