by K M Cholewa
“You think the ridiculous nonsense in my head would be much improvement?”
“At least it won’t be mine.”
Paris put down the cat food and let out a breath.
“I’m really sorry,” he said, again.
“Me, too.”
Geneva put the cat on the floor. The apartment was dark save for the light on above the stove that served as a night light. Geneva opened a cupboard and retrieved the French press.
“So a sick sister, huh?” she said. “Have you heard anything?”
Paris stepped around the counter and sat on a stool on the living room side, looking in.
“She’s dead,” he said.
Geneva looked to Paris. She frowned and then pressed the button on the coffee grinder. It was the inverse of a moment of silence but still an acknowledgment of the weight of death. When the grinding stopped, Geneva asked, “How’s Tatum?”
“It’s hard to say,” Paris said. “Shaken, I think, but perfectly calm, too. You know.”
Geneva put the teakettle on the stove and then brushed the tiny hairs off the counter between them. Paris watched with his signature expression. Not waiting. Not eager for the next exchange. Just present as a cat. Paris was attractive in a way most young women wouldn’t notice, Geneva thought, until another woman saw it first, and then they would kick themselves, knowing they could’ve had him.
“Cancer?” she asked him, dumping the coffee grounds into the press.
“No,” Paris said. “No, thank you. I’ll take it black.”
Geneva smiled. Then Paris did, too. The two of them were seldom alone. Tatum was the juncture where they met.
“Cancer infests that family,” Geneva said. “Passed on like an heirloom.”
“I didn’t know that.”
While the water continued to heat, Geneva went to her record collection. Even in the dark, she could zero in on what she wanted, a row of albums in paper sleeves, no original covers. Ten years ago, the young man who owned the record store she frequented had a flood in his basement. He gave Geneva fifteen albums that had survived the flood intact but with their covers ruined. A purist, he had replaced those too and had given the coverless copies to Geneva. A’s, B’s, and a few C’s. He had alphabetized from the floor up. Some Allman Brothers. Bowie. Camel. Geneva picked an old Camel album, Flight of the Snow Goose. Perfect morning music. Jazzy, mellow.
“Cancer took out both of Tatum’s parents,” Geneva said, dropping the needle.
“I guess I did know that,” Paris said. “Do you think Tatum worries?”
“About cancer?” Geneva said, surprised.
“Yeah.”
Geneva hesitated. From the sound of his voice, she didn’t think he meant did she worry about getting cancer again. She did the math with her back to him as she adjusted the volume. She calculated that Tatum had brought Paris around for the first time right when she had finished chemo. Tatum had a cue-ball head at the time and was skin and bones. She looked like a child refugee, a bald young boy. How could Paris not have known? What did he think? That she had just escaped from a concentration camp?
The kettle whistled.
“I honestly don’t think she thinks about it much,” Geneva said. “She doesn’t talk about it, at any rate.” Which was true.
Geneva remembered when Tatum told her about the diagnosis. Just two weeks before, Vincent had dumped her, or she had dumped him. Geneva never got the full story. Nonetheless, brokenhearted with a shaky prognosis, Tatum had forged ahead. Mastectomy. Chemo. Geneva had been surprised that Tatum took traditional, prudent steps to beat the cancer. She had expected indifference and self-neglect. She wondered if it wasn’t so much a will to live that drove her as it was a determination to be the one to decide whether and when to pull the plug.
Geneva looked at Paris. His brow was drawn, and he stared off to the side in private worry.
“Tatum’s okay,” Geneva said, pouring the water into the press. “Cancer.” She shook her head. “I hear it, and I want to know what did she eat, or breathe? What’s the family background? Was she repressed, not dealing with something — anger, resentment, unresolved childhood issues?”
“Cause and effect,” Paris said. “It’s pointless to look.”
“You think?” Geneva said. “Maybe. I guess I just want to reassure myself that my circumstances are nothing like theirs. I want to kid myself that I’m somehow different and therefore safe.” She slowly pushed down the press.
Paris still looked troubled. Geneva pointed a finger at him.
