by Brian Hodge
"… And … and phone calls would be nice."
The hawkish gray head shakes adamantly. “You know we can't contact anyone—people who would know, people who were at your funerals!"
"You asked. I'm just being honest."
"Be honest."
"Naturally, everyone wants to learn about their families—you can understand that. The Seppanens both passed over ten years ago, and now that they’re back they want to hear all the things that must have happened to their grandchildren."
"No one can go back to their families."
"They know that."
"It would jeopardize everything, create a sensation. Who in the outside world wouldn’t scheme to live forever or become young again? And given that the resources are limited, that could become very ugly very quickly. We'd be targeted and dragged on stage, and … and I don't know what would happen then, but it would all be over."
"Over?"
"Over. Finis. Kaput. What did you think I meant?"
"I didn’t know."
"We couldn't hold up to scrutiny. Quickly or slowly it would end for our little family."
"We don't want it to end, Ariel."
"Then keep me informed, Molly. It’s one thing to miss one’s grandchildren, but I need to know if anyone starts talking foolishly."
"None of them want to go back to where they were before you brought them here."
Ariel leaned forward very slightly. "And where was that?"
A look of weary dread sprang into the plump woman's eyes. "I – I can’t describe it."
"Evidently everyone was aware of their surroundings. Was it good, was it bad? Heaven or hell, Molly?"
"Please, Ariel …"
Ariel’s right palm flashed up again. "It couldn’t have been heaven, because then you wouldn't be afraid of going back. And if it was just nothingness, you wouldn’t be afraid of that either." She turned her left palm up. “So, is there a hell, Molly?”
Molly’s fleshy cheeks fluctuated like small bellows but nothing came out.
"Maybe it will clarify for you after a while, Molly. Then you can tell me. I’m depending on you. That’s why I’ve given you … responsibilities. And rewards. Speaking of which, is there anything special you’d like?"
Color ebbed back into Molly’s face. "I won’t lie about that, Ariel. I have a granddaughter too. I mean, you can’t help but think about things when you see what’s happened here. You remember Lindsay—you saw her at my birthday party five years ago. She has cystic fibrosis. I don't even know if she's still alive. She should be, though. Five years. She should be alive. And … and sometimes I’ve just wondered, you know, what if she were painted healthy again?"
"Molly, you know I can't."
"But it would be as easy for you as Jesus Christ touching the lame."
“Hardly.”
“You could do it, though. And how do you know God didn’t intend for you to perform miracles?”
“Well.” Ariel shook away a dazed smile. “Whatever happened after you died, it didn’t destroy your belief in God and Christ.”
Molly darkened.
"I don't even remember what Lindsay looks like,” Ariel said. “I'd have to get a photo. And then what would the others want me to do for them? I'd have to deal with that. There would be no limit to the things we'd all want for the people in our past. It would get out of control and jeopardize everything."
"She was so young, is all. Barely three. She'd be eight now."
"You don't know what you're asking. The sick child her parents have now would die, just like my Amber did."
"—Paavo or Dana could go and make some excuse to take a photograph. I don't think my daughter would recognize Dana. Or Kraft could go, for that matter."
"Kraft doesn't remember the past, so how could we trust him to not get lost in the present? If he was picked up wandering and taken to a hospital, his picture could get into the paper. Someone might recognize him."
"Sometimes he remembers."
"Kraft? He told you he remembers?”
“He called me Mollypop one day. No one has called me that since high school.”
“Interesting. But it doesn't make any difference as far as your granddaughter, Molly. Even if I did paint her back, she would be here with us. How would we return her to her parents? And even if we could do that, what would they think when they saw her healed and alive after they had just buried her? No, Molly … no."
Kraft remembering? Molly had said Kraft was remembering. Mollypop. Ariel looked in the mirror, patted the bags under her eyes, stroked the sagging flesh beneath her jaw, drew her shoulders back.
