by K M Cholewa
“You’ve got an opinion?” Geneva said.
Voodoo stretched his neck to meet her hand. Geneva stroked him from head to rear. He looked up to her with narrowed eyes.
A cat can teach you more than a ghost, he seemed to say.
A slow smile spread Geneva’s lips.
On her patio on this smoky morning, there were no hungry might-have-beens. No black hole drawing her in. No sacrifice being made. She was moving of her own volition, and it was without obligation. Duty. Need. What had she been thinking? She was not assigning her love according to need. She loved. She stood in the state of it, and she was not alone. She loved Rachael because Rachael was there in its field. She loved John too. He was there. She knew it. She could feel it.
The answer was not Don’t Look Back. It wasn’t Look Forward, either.
Geneva bent down and kissed Voodoo’s head.
“You’re a genius,” she said, though he already knew.
Geneva headed for her back steps. She had her last sentence. Her final column. She made it halfway up the stairs when a man’s voice startled her. She turned around. He was standing outside of Tatum’s back door. Vincent.
Geneva sighed and came back down her stairs. Vincent had come through Tatum’s apartment. He wore his confusion and pointed with his thumb over his shoulder.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“She’s gone,” Geneva said. “She’s dead.”
Vincent’s mouth opened. He dropped backward slightly and leaned against the duplex.
“She was killed,” Geneva said. She looked up at him from the bottom of Tatum’s steps. “Shot. At the Deluxe.”
“I just saw her last night,” Vincent said. “I was on my way out. I was supposed to meet her back in my room,” he said. “At my room,” he said. “I was worried.”
“Yeah?” Geneva said.
“She was working with me on my book.” Vincent looked off to the side. “The Deluxe, huh.”
“It wasn’t personal,” Geneva said, and Vincent looked back her way. “The shooting,” she said. “It wasn’t personal. She was shot by accident. Either the gun just went off or the bullet was meant for someone else. Maybe Paris.”
“That guy.”
“That guy.”
Vincent looked down, seeming to do calculations. Geneva suspected, but wasn’t sure, that his reunion with Tatum might have had to do with more than his book.
“What can I do?” he said, looking back up.
“Nothing.”
Then Geneva looked at him long. She climbed the stairs and put a hand on each side of his face. She could still see in him the ten-year-old boy she once had known. His brown eyes darted back and forth, slightly restless, looking into hers. Geneva kissed him. Affectionately. Maternally. Love, she thought. Stand there and see who shows up. For her, Vincent always did. Every time.
“How ’bout keeping your distance from this,” she said, letting her hands slide to his shoulders. “Leave the service to others. Let Paris and Rachael do this without you. Unless,” she hesitated, “unless, there was more going on, and uh, you need to be there.”
“I’m staying at the Red Roof Inn,” Vincent said, “if you need me.”
“In town long?”
“Hard to say.”
Geneva wondered if she should offer him the apartment. But it was too soon, and Rachael was coming.
Vincent pushed himself off the wall. Geneva hooked her arm in his, and they walked back into Tatum’s apartment together.
“You deal with a lot of spirits,” Geneva said as they moved down the hall.
“Not really,” Vincent said. “There are people who do, but I just deal with the dead.”
“Well, let me ask you anyway,” she said. “Who do you think has more to teach you, a cat or a ghost?”
“Depends on the ghost,” Vincent said. “Depends on the cat. Why do you ask?” He turned to face her as they reached the front door.
“A theory,” Geneva said. “My last column.”
“You’re retiring?”
Geneva nodded. Then she noticed Vincent squinting over her shoulder. She turned, following his gaze. Vincent stepped past her to the coffee table and picked up a stack of papers.
“My manuscript,” he said.
Geneva was surprised she had not noticed it. She was glad Paris hadn’t either. They both had been drawn past it to the kitchen counter and the cut-out paper dolls.
“Maybe you could take a look at it sometime,” Vincent said.
