“What’s the money dance?” Michael asked.
“Watch.” The dapper Romeo, a half foot shorter than his daughter, was leading Jane out to the floor as a lively dance tune struck up. Other couples followed. My father pinned a bill on her dress. “Sometimes,” I said, “they steal the bride and ransom her. The point is to get money for the newlyweds.” Jane was handed off to another relative, a big stocky construction worker who danced like a tree, then was spun around and was given to a boy about ten, who gazed up at her adoringly and pinned his money to her waist, his cheeks as red as tomatoes.
I rested my chin lightly on the top of Michael’s head. “Next life, would you be straight so we can get married?”
“That’d be all right, I guess. What if we’re both girls, though. Or guys?”
“Just don’t go anywhere when you get to the other side. Wait for me and we’ll figure it out.”
He leaned backward, turning his head into my chest. Light struck his irises, turning them a crystal color. “Will do.”
I leaned into his shoulder. “I’m going to be so lonely without you.”
“Nah, you’ll have what you need, sugar. You always do.”
“Sugar?” I laughed and settled next to him. “You’ve been hanging around your brother too much.”
He watched the dance without speaking. Then, “Life’s just too damned sweet, you know it?”
“Yes, it is.” I took his hand loosely in my own. “What’s been the best part, Michael? Music?”
He shook his head, a smile on his mouth. “Thanks for bringing me here, Jewel.”
“Oh, sure. Everybody oughta go to an Italian wedding at least once.”
“Not here, today,” he said. “Here, to this town, these people.”
“Michael—”
“Listen, okay, for just a few minutes.” He tightened his fingers around mine. “There’s some things I’ve been wanting to say to you, and they’re important.”
“I don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“This is a good time. We’re happy today.”
“But . . .” I didn’t want to talk because it made it too soon. I could feel it creeping up on us, on him, that scythe, but talking about details made the blade shimmer in the sun. I took a breath. “You’re right. This is good. And you know you can count on me.”
He gave me information on his papers, on documents he thought I would need. He’d written everything out and put it in a drawer in his room, and a friend back in New York had the key to a safety deposit box that was to be opened when I called. It held his will and sundries.
“There’s one more thing, Jewel, and this is the hard one.”
“Shoot.”
“Get my father here for the funeral. And don’t let Malachi leave until he gets here.”
I smiled, thinking of our dance. “Now
that
will give me some pleasure.”
“Thank you.” He let go of a breath, and holding hands, we watched Jane collect a fat wad of bills while her new groom discreetly got ready to go. Jane’s face was flushed and shiny, and I wondered if her heart was pounding. “Oh, they are going to have such a good time tonight,” I said.
He nodded, smiling fondly. “I’d sure like to dance.”
“Let’s do it, then!” I stood up and pushed a tangle of chairs out of the way, clearing a spot for us no more than three feet square. But we wouldn’t need any more than that. “Right here. We’ll just have our own little shuffle on our own little square of floor.” I stuck out my hand and he took it, standing slowly. I bowed. “Sire.”
A million times I have danced with Michael, in dozens of clubs over the years. He waltzed and tangoed like a master, but just now we slid into a shuffling two-step that didn’t go anywhere but in a circle. His body felt as insubstantial as the wind, so thin and light it was as if the fey folk were calling him to the other side a molecule at a time.
But it was still Michael, his voice humming through his chest in that familiar way, his neck and the curve of his shoulder smelling faintly of Aramis, his fine hair brushing my cheek. His broad, long fingered hands held me as we swayed, and I closed my eyes, letting all my love pour through me, brilliant as the light of a million candles. I breathed him in, close to my heart.
“The best part, Jewel,” Michael said, low against my ear, “was you.”
And I knew, right then, but I didn’t let on. I just lifted my head and smiled at him. “I love you,” I said.
He tucked me close and we shuffled in a weak circle. “You can’t help it.”
MICHAEL
He awakened just before dawn, the house silent around him. He turned his head and saw a particular blue in the sky beyond the windows. For one long moment, he relished it, that bright intense color, and the scudding of clouds beginning to obscure it. It would rain.
He had seen the sky gather rain clouds this way thousands of times in his life, in hundreds of locations. He never got over the beauty of it. Of thunderheads moving with authoritative darkness over the blue, blue sky. He had ridden in planes above those banks of clouds, and never failed to feel a little prick of sadness that he was above, not within, not below—feeling clouds, feeling rain, admiring lightning.
The house around him was very still. Everyone still slept. Only he was awake to appreciate the power and beauty of the approaching storm, to smell the rain on the breeze coming through the small opening of his window.