Why don't I paint myself younger?
A fold of gravity here, a tuck of time there. A half-dozen brush strokes could correct what she saw in the mirror. Call it her own health insurance. Her own life insurance. She had a different vanity from Ruta's. Ruta needed to fool herself. Ariel could use vanity like a utilitarian thing, fooling just the world.
She descended through the house without turning on lights, waggling her cane to touch familiar objects, groping through the rooms to the school corridor. When she reached Kraft Olson's room, she made three faint raps with the neck of the cane. Not surprisingly, there was no response. And when she gently pushed open the door, he was sitting at the window, his features hidden in silhouette.
Why don't I paint myself younger?
In she came, setting the cane aside and crossing the moonlit floor with as easy a gait as she could manage.
"Hello, Kraft."
"Hello," he said after a moment.
She presented her face full in the moonlight and looked into his eyes, but they were empty, hollow, vacant.
He might not recognize her, but, oh, how she recognized him! Right down to the last brush stroke with which she had brought him back; the last atom – she thought – of the man she still loved. She had done a wonderful job, especially the hair and the eyes. Perfect hair that he had always seemed to take for granted. No preener, Kraft Olson, grooming himself with surreptitious sweeps of a comb. She had spent more time brushing his hair to life on canvas than she had ever seen him do in real life. And the spectacular eyes—she had captured those too. So where had the old cavalier glint gone now that he was alive again? She had painted him younger than when his Alzheimer's had become pronounced. In his mid-sixties. But then, how could you tell when dementia really started, especially with someone as smart and articulate as Kraft had been? It was strange, because the others remembered what had happened up until their deaths, unlike Amber, who remembered nothing. Maybe with Amber it had been too great a span—age forty-four back down to nine—or maybe it was because she had been alive at the time of the re-creation. But even with dementia, Kraft had recognized her and the others at times up until he died, so she had thought that giving him back a few years would ensure he remembered everything about her. But he did not remember her at all.
Of course, that could be good. Because if he had forgotten Danielle Kramer, maybe she would have a chance with him now. (Why don't I paint myself younger?) Or, was this just an ancient hurt to her pride too absurd to rectify?
She wanted to be humble, and that was the paradox. Because it was pride that demanded she be humble. The potential to look like a mad egoist out for tyranny and revenge was obvious. Ariel the leper in charge of things. Pay her lip service, pay her tribute – an altar here, a statue there. But that wasn't what she wanted. What she wanted was to be worth something. Molly said they were grateful, but they weren't. …as easy for you as Jesus Christ. They were afraid. Fear thy God. She didn't want their fear. Only fundamentalists and fanatics used fear and took it on themselves to act as proxies for God. You could create the illusion of love, but you would never really have it if you forced it out of fear.
"Do you remember me, Kraft?"
He stared back blankly.
"I'm Ariel. We used to be friends."
"I don't remember you."
"Who do you remember?" She looked hard into his
eyes. "If you could have anyone you ever knew here right now, Kraft, who would it be? Tell me. Don't be afraid. I can bring people back. Tell me who you want."
His eyes remained rigid and impenetrable to her. He could be thinking she was insane, she thought, or he could be hating her.
"Who do you want, Kraft? Your mother? Your brother? Give me a name, and if it's someone I have a photo of, I'll paint them back." She had lots of photos of Danielle buried with the others in a wicker basket upstairs. "Remember how I used to take pictures, Kraft? All of our gang. I always took the pictures. That's why I'm not in very many of them. You always asked me to take the pictures."
She plucked a thread from the sleeve of his shirt, brushed his shoulder.
"Just say the name of anyone you want, and I'll deliver him—or her—to you, Kraft. Now or never."
He wet his lips. "I can’t remember anyone."
She really should paint herself younger.
But if she did, what would happen to her body? Would she still be there, dead, like Amber slumped in her wheelchair? Now, that would get everyone's attention. Dropping like a fly, a little terror in the parlor. Fear thy God….
