“Mysteriouser and mysteriouser,” said Elizabeth, staring out the window. “I mean, for instance, why would Rosie call Natalie to discuss this?”
“I don’t even know who Natalie is,” said James. Elizabeth turned toward her husband, who sat at the table holding a knife and fork upright, like American Gothic, his eyes even greener than usual, as if they were filled with trees.
six
HE took a turn for the worse this morning,” said the nurse, leading them to Charles’s room.
Elizabeth saw the small figure on a huge field of rumpled bed, his eyes closed, his body turning in a kind of spiral. It was as if he were trying to get comfortable in a way he would never achieve again in this world. Rae moaned and pulled up a chair beside him. Elizabeth stood at the foot of his bed, holding his shins through the sheets and thin blanket, barely able to breathe. But she could see that there would be no comfort coming from the outside. The only comfort would be in the ceasing of all this.
“Rae,” Elizabeth whispered. Rae looked at her sadly. The room smelled of age and decay and all the efforts to mask that animal smell—lemon swabs, antiseptics, baby powder. The sun shone through the round leaves of an alder outside the window, casting fluttering geisha shadows across the bed.
“Charles,” Elizabeth whispered.
She sat beside him across from Rae, who stroked his shoulder and arm, wiping at her eyes with her free hand, waiting. The nurse checked in from time to time to smooth his brow and bedsheets, swab his dry lips with lemony Q-tips, and after an hour or so, to give him a shot of morphine. He stopped turning then and lay still. His breathing grew slower, and the nurse came in more often.
“This could go on for days,” she said. “I’ve seen that happen.” But just around two, when the clock in the living room chimed, while Elizabeth was staring out the window at a redwing blackbird in the branches of the alder, hearing somewhere the cry of a mockingbird, cars passing, delivery trucks, children, a radio playing swing, Charles took a long deep breath, and a smaller one, and then he lay perfectly still. His mouth was open, as if something just then had flown out of it and away.
The women looked at each other, astonished. A small cry, like a bird’s, escaped Elizabeth’s mouth. The nurse came forward. She lay his arm down on the bed, to take his pulse.
“I need you to move for just a moment,” she said, and Elizabeth stood on shaking legs and backed away, looking to Rae for comfort. Rae got up and came over to her, and they embraced.
“Come with me,” said Rae, and she led Elizabeth away. They settled down on the couch in the living room and held hands. They heard the nurse making a phone call, heard soft talking, watched each other. Elizabeth listened to and felt Rae weeping beside her, while she stared off into space. Her head was tilted and her mouth slightly open, in suspension. She felt as deeply confused as she could ever remember feeling, a dumb animal beside its dead master.
THEY were waiting for Charles’s doctor to come by and sign the death certificate. His body looked shocked and abandoned and exhausted in that still, sunny room. His mouth was still open, as if he were crying upward for help, like a deeply sad angel in trouble. So this was his last face. It was terribly stark, Charles empty of life. Rae sat stroking his shoulder and arm, as she had stroked him so often in life, as if to say, You may be gone, but right here and now your arm is beneath my hand.
Elizabeth, exuding a rigidity that looked like calm, tried to sit in a meditative pose and couldn’t figure out why she felt so wild, so squirrelly. She got up, walked around, sat back down. There was an enormous hush in the room, as if the air had been sucked out with Charles’s last breath. The nurse came in, folded up some stray clothes, gathered up his medicines, and took them away. Rae was crying again, but Elizabeth was staving off everything that was piling up behind her eyes, threatening to wash her away—images of Andrew dead and bloody, her mother in the ground, her father sliding down a chute into the crematorium’s fires, Rosie dead behind a bush, Luther zipping himself up, Rosie’s mouth open just like Charles’s, staring unseeing into space. She, Elizabeth, felt like she was the dam holding it all back.