It had been a while since he’d been able to really walk without anybody helping, but this morning, he slid his legs to the side of his bed and put his feet on the floor. He felt acutely the brush of light cotton against his knees and across his chest. He felt the floor press up against the soles of his feet. He took a breath and loved the feeling of air in his lungs.
Peering through the window, he admired the wide grassy fields, and the muddy, deceptive flow of the Arkansas beyond, rushing to fill farmers’ fields with irrigation water. He thought of the places he and Jewel had seen on their way west from New York, thought of cottonwood trees, and the fishermen up early on the banks. He thought of the union of this river with the great Mississippi, and it pleased him.
His strength was small, but there was enough of it if he moved slowly. On a notepad he scrawled a few words so they’d know he was at peace, then he walked on his own power through the door and out into the world. The wind brushed over his face, cool and soft as a lover’s breath. It rustled leaves in the trees overhead, and he stopped, sweating, to admire the sound.
Peacefully, slowly, he walked to the river, stopping whenever he needed to, in no hurry. He admired spiderwebs hung between branches, and the flight of a magpie overhead. He took time to notice the darkening of the sky and the first ripples of lightning. Morning thunderstorms were rare, but he welcomed it.
At the riverbank, he had to rest a very long time. His body, thinner than it had been when he was twelve, shivered and quaked at the effort he expended. It was a long time—long enough that clouds covered all the blue in the sky—before he had the strength to move again. He had hoped to go naked, as he had come, but in the end, he had no more strength. He swallowed the pills he’d brought with him and waited, sitting on the bank for a long, long time, until the first raindrops began to fall.
It was a good day to die.
He had loved living. Loved every small thing about it. And he would dignify that by choosing this day to leave it, a day when the river ran swiftly, when rain pattered among the cottonwoods, a day when the people he most loved in the world slept entwined in each other’s arms.
Some might call it a sin, but he knew it wasn’t. It was dignified. It was tribute to all he loved, all he had experienced, all he’d been lucky enough to know. As he lay back to let the rain cover him, he thanked the beings that had allowed him to be here, and closed his eyes, and let them carry him away, his soul sliding into the swift current, into the river of time.
PRAYER TO SAINT JOSEPH FOR A HAPPY DEATH
O Blessed Joseph, you gave your last breath in the loving embrace of Jesus and Mary. When the seal of death shall close my life, come with Jesus and Mary to aid me. Obtain for me this solace for that hour—to die with their holy arms around me. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I commend my soul, living and dying, into your sacred arms. Amen.
Chapter 19
It was lightning that awakened me, not a loud crack, just a low, faraway rumble, like drums. I lay in the warmth of the bed, listening with my eyes closed to the rain coming down against the windows, blowing a fresh clean scent through the world, a promise that the day would not be hot. The breeze was even cold, and I could take some pleasure in the anticipation of fall, when I’d dig out the heavy quilts and we’d have to turn on the heat.
Next to me, Malachi slept like a dead man, the muscatel having done its work, and it made me smile fondly. Oh, they’d loved him, those old Italians, something I should have seen. If anybody loves a big alligator-wrestling, hard-drinking, ladies’ man, it’s a macho old Italian. He was one of them in three minutes.
I left him sleeping and tiptoed downstairs in my robe, headed for the kitchen and coffee. The light was dim and I didn’t see what was wrong when I went through the dining room the first time. It was only as I was measuring grounds that I stopped and went back to the doorway to double-check.
Michael’s bed was empty.
I stared at it for a long, long minute, thinking he’d gone to the rest room—though I knew very well he hadn’t since I’d just been in the downstairs bathroom. My vision grew acute as I stared at that empty bed, and details imprinted themselves on my brain—the small geography of shadows left by the rumpled covers, a whole world of hills and valleys and canyons and plains in a white sheet that looked pale gray in the low light.
The imprint of his head was still on the pillow. I went there first, putting my face down in it gently so as not to mar the shape, just inhaling the scent of his hair, the lingering hint of illness that never seemed to entirely cover the robust patchouliness of Michael.
My hands were shaking as I straightened and picked up the note.
The best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep. Love you all. Bye (and thanks for all the fish).
A hundred times I’d tried to imagine what this would be like. How I’d manage it. How it would go.
Nothing could have prepared me for the real thing. My mind went blank, but my body simply gave way, as if I had no spine, no bones. I fell straight to the floor, the note in my hand, the rain beyond the window. I couldn’t even cry.
