by Lynne Hugo
“We’ll have all kinds of cancellations this afternoon,” I said. “Donna will kill me if I’m too late, but I could probably get an extra half hour if I call and make nice to her.”
“Well, call and make nice, then. How does beef-barley soup sound?”
He’d started to treat me like that, taking charge, but it never made me feel bossed around. I’d always been the one to decide things at home, and I’d fallen into the same role with Wayne. This was different, strange and exciting, and I guarded the feeling like a treasure that nobody knows exists so nobody tries to take it away.
I did get my boots from our house, a little embarrassed because it’s so small and unremarkable, while John waited in the idling car. My secret life briefly intersected with my life with Wayne and I was conscious of it. Why guilt didn’t tarnish my pleasure in John’s company, I have no idea. It was much later that guilt’s infection came to a head; that day, we went to the park and set off into woods that had turned magical when the wet weight on branches lowered them into a canopy over the unbroken path. The grace of the land unhid itself, roots to trunk to branches, and it seemed we were being blessed. When John took my hand, I did not take it back.
It was one of the loveliest hours of my life. When he kissed me, I kissed him back, and there it was, the dime on which my life turned.
CHAPTER 11
Chaos is erupting at the wake, and Ellie has no idea what to do. Bill is carrying Maddie out of the room, following the oily funeral director who asks people to stay calm and wait where they are. Ellie waits a moment, but then follows like a lost child. She crosses the room, weaving through stunned, whispering mourners, but then remembers Charles and turns around to collect him. She ignores Mama and Daddy, who don’t seem to know what’s going on, and in a run stretched into a slow-motion caricature by Charles, whom she drags by the hand like an anchor, takes the way the director and Bill turned when they left the room.
By the time she finds them, Madalaine has been laid out on a table ordinarily used for a coffin in one of the rooms for smaller funerals. Ellie feels what she takes for a physical blow, that sharp is the shock and the sensation that she will never get her breath. The funeral director is bending over Maddie, and Bill is just stepping back. Ellie recoils and jerks her hand from Charles. Unrestrained, and the last jawbreaker shrinking as he works it down, Charles takes two lumbering steps, uncertain and disoriented as a bear about which way to go. “Maddie’s dead, Maddie’s dead, Maddie’s dead,” he begins. Hearing this, Ellie expels the first air she’s been able to gather into a long scream.
Bill jerks to consciousness and heads toward her in long strides, gesturing with palms-down hands to keep it down. “Ellie! Eleanor! Stop it. She’s fainted is all, or she’s had some kind of seizure, I can’t tell. Go get Lydia.”
Ellie stops, and Charles does, too, momentarily. “Lydia’s not here. She went to the hospital. She’s supposed to come back for the service.” Ellie forces the words out.
“Jesus. Is Wayne with her?”
“No, he’s here.”
“Then go get Wayne. And take Charles with you. No, leave Charles here.” Charles has begun his chant again.
Ellie obeys.
A moment later, Ellie and Wayne both hang at the doorway.
An edge of desperation is in Bill’s voice. He looks at Wayne. “Can you get hold of Lydia, get her here to take over? I’ve got to get a doctor or something, Maddie’s collapsed, I don’t know. Should I take her to the hospital?”
Wayne is not a take-charge man. “I’ll get Lydia,” he says, and has no answer for anything else.
“Look, could you…I mean please, take Ellie and Charles with you,” Bill says, his face reddening, as he runs his hand across the top of his ashy and thinning hair. “I can’t…”
“Right,” Wayne says. “Come on, Ellie, bring Charles. We’ll go get Lydie.”
Ellie goes into the hospital while Wayne double-parks and keeps Charles in the car. She has been to see Claire once since the accident, but she was with Wayne, and paid no attention to the labyrinthine floors and corridors. She’s not good with directions, even when they’ve been repeated, and is frustrated just looking for the elevators.