“Don’t you dare start worrying about Tatum,” she said.
Paris looked taken aback.
“Look,” Geneva said, turning to retrieve the mugs. “I once had a cat I absolutely adored. Sure, I adore all my cats, but this one was particularly amazing. Her name was SoHo, and we thought each other was just the bees’ knees. Anyway, she got diagnosed with cancer and was given four to six months. After that, every time I looked at her, I saw my own grief instead of the sweet, little creature that she was.” Geneva set two ceramic mugs beside the press. One was covered with Egyptian-style hieroglyphs. The other had a ♀ on it. “Tatum’s not sick,” she said to Paris. “Don’t start looking at her as though at any moment she may keel over dead. You may as well worry about asteroids hitting the Earth. They’re out there, you know.”
“You’re scaring me,” Paris said.
Geneva smiled, and he smiled back. She poured the coffee.
“Sorry,” she said. “I just can’t stand any more worrying. It’s not you. I’m lecturing myself.” She passed Paris the Egyptian mug. “Worrying,” Geneva said, “it’s largely a woman’s disease, you know. An epidemic blocking female enlightenment everywhere.”
Paris accepted what she told him. He didn’t know anything different.
“Ask me about my trip,” Geneva said.
Paris paused, then obeyed.
“How was your trip?” he said with a slight nod.
“Had great soup luck,” Geneva said, changing her tone. More upbeat. “Garlic soup from heaven. Tomato bisque to die for.”
Paris looked down, and then he made a mock serious face.
“Do you think we make our own soup luck?” he said, looking up.
“Perhaps,” she said. “But some of us are just born soup lucky. Perhaps we earned it in a past life.”
“Because you shared your soup?”
“Who knows?” she said. “Cause and effect,” she repeated his words.
“It’s pointless to look.”
They saluted each other with their mugs, not quite a toast. Geneva took a sip of coffee but knew she would not finish it. She had drunk it every day in Amsterdam, but it had been a vacation indulgence, more about ceremony than the caffeine. It was served dark and bitter with bread and a hard-boiled egg, the breakfast included in her lodging. But she couldn’t live on a regular basis with the low-grade agitation that came with drinking coffee. She thought she needed to know for certain whether any potential heart palpitations were driven by caffeine or some oncoming cardiac disaster.
“I like the music,” Paris said.
Geneva liked this about Paris. He always noticed the music.
“Paris,” she said, “since you’ve got the key, could you stop by tomorrow morning too? I need to go see Ralph. I’ll be spending the night.”
“Sure,” he said. “Do you think he realizes you haven’t been there for a while?”
Geneva looked past Paris into her living room. Ralph hadn’t done so much as mumble her name for nine years. It had been equally long since he had given her that old dog look, a combination of deep love and of being deeply tired.
“You know how they say dogs don’t have any sense of time,” she said. “They just know you’re there or you’re not there.”
“That’s how it is with Ralph?”
Geneva opened her mouth to say yes but knew it wouldn’t be true.
“
No,” she said. She twisted her mouth in thought. “He doesn’t know whether or not I’m there. I’m pretty sure.”
Outside the windows, it remained dark and would be so for at least another hour. The two were quiet, Paris on the stool, Geneva standing across from him leaning on the counter. Neither searched for the next thing to say. Both of their thoughts drifted privately. Geneva suspected her lecture didn’t take and that Paris continued his concern in private. His affection for Tatum was unmistakable. He was so different from Vincent, Tatum’s ex-lover and the son of a dear, old friend. Tatum met Vincent because of Geneva, but not through her. She did not set them up, nor would she. Vincent had used Geneva’s apartment sometimes when she was out of town or on weekends when she was visiting Ralph. He would leave her small buds of reefer in an empty cookie jar. Geneva was certain he did so at his mother’s direction. Vincent’s mother was 100 percent Northern Cheyenne and not crazy about white people. Geneva, for some reason, had been granted a special dispensation.
