Her brow fell and she shook her head. “No. That’s not true. At least not completely.”
“What do you mean, completely?”
“He left you, but it wasn’t his choice. After your brother died, your mother stayed in her bedroom for nearly a year. She withdrew from everyone. Your father felt guilty for your brother’s death, and that was a pretty big club she had to beat him with.”
“Why would he feel guilty?”
“From what I understand, he was supposed to be with him when it happened. Your mother blamed him for Charles’s death. I think he was so grief-stricken, he blamed himself. She withdrew all love from him. After two years, he couldn’t take it anymore. So they divorced.”
She looked at me somberly. “You have to understand that your father wasn’t doing well. He’d lost a son too. Only he carried the guilt with it. I’m not saying it’s an excuse, but it’s a reason.”
“I never saw him again.”
“Until just recently, neither had I. He never came back.”
“Then he did abandon me.”
She nodded sympathetically. “In a way.”
Hearing her say that angered me. “In a way? He left and never came back.”
She looked at me stoically. “If you want to see it that black and white, it’s up to you. But life is more complicated than that. Motive matters. It wasn’t what he wanted. And it wasn’t his idea. Haven’t you ever done something you thought was so bad that you lost faith in yourself?”
“I never had faith in myself to begin with.”
“You must have had some faith in yourself.” She looked down for a moment, then said, “Let me tell you something about blame. My brother took his own life thirty-six years ago.
“He was a very smart and successful obstetrician. He was delivering a baby when something went wrong. Both the baby and mother died. There was nothing he could do. Still, the woman’s husband filed a malpractice lawsuit against him. It didn’t matter that my brother was found innocent or that all his colleagues stood behind him.” She looked into my eyes. “Do you know what group of people are most likely to commit suicide?”
I wasn’t sure if it was a rhetorical question or she expected an answer. After a moment I ventured, “Teenage boys?”
“Doctors in malpractice lawsuits,” she said. “It’s because the very core of their identity is called into question. Whether they’re guilty or not makes almost no difference. That’s just the way we’re wired.
“In a way, that was your father. It doesn’t matter that your father was trying to help someone in need. It doesn’t matter that your brother’s death was an accident that could have happened even if he’d been home. He wasn’t there and your brother died. That kind of thinking can ruin a person.” She let out a long, slow breath. “I talk too much. And you haven’t eaten your soup. It’s probably cold by now.”
“I’ll heat it up in the microwave.” I looked into the old woman’s eyes. She looked tired. “Thank you for sharing.”
“Considering the topic, I won’t say it was a pleasure. But it is good to talk to you after all these years. I really have worried about you.” She stood. “I’m so pleased that you became a good man.”
“What makes you think I’m good?” I asked cynically.
She didn’t answer. “I’ll pick up my thermos later. Good night.” She slowly made her way through the mess back to the door.
I put my bowl in the microwave and tried to start it but nothing happened. The microwave didn’t work. I took my soup back out and ate it cool with broken crackers. As I sat there eating, I replayed our conversation. For the first time since I could remember, I wanted to see my father.
I finished the soup, then went back to the bathroom, finished cleaning up, and carried all the bags out to the Dumpster. It was snowing as I left the house—not much, just a few errant flakes here and there—but it looked pretty.
On the way to the hotel I stopped at a grocery store and picked up some more bottled water and trash bags, then drove back downtown. When I walked into my room, the message light on my phone was flashing. It was the front desk wanting to know if I was planning on extending my stay. I had already stayed longer than I had planned. I was starting to get the feeling that it might be a lot longer.
CHAPTER
Nine
December 13
I could tell something was different the moment I woke. Even in my room there was a peculiar stillness. I checked the clock. It was eight o’clock, but it was dark for the hour. I climbed out of bed and walked over to the window and parted the curtain. There was a blizzard outside. A complete whiteout.
From my eleventh-floor vantage point I could see Fifth South, the main thoroughfare to I-15. The street was invisible, completely covered with snow. Only a few intrepid drivers were on the road, crawling along at just five or ten miles per hour and still occasionally fishtailing. A block east I could see flashing police lights where two cars had crashed at the State Street intersection.
As I stood there my phone rang. It was Laurie.
“You didn’t call,” she said.
“When?”
“Sunday morning. You said you were going to call me tomorrow, aka, the day before yesterday.”
“Sorry. I got busy. What’s up?”
“How’s the weather?”
“It’s a blizzard.”
“I saw that on my weather app. Did you finish cleaning?”
“No. It’s going to take a while.”
“How long is a while?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, please find out—we’ve got work to do.”
“I’ll call you when I know.”
She sighed. “All right. Be careful out there. Ciao.”
I went back to the window and looked out. It’s not often you see a city frozen. Then I got dressed and went down to the fitness center, where I worked out for several hours. Not surprisingly, the exercise room was slammed, everyone held prisoner by the weather.
By the time I got back to my room, the blizzard had lightened to a mild snowfall. Yellow snowplows with flashing orange lights looked like Tonka trucks below me. They were out in force, scraping the downtown streets, a mechanical salt spreader tossing salt behind them like rice at a wedding.
