I let go of Jill’s arm then and concentrated on the back of a woman’s head in the next pew—ash blond, dark roots, the smooth curled-under ends a little flat at the very back where she hadn’t been able to reach. A few rows ahead of me I saw Kate’s sister, the mother of the boy who’d gotten married. Where was the nephew? Already on his honeymoon, maybe. I couldn’t remember where they were supposed to go. The wedding seemed like months ago.
I had the feeling that all of this, the funeral, the gathering, the ceremony, was something that had just gotten out of hand because of a single decision I had made, like fables in which one lie leads to crazy, grand consequences. If I’d come into Kate’s room a few seconds sooner, would I have caught her in a less resolute moment? It would only have taken a moment to press the button and then she would, in all likelihood, still be alive.
Could she have pressed it herself? I thought so, unless she’d gotten so weak in the past several weeks that even that was beyond her. I’d managed not to comprehend how thin she’d become; it was possible I’d avoided seeing that loss of strength as well.
I had gazed toward the voice issuing from a woman singing into a microphone near the coffin, still pondering. The church smelled of sawdust and perfume. Before I moved in with Kate, I had occasionally wondered what a crisis might be like, but I had envisioned her with a certain amount of tranquillity, calmer, the certainty more understandable. And after one imagined scene like that, having discharged my duty to at least picture it once, I had put the possibility out of my mind. It still didn’t seem possible that that night—her terror and her determination, the way I’d teetered on the edge of overriding everything she’d ordered me to do and nearly jammed my hand down on the button—was really what she’d wanted.
The air was stifling. As the singing reached into higher octaves I had to steady myself on the back of the pew in front of me. How had I managed not to acknowledge what it meant to promise to obey her?
There were whole days in my parents’ house when I lay in bed and stewed, hating her for being so circumspect—speaking in terms of asking her permission to call, of talk about remaining in control instead of saying plainly that we were talking about death. But I couldn’t stay
angry. I knew that, had I let myself, I would have faced what I’d promised to do—not that single after-school-movie image of something quiet and dignified—but what I had really signed on for, and what, finally, I had done. Kate hadn’t needed to explain more than she did. I understood it; I just managed never to think about it.
It didn’t comfort me to know that I had done what I’d promised. I should never have told her I could do it.
JILL BROUGHT ME SOME
of my things from Chambers Street, but everything else was still in there.
“What was the house like?” I asked her. “I may have left some food out; it’ll get ants. I don’t suppose you checked for ants.”
She looked at me, her face blank, and said, “No. Don’t worry about the ants.”
I was waiting to hear from Evan. I waited for him to send a registered letter, notarized, signed by a lawyer and telling me to remove my effects. I waited for him to drive to Oconomowoc in the middle of the night with my things in a trash bag and dump them on my parents’ lawn. I would have liked for him to do that, or I would have understood if he had made a bonfire of my clothes and books so I would wake up and see it flickering through the shades.
I intimated this to Jill. Nothing direct, just a veiled indication that I was afraid to encounter Evan. Not afraid, I amended, just worried, sort of.
Jill had been digging around her purse for her keys as I spoke. She was on her way to visit her parents, now that she was in Oconomowoc anyway. She glanced up at me briefly, then reached over and squeezed my hand. It felt strange. We were not hand squeezers. That was our mothers. We both stared down at her hand over mine for a second; then she took it away.
“Do you have enough to do out here?” she said. “Or maybe not. Maybe you’re just relaxing before you decide what to do.”
It must look like relaxing. It felt more like inertia so heavy there was little point in fighting it. When I let myself think of the things I ought to do—looking for a job, an apartment—they seemed to be incredibly intricate, detailed tasks.
“I picked up a few papers so you can look at apartments.” She paused delicately. “I don’t know what classes are still open but I bet you can find something.”
“I’m not going back to school right now,” I told her. I had been saying this in my head over and over, not in preparation for telling her but because it comforted me. How had I ever navigated the bureaucracy of the university, its deadlines and credit requirements and forms? I had, of course, and with no more difficulty than anyone else, and no doubt I would again, but I couldn’t imagine dealing with that now.
