Shaking out the Dead

by K M Cholewa

  “My wife wants to renegotiate our relationship,” Lee told her. “As far as I can tell, ‘renegotiating a relationship’ means a woman telling a man how he needs to change.”

  Corrina leaned in, as though she were about to confide.

  “Here’s what I know,” she said. “Men tend to think that when a woman tells him her feelings, she’s accusing him of causing them.” She picked up her snifter and raised it to Lee. “Thanks,” she said.

  The group she had arrived with was moving to a newly emptied table. Corrina waved good-bye to Lee and joined them.

  Lee thought about her, and her friends, all the next week. He remembered being them, the best and brightest in a room. He had felt that way with Margaret once, as a couple. They ranked in a crowd. People were aware of them and not the other way around. Because he had felt it again with Corrina, that old simmering, he knew that it was not he who had been diminished by time. The problem was Margaret.

  He hadn’t gone looking for an affair. Nor had he leapt into one at the first hints of marital dissatisfaction. Lee told himself this, and it was true. But when he came upon it, the improved reflection, it drew him like a magnet. He took shape before it. Over the next week, he watched Margaret as she moved behind him in the bedroom mirror and as she made school lunches and loaded the dishwasher. He realized that even her expressions of pleasure had to squeeze their way through her mask of hurt and resentment. Margaret’s face had become to him a constant accusation.

  But then, approval from the needy is hard to come by, as their dissatisfaction is built into the neediness. It comes to be, in fact, that the needy’s approval isn’t worth much anyway as the value of approval lies in the source. Margaret had been discredited by her desperation, cultivated by Lee though it was, and now all he saw in her eyes was that he was not good enough.

  Perhaps some cakes can be had and eaten too. But when it comes to wanting neediness and approval from the same person, both sides are out of luck.

  Lee returned to the bar the next week, hoping to find Corrina, and himself. That was a year before Margaret got sick.

  Living as the reflection in Margaret’s eye had come to feel to Lee like a slow dying, which was why, looking back, he could see that he had been in a life-or-death situation. He chose life. The body ducks without thinking. The soul, he figured, does the same. It reflexively dodges bullets and reaches blindly for lifelines when drowning.

  Corrina was that line, that life preserver floating on the surface. Lee told Corrina that if he hadn’t met her, he thought it might have been him, and not Margaret, who would have gotten cancer. He thanked her for saving his life.

  Corrina said that it was too bad Margaret couldn’t find someone to save hers.

  Lee’s affair with Corrina did not make him feel like a louse. He felt like a good man who in order to be a good husband had to go re-find his goodness some place else. His affair with Corrina had not felt like the low and sneaky part of his life but the honest part. Lee didn’t divorce Margaret. He never left. Technically, she did.

  

  Now, from an Adirondack chair, Lee watched the Atlantic’s crash and rumble, the tide moving in and out like breath. Bloody Marys kept the world slightly a blur but couldn’t stop the dreams, dreams in which he would find himself floating just slightly off the ground, feet grabbing for the earth. The only escape was to waken. The dreams were with him in Florida right after Margaret’s death. They were with him in Newark, and they were there for those two days in between — just two days that he had spent in his own home since parting paths with his daughter.

  After the launch of the satellite office in Newark, Lee had been free to return home. But instead, he headed south to Cape May, where it was still off-season and quieter than he had anticipated. Since the dreams followed him anyway, they were not the reason for avoiding home. His two days in the house had been suffocating. Everything there, the furniture, the appliances, the very walls seemed to ask where is she? as though his connection to them was through Margaret and here they had been stuck with each other awkwardly, blown off by the intermediary each had depended upon. Lee didn’t want to sell the house or give everything away. Nor did he want to be responsible for it. He didn’t know how.

  So it sat unoccupied. Almost.

