“I’m very sorry.”
He reached toward the sealed tomb entrance but didn’t touch it. “I was rarely sick. I was never injured. I died in my sleep. At peace, to some. I was never at peace. Such a burden—the desire to have faith as strong as the desire to abandon it. I prayed for the burden to lift, but it did not.” Noble faced me. “When I was called to go, I refused to pass the gates. I disobeyed. Why honor a father who won’t ease his child’s pain? And in the instant I refused, I realized the fallibility, that all I had been told was not gospel.” His smile was bitter.
“Why do you come to your remains, Noble?”
“The ache for my body eases the ache of my soul.”
“So why pray when you don’t have hope for an answer?”
“You are lucky that you have never believed. I wish I still did not.”
MORE THAN TEN YEARS had passed since I checked on Simon Beeker. The fifties were history. It was 1962.
He walked down the banquette with his head immobile above his long neck. That stretch of vertebrae, as if he had one or two extra, is what I recognized first. Then I scrutinized the proud, intelligent face that still bore his grandmother’s nose and his father’s Caribbean eyes.
He nodded cordially to neighbors along the way. The briefcase in his right hand looked heavy, but he did not stoop to equalize the weight. Simon’s left arm swayed with military precision. With each upswing, his wedding band glinted in the autumn morning sunlight. Coils of gray spiraled throughout his close-cut hair. His suit was navy, well fit, and he wore a white shirt and orange block print tie. He was forty-six, but he could have been mistaken for being a decade younger.
The high school grounds were quiet, too early for students to arrive. Simon walked into the red brick building and whistled down the bright hall. He took a drink from a fountain, inspected his image in a half-glassed door, and checked his watch.
In a classroom, he placed the briefcase on the desk and withdrew a stack of papers. Exams, graded. On the board, he began to write a list of names from the Civil War. Along the walls were posters of family trees, some that went no further back than two generations, some that included only first names on earlier branches, many with empty or question-marked dates. Simon had done his own, too. He included his parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, half-siblings, his wife, and their three children.
The back wall had a large, neatly painted wooden sign screwed into the masonry: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana, 1863–1952.
Simon dusted his hands away from his body. He reached into his briefcase and took out a battered textbook. The print on the cover was outdated, a typeface familiar in the Depression years, when modernity was embodied by bold sleekness. The second book was much older, well loved. He opened the cover and turned the first few pages slowly, copyright, title page, inscription. A first edition, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. To Mr. Simon Beeker. Regards, Andrew O’Connell. Simon’s smile was resolute.
Moments after the bell rang, young people began to enter his classroom.
“Morning, Mr. Beeker,” they said as they placed homework assignments on the edge of his desk.
“Good morning,” he replied. Simon watched them file into their seats. He looked as if he had something important to say.
SEVEN WEEKS had passed since either spoke a complete sentence to the other. Neither attempted to find the humility, or courage, to make amends. The silence, more than their physical separation, grew in its power to keep them apart for good.
On Saturday, Scott returned close to noon to an empty house. He grinned as he went to shower. His musty salt odor barely masked a ginger essence that wasn’t his. The smell had followed him home before. Someone from his running group had his attention. The intensity, however, had changed. Its presence wasn’t a passing thought. In its strength, there was danger. He had not crossed the line yet.
As he removed his running clothes, he whistled a Sousa march, something he had not done in many weeks. Another tune began once the water hit his back. Droplets flew vigorously over the curtain as he washed. After the soaping was complete, he stood quietly under the spray. An open bottle of shampoo tipped over the tub’s edge. Shit, he muttered as he turned off the water and tried to collect what hadn’t run down the drain. Scott paused, sniffed the bottle. He recognized the familiar almond aroma around him, but it was not the shampoo he had used. The scent belonged to Amy, but her toiletries were in the other bathroom that she had been using. While he dried off and dressed, he was silent and skittish. He looked around as if he realized something was missing.
Scott spent most of the day in his favorite chair, watching television and reading. Late in the day, he got up and went into the front room. He opened the bookcase to find a volume in its usual spot, but it was not in the place where his fingers landed. Scott skimmed every title on the front rows, then shifted books around to look in the back.
Amy suddenly entered the room. She grabbed my revealing photographs from the place she’d left them among her own. Scott looked at her harshly.
“Where’s the dictionary?” he asked.
“In there. As usual.” She turned to leave.
“Everything is out of order. It’s not here.”
Amy stood next to him. “You probably left it somewhere.”
“No, I didn’t. You must have moved it.”
“I haven’t moved anything.” She stared at the rows, befuddled.
“Then what happened in here?”
“I didn’t do this.”
“Maybe you don’t remember doing it.”
“I didn’t.” Amy glanced at him suspiciously. “Maybe you don’t remember moving anything.”
“I haven’t been in here for weeks.”
Amy began to walk out of the room. “Log on to the Internet. Look it up there.”
He followed her. “I still want the dictionary.”
“It’s somewhere. It couldn’t have disappeared.”
