Shaking out the Dead (22 page)



As they had walked to school, Tatum pointed out to Rachael the dead leaves that managed to hang onto the trees all winter long and now into spring, blocking the new growth. Rachael knew Tatum was happy because today Paris would finish moving into the basement. Two blocks before the school, Tatum stopped, as Rachael had requested during the very first week, and Rachael proceeded alone under a sky whose pockets were loaded with rocks.

But Rachael did not proceed alone. Not really. Her aunt didn't know it, but in the side pocket of her backpack was the Vincent she had cut from a photograph she had found in a junk drawer in the kitchen. She liked holding the paper doll in her hand, and she liked to look at it. It gave her a feeling, the tingle thrill of theft.

The tingle thrill helped remake her. The first day she carried him, Rachael told another girl that her name was really Mallory. Not Rachael. Mallory is what her mother called her before she died.

This information, the dead mother, ended up serving as a field of gravity. A small group of girls were drawn to her, finding definition and purpose in including her. They found security in their juxtaposition to her, their own mothers' existences reassured in contrast. Rachael told them her father was an Indian. She showed them a picture.

And it was so that Rachael awakened from her shock with a mix of truths and lies, enough of each to support the other. Too much of either and the scales would tip, disrupting nature's developmental edicts. She learned multiplication and grammar. She made friends. The mind performs miracles. Once split against itself, it survives by finding balance.

When Rachael reached the chain-linked boundary of the schoolyard, she didn't turn to wave at Tatum, though she knew she was still there. She walked through the gate knowing the watcher would change. Tatum would disappear, but other eyes would turn upon her. She was noticed. Always noticed. By teachers. By girls. By nine-year-old boys. Even those who gave her a wide berth couldn't help but be distracted, if just for a moment, when her presence registered. It wasn't just that she was pretty, although that was certainly part of it. It was the vacuum that accompanied her and made her a larger presence. A motherless space. A fatherless space. Nature abhorred it. People wanted it filled.

Barely in the schoolyard, she was flanked by three small girls.

“Rachael,” the first hollered.

“Mallory,” said another to the first, asserting her greater intimacy.

They circled her and chattered their way across the playground, stopping short of the steps to the school, the turf of the reigning posse of fifth-grade girls. The younger girls stood close enough to the older ones for association, distant enough to demure. One of the fifth grade girls was the older sister to one of Rachael's friends, Claudia. They were a family of sisters, five of them, Claudia being the youngest. Claudia spoke fast and frequently. She was always slightly disheveled — messy hair, jacket askew on her shoulders — by her efforts to keep up. She brought worldly news from the future to her friends.

The information, like Rachael herself, both attracted and repelled, was seductive and dangerous. The latest news had to do with a thing called a
period
. Yesterday, Claudia had explained that when you're almost a teenager, if you're a girl, you start bleeding out your — and she made a gesture close to her body, a pointing downward toward her crotch.

But the girls didn't swallow the information whole. It wouldn't be the first time Claudia's sister and her friends had passed on misinformation to the younger girls in order to shame them later for believing it. But another of Rachael's group, who also had an older sister, had investigated on their behalf. It was true, she reported to them. Her sister told her that the fat girls would get it first.

“That's what the machines in the bathroom are about,” she said.

The school bell rang, and the older girls disappeared through the doors. The younger ones held back for a moment before following.

The news of the bleeding, which seemed to be true, was something Rachael had never heard of before. But it did not shock or frighten her. It was just another given dropped before her with the others, dealt out like cards. For the rest of that day, when she went to the bathroom, each time that she dropped her underpants, she checked them for evidence. Drops of blood, or a river? She didn't know which to expect. She furtively checked her desk chair when she stood, on watch for a red pool, even though she was not the fattest girl.



Tatum emptied the kitchen drawer once, put it all back in and emptied it again. Nothing. It wasn't there. Rachael took the picture of Vincent. She must have. There was no other explanation. But why? Tatum went to Rachael's bedroom and eyed her secret photo albums from the doorway. There was no Keep Out sign. She had never been told not to peek. But Tatum couldn't quite kid herself into thinking that what she wanted to do wouldn't be wrong. Invade Rachael's privacy, and they would live a lie. This, Tatum knew. If she looked and didn't tell, she would condemn herself to pretending.

But she wanted to find it. It was the only picture she had of Vincent, and the empty frame had set off a craving. Tatum needed to see it and know that it still existed. Besides, Tatum told herself, what Rachael did with it might reveal critical information that she, as Rachael's guardian, should know.