She slowly looked around the room, trying to catch her breath, until her eyes stopped at the sight of a tiny wooden Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, an amber statue that Charles and Grace had brought back from India fifty years before. It was holding two feather-shaped objects in his hands, like Henry VIII about to tackle a leg of lamb, and all of a sudden she found herself stifling giggles, wracked with suppressed hysterics. A trumpeting snort escaped from her nose, just as it had at Andrew’s memorial, and again she pretended to sob, as she had way back then, when four-year-old Rosie had whipped around and glared. Rae wept wetly, quietly. Elizabeth got up and went to the bathroom, where she closed the door and sat on the toilet, pinching her nostrils shut, giggling like a schoolgirl, tears of mirth streaming down her face. She thought of Laughing Sal at Playland at the Beach forty years ago. Sal was a mechanical doll as tall as her father, who welcomed you into the fun house with a soundtrack of endless laughter, bending forward, chuckling, leaning back to howl. Horrible jackhammer noises poured out of Elizabeth’s nose, while tears ran down her face. Rae came to the door to ask if she was okay, and she managed through her hysterics to make a noise that sounded like yes, but she knew that she wasn’t. She heard Rae’s footsteps recede, and then Elizabeth felt grief trying to pierce her or trying to get through to her to save her: it was hard to tell. Crying withheld feels sometimes like dying. Finally when she started to cry, she was so deluged with mucus and tears that she didn’t think she would ever again get a full breath.
RAE’S eyes were red and swollen. They were sitting in silence, side by side, waiting for the doctor.
“Are you praying?” she asked Rae.
“Mostly feeling this incredible sadness.”
Elizabeth listened to the hush like a vacuum in the room. “I can’t bear to tell Rosie,” she said.
“I know.”
“Oh, Rae. Doesn’t he look very Japanese right now?”
“Yes, he does. Like something is being sucked in and held, disciplined in rigor. Like something turning in on itself.”
“But why does it seem Japanese?”
“Stillness in art, reticence in life.”
The doctor came. She was very kind and tender to Charles, stroking his cheek, and to the nurse, to Elizabeth and Rae. Rae did all the talking, filling in the doctor on their shared history, their friendship, Rosie. The doctor listened and nodded kindly, filling out her forms.
“Can we wash him?” Rae asked her, when she stopped talking.
“Of course.”
HE had a lot of bruises on his backside, where blood had pooled. They washed his face and legs and arms and genitals and back and bottom with soapy water and did not say a word, although a sound came up inside Elizabeth, kind of an ah-ah-ah, wordlessly, and it was like stroking the air, because that was all there was for her to stroke. She did not feel intimate enough with Charles to caress a body that no longer felt alive, but Rae did. She stroked him, cooing and clucking as you would while washing a baby. Elizabeth longed to let him know how moved and touched she was by his nakedness, lying in that bed, and by his departure, but as she moved the washcloth over his body, her head was filled with images of so many other times—crazy thoughts, memories of Rosie on the tennis court, rallying, running, Andrew in his dark green chamois shirt, pitching a tent in Yosemite, Andrew fishing Rosie out of the river, the biker she had slept with three days after his death. Rae cooing, Elizabeth perfectly silent, they washed Charles’s blue nails with red washcloths, one hand each, Elizabeth filled with a sad little voice that she couldn’t let out—and that was the deafening sound.
LILY pads floated on the pond in the little park where they held his memorial service at dusk, the little pond where Charles and Grace had spent so many hours with Rosie when she was young. It was a hot summer night four days after his death. Charles’s sister Adele had flown in from Au
stin for the service; their older brother was too sick to fly. Adele and Rae had made the arrangements, letting all of Charles’s friends know the time and the place, organizing a potluck for the gathering later at Charles’s house.
