I'd Give Anything

by Marisa de los Santos

  “Exactly!” said CJ, jittering and fluttering faster. “And the history of the school is folded up inside the history of the city and the state and the country. For instance, there used to be a full kitchen back near the gym so that girls could learn home ec, while the boys had gym class. Mr. Foulkes the old librarian told me that.”

  “What’s home ec?” asked Kirsten.

  “Exactly!” said CJ, practically screeching. “And also there was a room full of typewriters.”

  “What’s a typewriter?” I asked, scratching my head.

  “See what I mean? So cool. And that’s not all.”

  “How could there be more?” I asked, smiling at him. To me, an excited, moth-handed CJ is one of the sweetest sights on the planet.

  “I know, but there is!” He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Hiding places.”

  “Who do you need to hide from, honey?” asked Kirsten, frowning.

  “Not for me,” whispered CJ.

  “Oh!” I whispered. “For your sax!”

  “Which no one is ever going to attempt to steal. Ever,” said Kirsten, rolling her eyes. “Ever.”

  “Hey,” said Gray. “Maybe not. But if a really good hiding place gives CJ peace of mind, that’s worth a lot, right?”

  It was a Gray thing to say. I picked up his hand with its hills-and-valleys landscape of tendons and kissed it.

  And now, months later, when we were supposed to be at lunch, here we were in the basement. Which, as it turns out, isn’t just one basement, but three or at least two and a half: one that the custodial staff still use occasionally, then a deeper one you get to through a door, and then another, very small one a few stone steps down from the second one, also behind a door.

  Levels! Like Hell!

  For some reason, I’d expected dankness. Damp floors and sweating walls, but the place was dry and dusty and crumbly and musty-smelling.

  Since CJ had spent the last six months exploring the building and studying old blueprints and building plans and photographs from the school archives, he had a lot—and I mean a lot—of information to share, which he did in a nonstop stream of chatter that resounded off the basement walls. In addition, he wore, on his little blond head, a pith helmet with a headlamp, like a spelunker, so that every time he turned toward someone, he blinded them. And, for reasons known only to himself, he carried a baseball bat, which he occasionally used to pound on something, usually a wall, in order to demonstrate either its solidity or its hollowness.

  CJ in Hell was something to behold.

  The third-level basement was really just a large room containing a big metal tank-looking thing with a few little doors in it. CJ said it was a coal-burning gravity furnace.

  “Defunct now, of course,” he said.

  “Of course,” said Kirsten. Kirsten wasn’t a fan of the basement. She kept pulling (mostly) imaginary cobwebs from her hair.

  “But you know what the furnace is now?” CJ said, grinning.

  “I know you’ll tell us,” said Kirsten.

  “What?” asked Gray.

  CJ bonked the side of the furnace with his bat, and the clang made us jump.

  “The hiding place!” he said.

  “You’re going to come all the way down here every day to hide your sax?” I asked. “CJ. Honey. Is that not a little crazy? And how will you not get caught?”

  CJ thumped his chest with his child-size fist, then raised the fist to the ceiling. “This is my domain!”

  “Ooh boy,” said Kirsten, pinching the bridge of her nose and squeezing her eyes shut.

  “Down here, I feel like we’re in a whole different world. And the longer we’re here, the more I realize I’m forgetting the real world,” I said.

  “What real world?” said CJ.

  “Maybe it doesn’t exist anymore!” I said. “You never know.”

  Kirsten shivered. “It’d better exist.”

  For a few seconds, no one said anything. CJ swung his head around, surveying his domain, and we watched his beam of light slide around the walls and ceiling. Then, Gray said, “Maybe we should just stay down here. Never go back up.”

  He wasn’t joking. His voice was as dusty as the room we stood in. And something else. Dispirited. Hopeless. Sad.

  Gray has been sad for weeks. Not crying-sad. And not all the time. But even when he’s laughing or kissing me or making jokes, the sadness is there, dulling the colors, muting the sounds. Every time I ask him about it, he teases me or kisses me or puts me off. Gray is so good. People with hearts like his should never be sad. It is a cosmic wrong.

