Shaking out the Dead

by K M Cholewa

  “The funeral?”

  “More than that, I think.”

  

  Though the eulogy was inside, Geneva wore big-ass sunglasses. She did it the way she wanted to, old school. She bypassed the hat but wore a black scarf wrapped like a headband, tying at the nape of her neck. She looked glamorous, very Yoko Ono. There was not a vacuum, but a space around her. Standing near her, you stood in it. She received you from another world.

  In the parlor of the bed-and-breakfast, she sat in a red wingback closest to the table with Ralph’s pictures and ashes. When she had arrived, the photographs had been arranged chronologically. “Mix these up,” she had said to Helene, and the job had gotten done, though Helene hadn’t done it herself. This arrangement was better. No progress and decline. Time, they say, is an illusion. And yet, it always manages to run out.

  From behind her sunglasses, Geneva surveyed the room. Apparently, Rachael’s father had appeared as though out from the mist. His face did not appeal to Geneva. His energy seemed to ride its surface rather than emerge from deeper inside. Beside him, Rachael seemed in a trance, called by a voice only she could hear. She seemed to move toward her father even though she was standing still.

  Hope and fear. That’s what Geneva detected in her. The two didn’t mix well. Love-me/I’m-afraid-you-won’t, mixed together, can taste like hate. Or love. And love. Either way, with the two, the level of devotion involved ran deep.

  Geneva’s eyes shifted to where Tatum stood behind Lee and Rachael. Geneva knew she had hit a soft spot in Tatum from which there might be no recovery. But what was there to do? Apologize for needing what she needed? Apologize for taking it? Tatum fidgeted. Slightly behind her was Paris, young among the men. He was sure of himself but not of Tatum. But he seemed to be mixing the two up.

  Vincent came forward from the back of the room. He stood before the table. Only Geneva sat. Vincent spoke of death.

  “We don’t know Ralph’s reasons,” he said, “for hanging onto his body for so long. It’s been a long good-bye.”

  He asked the group to bow their heads. Beginnings and endings often have fuzzy lines between them, Geneva thought. But this was death. It was supposed to be crisp and sharp to the point of discomfort, and yet, somehow, it did not seem so.

  

  Behind Tatum, Paris stood listening to the tick of her mind as she worked up her arguments for Lee. She had shared her strategy with Paris. She would try to convince Lee to wait until school was over. Then, summer. This was a whim. Tatum was certain of it. It would wear off. She just needed to buy some time.

  “This can’t be happening,” she kept saying on the way to the service. Rachael had ridden to the funeral with her father in his rental car, following Tatum and Paris in hers.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Paris said, and she had looked at him like he had lost his mind. Paris put a hand on Tatum’s back as Vincent spoke, but she did not soften beneath it. At least Lee’s arrival had diverted Tatum’s attention away from Vincent. It was not a thought Paris was proud of. Besides, Lee was as likely to take Tatum from him as Vincent. If Lee took Rachael, Paris knew, Tatum might disappear too, into the loss, and push away whatever else there was to lose. Paris looked at Rachael from behind. She reminded him of a beautiful collie at the end of a leash as she stood at the end of Lee’s hand. She knew who owned her. Paris remembered her small body against his in the car. Lee was a hole that could absorb them both, Rachael and Tatum, leaving him alone.

  Rachael looked over her shoulder, perhaps feeling his eyes on her back. She and Paris locked eyes for a moment before she turned away, seemingly embarrassed.

  Paris thought back to Lee’s arrival at Tatum’s door. He had felt like a bystander when Vincent stepped up to shake Lee’s hand and had wished it was him, not Vincent, holding Lee’s hand and eye.

  However, the distance had allowed him to examine Lee more closely than he might have been able to close up. If his perception was correct, he had to hand it to Lee. Paris thought Lee could sense that the two other men present were not a team, that there were three of them, three men, each separate, merit and right distributing itself among them, and Lee doing the calculations, trying to work it out.

