“You really think it’s two different assholes, not one?” Sam said. “Captain’s sure it’s one.”
“He’s wrong. That surveillance video shows a pistol with a wood grip. Second holdup? A witness says no wood grip. Different weapons mean different assholes. You can make that one of your infamous second rules. I’ll pretend you made it up.”
“Let’s stick with one crime at a time, Luce.” Sam gestured at Jumble Guy. “Today we got us a .38 on a chain. We also have one nightmare RP; he’s like a rodent with ADD. I probably shouldn’t have pissed him off. You watch—he won’t let this go.” Sam squatted near the hearth. “What do you make of the chain?”
Lucy did yoga regularly, though not religiously. Not quite as often as Sam ate meat with nitrates, but close. When she bent from her waist to examine the gun, Sam found himself becoming annoyed at the posture she adopted—mostly because he hadn’t been able to approximate that position since the death of disco.
He used his pinky to indicate the trigger guard of the revolver. “The gun wasn’t hung from the chain. It’s attached to the chain. It’s locked on with a bolt and a wing nut. You ever see someone attach a gun like that?”
“Rhetorical? Why wouldn’t that chain interfere with the trigger action?”
“It’s tight and forward on the guard. Look how long the chain is.” He stood to chase the path of the chain into the mess of bricks that had tumbled down around the revolver. “Three feet or so here, give or take. Four there.” He pointed. Took a half step. “Over this way, five. Under the flue, back out, eight, ten, twelve maybe? More?” He looked at Lucy. “Why hide a gun in a chimney at the end of a chain that long?”
Lucy said, “To reach the chimney cap? It had to attach somewhere, either the flue or the cap, right? Did you find the other end? Is there a hook?”
“Haven’t gotten that far.” The end of the chain disappeared beneath broken bricks and cracked mortar. While Lucy snapped photos, Sam pulled on a glove and used his index finger to shift a brick to one side, exposing the end of the chain.
Lucy said, “Fuck, there it is. That hook is crimped onto the chain. No way to hang that onto the cap. There has to be more. Move those two bricks next.”
Sam stood. His spine crackled like it was made of caramel corn. “I have to start doing crunches,” he mumbled.
Lucy said, “What?”
Sam wasn’t ready to bend over again. He said, “Ophelia thinks I cuss too much. I’m working on it. You should, too.”
Lucy said, “Fuck that. But I like Ophelia, Sam.”
“You know she’s older than me? First time I’ve … been there.”
“Been where?” Lucy turned away. She didn’t want Sam to know she was smiling.
“Been involved with a woman who’s older.”
“So? You’ll die first anyway. The way you fucking eat.”
Sam laughed. “You do cuss a lot.”
“I haven’t liked most of your girlfriends. I can’t think of a single one I liked before Ophelia.”
“Not Carmen? I thought you liked Carmen.”
“Not even a little.”
“Huh. You would have liked Dee.”
“Dee? That mythical preggers sprite from back East? When was she your girlfriend? In a wet dream?”
“She wasn’t. Not, you know … well, at all. We had— Don’t know why I said that. We both like Ophelia. Maybe my search ends there.”
“Don’t blow this one like the others, Sam. The tits on Ophelia? Woman her age? You’d be a fool.”
Sam laughed before Lucy did. Everybody had an opinion about Ophelia’s breasts. Sam was used to it. Kind of.
Lucy lowered her upper body to get even closer to the end of the chain, balancing her weight on her left foot while allowing her right leg to float behind her as yoga ballast.
“Now you’re showing off,” Sam said.
“You think maybe that hook was part of a bungee?” Her index finger was inches from multiple frayed lengths of thin deteriorating elastic bands that extended out from the hook that had been crimped to stay fixed on the end of the chain.
“Now that you mention it, I am thinking that.”
Lucy said, “Well, that means—”
A brash, husky crack of thunder erupted from the direction of Gross Reservoir. A brilliant flash of lightning followed before Sam could even begin counting. Lucy tumbled onto her back from the shock of it all. Sam offered his hand.
