by Zoe Kane
“They were very organized,” observed Aunt Vera. “That’s good. People aren’t, always, and it can lead to disaster.”
“No, I was very organized,” Annie retorted, a little sharply. “Grace thought it was morbid and Danny made fun of me.”
“Well, you did the right thing,” said Aunt Vera encouragingly. “You know exactly what the terms are, you know all the details, you already have all the information. You’ve made things as uncomplicated as a hideously complicated situation like this can possibly be. An ounce of preparation, darling.”
“That’s what I told them.”
“So you’ll be moving in here?” asked Michael. Annie nodded. “Do you want me to . . . I mean, should I – Will you need me to –“
“You don’t have to move in, Michael,” his sister said, and his face collapsed in relief. “This is on me, not on you.”
“Not that the kids won’t need you too,” Aunt Vera reassured him hastily. “But –“
“But Annie is the oldest,” Michael agreed. “And she’s, you know, Annie.”
“Thank you, I think."
“There’s one in every generation of Walters,” said Aunt Vera. Though she had told them this many, many times before, Annie never tired of hearing it. “There’s always one Walter who carries the weight of all the others. It was my grandmother, and then it was my father, and then it was me, and now it’s you.”
“And it’ll be Isaac next,” said Michael, but Aunt Vera shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully, thinking about the three talisman animals laid out in a row at the foot of the bed upstairs. “My money’s on Lucy.”
“Did you manage to get them to sleep?” asked Annie, looking at the clock with concern.
“I think they’ll be all right. I put them in their parents’ bed.”
“You did what?” exclaimed Annie.
“That’s where they wanted to be.”
“You don’t think that’s going to freak them out?”
“They’re already freaked out, darling.”
“Yes, but –“
“They have the animals, they’ll be all right.”
“What animals?”
“The dolphin, the T-Rex and the cat,” chimed in Michael. “How do you not know about this?”
“Michael,” said Aunt Vera repressively.
“They have a million stuffed animals,” snapped Annie defensively, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, but these are the favorite ones,” said Michael, “so they have them pretty much all the time. Lucy has the white cat – her name is Princess, by the way. Isaac’s is the big green stuffed Tyrannosaurus Rex. His name is Murphy. And Sophia’s is the pink dolphin, whose name is Dolphin. He’s kind of the spokesman.”
“The what?”
“Dolphin holds regular conferences with Princess and Murphy,” explained Aunt Vera. “He speaks for all of them. So if Sophia tells you that Dolphin told her something –“
“That means it’s a general consensus,” said Michael. “That it’s what all three of the kids are thinking.”
“How about I just talk to them like normal human beings instead of using a pink stuffed dolphin as an intermediary?”
“Because they’re traumatized right now –“
“Yeah, well, so am I.”
“ . . . and because you scare them.”
“I scare them?” Annie set down her coffee cup on the table just a little too hard, and the loud noise jarred them all. She took a deep breath to collect herself. “How do I scare them?”
“You forget that they’re children,” Aunt Vera pointed out. “They love you, but they’re not entirely sure that they like you. You’re going to need to get to know them. You’re going to need to meet them at their level.”
“I know they’re children, Aunt Vera,” said Annie tightly. “I think I’m very reasonable with them. I understand that they need a little extra breathing room right now with what they’ve been through. But I don’t think communicating through a Lisa Frank toy is going to be the thing that makes the difference.”
Aunt Vera started to say something, but something in the way Annie was clutching her coffee mug in hands so tight their knuckles turned white gave her pause, and she decided everything else could wait.
“I think it’s time for bed, my darlings,” she said. “There’s a great deal to do tomorrow and we all need sleep.”
Annie nodded. “You two go on to bed,” she said, gathering up the dishes. “I’ll be along in a minute.”
Michael kissed his sister on the cheek and went upstairs, while Aunt Vera lingered for a few moments longer in the kitchen doorway, watching her niece’s deft hands as she washed coffee cups. There was something in the way that Annie carried herself – that ramrod-straight spine, the elegant curve of the back of her neck beneath her soft dark hair – that spoke of a rigid loneliness, an intentional distance from the maelstrom of the human world. There was so much weight on those small shoulders, and so little that anyone could do about it.
“When does it get easier?” Annie asked her suddenly, not turning around. “How many times do I have to go through this before it stops feeling like I’m being buried alive?”
Aunt Vera was silent. They rarely discussed the death of Annie’s parents or grandparents, but she knew the girl well enough to know that the scars were always there, just under the surface. How many times, she thought to herself wearily. How damn many. But this was different. This was Grace and Danny, and they were too young, they were half a century away from what should have been their time, and there was nothing Vera could say or do to make any of it better.
Annie turned around then to see some deep emotion blazing in Aunt Vera’s eyes, and they looked at each other for a long moment before Vera surprised Annie by her next choice of words.
“’I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground,’” she said softly, then kissed her niece on the cheek and departed, leaving a wake of rosemary-scented calm behind her.