  “I’ll stay down here with you any day,” I said, winking at him. But the smile he gave me was just his lips moving.

  Later, on the phone tonight, in a colorless voice, he told me that now that he was eighteen, he’s decided to go from being a junior firefighter to an actual full-fledged volunteer. Gray’s father is a career firefighter, but Gray always says he doesn’t like it, that he only does it because he thinks his dad wants him to.

  “You have one more year of high school,” I said. “Why not stop? Life’s too short to spend so much time on something you don’t like.”

  “I guess I just want to get close to my dad,” said Gray.

  “But you are close to your dad.”

  It’s true. Gray’s dad is crazy about him, goes to all his games, tells him all the time how proud he is of his football, his grades. He’s crazy about me, too. He pulls my ponytail and laughs at my jokes and says he can’t wait till I’m officially his daughter-in-law.

  There was a long hesitation, and I heard Gray start to say something a couple of times. I could feel his nervousness, a nervousness I couldn’t understand, thrumming through the phone line.

  Finally, he said, “Stay close. I want to make sure I stay close to him. No matter what.”

  I am going to write Gray a story about a boy so nice he gets elected King of Everything. I’ll give him a chapter every day, complete with illustrations. I’ll leave the chapters in his car, his locker, his backpack, his football bag to surprise him, and I’ll keep writing, the story won’t end, until Gray is happy again.

  I’m starting it now.

  Chapter Eight

  Ginny

  I found out that my mother was dead on the precise morning—if not at the precise moment—that fall gave way to winter. I was walking to the dog park in the just-before-dawn dark. Little creatures of light that they were, Dobbsey and Walt didn’t love darkness; they were moving in the straight-ahead, sandpiper-legs way they did when they were unnerved and just wanted to get wherever they were going. And then, as I was stepping from the curb to the street, as my foot dropped, I swear the temperature did, too. The crystalline air went from brisk to cold. I shivered inside my too-light quilted jacket and thought about the dogs, the chill seizing their tiny shiver-prone bodies, and I was about to turn around to go home and get us all coats when my phone rang, scaring me nearly out of my skin.

  It was Agnes, our long-suffering nurse. Lately, since my mother’s decline had begun, precipitously, to gather speed, Agnes or another nurse, a new one named Lomy, whom my mother viewed with keen disapproval the way she did most things she hadn’t handpicked, had been spending nights at my mother’s house. I had a meeting scheduled for the following day with Agnes and our family doctor, Godwin DeGray, who was overseeing my mother’s palliative care, to discuss increasing her pain medication. Goddy was my mother’s childhood friend, a man so kind he was my best evidence—maybe my only evidence—that my mother had once been something other than the woman I’d known. My mother was not particularly nice to Goddy and seemed to regard him from the same cool distance that she did the rest of us. But Goddy never stopped being nice to her, nice and unfailingly loyal. He was—had been for a long time—as he liked to say, “on the blessed verge of retirement,” and I wasn’t sure, but it seemed possible that my mother was his only remaining patient. When she was finished, he would be, too.

  I stood ver
y still and stared at Agnes’s name on my phone screen, the notes of my ringtone pinballing into the darkness. I filled my lungs with cold air and said, “Hi, Agnes.”

  “Ginny,” she said, her voice tinny and strained. “Last night, she sent me home. She said you were staying with her. Are you in there?”

  “What? No. I mean I offer to stay overnight all the time, but she flat out refuses. I’m walking to the dog park.”

  I heard Agnes groan. “Oh God.”

  “What?”

  “I shouldn’t have left last night. And she locked the dead bolt. I don’t have a key to that. I can’t get in.”

  “Agnes? It’s okay. Maybe Lomy is with her.”

  “She said that you were spending the night, that you’d be there within fifteen minutes. I didn’t want to leave before you got there, but she insisted. You know how she insists.”

  “Hold on just a second,” I said.

