by Jill Ciment
“Can I ride with her to the hospital?” Kat asked as they were fitting Edith into a body bag.
The two men exchanged alarmed glances. “We’re not taking her to the hospital.”
That was when it finally sank in. Edith was going to the morgue.
“Do you want a moment to say good-bye?” asked the taller man before closing the bag.
“We’ve already said good-bye.”
Edith was then zipped up, strapped on the gurney, and trundled away. Kat accompanied her as far as the elevator.
“Is there someone you can call to be with you tonight?” asked the shorter man.
The elevator door closed before Kat could answer him.
She returned to their hotel room, though that was the last place she wanted to go and lie down. A horror she’d never before known began to occupy the empty bed beside her. She thought she smelled death on the sheets. How long had Edith been dead? Oh god, let death have come quick; let her not have suffered long and alone. The odor—almost sweet—was still there. Kat stripped Edith’s bed, and left the sheets balled in the corridor for the maid. That’s when the messy, gulping sobs began, liquid grief. When she finally came up for air, she called the front desk.
“My sister just died. Is the bar closed?”
The Indian-accented young man stammered an enigmatic “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“Sorry the bar is closed or sorry my sister is dead?”
“Both,” he said.
A few minutes later, he knocked on the door with an open bottle of Scotch.
“A guest left this behind,” he explained.
“Would you like to stay for a drink?” asked Kat. She couldn’t bear to be alone.
“Nobody’s watching the front desk.”
“Please. Just one.”
“I could lose my job.”
She let the poor man leave, but still poured two glasses, one for herself, and one for Edith. The loneliness felt both cavernous and suffocating. Edith had been alone and without her pills. Why hadn’t Kat gone straight to the pharmacy? Why did she have to go home with Lenny? Why did she have to get drunk with Ashley? She was such a fuckup and now her sister was dead.
Daylight brought no comfort, though Kat had spent every waking hour of the night yearning for dawn. When she managed to doze off and forget that Edith was dead, the naked mattress was there to remind her when she opened her eyes. Why had she stripped the bed? She went into the hall to find the sheets, but the bundle was gone.
The Scotch bottle was nearly empty. She picked up Edith’s vial of heart pills. The label warned of sleepiness. She took three with the last swig. Between the booze and the beta-blockers, she finally sank into slumber, where she found herself dining with Edith in an Egyptian restaurant she didn’t recognize. Edith was relishing her food, a cut of rare lamb that she ate off the bone.
Kat waited until Edith finished before telling her the awful news. “Edie,” she said hoarsely. “Oh, Edie, I’m so sorry to tell you this, but you have to know. You’re dead.”
“I just finished eating my dinner. I’m no more dead than you.”
Two mustachioed waiters came over. One grabbed Edith’s wrists, the other her ankles, and swing-tossed her off the balcony, a ten-story fall to her death.
Kat finished her dinner, so grateful that the kind waiters had taken things into their own hands and spared Edith any more suffering. But when her plate was empty, she began to fret that Edith might not have died instantly, that she might have hit the pavement, crushed and in agony. Kat ran down endless flights of stairs. When she reached the street, Edith was sitting on the curb, stunned and shaken by the ten-story fall, but unharmed.
Kat burst into tears of elation. “I thought I’d never see you alive again!”
She woke momentarily euphoric, but then the naked mattress stripped her of that illusion.
She waited until a decent hour, nine sharp, before tolling the death bell. She called Edith’s old friends from work. She found their numbers in the BlackBerry.
“Hello, Janice.”
“You sound awful, Edie.”
“It’s Kat. Edith is dead.”
“Oh, no. No, no, no. How? When?”
“Last night. I found her. I don’t even know where they took the body. I forgot to ask.”
“Call Stanley. He’s Edie’s executor. I can’t believe she’s gone.”
“Neither can I,” said Kat.
She wasn’t ready to call Edith’s executor. The word sounded too final. She took another beta-blocker to buffet her thumping anxiety. What if Edith had taken her medicine that morning? What if Kat weren’t such a fuckup? Would Edith be alive? Did she call anyone for help at the last minute?