While they’d been distracted by the gun on the chain, the sky above the Front Range had turned the gray of bad dreams. “You got a tarp in your car?” Sam asked. “We should cover what we can for the crime scene guys. There has to be another end to that bungee someplace in the debris. Don’t want it floating away during a monsoon.”
Lucy was on the run toward her vehicle. She called back, “You have noticed that the crime scene guys are almost all women now? Yes?”
“I have not. I’m thinking that noticing that would be sexist. Wouldn’t it? Or am I missing something about the nature of the progress you’ve been wanting me to make?”
Lucy opened her mouth. She didn’t know how to respond.
They used some of Jumble Guy’s carefully stacked bricks to secure Lucy’s tarp in place. By the time they finished, rain was falling in fat drops. Lucy was a step behind Sam as he dashed to his Cherokee for cover.
Sam said, “Most days I love the monsoons. And we need the rain. But then most days I’m inside and I don’t worry much about being hit by lightning.”
Lucy was trying to remember the last steady downpour. She couldn’t. Red Flag Warnings had been posted since spring along the entire length of the Front Range. Boulder County was kindling. Everybody knew a wildfire was coming. A bad one.
She said, “The gun is a gun. Vic was shot, there had to be one. That chain, though? There didn’t need to be a chain.”
“Chain makes it a puzzle, Luce. You know me, I like the puzzles. But a bungee? Bungee makes it goofy. Let’s say you’re a guy crazy enough to stash your pistol in the chimney. Why not just run the chain to the top? Why add a bungee to the mix?”
“At the risk of sounding obvious, it makes the contraption spring-loaded,” Lucy said.
“Does. The handgun would disappear up the chimney right after you let go. Or after you died. Again, why? Why would somebody shoot himself and want the gun to disappear?”
“To fuck with us,” Lucy said. “I hate it when citizens fuck with the cops.”
“Language, language,” Sam said. “A disappearing gun? I’ve been doing this a long time. But that’s a first. Goofy, like I said.”
“Rain’s stopping,” Lucy said. “We got, what, three minutes of monsoon? Nada.”
“It’s so dry,” Sam said. “We’re going to get a fire soon. You watch.”
They got out of the car and began to remove the tarp. Sam said, “Have you heard the old stories about Ivy Baldwin? What he did up here? In Eldorado?”
“Amazing man,” she said. “No, astonishing man. Hard to believe what he did.”
“Do you think he really did what they say? Crossed that canyon on a wire?” Sam pointed to the canyon. “Has to be half a mile across. Quarter mile up.”
“Absolutely. I have pictures in a book at home. Guy named Ed Tangen took a lot of photos of him.”
“No net? Dozens of times? For real?”
“He even did it in his eighties. He was eighty-two, I think, the last time. My grandfather met Ivy once at Elitch’s. He used to perform there when it first opened.”
“Damn.” Sam got quiet for a moment before he asked, “Do you know what prado means? In Spanish?”
Lucy said, “Means ‘meadow.’”
“Huh. Wouldn’t have guessed that. Thought it meant vista, or view. Or foothills maybe.”
“And that,” Lucy said, “is why there are fucking dictionaries.”
3
After That Morning
ALAN
LAUREN HAD PLANNED her own service. The document des
cribing her wishes for what would take place after her death was in the shared file where we stored our wills in our home office. The file was marked WHEN I AM DEAD in block letters.
I had not known she had given her funeral any thought, but I was grateful for the road map she left behind. It allowed me an interlude when I would not need to make important decisions. When the time arrived I would hand off the funeral directions to her sister Teresa, who was eager to be useful.
LAUREN’S DEATH WAS AN ANTICLIMAX. I had stepped into the kitchen for a glass of water. When I came back she had ceased breathing. Stopped living. Begun being dead. Just like that. I wasn’t at her bedside when it happened.
The feelings that were so overwhelming to me that morning, the morning she was shot, all came back with fresh intensity. I sat alone with her and cried.