Geneva had watched Vincent grow up. His mother’s blood showed in Vincent’s eyes and cheekbones, and his nose belonged to his Italian father. The thick, dark hair could’ve come from either one. Vincent’s father was never referred to by name. No love lost. But the resulting offspring, Vincent, hit puberty with sultry looks, a good mind, and a fierce maternal loyalty — a death trap for any girl. To make matters worse, his taste in women tended toward the wounded. A little existential pain made him feel needed. But he expected to be the cure. It was a classic case of can’t-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too. That alone didn’t bode well for Tatum, but there was more. The idea of Vincent with a white girl wouldn’t sit well with his mother, despite that she now lived in Ventura shacked up with a white seventy-two-year-old California surf bum.
Tatum never stood a chance.
So they split up. Vincent disappeared into his career as an activist in the natural death movement, fighting corporate ownership of the passage to the other side, as he might say. He had published several articles and had even been on a talk show or two.
“Geneva,” Paris said, calling her back to the moment. “Back in Europe?”
Geneva looked to him. She was grateful Tatum had brought him around, thrown him into the mix.
“You never knew Vincent, did you?”
“No.”
“He entered my mind,” Geneva said. “Maybe he’s thinking about me.”
“Do you like him?” Paris asked.
“Like him?” Geneva said. She looked into Paris’s face. His eyes were slightly squinted, almost a wince. She suspected he would prefer she did not like Vincent much.
“He interests me,” she said, showing mercy. “Is that the same thing?”
“I’ll have to think about that,” Paris said.
“Well,” Geneva said, “do get back to me.”
Paris nodded. He looked into the bottom of his mug. “Thank you,” he said and got up to leave.
Geneva lifted her chin, a silent goodbye and you’re welcome. Her mind had leeched onto the question she had posed to Paris. Was being interested in someone the same thing as liking him, loving him even, if you’re interested enough?
“Good night,” Paris said from the door, though it was still-dark morning.
Paris closed the door to Geneva’s and faced Tatum’s. He had the key. He was glad Geneva was home. It made it easier to stay out. He stared at Tatum’s door for only a few seconds before it reminded him of the blank canvas in his closet and he left.
Paris walked with his hands jammed into the pockets of his canvas coat. He had no shadow as he watched the edge of the sidewalk where it met the small patch of grass of the boulevard. Trees tangled above his head until he spilled out of the residential streets and glanced up at the morning moon.
9
Rachael heard Tatum say her mother’s name. Margaret. Aunt Tatum spoke it from a hunkered down place outside the bathroom door in the motel room. Rachael knew the place well. A place where she, too, used to sit. Outside the bathroom door, she’d listen to her mother make bad noises in the shower. Rachael always knew when the noises were coming. She knew because her mother would turn on the TV in the kitchen and walk away. She would suggest a video for Rachael to watch and snap it into the VCR in the family room. She would turn on the radio in the bedroom. Rachael refused, though, to be swallowed by the contrived din of the house. Safer to listen. Better to eavesdrop on the secret. For whatever danger it held, she wouldn’t be alone.
“She gave me this look,” she heard her Aunt Tatum say into the phone.
Rachael knew the look. She could see her mother’s face, a double helix of love and anxiety, a look followed by a hug, too tight. A hug Rachael didn’t want.
That was before motel rooms with loud heaters and thin blankets and eating sandwiches off of their wrappers. It was back in the afternoons when autumn-colored leaves hung proudly, seemingly unaware of their fate. They rustled outside the window of her mother’s bedroom, where she had retreated, rolled to her side, and forgot about breakfast, laundry, and getting Rachael ready for school.
So Rachael skipped breakfast. She stayed home and collected the leaves as they fell. She brought to her mother the reds and yellows with their edges curling inward like fingertips. She held them by their stems and twirled them in pirouettes while she stood beside the bed. These leaves were the bravest, she told her mother, those unafraid to go first and lead the way.