Finally, a candy striper accompanies her to Claire’s floor, where a nurse tells her that Mrs. Merrill is in conference with Dr. Douglas in the small lounge. Through the glass panel in the door, she sees Lydia on a two-person couch, crying. The doctor is seated next to Lydia, her shoulders inclined toward her in concern, her hand over Lydia’s two, which appear to be clenched together. Ellie assumes there is bad news of Claire, and she jerks to one side and flattens her back against the hospital wall, afraid to either enter the room or leave.
Perhaps five minutes pass, during which Ellie peeks in intermittently. Finally, the doctor gets up to leave. Lydia is still crying. The doctor gives her a last pat on the shoulder and opens the door. “Oh, were you waiting to get in here?” she says when she sees Ellie.
“I need to see my sister, Lydia Merrill. Is Claire…?” Ellie says.
“You can go on in,” the doctor says. “We’re finished. It’s okay.”
Ellie opens the door, but hesitates in the doorway. Lydia looks up from where she is still seated, startled.
“Ellie! What is it? Why aren’t…”
“You need to come to the funeral home,” Ellie says. “Bill sent us to get you. Something’s happened to Maddie.”
“What? Is she all right?” Lydia bolts from the couch and hurries toward Ellie.
“I don’t know. She collapsed or something. Bill said for you to take over. I think he was going to get a doctor or something.”
“But Claire…” Lydia shook her head as if trying to clear it. “Yes, all right, let me tell Claire’s nurse so she can tell her why I’m gone when she wakes up, and I’ll come.” Lydia walks in the direction of the nurses’ station as she talks. Ellie trails by a step.
“Wayne and Charles are down in the car. You’d better hurry up. I’ve been here forever. What was the doctor saying?”
“Nothing,” Lydia answers, and Ellie knows it is a lie.
Lydia heads straight for the room where Ellie had left Madalaine with Bill and the funeral director. Madalaine is sitting up now; a friend of hers trained long ago as a nurse is beside her, holding a wet paper towel to Maddie’s forehead and another to the back of her neck. Madalaine is holding a paper cup of water and nodding her head.
Bill steps up to Lydia. “She’s okay now, she fainted. Please, go out and be next to Brian for her,” he says. “She can’t do it anymore.”
“I do not want her next to Brian,” Madalaine interrupts loudly.
“What? This is Lydie, Maddie, it’s Lydie. I asked her to come, she can…” Bill thinks that Madalaine sees Ellie instead of Lydia.
“She shouldn’t be next to Brian. She doesn’t deserve to be. She has no right. I followed all the rules, and my husband’s gone and my son is gone, and she’s broken every one but she has everything.”
Lydia thinks that Madalaine is blaming Claire through her. “Maddie,” she says, taking a few steps closer and putting her arms out. “Claire is devastated. You can’t blame her, really, do you?”
Madalaine flies into a rage of tears that blur into hysteria. “Not Claire, you. You. Why does everything work out for you? I didn’t do anything wrong but my child is the one who’s dead. Claire’s only my half niece, anyway, or doesn’t it work that way?”
Lydia realizes the road Madalaine is barreling down, drunk on memory, rage, jealousy and grief, altogether shredding reason and coherence. Even facts are garbled, coming as facts do, from sources as unreliable and biased as her own eyes and ears.
CHAPTER 12
Every part of me goes hot and icy when Maddie accuses me. The whole life I’ve constructed out of will and work and love is collapsing around my feet. I have to keep Claire out of this—that’s all I can think right now. I have to put Dr. Douglas with her impossible questions out of my mind,
and just deal with this part, here and now.
I gesture to Bill and the nurse, who are the closest to us. “Please, just let me talk to her alone.” Their faces wrinkle up, but they step back toward the door, though no one actually leaves the room except the nurse. Even Charles huddles silently behind Ellie, who is still blocking the doorway out into the hall. I do the best I can to get my voice directly and only to her. “Maddie. Maddie. This is a terrible thing that’s happened. The worst thing anyone can ever have to endure. You can blame me if you need to, but I want to be here for you. I’m your sister, you know I love you, and you know I loved Brian,” I say. This is only partly true. I don’t want to be here. I want to be anywhere but here, anywhere I can wrap myself around my daughter and keep all this from touching her.
