It was dark outside, she saw through the window. Had a whole day gone? Her eyes widened and she fell back on her pillow. A whole day, gone, and there weren’t many left. A day.
Well, she would get up. It was that simple. She would get out of the bed and out of the room and she would go for a walk. In life she had never allowed herself to lie in bed feeling sorry for herself and she certainly wasn’t going to die that way.
She pulled herself upright and let her legs hang over the edge of the bed; her toes touched the floor. Very good, toes still functioning, feet still complaining of cold floors. She scratched an itch alongside her nose. Good, face still functioning as well. So often it seemed only her brain and an infinitely sensitive cobweb of nerves in her lungs worked.
She stood up, tottered, and shuffled to the bureau. Her breath was short and taking in enough was painful. She felt dizzy and put both hands on the bureau to steady herself; after a minute she took out a sweater, which she put on right away, and a pair of gray wool socks. The sweater was rough and itchy, especially around the neck where it met the bare skin above her nightgown collar.
So far, so good, she told herself. She just needed to rest for a moment. She sat on the edge of her bed and pulled the socks on and rested her hands on her knees and was still save for the rising and falling of her chest. She reached into the drawer in the nightstand for the cigarettes and lighter.
At the top of the stairs she leaned against the wall for support. It was a long way down, and even longer back up. So, it would be good for her, not dying in bed. But she didn’t want to die. Wasn’t it amazing to find out that even wasted to nothing, even with no prospect of anything in life other than that bed and this pain, she rejected dying.
“It’s okay, Phillip, let go,” she’d said to him as he’d struggled at the very end, gasping, fighting.
What a horrible thing to say.
She started down the stairs, one step, one step.
Guilt overtook her in the form of an image of Phillip’s face in death. Let go, she’d told him. He’d had a broad nose and wide cheeks and his hair had always been slicked into place, but not when he died. And there was no peace in his eyes, no acceptance. He hadn’t listened to her. Guilt and time passing, year and year, month and day, all of it nothing, as meaningful as a measuring cup of water.
“The railroad people think they’ve invented time,” her father had said once, snapping the pages of his newspaper. “The Standard Time Act, if you can imagine such nonsense. Next they will try to sell us round trip tickets to God and cheap paper souls.”
What room was that, Mrs. Atlee wondered. A smoky fire, a low ceiling, Mother in her chair, an open book in her lap.
Father had read his paper in the evenings, sitting in the high-backed chair in the living room, snapping pages, commenting aloud for the family.
“Time zones,” her father had said. “They have replaced God’s time with money’s time, and we will all live to regret it. We have let the measurements themselves become the valued property. Money. Minutes. An acre is not land, it is only a term we use.”
Mrs. Atlee, a small girl in a blue dress playing on the floor, had pointed at her shoes.
“The shoe man measured my feet today,” she’d said.
“Very good dear,” he’d answered, behind his paper.
“Yes they did,” her mother had said, smiling at her.
Mrs. Atlee, a small woman in an oversized black sweater, made it to the bottom of the stairs, panting. She listened for her daughter and, hearing nothing, crossed the kitchen to the back door. On the back patio she sat panting in a white metal chair. It was very cold. It was nice to be very cold.
She lit a cigarette but could not get her breath back. Like drowning, she thought; like water filling me up. Oh God. She gripped the arms of the chair and breathed in but it wasn’t enough. Calm, she told herself, calm. You won’t be able to breathe if you’re panicked. She held the cigarette to her lips and attempted a drag. The long ash broke and fell on her sweater.
“Oh God,” she murmured.
She opened her eyes to the white moon hanging just above the bare outstretched tree limbs. The stars in their millions rippled and washed the sky like the downfalling sparks of a great firework.
“Mrs. Atlee?” Sam asked. “What are you doing out here?”
“Look, they move,” she said, nodding in the direction of the sky. “Look.”
Sam looked. To him the million lights were still. “Aren’t you cold?” he asked.
“I have a sweater,” she said. A breeze touched her hair.
“Let’s go inside,” Sam said. “Aren’t you hungry?”
She looked at him. “Yes, I suppose so.” She nodded but sat still. She had no breath and couldn’t feel her legs.
“Oh,” Sam said. He put his briefcase down.