She wished she had gone to Amber's funeral, seen the body. But how could she when she had to take care of the nine-year-old reincarnation of the forty-four-year-old corpse? "I'm too upset," she had told her son-in-law and grandson. There was no love lost between them anyway, and they hadn't tried to persuade her to attend, and except for Christmas cards there had been no further communication. She had considered taking nine-year-old Amber to her own funeral—who would recognize her?—but she had feared that Amber might become hysterical. Later, when she actually took the child to her own grave site, it became apparent that the fear was unfounded.
"Is that me?" Amber had asked, staring down at the cold stone.
"No."'
"Yes, it is."
"That was who you'll become, if you're foolish again."
The rosebud mouth tightened and the stare locked. "What was I like?"
"You were partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair."
"But what was I like? Didn't I have a life?"
"You sat. You waited to die. You couldn't climb things anymore and you were unhappy."
The thought that if she did paint herself younger she would have to bury herself, struck Ariel as absurdly comic at first. But as she pictured the details of dragging her own body out of the house and into the woods, she became terrified and disgusted. What would her cold flesh feel like? Would her clothes become torn in the dragging, her hair raked wildly in every direction? Without a coffin, the hole would have to be deep to keep animals from unearthing her. Would she be able to arrange the body in the grave? And most of all, would she be able to forget raining clods of dirt down over her own face and form?
"Paint me again," her husband, Thomas, pleaded that very night. "Paint me with legs."
"I'd have to get rid of the body you have now."
"I'll bury myself if you paint me with legs."
"What was it like to be dead?" she asked urgently. "Are the bodies still in the graves?"
"Paint me whole and I'll tell you."
"No, thank you. I've already lived that life."
"You're insane."
"Careful, careful."
Chapter 2
Denny Bryce rehearsed it all evening and in the dawn. The delivery. The four words. And each repetition sounded more like a lie. Finally he said it to his father: "Let's go see Mom."
The old man sat in his chair—the recliner throne about to be abdicated—and his eyelids pulsed without opening. "She's in the kitchen."
"No, Dad. She died, remember? You were at her funeral."
The eyes opened, the head came up. Martin Bryce gasped as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Beth dead. The terrible reprising of shock, tension knotting at the bridge of his nose, his lips spreading in a grimace to contain the pain. "I forgot," he said apologetically, and Denny stroked his silver hair.
"It's okay, Dad. It's okay. I meant her grave. Let's go visit her grave."
He felt lower than a scavenger, as despicable as a bully. His faithful, hardworking, dependable, trusting father. Throw him out, Denny. Take away his house, the only thing he has left, the citadel of his memories. Let me see you do that.
"While we're out, I'll show you some things…. Okay? Okay, Dad?"
Nod.
He isn't listening. Tell him, but don't tell him. Soothe your guilty conscience. He doesn't understand. But you can pretend he did.
He had never lied to his father in these latter years. Never manipulated him. Not since high school. He had told him straight up what the medical prognoses were for his mother, for the old man himself. He had told him the truth about his sister, Tiffany, when she had committed suicide seven years earlier. Wretched Tiffany, who at age forty-seven had finally tired of fighting drugs and depression. He could have said it was an accident or a medical thing—God knows she had enough wrong with her—but he hadn't. Why let his parents doubt? He had told them. Told them everything on his almost daily visits. Investments, mortgage, insurance, repairs, scams, health—everything. More than they understood or needed to know; but they listened in order to hear him taking care of them, like he always did, mowing the lawn, shoveling the drive, plunging the toilet, changing the screens, raking the leaves. Acts of love to which his parents were happy spectators as well as recipients. How grateful they were, and it was sometimes hurtful to see that—as if they were surprised that he should give back to them. So, above all, they trusted him.
"What do other old people do who don't have a son like you?" his mother would say.
