The Unforeseen

by Molly Gloss

  Another guess: in the day or so since her mother’s death, Madison Truesdale hadn’t been using the dining room for dining, if she ever had. The table was cluttered with arrangements of flowers no doubt carrying sincere expressions of sympathy, loose stacks of papers that no doubt included her mother’s insurance policies, and an assortment of unrelated things that I had fun trying to fit into her story of recent grief: a new Angels baseball cap, a screwdriver and box of screws, a pump jar of skin cream for cracked heels and hands, and a cheap plastic sculpture of a horse tipped over on top of one of the piles of papers. Now that she was alone in the house maybe she was using the dining room for living and the living room for dining: there were a couple of plates with dried-on food, and glasses holding the ripe dregs of tomato juice on the coffee table in front of the sofa.

  Madison didn’t apologize for the clutter or make any move to pick up the dirty dishes. She gestured that I should sit down in the overstuffed chair that took up a corner of the living room, so I perched myself on the edge of the seat and took out my notepad and stylus and a recorder; she sat down on the end of the sofa that was farthest from me.

  I clicked on the recorder and smiled slightly without looking up and started with, “Madison is a very popular name,” just to see where that took us.

  She knew what I was getting at; I was not the first person to mention it. “It’s a family name,” she said drily. “My grandmother’s maiden name. I was born before they started giving it to all those little white girls.” She made a small dismissive sound. “If she’d known what was coming maybe my mother would have called me D’Shawna.”

  I smiled again. “Your mother lived here with you?” I always went over everything, including everything I already knew the answer to, because sometimes small details emerged from an interview. You were always looking for what would tip the balance.

  Madison Truesdale shook her head. She was having none of it. “I’m the one who lives with her.”

  “Is that right? So did you grow up in this house?”

  “Yes I did.”

  “How long ago did you move back home?”

  “I left my husband at the end of April. I’m waiting for my divorce to settle so I’ll have money for a down payment on my own place.”

  I was thinking you might say you’d been here four or five years. That would almost be the cliché, wouldn’t it?” I laughed. “Anyway, I guess my parents were worried about it; afraid I’d move back home after my divorce and expect my mother to have dinner ready every night and start doing my laundry; afraid I’d never move back out.”

  She crossed her legs carelessly, looked away. “I do my own laundry and bring home take-out.” I waited a bit, which is sometimes a useful tactic. Sometimes it nudges them; they don’t like the silence, and then something shows up. “My mother has her own life and so do I,” she said after a moment and turned her head to look at me again. She was deliberately choosing the present tense.

  I waited, but so did she. Finally I said, “Can you tell me where you were when your mother died?”

  “I was here. At the computer.” She gestured toward a little drop-front desk in a corner of the dining room.

  I said, “Would you tell me about it?”

  She looked out the front window to that smudged view of the Hollywood Hills. “I heard a loud bang. Before I was married I lived in Oakland in a neighborhood where we’d hear gunshots sometimes so I knew it wasn’t a gun. Or backfire, this wasn’t like a backfire. I thought it was a car accident, two cars crashing into each other. That’s what it sounded like. Right in front of the house. So I got up and looked out the window and saw just the one car coasting to a stop. And that’s all. So I went out on the porch to ask Mother if she’d seen anything.” She crossed her arms and looked right at me. “There was a piece of metal sticking out of her chest, something shaped like the handle of an umbrella, with a curve on the end.”

  “Was your mother conscious?”

  She uncrossed her arms and made a brushing-away gesture. “Oh no, no, she was already dead. I wonder if she even heard the bang.”

  “Did you realize this metal was from the car in the street?”

  She looked at me in some surprise. “I’m fairly sure that wasn’t my first thought.”

  “And did the people in the car realize what had happened?”

  “No. Of course not. I could hear them down there in the street, upset about their car, that it had made this terrible noise and then quit running. Who would think? No, of course not.”

