The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  I had not seen Ginny in more than a year, this young woman I had known since she was thirteen, when I could not tell her apart from her twin sister, except for their noses: Ginny's more aquiline than Susanna's. Even their voices were identical. She was lean and sportive in that row of travelers, like the pictures I'd seen of her mother when she was Ginny's age, but wearing a pair of awful jeans with gashes in the knees, and a flimsy tank top, and, so it seemed from the distance, a row of small silver hoops that rimmed her ears. She was squinting against the bright sunlight and smiling a contorted, bittersweet smile, unsure of what was called for. I must have been, too.

  She was the third or fourth one through the gate into the waiting area, and I could see that it was difficult for her to look at me the closer she got, a sort of adolescent nervousness—lowering her eyes, letting them dart everywhere but in my direction. But when we were finally face to face, she flung her arms around my neck with a force and neediness I had not expected and began, suddenly, violently, to sob against me. We were blocking the exit, but people squeezed around us. I held one hand against the back of her head and the other on her shoulder; I held her that way for a long, long time.

  It is a peculiar thing to be, a stepmother, and, stranger still, an almost ex-stepmother, and I don't know if we were happy to see each other, but we were relieved. Or maybe the relief was all mine; I had so dreaded telling her the news that comforting her now was effortless. But how could it not be? She and her sister were the closest thing to children in my life, and comforting one's children, even those not born of your flesh, is easy, so bred in the bone that even Daniel was good at it.

  At first it was a cakewalk. For half an hour, the edges of our personalities, the burden of our history and of the present, were blurred by grief and good will. We were relief workers at the aftermath of a tornado; one of us would switch to being a survivor, and then we'd dive backward into the opposite role. We were as close as we had ever been. There was no courtesy not indulged, no tenderness denied. We were so finely attuned to each other's needs, the whole thing could have been choreographed by George Balanchine.

  "I came right away because I wanted to say goodbye to him," she said, holding my arm as we approached the luggage carried off the plane.

  "Of course," I said, kindly, lying, lying. I would tell her the truth in the car, dispense it in small bites the way I had learned it; no point having it land on her all at once like an avalanche.

  "Susanna's trying to get here tomorrow. I had her neighbors drive up the mountain to the cabin last night and tell her. She and Daddy hadn't spoken for months."

  "I was afraid of that." Actually, I had pushed that fear to the back of my mind until this moment; that's how much distance there was between this family and me. Now I carried Ginny's bag to the car with a new fear: that all of our gentleness would evaporate before the hour was up. I still was not used to the island breeze, the lightness of the air, the terrible closeness I felt to her, terrible because it had taken this death to bring it on, because I knew how fragile it was. Then we were off, on the long road to Evan's.

  "Susanna was furious that Daddy didn't come to California to see her when little Rose was born."

  "I was too. I did everything I could to get him there." Rose had arrived six weeks before I left. Will's refusal to go to see her—and his daughter and son-in-law—helped push me out the door, allowed me to see that Will was so tangled up in his fears that he could not make the most basic parental gesture. If he could cut himself off that thoroughly from his beloved children, who was he? If what he wanted in this world—or if all he could handle—were retreat and isolation, why had it fallen to me to stay and be his lifeline? "He was afraid," I said to Ginny.

  "Of a two-day-old baby?"

  "Of his feelings. All his guilt about Jesse"—his son who had died many years before—"and his sadness that Susanna lived so far away. He never let go of the idea that she lived out there in order to avoid him. Maybe he thought that seeing Rose would bring back his grief over Jesse."

  "Susanna sort of gave up, after he wouldn't come. When he called and left messages with her neighbors, she wouldn't call him back. He wanted to buy her a cell phone, but she said the reception was terrible on the mountain. He wanted to buy her a computer so that he could send her e-mail. But she needed a phone for that too. He wanted to be in touch with her but only from a distance."

  "How did she take the news that he'd died?"

  "She asked if he'd killed himself, first thing. That's what our mom asked too." Why didn't I tell her right then that it was a possibility? It would have been easier than what we went through later, but I was still raw from everything Ben had told me, and from reading three weeks of Will's mail. According to the phone bill, the last call he made was at 10:05 the night of May thirty-first, a Wednesday, to his friend Diane in Cambridge. They had talked for fifteen minutes. His last ATM withdrawal was that afternoon: $200. The last charge on his credit card was a week before, for a CD from Amazon.com. There was also a curious letter he had written to someone named Crystal Sparrow; it was stamped RETURN TO SENDER: NO FORWARDING ADDRESS. The address was a rural delivery route on the West End of the island, about halfway between the airport and Evan's house. In the handwritten letter, he asked her out on a date. I'd stuck it in my purse, intending to track her down. And there was a postcard from the video store: the movies he rented 5/31/00 were overdue.

  I did not know where to put the fact that he had been dead for three weeks while I had romped around in bed with Daniel, playing mother to his children, playing the carefree divorcée. All the great mad joy I'd felt on returning to New York had gone to dust, ashes, rot.