She nodded, unsurprised.
“How’s Mark?” I asked her. “Tim’s friend,” I added inanely, as though she wouldn’t know.
“He’s okay,” she said. “He said he called you but you haven’t called back.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. I hadn’t seen the point. The notion of having the energy or even the need to bother with it all—the stairs up to his apartment, keeping my fingernails away from the condom, the adjustments, shifts, and murmurs. Was that really what I was going to do now, anyway, go out and get laid?
EVEN AFTER SEVERAL WEEKS
at home, I still awoke at odd intervals in the night: yanked upward at one, at quarter after three, at four. It took a few seconds every time to figure out where I was, and that the sound that had jarred me was the clanking of pipes or my father closing the bathroom door, and not the watery gurgle of breath over an intercom. The first few times it happened I picked up the clock radio next to the bed in a haze and listened to it as though I’d hear her through it, breathing.
I never dreamed of Kate. I wanted to. Jill had dreamed of her grandmother once, shortly after she’d died, and she said it had felt like a gift. I didn’t believe some spirit incarnation had come to her, or that one would really come to me, but I thought my mind might be keeping something back, one forgotten moment that could come to me like an apparition, that I could savor.
I tried to will it. At first I only thought of Kate when she had been happy: at the market, at parties, but it felt maudlin, undeserved, and
self-serving:
Oh how happy she’d been, the trouper, and wasn’t she happy somewhere else now too
. So instead I pictured her stretched out on Evan’s bare mattress as I traced around her, smiling grimly up at the ceiling.
But I stopped after a few nights. I was afraid I wouldn’t get Kate standing calmly in my doorway, or laughing. I thought she would come to me pale and pinched with anger, her arms crossed, her lips a white-rimmed line.
WHEN I HAD BEEN
home about four weeks I heard my mother answer the phone in the kitchen. From the way her voice rose and then lowered, the muffle of it where she must have stood at the far wall of the kitchen where I would not hear, I knew it was Evan. She came in after a few minutes and said, “That was Kate’s husband. He wondered if you’d like to get your things this week.” She sat down next to me and said, “He’s selling the house, so it needs to be cleared out a bit.”
“I’ll go,” I said. “Will you drive me?”
She nodded. “He asked that you send the house keys in the mail.” She stroked my hair and sighed. “Can I make you something for dinner?”
I HADN’T BEEN OUT
much in the weeks I had been home, and back to Madison only for the funeral. As my mother and I walked down our driveway and got into the car to go to Chambers Street, the first thought that struck me was that it was too easy. No pause to lift and settle someone, no folding up a chair. It felt incomplete and careless to simply slide into a seat and snap the seat belt in place.
We didn’t speak during the drive. When we reached the neighborhood, I peered around at the people sitting on porches and kids tearing around yards. The neighbor’s dog was racing in circles around their house.
“My,” my mother said. “Those kids are loud.”
I knew those kids. They were always wrecking their bikes near our house.
“Remember when Jill and I lived near that elementary school?” I said. “They sound like bloody murder when they’re playing. I don’t know why people think it’s supposed to sound nice. Liam called them hyenas.”
She shot me a curious glance as she parked in the driveway. “Who’s Liam?”
I was looking up at the house. It had only been a month since I had been here. There was no reason for it to be cobwebbed and decrepit, but it surprised me how neat it looked. The flowers in the window boxes were still blooming.
“What a nice little house,” my mother said.
The night Kate died, my mother and father had arrived together to take me back home, one of them to drive me and the other to drive my car. I had watched them get out of the car, my mother in her old jeans and a windbreaker, my father, oddly, in neat khaki pants. How comforting it was to see them coming toward me, so grave and calm. I experienced a vestigial surge of trust from childhood, as if all were truly well now. I rarely even spoke with my father other than hello and how are your grades, and it made the sight of him that much more significant now. What did I think he could do for me, just because he was here? But it had moved me, the sight of his thinning dark hair at the top of his skull when he bent down to help me up from the couch where I’d been waiting, the wrinkled flesh around his neck and jaw, soft, loosened from age.