There were already significantly more cars on the road than there had been before. Salt Lakers are used to snow, and weather that would render a Floridian housebound barely warrants a sweater along the Wasatch Front. Utahans, like most people who live in cold climates, take a curious pride in that.
I took a shower and ordered room service. I should have ordered before my shower, because there was an hour wait for food, since no one was leaving the hotel to eat.
I turned on my laptop and pulled up the book I was currently working on, but couldn’t get into it. I had written only a few hundred words when room service knocked on my door. The woman pushing the tray looked harried. “Busy?” I asked rhetorically.
“A bit more than usual,” she said. “The blizzard’s kept everyone inside.”
I signed the bill, and she ran off.
It was almost noon when I finished breakfast. I looked out the window again and the snow had completely stopped. I knew that the freeway and downtown streets would be cleared before the suburbs, so there was no sense trying to go out to my mother’s house just yet. I had another idea. I grabbed my coat and went down to the concierge counter in the hotel lobby.
“Could you call me a cab?”
The young woman behind the counter replied in a British accent. “You can catch one outside, sir. They queue near the front.”
“Thank you.” I walked out the gilded revolving door. A young man in a hunter-green jacket and top hat nodded to me.
“May I help you, sir?”
“I’d like a cab.”
“Yes, sir.” He lifted a whistle and blew. An oxblood-red taxi pulled up. “There you go, sir,” the young man said, opening the back door for me. I handed him a five-dollar b
ill and climbed in.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“The Salt Lake cemetery,” I replied.
The driver pulled out of the hotel’s large circular driveway onto Second West. The traffic was still light as we wound our way through the downtown streets.
“That was some blizzard this morning,” the driver said. “Shut us down for a while.”
“I’m surprised at how quickly it stopped and everyone got back to business.”
“That’s the weather in Salt Lake, you know. It’s the lake effect. You don’t like it, wait a few minutes.” He glanced back at me in his mirror. “Can’t guarantee the roads will be clear at the cemetery.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
About ten minutes later we pulled into the diagonally faced gates of the old cemetery. I could see that the roads had been freshly plowed.
“Whereabouts in the cemetery are we headed?” the driver asked. “It’s a big cemetery. Here’s some trivia for you: it’s the largest city-operated cemetery in the country.”
“Do you know where Lester Wire was buried?”
“Lester Wire?”
“The inventor of the traffic light.”
“Hmm. No, but I can look it up.” He pulled over to the side of the narrow, snow-banked road and consulted his smartphone. “Lester Farnsworth Wire. Inventor of the electric traffic light. It says here he picked red and green colors because it was Christmas and he had electric Christmas lights available.” He set down his phone. “He’s up on the northeast side.” He pulled back onto the street. “And now I’ll know who to cuss out when I hit three traffic lights in a row.” He glanced back at me. “He a relative of yours?”
“No. My brother is buried near him.”
“Gotcha.”
We wound through the labyrinthine roads of the cemetery until we came to a vertical concrete monument and the driver stopped.
LESTER FARNSWORTH WIRE
SEPTEMBER 3, 1887–APRIL 14, 1958
INVENTOR
ELECTRIC TRAFFIC LIGHT
“There’s your man. Or at least his grave.”
“I’ll just be a few minutes,” I said. I climbed out of the car. Even though we had only driven ten minutes from the hotel, we were higher in altitude and the temperature had dropped. I shivered as I pulled my coat tighter around me.
My brother was buried twenty steps to the right of a ten-foot obelisk with a cement ball on top. His headstone was level with the ground and subsequently buried in snow. I walked to the grave, felt the stone out with the tip of my shoe, then knelt down and cleared the snow from the marker’s granite face.
I had been to this spot more times than I could remember. Enough that even after all these years I could find it covered in the snow. The tradition must have started early, as I had a vague memory of my father and mother lighting a sparkler and sticking it into the ground on Charles’s birthday. After my parents divorced, my mother and I went alone. Three times a year. On Charles’s birthday, on Christmas, and in August on the anniversary of his death.
But now it had been seventeen years. I stood up and looked down at the marker.
“You shouldn’t have gone, Charles. Wherever you went, I hope you had a better time than I did.”
I looked at the grave for a few minutes, then felt suddenly curious whether my mother’s grave was next to his. I took a few steps through the snow, about five or six feet east of my brother’s stone, until I felt another gravestone. I pushed the snow off with my foot, exposing the top of the marker.
RUTH CAROLE CHURCHER
REST IN PEACE
I sighed. Then I walked back to the taxi and climbed back in. “Back to the hotel,” I said.
I must have looked different, because the driver didn’t say a word the whole way back.
I didn’t return to my room. Instead, I went from the cab down to the parking garage and got in my car. I waited a few minutes for it to warm up, then I drove out to my mother’s house.