Kat reached for the BlackBerry. It contained so much of Edith’s life it seemed like a sacred memory totem. Edith’s last call was to Vida, probably the last person Edith spoke to. It was placed at eleven a.m. sharp and lasted two minutes and nineteen seconds. What had they talked about? Did Vida say something that gave her a heart attack? The call before that was to Stanley. Did he say something that killed her? Who was the last person she emailed? Edith’s AOL account asked for a password. I’m her twin, Kat thought, we shared every cell in our bodies for sixty-four years, surely I can guess her password. The account locked after ten failed attempts, and then Kat wept anew because she hadn’t known her sister at all. She found Edith’s last web search. Act of God.
Had Edith found God? Their mother was a secular Jew. Their father’s only religion was jazz, or so their mother told them. He died when they were three of a cerebral aneurism while soloing on his trumpet. Edith had always been adamant about her lack of faith, while Kat secretly hoped for miracles.
Over the next couple of days, Kat used the money from Edith’s purse to buy one bottle of vodka after another. She didn’t care what brand.
The BlackBerry rang sometime on the third day while Kat was reading Edith’s datebook, weepy because Edith had so many friends. When the sacred BlackBerry rang, Kat almost believed that Edith was calling her from the other world.
“Katherine, it’s Stanley Flom. I’m so sorry for your loss. Everyone here was so fond of Edith. You have our deepest condolences.”
“Thank you,” Kat said.
“I know this is a difficult time for you, but the medical examiner’s office phoned me this morning. A decision has to be made. Edith wanted her body donated to science, but now that the preliminary autopsy is in, the ME doesn’t think she’ll be eligible.”
“What did she die of? Was it her heart?”
“I didn’t ask. You’ll need to choose a funeral home.”
Stanley might as well have told Kat that she needed to find an empty lot in Brooklyn and dig a grave. “Could you do that for me as her executor?”
“Certainly. Should we find a Jewish home? Was she religious?”
“I don’t know.”
“She left a letter for you in the event of her death. I imagine you don’t want me to mail it. It’s waiting for you anytime.”
“Can I come now?”
“Of course.”
As badly as Kat ached to read that letter, she didn’t want to arrive for that solemn occasion in the rank crumpled clothes she’d been living in for three days. She stripped and showered, then put on Edith’s pantsuit, the one Kat had worn to Sutton House in another life. It was still pouring out. She took a cab. To arrive by subway seemed disrespectful. In the elevator, riding up to Price, Bloodworth, Flom, Mead & Van Doren, a young woman, an attorney by the way she dressed, smiled at Kat and asked how she was enjoying her retirement. She must not have heard about Edith’s death. “Hey, I like the blond do,” she said.
The stately law office was hardly the anthill that Kat had imagined whenever she’d pictured Edith at work. She had never once visited her sister’s beloved library, but then again, she had never been invited.
Stanley Flom’s secretary Janice became teary when she saw Kat. “Edie was such a kind, generous soul. She wi
ll be dearly missed.” She gave Kat a warm hug, and then opened Stanley’s door.
Stanley was a tall, pudding-jowled man in his late seventies. He rose and stepped around his spotless desk to shake her hand. She noticed the envelope at once on his black leather desk pad. Stanley again offered his condolences, but Kat wasn’t listening. She had gone to the place where the grieving go, an open field or the ocean’s edge—hers was a rocky cliff—anyplace where there might be a promise of something out there, where one might confuse absence with presence.
He handed Kat the envelope.
“Do I read it now?”
“It’s up to you. Would you like your privacy?”
“Yes, thank you.”
She didn’t immediately tear it open. She borrowed a silver letter opener from his desk so that she would do as little damage to the envelope as possible. Edith wouldn’t be sending her another.
My Dear Sister Kat,
If you’re reading this, I’m gone. I know you’re grieving, but you’ll be fine. You are a survivor. I have an important favor to ask. Please go in person to tell Alice Flom of my death. Go as soon as you can. I want you to tell her, not Stanley or anyone else. Please, Kat, I’m counting on you.
