That would be like me, to hear one ominous murmur in the next room and zip outside to swing or do something else equally pointless until they forced me to listen to whatever they had to tell me.
I was sitting in a fraying green lawn chair on the patio behind the house, wearing a T-shirt and shorts rolled up to the tops of my legs. It wasn’t really sunny enough for the outfit, but I’d slept in it. My toenails bore patches of red polish across the centers, what was left after the nails grew out and the polish flaked off. When I shifted in my chair a faint, sour scent rose up off of me. That morning my mother had promised me lunch at the Kiltie if I got myself ready. I’d made a sarcastic comment about dressing for the drive-in, but I got her point. I’d been here three weeks. It was probably time to try and get it together.
A book was facedown on my lap. After reading the same paragraph four times I had turned it over on one leg and stared out across the yard. The swing set, dome-climber, and jungle gym had all been gone for years, but I thought I could still see a slight depression in the earth, the grass sparser in the spots where the hollow metal poles had been sunk into the dirt.
You couldn’t plan a truly wonderful day in the backyard, I was remembering. You never said, Today is the day I’m going to build a town under the dome-climber. You just went out there with an old blanket and threw it over the metal dome and got inside the tent it made and waited to see what came to you in the warm musty-smelling shade. If it was a good day, everything unfolded as you went: You lived alone in the forest beneath the blanket and ate roots and berries, and you stayed out there well into a fall evening, till your fingers were pleasantly numb from cold. Or the swing was a time-and-universe-traveling swing, operated by pressing the chain-links as buttons, and you might accidentally end up on the Viking planet and battle your way through them before launching yourself back onto your swing, belly down, clutching furiously at the links to blast off. I remembered the Viking war as taking up most of a day, but it had probably lasted twenty minutes before my mother called me in for an egg salad sandwich. I had tried to re-create it a few times, but it never worked.
I was reinstalled in my old room. For some reason Mom had wheeled in the television, though I could have come out and sat on the couch in the living room. I didn’t point this out, figuring it was easier for both of us if I stayed out of her way. She brought me plates of eggs, cooked carrots, and sliced pink supermarket tomatoes. When I was sitting out in the yard, as I often was, she’d appear at my elbow bearing sweating glasses of ice water or juice with an odd, gritty texture and malty aftertaste. I suspected she dissolved some kind of protein powder into it.
I’d been out in the yard since Simone and Hillary left an hour before. They’d driven here from Madison, sat with me in the living room for half an hour or so, and then stood up and hugged me. I was embarrassed at looking the way I knew I did and kept the hugs brief and distant, averting my face.
The house on Chambers Street was empty, they’d told me. No one had heard from Evan what he would do with it. Here, they had said, and they each handed me their keys to the front door. There had been no advance decision that I would be in charge of it, but there was a faint air of deference in the way they dug into their pockets at the same time, each presenting me with a key on the palm of her hand.
I had set them in the crumbs on the half-empty plate of cookies my mother had put out. They both stared at the keys for a moment and then turned back to me. Hillary tore at a cuticle.
Simone cleared her throat. “The funeral was terrible,” she said. “Her parents planned it, so it was all God’s great plan and what did we learn from it all.”
Hillary looked at me and looked away, sipping the iced tea my mother had made for them. The sunlight glinted off her glasses. It was hot in the living room, I realized; the heat baked the dark carpeting and heated the air. I shifted uncomfortably. I hadn’t showered in days.
“Why didn’t you come?” Hillary said. She’d set her glass down. “It was very odd that you weren’t there.”
“Hillary,” Simone said. She turned to me. “People understood. You were there when it mattered. I wouldn’t ask but . . .” She paused, then shrugged slightly, as if to say there was no gracious way to continue. But she kept her gaze on me. It was clear she wanted an answer.
I felt sick, the tannic tea on an empty stomach, the aspirin I had taken for a headache before they arrived. Simone, flushed, dropped her eyes to the cookie in her hand.