Tatum entered Rachael's bedroom armed with her excuse. She squatted before the dresser and fingered the old photo albums, the ones whose contents she knew, the ones full of Margaret. The past. Tatum sat back on her heels and looked at the stack of the newer ones, the secret ones.

Vincent. What could be Rachael's reason for wanting him? Tatum knew her own reasons. It was the psychic press of incompletion. The interrupted pattern. She would've left him as soon as she was sure he didn't really love her. But he became sure of it first. She then thought of Paris and wished she hadn't. They were different men.

But she was the same.

Her thoughts and the old photo albums made Tatum feel deflated by the past. It made her remember what is. But “remembering what is” is impossible. It is oxymoronic. “Remembering what is” casts a spell that plays with time. It invokes the past back into being.

Tatum walked away from Rachael's photo albums, leaving them undisturbed. Her thoughts continued to mold her, though, seemingly from the outside, shaping her to old dimensions, a size uncomfortable and yet right-feeling. Her heart for the day's agenda was lost, and she returned to the kitchen and its floor littered with the drawer's contents. She picked up the duct tape, napkin holders, and trivet and tossed them back into the open drawer. She looked at her address book and tried to re-summon her ambition. She lifted it from the drawer and realized a pen was stuck inside, marking a page. The page didn't interest her, but the pen did. She let it roll from the book into her hand and then held it like a knife ready to stab. She remembered Margaret's funeral and the grave marker Lee had chosen for her.
Wife and Mother
.

Some things are written in stone. The only way to fix some things is to destroy them. She readjusted the pen in her hand and with the other hand rubbed at the flat side of her chest.

She wouldn't let it win. Vincent. The past. Anything in the way of what could be. Symbolic gestures have power. This, Geneva had told her. They ground the intentions in the physical world and instruct the subconscious in terms it can understand.

She had an idea.

Tatum left her apartment. At the bottom of the basement stairs, she took in the center of the room, Paris's bed — the present, maybe even the future — carved out from the stored debris. Tatum climbed to the box where the Book of Rachaels sat on the top. She opened it to her own name and the block of space that followed, the insult, a blank salute to her unworthiness, recognized by even her own mother. Tatum would add Margaret to the Book of Rachaels. She would add her mother too. She would fix the book by destroying it.

Her heart pounded in her chest. She thought of Margaret and her mother and tried to bring into focus the thing to say. But memories of others are inevitably memories of ourselves, reminding our cells of who we used to be, for better and for worse. Hope might be plucky, but history had weight, and it wasn't afraid to throw it around.

Memories gathered to watch her, their doubting eyes making her nervous. Hope sat in the middle of the basement space without her. She observed it from her place on the periphery, knee-deep in boxes and history, holding a pen above a page. The longer Tatum failed to bring the thing to say into focus, the more time other voices had to whisper in her ear.

Hope, the voices said, like happiness, is not dependable. Hope is a rug that can be pulled out from under you at the whim of others with greater claims to it. Hopelessness was the greater refuge. Harder to snatch away. That's why others abandon the depressed. They resent that they can't control their feelings, rip away the despair with the ease with which they could topple joy.

Or so the voices said.

The voices whispered in her subconscious, but the message reached her conscious mind. What she was doing was taboo. In fact, she realized that technically the Book wasn't even hers to change. It belonged to Rachael.

“Goddamnit,” she hollered, tossing the Book back into the box, the holler and the thud drowning out the sound of the door opening above.



Paris had parked in front of the duplex. Eager to leave behind the haunted canvases and empty stools, he grabbed his box of shoes and headed up the walk. Barely into the foyer, though, he heard Tatum holler from the basement. He dropped his box and ran down the stairs. Reaching the bottom, he looked to his left. Tatum stood among the boxes, holding a pen, looking guilty and surprised.

“Hey,” he said, seeing her unharmed.

Tatum closed her eyes.

“What's wrong?” Paris said.

But Tatum just stood there.

Paris spoke softly. “Excuse me,” he said, “but your invisibility shield is malfunctioning.”

Tatum smiled, weakly. She opened her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I was looking for some old junk. I wasn't thinking. I'm in your space.”

Paris motioned at the house above them. “Actually,” he said, “I'm in yours.”

Tatum climbed over the boxes. When she reached him, Paris asked her, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I'm fine.”

But lies weigh less than the truth. That's how another detects them, by some internal psychic scale. Density and texture reveal them, not a person's knowledge of the facts. Paris considered whether to press her.