Rae put star-shaped candles on some of the lily pads, and Charles’s nurse brought camellias to lay on others, to consecrate the pond. Both of them asked Rosie if she wanted to help them, but Rosie shook her head no. Everyone kept trying to get her to help them, and she felt they were doing it because they thought it would help her, and she would have none of it. She deliberately stood a certain way, a certain uninviting way she’d seen other teenagers who were being mean to their parents stand, like their body was a card table half folded up. Her hands were knotted against her belly, and her elbows stuck out like, she hoped, a pitchfork. She looked around at the several dozen people who had come, old friends she’d met with Charles over the years, a few distant relatives, waiting around the pond for the service to begin. Lank and James were sitting under a great ponderosa pine, looking very tired. Her mother looked tired, too, and as if she had whiplash. She made Rosie think of a sad flight attendant. She kept smoothing everything and everyone, smoothing away hair from Rosie’s brow, smoothing the wrinkles out of James’s shirt. Her hands moved like a ballet dancer’s hands, like the hands of a waitress at an Indian restaurant. She had brought a tree to be planted here later, a birch, delicate as a deer, with pale green leaves that would drop off every fall and come back in the spring. But she didn’t cry, and Rosie didn’t either. She felt mean. She looked at all these people, her mother and James, Lank and Rae, with all their words of encouragement, their need to be close to her, and she imagined telling Simone how annoying it had all been. Simone would understand, but Rosie hadn’t wanted her here today. She was angry at her for only being a little sad that Charles had died, for still having the tiny baby inside. But Simone would have understood wanting to be left alone. It was like when you were sitting in the shade because that’s what your insides felt like or what your insides were needing, cool and dark, and all the grown-ups tried to get you out into the sun.
There was no minister, no program. Adele had brought an enormous bulletin board covered with photographs of Charles—ancient childhood portraits, black-and-white snapshots of his wedding to Grace, color photos of him here on a bench by this pond sometime in the lonely active years since Grace’s death. Adele mounted the collage on a tripod, and Rosie stood studying it, mostly for something to do. All these people she didn’t know were standing around looking like they were staring at a car wreck. She was worried that she felt so cold and mean. Her mother wandered over. She was dressed very beautifully, in brown silk and linen, with pearls. Rosie was wearing a black T-shirt under a black jumper, black socks, black high-top Keds. Her mother had tried to get her to wear tights and black dress-up shoes. Rosie avoided her gaze, ducking her head down so that her bangs covered her eyes and she had to stare at the photos through thick black curls.
There was a snapshot of Charles in a rowboat somewhere, young and handsome, wearing an old-fashioned T-shirt, like a muscle-man shirt. She almost said out loud to her mother that Charles looked like her dad would have looked if he’d lived another forty years, but if she said that, her mother would just try to make everything come out okay. Rosie wanted to feel these terrible empty held-breath feelings, this extremely sad thing that had happened, Charles dying, and she didn’t want her mother to take it away and define it for her and then hand it back. She didn’t want a guide. She felt like she had to be mean if she wanted to be herself, while all the grown-ups wanted her to be soft and sad and loving like they were being, and she did not want them to mess with her. She raised her elbows higher, like the turrets of a castle, to keep the grown-ups away. She felt fiercely alone, and she wanted to feel that way.
“They make you sad because they remind me of who he was,” she said about the pictures of Charles, and as soon as she said it, she felt angry at herself. It was like something Simone would say.
Rae had covered a TV dinner table with a beautiful silk weaving she’d made for Charles after Grace died—pale blue with egrets, a pelican, poppies, a setting sun. There were candles on this little altar, a small framed photo of Charles, one of his bow ties, a Giants cap. And there were his hiking boots, too, which made Rosie sadder than anything else. She bent forward to breathe them in, relishing the smell of leather.
“The most poignant thing you can see of a dead friend, for me, is their shoes,” said her mother. “Maybe because they smell like him. They bore his weight. They touched the ground on which he will no longer walk.” Rosie looked over her mother’s shoulder at James, who was talking nicely to a group of old people, saying something funny that made them all laugh. She started to think about Edgar Allan Poe, all those stories of people being buried alive, and she thought about how glad she was that Charles had been cremated, so he didn’t have to wake up in his coffin and be alive. Cremation meant it was too late for that, although what if you were a tiny bit alive when they sent you down the chute into the furnace, and the fire woke you up? Would anyone hear the screams? She shuddered, saw Charles’s body burning, like at a luau. She imagined someone coming by and peering in at the furnace in the crematorium, with a chef’s hat and a spatula.