No bones in my body and no activity in my brain. I stared at the narrow planks of the hardwood floor, noticing the grain of one board looked exactly like a weather photo of a hurricane, while the one next to it made me think of the shivery lines on a graph that measured heartbeats. I’d had one when Shane was born, and had watched it shivering up and down with his speedy heartbeat for hours and hours. Michael had been there.
Then.
And now he was outside in the rain and he needed me not to fall apart. It was easier than I thought to get to my feet, though it did make me a little dizzy. I walked upstairs to my room. Malachi’s foot stuck out from beneath the sheets and I bent to put my hand around his arch. “Malachi,” I said, surprised at the husky power of my voice. “Wake up. I need your help.”
He was noiselessly, completely awake. I’d never seen anyone go from sleep to awake so fast. “What is it?”
“Michael’s gone.”
“Gone—” He sat up straight. “Oh.” He swallowed, then tossed the covers back and put his feet on the floor. I handed him his jeans and then found my own. In silence, we put on socks and shoes. “He go to the river?” he asked, his voice a little rough but pretty steady.
I nodded.
It didn’t occur to either of us to take an umbrella. We walked through long, yellow grass, rain wetting our heads, making my hair heavy against my back. Beneath an ancient cottonwood, Michael lay stretched out in the rain, his body so absurdly, painfully thin.
His body. It was so obviously just a body.
Malachi knelt and lifted him in his arms, so gently I nearly fainted with it, and carried him home. We laid him out on his bed, and I washed him, head to toe, brushed his hair, dried him carefully, and put him in his favorite shirt and jeans, even shoes and socks, before we called the coroner to report the death. Malachi made a pot of coffee and put a song on repeat on the stereo, “Long As I Can See the Light,” an old CCR song that moved quietly through the house on mournful notes of saxophone. “Do you mind?” he asked me, bringing me a cup of coffee.
“No.”
It wasn’t until I woke Shane, and he pushed by me to go downstairs and somehow make sure I wasn’t lying or mistaken, that the quiet stirred. Even then, Shane came into the dining room and turned on the light, and his honest child’s heart simply burst. He put his head down on the bed next to Michael and wept silently, his shoulders shaking. I stood next to him, touching his back, wishing for that easy flow of tears, a way to block the thickness building between me and the world.
And when Malachi, big and solid and tough, sank down into a chair and put his head in his hands and wept, not in any kind of hysterical way, just deep, heartfelt, silent tears, I wanted to express it, too. Howl. Scream. Something.
Instead I went to the kitchen and picked up the phone, dialing Jordan first, who would help me get the word out. I didn’t think I could stand to say it over and over again, and she would help me. As I was talking to her, I got out a heavy ceramic bowl and added flour, baking powder, salt. Muffins would be good on such a cold morning.
And the rain just fell and fell.
The thing about family is that they move in at such moments. By midmorning, my house was filled with women cooking. By noon, there was a steady stream of cousins and siblings and children and aunts and uncles, coming by to pay their respects, every single one of them carrying a covered dish. Someone—maybe it was even Malachi—called the officials, and between my mother, Nana, and Jasmine, they settled on arrangements.
The only thing I remembered to do that day was take care of Michael’s request. I carried the phone into my bedroom, into the silence that still smelled of Malachi, and dialed a number in Ohio. A man answered. An old man, one who’d smoked a lot of cigarettes back in the day when that was still allowed in prisons. It was a polite hello, drawled out softly in Malachi’s very deep voice.
“Mr. Shaunnessey?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am. What can I do for you?”
“Well, sir, I’m afraid I’m calling with bad news. My name is Jewel Sabatino, and I’m—”
“I know who you are. Michael’s friend.” His voice roughened. “Reckon, since you’re the one took care of him all this time, you’re calling to let me know he passed, huh?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry.” I blinked. “He wanted you to be here for the funeral, and if it’s all right with you, I’m going to arrange a flight for you tomorrow.”
“He said that? He wanted me there?”
“Yes.”
“It’d be my privilege, young lady,” he said. “I’mna have to take you up on your offer of a flight, because I ain’t got two nickels to rub together right now, but you just let me know when and where, and I’ll be there.”
He could be a pallbearer. I drifted a little, thinking. Him, Malachi, Shane . . . and who else? Maybe Henry would do it. I wouldn’t have minded, but a casket is heavy and I’m strong but not that strong.
I realized Mr. Shaunnessey was talking. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t catch that last part. I’m not . . . I just . . .” A well of emotion came out of nowhere suddenly, and I had to stop.
“Sugar, you have every right. Go on and cry if you need to, I’ll listen.”