  I sat down on the curb and dropped my head between my knees. I could feel Dobbsey and Walt butting their noses against the top of my head.

  “Ginny—”

  “Maybe she just wanted to be alone?” I said. “That would be like her, to want a night alone.”

  “Maybe. I’m standing on your mom’s front porch,” said Agnes. “You’d better come.”

  She’d left an envelope taped to her front door. On the envelope, she’d written: Agnes, Give this Envelope to Virginia Before You Open this Door. Call Her Right Now. I Mean It. Inside was a note to me.

  Dear Virginia,

  I request that you not enter my house. Call 911 and have them send an ambulance, although you can tell the dispatcher that there is no need for sirens and lights or for exceeding the speed limit. Insist upon this. We don’t need a circus.

  I would prefer that you not see me in what will be my current state at the time you read this (although I assure you that I am well turned out and perfectly presentable), but I anticipate that you will be tempted to not honor that preference because of some misguided and ridiculous goal of achieving “closure.” Trust me: I am dead.

  I chose this. I made a plan and executed it, the way I always do. I was entirely sane and clearheaded at every stage of the process. No one helped. My death was not the result of foul play, although I know that if it had been, there would be a long list of viable suspects, a fact I view as evidence of a well-lived life.

  Do not be foolish enough to assume that I did this because I was despondent. I have never in my life been despondent. And for God’s sake, don’t blame yourself or anyone else. That would be arrogant and presumptuous. No one but I had anything to do with this.

  My attorney Henry Hill has all of my instructions. I will be cremated. No funeral.

  I died the way I lived, on my own terms. You might try living that way, as well, Virginia.

  Your mother,

  Adela Sartin Beale

  Shoulder to shoulder, Agnes and I sat together on my mother’s front steps as I read this. Around and above us was full-blown morning. Clear blue, cantaloupe orange. A comma of moon, vanishing. From somewhere inside the house, I could hear singing, two women’s voices, silver and gold, rippling into and out of each other like tributaries. When I finished the letter, I handed it to Agnes to read and tugged my jacket sleeves over my hands to warm them.

  When Agnes finished reading, very soon, I would call 911. The ambulance would come, a tumult of violent red and whirling lights but no siren, a police car, too. There would be chatter and people, neighbors materializing silently on the front walk. I would see my mother’s face, sunken above the carefully buttoned collar of her gray silk blouse, her skin like paper that had been crumpled and then smoothed out, her eyes shut.

  Soon, I would have to perform an accounting of my feelings, to measure the dimensions of the new Adela-shaped hole in my life.

  But for now, for these seconds, there was peace: a shining sky, sleeping flower beds, voices like water.

  “Delibes,” I said, remembering. “The ‘Flower Duet.’”

  Agnes folded the letter, slid it back into the envelope, and pressed it into my hand.

  “Your mother was too weak to stand,” said Agnes, very quietly.

  “I know,” I said.

  “When I left, she was upstairs, in bed.”

  “Yes, I thought she probably was.”

  “This letter was on the front door.”

  “I know.”

  “She couldn’t have done that.”

  I closed my eyes and imagined Goddy, shutting the front door behind him, taping the letter to it. I think he must have done that. Maybe he did more before then, back in the house: turned on music, administered drugs, kept watch. Maybe he hadn’t. But I knew that whatever he’d done he’d done because of a friendship so long-standing it had not mattered when one of the two people in it had ceased, a long time ago, to be a friend.

  I put the letter into my pocket and took Agnes’s two hands in mine. Her blue eyes were gentle. I looked into them steadily and told her this: “I say she could have. She has always been capable of much more than anyone would ever guess.”

  For a moment, we sat there, eyes and hands locked. Then, Agnes nodded.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she said.