Annie was feverishly grateful for that soft figure with her untidy copper-gray hair as she watched her close the door of the guest room. She placed the last mug on the yellow tea towel next to the sink to dry, then climbed the stairs towards the twins’ room, where Michael was already contorting his lanky frame into Isaac’s twin bed, lit by a soft rosy glow from the Disney princess night-light in Sophia’s corner of the room and the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling over Isaac’s.
Annie climbed in across from him, rustling the flannel sheets as she tried to make herself comfortable, and the poem’s final lines floated into her mind with a piercing clarity. She whispered them to herself over and over, like a mantra, as she tossed and turned in Sophia’s narrow bed.
“I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
Chapter Five: Marcus Rey
The accident happened on Wednesday.
By the time the weekend was over, the list of new things Annie had learned to hate in the past three days – including but not limited to tuna casseroles, sympathy phone calls, shiny smiling families in holiday commercials, and snow – had reached a considerable length. Upon careful reflection, however, she decided that the one she hated worst of all was obituaries.
Probably nobody liked obituaries – probably even the people who wrote them secretly wished they had other jobs and said vague things when they went to high school reunions like “I write for the paper” instead of admitting what they actually did – but they had gone very rapidly from something that Annie had never particularly considered in her life to her deepest and most violent loathing in all of the world, the magnitude of which staggered her. They filled her with an echoing, hollow sadness she could scarcely bear. She couldn’t have fully articulated it to someone else – had tried, a little, to explain it to Michael and then given up – but it was piercingly clear in her mind, and was something to do with the weight of them. The density of all that g
rief. An entire section of the newspaper devoted to nostalgic remembrances written by people trying to hold back their sorrow. Tiny windows into the life of someone who had been loved and lost. “Her favorite flower was daisies.” “He loved trains.” “She won six national awards for her Lady Baltimore cake.” “He was a devoted grandfather.” “She was a beloved school librarian.” All real people, all loved by someone. Why, why, why? Why pretend that it was a golden anniversary toast? Why call it a “Celebration of Life”? Didn’t these people understand that if any one of us ever learned to think of the dead – all the dead, everyone’s dead – as real people, people who had been loved, that the world would stop moving, actually stop spinning altogether on its axis, because the weight of all that weeping would make us all collectively unable to move on? Who could live like this? Who could read these pages every day, witnessing the intimate private grief of all those parents and children, husbands and wives, and let themselves feel any of it? “He is gone and we are broken without him and nothing will ever be the same again.” What more is there, really, to say?
Spouses. Spouses were the worst. It was excruciating. It made her never want to get married. Because which was worse? “Betty is survived by Paul, her husband of fifty-two years,” a statement which would break your spirit completely under the crushing burden of pity for poor lost Paul, who probably never cooked a meal in his life and doesn't know where Betty kept the broom, and will live out the rest of his days sitting in a recliner in front of his TV eating frozen dinners reheated by some perpetually irritable niece who wishes Paul and Betty's children lived nearby so she didn't have to take precious time from her spin classes to come over here and make Paul dinner like this was 1957?
Or, is it worse the other way, is it worse to say “Betty was preceded in death by her beloved husband Paul,” which only sounds cheerful and silver-lining-ish if you're a person who believes in the afterlife (which Annie wasn’t sure she was). And this scenario is no improvement, of course, because now here you have the specter of all the years Betty spent alone without Paul, sitting in her dining room with no one to talk to, staring at the fading wallpaper and eating alone at a table designed for six. Honestly the thought of it was enough to make you crawl underneath the blankets and never come out again.
Of course, there was a third story, a very different story, the one for which Annie was currently struggling to find any remotely appropriate words. Because sometimes, every once in awhile, you could dispense with the soul-shattering pity for the lonely surviving spouse and introduce a new kind of horror:
“They died together, simultaneously, in a fiery car wreck.”
No sunshine and roses, no nostalgic soft-focus flashbacks. Just hot smoking metal and ambulance sirens and two dead bodies. That was what she wanted to write. That was the only thing, in this moment, that felt sufficiently true.
But Aunt Vera would kill her, and Michael would sigh, and everyone at the funeral Mass would stare at her like she was some kind of monster, so instead it was all about Danny’s groundbreaking research on industrial pollution in the Columbia River and Grace winning the Governor’s Award for her work with the domestic violence shelter, it was all “church choir” this and “soccer mom” that, it was a lovely rosy portrait in bullet points of all their greatest achievements that would never in a hundred years be able to capture a fraction of the people that they really were. Or why Annie had loved them. Or how the hell she was going to keep herself from permanently screwing up their kids.
She closed her laptop with a decisive click and leaned back against the sofa cushions, wishing for the millionth time in three days that there was someone, anyone, who could carry this burden for her. But that person – those people – were gone. She had no one but herself. She had no one to lean on when everyone else was leaning on her. Michael and Aunt Vera would do as much as they could, but it was going to be her living in this house. It was going to be her, now, the one who had never wanted children, who had to become the parent. Everyone was looking to her to take care of this, and she had to do it right.
