Aftermirth

by Hillary Jordan

“What about you?” I asked. “You tired? Want me to drive?”

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  I realized I’d been hoping she’d say that, and then I realized why: this way I could look at her. “Uh, what time are we meeting Catherine tomorrow?”

  “We’re picking her up at the airport at ten and then going to George’s house. That’s his name, George Drayton.”

  “Did she tell you his story?”

  “Yes. His partner was killed last July third. Ran his car off the road, straight into a fireworks stand. Fortunately they saw him coming, and no one else was hurt in the explosion.”

  “So what does that have to do with us? I mean, what’s the . . .” I faltered.

  “The punch line? When they pulled his body out they found bubble gum all over the lenses of his sunglasses.”

  I pictured it: the guy blowing a big bubble, being blinded, losing control of his car, kaboom. “So if it hadn’t been July third, and it hadn’t been a sunny day . . .”

  “Yeah.” Elena shook her head. “He was just half a mile from home.”

  “Poor guy,” I said, thinking not of him but of his partner, standing in the kitchen chopping carrots and hearing that awful blast of sound and thinking, What the hell? And then maybe knowing in his bones, like I had, that it had something to do with him; that it had blown up his hopes and changed his life forever.

  Elena let me sit with it for a while, and then she said, “You want to tell me about her?”

  And suddenly Jess was there in the car with us, and there was room for her because Elena made room—by wanting to listen and understand, by already partway understanding before I even started to talk. And so I gave her Jess: her laughter, her restless curiosity, the combination of strength and vulnerability, passion and compassion, that made even the most reticent people want to tell her their stories and trust her to write about them. Her crazy Mormon upbringing, her three macho brothers who never liked me and her devout widowed mother who, to everyone’s surprise except Jess’s, did. The look on her face when I asked her to marry me, when she saw Iz in his cage at the ASPCA, when she landed her first New Yorker piece, when they called my name at the Emmys. Of course I didn’t share everything—there are parts of Jess that are nobody’s but mine—but I gave Elena a lot of the really good stuff and finally, when she nudged me—“And in addition to being an angel, was she also a saint?”—some of the bad.

  Jess could be impatient and moody. She tended to fret over little things: an unreturned phone call, an overcooked roast. She’d voted for Bush twice (though not, in her defense, for McCain). And the worst thing, the thing I’d never told anyone, was that buried beneath that magnificent humor of hers was a ferocious, scorched-earth temper that emerged every six months or so and turned her into an alarming stranger. The last time being the day she died.

  Oh, did I forget to mention that?

  It wasn’t me she was mad at that day; at least, not initially. She’d been working for months on a long piece for the Atlantic Monthly about political wives, and they’d decided to cut it in half. Jess was in high dudgeon: the editors were cowards, Philistines, sexist porkers. I made the mistake of pointing out that the managing editor, who’d presumably been part of the decision to cut the piece, was a woman, and that’s when Jesszilla came roaring out. Usually I just let her rant until she’d spent her fury, but that day I was fed up with the drama, and when she tore into me I tore back. We said terrible things to each other, things the sight of her on that sidewalk twenty minutes later wiped almost completely from my memory—a small mercy. Jess was always the one who stormed out at some point in the argument, and that day was no different. Except that day she took Izzy with her. And died.

  FADE IN:

  INT. KITCHEN - DAY

  MICHAEL LARSSEN, 34, is standing in a well-appointed open kitchen, furiously chopping carrots, WHACK WHACK WHACK. He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt that says “I’m with stupid” over an arrow pointing down. Every few seconds he looks up and glares at the front door, like he might cheerfully decapitate the next person who walks in. He’s so distracted he cuts his finger with the knife.

  MICHAEL

  Son of a BITCH!

  The rest of the scene went pretty much the same as previously scripted, except when I described it to Elena I found myself dredging up details I didn’t even know I remembered: How the jacket covering Jess had had a Knicks logo on it, which she would have hated, diehard Lakers fan that she was. How one of her shoelaces was loose, and how I’d had the irrational urge to bend down and tie it. How, when the paramedics were loading her body into the ambulance that would not be racing to the hospital with sirens wailing and red and blue lights flashing, the sky cleared suddenly and the sun broke through, and I looked up at it and shouted, “Fuck you!”