Maddie seems to come to a little, and I can see her back up inside herself. She crumbles into a softer, wordless crying.
“I know I don’t deserve what I have.” I cross the last few steps between us, sit and put my arms around her, and whisper this into her hair. “I know. I know. Please, I’m begging you, don’t hurt Claire.”
“That’s all you care about,” she says back bitterly, but privately, quietly, and I can tell she is getting her impulse under control.
“I know you love her, too,” I say, “not for me, but for herself, I mean. Take out whatever you want on me, but please, find a way not to destroy her world.”
“I’m going out to be with Brian,” is all Maddie says. She stands up unsteadily. Bill advances toward us and I step aside for him to help her, though there was a time when Maddie would have turned her back on Bill to lean on me. Isolation settles over me like a bell jar set down by the enormous hand of God.
Ashamed and embarrassed, I stay behind. Ellie and Charles follow Maddie. Wayne waits, shifting his weight from foot to foot, an awkward distance from me.
“Well,” he says. “Well. I guess the cat’s out of the bag. I guess it was all along.”
“Wayne, please,” I say, “not now. Dr. Douglas told me that my kidney isn’t right for Claire because there are antibodies in my blood from my gallbladder operation, when I had that transfusion. You’re not a match either, we knew that was a long shot. She asked me point-blank who Claire’s father is.” My body feels as though I’m trembling, but I cannot see the shaking.
“I am,” Wayne says, his face a rigid mask.
“I know you are. Wayne, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I know I promised, but I’m going to have to try. You understand, don’t you? You don’t want her on dialysis any longer than she has to be, do you? I have to find him and ask—”
“No,” Wayne says. “Absolutely not.”
There is a whole funeral service I have to get through, with Wayne’s words pounding against the inside of my head. The one hymn is slow and mournful, the minister’s words comfortless, at least for me. Wayne is one of the pallbearers, and so is Daddy. Bill actually sits next to Maddie, leaving Melody three or four rows behind him. Both sides of Brian’s family ignore her, and for the first time, my heart goes out to her. How frightened and wounded she must be by this picture of Bill and his wife. Her being here requires courage, and I respect that she has not tried to hide anything. Not the smallest thing, and certainly not something as big as life itself. It’s very warm outside, and the windows are thrown open for the May breeze instead of air-conditioning, which would have made sense. Melody sits fanning herself with the little program and memorial card the funeral home has made up, her beach-ball stomach resting on her lap for the whole world to see. She leans her head back, and the soft hollow of her throat, below the vulnerability of her Adam’s apple, is right there for people to hurt, and of course, they do, they will.
Brian’s coffin is left beside the deep hole in the ground that has been hidden with AstroTurf, as if we didn’t know that as soon as we all clear the cemetery, he’ll be lowered into it and buried forever. Even at the grave, I am not concentrating on Brian or even Maddie. My mind is racing, darting down blind alleys, trying to find a way out. I wish I were more like Melody.
I imagine myself picking up the phone tomorrow. “John? This is Lydia,” I’ll say. “I hope I’m not calling at a bad time.” No, I involuntarily shake my head. That’s all wrong. Weaving themselves between the words in my head is the minister’s. “Yea…through the valley of the shadow of…” and I bury my face in my hands so I can use my thumbs to cover my ears, sliding them beneath my hair so no one will see. I cannot think about the shadow of death. I will think about how to call John.
It is so rare that I allow myself to think of John that now, when I must, I am quickly confused. I don’t know what I believe anymore, as though the type inside a book changes to read something different every time I open it. Once, to me, he was perfect, then he changed—or the lens through which I saw him did. And then, over time, it all seemed to change again, and I remember him softly now, wrapping him with the silver benefit of every doubt.