With All My Love,
Edie
Who was Alice Flom? Kat didn’t remember Edith mentioning her. Alice had the same last name as Stanley. Was she his wife? The letter had no date, just the address of a nursing home in Westchester.
Stanley returned with Janice, who carried a pot of tea and two cups. He sat beside Kat, on the client side of the desk, in the second armchair. Why did Edith trust him as her executor yet not trust him to tell his wife of her death? Was he Edith’s secret lover all these years? Was Alice her friend or rival?
“You haven’t asked about the will,” Stanley said.
Kat already knew what the will said. Edith had told her numerous times. She’d set up a trust for Kat, with an undisclosed sum, to begin payments on her sixty-fifth birthday. Even in death, Edith wanted to make sure Kat ate in old age.
As long as Edith’s story was still evolving, she was alive for Kat. Outside the offices of Price, Bloodworth, Kat hailed a taxi. She gave the cabbie the nursing home address in Westchester, twenty miles north, an hour-and-a-half slog on the flooded expressway.
The cab pulled up to a bleak brick building on sumptuous grounds, as if a prison had been built in heaven. The Filipina nurse at the front desk said visiting hours were over, but when Kat told her about Edith’s last request, she pointed Kat down the hall. “Third door on your right.”
Alice didn’t see Kat at first. She sat on a reclining chair, wearing a nightgown. She must have been ravishing when she was younger, but now, her facial skin looked as if it had been pinched and pinned up on her prominent cheekbones, like a pleated skirt. Her eyes, wet black river stones, appeared to be rapt in bliss, or captivated by nothing. But when she noticed Kat standing in her door, the vacant stare filled with suspicious bewilderment.
“Who are you?”
“Kat. I’m Edith’s sister.”
“Who’s Edith?”
“You don’t know?”
“Maybe I know, and maybe I don’t, but I’ll only tell if you promise to take me home with you.”
“Where do you think my home is?”
“You live with your mother.”
So she did know who Edith was after all. Alice’s black eyes—still wary, still befuddled—flooded with tears. Why would she cry for her rival? Maybe they were lovers? Was Edith gay? Wouldn’t Kat have known, at least suspected? Why wouldn’t Edith have told her? Kat walked toward Alice, who cringed like Kat meant to beat her. She sat down on the bed’s edge and slowly offered Alice her hand. Alice took it in both of hers and examined Kat’s palm, front and back, as if it were a gift box and Alice was supposed to guess what was inside. Kat intended to carry out Edith’s last request even if poor Alice didn’t understand. Edith was counting on her.
“Edith isn’t with us anymore.”
“Who’s Edith?”
The play was supposed to have begun twenty minutes ago, but the inexhaustible rain, a constant for five days, wouldn’t quit, though it had subsided enough to give false hope that it might abate long enough to have at least one performance. The expectant audience, despite a canopy of umbrellas, was now wet and shivering.
Costumed and made-up and ready to hit the boards, Vida, Edmund, and the Earl of Kent watched the Weather Channel on the Fool’s iPad. Regan and Lear, married in real life, played gin for a dime a point, while the stage manager went outside for the third time. If the rains were abating, the surface of Turtle Pond, the small lake next to the stage, would calm down first. Canceling would be an easier call if the play were Hamlet or Henry V. The stage boards would be too slick for swordfights. But the only real stage violence in Lear, aside from the storm and a couple of stabbings, is the plucking out of Gloucester’s eyes, and that could be accomplished without slipping on the wet boards. Cordelia, a television actress Vida found insufferably earnest and mediocre, strode into the dressing area and announced that the audience was waiting. “We can wear big fun hats to protect the mikes,” she said.
“What kind of a big fun hat should the King wear to his own tragedy?” asked Regan, reshuffling her hand.
“Gin,” said Lear dryly to his wife. “You now owe me one thousand sixty-six dollars and eighty cents.”
“First Julia broke her teeth, and now this,” said Edmund.
“I’m canceling the performance,” said the stage manager.