  A car throws a piece of metal off the undercarriage and it strikes a woman sitting on her porch thirty feet above the road, strikes her in her healthy heart and kills her before she has time to turn toward the sound of the bang. Who would think?

  • • •

  I wasn’t kidding about the sky falling on your head. Here’s the ad that launched our NewLife Youth Protector Policy: A man and a woman in their thirties step onto a porch very early in the morning, barely dawn, sky heartbreakingly clear, air filled with birdsong. Camera pulls back to show a big, handsomely weathered cedar shingle house, oceanfront. They step off the porch, walk down through the low dunes and saw grass onto the hard sand, and set out on their morning walk. Camera follows them as they clasp hands and begin to swing their arms like kids. Back inside the house two kids are asleep upstairs in separate bedrooms. Close-up of a boy’s bare foot sticking out from the edge of the covers. Yellow moons and stars on a little girl’s pink pajamas. In the kitchen, a couple in their sixties stirs around making coffee, oatmeal, murmuring to each other just enough so we get the message: they’re the grandparents of the children upstairs; this is a family vacation. Then, jarringly, a series of edits from newsreel footage and YouTube clips: the demolished house gouting a thin column of black smoke; the stabilizer fin from the tail of an airplane rising incongruously above the wrecked roof and shattered bricks of the chimney; clumps of neighbors, some of them still in their night clothes, standing on the sidewalk staring at the house openmouthed or taking pictures with their cell phones; plastic sheet–covered bodies lined up on the lawn, two of them very small. Then a long shot of the young couple walking back from the far end of the beach, you see them begin to notice the smoke, see their hesitation, see them begin to hurry. Then cut to the hard pitch, the couple in close-up with the sea at their backs, the woman’s hoarse plea: Don’t make the mistake of thinking, as we did, that because your children are young, Remediable Death Insurance is unnecessary or an extravagance. We’d give anything to bring back our children. And if they’d been insured, they’d be with us right now. In our arms, both of them. Her voice breaks. The man, bleak and worn down, pulls her to his chest, looks away from the camera toward the headland at the far end of the beach. Cut to black screen, then the NewLife logo, the sound of the surf in the background.

  That advert was fucking perfect.

  The plane had an industry-best reliability record, had been recently inspected and serviced, the pilot had a thousand hours incident-free in single engine fixed gear aircraft. It was a clear day. The house was not under any regularly scheduled flight path or near any small airports; the pilot had simply decided to take his wife out that morning on a pleasure flight. The plane struck a pelican along a part of the coast where pelicans hadn’t been seen in a decade, and it went down so fast there wasn’t time for the pilot to finish saying Mayday. And the kids had died of trauma to the head and chest, their bodies not badly burned or dismembered. It was exactly the sort of thing we can’t wriggle out of paying, the sort of thing I don’t see more than half a dozen times in a year. Thank god they didn’t have insurance.

  Of course the parents wanted us to revivify their children in exchange for appearing in the ad, but that would have destroyed the point of the ad; they finally settled for an endowed foundation in the kids’ names, something to do with art therapy for impoverished youth I think.

  • • •

  If your mother or your uncle or your brother was sudde
nly struck dead and you stood to inherit their nice little estate, would you file the paperwork to bring them back to life? Or would you quietly ignore the insurance policy they’d been paying on for years, let them stay dead, and collect your inheritance? It used to surprise me, how often family members would go ahead and file an RD claim, even against their own financial self-interest. I used to think, in cases like that, love for the dead person must trump avarice. Heartwarming, if that was always true. But sometimes it would turn out the dead person had thought ahead and tried to cut off the family’s options. Here’s what I knew about Madison Truesdale: Her divorce settlement wouldn’t buy a studio apartment in Anaheim, but she stood to inherit her mother’s house free and clear. Los Feliz, with that view. Plus a little nest egg in CDs and bonds. She and her mother had no other relatives, there had been nobody holding Madison’s feet to the fire, nobody to know or care if she had failed to pursue her mother’s Remediable Death claim. And Madison hadn’t exactly been effusive in her grief. So it was possible she and her mother weren’t on the best of terms and her mother had put a coercive clause in her will, something like: In the event of my untimely death, and in the event my daughter fails to make the RD claim, I revoke the previously stated terms of my will and give the entirety of my estate and assets to charity. I hoped for this, actually, because there were ways for the Legal Department to work that angle; ways to make Madison Truesdale a happy heir by making the RD claim go away quietly; and in that case I wouldn’t have to keep looking for something to cite—a particular word or phrase in a sub-paragraph of Exclusions or Personal Responsibilities—denying Madison Truesdale’s mother an expensive new life.