  “Grief is love without the beloved,” Vincent said. “Grief is love turned inside out. Nothing to be afraid of.”

  Paris mumbled Amen with the rest of them.

  He stepped away from Tatum as the service broke up. Geneva stood and turned to face the room. Helene was at her side. Paris put out his hands as he approached her, and she placed her black-gloved hands in his.

  “So that’s the father?” Geneva said in a soft and measured tone.

  Paris nodded.

  “It’s bad news?” she said.

  Paris nodded again.

  

  Geneva remembered Tatum standing in her living room asking if Geneva thought Rachael would be better off with Lee and whether she should call him. Yet, clearly, this situation was not of her own making. Tatum cocked the pistol, Geneva thought, and was now upset someone else was pulling the trigger.

  “How do you feel?” Paris said.

  Geneva looked off to the side from behind her dark glasses. She liked the way the question sounded in Paris’s mouth. He meant it. He wanted to know. He had no assumptions. Geneva tried to be as honest as protocol allowed.

  “I’m on a new planet,” she said. “I suppose we all are. It must change a little, at least, every time someone dies.”

  The small group of guests retired to the porch and front yard. The giant lilac bushes surrounding the bed-and-breakfast had survived the hailstorm better than most and infused the gathering with a sticky, heady sweetness. Geneva sat on a settee on the porch beside Helene. Helene’s hand rested on Geneva’s knee. Geneva occasionally touched the blue, bad tattoo of a phoenix on the sun-spotted skin of the back of Helene’s hand. A few people from the Messenger had come, and they expressed their condolences and then huddled together at the wine table. Two residents from the nursing home were parked in the sun in their wheel chairs, aides standing idly behind them. Geneva’s neighbor, Ron, approached the settee. He told Geneva that if she needed anything, he was right next door. Vincent stood at his mother’s shoulder, looking out at the lawn.

  

  At the bottom of the porch steps, Tatum and Paris joined Lee and Rachael. An old-fashioned sleigh sat on the front lawn of the bed-and-breakfast with a solemn white wreath set up in the driver’s seat.

  “Can I climb on that?” Rachael asked Tatum, then blushed, and redirected her eyes to Lee.

  Lee looked to Tatum and then quickly away.

  “Looks like it,” he said, and off she went.

  Lee turned to follow. He watched her run, mount the runner on the sleigh, and then hoist herself into the seat. He had to admit, he wasn’t sure if she had changed or whether he had never looked closely before. She looked different to him. No longer a subset of Margaret, but his, alone, she seemed, at once, both older and younger than he remembered.

  “Lee.”

  He turned. Tatum had come up behind him.

  “Lee,” she said, and the reasoned arguments concocted during the service stuck in her throat and all she could say is, “what are you doing?”

  Lee furrowed his brow.

  “What are you going to do with a little kid?”

  “Rachael?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Lee knew this might happen. He had considered it as he sat between flights. Tatum might judge him just as she had when he had asked her to take Rachael before. She didn’t understand then, and she didn’t understand now. He had decided he wouldn’t negotiate. He didn’t have to. His job was to do the right thing, not convince Tatum of its rightness.

  “Thank you for all you’ve done,” Lee said. “But you know as well as I do that she should be home now.”

  “As opposed to four days after her mother died.”

  “I did
what was best for Rachael then,” Lee said patiently, “and I’m going to do what’s best for her now.”

  Tatum looked past Lee to Rachael, who stood on the sleigh beside the wreath of flowers, looking in their direction.

  “I’m not sure you know the difference between what’s best for you and what’s best for her,” Tatum said.

  Lee stared at her coldly, then turned away.

  “Just wait until school is out,” Tatum said, changing her tone, pleading, “or after summer vacation. This isn’t the sort of thing you do on impulse,” Tatum said to his back.

  Lee turned around slowly. His voice was exasperated.

  “Why are you doing this?” he said, turning out his hands. “I haven’t seen my daughter in six months.” He said it like it was Tatum’s fault. “This is our reunion. Our time. Why are you ruining it?”