Mrs. Atlee began to cry.
“It’s okay,” he said, feeling stupid. What exactly was okay? He picked her up and carried her, feeling her bones.
She rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. It wasn’t Phillip so she told herself it was; it wasn’t her father so she told herself it was but this walk was unsteady, something her father and Phillip had never been. Why couldn’t she have her father there one more time—if it were all ending soon, what did it matter if he came back to carry her up to bed one more time? One knows, no matter how often one gets inundated with life and forgets, that one is peripheral, that there is an entire world—but never more so than at the end, when one can perceive the continuing motion, the rhythm of which one is not a part. The world without you in it.
They started up the stairs. She could feel the muscles in the boy’s arms straining. She could see him coming up to the room—next week, two weeks—to put her possessions in boxes, pausing to sit at the edge of the bed in which she’d died. She thought of a child somewhere in Boston, born the minute after she died, to inhabit a time she never felt.
She felt herself laid gently on her bed. “Thank you, Sam,” she said.
“Of course. Would you like some water? Or something to eat?”
“Yes, yes. Something. But sit,” she said. She gasped for air. “Sit and talk for a moment,” she managed to say.
Sam pulled a chair close to the edge of the bed.
“I need a bible,” Mrs. Atlee said, turning her eyes to Sam. Her hair hung over her forehead. “Sam,” she added.
“Yes, Mrs. Atlee,” he said. “I’ll get you one.”
“Good.” She looked away from him.
Her pale hand moved toward him. He stared at it for a moment, unsure, then took it in both of his hands.
“I never used to cry. Never. And now I do all the time. I suppose self-pity comes with age.”
“No,” Sam said. “I don’t think I’ve seen you cry before today. I—not that—”
“I feel I’m crying all the time now,” Mrs. Atlee said. “All the theories of life—all the trying… trying to understand or take control of it. And now, at the end, I just—I only love it, Sam.”
“The end,” Sam said. “Don’t say that, Mrs. Atlee.”
“Why not? It hurts so much. Maybe this is it. The doctors telling you is intellectual. It’s like an adult telling you something when you’re a teenager. You know they’re right, probably. Or you know you’re supposed to think they know more than you, anyway. But….”
Mrs. Atlee licked her dry lips. Sam handed her a glass of water.
“But,” she said again.
Sam felt the gentle pressure of her squeezing his hand.
“But you don’t know anything till you feel it yourself,” she said quietly. Her breath was uneven. “And I feel—every day I love it more and leaving it seems worse and worse.” She looked at Sam and smiled. “What peace,” she said. “What peace to know I only love it…. I don’t expect anything from it anymore. What peace, Sam.”
She closed her eyes and cried; her short, hard gasps brought on a coughing fit. Her hand readjusted around Sam’s and held
his tighter.
“I’m not scared,” she said. “Only of the pain. Not of dying.”
The room was quiet and Mrs. Atlee fell asleep.
Sam heard a car door shutting. Mrs. Atlee was likely to sleep for a while, but if she woke up and he was not there that would be awful. She was fragile tonight—somehow she had never seemed fragile and now she did. She was right—he’d known she was dying and only now, when he’d felt how fragile she was, did he know that sometime soon she would no longer exist.
He was still holding her hand. The dark sky was visible through the window. He bowed his head and tried to pray. The noise of her breathing, harsh and wheezy, filled the room.
Sam gently removed his hand from hers, took the nearly empty water glass from the nightstand, and left the room, looking back once; Mrs. Atlee’s face, set in a grimace, seemed impossibly white.
As he neared the bottom of the stairs he heard Robin’s cooking music, a willowy amplified flute scuttling along above drums and driving bass.
“Oh, Sam,” she said, sprinkling green spice on a pink slice of meat. “You’re here already.”
“Yes,” Sam said. She was trying to be pleasant, he should do the same. But it wasn’t early, really; she just liked to tease him that he always left work early.
“I found your briefcase outside,” she said. “I brought it in. But please make an effort to not leave things lying around.”
“Okay,” Sam said.