She entered the bedroom and opened the closet. As she kicked her shoes to the floor, Scott blocked the doorway and scanned the tops of the furniture. Amy walked past him to the chest of drawers where she kept her nightclothes. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled to the foot of the bed. Scott peeked underneath, then moved to the right side, his side, and stretched his arm.
Amy stood nearby as he pulled out the dictionary. Several marbles rolled from under the bed, bouncing against each other. A thin layer of dust covered the dark blue hard cover. Scott sat down and whipped his finger against gray haze. As he grabbed the thick spine, he noticed a narrow rectangle poking from the top of the pages. Scott slipped it free. He stared at the old photograph of them at a pool, before they had married, before they were pushed into the deep by a devilish, bearded friend.
Scott didn’t move. Amy peeked over his shoulder.
“Chloe,” Amy said. She could only assume it had been her friend’s doing.
“Why?”
She sat next to him. “To make a point. To remind me.”
He did not pull away when she took his arm and laid her forehead on his shoulder.
IN THE DARK, across from each other on the sofa, they tried to begin again.
Amy had not told Scott because the way she felt changed from year to year. In those first few weeks after Jem died, she mourned for the baby she had not known her body held. She confided in Chloe alone, the one person left whom she trusted completely, the one person she could not disappoint. Her grief was complicated. She wouldn’t have welcomed the pregnancy under different circumstances. She had been using the birth control pill and had not missed a dose. The failure was a shock, a betrayal of her responsibility. She remembered having a light cycle that month, unusual but not unheard of, and days of light nausea. She blamed the stress of Jem’s leaving for her body’s malfunction.
Almost certainly, all things considered, had Jem not died, she would have had an abortion. But it was only speculation, sh
e realized, because the moment she learned what had happened, she wished the loss undone.
During the long weeks that she healed, back in her old room at her parents’ house, her first job on hold, she caught herself turned sideways in mirrors, imagining the steady convex swell. Her parents would have been aghast if she had been pregnant, more so because she could not marry and make things right. But Amy knew her mother would have slowly recognized that there was a grandchild on the way, and the tragedy of Jem’s death would bring more sympathy than shame. There were times she was tempted to tell her mother about the pregnancy. As a mother, she could imagine her daughter’s pain. By then, however, Amy felt confused—relieved that she had no decision to make on her own, no child to raise by herself, angry that she had lost Jem in another way she didn’t expect, that the accident had decided the fates of them all, ashamed that she would not have wanted the child, surprised that sometimes she did more than anything.
Then, after she left the nest again, she rented a new apartment and returned to a job that had been temporarily filled by someone else. Through those long work days, Amy realized that she could not have cared for a baby alone. Secretly, with guilt, she was glad that the choice had been made for her. That is, until the quiet of her apartment became too much and she wanted something, someone, there to hold. Someone to need her again.
The baby would have been born in May. During the first week of that month, she imagined the event of a birth that never came. Amy remembered calling Chloe and crying so hard she couldn’t stop. Her friend was living in Virginia. Chloe was ready to board the first available plane. It took a three-and-a-half-hour discussion to calm her. Amy would have named the baby Jeremy if a boy, Michaela if a girl. It had Jem’s dark hair and her blue-green eyes, his long fingers, and her tiny seashell ears. Amy wondered if the burst of emotion and imagination was normal. Chloe assured her that it would have been more disturbing if she’d had no reaction at all.
Then each year, the child she envisioned grew. He was a boy. Little Jeremy’s presence was rare, but Amy felt him completely when he appeared. She dreamed of him. Sometimes he ducked around supermarket shelves and doorways. She once confided in Chloe about her specter child. Chloe did not poke fun, did not tell her to get over it. Jeremy was a part of her, even if no one had ever seen him.
She wasn’t sure why she had not told Scott about the miscarriage. When their friendship rekindled, she wanted to focus on their happier moments. By the time she had fallen in love with him, she noticed that she thought of the child less often. Amy knew Scott wanted children of his own, and to her knowledge, there was no reason to worry about whether she could conceive again. However, Amy still wished, at times, that the baby had been born. That he was Jem’s child complicated her admission; there was too much history among the three of them. Amy believed Scott would understand, but she feared what she would unleash by talking about it.
Then, almost a year before, when Scott initiated the first tender proddings, inquiring whether she was ready for a baby of their own, the specter child came more frequently. He no longer resembled her, but he would not let her forget he was hers.
When Amy finished, Scott took her hand. “I’m sorry. I wish I could have helped you somehow.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“You just did.”
That night, they lay in separate beds, but neither slept well. They both knew there was more between them than the child who could have been.
“YOU WERE like that as a child, weren’t you?” Andrew says.
I look up from my book toward him. He points to a girl several yards away. She is seven, maybe eight years old. Her strawberry blond bob tumbles into a shag each time her hands touch the ground and falls with two delightful curves along her cheeks as she stands. She moves so quickly and the space between her knees is so wide that her dress doesn’t fall to her dainties. With a toe pivot, her cartwheels turn into walkovers, her back and thighs curve with hidden strength to pull her up again. A little boy no older than four attempts his own cartwheels but looks like an arthritic frog instead.
