“I don’t care what she felt,” Bill said, but then, correcting himself, “I mean, I want her to …” But he couldn’t explain what he meant, he couldn’t think.
And Judith, whom he had briefly forgotten, couldn’t stand up without putting aside her phone. The cord was caught in the shoulder bag, which was still hanging on her neck.
“This is not how you inform people,” she said, pulling her bag off, the phone, the whole mess, leaving it on the chair. “You said she was doing better. You said there was nothing to worry about.”
Dr. Kleinman looked at her. “I wouldn’t have said that.”
“Somebody said that.”
“What are we supposed to do now?” Bill asked.
“You can look at her; it often helps to say goodbye. There are some papers to sign, and you can collect her things. Someone from the hospital is going to talk to you about organ procurement.”
“I don’t want her things,” Judith said, still angry—her face red and thick, her lip stubborn, her eyes staring. “Last night, when we left, she was fine. And today nobody knows where she is.” The staff changes over, Dr. Kleinman began to explain, it’s not … but Judith interrupted her. “Then you come in and tell us in front of everybody.” The Indian man looked away, and she went on: “Nobody calls us. This is not how things should be done in a well-run hospital. I don’t know why I wasn’t called. I have a phone. The number is on her contact sheet. We could have come at any time. My uncle and I have made considerable sacrifices to be here. When … what’s the point. We’re ten minutes away in the car. I don’t understand why she had to die alone. I don’t understand that.”
“It happened very quickly.” The doctor was starting to repeat herself. “She wasn’t in any pain.”
“Don’t give me that crap about pain,” Judith said. “That’s just one of those things that everybody says. I know because I used to say it, too.”
“Do you want to see …”
“Yes, I want to see her,” Judith said. “She’s my mother.” And Bill felt a flare-up of admiration. But it didn’t last long, Judith’s anger—it was quickly replaced by something else.
In fact, it was Bill who descended the elevator to the mortuary, into the windowless depths; Judith couldn’t face it. His sister lay on her back, her cheeks swollen and pale, her hair brushed thinly across her scalp.
Afterward, they had to wait around to talk to someone from the OPO—the organ donation people. Judith sipped from a can of Diet Coke among the rows of chairs lined up in front of another reception desk, in another windowless room. Everything takes time, whole days seemed to pass without sunlight. Her face in the energy-efficient glare had an oily sheen, a layer of something unhealthy on the surface. She looked like an unhappy teenager, except middle-aged, thick around the waist—in a sulk. There was no public element to her expression, all the meaning was withheld or turned inward. Who could blame her, Bill thought. She had been cast adrift. With what? With him, among a few other people.
Sitting down again, he put an arm around her. “We can probably go.” But she responded by hiding her face against his shirt. For a moment it was like he held his sister in his arms again, he was doing her bidding, looking after Judith but also somehow … consoling her for her own death.
Then the woman from the OPO found them. Middle-aged, she had short hair—dyed black. A slight cold; her nose looked red, it was that time of year. But her manner was efficient and practical, she kept emotional appeals to a minimum. Bill had the conversation with her but Judith signed the papers; she was next of kin.
By this point it was almost one o’clock, and Bill rarely ate breakfast. He didn’t want to drive home without something in his system; he felt weak and jittery and also strangely reluctant to leave the hospital. Because once they left, they had no reason to come back. The reason had gone. So they got lunch at the food court, Chinese food, and he even made a joke about Jewish traditions. But the taste of lo mein and fried rice stayed in his mouth for the rest of the afternoon; the food sat on his stomach, too, the sugar and fat content was high. A growth of sharp nail was also bugging him—it kept catching on fabric, he even scratched himself.
After lunch, he left Judith eating dessert, key lime pie (she was a comfort eater), and went up to the isolation wing to collect whatever belongings Rose had left behind. There wasn’t much, but he stood outside the locked doors again and waited for someone to buzz him in. Dr. Kleinman came through reception while he was talking to one of the nurses, and he tried to thank her, or apologize, he wasn’t sure which—but he wanted some kind of continuing contact with her, because contact with her meant … nothing much anymore.