As though she could sense the coming questions, Tatum reached for his hand to stop their progress. Paris leaned in and kissed her, a dishonest kiss, one to hide in, one for her to hide in.

“Tired?” she said when they pulled apart.

He hadn't slept since before last night's shift. He nodded.

“Sleep,” she said, and she turned to go up the stairs, checking once over her shoulder as she left. At the top, she closed the basement door, but Paris could still feel her anxiety. He was no stranger to it. It held a threat. Reasons to run.

He went to the edge of his mattress, sat down, and untied the laces of his boots. Tatum wasn't fine, and he wished she hadn't lied to him, not because it insulted him or made him feel betrayed, but because he wanted to know her. But then he was no one to talk. He hadn't exactly shared the last hours of his life with her either. Lucky for him that with lies of omission, there was nothing to weigh. Still, he worried. Lies multiply. They have to to survive. Like cancer, they build an alternative world that ends up killing the host world, taking it down with it.

Paris remembered the box he had abandoned upstairs, and he retied his boots. He stood and moved toward the steps. But the spot where he had seen Tatum held a gravitational pull. Was she trying to clear out something she didn't want him to find? Did she sense his past crimes and was being proactive? Paris sighed. Perhaps he could atone for the past, he thought, by not rifling, again, through Tatum's belongings. He could be a better man.

And yet, there was an “on the other hand” that attracted him. Don't we all want our secrets known? Want our diaries read by eyes that fall in love with us for knowing the bone cold truth? In fact, Paris thought, love doesn't make us respect each other's secrets, it drives us to unravel them, one by one, at any cost.

Doesn't it?



Outside the valley, the sky loosened, clouds merely puddling where they once were sea. Geneva didn't gun it like she used to. The speed limit was plenty, so she let the speedometer creep just a few numbers above it, enough to stay in the flow. Not the flow of real traffic, the traveling cars and pickups, but the flow that was there underneath it all, invisible and rushing between yellow lines. No point in resisting and moving more slowly to acknowledge rules and regulations of which flow took no notice. No point in pushing either, trying to outrun it or beat it home. She knew the flow travels, always, at the optimal velocity. That's why it's called the flow.

As she approached the highway exit, she gently pressed the brake. New and delicate growth peppered the close-cropped side of the road. Geneva cultivated her mindset as she drove the final stretch to Parkview Homes. Patience without waiting — that was the objective. To wait was to operate in violation of the flow's dictates. Signing a Do Not Resuscitate order had set up a pending. But it was a pending that must be ignored. Ralph had a flow of his own, and it was to be respected. Her job, Geneva thought, was not to check her watch, but to stand by and witness and not allow him to die alone in the company of people whose only interest in him was his safety.

She reached with her right hand to her purse and opened the flap, double-checking to see that she had remembered the tape she had made for Ralph.
“And I think to myself, what a wonderful world . . .”
It would suit the day perfectly. Geneva had recorded version after version of “What a Wonderful World.” She had opened the tape with Louis Armstrong and closed with an instrumental by Charlie Byrd. In between, she included Ray Charles, Eddy Arnold, Glen Campbell, and Ruth Brown, to name a few.

She hadn't listened to it through before snapping it out of the deck that morning, but she had checked all the transitions between songs, and they were clean. She didn't put it in the car's tape deck because she wanted to hear it for the first time with Ralph, in his room, the context for which it was designed. She was curious as to whether it would come off as a study of a song or just be repetitive and irritating. If the former, good for her and good for Ralph. If it turned out to be the latter, too bad for the social worker who served as Ralph's guardian.

Geneva parked in the lot but remained in the car. The gray clouds above had dissolved to little more than streaks and smears, mere scuff marks on a blue sky. She took a deep breath and looked through her window toward the old stone building. It had once been the Masonic Home serving the old and infirm of the order and their wives. But as the old geezers advanced toward extinction, it was primarily their wives who had taken up residency there. But the real estate was worth a mint. It's hard to win a fight in which you don't get a vote. Sorry ladies. The Masons sold it, and the facility changed hands. The wives were out. The doors were thrown open. Geneva was first in line. The grounds were beautiful. The cost, significant.

Masons or no, the community was a small and closed one, the kind where everyone in it knows everything. So Geneva tried to take her cue from Hester Prynne and wear her so-called sin without shame. She opened the car door. As she approached the front of the building, she gathered herself, lifting her ribs from her pelvis, letting her head reach up from her neck. She mined herself for height, claiming each fraction of an inch. She would meet squarely the gaze of anyone who cared to stare.