“What do you mean ‘were’?” I stand up, tuck the hem of my skirt into my garter bands, and toss my cloche on his lap.
Before Andrew can grab me, I run toward the children, brace myself against the momentum, and spin ten perfect cartwheels. The little girl’s jaw suspends from her high bunny cheeks, but the boy claps. I bow toward them, which only makes the boy cheer and the girl join him. They line up on each side of me, and we three acrobats spin across the ground, cartwheels and somersaults, the grass springing back to life when we release it. We collapse to the ground, dizzy, and I lie facing the sky, my abdomen screaming with laughter. The children giggle nearby. As I calm down, a woman’s voice stage-whispers behind me, Susan, Herbert, come here right now. I pitch my head back. A woman not much older than myself glares at the mess of us, meets my eyes. I can only smile. What have I told you about these shenanigans, little girl? she says. Ladies don’t behave so shamelessly. That last sentence was meant for me. Susan obeys, but before she walks away, behind her mother’s back, she blows me a kiss. I pretend to catch it on the tip of my nose. Clumsy Herbert steps on my hand but gives me a most precocious grin as he steadies his gait.
When I stand to brush the blades away, I see Andrew sitting with his spine flush against the tree, deciding whether to be amused, embarrassed, or appalled.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he says with a paternal tone that betrays the glint in his eyes.
“Why not?” I fluff and primp myself back into respectability.
“It’s indecent.”
“Depends on what you were looking at.”
Andrew can’t hold the scowl any longer and laughs. “Their mother looked angry.”
“Livid.”
“What kind of mother would you be?”
“That assumes I want to be one.”
“Humor me.”
I tuck my hair under my hat and thumb to the page I had been reading. Andrew lays his book flat on his thighs. “Honest. I wouldn’t hide anything, like pretend I’m happy when I’m not or fail to give the facts of life. I’d be indulgent. I don’t mean I’d let my child have lollipops for supper, but I would want her to become an individual, not force her to be something she doesn’t want to be. And affectionate. Children like to be held and kissed and petted. Respectful, too. A child should be allowed her own opinions about things.”
“You would raise a child the way you were raised.”
“I suppose you’re right. So what kind of father would you be?”
“A good provider, of course. My children should have every necessity. Good educations, too, and what extras I can afford to encourage their interests. I also want my children to be safe and secure. That’s important to me. Even though I expect to be very busy with my work, I want to be attentive to them. Suppose my child wants to talk to me, about his day or any such thing. I should listen, not put him off.” He pauses, looks at me. “I agree with you—children need affection. Sometimes that can be as important as kind words, don’t you think. And I want the child to know I love him and for him to love me, not only because I’m his father.”
“Like you were raised.” I knew in my gut that Andrew spoke of aspirations, not of models.
“At the foundation, yes, of course.”
“You would make an awfully cute daddy. Cream of wheat on your shirt, a damp patch on your trousers.”
“Do you think I’d be a good father?”
“Haven’t you always been good at what you put your mind to?”
“Yes.”
“No different in this case. It’s all in what you want.”
“I think you’d be a good mother.”
“Do you? Why?”
“The child would never question how much he—”
“Or she.”
“—or she—is loved.”
My throat opens to reply, but I haven’t a clue what to say. Such a strange lit
tle reason, as if that were reason enough. Absolutely sincere, almost as if he’d thought about it before. Finally, I pat his knee. “Thank you, darling.”
Andrew gives me an affectionate smile and turns back to his novel. As I look at him, I picture his face as an old man, the wrinkles unable to obscure the handsome geometry there, and I’m scared half to death by the sight.
I AWAKE FROM A NAP, wet, and Mother tries to dress me in dry clothes. I am barely two years old. Naked, I scamper across the room to look out of the window. The summer storm taps a fast rhythm against the roof, which I try to mimic with my little feet. A thunder roll echoes in my belly. I pull the ribbon from my fine blond hair and circle it around me.
“Raziela, come here.” Mother holds a dress on her lap.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I sing.
“Then I shall get you and tickle you silly.” She rises from her knees and begins to inch toward me.
I squawk, run through the door, wobble down the stairs faster than I’ve ever gone—Mother exclaiming, “Oh, slow down!”—and whip through the living room. My father looks up from his magazine as my blur and trailing red ribbon approach him. A moment later, he lets out a trumpet blast of a laugh.
As I struggle with the back door’s knob, Daddy says to Mother, “Our daughter is indecently exposed. Shame on you.”
“She takes after you, darling,” Mother says.
I slam the door closed as their footsteps approach. By the time they are outside, I am in the middle of the backyard with my face to the sky, giggling as the drops create rivers down my body. A metallic trail of water parts my lips. A thunderclap startles me. I scream with more delight than fear. Slowly at first, I spin, my ribbon above my head. I close my eyes and spin faster. The grass peeks between my round toes and licks my ankles. My breath is shallow with joy—I have only enough air to bellow my giggles.
The Mercy of Thin Air Page 22