“I’m sorry about my niece,” he said, and the doctor responded, perfectly reasonably, “It’s understandable.”
Her shift was almost over, she had the unaffected quality of real tiredness, and for some reason he tried to keep the conversation going. On Christmas Day nobody wants to be here. Not you either, I guess, though maybe …
“My husband is Jewish,” she said, “I’m not,” and he couldn’t tell if offense was taken, or she was just stating facts. For maybe half an hour this uncertainty bugged him. His sister had just died, but still this slightly awkward personal interaction with an attractive middle-aged woman occupied some of his mental space. Because you’re a foolish person, he thought, beating himself up—visibly shaking his head.
It was after three when they got home and Bill went straight to the downstairs bathroom. Usually he liked to play cards on the pot, solitaire, but his cards were upstairs so he looked at the stack of magazines under the sink, slipping against themselves on the small tiles. Rose had a subscription to Martha Stewart. What do you want with this stuff, he thought, flicking through the glossy pages. The kind of life she’s selling. Afterward he washed his hands thoroughly and dried them on the bathroom towel, which hadn’t been changed, probably, in several weeks. Rose had dried her hands against it.
Judith sat at the desk in the parlor, talking to somebody on Skype. You could hear her voice all over the house—he heard it from the bathroom. Part of what he was doing while he wiped his ass was trying to work out who she was talking to. Not Mikey, it didn’t sound like her kiddy voice. Maybe one of her girlfriends, she had the air of a woman confidently enlisting sympathy. But in fact it was Gabe, her ex-husband. He didn’t say much; Bill could see him in the background of the computer screen, looking slightly veiled or protected by the low resolution. His face was generally hard to read. He was a person to whom facial expressions don’t come naturally. Judith was saying, “The trouble with emergency rooms is nobody goes shopping for where they end up. Otherwise they’d be better run. If people had a choice …” But she was losing steam. “When’s Mikey coming back?”
And Gabe said, “Do you want me to tell him?”
“I don’t want to upset him.”
“He won’t be upset.”
“Of course he will, she’s his …” but Bill interrupted her quietly.
“I’m going to make a few phone calls in the kitchen,” he said. “In case you need the phone.” But she shook her head.
For the next hour he sat at the kitchen table dialing numbers. The handset grew hot against his ear. The first person he called was Liesel, and left a message. “Hey, it’s me. Rose died last night. I’m okay. Maybe I’ll try one of the kids’ cells if I can find the number.” But the next person he called was Alex, Rose’s ex-husband. He could see his phone number written on the fridge. Alex lived in Arizona, his wife was Catholic. It was two hours earlier, and they were still sitting down to Christmas dinner. Bill got the feeling that Alex was happy to walk out of the room—he was one of those guys who wore his cell phone on his hip, even on weekends. Even on Christmas Day.
“What’s on your mind?” Alex said.
They always got along easily enough. Bill could hear the background noise of small children, plates, somebody moving around the kitchen. His wife’s family was local—she had a lot of relati
ves.
“Rose died last night,” Bill told him.
He was aware of repeating himself and the slight diminishment of meaning. He was going to have to say it again and again. Diminishment of meaning was part of the job. You can’t be too sensitive or squeamish about it.
“Hey, jeez,” Alex said. “Oh shit. Poor kid, I’m sorry. You really hit me in the solar plexus. She’s really had a pretty shitty ride.”
“Well, I wanted to call you. I thought you should know.”
“I appreciate that, Bill.” His accent hadn’t changed at all, he was still a Jewish guy from New Jersey. If anything, it had frozen in time. Sometimes Alex liked to appeal to Bill, as another Jewish guy who had married a shiksa, and lived in the sunny Southwest. “Does Judith want to talk to me?” he asked. “Is she still there?”
“She’s talking to Gabe right now. I’ll tell her to call you.”
