The Storm at the Door (35 page)

One day early that September, my mother called my grandmother at Jillian’s house. Katharine was fretful, but at a loss for the words to describe her concern.
There is something that just isn’t right. There is, I don’t know, something there. And I just worry, you know?

Even on bad days, when Katharine could not remember her husband’s name, she still spoke in obscure, generalizing ways of trauma and loss. And yet, for the nearly three decades following Frederick’s death, Katharine took no new husband, no new boyfriend.

A year earlier, Lars Jensen had reemerged again, phoning my grandmother’s house while my aunt Louise was staying with her. Katharine had refused to take his call. Katharine was bereft but wanted no salve for the absence she often could not even name. Still, her anxiety, on the fourth of September, 1995, seemed to my mother different from her ordinary sadness.

•   •   •

There is the sound. From the basement of Jillian’s house—at four in the morning, on the fifth of September—the sound of a falling.

The sound wakes my six-year-old cousin, who then wakes my aunt Jillian.

Mommy? I think something fell down the stairs. I think it was Indy
. But Indy, the family’s Labrador, lies at the far side of Jillian’s
bed, where he cocks his head at the predawn commotion. And so Jillian rises and walks down her hallway. This scene too will become mythic, but now it is just a moment. Jillian walks in her robe as her mother, one night in Singapore, walked in her own robe, but also like a hundred other times Jillian has risen to inspect noises.

Maybe something fell off a shelf? Maybe a raccoon got in somehow? Could it possibly be burglars, out here in the woods of New Hampshire? The door to the basement is open. The staircase it leads onto is dark.

Deep within that darkness, at the bottom of the steps, is the sound of struggling breath. My aunt touches the switch, lights the scene, and reveals the fact of what has happened. At first, she feels that she can take it back. She can turn off the lights and turn them on again, and there will be nothing. She can crawl back into bed with her husband and explain that it must have been the wind. But she descends the stairs, and the scene persists.

Jillian tries desperately to will it away. She says,
Okay, you’re going to be okay
.

Already she is imagining her mother’s recovery, the close call, how they will all have to keep a closer eye on her from now on, but that will be it.
It will be okay
, Jillian tells her mother, and then she yells for her husband to call an ambulance.

•   •   •

Four hours later, I opened my eyes to find my mother, in tears, seated on the corner of my bed, explaining that my grandmother had had a good, long life.

Likely, my mother told me, my grandmother tripped on something and fell against the door to the basement, into the space beyond. Or maybe she pushed open the door—in the
midstages of Alzheimer’s, in the dark—and walked confidently into what she believed to be the bathroom, to discover that the floor had abandoned her. Instead of cold tile under her feet, there was nothing at all. Nothing but blind space, and a falling.

An accident, a terrible accident
, we said at her funeral. We had flown up to New Hampshire. It was the first time I had seen Echo Cottage in the fall, frigid autumnal gusts denuding it, in broad strokes, of its summery magic.

But at least, this way, her mind was spared. At least, this way, she died still herself
.

•   •   •

One morning, three or four months after my grandmother’s funeral, I sat opposite my mother at our kitchen table in Texas, eating the breakfast she had made for us. My mother looked out the window for a long while, her fried eggs coagulating. I asked her what she was thinking. She turned to me, her eyes glassy and narrow, and admitted that sometimes she still wondered exactly why her mother had fallen down the stairs that night. She would never say that my grandmother’s fall was in any way deliberate, and we can’t believe that it was. Still, my mother sensed that her mother, even in her confusion, grasped her situation, understood the troubles her worsening disease would impose upon her family. After all, she knew better than anyone the burdens of her husband’s hospitalization. Perhaps anxious and deliberate Katharine had at last allowed, even courted, recklessness.

What Mum hated more than anything
, my mom told me,
was to be a burden
.

A misstep. Or a pang in the heart. Or recklessness. Or a decision. The unknowable act, and then gravity. My grandparents reduced to bodies, their lives forever reduced to our stories. The full truth of how they lived and died split open and bled away.

There is my grandfather, his brain sharing his skull with the concrete. There is my grandmother, on an emergency helicopter ride, high over the land in which she was born, grew up, spent most of her life. They have both fallen into some other space.

That space, just beyond our understanding, like my grandfather’s months at his mental hospital, or the truth of what my grandmother silently endured, or the lost words of my grandfather’s pages: a vacuum punched open, which still draws our compensations that will never quite suffice. That space, like all that Frederick destroyed and all that Katharine concealed, an emptying of our history, which we can only try to fill with something different and new.

On a July day in 1989, my grandmother looks at the fire she has made.

This time, she burns all the pages. Simple as that. The paper burns; his words burn. Why should she expect it to be otherwise? Isn’t this precisely the point? Yes. The point is that they are only words. One night, years and years ago, she had read those pages and let herself think that they were something more.

But, of course, they weren’t enough. He wasn’t enough. Not to hold her, or our family, from the senselessness of what happened.

She thinks of when she once saw a sparrow fall from a high branch of one of the trees in front of Echo. Down he fell, like overripe fruit, the collision of his tiny head with a rock soundless to her. He spasmed there, and never moved again. The moment happens and then it passes. Simple as that. Living things die. Paper burns. What had seemed timeless ends. He is gone, and now the pages he wrote are burning.

And yet. How is it that, despite all, the idea of another life persists? How is it that after all the ways he failed her, after all the effort with which she has tried to deafen herself to that history, the heart-boom of a first touch, forty-five years before, can echo even still?

Another life, one in which their love would have been enough, one in which their words would not have failed them.

Maybe it is true that sometimes, and only for moments, that other life had been theirs.

My grandmother closes the door to the Franklin stove, and the embers inflame. Within moments there is nothing left of my grandfather’s pages, nothing at all.

Outside, treading the tepid lake water with my mother and brother, I notice that the chimney has started smoking again. I wonder about the fire, what my grandmother has burned, and why.