I had been sitting there for an hour and a half when they arrived. The ambulance was gone, Kate was gone, but my blood raced anyway, my pulse running rapid as a sparrow’s heart. I think I was trembling. I was that way until my parents arrived. My father came in first. When I saw his shape in the doorway, the sloping width of his shoulders, his calm face, it tore me open.
I UNLOCKED THE FRONT
door and held it open for my mother. Then I followed her inside.
It smelled like nothing at all. Not stale air, not flowers, not the last garlicky dinner I had cooked. I looked around: Nothing was out of place. The calla lilies that had been on the kitchen table were gone, the vase that had been drying upside down on a towel by the sink. Who had been here? I thought of something then, and went into the kitchen to look around. The funnel and tubing I had used to feed her was gone too, from its place beside the sink where we always left it after washing.
I opened the refrigerator: some bottled water, a jar of jam. I had had it stocked full of vegetables before I left, but of course that would have spoiled by now. I shut the door.
“This really is a lovely house,” my mother said. She was standing in the middle of the living room, gazing around at the bright walls, the photographs in their frames. In her shorts and tennis shoes, her dark hair, streaked with gray, falling from its ponytail, she looked baggy and out of place. Well, she should feel that way. I wanted her to see what it had been like—that it wasn’t drudgery, that I had lived in a pretty house on a welcoming street. She had never once accepted an invitation to visit us.
“Such a lovely color,” she went on, looking toward the living room wall. She glanced over at me and gave me an innocuous little smile. I didn’t understand how she—how anyone—could look at me as though I were still myself, or even made up of the same stuff they were. I felt as conspicuously different as if my skin had changed color overnight. Even my face looked wrong these days, my eyes stark and gray, my mouth colorless and somehow a whole new shape. I believed that Kate had sunk into me like a sunburn, rooted herself in my skin like a pelt, but everyone refused to acknowledge it.
“Let’s go,” I said. I turned my back on my mother and went down the hall to my room.
My room hadn’t been touched. My clothes were still piled on a chair, the bed unmade. The day of the wedding had been chaos, I recalled, and I had left it a mess as I tried to finish Kate’s hair and makeup.
“I’ll go get the boxes,” said my mother.
When she was gone I went to Kate’s room. The shelves were cleared of photos and statues, the plants removed. But when I peeked into the top drawer of the bureau I saw that the cleaning had only been a surface sweep, maybe by the real estate agent, and her clothes were still in there. I moved aside the underwear and lace bras, and found the Chinese lacquer box. I put it in the pocket of my jacket.
I opened up the nightstand drawer too, and found the wedding ring we’d put in there, and the blue butterfly in its little box. I left the ring and took the butterfly. I was planning on throwing it away somewhere,
or just hiding it. I didn’t want Kate’s mother, or Evan, turning it over in their hands and figuring out how it was used and who helped. It wasn’t any of their business.
I was back in my room when my mother returned. She stood next to me, folding my things and placing them in the boxes, moving them to the floor as we filled them. She was very strong. She knew to bend her knees and not to use her back. She could carry heavier boxes than I could.
I had to keep telling her what to take and what to leave.
I just borrowed that from Kate
, I said, as she held up books stacked by the bed and a sweater draped over a chair.
That’s not even mine
.
W
HEN I AWOKE THIS
time I could tell it was well after midnight. There was no sound—no cars on the street, no television on in another room. I was sitting up in bed, and suspected I had been for a while. Even in the dark I could see the shapes of clothes and towels all over the floor, some empty soda cans, and a glass I’d been drinking water from, cloudy with fingerprints. The clock said 2:43
A.M.
I sighed, rolled over, stared at the lavender wall, and then got up.
I could still walk through this house in the pitch dark and find my way. I moved through it slowly and carefully, easing open the back door and leaving it ajar.