“Maybe she will, maybe she won’t. Okay …” But the way he said it, he was stalling for time, he wanted to keep talking. Maybe he didn’t want to go back to Christmas dinner.
But in fact as he stayed on the phone Bill figured out the reason. Something was bothering Alex about Rose’s estate. It turned out that after the divorce Rose couldn’t afford to buy out his share of the house. So he ended up loaning her the money. She was supposed to pay interest on the loan, but that was one of those things … the truth is, he let it slide. For various reasons. Guilt being one of them. “Now I guess the house will be sold. I don’t know what it’s worth these days, but whatever it sells for the interest is going to have to come out of it. I expect this’ll be another argument with Judith.”
Alex wanted Bill to help explain his point of view. He figured Bill was probably the executor of the estate. “Look,” he said, “I know it’s not the time nor place. But in my experience there is no time or place, I wouldn’t be having this conversation at all except for the kids.” He meant the twins, the girls he had by his second wife, who were coming up to six years old.
Bill said, “I think all of this is a little premature. But consider it noted.”
He got off the phone when he could and called Nathan. Nathan was the son he turned to when anything of this nature came up—when what you had come into contact with was reality at this level of moral and technical detail. “Listen,” he said, “can you talk?”
Nathan, who disliked having a cell phone, but nevertheless kept it around and reachable on his person, said, “I’m sitting over the road. At Dodie’s house. Julie’s talking to her for a school project.”
“I’m sorry, son. To interrupt. Rose died last night,” and Nathan said, “Let me walk outside.”
Bill could hear him making his excuses. He could hear Julie saying something, and then the screen door closing behind. After that Bill explained himself and Nathan listened. His immediate concern was to get through whatever came next without permanently alienating Judith and her father. Much of the trouble was likely in the future, but he wanted to lay the groundwork now, and if there were little things, like the funeral, decisions he could make now … “Part of me of course is also pissed off at the guy and always has been. But I’m trying not to act on those feelings. There are other complications.”
Over the years, Bill had loaned his sister a considerable amount of money. He wasn’t good at keeping records, but probably he had a list somewhere. Or several lists. Their understanding, for tax reasons, is that these weren’t gifts, in which case they had to be charged interest at the minimum legal rate, but as Nathan knew, the rate went up and down, and given the state of his records … Why this mattered, though, is that he didn’t see any reason that Alex should claim as his share of Rose’s estate money that properly belonged to Bill, and which he could otherwise dispose of as he wished. By helping out Judith, for example, who was trying to buy an apartment. Or even setting up a trust for Mikey.
Nathan, standing on Dodie’s porch, in the mild pleasant yellow-grass pale-skies sunniness of a Texas December day, could hear in his father’s voice something else, a kind of outpouring, which expressed itself in Bill’s case as anxiety, or not even anxiety, as an appetite for practical steps and details. A way of deferring. “Don’t worry about this now,” he said. “Not right now. I can’t call anyone today, it’s Christmas. But tomorrow I’ll get on the phone to Beverley Lang …” and afterward, after Nathan hung up, Bill was still in Rose’s kitchen, and going through numbers. He called Liesel again, and when she picked up, he said again, “Listen, there’s been some bad news. Rose died last night.” And when she hung up he called Paul.
* * *
Julie had been in a mood all morning. Mostly she was just tired. The kids were allowed to stay up as late as they liked on Christmas Eve, and Julie didn’t get to bed until one. When she left, Ben was still sitting in front of the dead fire, playing on Susie’s phone. For some reason she felt like she was in some kind of competition with him. Everybody thought that he was struggling or misbehaving or going through some kind of hard time. Whereas from Julie’s point of view … even Margot kept tagging after him … he always got his way. This was one of the ways that parents basically didn’t understand what was going on. They all felt sorry for him, because he was moving to England. But where am I going? Nowhere.