She signed in and made her way to the intensive care wing. Outside Ralph's door, Geneva met Vernita — Ralph's guardian, her babysitter. Vernita was a frumpy, middle-aged Native American woman with a bad perm and dark framed glasses. If Vernita had a judgment, if she were on one side or another in the case of the humpstress of Parkview, Geneva couldn't tell.

Vernita followed Geneva into the room and took the chair farthest from the bed. The circumstances were not intimate, as was the point. Under surveillance, Geneva felt as though she floated slightly outside the surface of her own skin, watching herself be watched. Though in the past she had preferred telepathic communication to talking aloud to Ralph, now it seemed uncaring, as though the silence were evidence against her. So, she kept up a blameless patter.

“Ralph,” she said in greeting and then paused at the dresser to snap the tape into the deck. She hit the play button, and Louis started to sing. The volume was modest, but still, the music organized the room, said how it's going to be. Geneva took slow steps toward the bed stand where she put down her purse. From its outside pocket, she withdrew a crystal on a fishing line she had brought along to hang in the window. She dropped it into the palm of her hand and then bent over and planted a kiss on Ralph's forehead. Then, she stood there staring at him, turning over in her mind for amusement's sake the question as to how far she could go before Vernita blew the whistle. Could she lick his cheek? Suck his earlobe?

She walked around the foot of the bed. Approaching the window, she withdrew a hook with a screw bottom from her coat pocket. She pushed the screw's pointy end into the top of the window frame. She waited for Vernita to try to stop her. Second demerit for violation of Parkview property. But, as Geneva's back was to her, she didn't even know if Vernita were watching.

Three more hard twists and the screw was in tight. Geneva looped the end of the fishing line and hung the crystal. The sun was positioned perfectly. Dozens of dots — red, purple, gold, and green — jiggled into being, spraying light across her cheeks and shoulders and down the front of her coat. Beyond the window, the lawn was a mix of new green and raked dirt. Geneva looked out to the paths paved for wheelchair access to nooks with park benches and bridges with guardrails. Slightly farther out was a small grove of Russian Olives surrounding a small pond. Geneva used to wheel Ralph to it before the time came when he would become completely disoriented if he left the building. Then, even if he left his room. His fear made him dangerous. Fear tends to do that.

She turned from the window.

“1967,” she said, moving toward the bed as Louis's version ended and Ruth Brown's began. “It was written in 1967.” She removed her coat and placed it on the back of the chair. “George Weiss and Bob Thiele wrote it. Weiss wrote a ton of hits. Elvis. Ella. Sinatra. All the greats sang Weiss.”

Had Ralph been conscious, he would have rolled his eyes and smiled, so gracious to endure her chitchat.

“Thiele had his own radio show when he was just fourteen,” she said. “Jazz.”

The dots of light swayed slightly as the crystal turned, rolling right then slightly left. They danced across the bedspread. Geneva listened to Vernita listening, trying to discern whether she was tuned into the music or to the drone of her own thoughts.

“Know who recommended Ruth Brown to Atlantic?” Geneva said. “Duke Ellington. Ruth put Atlantic on the map.”

Glen Campbell was next. The break between was a nanosecond longer than Geneva thought perfect.

She knew nothing of Glen Campell's version, other than that it was. So there was no patter of trivia or regurgitation of old liner notes, nothing to conceal from herself her true thoughts: conversations with Ralph had greatly improved with his Alzheimer's. No reactions for her to react to. No opinions about what she had to say that were really opinions about what it meant about
her
that she would have such an opinion. Ralph's conversational style was often that of the politician's. Skip addressing the argument. Undermine the credibility of the arguer. It was a sensational diversion. Content never survives the strategy. Yet, she had never given up hope, not really, that it might change. It took Alzheimer's to cure her of that hope. Well, maybe not cure, but it had forced a refocusing of it. The hope for change became the hope for answers. There was a reason she had chosen Ralph. A reason it had felt so right. The reason simply had not yet revealed itself. But it would. It just took patience.

Patience. The virtue that was its own reward. Not that different, really, from having a high pain threshold.

A quick knock on the door preceded its opening. An aide, a young man, arrived with a cart. For a brief second, in his eyes and smirk, Geneva believed she detected herself in his mind, naked and wrinkled-ass, riding Ralph into the sunset. On the bright side, it was probably the first time in a decade plus that a man had undressed her with his eyes.

She stood slowly and stared at him like she were wearing her birthday suit and that it was his good fortune to see. He averted his eyes.

“Let me step out,” she said, and she flipped her coat from the back of her chair. She snapped off the tape deck as she left, disappointed she wouldn't hear the tape from start to finish as a whole.

