Teddy Bears

Prologue

Beginning

        In Redford, Massachusetts I lived with my dad in an apartment, the second floor apartment of a two-story building that was just a few streets away from the beach, or “the fort” which is what it's been called as long as I've been alive. (It's a popular beach)

        We moved there a few months after I turned twenty, after dad ended up selling our nice red little house in the center of town, a beautiful original, a spacious home with two floors and everything else a family would need if a family ever lived there besides a backyard; that place only had a cement square and a rectangular patch of grass my grandma used to plant her tomatoes every June. She owned it.

        See, we moved entirely on account of her death. We used to live with her, I basically grew up with grandma being only a yard, if that, away. She died in 2012, a full year before the events I've just begun to write, and the tole it took on everybody was something legendary. Even in the worst dramas I've watched, movies about horrible live-settings, I've never seen such a despair as the one my grandma cause on July 4th, a day we planned, this including my dad and uncle and aunt, to have a little party at our house and drink like fishes and set off fireworks in the street, something we always did. Somehow, luckily, our neighbors never said a word, even though there'd be times I'd be paranoid about the surrounding trees catching fire, as trees were on every street for miles where we were and I'd always be scared dad would get arrested. This was when he was actually a functioning human being.

        But no, I never got to experience that type of anxiety that year, because on that day, early on, about eleven in the morning I woke up to my dad screaming, “Oh no!” over and over again, and it jolted me up and I ran downstairs (he was so loud I didn't just hear it upstairs I heard it from my window in echoes from outside) in nothing but boxers and I remember clearly running into the kitchen, seeing dad on the floor with grandma in his arms. I stopped and gasped; I couldn't see her face as it was turned into dad's chest, but I knew, I just knew she wasn't there, that it was all dad and his crying that moved her back and forth, it wasn't her breath anymore. Dad was hyperventilating, shaking to the point the vibrations knocked grandma's arm off her stomach and smacked the floor; he looked up at me with the biggest red eyes I had ever seen on him, quivering his bottom bearded lip left to right yelled, “Ma's not breathing! She fell!”

        I hadn't even fully grasped whatever it was I was seeing; I could just stare at them both, dad on his knees, clutching grandma by her white hair and a hook under her arm above the brown tiled circular patterned kitchen floor. I leaned on the fridge, as it sat near the kitchen entrance and I didn't move much further than the door-frame, “What... What hap-”

        “God, nothing, I don't- We were talking and she just fell! She hasn't moved her face!”

        A pained lump began to grow in me, I felt like I was going to be sick. Dizziness crept into my head and I could barely think, but I turned away and knew, from seeing the house phone charging on the hutch that I needed to call for help. So then an ambulance along with a cop car showed up; I put on a shirt and a pair of shorts from the day before and waited for them outside on the porch, because I didn't want to deal with hearing dad cry, still on the floor begging grandma to breathe. I didn't want to see her either, my legs were shaking and my heart wouldn't stop misbehaving and I probably would have started crying if they hadn't showed up right then. I directed three paramedic guys by pointing them in the direction to go, telling them to follow the sound of the screaming.

        The cop, this pudgy brunette female officer who was actually really nice to me, took my information and I told her exactly what happened only not even ten minutes before. When she saw that my face was turning bright red from trying to suppress the force of my emotions she put her logbook in her pocket and told me to sit on the steps, and I did, finally letting go the tears so they could finally chase down my face; she talked to me, tried to ease me up in spirit, and she didn't have to at all but I was so appreciative that she tried and I kept thanking her until finally the paramedics, after nearly fighting for my dad to let her go, wheeled my grandma out of the house draped under a sheet on a gurney, and dad walked behind them with his hand on one of their shoulders continuously babbling words at her body. Some people, the neighbors across the street and a few others along the street either poked their heads through windows or gathered at their doors to see what was going on, they all knew us or knew of us. Then dad, after they loaded her in the back of the ambulance, ran over to me, with his face almost unrecognizable from all the squinting and squeezing from his crying, and hugged me. From that moment the rest of the memory hazes away into nothing but the feeling of pure dread, I only remember just walking from room to room feeling a darkening, and saw that each room was just as bleak and the hallway walls matched them.

        Totally useless information. My grandma's death adds nothing to the story but a large trivial fact, a traumatic touch to everything else, but it was the reason why everything got turned upside down. It's why within the year afterward, after the sadness of the funeral, which was where her death finally caught up to me and I couldn't control myself from balling, we had to start thinking about selling the house. Truth was grandma paid a little more than half of the bills because dad never could hold a full time job (and why I'll never know, he rather would work for under-the-table money than bigger checks fixing up houses with people he knew, he didn't have a degree in carpentry but knew almost everything about it A to Z) and his welfare money went strictly toward food. So when she passed it was all dumped on him. After dealing with sporadic shut offs, no hot water, and even not having food to eat he put the house up. The last few months there were especially bad.

        That was the start of something else, like the day after the FOR SALE sign was erected dad started to lose it. He kept complaining about the house having to go. “This is my house!” he would say, and in the usual nightly heated arguments with my uncle over the phone he'd tell him, “Dad picked it out for me and ma left it for us!” meaning myself and dad. He'd usually be drunk whenever they'd talk. It was the beginning of him turning stupid. He would just keep getting hammered, and not the usual, few beers a night, kick back and watch a game with me most likely having a few with him; he became very unpleasant and distant from everything that was happening. He didn't want to leave his childhood behind, or really lose what he had left of it. I wasn't as sad, I didn't want to leave all that much either, but he took it too closely and everything suddenly became uncomfortable.

        The day we moved, after weeks of people showing up to look at the house until finally someone bought it for a-hundred thousand dollars (which was way more than I thought we would get, but dad did say the house was all fixed and replenished from his work so the market was nice to us), was such an awkward strain. Thankfully uncle, my uncle Pete, came by bright and early to help the movers, even though he was just as angry as dad was. As the furniture left piece by piece to the truck, dad slept through most of it; when he finally woke, just as drunk as he was when he passed out, he had to leave the room so they could start on it. He wasn't happy about it but he did what they said, and he dragged me by the collar of my shirt to join him downstairs, where he sat on the vacant floor in the corner where the bookshelf used to be and cried. There was no consoling him or any understanding what he was trying to say, he rocked back and forth like a nut and basically suffered a little breakdown. It was worse though than when I saw him in the kitchen. I just sat there with him by his side hugging on to him, rocking, all while my uncle and the movers walked by. Finally dad smartened up and left with my uncle to the new place, swearing at one another in hushed voices while they left me alone for a few hours, alone walking over for the last time the barren carpets, rooms, to make sure it was all appropriately clean, and thought about how dad acted. I actually apologized to the walls for all the “stupid shit” it's had to conceal.

        Now, in the present that this story takes place; it was the middle of March. Our side of Massachusetts had just gotten over a bitter polar vortex that made the end of winter feel like it just begun. But by the middle of the month the weather turned up and spring was rolling in.