  Margaret was there. But she wasn’t in her grave. A fact only Lee was aware of. She was in a box in their bedroom. Lee knew that Margaret wanted to be cremated, the logistics of decomposing too unseemly for her to stomach. But she didn’t want to offend relatives and her Catholic heritage. She told him all this years ago before she was sick, before she was unhappy, back when such a conversation was innocent, macabre musings, a projecting of themselves into a harmless future too far away to worry about. But Margaret had not left Lee with instructions as to what to do with her next, after she was burned. Before leaving for Florida, he had placed her on the shelf beneath her nightstand, slid in between a Bible and a green leather book.

  For those two days at the house, Lee did not sense Margaret’s ghost watching him. No one was watching him. His calls to Corrina went unreturned. He gravitated to the box of ashes. He sat on what was once Margaret’s side of the bed and looked down at the box. But it failed to look back. It was silent and self-contained. He reached down and pulled the green leather book from the shelf. Margaret had told him about the Book but had left out the nitty-gritty details. As far as Lee was concerned, it was nothing more than a type of family tree.

  He flipped through it. He noted the strange, self-congratulatory tone. Maybe, he thought, it was something that made sense to women. He paused over his daughter’s entry. Her birth date caught his eye. It was two days away.

  Lee did not think of his daughter much. It had not been his habit. She had been well cared for by Margaret. He had no cause for worry. He provided the cash, and the two lived within the comfortable wing of protection it cast. The world the two shared was satisfying and complete. He paid the tab. And now, Rachael was in his wife’s sister’s care. Doing the right thing sometimes means finding the right person to do it. He probably hadn’t brought it about as well as he might have, but the outcome was what mattered. Rachael was cared for. She was safe.

  Yet, there on the edge of the bed during those two days, the terrifying lightness snaked in through his feet, climbed his legs, and reached up into his chest and shoulders. It was the warning, the feeling that came in the dream right before the force field lifted him.

  Lee couldn’t explain why Margaret’s death had surprised him, but it had. Even after the fact, he walked through the next days like he was playing a role, testing a circumstance, sampling it, to see if it was to his taste. That was how he had been feeling when Tatum said to him, “You should probably check on Rachael.” Tatum had been standing in his kitchen. They had been planning the funeral. She said the words, and then she picked up the phone to order Chinese food.

  Checking on Rachael would not have occurred to him. But it was not because he didn’t care. He had assumed, without even knowing he was assuming it, that Tatum had assumed such duties. The recognition that his daughter was uncared for unleashed adrenalin into his blood stream. It was the moment he realized that Margaret had made no arrangements for Rachael. It was the moment he realized that Tatum hadn’t stepped up to the plate.

  Fear. Embarrassment. Helplessness. They added up quickly. They were the anxiety. They were the adrenaline. But Lee had a different interpretation for his upset biochemistry. Lee interpreted the discomfort as insult. Insult was preferable to the insecurity that might overtake him on the way to his daughter’s room. He climbed the stairs, indignant at what he considered Tatum’s “order.” He pushed on the half-opened bedroom door. His eyes slipped through the room. He didn’t see Rachael, and he moved to back out, when he heard a rustling. A shifting.

  So he took another step, deeper into the room. He saw little socked feet sticking out from where Rachael crouched between the wall and the dresser. More steps, a floor
’s creak, and her face appeared, her eyes lifted to him, large green pools, pulling at him with wordless, shapeless need. She was a black hole, and the force she exerted dismembered him where he stood.

  His skin went first. Then, the organs. He was ripped apart, robbed of even the organizing intelligence that said the heart goes here, the arms go there. Perception did not shape him. It reached at him with greedy hands. Lee floated like a junkyard of parts. He unraveled among pink ruffles, unicorns, and glitter. So he wasn’t even there, not really, when he lowered himself to a knee and placed a hand on Rachael’s arm.

  “You’ll be okay,” he said.

  He didn’t realize it, but in telling her “you’ll be okay,” he had let her know that she was on her own.

  It made the sucking stop, but the need remained. This, Lee did know. Still, he stood and turned.