“I just . . . I woke up and it felt like I’d heard something in my sleep. I went in to check on her but—” I felt my face getting red. “She was . . . I wasn’t there fast enough, I guess.”
They stared at me. I shouldn’t have tried to lie. They weren’t amateurs—they knew what we’d been trying to prepare for, and in fact they seemed calmer about this than I was. Had everyone else understood how close we’d been to the end but me?
I could have told them the rest of the story, but suddenly it occurred to me how it would sound. How could I say I had taken away the call button, whether she had told me to or not? I had actually moved it out of the way. At the time I was sure I was preventing her from accidentally summoning someone, the same way I’d forced my own hand away from the button, but in the days since Kate had died, everything that had happened in that room seemed mysterious and malleable. I could reinterpret every part of it, second-guess each decision I had made. What if I had completely misunderstood her? In that professional, appraising way, Simone and Hillary might hear what I’d done and know I’d done it wrong. Most people had no idea what to imagine, but they did, and my worst fear was that they would find some loophole I hadn’t, and say simply, But why didn’t you just—
“And I was at the funeral,” I said. “Jill and I came late and stayed toward the back. I just didn’t want to make a scene.”
Hillary looked at me. “Why would you make a scene?”
I was afraid of Evan. I was afraid he’d grab me and drag me off to a corner to demand I explain.
“I guess I wouldn’t have.”
We had arrived as they were closing the casket, unfolding a cloth over it, and as Jill and I waited to sneak in to a seat I had had the overwhelming urge to walk forward, calmly, so everyone would know I wasn’t crazy, and just raise the lid, keep the coffin open. The urge didn’t feel as macabre at the time as it seemed later; I’d just realized with the force of irrefutable logic that we didn’t have to seal her inside that thing, cover her indifferent face, which I had glimpsed surrounded by pale satin. We had been standing at the back of the chapel, Jill and I, and I’d grabbed her wrist without thinking, captivated by the possibility of reprieve. I was the only one who knew we could all refuse to do this. We could still have her here. Not forever, but we could put it off. For an hour, a whole afternoon, till tomorrow.
Up toward the front of the chapel I’d seen Evan’s blond head, his dark suit. I felt Jill staring at me, and shook my head without looking at her. We stood there and watched two people wheel the casket toward the front of the church, covered in a green-and-white sheet that looked like a tablecloth and that Kate would have hated. She would have hated all of this.
Jill and I had taken a seat in the last pew. I didn’t run after the casket, it goes without saying. But I could not forget that I could, that we all could, and I marveled at the sheer willpower of what we were all doing there—not the service itself, but its aim. Step by step we’d force ourselves to cover her, layer by layer, take her body somewhere else, somewhere far from us, and leave her there.
I let go of Jill’s arm then and concentrated on the back of a woman’s head in the next pew—ash blond, dark roots, the smooth curled-under ends a little flat at the very back where she hadn’t been able to reach. A few rows ahead of me I saw Kate’s sister, the mother of the boy who’d gotten married. Where was the nephew? Already on his honeymoon, maybe. I couldn’t remember where they were supposed to go. The wedding seemed like months ago.
I had the feeling that all
of this, the funeral, the gathering, the ceremony, was something that had just gotten out of hand because of a single decision I had made, like fables in which one lie leads to crazy, grand consequences. If I’d come into Kate’s room a few seconds sooner, would I have caught her in a less resolute moment? It would only have taken a moment to press the button and then she would, in all likelihood, still be alive.
Could she have pressed it herself? I thought so, unless she’d gotten so weak in the past several weeks that even that was beyond her. I’d managed not to comprehend how thin she’d become; it was possible I’d avoided seeing that loss of strength as well.