  “Did your mother leave a will?” I asked her.

  Madison gave me a dry look. “Yes she did have a will. Were you thinking that’s why I filed this claim?”

  Her look should have warned me off but I missed the signal; I went ahead with the script, rolling out the words in tones of grave concern. “If there is a clause in your mother’s will regarding her RD policy, you may want to get in touch with our Legal Department to discuss your options.”

  She fixed me with a cool and very hostile stare. “My mother was sitting on her porch reading a magazine and was killed by a piece of shrapnel from a car half a block away. She was insured for this. I insured her. I’ve been paying her premiums for fifteen years. There was no clause in her will. She left me her house and everything in it, without restrictions. You and your legal department can go to hell.”

  Okay, sometimes you have to roll over on your back and put all four feet in the air. I fixed my eyes on my hands, twisted the stylus a few times, and then tipped my chin up just enough so I could glance at her from beneath my eyebrows. “I admit, I asked the question in case you were looking for a way to withdraw the claim. I’m uncomfortable with it, but this comes up with some clients, questions of inheritance and probate. We try to let every insured know what their rights and alternatives are.” I made a slight gesture with my shoulders, not quite a shrug, more a motion of embarrassed apology. “Not everyone I deal with has loving motives.”

  She inhaled sharply through her nose, which I thought at first was disgust, disbelief; but then she said with sudden fierce emotion, “I just want my mother back!” and she glanced away, tearing up for the first time. After a moment more she said, choked and passionate, “I love my mother! I just want your company to give me what I’ve paid for.”

  I think I let a little silence go by before saying, boilerplate double entendre, “That’s why I’m here.”

  • • •

  You hear rumors about billionaires a hundred and fifty years old who’ve had their life restored three or four times, but I happen to know that’s crap. People get old, their ability to regenerate tissue slows down and finally stops, even if said tissue is carefully nurtured in a green-tank and then a forcing bed. Plus, most people die of something irremediable anyway, and this is especially true after you hit seventy or so. It’s what insurance companies count on. But we love those billionaire rumors; we’re happy to foster them. Our advertising is all about fairness, equity, rightness. We play the class card. The resurrected people we showcase in our ads—people who had NewLife policies when they died from an unforeseen event—are welders and bus drivers and schoolteachers. Look, we say, it’s not just the wealthy who should be able to come back from the dead. Our premiums are modest; we want to make it possible for the average man or woman on the street to afford the prohibitively expensive cost of revivification—when possible, of course. To the old question, “Who deserves to be repaired, and restored to life, when they’ve died before their time?” our answer is, “You!”

  What we don’t say is that the wealthy aren’t bound by the limits of an insurance policy. They foot that astronomical bill themselves, which means they don’t have to fear Perils and Exclusions even if they died skiing into a tree at Chamonix Mont-Blanc or trying to set a round-the-world record for high-altitude hot air balloons. If somebody in the family is willing to write a check, and there’s sufficient healthy tissue on a fairly intact body, they’re good to go. Again.

  None of this is a secret, or not much of one, and you’d think by now the hoi polloi would be wise to it. You’d think they would know that most people die of something quite irremediable; that “sufficient healthy tissue on a fairly intact body” is the exception, not the rule, in cases of early death. But I guess people are still looking for a hole card, a winning lottery ticket. Or they think a Remediable Death policy somehow takes randomness, meaninglessness, out of the equation. They haven’t realized yet: in this game the cards are marked. I don’t know anybody in the insurance business who owns an RD policy, and really, why would we? There’s a nasty little saying in the industry: only the rich die twice.