In the hall, she paused to pull on her coat. A nurse she knew well acknowledged her with a mere chin nod and then averted her eyes. Being watched and avoided amounted to the same thing. She would rise to the occasion of it but couldn't deny that she cared. Being misunderstood is to not be known. Existing only to oneself grows tiring.

Geneva turned to head for the front door when a young woman emerged from the next room. She had short blonde hair and a tiny piercing in her nose. She carried a clipboard and wore a name badge. The girl flinched when her eyes met Geneva's. It was Alice. The social worker. She did not seem to imagine Geneva naked.

Geneva adjusted her coat on her shoulders.

“Boo,” she said flatly.

Alice looked beyond Geneva's shoulder for an escape. Open warfare was not her forte.

“We obviously know who each other are,” Alice said nervously.

“
Is
,” Geneva said. “Who each other
is
.”

Alice steadied herself, focusing for battle.

“I'm sure your intentions weren't to do harm,” Alice said, her words clipped, like she was in a hurry. “But my responsibility isn't your intentions. It's the resident's experience.”

“And my husband's experience was what?” Geneva said, in a voice darn near a purr. “How do you know he wasn't fully lucid, calling out ‘Give it to me, mamma'?”

“If that were the case,” Alice said, “you should have submitted that information to the board. It would have been of interest to his doctor, too, I'm sure.”

“What are you,” Geneva said, “twenty-four, twenty-five?”

“I don't see that it's relevant.”

Geneva crossed her arms over her chest.

“You have no idea all that you don't know,” she said.

“I'm sorry you feel that way,” Alice said.

“You have not been authorized to apologize on behalf of my feelings.”

Alice readjusted the clipboard on her hip. She was younger than Tatum, Geneva could see. Younger than Paris. She was right-on from head to toe, from haircut to sensible and cruelty-free footwear. She was a righter of wrongs; the meter of justice. The terrible grays of experience had yet to tarnish her absolutism.

“I have extensive training in geriatric, psychiatric matters,” Alice said. “My master's thesis. . .”

Geneva burst out with a laugh, interrupting her.

“I'm sorry you. . .” Alice said and then stopped herself.

“Have you ever considered ‘I'm sorry
I
'?” Geneva said.

“I have nothing to apologize for.”

“And yet, you keep saying sorry.”

“Excuse me,” Alice said. “I have rounds.”

Their eyes locked, but as Geneva looked, the fight drained from her. The girl knew nothing, but how could she know otherwise? Her youth, the piercing, the clothes — they misinformed. She wasn't righteous. She was self-righteous. She stood not for justice but for control. Geneva believed in heroes, revolutionaries, and fighters of the good fight. But that's not what she had here. Alice was a person whose power in life would come from red pens and a deftness with bureaucratic processes. In other words, she had no power. How, Geneva wondered, had she ended up in battle with such an inferior opponent?

“Move,” Geneva said, without energy, as Alice stood between her and the lobby. The idea of stepping around Alice did not occur to her.

Alice moved. Geneva left the building. She stood on the front steps and grunted a laugh. The sun was blasting. The sky, screaming. The day was hollering,
hallelujah
. In Montana, spring days are rare. April snow could turn to rain, and rain might piss from the sky through June. The Memorial Day weekend could feature wet and sloppy snow. Sometimes, spring showed up for a day or two in February, then another two in May. A Tuesday and Wednesday, perhaps. But then, by Thursday, the thermometer might snake up to ninety and within weeks turn everything brown and bring on yet another taxing fire season. But, nonetheless, today, here it was. The rarity. The gorgeous spring day.

Geneva walked down the steps, into the spring day but not able to be part of it. She crammed her hands into her pockets. Nurses and aides and administrative staff took their breaks walking the asphalt paths. A lone visitor pushed her loved one in a wheel chair, pausing to feel his hands for coolness or warmth and adjusting blankets accordingly. Geneva pointed herself in the direction of the pond and the Russian Olives. Annoyances, large and small, came between her and the afternoon's glory.

It wasn't just Alice. Unfair though it was, she found herself blaming Ralph too for her current slew of irritations. She thought the thought she tried hard not to think: she wanted Ralph to die. She wanted him dead retroactively. She wanted the wisdom, the gift, that was the product of commitment. The lesson. She wanted it all realized. Commitment, she knew, from the outside, can look like martyrdom, or even laziness. But for her it was about trust. She had to trust her own judgment. There was a reason for her choices, and she wanted the reason revealed because then it would be over.