“I need you to sign this,” the man said, holding an electronic tablet and a special plastic pen out to her. He was young, Claire’s age, and for this reason, she assumed, he was the one who had to work on Saturdays. She clutched the box of her mother’s ashes with one hand and took the pen with the other and signed the tablet. Her name appeared on a tiny screen at the top of the tablet, sloppy and childlike.
“Have a nice day,” he said solemnly, and held the door open for her.
She glided past him, carrying the box as if it were nothing at all. She walked past the places in the hospital that had become so familiar to her—the gift shop and the coffee cart, the information desk and the community kiosk—and into an area that had been cordoned off for construction when she was there last. It was an atrium composed almost entirely of windows, empty now, the air lush and warm and tropical. Palm trees rose high above her, anchored into pots embedded into the new floor.
She sat down on a bench and flipped the box over in her hands. To the Family of Teresa Rae Wood it said on a white sticker, in curly, old-fashioned typescript. She gasped and quickly sobbed, clutching the box to her chest. It was amazing. Her mother. The ashes of her mother’s body, in her hands. She realized now that all these weeks that she’d been dead, Claire had held on to one image of her, to that of her mother the way she lay in the hospital after she’d died—altered, but intact—and in particular, the way she’d looked when Claire had been alone in the room with her, after Bruce and Joshua had left and she’d pulled the hospital gown from her body, stripping her naked, to get one last look at her mother: fleshy and solid and cold, but still there, still her mother. And in some way that image had reassured her, had made it remotely possible that her mother wasn’t really dead at all, or that she was dead but would come back to her, back to life. That if her body still existed in such appalling glory, that indeed it could be true that at any moment she could appear in their living room, or when the phone rang, Claire could pick it up and it would be her mother, calling to see how she was.
This was gone now, vanished in a moment, the truth, a weight in her own hands.
Slowly she released the box from her chest and sat with it on her lap for several minutes wondering what to do next. She could take the elevator up to the fourth floor and see if Pepper Jones-Kachinsky was in and leave a note if she wasn’t. She could have lunch at the Happy Garden, where she used to go with her mother when they came to Duluth. She could go home and wait for Bruce or Joshua or David to arrive. She could do all three in that precise order. But then another thought came to her, which immediately washed all the other thoughts away.
“Welcome,” Bill Ristow said when he opened the door. His voice had the calm of a Zen master, his demeanor like that too—as if he’d not only been expecting her, but willed her, through weeks of meditation, to come.
“Hey,” she said, and placed her hand on the side of her neck, a new habit of hers now that her blue braid with the bells was gone. She kept forgetting and reaching for it when she was nervous or attempting to seem nonchalant, or, unconsciously, trying to draw attention to the image that she felt the blue braid with the bells had bestowed upon her. She’d cut it off the morning of her mother’s funeral and, that afternoon at the wake when she’d had a moment alone with her mother, she’d stuffed the thin braid into the pocket of the skirt her mother wore in the casket.
“Look at you,” said Bill.
“Look at you,” she parroted back to him. They embraced briefly.
“Come on in,” he said. She followed him into the living room. “Sit,” he said, and she did.
“I wanted to …”
“Shhh,” he said, holding his hands up. “Let’s just be together for a minute. I want a moment to see that it’s really you.”
“It’s me,” said Claire, but he held his hands up to silence her again. He sat smiling and staring at her for so long she wondered if he actually had become a Zen master since they’d last met, but then he rose and went into the kitchen and returned with two cans of Coke and an intricately made submarine sandwich that he’d just finished preparing when she knocked on his door. He cut it in half for them to share.
“So how are you?” he asked her.
“Fine. How about you?”
He told her a long story about how his truck had died so he had to get a new one and another long story about what was happening at his job with the Port of Duluth. Claire ate her half of the sandwich while he talked, hungry after having not eaten since having a few bites of Mardell’s chicken the night before. From the couch she could see her car. The box with her mother’s ashes was on the passenger seat and she felt it beckoning to her like a light.
“And I’ve been traveling too,” Bill continued on. He took a long last sip of his drink. “Here’s the places I’ve been since I saw you.” He counted them off with his fingers. “Hawaii, Jamaica, and Maine.”
“Wow. You’ve been busy. Which place did you like best?”
“Maine,” he answered, without having to think about it. “It reminded me a bit of Alaska in a way. My youth.”
Claire wondered about her youth. This was it, she supposed, and it seemed that it would go on and on and on. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. It was like walking across a desert without a hat.
“Did you have fun?”
“I suppose so. More like I got to run away from my grief.” He chuckled and looked away, out the window, at Claire’s car. “You still got that Cutlass?”
She nodded and smiled.
“It’s a good car,” Bill said, still staring out at it. He went to the stereo cabinet and began sorting through his record collection. “What do you want to hear?”
“Greg Brown,” she said. That’s what he’d played for her the first time she was here, though now she could see that he didn’t remember it.