Rae came over and hugged Elizabeth. Then she put her arm around Rosie’s shoulder. “I can’t hug you, can I?”
“No.”
“We’re going to begin,” Rae said. “We’re just going to tell some stories, remembering him. I wrote a small something; maybe you have a story to tell.” But Rosie shook her head.
Elizabeth, Rosie, James, and Lank huddled together near the altar. Adele recited the Twenty-third Psalm, several old friends stepped forward and told funny anecdotes. The fog was beginning to roll in, like a visitation. Rosie put her free hand in her mother’s. She did not mean to. She felt put down somehow, although that did not make sense—intruded upon, leeched onto—and she wanted all the grownups off of her, but without meaning to she had taken her mother’s hand. She left it there. Rae, standing by Adele, cleared her throat and looked into the faces of the crowd until her gaze settled on Lank. She raised her eyebrows inquiringly. Rosie looked at Lank, who was wearing the same dark gray suit he’d worn when her mother married James. He looked like a balding angel in disguise as a banker. He shook his head.
“I thought you were going to sing,” she whispered to Lank.
“I can’t,” he said.
A man who was drunk began to ramble on, some story about when Grace was sick and Charles used to sit out in the garden with her for hours at a time in the shade. He read something from the Bible that made no sense to Rosie. She remembered the note in Simone’s desk—that in case they were going to bury her, they should shoot her in the head first to make sure she was really dead. She pictured Simone buried in the ground, scratching at the lid of the coffin, her baby floating around in her stomach, waiting to be born. She started hearing the song from when she was little that kids sang about people rotting in the grave: “The worms go in, the worms go out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.” She thought about telling the story about how Charles taught her to ride a bike, but she felt too mean, like it was too good a story for them. Pedal and steer; pedal and steer. The sun was going down over the grove of oaks to the west. The candles flickered on the lily pads like lightning bugs. Rae stepped forward and began to read.
“If we were having a religious service here today,” she said, her voice very high, “which of course Charles would not have permitted, a priest would be saying that we are committing him to a love that goes broader and deeper than one we can see.” Rae looked right at Rosie, from the other side of the candlelit pond, and Rosie looked back with fierce concentration. “And I believe we are,” Rae said. “If we can trust love in life, as Charles so obviously did, if we believe that love is the truest, most enlivening fact of our lives, then we admit that love is real in life—and so may in fact be real in death.” Her vo
ice was trembly and wet. “I remember when Grace died,” she said. “At her service Charles said that we who had loved her in life would not lose her in death. It is true. We didn’t lose her. Because death is not what is finally sovereign; love is. And so in this spirit we commit him.” A lot of people, including James, were crying softly. Rosie shivered. The evening had grown cold. Her mother was staring off into space, blank as a garden statue. Pedal and steer, Rosie remembered, I won’t let you go, I won’t let you fall.
And then Lank stepped forward. He seemed confused, like he hadn’t picked out what song he was going to sing yet, and her mother reached forward and scratched one of his shoulder blades lightly, the way she did to give you encouragement. Rosie looked into her mother’s face and saw how tired she was, too. Everyone here seemed so tired. Lank closed his thin lips to make an instrument out of them, and he hummed one note to himself, like his own little pitch pipe. He began to sing the same song they had sung when they buried Grace. It was a Christmas song, even though Grace had been buried in May and even though it was now well into summer. It was slow and mournful, like a spiritual, hanging in the night as if each quavering mournful note were being placed on a shelf right above him. He was singing with his eyes closed, and Rosie tried to hold her eyes wide open so the tears wouldn’t pool and fall. But she felt her meanness and her safety melting even though she did not feel like crying with these people, and her tears did fall as Lank sang.
Lo, how a rose e’er blooming,
From tender stem hath sprung.
Of Jesse’s lineage coming
By faithful prophets sung.
It came a floweret bright.
Amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night
Miserable, her back bent forward, she buried her face against her mother’s side without meaning to, and finally, past all of that resistance, a quiet mewling sound rose from somewhere inside her, like a small wounded wind.