  • • •

  Madison Truesdale had surprised me with that sudden display of feeling. I’m unimpressed by the weepers and wailers, which is what I mostly run into. Or the ones who don’t give a rat’s ass and don’t try to hide it. The dignified and private grievers, people like Madison, people holding it in, holding it together, they’re like snow in August, and I’m always surprised when one turns up. Plus, I thought I had this woman pegged and now she’d thrown me off my stride.

  I clicked off the recorder, which people often take as the end of the official interview. Then I settled back in the chair and started again, dealing out just a few more questions like face cards between runs of aimless impersonal chitchat—making up for that rude business about wills and legal loopholes. There was a chance this tactic would dull her into an unexpected or careless revelation; or maybe not, and this would turn out to be a claim I could forward to the home office for payment. I asked how long her mother had lived in this house, and when she said thirty years I shook my head and smiled and told her I hadn’t ever lived anywhere longer than a couple of years. Told her I used to live in Los Feliz myself, used to go to the old Liberty Theater just up the block from here, too bad they didn’t still run it as an art house, nothing playing there now but Hollywood buzz bombs. She didn’t seem to think any of this required a response. I said I lived over in the Valley now, the cheap edge of Thousand Oaks, brushfires pretty much all summer, which, if I stayed there—little sad smirk—probably improved my chances of dying from pulmonary issues. This time she looked away and pursed her mouth, impatient or offended. I asked, did her mother often sit out on the porch? Yes, she said, just the one word. Great view from that porch, I told her, too bad about the smoke from Griffith Park obscuring the hillside but in the winter the view must clear up, was I right about that? Which got a small acknowledgment. Finally when I said I recognized the horse on her dining room table, Da Vinci’s very famous clay model horse, she looked over at it and said dismissively, “That’s a cheap plastic copy Mother picked up in a gift shop in Florence on her one and only trip to Europe.”

  I smiled. “I was in Florence two years ago. I saw a full-scale model of that horse. When was your mother there?”
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  She said, “I don’t remember,” but then turned back to me and seemed to think over the question. After a bit she said, “Eight or nine years ago. She went with her sister Drewsy. Drewsy died the next summer, an aneurism, so I guess that makes it seven years ago.” After another moment, she gestured toward the front windows. “Drewsy used to help Mother keep the garden up. I had forgotten that. It’s overgrown now. Mother hasn’t been able to keep up with it on her own.”

  “I like the look of it, the wildness,” I said, which was true. Then I smiled and said I wasn’t in favor of the cypresses pruned along the porch—too formal for the lovely disorder of those flowers. I thought this might provoke a friendly argument, but she may have known I was playing her. Or she meant it when she said she didn’t know anything about flowers, that the yard was her mother’s thing. I rattled off the names of the flowers I recognized—fleabane, Catalina lilies, coreopsis—and that I had learned the names of flowers from my mother, which was also true.

  After a silence, she said, “Is your mother still living?”

  “Yes she is.” I considered whether to play the next card and then I said, “I had a younger brother who died of lymphoma”—this was another true thing—“and my mother has never really recovered from it.”

  She looked over at me. “How old was he when he died?”

  “He was twenty-eight.”

  She went on looking at me and then nodded as if this was information that did not surprise her in any way.

  • • •

  Here is the complicated thing about staring too hard at death, at the causes of death. You start to think every death has a cause; or rather, you start to think every death would not have occurred but for one small thing. That every death was caused by, resulted from, was contributed to or aggravated by—something. And on the one hand this is comforting. You think, if you could just control all the factors, you’d live forever. When you can dig down and find the little misstep, the oversight, the omission, the thing that gave just enough push to start the bones rolling, you feel reassured, and you put that little thing onto your mental list of things you will never, ever do.