He put the water glass on the kitchen table and went into the living room. He wanted to avoid the thrusting music, he wanted to bring Mrs. Atlee something to eat, but with Robin in the kitchen he couldn’t put together a leftover supper and microwave it; she’d complain that he was in her way, the kitchen was tiny, and so on. He picked up the phone and dialed his voicemail, just for something to do while he thought. There was an old saved message from Alice on there. He’d forgotten about it.
“Hi Sam,” the message started, Alice’s voice soft but roughened by the poor sound of the recording. “It’s Alice. I know you’re at work, I didn’t want—I just have a second so I wanted to tell you—you can call me tomorrow if you want. During the day, okay? I totally understand if you—if you can’t. But call if you can. Okay. Bye-bye.”
Sam erased the message. He stood in front of the cluttered bookcase, scanning the shelves slowly, trying to remember if he’d ever seen a bible in the house. Didn’t most people have a bible in the house somewhere? He could buy one, that might be nice, actually, he could give it to Mrs. Atlee and when—well he could give her one, it would be a nice gift.
“Are you going to eat with us?” Robin asked, leaning into the room. “I can make some extra, if you’d like.”
“Oh—ahh, no, thank you,” Sam answered. She would cook some for her mother, though, wouldn’t she? Of course she would. She’d also make her mother ask for it if she could.
“What are you looking for?” she asked, drying her reddened hands with a dishtowel. “Looking for a good read? You’re welcome to one of mine.” She nodded at the section of the bookshelf in which her shiny murder mysteries were alphabetized.
“No, thanks,” Sam said. “Actually, Mrs.—your mother asked me to get her a bible, so I was wondering if we had one. If you guys had one.”
“A bible?” Robin asked. She stopped drying her hands. “Oh,” she added.
“I don’t remember seeing one, now that I think about it,” Sam said. “I mean, since I was a little kid.”
“She wants a bible,” Robin said. She looked at him, her eyes for a moment full of comprehension and struggle.
Sam almost reached out to her. “She just—” he started to say.
“Yes, yes, we have one,” Robin interrupted, blinking and sighing. “It’s here somewhere.” She put the dishtowel down and searched, kneeling to scan the lowest shelves behind the TV stand. The thumping, floating music carried in from the kitchen. “Here it is,” she said, straightening. “Here, Sam.”
“Thank you,” he said, taking the small leather-bound book from her. The edges of the pages were red.
“That was my great-grandfather’s,” Robin said. “I wonder if Mother will remember it.”
Sam opened the book gently. On the first tissue-thin page, in black ink faded brown, in tiny, formal hand, was written, “Arthur South, new family bible. Boston, 1868.” Underneath that, in smaller writing, in different inks, were names and dates. “Charles Ware, b. May 8, 1868. Theodore Lowell, b. October 16, 1869. Isabel Parker, b. February 12, 1872.” A different hand, in darker ink, recorded Arthur South’s death and those of his sons, as well as the births of Mrs. Atlee and her three younger brothers. A third hand, in light ink faded almost entirely, had written in flowery letters next to Isabel’s name, “RIP at last, 1919.”
“Oh,” Sam said. “This is strange.”
“What?” Robin asked.
Sam frowned. “A guy came to see me—he said he’d gotten my name—” He looked around.
“What?” Robin said.
Sam blinked. “I had a client with the same name, that’s all,” he said. “It’s just a coincidence.”
“South?” Robin asked. “That’s my mother’s maiden name. They used to be a very influential family in Boston. I wonder if it was some long-lost cousin or something.”
Sam rubbed his chin. “I guess I’ll take this up to her,” he said, gesturing with the bible.
“Supper won’t be too long,” Robin said. “You can take her a plate later.”
Sam refilled Mrs. Atlee’s water glass and started slowly up the stairs. Mr. South comes to his office with a deed for a piece of land belonging to an Isabel South, who died in 1919, aged—well, according to this, forty-seven. This is the person in the bible, of course, the person—wasn’t that the aunt Mrs. Atlee had told him about? What did “RIP at last” mean? So Mrs. Atlee was—what—a cousin of Mr. South’s?
His shoes slid with a grainy noise on the wooden steps. As he came around a turn he heard a low, gurgling cry. He started to run, water slopping over the edge of the glass onto his hand. The low cry continued, a moan, as if Mrs. Atlee would be screaming if she could.
