“What is it, exactly, we’re working through?” I asked. I wasn’t trying to be argumentative. I really wanted to know. “I’m not trying to be a jerk here, I guess I’ve just lost sight of the goal for the moment.”
“What we’re attempting to do here is help Cynthia deal with a traumatic incident in her childhood that’s resonating to this day, not just for her own sake, but for the sake of the relationship the two of you share.”
“Our relationship is fine,” I said.
“He doesn’t always believe me,” Cynthia blurted.
“What?”
“You don’t always believe me,” she said again. “I can tell. Like when I told you about the brown car. You don’t think there’s anything to it. And when that man called this morning, when you couldn’t find it in the call history, you wondered whether there’d even been a call.”
“I never said that,” I said. I looked at Dr. Kinzler, as if she were a judge and I a defendant desperate to prove his innocence. “That’s not true. I never said anything like that at all.”
“But I know you were thinking it,” Cynthia said, but there was no anger in her voice. She reached over and touched my arm. “And honestly, I don’t entirely blame you. I know what I’ve been like. I know I’ve been hard to live with. Not just these last few months, but ever since we got married. This has always hung over us. I try to put it away, like trying to put it in the closet, but every once in a while, it’s like I open that door by mistake and everything spills out. When we met—”
“Cynthia, you don’t—”
“When we met, I knew getting close to you would only bring you some of the pain I’d been feeling, but I was selfish. I wanted to share your love so desperately, even if that meant you’d have to share my pain.”
“Cynthia.”
“And you’ve been so patient, you really have. And I love you for it. You have to be the most patient man in the world. If I were you, I’d be exasperated with me, too. Get over it, right? It happened a long time ago. Like Pam said. Just get the fuck over it.”
“I’ve never said anything like that.”
Dr. Kinzler watched us.
“Well, I’ve said it to myself,” Cynthia said. “Hundreds of times. And I wish I could. But sometimes, and I know this is going to sound crazy…”
Dr. Kinzler and I were both very quiet.
“Sometimes, I hear them. I can hear them talking, my mother, my brother. Dad. I can hear them like they’re right here in the room with me. Just talking.”
Dr. Kinzler spoke up first. “Do you talk back?”
“I think so,” Cynthia said.
“Are you dreaming when this happens?” Dr. Kinzler asked.
Cynthia pondered. “I must be. I mean, I don’t hear them right now.” She cracked a sad smile. “I didn’t hear them in the car on the way over.”
Inside, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“So maybe it’s when I’m sleeping, or daydreaming. But it’s like they’re around me, like they’re trying to talk to me.”
“What are they trying to say?” Dr. Kinzler asked.
Cynthia took her hand off my arm and linked her own fingers together in her lap. “I don’t know. It varies. Sometimes, it’s just talk. About nothing in particular. About what we’re having for dinner, or what’s on TV, nothing important. And then other times…”
I must have looked as though I was about to say something, because Dr. Kinzler shot me another look. But I wasn’t. My mouth had opened in anticipation, wondering what Cynthia was going to say. This was the first I’d heard her speak about hearing members of her family speak to her.
“Other times, I think they’re asking me to join them.”
“Join them?” Dr. Kinzler said.
“To come and be with them, so that we can all be a family again.”
“What do you say?” Dr. Kinzler asked.
“I tell them I want to go, but I can’t.”
“Why?” I asked.
Cynthia looked into my eyes and smiled sadly. “Because where they are, I might not be able to take you and Grace with me.”
8
“What if I skipped all this other stuff, and just did it right away?” he asked. “Then I could come home.”
“No no no,” she said, almost in a scolding tone. She took a moment, tried to let the calm wash over her. “I know you’d like to come back. There’s nothing I’d like more. But we need to get these other things out of the way first. You mustn’t be impatient. There were times, when I was younger, when I was a bit impetuous, too impulsive. I know now it’s better to take the time to do something right.”
She could hear him sigh at the other end of the line. “I don’t want to screw it up,” he said.
“And you won’t. You’ve always been a pleaser, you know. It’s nice to have at least one in the house.” Half a chuckle. “You’re a good boy, and I love you more than you’ll ever know.”
“I’m not really a boy anymore.”
“And I’m no little girl anymore either, but I’ll always think of how you were when you were younger.”
“It’s going to feel weird…doing it.”
“I know. But that’s what I’m trying to tell you. If you’re patient, when the time comes, once the stage is set, it’ll seem like the most natural thing in the world.”
“I suppose.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“That’s the thing you need to remember. What you’re doing, it’s all part of a grand cycle. That’s what we’re a part of. Have you seen her yet?”
“Yeah. It was strange. Part of me wanted to say hello, say to her, hey, you won’t believe who I am.”
9
The next weekend, we went up to see Cynthia’s aunt, Tess, who lived in a small, modest house about halfway up to Derby, just off the heavily wooded Derby Milford Road. She lived less than twenty minutes away, but we didn’t get up to see her nearly as often as we should. So when there was a special occasion, like Thanksgiving or Christmas or, as was the case this particular weekend, her birthday, we made a point of getting together.