  And there she was. Tatum. She had slipped into the bedroom and leaned against the wall near the door. He flushed, as though she could read his thoughts and knew that he knew he had stopped the sucking but not the need. A moment that had passed for him with discomfort, though not self-reproach, reframed itself through the lens that was Tatum. She had sent him to his daughter to watch him fail. Hatred flickered in his chest, and it was its own explanation.

  The next day, Tatum stood beside him as the hired backhoe dug Margaret’s phony grave. Her questions about Margaret being buried on the property were oddly specific. Did it take a permit? Were there laws governing family plots? It made him wonder if she knew that Margaret would acutally be cremated and she was testing him.

  When the backhoe was done, Tatum was silenced by the product. She squatted down and fingered the dying grass beside the grave. It was a crisp autumn day, the trees swaying ever so slightly.

  “That last call from Margaret,” she had said, “I wish I knew if there had been something important she wanted to tell me, some final message.”

  Lee looked down. She was looking up, her eyes green pools like Rachael’s, exerting a pull too, though not as strong. She was asking him a question, and he felt he knew the answer she sought.

  Lee remembered the moment from his Adirondack chair in Cape May. Seagulls shrieked and landed not far from his chair, acting nonchalant, while piercing him with their sidelong glances as though if they pierced hard enough, a Cheeto or Cheerio might be extracted from his flesh. He shook the white pebble ice cubes in the bottom of his glass as the morning haze drifted. Standing there by the phony grave, it could’ve been so easy. He could have made up anything. He could have told her that Margaret wanted her to take care of Rachael. Her, and no one else. Her, above all others. Even himself. But he just couldn’t give it to her.

  Instead, he had pleaded overwhelment. His tears were real. Take Rachael, he asked of her. He asked for time. He knew it was the right thing. Right for him. Right for Rachael. Right for Tatum.

  Of course, she had said yes. But she judged him for it and made it no secret.

  He had left Tatum standing there beside the grave. He walked toward the house over the matted leaves, a strange mix of relief and fear making him unsteady as he crossed the yard. He lifted his eyes to the trees and noticed an empty bird feeder hanging on the dogwood near the house. How long had it been empty, he wondered? Since Margaret got sick? For years? He felt it again, the feeling that had started in his daughter’s room the day before. The unraveling. The eye closing.

  As Lee looked up at the tree and feeder, a sense of lightness had entered through his feet and traveled up his legs. To keep from floating up, he reached for things — the knob to his front door, the railing on the stairway inside as he raced up, the varnished wood surface of the door to Rachael’s room as he pushed it open. When Rachael saw his face, her bottom lip set to quivering and then panicked tears began to fall. Lee sat on the bed and pulled her into his arms.

  Four days later, he loaded her into Tatum’s car and sent her west. He headed south.

  Three months later, when he returned home for just two days, he had visited Margaret’s ashes, but not her grave. The ashes hadn’t looked back at him, but the green leather book had. When he stood from the side of the bed and left the room, he had unconsciously carried the Book along. When he took the birthday gift he had bought to the shippers, he also sent the Book of Rachaels.

  

  And now, he was alone, with no He to be. The eye had closed. Margaret was no longer inside his mind, watching him like God, present and silent. He had existed to her always. In his presence. In his absence. In love. In anger. In sorrow. In contempt. Clocks told her when he was leaving and when he was late to come home. Calendars told her when she needed to make sure the dry cleaning was picked up for his business trip. A ringing phone. Was it him? He was the sun. She orbited. He was the tree that fell, and she was the ears to hear. He had never really believed she would die. He thought that someone who wants something from you doesn’t leave.

  The seagulls gave up on him. The white waves of low tide crashed and were pulled back to sea, dragged by their heels, ruffled fingers clawing at the packed sand. Lee stood and headed up the beach to the restaurant’s patio. Unfaithful husband. Part of his mind knew what it meant. It meant that he had been unfaithful to a role in order to be faithful to something that ran much deeper. But the part of his mind that knew this was softened by vodka. The part that was left didn’t know what to know. He looked up into the washed out sky, but it gave him vertigo. He looked down, but the rolling granules of sand that tumbled forward with each step did the same.