I had gazed toward the voice issuing from a woman singing into a microphone near the coffin, still pondering. The church smelled of sawdust and perfume. Before I moved in with Kate, I had occasionally wondered what a crisis might be like, but I had envisioned her with a certain amount of tranquillity, calmer, the certainty more understandable. And after one imagined scene like that, having discharged my duty to at least picture it once, I had put the possibility out of my mind. It still didn’t seem possible that that night—her terror and her determination, the way I’d teetered on the edge of overriding everything she’d ordered me to do and nearly jammed my hand down on the button—was really what she’d wanted.
The air was stifling. As the singing reached into higher octaves I had to steady myself on the back of the pew in front of me. How had I managed not to acknowledge what it meant to promise to obey her?
There were whole days in my parents’ house when I lay in bed and stewed, hating her for being so circumspect—speaking in terms of asking her permission to call, of talk about remaining in control instead of saying plainly that we were talking about death. But I couldn’t stay angry. I knew that, had I let myself, I would have faced what I’d promised to do—not that single after-school-movie image of something quiet and dignified—but what I had really signed on for, and what, finally, I had done. Kate hadn’t needed to explain more than she did. I understood it; I just managed never to think about it.
It didn’t comfort me to know that I had done what I’d promised. I should never have told her I could do it.
JILL BROUGHT ME SOME of my things from Chambers Street, but everything else was still in there.
“What was the house like?” I asked her. “I may have left some food out; it’ll get ants. I don’t suppose you checked for ants.”
She looked at me, her face blank, and said, “No. Don’t worry about the ants.”
I was waiting to hear from Evan. I waited for him to send a registered letter, notarized, signed by a lawyer and telling me to remove my effects. I waited for him to drive to Oconomowoc in the middle of the night with my things in a trash bag and dump them on my parents’ lawn. I would have liked for him to do that, or I would have understood if he had made a bonfire of my clothes and books so I would wake up and see it flickering through the shades.
I intimated this to Jill. Nothing direct, just a veiled indication that I was afraid to encounter Evan. Not afraid, I amended, just worried, sort of.
Jill had been digging around her purse for her keys as I spoke. She was on her way to visit her parents, now that she was in Oconomowoc anyway. She glanced up at me briefly, then reached over and squeezed my hand. It felt strange. We were not hand squeezers. That was our mothers. We both stared down at her hand over mine for a second; then she took it away.
“Do you have enough to do out here?” she said. “Or maybe not. Maybe you’re just relaxing before you decide what to do.”
It must look like relaxing. It felt more like inertia so heavy there was little point in fighting it. When I let myself think of the things I ought to do—looking for a job, an apartment—they seemed to be incredibly intricate, detailed tasks.
“I picked up a few papers so you can look at apartments.” She paused delicately. “I don’t know what classes are still open but I bet you can find something.”
“I’m not going back to school right now,” I told her. I had been saying this in my head over and over, not in preparation for telling her but because it comforted me. How had I ever navigated the bureaucracy of the university, its deadlines and credit requirements and forms? I had, of course, and with no more difficulty than anyone else, and no doubt I would again, but I couldn’t imagine dealing with that now.
She nodded, unsurprised.
“How’s Mark?” I asked her. “Tim’s friend,” I added inanely, as though she wouldn’t know.
“He’s okay,” she said. “He said he called you but you haven’t called back.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. I hadn’t seen the point. The notion of having the energy or even the need to bother with it all—the stairs up to his apartment, keeping my fingernails away from the condom, the adjustments, shifts, and murmurs. Was that really what I was going to do now, anyway, go out and get laid?
EVEN AFTER SEVERAL WEEKS at home, I still awoke at odd intervals in the night: yanked upward at one, at quarter after three, at four. It took a few seconds every time to figure out where I was, and that the sound that had jarred me was the clanking of pipes or my father closing the bathroom door, and not the watery gurgle of breath over an intercom. The first few times it happened I picked up the clock radio next to the bed in a haze and listened to it as though I’d hear her through it, breathing.