That was fine with me. I loved Tess nearly as much as I did Cynthia. Not just for being such a great old gal—when I called her that I ran the risk of a dirty yet playful look—but for what she had done for Cynthia in the wake of her family’s disappearance. She’d taken in a young teenage girl who was, Cynthia would be the first to admit, a handful at times.
“There was never any choice,” Tess told me once. “She was my sister’s daughter. And my sister was gone, along with her husband, and my nephew. What the hell else could I have done?”
Tess had a way of being cantankerous, slightly abrasive, but it was an act she’d developed to protect herself. She was all marshmallow below the surface. Not that she hadn’t earned the right, over the years, to be a bit cranky. Her own husband had left her before Cynthia had come to live with her for a barmaid from Stamford, and, as Tess told it, they’d fucked off to someplace out west never to be heard from again, and thank Christ for that. Tess, who had left her job with the radio factory years earlier, found a job with the county, clerical work in the roads department, and made just enough to support herself and pay the utilities. There wasn’t much left to raise a teenage girl, but you did what you had to do. Tess had never had children of her own, and with her no-good husband gone, it was nice to have someone to share her home with, even if the circumstances that brought Cynthia to her were shrouded in mystery, and undoubtedly tragic.
Tess was in her late sixties now, retired, getting by on Social Security and her county pension. She gardened and puttered about, took the occasional bus trip like the one she took last fall up through Vermont and New Hampshire to look at the changing leaves—“Jesus, a bus full of old people, I thought I’d kill myself”—but she didn’t have much of a social life. Not a joiner, not inclined to attend AARP meetings. But she kept up with the news, maintained her subscriptions to Harper’s and The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly and was not bashf
ul about offering her left-of-center political opinions. “That president,” she said to me on the phone one day, “he makes a bag of hammers look like a Nobel Prize winner.” Spending most of her teenage years with Tess had helped shape Cynthia’s attitude and perspective as well, and no doubt contributed to her decision to pursue, in the early years of our marriage, a career in social work.
And how Tess did love to see us. Especially Grace.
“I was going through some boxes of old books in the basement,” Tess said, flopping into her La-Z-Boy after we’d done the hug thing, “and look what I came across.”
She leaned forward in her chair, moved aside a copy of The New Yorker that had been hiding something else, and handed Grace an oversized hardcover book, Cosmo s , by Carl Sagan. Grace’s eyes went wide, looking at the kaleidoscope of stars on the cover.
“It’s a pretty old book,” Tess said, as if apologizing for her thoughtfulness. “Nearly thirty years, and the guy who wrote it, he’s dead now, and there’s lots better stuff now on the Internet, but there might be something in there to catch your interest.”
“Thank you!” Grace said, taking the book in her hands and nearly dropping it, not expecting it to be quite so heavy. “Is there anything in here on asteroids?”
“Probably,” Tess said.
Grace ran down to the basement, where I knew she’d cuddle up on the couch in front of the TV, maybe wrap a blanket around herself while she leafed through the pages of the book.
“That was sweet,” Cynthia said, leaning over and giving Tess probably her fourth kiss since we’d arrived.
“Didn’t make any sense to throw the damn thing out,” Tess said. “I could have donated it to the library, but you think they want thirty-year-old books? How are you, sweetheart?” she asked Cynthia. “You look tired.”
“Oh, I’m fine,” Cynthia said. “You? You look kind of beat today.”
“Oh, I’m okay I guess,” Tess said, peering at us over her reading glasses.
I held up a loaded shopping bag with twine handles. “We have some things.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” Tess said. “Hand me my loot.”
We called Grace back up so she could see Tess receive some new gardening gloves, a red and green silk scarf, a package of fancy cookies. Tess oohed and aahed over each thing as it came out of the bag. “The cookies are from me,” Grace announced. “Aunt Tess?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Why do you have so much toilet paper?”
“Grace!” Cynthia scolded.
“That,” I said to Grace, “is a fox pass.”
Tess waved dismissively, suggesting it would take more than that to embarrass her. Like a lot of older people, Tess tended to stockpile certain staples. Her basement storage cupboards were loaded with two-ply. “When it’s on sale,” Tess said, “I pick up extra.”
As Grace retreated again to the basement, Tess quipped, “When the apocalypse comes, I’ll be the only one left who can wipe her ass.” The gift presentations seemed to have exhausted her, and she leaned back into her chair with a deep sigh.
“You all right?” Cynthia asked.
“I’m peachy,” she said, then, as if she’d just remembered something, “Oh, I can’t believe it. I meant to buy some ice cream for Grace.”
“That’s okay,” Cynthia said. “We thought we’d take you out for dinner, anyway. How about Knickerbocker’s? You love the potato skins.”
“I don’t know,” Tess said. “I suppose I am a bit off today, tired. Why don’t we have dinner here? I have some things. But I really wanted some ice cream.”
“I can go,” I said. Tess lived closer to Derby than Milford, and I could drive up there and find a grocery store or a 7-Eleven.
“I could use a couple of other things,” Tess said. “Cynthia, maybe you should go, you know if we send him he’ll just get it all wrong.”