“How about Billie Holiday?” he said, putting the record on without waiting for her answer. They listened to the music without saying anything. It was a warm day and the windows of the house were open. The breeze blew various things around the room: balls of dust and hair, an empty pill bottle that had fallen from a tabletop and rolled, pristine pieces of paper that had been lifted by the wind one page at time from a printer that Bill had set up in the corner of the room. All of these things felt familiar to Claire, the breeze and the things blown by it, as if she’d lived in the house for years. And Bill felt that way to her too—his very presence a balm.
“So what about you?” he asked after a while. He sat down on the coffee table so he could be closer to her. “Are you back in school?”
She shook her head. “I’m taking some time off. I figured,” she twisted her hands together, “with my mom and everything.”
He nodded.
“There’s so much to do, getting things all settled at our house. And my brother needs someone to look after him. He’s not graduating, but he’s working on getting his GED.”
He nodded again. She looked out at her car. It seemed to be both on fire and also frozen solid, a block of glimmering ice.
“You have to be a mother to him now,” Bill said.
“In some ways.” Her eyes went to his and then flickered away. “He’ll be eighteen tomorrow, actually.”
“A man,” he said.
“Not really,” said Claire. She thought of Bruce then, of how he didn’t treat her and Joshua like kids anymore, ever since their mother died.
“What happened to your little braid?” he asked, reaching out to touch her shoulder where the braid used to sit.
“Oh.” She reached for it and got Bill’s hand instead. “I just wanted something different.”
“Different is good,” he said, still holding her hand, their fingers tangled awkwardly together.
She laughed a little, her other hand fluttering up to touch her neck. She wondered what he thought of her being there, if he’d slept with anyone since her. She considered telling him what she’d done with the braid, but then decided against it. He would think
it was juvenile. She’d regretted placing it into her mother’s coffin almost immediately after doing it. She thought that perhaps she should have written a letter and folded it up and put it in the pocket of the skirt her mother wore instead, or a photograph of herself, as Joshua had done, or a poem that both she and her mother had loved, as she’d initially considered doing. It had been too late by then, of course, as she sat in the front row of metal folding chairs at her mother’s funeral, listening to the weeping and coughing and nose-blowing of all the people who sat in the rows of chairs behind her. She’d ached to turn and see who was doing what—who was weeping, who was coughing, who was blowing their noses—and silently she scolded this indecently curious part of herself. Instead, she sat as unmoving as a statue and ramrod straight, as she believed a woman should sit when sitting at the funeral of her mother. She’d had to do what she thought she was expected to do at her mother’s funeral because she hadn’t felt what she believed she was expected to feel. What she felt, after days of sobbing, was that she would never again shed another tear. That her body was now a piece of ice. She remembered the way she felt like an inanimate object during those long days at the hospital, and now, she realized, her transformation was complete. At her mother’s funeral she felt she was inanimate not just in body but also in spirit and in mind. She stared at the ugly chandelier that hung above her mother’s casket and felt in sympathy with it, felt some essence of herself emanating back to her from its small glass bulbs shaped like flames. She felt this way about the silver doorknobs on the doors as well, and the maroon carpet edged in cream. She listened as the minister spoke about her mother and life, death and grief, and the fact that that very day was the first day of spring. Claire bowed her head and stared at her lap. Mardell, who sat behind her, took this pose as a sign that she was crying and she placed a hand on Claire’s back. Through the holes of her crocheted sweater Claire could feel a dime of Mardell’s palm making direct contact with the flesh on her back and then the dime seemed to heat up and enlarge, and it crept like a rash all over her back, becoming a nickel and then a quarter and taking her entire body over until Claire couldn’t be the chandelier or the doorknob or the carpet anymore and the tears seeped from her eyes. She shifted away from Mardell’s hand and gathered herself by smoothing the pleats of her black skirt hard against her thighs.
She wasn’t about to tell Bill all of this, though Bill would be the one most likely to understand. There were things she remembered about him more clearly now that they were in the same room, things she’d forgotten, and things she realized the moment he’d answered the door: that she wasn’t in love with him, for one. Not now or ever. That to love him or to be loved by him had never been the objective. That with him she would both never and always be alone.
“It’s good to see you, kiddo,” he said.
In reply she squeezed his hands tighter and leaned forward so her knees were knocking against his.
“What?” she asked after several moments, smiling. He’d been staring at her, silent again, like he was a Zen master, like she was a marvel.
He got down on his knees and kissed her hands, taking them into his mouth, eating them up, and then he pulled her down to him on the floor and whispered into her hair the same thing over and over: “Thank God you came.”
• • •
On the drive home, it occurred to Claire that she’d been driving on this very highway the moment her mother had died. She and Joshua had been about half an hour away from the hospital when their mother took her last breath. She concentrated on that now, passing billboards and copses of trees, rumbling over cracks in the concrete and past abandoned farms, thinking: there? there? A part of her believed she would recognize the place she’d been when her life had changed, but she was wrong. She didn’t think about the cardboard box on the seat beside her, or why she’d had sex with Bill an hour before, or what she would say to David when she saw him.