  I took out my phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  When I got home, chilled and dizzy with exhaustion and with so many phone calls to make, a sky-blackening swarm of phone calls hanging directly over my head, I made myself coffee in the French press I’m usually too lazy or impatient to use. And there was a holiness in it. I don’t mean in the coffee itself, but in the unhurried act of making it. Pouring hot water into the carafe to warm it, opening the bag of oily, deep brown, clicking beans, breathing in their nutty fragrance, grinding them to a coarse grit. The water tumbling into the kettle made a solemn music. In the intervals of waiting—for the water to boil, for the coffee to brew—I let my mind rest empty as the white coffee bowl Avery had given me last Mother’s Day because she knew I liked to warm my hands on my cup. And then the slow downwardness of the plunger, the coffee arcing from the spout. I even frothed milk, and it floated in my bowl like snow. I am not religious, but there is something prayer-like about tasks that you cannot rush through, the steady work of hands, every step imbued with patience.

  When I’d drunk, small sip after small sip, and cleaned the press and my bowl, and put everything away, I called Kirsten. Just weeks ago, I would’ve called Harris, not instinctively, but because he was my husband, the person you call when something happens. But I decided, right then and there, that one of the privileges of having a husband who had lost his mind over a teenager was not calling him when you didn’t feel like it. I didn’t even know where he was. Although he was technically still camping out in the room above the garage, his car hadn’t been in the driveway when I’d gotten home from my mother’s. In fact, his car hadn’t been in the driveway all that much lately, and my near lack of curiosity about where he’d been spending his days surprised even me.

  “Tell me you’re calling because you just threw Harris out on his wide ass and you want to celebrate” is how Kirsten answered her phone.

  “Could you dial back on the empathy?” I said. “I mean, jeez, compassion is great and all, but this is getting to be too much. And it’s not that wide. I’d say wide is the wrong adjective altogether.”

  “Wrong. Harris has man hips. When those big, muscular Big Foot types age, they get man hips, and Harris is no exception.”

  “Again with the empathy.”

  “Your voice sounds weird. What’s the story, morning glory?”

  I shut my eyes for a moment the way I used to do before I opened them and jumped off the ridge into the quarry. Because my mother’s death was about to become real. Even though Agnes and about eight million Fire and Rescue workers and hospital workers and a gaggle of ogling neighbors with coats thrown over their pajamas knew that Adela was dead, it wouldn’t become really real until I told someone I loved. Such was the way of my world.

&nbs
p; “My mom died this morning. Or maybe last night.”

  “Oh, honey. That’s big.”

  And as soon as Kirsten spoke those words, I realized that’s exactly what it was. Maybe not sad. Or painful. Or a relief. Although it might eventually strike me as all of those things. But it was big because, whatever else she’d been or failed to be, Adela had been big.

  “Yes.”

  I heard bumping and rustling on the other end of the line and knew that Kirsten was putting on shoes, tugging on her coat, probably searching for her keys, which she was always losing. Pretty soon, she’d start rooting around in myriad bags and pockets and drawers for her phone before she realized she was talking to me on it.

  “First Harris, now Adela. That’s a shit-ton of change for you at once. Spectacularly bad timing.”

  I smiled. “So inconsiderate.”

  “Okay, okay, so maybe the timing was outside of Adela’s control,” said Kirsten, in a funny, grudging voice. “Although it’s strange to think of anything being outside of Adela’s control. You’d think she’d be like, ‘Death, bend to my will.’”

  “Actually, she was like that.”

  Silence as this sank in, then: “You know what? Go, Adela!” And then: “Wait. I’m sorry. I should be more sensitive.”

  “Why start now?”

  “I actually wasn’t being glib, though. For once.”

  “I know you weren’t.”

  “What did she have? Weeks? Days?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m heading out to my car.”

  “Yeah, but where’s your damn phone?”

  “Oh crap. Hold on.”

  “Kirsten.”

  All the rustling paused. I could picture Kirsten coming to a dead stop in her kitchen, her free hand going instantly to her hair. Kirsten always smoothed her hair when she got serious, as if whatever there was to face, she would face it better without flyaways.

  “What?”

  “When I went over to my mom’s this morning, Avery was still asleep. I left a vague note, giving her permission to ride with a neighbor kid to school. But she’ll be home soon.”