The Mourning After Read Online Free Page A

with Shalimar.  It was a scent that Levon first equated with being watched by his favored babysitter Roxy, and later the smell was connected to what they had lost when his sister materialized. 
    His mom always looked stunning those evenings with her hair falling on her shoulders, softening her face and eyes.  The pre-bun era , Levon thought to himself, was a magical period in all of their lives.  Levon tried hard to remember the precise instant when things went from carefree and wild to contained and suffocating.
    Upon her return in the evenings, Levon would stir, jarred awake by the full-bodied smells of his mother’s familiar scent.  And though his eyes were closed, feigning deep sleep, he knew she was smiling, her cheeks ripened with laughter.  At fifteen, Levon distinguished the scents: perfume, wine, a hint of garlic.  At a younger age, the smells were the defining scent of his youth, bottled up in once forgotten familial happiness.  It would be the scintillating mixture of Saturday nights that had come to mean love and trust.
    Nestled under the covers, Levon felt her body leaning over his, while strands of her hair tickled his back.  She would whisper things that he hadn’t heard in years: “I love you, Sailor Boy.”  “How’s my monkey?  I missed you tonight.”  “Sweet dreams.”  Levon used to think he was silly for remembering those interludes and phrases reserved for him and him only.  He had scribed the words on paper so many times the pen could write them without the will of his hand.  He foolishly believed that if he wrote them down, they would be real, and the permanence would prove Levon’s worth, verify that he was lovable.
    She once found him cute enough to tag him with the name Monkey that combined charm and chunky cheeks.  Back then, his room was hand-painted in the deep hues of the jungle, and the monkeys with their animated poses and childlike smiles often transformed Levon into a world of fantasy.  Then Levon, in what stung like a swift slap of the wrist, had to switch rooms with Chloe so that her room was closer to their parents.  As hastily as his mom had named him Monkey was the rapidity with which the strokes of French pink brushed over his jungle walls.  They never got around to repainting what was supposed to have been Chloe’s room, and now was Levon’s.  Yellow was neutral, they claimed, a term they used loosely at the time, and which would later become the cornerstone from which contempt was bred.  After that, whenever Levon would see a monkey at the zoo, he would scream and cry until they stopped going to the zoo altogether.
    And Levon had long since given up sailing.  After capsizing three boats, you realize you were never meant to rest your curved bottom on a meager piece of fiberglass and expect it to stay upright.  Bon voyage, Sailor Boy.
    Once Chloe emerged, Madeline and Craig ceased going out for dinner, and Madeline gave up wearing Shalimar.  Levon smelled it sometimes when he would accompany her to Burdines on Lincoln Road.  They would walk through the cosmetics and perfume counters to get to the escalator that would bring them up to the children’s department, and Levon would purposely slow his gait. She would reach for his hand and tug on him with a fervor that signaled to Levon they weren’t stopping for a new bottle.  They were going to ignore what was once normal.  The wish that Levon so often dreamed about remained bottled up, and the only scent that would seep into their house was the kind that didn’t come from a bottle.  Without the elements of color, taste, or touch, it had the capacity to invade all the senses.  It is what becomes of a Shalimar-less existence.  It was unhappiness.
    The fights were always the same.  Drenched in sleep deprivation and the genuine prospect of death, accusations turned venomous and hostility burned from the ashes of exhaustion and tears.
    “The next feeding’s yours,” Craig would grumble, crawling