  "How come you didn't call me right away?" Ginny said in the gentlest tone, almost as an afterthought, like someone genially tying up loose ends, someone other than my perennially angry stepdaughter.

  "I tried. The number I had for you was disconnected, and I couldn't remember the call letters of your TV station. I was going to look for your father's address book in the house. I'm sorry you found out the way you did. And sorry it's been so long since we've talked."

  "It's all right." This in the same understanding, unfamiliar voice. "I thought about calling you once or twice, but, I don't know, it seemed disloyal to Daddy."

  "I understand."

  The island's great beauty rolled alongside the car, a ticklish distraction not only from the shock of Will's death but from the high wire on which Ginny and I teetered. It was always that way with her, things going along fine, then a flare-up, spontaneous combustion. Would we make it to Evan's house in one piece?

  "I know you feel guilty, Soph. I do too."

  "About what?" Might she know about Daniel? Had she spoken to Will's friend Diane?

  "Not being with Daddy when he died. When I was little and he traveled, I was always afraid the State Department would call and say he was dead in a country I'd never heard of and couldn't pronounce. When I was seven I learned the name of every country and capital in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Some weird, like, self-defense. When I was fourteen and Daddy retired from his job, when you and he were first together, he confessed he'd never worked for the State Department and he'd hardly ever gone to the places he told us he'd been. He and Mommy would say he was in London, and he would be in, like, Cambodia. Then I had to rethink the geography of my whole childhood. That's how I feel right now, like Daddy said he'd be in a particular place, and I was counting on it, but he's not."

  I reached across the gear shift and took her hand, and she let me hold it.

  "I don't remember a funeral parlor on this end of the island," Ginny said. We were more than halfway to Evan's place, heading into island farmland, rolling meadows, the ancient cemetery I had written about when I first arrived.

  "There isn't one."

  "Then where are we going?"

  "To Evan and Mavis's house. Where did you think?"

  "I thought you were taking me to say goodbye to Daddy. That's why I came so soon."
/>   "There's an autopsy. Off-island. The medical examiner ordered it."

  "Why didn't you tell me? When will he be back here?" The questions had sharper edges, arrowheads, say, but not steak knives. Not yet.

  "I had no idea you thought we were going there now. I'll call the coroner as soon as we get to Evan's and find out when they'll be through with the body." I should have said everything at that moment, instead of storing it up, but I was trying to spare her, give her a few more hours before she had to endure another round of horrors. "You remember Evan and Mavis, don't you?"

  "I just saw him on Ted Koppel. My boyfriend has to watch it every night, like that disease where you have to wash your hands every five minutes. I said to him, 'My almost-ex-stepmother used to be his girlfriend.' 'Ted Koppel's girlfriend?' He was, like, wow. So I said, 'Don't you think I'd have told you that when you first made me watch this? The lawyer's girlfriend, the guy who's sticking up for the German girl who killed the baby.' He was, like, 'Your stepmother dated that guy? He would defend Slobodan Milosevic if it would get him network TV time."

  "I hope you told him it was when Evan was in law school, and that he didn't defend any celebrity murderers before he passed the bar."

  "Whatever."

  "I meant to ask you about the dog."

  "Horrible Henry?"

  "Did you ever talk to your dad about taking him?"

  "No. I thought you were going to get him once you were settled, and I figured it had already happened."

  "He's missing. And speaking of missing, do you know if your father has a will?"

  "It's in my suitcase. He sent it to me a few months ago in a sealed envelope that said, 'To be opened only in event of death.' It gave me the creeps. He sent Susanna a copy, too."

  "How many months ago?"

  "I don't know, a few."

  We had just turned onto the dirt road, and the car was wobbling over the ruts. "Did you open it?"

  "This morning. I'll give it to you when I unpack. I think Daddy mentioned you in it."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, but I can't remember how it went."

  I am still not sure whether she was telling me the truth. Did she really not remember what her father had said about me in that document, or was she doing exactly what I was doing to her: withholding unpleasant information until it was impossible not to?

  "The only thing we can rule out now is a stroke," the coroner said while Ginny took a shower upstairs. "We can't determine if it was a coronary. Too much decomposition. Next, we test for substances in the system." Flossie was sleeping under the dining room table, her furry chin on my bare foot. "But to tell you the truth, it doesn't look good."

  "Good for what?" It was an unexpected word, under the circumstances.

  "A conclusive answer."

  "Because?"

  I heard an unprofessional sigh. "We normally test the blood, and there's not much of it to test."

  I understood this was a euphemism for "none," but something made me ask the next question; my stubbornness, my refusal to believe that every inquiry would lead to darkness and more darkness. "I think I know the answer, but if my husband's daughters want to see him, you know, to say good-bye—"

  He did not let me finish. "There's nothing much left to say goodbye to."

  I have since parsed that sentence clean. I have had dreams about it, have thought, in lighter moments, that it would make a decent refrain in a country-and-western song, but I have no idea precisely what it means. It is not in the least descriptive; it simply deters intruders by not inviting a single clarifying question: What exactly do you mean by "nothing much"? A skeleton picked clean, like a Thanksgiving turkey two days later? And if not that—

  "I'll tell them," I said to the coroner. "Or maybe I won't. One other thing; I'm not sure what happens next."