The weeks slipped by, and Rachael learned to climb cupboards and eat pretzels for breakfast. More leaves fell. They fell in small showers riding together on shared breezes. One evening, when her father got home, he came to the bedroom where Rachael was sitting in the pocket between her mother’s arm and torso while they looked at old pictures of great aunts also named Rachael. Her father brought a woman into the bedroom, gray-haired but not too old. The woman told Rachael to call her Miss Geri. Rachael looked to her mother to know whether or not to like her. At first, her mother ignored the woman’s presence, not rudely, but as though she couldn’t see her at all. Before too long, though, Rachael could sense a silent gratitude, a relief in her mother, and so she ate Miss Geri’s food and let her dress her for school.
Miss Geri left late at night, and when she did, Rachael snuck into her mother’s bed. In mornings over breakfast, Miss Geri would admonish her playfully, telling her that her mother needed rest.
“Are you afraid to sleep by yourself?” she asked.
Rachael shrugged.
“I promise you,” Miss Geri said, “there are no monsters in your closets, and if there were, I’d clean them out.” She raised her arm, holding her sponge aloft, demonstrating that she possessed the proper weaponry for the job.
Rachael gave her a half-smile to be polite. She knew the monsters weren’t in her closet, and she also knew that they couldn’t be fought because they never attack. They watch. They owned you, and it was enough.
When only the stubbornest of leaves remained, holding on to their place in the sky by fragile fingers — seeming, now, the brave ones — Rachael woke up knowing her mother was gone. Rachael sat with the covers wrapped at her waist and stared at the drape of the sheet over her mother’s shoulder, waist, and hip. Her hair was messy in back and Rachael thought that she should brush it before Miss Geri arrived. She leaned over her mother’s body and directed her voice into her ear. She spoke as though into a dark house she wasn’t sure was empty. “Mommy? Mommy?” She shook at her shoulder, but she knew. She also knew that her mother hadn’t become a ghost and floated up and away. She was still in there but past a big door, maybe two, hiding down deep.
That’s dead too.
When her father came in, Rachael moved back from her mother fast and said, “Now she’s dead.”
Her father stared at the draped sheet. Then he gathered Rachael off the bed and crushed her to his chest. She felt flat as a shield against him as he squeezed her too tight. She st
ared over his shoulder into the long hallway that led to the stairway down to the foyer. Her stomach growled for breakfast, and her father’s cologne was making her slightly nauseous. His big hand held the back of her head and scrunched her hair.
She struggled from his arms and ran to the master bathroom to get her mother’s hairbrush. But once inside, Rachael remembered it was on the nightstand. She turned to leave, but her eye caught a movement in the mirror. She blinked at her reflection, and it blinked back. Still, she didn’t trust it. It wasn’t her, not who she wanted to be but someone coming for her, to get her, to be her. Her mother hadn’t been alone when she cried. A sneaky child was in there with her, and her father too, a ghostly version, whom her mother beat with words like fists, words muffled but not drowned by the shower’s drum and patter.
A sudden ringing startled Rachael, and she broke away from the reflection. She ran from the bathroom, past her father, who lifted the phone from its cradle, and down the hall. In her bedroom, she hunkered into the space between the side of her dresser and the wall and let the three sides hold her.
There she sat, alone, hearing no pounding shower, no radio, or television. She covered her ears, but the noise was inside. She tried to be deaf to both worlds, the one inside and out, which created a world without her, one in which she did not exist. When the noise was gone, she felt the static hum around her and pretended she was it. A vibrating nothing.
Then, she realized a thing that had never occurred to her before. All the sounds, all the furniture, the hallways and walls, they existed without her, went on in her absence.
Another ring, but the doorbell now. It was a sound disconnected from meaning, asking nothing of a self that didn’t exist. Rachael stayed in her corner and let it ring again. She heard without listening, blended as she was into the invisible fabric of space. Then she heard the clank of the knocker that nobody ever used. The unfamiliarity of the sound focused her attention, called her back into being. Rachael rose from her corner. It made no sense, but she thought, maybe it’s Mom. She left her room and crept down the stairs. She approached the front door apprehensively. Even though she wasn’t allowed to, she opened it.