  When I finished, Elena was quiet for a long while. From the wistful look on her face I guessed she was thinking about her father: the last time she’d seen him, the things she’d said to him and hadn’t, wished she’d said and wished she hadn’t. My hand reached out and squeezed hers.

  INT. HOTEL LOBBY - NIGHT

  Michael and ELENA, 29, are standing at guest reception in an elegant hotel, with IZZY, a springer spaniel, sitting at Michael’s side on a leash. Behind the desk is a stylish FEMALE CLERK, 25. This is the South: she greets them with a genuinely welcoming smile.

  CLERK

  Good evening. How may I help you?

  MICHAEL

  (tired, babbling a little)

  Hi, do you have any rooms available? We don’t have a reservation. And as you see, we have a dog. A really quiet, well-behaved dog. Well, probably everyone says that about their dog, but Izzy actually is.

  CLERK

  I believe you, sir. And dogs are welcome here. How many rooms will you be needing?

  Michael hesitates and looks at Elena, and the clerk gets very interested in her computer screen. The two of them come to a silent agreement.

  MICHAEL

  Just one room. A king, if you have it.

  CLERK

  Of course, sir.

  INT. HOTEL ROOM - NIGHT

  Michael and Elena come in, drop their bags and move into each other’s arms without a word. They don’t kiss, they just hold each other tightly.

  INT. HOTEL ROOM - NIGHT

  Michael and Elena lie entwined in the bed on top of the covers, still fully clothed, sleeping peacefully. Izzy is on Michael’s other side, sandwiching him.

  WE OVERSLEPT AND ended up having to scramble to get to the airport in time to meet Catherine’s flight. As we left the hotel room I looked back at the bed, thinking about what would almost certainly have happened there if we hadn’t been so wiped last night and in such a hurry this morning. I couldn’t feel too resentful toward the good doctor, though. If it hadn’t been for Catherine, Elena and I wouldn’t have ended up in that bed in the first place, and I wouldn’t have woken up feeling something like happy for the first time in two years.

  Elena was quiet and pensive in the car on the way to the airport. I kept casting sidelong glances at her, trying to gauge her mood, hoping she felt as good as I did, but her face gave nothing away. Ten minutes from the airport her phone chimed: a text from Catherine saying she’d landed and would meet us outside. As we pulled into the arrivals area I surveyed the people waiting to be picked up, looking for a wise, matronly type. The only woman I saw standing alone was a tall, striking brunette who bore more than a passing resemblance to Angelina Jolie. Who I’d had a thing for ever since I was sixteen and saw her in Cyborg 2. I must have masturbated five hundred times to that video.

  “There she is,” Elena said excitedly.

  “How do you know?” Angelina was now waving at us.

  “I told her what kind of car you had. Besides, she looks just like I pictured her.”

  “Huh.”

  I pulled over and Elena hopped out, and before I could even put the car in park she and Catherine were hugging like they’d known each other for years and chat
tering away in Spanish. I went to join them, feeling a bit like an interloper.

  “And this must be Michael.” Catherine turned to me, appraising me with large green eyes that I felt sure missed next to nada, a theory she confirmed by holding out her hand instead of hugging me like she had Elena. “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. And then, “I’m very sorry about your wife.”

  “Uh . . . you’re welcome. Me too. I mean I’m sorry too, about your brother.” I pumped her hand robotically, walloped by her beauty, which was exactly how I’d felt the one time I’d met Angelina Jolie, at a party at some muckety-muck producer’s house in Malibu. Catherine was older. The crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes said she was on the wrong side of forty-five, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at the rest of her. She was slim and fit, with lips like eiderdown pillows, long, tousled-looking brown-black hair and an hourglass figure revealed—in case anyone might miss it—by a low-cut blouse and a pair of skin-tight jeans tucked into high-heeled boots. She looked less like a therapist than a former Playboy centerfold. A supremely confident, ferociously intelligent former Playboy centerfold played by Angelina Jolie.