But sometimes it was helpful to be in a bad mood. It helped you get your way. In the morning, after breakfast, Nathan carried her mattress across the backyard and leaned it against the side of the little hut. They had to take some of the crap out to make room—the kitchen set, and the old edge trimmer, which didn’t work anymore but lay in a pile of its own coils on the wooden floor. Nathan dragged it through the doorway, thinking, if Bill were here, he’d complain that you can’t leave it outside, it’s going to rust. It doesn’t work anyway. You haven’t used it in years. It just needs a new fuse, or something like that. And so on. So even without Bill he had the conversation in his head, but set it under the window on the porch, where unless it rained horizontally the trimmer would be perfectly fine.
Clémence came out with a broom and helped Julie sweep—she cleared the cobwebs out of the corners and off the ceiling. It was very dusty. There were no curtains. “You sure you want to do this,” her mother said. “Nobody will blame you if you change your mind. I’ll be relieved.”
“I already said …” Somehow she found it difficult to accept help graciously from her parents. Ben stood around, watching—his glasses made him look innocent and interested. Willy was hitting balls on the court behind. Margot wandered between them. It was all very public.
“You’re not going to sleep out there,” Ben said. “I don’t believe it.”
“Of course I am.”
“You’re so predictable,” he said. “It’s so easy to get you to do stuff. I don’t even think you really want to.”
“If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t do it.”
“I don’t think you’re going to anyway.”
Whatever she did or said, Ben twisted it around, so it looked like she was giving in to him or proving him right. Nathan, listening, put his hand on Julie’s shoulder and pulled her toward him a little. “You’ll be fine, it’ll be fun,” he said. It occurred to her that he wanted her to win—that she was fighting his battles, too. Against Susie or whomever. This cheered her up.
So after lunch when her father suggested going over to Dodie’s house she pretended that this is what she wanted to do. The skies had cleared again, the temperature was rising, and they walked together down the driveway and across the street. Her house had a little sunporch (with a swinging bench inside, a side table with plants on it, there were jars of dead cacti on the floor, next to a box of garden chemicals, ant poison, bug spray, etc.) and you had to pick your way through to knock on her door. Nathan carried in his hand the bottle of Promised Land Eggnog, which he had failed to give her the day before. Julie waited on the step outside and hoped that Dodie wouldn’t answer.
But she did and invited them in. The old woman wore thick brown sunglasses, wh
ich must have pinched a little, because she shifted them constantly. Her face was skinny and wrinkled. Julie found it hard to look at her. One of her hands was swollen, but she held it out anyway, in a kind of gesture of greeting, and Nathan gripped it lightly from above and let go.
She offered to make them tea then thought better of it and poured out the eggnog in three glasses on the kitchen counter, which served as a barrier between the kitchen and the living room. It was a very small house—they were sitting in the living room, under the fan, and could see her struggling with the lid. Then she put the glasses on a tray and carried them over. The kind of Seventies water glasses with colorful patterns painted on. (The paint had begun to peel away, they didn’t look clean.) Julie took a sip and set it down on the chest in front of her feet and didn’t touch it again for the rest of the visit.
“Did your daughter come down?” Nathan asked.
No, she was in Denver with her son’s family. They just had a baby and didn’t want to travel. “My great granddaughter, would you believe it. Of course, they invited me, too, but I don’t like flying anymore. It’s fifteen hours in the car. I’m fine. I’ve had a lot of Christmases. I don’t mind being on my own; I’m used to it.”
Even in high school, Nathan got the feeling that she didn’t like him much—that something about him got on her nerves, his manner or air of considerate behavior. But he could usually rely on this manner to help him ignore it. Her house always pleased him, it was very Old Austin. The air-conditioning unit in the window, its tidy clutter, the potted plants, carefully looked after, her framed photographs, mostly of roads in landscape, hanging on the narrow spaces of wall between the windowpanes. (Her husband was an amateur photographer; he had been dead for thirty years.) Even the modest kitchen, with its linoleum counter and wooden drying rack.
He said, “Julie wants to sleep in the little house in our backyard tonight. As a kind of protest. I told her you could probably tell her some stories about Mr. Mosby.”
Christmas in Austin Page 29