Sam pushed the door open. The room was dim, the light beside the bed seemed weaker than usual, spreading in thin mist. Sam put the bible on the bureau and went to Mrs. Atlee’s side. She was moaning, her eyes wide.
“Mrs. Atlee?” he said, touching her shoulder.
Her eyes opened, bulging. “Sam,” she said.
“Are you all right? Have some water.”
“Oh,” she said. She drank from the glass.
“What is it?” he asked.
“My God, Sam. I—” She gasped for breath. “She—she—I know it now.”
Sam stood up and looked around the room. He shivered. The yellow light stained the bedspread and Mrs. Atlee’s face, the books on the nightstand, the armchair. Sam turned suddenly toward the door, quickly back to Mrs. Atlee, and to the door again. The window above the bed was open. He felt Mrs. Atlee take his hand. The room was cold, somehow damp. He shouldn’t have left, he thought. He’d known it would be hard for her to wake up alone.
“It’s okay,” Sam said, leaning over her. “Did you open the window?”
Her wide eyes took him in, yellow and gray, sky blue and thunderstorm green.
“She was here,” Mrs. Atlee said. “You don’t understand, Sam, she was here, in this room. My aunt. Oh, Sam.”
Sam held her cold hand in both of his. “Who was here?” he asked.
“My Aunt Isabel,” Mrs. Atlee said. “I’m dying, Sam. I know it now.”
“What?” Sam asked. He looked quickly around the room again.
“You—you can—try to understand, Sam. I know you can feel it.”
“What? Who was here?” Sam asked.
Mrs. Atlee was still. Sam panicked, opened his mouth to call her name, but her heavy gurgling breathing resumed.
“Which is lonelier,” she said. “Dying alone or with your family around you and you know you
have to cut off from them and do it.”
“Shhh,” Sam said.
Mrs. Atlee turned on her side, away from him.
Sam retrieved the bible from across the room and sat in the chair beside the bed.
Chapter Twenty-One
Resolve
Sam looked at his watch. He stood and moved to the window, looking out at the lights in other buildings. He needed to leave or he would be very late to see Mrs. Atlee; he took a quick inventory of the work he had to do and, yawning, decided it could be done in the morning. As he pulled his coat on the phone rang and he answered it.
“Sam Morgan,” he said.
“Hi, Sam.”
“Alice? Hi, how are you?”
“I’m fine, I’m ok.”
“Good, good.”
“Yeah. I need to talk to you, Sam, if that’s ok.”
“Of course. What’s going on?”
“Can I see you?”
“Sure. Anytime.” Sam sat down.
“Ok,” Alice said. “Let’s meet in an hour—can you make it in an hour?”
Sam thought of Mrs. Atlee. “Well, I have to—”
“I know,” Alice said. “You have to go to your grandmother’s. This is very important, or I wouldn’t ask.”
“Ok,” Sam said. “We can get coffee or something.”
“Sure,” Alice said. “What’s your—where do you get off the subway? I’ll meet you there, just for a minute.”
“Yes, fine,” Sam said. He told her where the train stop near his apartment was and hung up. He noticed a white envelope on the floor near the door, as if it had been slid under. His name was written on the front in elaborate script and it was sealed with red wax imprinted “JS”. Sam tore the envelope open. The white card inside was embossed with two dogs, stretching toward each other as if to touch noses. The same elaborate script proclaimed a date and time for a supper at the Beacon Club. “I must insist that you come” was written across the bottom, signed J. South. He turned the invitation over; there was no RSVP information.
Sam smiled. Supper at a fancy club on Beacon Hill. That would certainly be something new. Mrs. Atlee would have to tell him what to wear and give him some advice on how to act. He put the envelope in his overcoat pocket and left his office, nodding goodnight to the few people still working. In the elevator his mind turned back to Alice. Maybe she wanted to tell him that she felt something, too. But that was just hoping, her voice hadn’t sounded excited like that. She didn’t feel anything for him beyond friendship and she shouldn’t. She had kids. You couldn’t have a future with a married woman. What was the best-case scenario, that she’d leave her husband for him? Then he’d be a step-father. It was a stupid crush and he ought to stop thinking about her.
THE GHOST DETECTIVE: Boston Page 21