  She gave me a compassionate smile, like she was used to reducing men to monosyllable-stammering idiots. “I just hung up with George,” she said. “His house is about twenty-five minutes from here, on the outskirts of Charleston. He gave me directions.”

  “Well then, let’s get this show on the road!” I boomed unnaturally, sounding like a game show host telling a contestant they’d just won a BRAND NEW CAR! Elena was looking at me with one eyebrow lifted. I grabbed Catherine’s roller bag and beat a hasty retreat to the trunk.

  To my relief, Catherine not only declined Elena’s invitation to sit up front, but she also kept the conversation light, steering clear of the three-hundred-pound dead gorilla in the car with us. She fussed over Izzy for a gratifyingly long amount of time, and then we chatted about Austin, where Elena had family and I’d done some comedy gigs, and New York, where Catherine once had a teaching fellowship at NYU.

  “My mom’s a professor there,” I said. “Denise Larssen. Did you know her?”

  “No, but I was only there for a semester. What department’s she in?”

  “English. She teaches American lit. How about you, what did you teach?”

  “Human sexuality.”

  I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were full of mischief. “Bet that was a popular course,” I said. We all laughed, and I felt myself begin to relax. A feeling that lasted all of ten minutes, until we got to Summerville and pulled up in front of George’s house.

  Elena whistled, and I said, “Mint julep, anyone?”

  George’s “house” was a mansion straight out of some antebellum wonderland: a surreal pink and white confection of a plantation house surrounded by more roses than I’d ever seen in one place outside of Pasadena. He could have single-handedly decorated an armada of parade floats.

  “A hundred and eighty degrees from the Harbucks’,” Catherine said quietly.

  Which slammed all three of us head-on into grim reality and our reason for being there. The exuberant flowers and cheery pink paint suddenly seemed heartbreaking, more so even than the shabbiness and neglect we’d found in Durham. I thought of myself, cursing the sun the day Jess died. How could George stand to be surrounded by so much meaningless fucking beauty?

  I started to tear up—just what a guy wants to do in front of two attractive women, one of whom he hopes to make mad passionate love to later that night. I turned my head toward the driver’s side window to hide my face and felt Catherine’s hand come down on my shoulder, and with it, the phantom warmth of all the hands that had touched me there in the last two years: the unyielding grip of the guy who’d pulled me back from Jess’s charred body. My father’s hand and my brother’s, saying with a squeeze all the things they didn’t have words for at the funeral. The hands of worried friends, colleagues, strangers. Esteban’s hand and his relatives’. Elena’s, a mere forty-eight hours ago.

  “Don’t,” I said, shrugging it off. I wanted to shrug them all off. I was sick to death of feeling that weight; of being that guy, the guy who induced people’s sympathy instead of their laughter.

  “It’s okay,” Catherine said. “You don’t have to come in with us if you don’t want to.”

  “Oh, yes he does,” Elena said. Her voice was fierce. “Look at me, Michael.”

  I shook my head and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

  “Look at me.”

  I looked. Her face was adamant and impossibly lovely. “You can,” she said, just like she had at the funeral home. Only this time what the words triggered wasn’t grief, but rage. Not at Elena, but at the whole effed-up situation. And for the first time ever, at Jess. If she hadn’t had a temper tantrum and stormed out like a petulant teenager, I wouldn’t be sitting here blubbering in front of a stranger’s house in suburban Charleston. I wouldn’t have wrecked my career and driven away every person who cared about me, wouldn’t have spent two years lost in a gray hell.

  Fuck you, Jess, I thought. And felt something black and toxic slide out of me that I hadn’t even known I’d been carrying, even as the truth rose up and burst open in my head: I hadn’t just been cursing the sun that day. I’d been cursing her, my wife who was lying dead at my feet, and I’d been so ashamed of myself afterward that I’d taken all that rage and stuffed it back into whatever dark hole it had come from. And there it had stayed, festering, ever since.