I never dreamed of Kate. I wanted to. Jill had dreamed of her grandmother once, shortly after she’d died, and she said it had felt like a gift. I didn’t believe some spirit incarnation had come to her, or that one would really come to me, but I thought my mind might be keeping something back, one forgotten moment that could come to me like an apparition, that I could savor.
I tried to will it. At first I only thought of Kate when she had been happy: at the market, at parties, but it felt maudlin, undeserved, and self-serving: Oh how happy she’d been, the trouper, and wasn’t she happy somewhere else now too. So instead I pictured her stretched out on Evan’s bare mattress as I traced around her, smiling grimly up at the ceiling.
But I stopped after a few nights. I was afraid I wouldn’t get Kate standing calmly in my doorway, or laughing. I thought she would come to me pale and pinched with anger, her arms crossed, her lips a white-rimmed line.
WHEN I HAD BEEN home about four weeks I heard my mother answer the phone in the kitchen. From the way her voice rose and then lowered, the muffle of it where she must have stood at the far wall of the kitchen where I would not hear, I knew it was Evan. She came in after a few minutes and said, “That was Kate’s husband. He wondered if you’d like to get your things this week.” She sat down next to me and said, “He’s selling the house, so it needs to be cleared out a bit.”
“I’ll go,” I said. “Will you drive me?”
She nodded. “He asked that you send the house keys in the mail.” She stroked my hair and sighed. “Can I make you something for dinner?”
I HADN’T BEEN OUT much in the weeks I had been home, and back to Madison only for the funeral. As my mother and I walked down our driveway and got into the car to go to Chambers Street, the first thought that struck me was that it was too easy. No pause to lift and settle someone, no folding up a chair. It felt incomplete and careless to simply slide into a seat and snap the seat belt in place.
We didn’t speak during the drive. When we reached the neighborhood, I peered around at the people sitting on porches and kids tearing around yards. The neighbor’s dog was racing in circles around their house.
“My,” my mother said. “Those kids are loud.”
I knew those kids. They were always wrecking their bikes near our house.
“Remember when Jill and I lived near that elementary school?” I said. “They sound like bloody murder when they’re playing. I don’t know why people think it’s supposed to sound nice. Liam called them hyenas.”
She shot me a curious glance as she parked in the driveway. “Who’s Liam?”
I was looking up at the house. It had only been a mont
h since I had been here. There was no reason for it to be cobwebbed and decrepit, but it surprised me how neat it looked. The flowers in the window boxes were still blooming.
“What a nice little house,” my mother said.
The night Kate died, my mother and father had arrived together to take me back home, one of them to drive me and the other to drive my car. I had watched them get out of the car, my mother in her old jeans and a windbreaker, my father, oddly, in neat khaki pants. How comforting it was to see them coming toward me, so grave and calm. I experienced a vestigial surge of trust from childhood, as if all were truly well now. I rarely even spoke with my father other than hello and how are your grades, and it made the sight of him that much more significant now. What did I think he could do for me, just because he was here? But it had moved me, the sight of his thinning dark hair at the top of his skull when he bent down to help me up from the couch where I’d been waiting, the wrinkled flesh around his neck and jaw, soft, loosened from age.
I had been sitting there for an hour and a half when they arrived. The ambulance was gone, Kate was gone, but my blood raced anyway, my pulse running rapid as a sparrow’s heart. I think I was trembling. I was that way until my parents arrived. My father came in first. When I saw his shape in the doorway, the sloping width of his shoulders, his calm face, it tore me open.
I UNLOCKED THE FRONT door and held it open for my mother. Then I followed her inside.
It smelled like nothing at all. Not stale air, not flowers, not the last garlicky dinner I had cooked. I looked around: Nothing was out of place. The calla lilies that had been on the kitchen table were gone, the vase that had been drying upside down on a towel by the sink. Who had been here? I thought of something then, and went into the kitchen to look around. The funnel and tubing I had used to feed her was gone too, from its place beside the sink where we always left it after washing.
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