“In a few weeks,” Geneva said. She put a hand on his back as they entered the foyer.
“I’m really sorry,” Vincent said at the front door.
“We all are.”
“Call my mom,” Vincent said, his way of trying to look after her.
“I do,” Geneva said. “I will.”
Vincent left, heading down the walk. Geneva watched him from the stoop. He was barely taller than Paris, but leaner. Tidier. Tighter. Geneva considered Vincent’s distinctions. He did not deal with spirits. He didn’t deal with the dying either. Vincent dealt with the dead, that moment in between the two that should be only a moment and yet so often managed to drag forward into time.
“Vincent,” Geneva called to him.
He turned.
“The reason a cat can teach you more than a ghost,” she said, “is because the cat’s here. The ghost’s not.”
Vincent walked to his Chevy Trailer King. He had sucked in his lips and nodded in response to Geneva. He thought she was trying to tell him something, to let Tatum go. He climbed into the cab and turned the key. Geneva needn’t worry, he thought. There was nothing he was holding on to. Nothing to let go of. It had not escaped him that Tatum had left his motel room, left him, to go to Paris. But it didn’t change the fact that for him, death always opened a new pocket of space. He felt it every time he was called. He never discussed it with anyone, his awareness of the new space.
Death didn’t bother Vincent because he didn’t take it in. Instead, he stepped into it. He filled the empty space. It seemed to be what people wanted.
Geneva watched Vincent walk to his car. She considered that if Rachael came to live with her, Vincent would be in and out of Rachael’s life because he was in and out of Geneva’s. In Rachael’s world, Geneva thought, men leave, but they come back. Women never leave, and yet they seem to disappear.
But not her.
“Twenty more years,” she instructed the powers that be. That would get Rachael to almost thirty.
Vincent pulled away from the curb. Geneva turned back toward the duplex, wondering what to do about Tatum’s apartment. Should she leave it for Rachael to see as it was? Only the largest items remained, and the plants, a footprint of the life that had passed through. Geneva walked to the kitchen counter and peeked into the box on its surface. Some clothes and hair do-dads. Rachael’s things. Geneva picked up the green leather book also lying there to pack it with the rest but hesitated. She had been concerned about how the ripped up apartment would look to Rachael. What about the ripped out page?
Geneva opened the Book and withdrew it. She placed the two items, the book and the page, on the counter one under each hand. Why had Tatum ripped it out? Did it have something to do with going to see Paris? Was the picture somehow her suicide note?
It was not a suicide.
Geneva pursed her lips. She pushed the torn out page farther from the Book. They didn’t belong together. Maybe that’s what Tatum knew. It seemed to Geneva, however, that Tatum had crumpled the wrong item. The Book of Rachaels reminded her of Ralph’s ashes. Something dead in need of a letting go. Geneva considered burying it just as she had buried Ralph’s ashes the night before.
She left the torn-out page on the counter. She took the Book and made her way to the yard. Tatum had given her power of attorney. She entrusted her to pull the plug or not, if the time came. This Book wasn’
t even a life support system. It was a death support system. The time to pull the plug seemed to be now.
Geneva stepped outside. The sun didn’t look well. It looked red, stepped on, and smeared behind a milky cataract. She held the Book against her chest and looked around to see if a spot jumped out at her. She would leave it to the gods, she decided, just as she had with Ralph. If the right spot spoke to her, into the dirt it would go. If not, well, then its number wasn’t quite up.
Her eye caught the gas grill. Another option. Death by fire?
“Geneva.”
Her head whipped around.
Ron’s head rose above the fading carragana bushes. His gray, thinning hair was as disheveled as usual.
“Saw a patrol car outside your house this morning,” he said. “You all right?”
Geneva walked to the hedge.
“Tatum was killed last night,” she said. “Shot at the Deluxe.” It was the third telling in hours.