  He crossed the restaurant, his eyes taking a quick inventory of the few customers. He didn’t know that he was looking for a woman. A face. Someone to look into him and see herself and mistake him for the self she had misplaced. Vanity didn’t kill Narcissus. It was mistaking his beauty for that of another’s.

  Back in his room, Lee sat on the edge of the bed and called in for his messages. He listened to Tatum’s voice, earnest but without edge. Her words made him remember the “hunkered-downness” of his daughter. The green pools of her eyes. The need. But the black hole that had dismembered him now felt more like gravity pulling him in, reassembling the pieces of a self that had fractured and broken. Tatum told him to try to see himself through Rachael’s eyes.

  He did, and he could. He was the mysterious stranger. He was her father. When he imagined her, he felt a push-pull coming from her. Enough pull to keep his feet on the ground. Enough push to keep him from sinking.

  36

  

  Geneva used her best lotion. She dressed in a cream-colored sweater and blue canvas pants and wore her flat, brown leather boots. A little eyeliner. Eyebrow pencil. A touch of rouge. Aging shrinks the range between how a woman looks at her best and how she looks at her worst. On the upside, it saves time. Geneva reached quickly the outer limit of how good she could look. There was no sense in pretending there was further to go.

  She picked up the directions to John’s and headed for her door. The last of his directions included unmarked roads and navigation by landmark as opposed to street name. She was curious about his word choice. He referred to his house as the “shack” on the left.

  Shack. Was he being cute, and it really referred to a ranch estate? Was it indeed a “shack,” and he would meet her in his long johns having just finished shaving over a water barrel? It crossed her mind that it might not be his home at all, but the shed he used to butcher his victims, middle-aged women in search of a last hurrah.

  She hesitated at her front door but then returned to her desk. She wrote a note including the date, the time, and John’s address — for the investigation, just in case.

  Outside the city limits, the valley spread, subdivisions occasionally blemishing the expanse of ten- and twenty-acre lots. Horses stepped toward their barns, shaking out their manes, finished with the day’s work of gracing the landscape and providing elegant foreground to the distant snow-capped Rockies. The drive from Geneva’s front door to the last stre
tch of dirt and gravel that led to John’s shack took thirty minutes. She approached from the west and noticed a structure on the right. It truly did look the size of a shed, too small to house a man of John’s size. As she passed, she looked up into her rearview. On the other side of the small building was an outdoor grill with John standing behind its open lid. Ahead, the only building was a tall and narrow outhouse.

  She hit the brakes and threw the car into reverse, rolling back slowly over the gravel. She turned into his drive. Psycho killer or no, Geneva liked the cut of his body against the sky.

  John closed the grill and watched her walk from her car across the dust and prickly pear. His eyes sparked at her like he had been waiting for her for years, decades, always knowing that someday, she’d turn her wheels up his drive.

  Geneva reached him and turned out her arms as if to say, Here I am.

  John hung the meat fork on the grill. Behind him in the distance, the Continental Divide lumbered across the sky, snow-capped and purple in the dusk.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” Geneva said.

  “And it’s all for free. Come on in,” John said, motioning toward the shed.

  The front door was open and constructed like one to a horse’s stall — tall, wide, and split with an upper and a lower gate. Inside, there was one large room with north and south facing windows. A queen size bed and nightstand took up nearly a third of the room. The opposite corner included shelves, a sink, and refrigerator. The large wood stove had two burners and an oven compartment. The smell of potatoes leaked from the bubbling pot on top.

  “You cook on that?” Geneva said.

  “All the time.”

  Geneva took in the room. It was completely simple but not without modern conveniences — a refrigerator, a radio. Maybe not a microwave, but a toaster oven.