The south end of the Salt Lake Valley had gotten even more snow than downtown, and from what I could tell, my mother’s neighborhood had been deluged with more than thirty inches. The entire place looked like an ice village, and cars looked more like igloos than automobiles.
A plow had been by, so the road was like a roofless tunnel with five-foot snowbanks towering on both sides. Those unfortunate souls who had left their cars parked in the street found the driver’s side of their vehicles piled with snow up to their roofs.
I parked in front of my mother’s house. I had to climb over a large snowbank to get into the yard.
It was already twilight when I arrived, and much of the home was obscured in shadow. As I neared the walkway I found footsteps leading up to the front door. They were recent enough to still be distinguishable: small, feminine-sized, with a small heel. I wondered if Elyse had tried to make her way over, but I decided that was unlikely. She would have seen that my car wasn’t here. Besides, for an elderly woman, walking through this snow and ice was just begging for a broken hip. Still, I couldn’t think of anyone else who would have come by in this weather.
I unlocked the front door and went inside. I flipped on the lights and walked over to the thermostat. I turned it up to seventy-five, turned on the music on my phone, and went to work on the space I’d dreaded most of all—the front room.
As I worked, I thought of Charles, the day he died, as well as all the times I went with my mother to the cemetery. I never knew how she would react. Sometimes she would fall to her knees and wail. Other times she would just stare angrily at the ground. Those were the times that frightened me the most. I never knew what Charles Day would bring.
I worked for about five hours, calling it quits a little after ten. I had managed to completely uncover the piano, which was my goal for the evening. I wiped off the bench with a damp cloth, took off my gloves, and sat down. I began to play. The piano was out of tune, but not horribly.
My mother had made me take piano lessons until I left the piano along with my home. With the exception of a few parties, I hadn’t played for years. It was one of the things I had left behind, I think, because it didn’t belong to me. Charles had wanted to play the piano. And a year after his death, the charge was given to me. I never wanted to learn to play and I hated every minute of practicing. Still, it was part of my past. It was part of me. And in spite of my resistance, I had been good once.
I began to play Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence.” I remember one night my mother coming into the front room and sitting down while I played it. After I finished, she said softly, “Play it again.”
It was the last song I learned, which is probably why I still remembered it. Or maybe it was because it was one of the saddest pieces of music ever written.
As I finished playing the song, tears were falling down my cheeks. For the first time since I’d heard the news of my mother’s death, I felt loss. I pounded on the keys, then laid my head against the fallboard and wept. The thing is, I wasn’t sure what I was feeling loss for. Maybe my mother. Maybe the loss of the mother I’d never had. Maybe my childhood. Maybe just everything.
As I sat there I remembered something. I got on the floor and slid my head under the seat. It was still there. Charles had written on it in black marker:
Charles Churchers piano
Five years later I had written beneath it:
You can have it
I stood back up, closed the lid on the piano, then locked up the house and drove back to the hotel.
CHAPTER
Ten
December 14
I woke the next morning around nine. On my way back to the hotel I had decided to keep the piano, so I looked on the Internet for a piano mover. The first two balked when I told them I wanted it delivered to Coeur d’Alene. The third was glad for the work.
I left the hotel early. The day was beautiful, the sky as blue as a Tahitian lagoon. I stopped at the Starbucks drive-through for a Venti coffee and blueberry s
cone, then drove to the house.
For the first time since I’d come to Salt Lake, the old neighborhood looked alive. People were out shoveling their walks or pushing snow blowers with great white arches spraying from their machines. One man was brushing snow off his car with a push broom.
The footprints I had seen on the walkway the day before were now iced over, preserved like winter fossils. I went into the house and went back to work in the front room. Now that I had exposed the carpet in places, I remembered it, an avocado-green shag that was outdated long before I was born. They say that if you wait long enough, everything comes back in style, but I think you might have to wait a few centuries for the avocado love affair to rekindle.
Several hours after I started cleaning, I came across boxes with Christmas ornaments and decorations that had been magical to me as a kid. The boxes still contained magic. Instead of pushing them out to the Dumpster, I opened them up, carefully unwrapping each treasure. One box contained old holiday records, a collection as eclectic as the season itself. Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas, Kenny G’s Miracles, Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, the Carpenters’ Christmas Portrait, A Fresh Aire Christmas, Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song, The Perry Como Christmas Album, Herb Alpert’s Christmas Album.
I kept digging through the pile until I found what I was looking for—my mother’s record player. It had been decades since I had used one. I had seen the old vinyl records coming back in vogue at the bookstores I signed in. I had even been tempted to buy a few albums; I just never got around to it.
I brushed the dust off the record player and plugged it into the wall. The tan, felt-covered turntable began spinning. I checked to make sure that the speed was set at 33 rpm, something I have no idea how I remembered, then I took the Charlie Brown Christmas album from the sleeve and put it on the player. Counting down the songs by the grooves in the record, I gently set the needle at track four, “Linus and Lucy.” As the familiar strains of the song started, a smile crossed my face. Even in the worst of times, there had always been something healing about the music of Christmas.