“You’re early” is what she said when she got out of her car. She looked at her watch; it was four.
“I packed this morning and left straight from work,” he said, coming toward her. “Where were you?”
“Duluth,” she answered, not ready yet to tell him about her mother’s ashes. She glanced at the box in her car as she slammed the door shut. It would be safe there.
“Are Bruce and Josh home?” she asked as they ascended the porch stairs.
He shook his head and pulled her to him, nuzzling his mouth into her neck. He smelled like sweat and her expensive organic shampoo, which he swore he never used. “We could make use of our time alone.”
“David!” She pulled away from him.
“What?”
She looked around the porch. “We’re not going to do it here.”
“Not here. In your room.”
“We can’t do it in my room!” she said, scandalized.
“We’ve done it there before.”
He was right. They had had desperately silent sex in her childhood bedroom with her mother and Bruce and Joshua sleeping a mere wall or two away several times, when he had come home with her in the past. But this was different, their future sex. It was intentional sex, sex with a purpose. It was the sex that would make it all good again between the two of them. It was sex that needed room, but not an actual room. She’d thought of something else.
“Let’s pitch a tent in the yard and sleep out there.” She looked at him encouragingly. “That way we’ll have our privacy.”
He smiled like a boy. He wore a T-shirt that bore the name of a volunteer fire department in Nebraska he’d never heard of and a pair of baggy shorts that went past his skinny knees. She touched his arm, studying it with her fingers, as if she were looking at it for the first time. Sometimes he was that way to her: brand-new. A sting of sorrow shot into her, or nostalgia, or regret. All three, she realized, each one truer than the one that came before. She wished she could go back and not sleep with Bill, or she could go back and love David the way she did before her mother died, or she could go back and never have fallen in love with David to begin with. All three, she realized, each one truer than the one that came before.
Before she and David lived together, he lived alone in an apartment on the fifth floor of a big building near Loring Park, and she thought of that now—thought, strangely, of it often. How she would take an ancient elevator and then walk down a long hallway to his apartment, excited to see him, passing by the sounds and smells that emanated from other people’s doorways. How David would open his door and pull her inside. His apartment was clean and simple and orderly, with a futon lying on the bare oak floor, covered by a quilt he’d sewn in a class he took at the community college. It was those sorts of things that made her love him: the futon, the quilt, the bare wooden floor. She remembered herself now being that woman. The woman who walked down the hallway, passing the doors of strangers, curious and dumb and pure and sweet and kind and good. A daughter. Beloved. The girl who thought herself a woman. The woman who’d never loved anyone who’d died. The woman who arrived at her lover’s apartment, full of joy and wonder, dressed in whatever she’d concocted from her day of thrift-store shopping, thinking she looked hot and intriguing and cool.
She was older than that now, she believed, with both remorse and relief.
“So, where’s the tent?” David asked.
“In the barn.” She saw her sunglasses sitting on the ledge where she’d forgotten them that morning and put them on.
“Let’s go get it,” he whispered, and pulled her to him again.
Her first impulse was to shake him off, but she remained still, her body a sculpture made of stone or glass, her face expressionless behind the blind eyes of her black sunglasses.
And so they would fuck. They erected the tent on the flattest spot they could find, on the grass just beyond the fence-line of the horses’ pasture. Her mother’s rhubarb grew nearby, flourishing already, and beyond them, her tulips, the colors fading from their rims. All around them, the hens grazed
and rooted, looking for bugs and whatever else interested them. They would be gone by nightfall, tucked into their coop. Claire shooed them away from the tent, feeling sick with calculation about the night’s events. She realized that having sex in the yard was a more absurd prospect to her than having to be quiet in her room, but she forged ahead anyway, inflating the air mattress and spreading out sleeping bags and pillows. She lay down, staring at the tent’s ceiling, happy to be alone for a moment. It was growing dark, and still Bruce and Joshua weren’t home. It occurred to Claire that she and David could just go into the house and do it now, get it over with, but she didn’t have the heart to propose it.
She crawled out of the tent and went to her car and got a bag from the back seat. David sat on the picnic table smoking a cigarette. He smoked one at the end of each day, his only vice. “Look what I got for Josh’s birthday,” she said, walking toward him. She pulled out a wide tin tray from the bag. When she opened it up, it fanned out like an accordion. On one level there was a neat row of colored pencils, on the next what looked like crayons, and on the last, fat markers.
“Cool,” he said, smashing his cigarette in the metal dish that Bruce kept out there. “Can it be from both of us?”
“Sure. I figured he could use it, with all the drawing he does.” She reached for one of the markers, a purple one, and removed the cap and pressed the tip to David’s scalp, where his part was. Pepper Jones-Kachinsky had done the same to her the day before her mother died. It was meant to remind her always that she was a child of God.
“What are you doing?” he asked, swatting at his hair.
“Messing around,” she said, more gravely than she’d hoped, and then she smiled, as if she really had been just messing around, and handed the marker back to him.
“Come here,” he said, grabbing her wrist with mock violence.