And I almost did, right there, break down and sob, but there was something in me so afraid that I wouldn’t stop if I started that I managed to get it back under control. “I’m okay. I should have the details for you in a couple of hours, and I’ll call you then, all right?”
“That’ll be fine.” A pause. “Is my other boy there?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” was all he said.
The day blurred after that. I know I moved through it, applying myself to details like where and when and how. I made phone calls to all the people in New York and LA who would want to know, and listened to a lot of those people cry. Some of them made plans to come in for the funeral, musicians mostly, and some of the inner circle from the restaurant. Hotel rooms had to be found for them.
Shane and I planned the wake, to which everyone enthusiastically added. My uncle Zito, who ran a wholesale distribution business, contributed the wine and spirits. Three of my cousins pitched in for a couple of kegs. Jasmine, immaculate in her blue silk dress, spent the afternoon on her cell phone arranging for chairs and tables to be delivered, for ice and condiments, and a million other details that would have purely escaped me. Between all the food service people, we covered the feast pretty easily. We agreed, my sisters and mother and nana, to leave Jane alone to enjoy her honeymoon. If she called any of us, not a word was to be spoken, and I knew Michael would have wanted it that way. Jane, practical girl, would agree. The beginning in this case was more important than the end. She and I would find a way to create a memorial to Michael when she got back.
Malachi disappeared. Shane went looking for him late in the afternoon, but he’d gone somewhere on his bike and nobody knew where. By that time, I could tell my family was worrying about me, and someone took charge of getting me a Valium scrounged from someone’s stash, and when that only intensified my confusion, they put me to bed. Jordan sat with me, watching the television, until I fell asleep.
Maybe it was just a defense, but I slept like it was me who died. Slept deep and hard, waking every so often through the night with a sense of confusion to see someone else beside the bed, sometimes my mother, sometimes a sister, sometimes Shane.
It was never Malachi, but I never surfaced long enough to figure that out, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have cared anyway. I wanted Michael to comfort me over Michael’s death, and it didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense.
Malachi showed up in the morning, haggard and in need of a shave. He didn’t say a word to anyone’s questions, just smiled wanly as he cut through clusters of my relatives to where I sat on a kitchen stool, peeling apples for Abe’s pie. I hadn’t told him yet that Abe was on his way. I didn’t know if I would.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, taking my hand.
“But I’m—”
“Excuse us,” he said to the others, dragging me outside behind him into the steamy, overheated midday garden, then beyond.
“What are we doing, Malachi?” I asked impatiently, pulling back on my hand. “I have a million things to take care of.”
He didn’t answer, but tugged me through the garden, accidentally stomping the edge of a zucchini plant and noticing with a little “sorry.” I leapt over it, caught up with him. “What’s going on?”
He stopped, finally, in the shadows of the orchard. “I been working on these trees,” he said vaguely. “Can you tell?”
Confused, still not really with the program, I scowled at him. “Couldn’t this wait? I really am busy.”
“I know.” He didn’t let go of my hand, though as he pointed upward. “Got a couple of books out of the library and did some pruning. You’re not strictly supposed to do it in the summer, but you had some rot and disease going here. The crop won’t be great this year, but you could make real money outta this orchard in a couple years if you get it together.”
Maybe, I thought, this was just his way of dealing with things. Everybody was different. “Thank you, Malachi. That was nice.”
He bent then, and kissed me. Hard. Backed me into a tree and pressed our bodies together, a small sound of sorrow coming from his throat. For one minute, I let him absorb what he could, but it didn’t touch me.
Dispassionately, I opened my eyes, looking at his sorrowful face and feeling his big body against mine without a single answering spark in any cell of my body. It was like he’d already left. When he sensed my disinterest, he raised his head and I ducked away. “How long until you leave?”
“What?” He looked so confused that I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
“I hope you’ll stick around for the funeral. Even with you, I’m a pallbearer short.”
“What are you talking about? You think I’d cut out before the funeral?”
I plucked a leaf from a branch. “How would I know?”
“Oh, shit. You’re pissed that I took off last night, right? But it wasn’t for a woman, Jewel, I just . . . needed to be out of there, away from all those people, so I could grieve in my own way.”
“I was barely conscious, so no offense, but I didn’t really notice.”
He put his hands on his hips, brows pulling down. “Look, I’m tired and not really thinkin’ that clearly. If there’s something I’m not picking up on, you’re gonna have to just say it straight out.”
I wanted to hit him. The burst of anger was so hot and clear and direct that I had to take a step back. “There’s nothing to say.” I backed up another step. “I have to get back. There’s a lot to do.”