  “I . . . ” Tatum said. “I’m not trying to ruin it.”

  “Well, you are,” he said.

  Paris came up behind Tatum and stopped short. He could feel the tension.

  “I have no idea,” Lee said, “how you could think she’s better off with you than with me.”

  

  Tatum felt her face flush. She’s better off with us, she wanted to say. With me, Geneva, and Paris. But she couldn’t make promises on others’ behalves, and she couldn’t promise that she wouldn’t drive them away. She might have already driven Geneva away. Words stuck in her throat.

  Lee turned away from them and walked toward the sleigh. Tatum followed. Paris followed Tatum.

  At the sleigh, Lee reached up and brought Rachael to the ground. Tatum could feel it coming. He was going to say something right now. Almost as though a bus were careening toward Rachael, Tatum wanted to rush in and shove her out of the path.

  “I bet you’re ready to come back home,” Lee said.

  Somehow, it was visible, the heat reaching up from inside Rachael’s belly, turning her cheeks scarlet. Her eyes shot to Tatum. Rachael looked as she had at the water’s edge. Busted. Found out. Would she start swinging? Tatum could see she would not. It would stay inside, a push-pull, a mix of desire and fear.

  

  Lee felt the same push-pull as Rachael did. Desire and fear. But for him, the push-pull was soothing, the sensation of his feet touching the ground, but not sinking into it. There was no floating up, and there was no dragging down. Afraid to hold on and afraid to let go, Rachael’s grip was one that offered a perfect equilibrium.

  “Maybe we should all go,” Tatum said, impulsively, and with false brightness.

  Rachael looked to her father. Lee stared coldly at Tatum. He misunderstood her motives. He thought it was a power play, that she was trying to make him the bad guy in front of Rachael by forcing him to say no.

  “Maybe that’ll work up the road,” Lee said.

  

  Paris heard Tatum’s blurted words. He had been invisible, listening to it all. But now, he had gone deaf. He stopped hearing the conversation and felt frozen to the spot, which was strange, because he was already moving down the front walk of the bed-and-breakfast, down the street. He wanted out of the khaki pants and the white shirt with the creases from the package. He wanted a white T-shirt and jeans. He wanted work boots, the diner’s counter, and a poured cup of coffee to be enough. Paris wanted the sky at dusk and the sky before dawn and not this straight above light. Tatum was willing to leave, leave him and head off to the Midwest with Lee and Rachael. Paris knew that grief might consume Tatum in a way that she would become lost to him should Lee take Rachael away. He also knew that he might blow it with Tatum with his lies of omission and self-imposed curses. But he didn’t know she would just walk away. He hated himself, and he hated all the lies. Not the ones of omission, but the ones he had told himself.

  Hope had empty hands, empty as the hands of need, or longing. It was defined by the emptiness. That’s what made it hope.

  

  Away from the valley lights, the night was black and the sky packed with stars. Geneva’s Saab crept up the road toward John’s shack.

  “Okay, that’s close enough,” Geneva said. She pointed at the dark silhouette of the building. “There it is. Now, let’s turn around.”

  But Helene kept a light foot on the gas, rolling up the road. She pressed the brake as she pulled up beside the shack.

  “Don’t slow down,” Geneva said. “Drive.”

  Helene gave the car some gas. Geneva watched the shack recede in the rearview mirror as they put distance between themselves and John’s.

  “It’s a shack, all right,” Helene said.

  She kept driving, and the road started to climb. The tree line encroached, and the moon above now flashed in and out between the lodgepole and spruce. Helene slowed down.

  “My night vision’s shot,” she said.

  “That’s a comfort.”

  With John’s shack several miles behind them, Helene pulled over where the shale had broken free of the earth and spilled, carving a sort of stone waterfall into the side of the mountain. She killed the motor and silence asserted itself, there all along.

  “What could I have done with my mind if I hadn’t spent all that time trying to figure out my marriage?” Geneva said.