  I was aware of Elena watching me patiently, giving me the time to work through whatever I was feeling. Jess had been lousy at waiting. She was always racing ahead of me emotionally, drumming her fingers while I made my halting, plodding way toward her. And in that sense, nothing had changed. Once again I was the laggard and she was the frontrunner, waiting for me to catch up. But this time she’d gone far, far beyond me, and the wait would be long.

  At least, I hoped it would be long.

  I told her I was sorry then. Sorry for my anger and for the things I’d said that day, sorry I hadn’t stopped her from walking out that door. And most of all, sorry I wanted to live without her—because there was no denying that I did. I sent the apology off into the ether and felt an answering whoosh of certainty that if Jess were here, she’d apologize too and forgive me for all of it, just like I would forgive her. Had already forgiven her. About damn time, Larssen, I heard her ghost say. Took you long enough.

  I looked at Elena and Catherine, and then past them, at George’s house. I’d had over two years to mourn Jess and come to terms with her death, but they’d only had a few months: three in Elena’s case, five in Catherine’s. I didn’t know what was waiting inside those pink walls, but I would go with them and find out, in the hope that they’d be able to leave a tiny part of their sorrow here, behind them.

  I HALF EXPECTED the door to be opened by a butler in coattails and white gloves, but George welcomed us himself, the ladies with kisses on the cheek, me with a handshake and a wan smile, and Izzy (who’d been preapproved on the way there) with a pat on the head and a dog treat. “I have two dogs of my own,” he told me, sounding a lot like Ashley Wilkes. “I’d introduce them to Izzy, but they’re territorial beasts, and I’m afraid they’d try to have him for breakfast.”

  George was tall and slender, fiftyish, with a long, Stan Laurel face, thinning ginger hair and mournful hazel eyes. Like the house and grounds, he looked ready for a garden party. He wore off-white linen pants, pristine white bucks and a salmon-colored pullover. No silk cravat, but I bet he had a drawer full of them in every color.

  After the introductions he led us down a hallway and into a huge formal living room full of seriously valuable- and fragile-looking antiques and Oriental rugs. No doubt Scarlett O’Hara or an Architectural Digest photographer would have felt right at home, but I was afraid to touch anything. The room was dominated by a life-size oil painting of George and a much younger and be
tter-looking man who must have been his partner. The two of them were holding identical pugs. I smiled; from George’s description I’d been picturing a pair of ferocious Dobermans.

  George waved to a nice spread of pastries and fruit laid out on a sideboard and told us to help ourselves. No mint juleps, but there was a pitcher of Bloody Marys as well as coffee and tea. We all went for the Bloodies, meanwhile Izzy lapped at some water George had left for him in a gold-rimmed china bowl on an ornate silver tray. “Don’t get used to it, buddy,” I told him.

  We sat down, me next to Elena on one of the half-dozen sofas in the room and Catherine and George in chairs across from us. An awkward silence fell, and we all looked at Catherine: she’d called this convention. I was prepared for some kind of psychobabbly speech about grief and healing, but she surprised me once again.

  “My brother’s name was Caleb,” she said, without preamble. “Caleb Breedlove. He was actually my half brother. Our mother left his father and married mine when Cal was two, and I was born a year later. We grew up together in Austin, but he never really liked the city. My dad was a petroleum engineer who worked for the university; Cal’s was a hill-country farmer, and that was the life he wanted. As soon as he graduated from high school he moved back to Kerrville to help his father on the farm. I was inconsolable when he left. In spite of our differences, we adored each other. I’ll never forget the time in grade school when some jerk in his class told me I wasn’t his real sister because we had different daddies. Cal found me crying and broke the kid’s nose. He got paddled for it twice, first by the principal and then, when he refused to apologize, by my father, but Cal didn’t care. I couldn’t have wished for a better big brother. We grew apart over the years, but we made a point of talking on the first of every month, and he always sent me yellow roses on my birthday. That’s how I knew something was wrong last April, because the florist didn’t come.”

  Catherine swallowed hard, and I thought she was going to keep going and tell us how Cal had died. Instead she stopped and turned to me. Expectantly.