  "We'll call you with the results. Sometime next week."

  "No, I mean, the body. Are you finished with it?"

  "Yes. The funeral home will pick it up."

  "But we're not having a funeral home service, and he's going to be cremated." I saw Ginny come down the stairs in fresh shorts and a white T-shirt, her long blond hair wet and ruler-straight. I watched her gaze around the sunlit showpiece room as if she were visiting a Moroccan bazaar.

  "You'll have to talk to the funeral home about all that, Mrs. O'Rourke. I assume you have the number."

  As Ginny crossed the room, I saw she held an envelope, and when I hung up the phone, I was surprised to see her glare at me. "That's not going to happen," she said sharply.

  "What's not?"

  "He's not going to be cremated."

  "He told me last summer that's what he wanted. Did he tell you something else? Is it in his will?"

  "That's not what we want. Where's the phone book?" She found the slim island directory on one of the end tables and began flipping through it, biting the inside of her cheek, right at the V of her mouth where her upper and lower lips met. The instant I realized she would do that until her anger abated, and that she'd been angry for all the years I had known her, I got up and walked across the vast space into the kitchen, which was connected to the big room by a cut-out in the wall. I tried not to storm off or bang around angrily. It was too soon for that, and it was not my style. In a calmer moment, I would tell her again what Will's wishes were. In the meantime, I would do my best to take care of her.

  "Are you hungry?" I called out. "Mavis left us chicken salad and peach pie from Sharon Asher's farm stand. Can I fix you a plate?"

  "I don't eat meat," she mumbled. "Or chicken. Or fish."

  "I thought you'd started again."

  "Then I stopped." On and off the wagon. It sounded as if she had a speech impediment, still chewing on her cheek.

  "What about peach pie with vanilla ice cream? That's what Jack Kerouac and his buddies ate at truck stops in On the Road. Cheapest way to get all that protein; in the ice cream, I guess. Though it may have been apple, not peach."

  "I don't eat dairy either."

  "It doesn't hurt the cows when you milk them, Ginny. They actually kind of like it."

  Silence, then more silence from the other room. I guess I had sounded sarcastic, when I only meant to sound playful. "There are also some grilled vegetables, let's see, and a loaf of homemade bread."

  "Anything's fine, Sophy."

  But of course nothing was fine, not what I'd said about cows or cremation or probably peach pie. This kid and I had a history or maybe it was only the future we wanted to steer clear of, the upcoming forty-eight hours spiraling across the prairie like a tornado. Disasters. Disaster metaphors. The Christmas she was nineteen, in a blazing non sequitur, she accused me of wishing that it had been she who died in the car accident, instead of her brother, whom I had never known.

  I carried food and plates into the dining room, expecting that she would dislodge herself from the armchair, where she was still studying the phone directory. She did not budge.

  "Who you looking for?"

  "Father Kelly."

  Not a name I knew. "Are you thinking of having a Catholic funeral?" I asked this with as little inflection, and astonishment, as I could.

  "Of course."

  "Your father hadn't been to church in thirty years. Maybe forty."

  "Except when Jesse died."

  Here's what you don't know about shock until its insulating effects fall away like chunks of plaster from a wall: it acts not only as a painkiller, a mega-Klonopin, but it deadens years of long-term memory, your history, and perhaps your spouse's, which you have come to know so thoroughly, it has become your own, the way property does in marriage.

  Until that moment I had not remembered Will's accounts of the civil war that had erupted over Jesse's funeral.

  Will's history. He had wanted his son to be cremated, the ashes scattered in the sea, and a secular service to be run by a Berrigan-type former priest who would have let the college kids speak about their friend and classmate. Jesse's mother, Clare, no longer Will's wi
fe, had wanted the Roman Catholic ritual, the coffin with white-satin lining, the procession of limos to the cemetery. "Haven't you done enough damage?" she was unkind enough to say when Will described the ceremony he wanted. That cruelty and his guilt were enough to make him submit to Clare's funeral arrangements. That's what he used to call it: Clare's funeral.

  Will's funeral. Across this vast room, the late-afternoon light slanting in against the couches and kilims in trapezoidal shapes, Ginny looked up from the phone book and said, "I forgot to tell you. My mother's coming tomorrow afternoon from Chicago. She's trying to rent a house for a week so that Susanna and I have a place to stay. Hotels are all booked. Do you know if Saint Anne's by the Sea is the church with the Gothic fretwork near the saltwater taffy place, or is that the one by the elementary school that looks like a bank?"

  "Can't say that I know."

  Those were the only words I could utter right then, and just barely. I closed my eyes and must have sighed in self-defense, as I do now, remembering the cumulative force of this news. Clare's Funeral Redux? Clare the real estate agent, Clare of the deep pockets and the religious right, Clare the mother of his children who had endured the sufferings of the Virgin Mary. Was this going to be Clare, who worshipped money and property and God with a capital G, versus me, who had spent the last three weeks in bed with another man? This was not a competition I could win.