  “Maybe you would’ve cured cancer.”

  “Probably not.”

  “The life that wasn’t,” Helene said. “You’re bound to have one no matter what you do.” She turned the key halfway to get just enough juice to roll down the window before realizing it wasn’t electric. She shut the car back off and rolled down the window manually. The air came in smelling of earth and pine. “Well,” she said, looking at Geneva. “What shall we do? We could ride up the road farther. Looks like it keeps climbing. We’ll find the edge of something to pour him off of.”

  Geneva shook her head. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “Well, I have to go home day after tomorrow, and I don’t want to leave you alone with that box.”

  “You know,” Geneva said, “I want to do it when I feel good about it. Resolved. Right now, it feels like walking away from a failure.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in guilt.”

  “I don’t. I believe in responsibility.”

  “So what responsibility are you living up to by carrying around that box of dust?”

  Geneva stared straight ahead, hands flat on the top of the black box.

  “I didn’t succeed. I didn’t do this right. I’m responsible to figure out how I could’ve done better. I don’t mean I’m responsible to God or anything like that, just responsible to myself to do the best I can.”

  “But you haven’t done anything for years — that’s the problem. You want to do well at something you weren’t doing.”

  “What wasn’t I doing?”

  “According to you, loving Ralph. You can’t succeed at loving someone you don’t love.”

  “But I did love him.”

  “Well, okay then.”

  An owl hooted, and Helene turned in the direction of the sound. She pointed with her thumb out the window.

  “A sign?” she said.

  Geneva felt the box in her hands. She wished she had the sudden impulse to leap from the car and climb a rock and speak into the night some final farewell, a request to Grandfather Owl to carry Ralph off on his sacred wings. But it didn’t ring true.

  “Drive,” Geneva said. Helene sighed and turned the key. She started up the engine, rolled up the window, and turned the car around to go back the way they came. Geneva looked out the passenger window. She and Ralph both knew he loved her. They knew she loved him too but just wasn’t good at it. He had been generous enough to allow her to keep trying to figure out how to do better.

  Geneva’s foot tapped agitatedly as they came back down the hill. They emerged from the trees into the open valley and traveled several yards when Geneva blurted, “Let me out.” Helene looked at her but kept driving. “Let me out,”
Geneva said louder. Helene hit the brake. Geneva got out, taking Ralph with her. Helene watched through the windshield as Geneva hustled past the front bumper. The headlights illuminated the ditch and barbed wire stapled to fence posts. Geneva stopped up the road a bit but still in the headlights’ glow. She put down the box at the edge of the road. She backed away from it, just a few steps.

  Helene opened her car door and stood.

  “I cannot think this now,” Geneva said, without turning.

  “Think what?”

  “He didn’t love me,” Geneva said. “It wasn’t me. It was him. I filled a slot for him. That’s all. When I failed to fit snugly in the slot, he let me know, and I hopped to, shut up, rearranged myself, whatever it took to solve the ‘problem.’ I made myself palatable.” Geneva looked back over her shoulder at Helene. “Palatable, for God’s sake.” They stood looking at each other in the night. “You knew,” Geneva said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But you didn’t say it.”

  “I said it a million times,” Helene said. “You couldn’t hear.”

  Geneva put her hands on her hips and looked to the sky in exasperation. Stars winked.

  “You’re just mad at yourself,” Helene said.

  “Mad at myself.”

  “Yeah. For denying yourself. You wanted more. You talked yourself into less.”

  Geneva looked over her shoulder at her friend and then back around at the box. Geneva’s body sank just slightly, as if sighing.

  “I am not mad at myself for denying myself,” Geneva said. “I’m mad at you for pointing it out.”

  Helene smiled.

  Geneva stepped forward and picked up Ralph. She returned to the car. Helene swung back in and put it in gear.

  “A man asking you what you want him to do might get old,” Helene said as they drove past John’s shack. “Isn’t it hard enough figuring out what you want to do yourself?”