Booing, louder than the rain, filled the dressing area, and all the actors turned toward the sound as if it had been directed at them personally. The stage manager must have just announced that the performance was canceled.
“Let’s just get takeout,” Regan said to Lear as he changed out of his kingly robes into his stretch-waist jeans.
“I’m wired, does anyone want to get a drink?” asked Cordelia.
“I’m going home, lighting up a fat joint, and watching TV,” said Kent.
Vida caught a cab back to the hotel. When she initially made the reservation she hadn’t known the hotel had a loud club off the lobby. There was always a throng of tattooed young waiting to get in. The club’s entrance resembled a limestone cave’s mouth. Inside, aquamarine light shimmered, like reflected water in an underground grotto. The elevator kept to the same blue theme and her corridor, also blue, was lit with concentrated halogen spots that made Vida feel as if she were stepping from one lily pad of light to another. When she finally reached her room, took off her shoes, and stretched out on the bed, she felt the club’s music thrumming through the floor. The hotel was costing her a fortune, and today she learned that she wasn’t going home anytime soon. The day after tomorrow, her house would be hermetically tented and disfigured with acid until every last spore of what her insurance agent now referred to as The Supermold was dead. The EPA had ordered an immediate burn because the infestation had spread to her adjacent neighbors. After forty-eight inches of rain in five days, her basement must have become a primeval swamp.
She reached for her cell phone and texted Sam, a former lover whose key she still had. He was doing Othello in London. They had met through Virginia and had once played husband and wife in Albee’s The Goat, but when the run ended, their robust sex, without the goat, fizzled into friendship.
He answered her immediately.
GUESS WHO’S SLEEPING WITH DESDEMONA????????? ME CASA SU CASA. SORRY ABOUT THE MESS.
She didn’t know if he was referring to her situation or the cleanliness of his apartment. He lived in one of those posh new Williamsburg developments on the East River, only a few blocks from her home. She had looked at an apartment on the twelfth floor of the second tower before deciding on her old row house. She hadn’t wanted to live so aseptically, in concrete and glass.
On the second floor of the first tower, she got off the elevator and unlocked Sam’s door. He wasn’t kidding about the mess. The entr
y floor was stained red. An open bag of pretzels, half-empty jars, and pineapple rind cluttered the small kitchen counter. A woman’s black sleeveless dress, silk camisole, and jeans were hanging over the tub. Was he seeing someone and hadn’t told her? Whoever she was had good taste, though Vida didn’t care for the uniform red cast to all the fabrics. Only as she was changing the bed sheets did it strike her—didn’t she own the exact same dress, camisole, and jeans? She left the bed unmade to check the labels. Her size. She slipped her hand into the jeans’ left front pocket and her index finger found the familiar hole. Had she left some clothes at his house? She hadn’t spent the night here in six months. Sam had been over for dinner a couple of weeks ago, had he stolen her clothes? Why would he steal her clothes? Why would he dye them red? Maybe she was making too much of a wild coincidence, albeit an unsettling one. He’d always said he admired her style. Why not expect him to be attracted to a new lover who had similar tastes? The clothes weren’t exactly haute couture originals. She was a size eight, common enough. And doesn’t everyone have a hole in her pocket?
Ashley hid in the broom closet when she heard someone open the front door. According to the hen’s datebook, the actor wasn’t supposed to return for a month. Whoever was inside walked with a light, female stride. When Ashley heard the bathroom door close, she quietly tiptoed out of the apartment, wearing only the actor’s kimono. Her temples were pounding from startled flight, but she strolled down the hall as if she belonged there. She rode the elevator to the top floor. The penthouse key was on the ledge where the doorman had left it.
Closing the door behind her, the darkness was so abrupt and depthless that it looked as if someone had blacked out the three glass walls, or maybe the thirtieth floor was engulfed in the black clouds, or maybe it was raining oil. If a city was out there, she couldn’t see it.
She didn’t dare turn on any lights. Who knew who was watching? She groped her way across the vast nothingness, a blind beggar crossing the steppes, exposed to whatever hunts at night, unaware of the precipice ahead.