I felt some anger. But I felt mostly sad. And very much alone.
The only person in the house with me was Sofie, Lauren’s teenaged daughter from Holland. Sofie had arrived in Colorado only two days before. That was when she and I met. Sofie was a revelation to me. She entered our fractured, wounded family with grace and familiarity, almost as though she were reentering our family, naturally finding her place in seams and gaps that I didn’t perceive until she filled them.
She heard me crying beside her mother’s body. She joined me. We sat for a while, crying together, arms around each other.
To comfort me and maybe herself, she told me stories about her mother’s visit to the Netherlands.
TERESA GAVE ME INSTRUCTIONS. Because she thought I’d forget, she emailed me schedules. And she texted me reminders about the schedules. She told me what time to be ready to leave the house, when to have the kids ready to go. I did my best to comply.
I texted her back so that she didn’t have to text me again.
Grace wanted her sister, Sofie, not her aunt Teresa, to help with her hair. But it was Teresa who told Grace she couldn’t wear that to this, or vice versa. I was grateful for Teresa’s help with the daughter wrangling. I would have given in to Grace on everything.
Had someone asked me before—before that morning, the morning everything changed—I would have guessed that Lauren would choose cremation. As with so many other things having to do with the end of our lives together, I got that part wrong. The final remembrances were to conclude with a traditional motorcade—a couple of black limousines chasing a black hearse—to a cemetery for an old-fashioned hole-in-the-ground burial.
Teresa guided me into place near the gravesite with the frustrated resolve of a choreographer who was exasperated with her most-challenged student. The Indian summer sun shone brilliantly in the southwest sky. I stood where Teresa put me, a half-dozen feet back from a dark pit excavated in a slightly uphill expanse of gray-green turf.
I called her back. I said, “Please. One thing?” I asked her to have the cemetery staff remove the turf-hued carpet from around the mechanical apparatus that would lower the weight of my wife’s coffin into the earth. I was certain that Lauren would not have been pleased by the faux-grass accompaniment.
A man from the cemetery rolled up the grass rugs. The unadorned hole looked like a scar in the earth. That felt right to me. The day was about raw dirt.
Around me were my children.
I was grateful. For them. For their lives. For their presence in mine. For the support they didn’t know they gave. In that moment, and forever, for the chance to support them.
Around us, mostly behind us, but some on each side, and a few dozen more across the way, were a hundred people, give or take. I only glanced up at their faces a couple of times. I saw many strangers. How could that be, that so many people I don’t recognize want to see my wife’s body lowered into the ground?
Once I learned of Lauren’s wish that she be buried, I’d made a guess that the gravesite she preselected would be in the shade of a tree, or on a north-facing slope. It turned out that I got that wrong, too. After years of avoiding sunshine as a reluctant homage to the multiple sclerosis that had plagued her since shortly before we’d met, she wanted her body to disintegrate for eternity in as sun-washed a spot as the high plains could provide. Damn the summer heat. Damn the UV rays.
Lauren also surprised me by identifying a friend—someone I wasn’t sure I had met, a woman she had once volunteered with somewhere—to act as “spiritual presence and guide” at the final service at the cemetery.
If forced to rate it before that morning, I would have placed Lauren’s spiritual inclinations at no higher than a two on a ten-scale. I allowed that it was possible that I had that wrong, too, about my wife. The cynical side of me entertained and then rejected before finally accepting the alternative conclusion that, should there turn out to be an afterlife, my wife wanted to have greased the skids. Just in case. Maybe.
When Lauren’s friend stepped forward to begin her role as our spiritual presence, and to guide us, I tried to match her face with a name. I thought Teresa had told me that her name was Crystal. But she introduced herself to us mourners as Clover.
Clover spoke for a few minutes. Nothing she said registered. It was babble; her words had nothing to do with Lauren’s life. She concluded by looking up at the sky with great drama. She announced that Lauren had asked that a song be played before she was lowered into the earth.