“I suppose,” Cynthia said.
“And there’s some things I’d like Terry to carry down to the basement from the garage while he’s here, if you don’t mind, Terry.”
I said sure. Tess made up a short list, handed it to Cynthia, who said she probably wouldn’t be gone more than thirty minutes. I wandered into the kitchen as Cynthia went out the door, glanced at the bulletin board next to the wall-mounted phone where Tess had pinned a picture of Grace taken at Disney World. I opened the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, looking for some ice to put in a glass of water.
In the front of the freezer was a container of chocolate ice cream. I took it out, pried off the lid. It had one scoop out of it. Getting a bit absentminded in her old age, I figured.
“Hey, Tess,” I said, “you’ve already got ice cream here.”
“Is that a fact,” she said from the living room.
I put the ice cream back, closed the freezer, and took a seat on the couch by Tess. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“I’ve been to the doctor,” Tess said.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“I’m dying, Terry.”
“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
“Don’t worry, it’s not going to happen overnight. I might have six months, I might have a year. You never really know. Some people, they can hang on quite a while, but I’m not looking forward to some long, drawn-out kind of thing. That’s no way to go. Tell you the truth, I’d like to go fast, just like that, you know? Lot simpler that way.”
“Tess, tell me what’s wrong.”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. They’ve done some tests, they’ve got a couple more they have to do to be sure, but they’ll probably just tell me the same thing. The upshot is, I can see the finish line. And I wanted to tell you first, because Cynthia, she’s been going through a lot lately. Twenty-five years, the TV show.”
“There was an anonymous call the other day,” I said. “That shook her up pretty bad.”
Tess closed her eyes briefly and shook her head. “Nuts. They see something on TV, they get out the phone book.”
“That’s the way I figure it.”
“But Cynthia’s going to have to know eventually, that I’m not well. I guess it’s a matter of finding the right time.”
We heard noises on the stairs. Grace emerged from the basement, lugging her new book with both hands. “Did you know,” she said, “that even though the moon looks like it’s been hit with way more asteroids than the Earth, the Earth has probably been hit with just as many, but because the Earth has atmosphere, the atmosphere smoothes the land so you don’t see all the craters, but there’s not any air or anything on the moon, so when it gets hit by an asteroid, it just looks that way forever?”
“Good book, huh?” said Tess.
Grace nodded. “I’m hungry,” she said.
“Your mother has gone to pick up a few things,” I said.
“She’s not here?”
I shook my head. “She’ll be back soon. But there’s some ice cream in the freezer. Chocolate.”
“Why don’t you take the whole container downstairs,” Tess said. “And a spoon.”
“For real?” Grace asked. This violated every rule of etiquette she knew.
“Go for it,” I said.
She ran into the kitchen, dragged a chair over to reach the freezer compartment, grabbed the ice cream and a spoon from the drawer, and ran back downstairs.
Tess’s eyes were moist when I looked back at her.
I said, “I think you should be the one to tell Cynthia.”
She reached out and held my hand. “Oh, of course, I wouldn’t make you do that. I just needed to tell you first, so when I tell Cynthia, you’ll be ready to help her through it.”
I said, “She’ll have to help me through it, too.”
Tess grinned at that. “You turned out to be a pretty good catch for her. I wasn’t so sure at first, you know.”
“So you’ve said.” I smiled.
“You seemed a bit serious to me. Very earnest. But you turned out to be perfect. I
’m so glad she found you, all the heartache she’s had.”
Then Tess looked away, but squeezed my hand a little harder. “There’s something else,” she said.
The way she said it, it was like what she still had to tell me was bigger than the fact that she was dying.
“There are some things I need to tell, while I’m still able to, to get it off my chest. You understand what I mean?”
“I suppose so.”
“And I’ve only got so much time left to tell it. What if something happens and I go tomorrow? What if I never get a chance to tell you what I know? Thing is, I don’t know whether Cynthia’s ready to hear all this, I don’t even know if it does her any service to know, because what I have to say only raises more questions than it answers. It may torment her more than help her.”
“Tess, what is it?”
“Just hold your horses and hear me out. You need to know this, because it might be an important piece of the puzzle someday. On its own, I don’t know what to make of it, but maybe, in the future, you’ll find out a bit more about what happened to my sister and her husband, to Todd. And if you do, this might be useful.”
I was breathing, but it felt as though I was holding my breath, waiting for Tess to say what she had to say.
“What?” Tess said, looking at me like I was stupid. “You don’t want to know?”
“Jesus Christ, Tess, I’m waiting.”
“It’s about the money,” she said.
“Money?”
Tess nodded tiredly. “There was money. It would just show up.”
“Money from where?”
Her eyebrows went up. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Where was it coming from? Who was it coming from?”
I ran my hand over the top of my head, starting to feel exasperated. “Just start at the beginning.”
Tess breathed in slowly through her nose. “It wasn’t going to be easy, raising Cynthia. But like I said, I didn’t have any choice. There wasn’t any other choice I’d have wanted to make. She was my niece, my sister’s flesh and blood. I loved her like she was my own child, so when it happened, I took her in.