CHAPTER 13
Bill has actually done it again, left Melody to fend for herself while he takes Madalaine home from the funeral. Jennifer is with Emily, her best friend, whose mother offered to keep Jennifer with them as long as might be necessary after Madalaine collapsed at the wake. Even though the refrigerator is crammed with meat and cheese trays, and soft rolls are stacked on the counter along with coffee cups, napkins and plates of cookies, word passed at the burial service not to go back to Madalaine’s house afterward, and the driveway is mercifully empty when they pull up.
The burial of her son nearly killed Madalaine, and Bill wasn’t far behind. The late afternoon had been sunny, the cemetery in full, late-spring bloom on the kind of day Brian would have spent ignoring homework and shooting hoops. Now his father’s car is parked beneath Brian’s basketball net, and Brian will not be asking if he can move it.
They have not spoken since leaving the cemetery, driving out from beneath a canopy of new leaves, but the silence is as replete with empathy as if the last months—and indeed, the year before those—had been deleted from their lives. Bill’s hand is on the back of Madalaine’s black dress as they go in through the garage door.
Madalaine is in one of what she calls her amnesia periods, when her attention turns to some minutiae of living and, for a few moments it is as though she is in her old life. It is doubly disorienting when she is with Bill now because she may forget that he has left her, forget that Brian is dead, or both, until either memory is jolted awake and despair washes over her again.
“Look at all this stuff,” she says, clicking on the kitchen light to dispel the shadows. “Where will we put it?”
“Honey…who cares?” It comes out as nearly a moan. He has slipped and called her honey again, though it escapes his own notice, and, at the moment, Madalaine knows Brian is gone, but has forgotten that in his way, Bill is, too.
Madalaine glances at him and sees the dark smudges like bruises around his eyes. “You look exhausted,” she says, and rubs his back. “Do you want to lie down awhile?”
“You’re the one who needs to lie down,” he says. “Has the dizziness come back?”
“No, I’m…okay. It was the red stuff on Charles’ mouth, you know? I didn’t know… It was like…Brian, and I thought I saw Brian again. I don’t know.”
“You just couldn’t take any more,” Bill offers. “It’s so…unreal, isn’t it? I keep forgetting. Not forgetting, really, just not believing, I guess.”
“Yes, that’s exactly it. You feel normal, and then suddenly you know nothing’s normal.” Madalaine puts her arms around him and rests her head on his chest. “Yes,” she says then. “I guess I do need to lie down.”
This is how it’s been since the night it happened when Bill brought Madalaine home from the hospital after they had seen Brian’s body. They’d alternated falling apart; when one did, the other pulled himself or herself together just enough to drag the two of them to the next hurdle. Bill welcomes Madalaine’s need; it gives him something he can do. And when he is
overcome, well, Madalaine’s hands are as knowing and kind as he’d seen them when she bathed the children, back when the children were small and the four of them were a family.
They make their way down the hall to the bedroom. Without a thought, Madalaine pulls her dress over her head and hangs it in the closet after kicking off her low-heeled shoes. She peels off her slip and black panty hose and then stands in front of her bureau.
“I have no idea what to put on,” she says. “How can I just put on shorts, I mean, it doesn’t seem right. Nothing will ever be right again.” Tears refill her eyes, and her body begins to sag. Bill thinks she may be about to faint again and quickly crosses to her from the bed, on which he had been sitting, letting his body crumple into itself.
He puts his arms around Madalaine, easing her toward the bed where he arranges her limp body. He climbs over her on his knees and lies alongside her, working one arm underneath her so he can gather her up close to him. For the second time in three days, Bill and Madalaine lie on the bed they shared for years to hold each other while they cry.
For perhaps twenty minutes, they comfort each other with their hands and the wordless history that passes back and forth between them. “Is it too late for us to have another baby? Let’s have another one, please?” Madalaine whispers. “I am…so empty, so empty. I need…inside me, I need…”