Ron closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Paris was working,” Geneva said. “It’s all too awful.” She told him what she knew. “Rachael will be coming out with her father at the end of the week.”
Ron’s blue eyes were soft beneath his gray and wiry brows.
“You’ve had a rough couple of months, haven’t you?” he said.
Geneva considered it. Rough? No. They’d been amazing. In a shack outside of town, her body had come as alive as her mind. The questions that had plagued her — did she love, could she love? — existed not behind her in time but elsewhere in space. They remained unanswered, but it didn’t matter because they were no longer hers.
Rough? No. It had been a time of a slow letting go. Learning how to do it as she went along.
Ron misread Geneva’s watering eyes. It wasn’t grief. It was gratitude.
Geneva held the Book upright before her chest.
“I’m going to burn this,” she said to Ron.
Ron’s sympathy turned to confusion. He raised his chin and squinted.
“It was Tatum’s,” Geneva said. “It’s a family history of sorts. It caused her nothing but grief.”
Ron scratched at his beard.
“As a librarian,” he said, “I can’t condone this.”
“I hate to contribute to this smoke, though,” Geneva said, looking up.
“Book burning,” Ron said seriously, shaking his head. “It’s not a legacy I’d want to be a part of.”
“This has nothing to do with legacy,” Geneva said, pronouncing legacy with a hint of disgust. “Quite the opposite.” Ron extended his hand, and Geneva handed him the Book over the top of the hedge. “Rachael’s seen it,” Geneva said as Ron flipped through. “Burning it just keeps it from being rammed down her throat. Family-wise, this stuff has become some sort of gospel. Burning it isn’t about what it says. It’s about what its very existence means.”
“So, you’re burning the gospel?” Ron said, without looking up.
“Bad book burners burn books because they’re afraid of new ideas,” Geneva said. “I’m a good book burner. I’m burning this book because I believe in new ideas.” She reached across the hedge for the Book.
Ron surrendered it but wasn’t buying her reasoning.
“Gotta do what I gotta do.” Geneva sighed. She shrugged and turned away. She crossed the yard, returning to the patio where she opened the grill She picked up the long cylinder of matches.
“Stop,” Ron called from the hedge. “Don’t do this. Not in a gas grill. Come over here,” he said. “Give it the dignity of burning in a Weber.”
Geneva paused. A Weber. More cauldron-esque. Yes. She turned.
“All right,” she said, and she returned to the hedge. She squeezed through where it was least dense. Ron had gone ahead. He stood on his patio where the squat, black Weber sat between a picnic table and several potted tomato plants.
Ron shook his head.
“Destroying knowledge,” he said.
“It’s not knowledge,” Geneva said. “It’s information.”
“Information that might hold the key to answers that little girl goes looking for someday.”
Geneva opened her mouth to speak, but Ron kept going.
“What came before helps us understand what’s happening now.”
“But who needs a map to where they’re standing?” Geneva said.
“Geneva,” Ron said, his eyes softening, “history’s not the enemy. Knowing how you got to where you are shows you that the way things are is not that way by divine edict. There were reasons. Hows. Causes and effects. Maybe even lies. ‘To understand something is to be delivered of it,’” he quoted. “Spinoza.” Then Ron looked at the ground and rubbed his beard. “You’re probably wanting to get on with your life, I suppose, losing Ralph and all,” he said, “but where we’ve been, where we’ve come from — important stuff. Let Rachael have that.”
“You’ve invited me here under false pretenses, haven’t you?” Geneva said.
Ron cocked his head and lifted his bushy brows.
“Forward is forward,” Geneva said. “Know where you want to go and go. Looking back just slows you down.”
“But if you don’t know your history,” Ron said, “you’re bound to repeat it. It may be a cliché, but clichés earn their status.”
“Nah-ah,” Geneva said. “History repeats itself because we keep thinking about it and keep talking about it. How can anything new happen?”
Ron frowned.