I didn’t know what the sky had to do with it. But I had woken that morning determined to be well behaved. The determination was essential because I didn’t feel at all like being well behaved. In fact I was fighting a strong urge to be a requiem rebel.
Lauren’s MS had left her music averse for the last years of her life, but she had chosen to have music played when she could no longer be discomfited by it, just as she had wanted the sun to shine when its heat could no longer create any havoc for her.
The song she had chosen for the end was “The Weight” by the Band.
I don’t read music. I don’t understand the structure or the nomenclature. I feel music like almost everyone else. But I don’t feel music like my daughter feels music.
Immediately after the initial chord of the song called the gathered to attention, Gracie broke into dance beside me. For the first few measures my daughter’s movements were confined to some restrained motion of her feet and her lower legs—like an Irish step dancer warming up for something big.
I just need some place/Where I can lay my head.
I could tell by the hushed intake of collective breaths from the mourners, and from Aunt Teresa’s suddenly wide eyes directly across the way, that Grace’s dance performance was indeed an impromptu addition to the festivities and not part of her mother’s detailed going-away choreography that I had not been tipped off about.
For those first few measured steps Gracie held my hand as she danced, but that didn’t last. She shook off my fingers as her feet began to move faster, and her hips began to lift higher, and her arms began to drift until they found the parts of the melody they were seeking. Her long fingers, no longer tethered to me, extended out and up to meet the power she was feeling that came from some essential force, somewhere else, or somewhere deep inside her, as music begot motion.
My impulse was instinctive: To stop her, to protect her. To lean over and whisper, “Not here, honey. Later. You can dance later. All you want.” But I didn’t. Gracie had a need to dance right then. She had every right to dance. Lauren, I wanted to believe, had chosen to have music at the burial for Grace.
In case her daughter had a need to dance.
Grace displayed no self-consciousness during her graveside recital. She could have been dancing alone in our basement.
I expected the dance to stop shortly after it began. My initial thought was that Grace had memorized a few steps, a little jig that would serve as a bugle blow to announce a change in phase of the ceremony. I thought the dance would be confined to the solitary square meter of ground beside me.
The early moves were indeed regimented—in the sense someone had probably danced them before Gra
ce danced them—but soon the steps became free-form and freeing. Once she got going I felt certain that no one had ever danced the moves that Gracie did that day. I watched in awe and admiration as my daughter’s coltish legs bounced into motion I had never seen before.
Gracie cried as she danced. The tears began to form right from the first note, from her first step. She never sobbed; the tears fell silently, dripping down her cheeks and off her chin. But hers wasn’t a sad dance; she moved with exuberance that she intuitively matched to the circumstances. She lifted my mood as she captured the essence of the parts of her mother that were never anchored to this earth by her illness.
It was a lot to ask from a little girl’s graveside dance. But I thought Gracie pulled it off like a pro.
As the lengthy song wound down—“The Weight” is a dirge, not a ditty—she reached out and took my hand again. Taking her father’s hand was not an act of supplication on Grace’s part, nor was it a bid to seek a closing canopy of paternal security.
She was inviting me to join her in the celebration of her mother’s life.
I can’t dance. My daughter knew that better than anyone. But there, beside my wife’s open grave, with my daughter’s hand in my hand, I began to dance in front of the assembled mourners. I danced with Grace until the music that Lauren had chosen stopped on the precise note where she had chosen to stop it.
Gracie wasn’t done. She kept on, extending her dance for a few more measures as she heard personal notes that no one else in the cemetery could hear. Her final movements, her final tribute, took place in stunned, and stunning, silence.
When she was done, she exhaled audibly. Some of the fallen tears hung poised on the curve of her chin, waiting to drip to the ground. Then she stood still again beside me, her back straight, as tall and proud as she had ever been. I fell to my knees and hugged her. Her tears wet both of our faces.
Grace’s dance spoke about conclusion and finality and passing so succinctly that I would not have wanted to be the person forced to use words to try to say the same thing, next. “That was beautiful,” I whispered to her.
Compound Fractures Page 3