Nothing she had ever given him—and she had given him everything—could be as important as those words.
And now the great betrayal. Why couldn't he just sit down on the couch and tell the old man that the Twins were still leading their division? "They'll blow it," his father would say, and he would take his mother's role of optimism and remind him of the World Series victory in '91. Then they could just go on like that. Small talk forever.
"Guess we'd better get going, Dad. Do you have to go to the bathroom?"
Martin stood in the living room, breathless from having donned his sweater. It was summer, but he was always chilled. He shook his head, moved his lips as though he wanted to say something else.
"Do you want your hat?"
“No.”
"Okay, then."
What he really meant was, Say farewell to your life. Say good-bye to the house you're never going to see again. Walk away from every semblance of your life, the old familiar things, the artifacts, the sacred surfaces that Beth and Tiffany touched a million times and that will be profaned by the next garage-sale shopper, or the next owner of the house, or the sanitation engineer when he leaps out of his truck to make the heave. That was what he meant to say.
And through the opacity of his father's expression, there came just a glint for a moment. Not a doubt, really, but a question. Denny turned away and pulled the door open against the swollen jamb, trying in vain not to stir the clapper in the little bell his mother had hung there.
Then came the slow, unsteady journey onto the steps, his father groping for the grab post Denny had installed on the porch (four lag bolts—see how much I love you?), shuffling down the sidewalk, stopping for breath, opening the car doors, moving the seat back—a crude ballet of clutching hands, lowering, pivoting, ducking. The terminal sound of slamming doors. Then the key turning in the ignition. Look, Dad! Look at the house. You won't see it again. Don't you want to see the house for the last time?
But he didn't know it was the last time, of course.
Denny's emotions were singing so loudly that even the old man must have heard, he thought. He was swallowing sand by the mouthful. His father, though a great pragmatist, nevertheless had his intuitive moments, and this could be one. The silence between them became expectancy, as if Denny should explain, but the merciless car made all the i
rreverent noises that cars do. You couldn't say delicate things with the bumpkin thud of gears in the background, or the hiss and oscillating whine as you rolled down the drive pumping the brakes. So they got under way, the center of his father's life receding behind them, and each ticking second was like another foot of safety rope.
He started out for the cemetery where his mother was interred, but it wasn't five minutes before his father asked aloud where they were going. And what was the point of following through with the awful misdirection if his father had forgotten? Just get to the place. Don't go to the graveyard in Little Canada. Get out of the suburbs, away from the Twin Cities. Take him to KNEAL. New Eden. Home ….
"I can't leave you alone anymore, Dad. You wander, you start fires. What's going to happen when I'm back at school full-time this fall?"
"You don't have to worry about me."
"Yes, I do."
"I can take care of myself."
"Dad … you can't. That's a fact—you can't. I don't want to hurt your self-esteem or mess with your independence, but you could get hurt or killed."
"What difference does it make?" Martin asked wearily. "Your mother was the only reason I was alive. She was the best thing that ever happened to me."
"I know. But you can't expect me to let go of you like that, Dad. When God calls you in … okay. I'll accept that. But you can't ask me to just ignore you. What kind of a son would I be if I did that? You care about me, don't you? You wouldn't want to leave me with a legacy of guilt."
It was the only thing that worked anymore. This suggestion that his father still had an obligation to him. They lapsed into silence until they were jouncing up the eroding asphalt drive to the old farmhouse, and then Martin asked: "What's this?"
"New Eden, Dad. It's a great place. We're gonna try it, okay?"
After that it was all like a Bunco game in which Denny was a shill, infusing his old man with words, will, illusions as they migrated somehow through the greetings and the rooms to the chamber that had been cleared for his father. It was large—once a small classroom, according to the woman named Molly—and now there was a miscellany of old furniture on the tile floor and an immense open spot for the bed Denny was to bring on another trip (the bed was central) and there were paintings that looked like originals on the walls.