“Matches,” Geneva said.
Ron pursed the lips tucked in his whiskers. He sighed and moved toward his back door. But Geneva had taken in his argument more than she had let on. She was questioning herself and her plans. Did the adage “Know Thyself” really require knowing a couple of generations’ worth of knowing theeselves? Wasn’t there something to be said for taking history out of the picture? Or was that impossible? She wasn’t sure. She considered that maybe she should just pull out the pictures and destroy the text. Preserve content. Destroy context. Rachael did seem to like photographs. Or maybe she should save the Book, and someday they could examine it together, herself and Rachael, and talk about perspective and meaning.
But did it matter that the past could be seen from twenty angles? Wasn’t it still just the past?
Ron emerged from his back door. Geneva wasn’t sure what she was going to do.
“You can’t change the course of history by burning a book,” he said, reaching the Weber.
Geneva looked at him and decided.
“That right there,” she said. “Just listen to what you’re saying. The ‘course of history’ like it’s a road that’s already laid out. ‘The course of history’ like there’s a here that necessarily leads to there. That there,” she said, “is exactly the problem.”
Geneva extended her hand for the matches.
Reluctantly, Ron handed them over. Defeated, he lifted the lid to the Weber.
Geneva opened the Book and ripped out several pages. Ron winced. She placed them on the grill. She tucked the Book beneath her arm and struck a match.
“This isn’t history,” she said, touching the flame to the corners of the pages. “This is a tuning fork, and what it attunes to is something that doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s a ghost. It’s a distraction. This book is the great oppressor,” she said.
“Viva la revolution,” Ron sighed as the pages curled with dark edges, smoking and giving off a chemical stench. The smoke floated up, joining the effluvium of the surrounding raging fires. Spirits came together in the sky. Trees and grasses and woodland victims. Vapor tendrils touched. They spread out over the valley, unable to escape.
48
Geneva suggested that she and Rachael go across the hall to look for things to decorate the spot where they would bury Tatum’s ashes. Geneva thought it best to have a concrete reason for going over there so that Rachael could gravitate naturally toward whatever sh
e might want or need as keepsakes. They stood together in the doorway of Tatum’s apartment. Lee had dropped Rachael off at Geneva’s the night before as planned while he stayed in a hotel downtown. Not counting burning a generations-old family genealogy, Geneva left Tatum’s apartment just as she’d found it.
“Like what kind of stuff should I look for?” Rachael asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Geneva said. “Jewelry. Anything pretty or something that makes you think of her.”
They took several steps into the living room. Rachael’s head turned, taking it all in.
“She died before she got the message from your dad,” Geneva said. “She didn’t know you were coming.”
Rachael stepped into the apartment where she had lived for seven months. Unlike her mother’s house, it was a world already gone, changed to something else. She stepped with her arms at her sides, reached toward nothing, and seemed not quite to know where to go. Geneva purposely moved toward the counter so that Rachael might meet her there.
“You’ve got some stuff over here,” she said.
Rachael walked over and lifted her chin. Then she climbed onto a barstool and took a look at the cutouts. Geneva watched as Rachael stacked them into a pile, one on top of the other. She seemed to hesitate for just a moment over the cutout of Vincent. Geneva remembered Tatum telling her about the missing picture of him. Apparently, it had turned back up. But when? Before the ripped out page? After?
Once Rachael had the paper dolls in a tidy stack, she kneeled on the barstool and peeked into the box filled with old clothes, books, and barrettes. She looked them over without reaching in. Then she climbed back down.
“You okay?” Geneva said.
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s all you want?” Geneva said, thinking about the Book she had burned.
“Uh-huh.”
“You want to check the bedrooms?”
“No, thank you.”
Geneva understood. She even thought Rachael wise. There were no souvenirs here. Tatum herself had decided that there was a clean break to be made. Who were they to question her? Geneva placed a hand on Rachael’s back and led her across the hall.