And she would be doing it alone.
There were very, very few times when Annie wished she was married. She’d come dangerously close to it once, and had very clearly decided it wasn’t for her. She had lived alone a long time and could fix her own flat tires, kill her own spiders, install new electronics without a manual, climb up on the roof to clean out the gutters by herself, and handle all the other things that sitcoms seemed to indicate that households needed men for. She had her family, her colleagues and her students, so she wasn’t lacking for social interaction; and as for other, more intimate kinds of loneliness, and what she might or might not do to assuage them . . . Well. Those were things that well-brought-up people did not discuss.
Regardless, Annie was thirty-eight years old and her last (and only) serious relationship had flamed out rather spectacularly four years ago – there’d been nobody since – and yet she had felt for the most part, when she looked at her life, entirely satisfied. Content. Happiness didn’t always look like what Hollywood told you it would look like; not everyone gets wild romance in New York and Paris, after all. Sometimes happiness was a class full of bright, competent students who showed up on time with their reading actually completed and asked smart questions, followed by dinner and a movie on the couch with your siblings and returning home to a glass of wine and Jane Austen in bed. That was plenty. She was fine.
She had been fine.
But, of course, that was before.
The ache she was experiencing now was more than just grief, she realized; it was the sudden realization that what she had thought of as her own self-reliance was really, all this time, a quiet dependence on someone else to help her shoulder the family’s burdens, leaving her free to have a life of her own. While Danny was on top of things, there had been no reason for Annie to worry about the family. While Grace was the family matriarch, Annie could be a supporting player. She was valued, she had skills the others lacked, but she was not the sole anchor. She could move about freely.
Not anymore.
But, since following that particular line of thought would end in nothing but heartache, she took a deep breath, swallowed the Dark Thing back down into the pit of her stomach, and got up off the couch to go make herself look presentable. She had to be at the attorney’s office in less than an hour. The fate of three small children was about to be legally and permanently placed into her hands, she reflected, so she ought to at least brush her hair.
* * *
“Miller and Miller, please hold. Miller and Miller, please hold.” The blonde receptionist barely looked up at Annie as she waved her into the lobby and motioned her to take a seat. The firm was small – a father-and-son team with just a few associates. Annie had lobbied hard, four years ago after Lucy was born when everyone in the family updated their wills, for Danny to go with Wheaton Bartlett Pettygrove, the largest and most-respected family law firm in the city, but Danny had gone to high school with Charles Miller and claimed Charles was the only attorney he trusted.
“Miller and Miller, please hold. Miller and Miller, please hold.”
The waiting area was small, though reasonably elegant and comfortable, and Annie – who had arrived early – had it to herself except for one other person (a tall dark-haired man who needed a haircut) who arrived a minute or two after she did and had sat down in one of the other leather armchairs with his back to her.
Annie picked up a two-month-old New Yorker and began flipping through it as she listened to the receptionist’s singsong refrain. Who here was so goddamned important that everyone in the greater Portland area was perfectly willing to brave the desolate no-man’s-land of tinkling classical hold music until Miller or Miller or one of their lesser minions were finally at their leisure?
Annie raised her eyes from the article she had been reading about the National Zoo in Washington D.C. to glare at the receptionist, watching her send phone call after phone call into the abyss
of waiting on hold, and felt the girl’s chirpy voice begin to grate on the inside of her skull. Had anyone who placed a call in the last half hour had actually been connected to anyone they were trying to reach? Were they all just on hold forever? What the hell were they paying her for? Was she someone's niece? How did she get this job? Was she chewing gum?
Annie had taken a sudden, irrational dislike to this girl and badly wanted to be rude to her. She briefly considered walking over to the desk and saying something scathing, just as the incessant rhythmic torture of “Miller and Miller, please hold” ceased abruptly and was replaced by blissful silence. Annie looked over and saw that the girl was on the phone, listening intently to someone. She hung up and looked over at Annie and smiled, with real warmth, and Annie felt a little kick of guilt in the pit of her stomach. The girl was very pretty and very young. She was a kid. Couldn’t have been more than twenty. Maybe she was new and just figuring out the switchboard. Maybe there was another receptionist in another office who directed the calls where they were actually supposed to go. Maybe Annie could stop judging people as incompetent just because she was having a terrible day.
She was so busy feeling relieved that she hadn’t actually gone over to yell at her for not answering the phones that she didn’t realize the girl was speaking to her.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said Mr. Miller is free, you can both go on in. Left at the end of the hall, then right.”
“Did you say ‘both?’” Annie started to say, but the phone rang again and “Miller and Miller, please hold” commenced anew. She picked up her purse and coat to head towards the door the receptionist had indicated and realized that the shaggy-haired guy was following her. Evidently their appointments were for the same time; Annie hoped for her sake that Danny Walter’s will rated a high enough priority that she got Miller Senior. Please let this guy have the kid lawyer.
