THREE DAYS AFTER his funeral I saw Hugh again.
Standing at the kitchen sink, I looked out the window at the small yard behind the house. I could not feel my body. I could not feel anything. Since his death, I had moved through the days in a walking stupor and felt best there.
What had surprised me was not the horror of the loss, but the gain of so many terrible things. The gain of time: if he were here now, we would be doing this together. Now there was nothing to do. If he were here now, I would be doing this forhim. Now there was nothing to do. If he were here now I would touch him, talk to him, know he was in the next room… the variety was dreadful, endless.
As was the space around me. The space in our new double bed, the house, the life we had just begun together. Hugh’s empty easy chair, the empty shoes lined up carefully in his closet, the table with only one place setting.
The silence grew palpably larger, the days longer, the nights indescribable. And there was a sudden, almost religious importance to objects—his coffee cup, his razor, his favorite recipe, television show, color, tree. I stared at his moving boxes with the funny names on them. Tarzan Hotel. Sometimes I reached in and touched an object. Some things were sharp. Some smooth. Always Hugh’s. A silver penknife with a broken blade inscribed Sarajevoon the side. A cranberry baseball cap with Earlhamacross the top. A volume of poetry titled The Unknown Rilke. Horribly, I turned two pages into it and read this before it registered:
Now we awaken with memories,
facing that which was; whispered sweetness
which once pierced and spread through us
sits silently nearby with its hair all undone
Another box contained some of the sticks he had collected. When I saw them I immediately left the room.
I scoured my mind for things he had said, his opinions, beliefs, jokes, anything mentioned off the cuff, in passing, in earnest. Anything. I wrote it all down because I wanted every trace of Hugh Oakley for me and our son. I sat in his chair for hours and hours trying to remember everything. But it was like picking up rice grain by grain after spilling an entire bag on a white floor full of cracks. It went all over and so much of it was invisible.
Holding a glass of water in my hands, I stood at the kitchen window staring out at the yard. Before I realized it, I was smiling. I had remembered something new: Hugh saying we should plant pumpkins and sunflowers out there because they were the clowns of the flower kingdom. How could you not laugh at a pumpkin? How could sunflowers not make you smile? I drank some water and felt it cool down my throat. I put the glass against my forehead and rubbed it back and forth. The telephone rang and I closed my eyes. Who would it be this time? What on earth could I say to them? Leave me alone. Can’t you all just leave me alone now? I opened my eyes again.
Standing twenty feet away across the yard were Hugh and the little boy I had seen the first time we visited the house. The phone rang again. Hugh looked exactly as he had the day he died. He was dressed in the same clothes—dark slacks, white shirt, the blue tweed sport jacket from Ireland he liked so much. The phone kept ringing.
Over that noise, I heard something tapping. I didn’t recognize what until I looked down and saw my shaking hand. The water glass rat-a-tatted against the metal sink.
The little boy turned around and knelt down. The answering machine clicked on. I heard my calm voice say the old message: “We’re out now, but please leave a message.…”
Barely able to control my shaking hands, I slid the window up and called Hugh’s name. Called it, cried it, whispered—I don’t know how it came out. He looked at me and gave a small breezy wave, as if I were calling him for lunch and he’d come in a minute. But he had heard me! And he was really there! But he was dead. But there he was.
I was so amazed, so riveted, that I didn’t notice what the boy was doing. Didn’t see him pick up the stone and throw it.
It hit me in the face. I grunted and staggered back. Hands over my eyes, warm blood already gushing over my fingers. Stepping on something, I twisted my ankle hard and fell down. I tried to put out a hand to stop the fall. But it was so slick with blood that as soon as it touched the floor, it skidded sideways. My head hit with a loud thud.
I lay on my side and tried to blink, to clear my head. Everything had slowed almost to a stop. Blood was in my eyes and I couldn’t really open them. I was viciously dizzy. I lay still and heard myself pant. When I could, I wiped my face and opened my eyes. I saw the rock on the floor. That is what I had tripped over. It was brown and silvery and huge. A big rock on the kitchen floor. I remember thinking even then, even there. What’s this rock doing here?
And then something else. Nearby a child was laughing.
None of it was clear to me. I tried to focus my mind on this thing and that—getting the blood out of my eyes, seeing clearly, regaining my balance. But reality was tipped on its side and I could not right it. The child’s laughter remained above and inside and around my confusion. It was the only constant and it was very clear.
“WHAT HAPPENEDTO you? This is a bad cut.”
“I fell.”
The doctor stopped bustling for the first time since entering the room. An ugly woman with a monk’s haircut, she narrowed her eyes. “You fell?” She was wearing white surgical gloves and she pointed a finger at the bandage on my forehead. “That doesn’t look like a fall, Ms. Romanac. Are you sure?” Her smile lasted a second. We both knew what she was saying. “It looks like you were struck with something. Something heavy and sharp.” Her voice rose indignantly on the last word. Her stern face was ready to be outraged. If I didn’t tell her the truth, I would feel that rage. She moved and spoke with the undiscerning sureness of a hanging judge. I was glad I didn’t know her.
I started to shake my head but my neck hurt terribly, so I stopped. “My neck hurts too.”
She put a hand on it and gently felt up and down with her fingers. “That’s normal. It’s either the trauma from the fall or you jerked it unnaturally and twisted the muscles. It’ll go away in a couple of days. But this is what really concerns me.” Again she pointed to my forehead. “We don’t usually see this kind of cut from a fall.”
I took a deep breath and let it out in an aggravated, tired-of-this whoosh. “No one bitme, Doctor. All right? I’m alone. The man I lived with died a few days ago.”
Her expression remained unchanged. Emergency room doctors have heard every lie and story in the world. “I’m sorry. But a wound like this usually indicates abuse. I could explain the technicalities of it to you, but that’s not necessary. Are you on any kind of medication?”
“No. I was given Valium but I don’t take it.”
She went to her desk and scribbled on a pad. “Here is a prescription for a muscle relaxant for your neck, and this one is for pain. Are you seeing anyone? A counselor or a therapist? They can be very helpful when you’ve lost someone close.”
“Ghosts,” I wanted to say. I’m not seeing a therapist but I haveseen ghosts. One even threw a rock at me.
“Thank you for your concern, Doctor. Do I have to come back here?”
“Yes. I’ll need to remove the stitches in a week.”
I stood up very slowly but still my head throbbed and pain went down the back of my neck in a fiery shot. I wanted to be out of that room, away from that aggressive, offensive woman, out in the world again. All I wanted was to be out on the street.
“We also have the results of your pregnancy test and sonogram, Ms. Romanac. They were positive.”
My back to her, I tried to turn my head but the pain said no. I turned completely around to face her. There was nothing to say. I already knew it and had taken the hospital test as an afterthought. The day Hugh died I knew I was pregnant but never had the chance to tell him. That was the worst. The absolute worst part.
“You could talk to our counselor about that as well.”
I didn’t understand what she meant. She saw the question on my face and tightened her lips.
“The child. If your partner is gone then perhaps you might want to consider terminations…”
I caught the gist of what she was saying more from her tone of voice than from the actual words.
“I’m having this baby, Doctor. Can I go now?”
“Would you like to know if it’s a boy or a girl?”
I started for the door. “It’s a boy. I already know.”
Her voice was haughty and dismissive. “No, actually it’s a girl.”
MY LOVER MADE the best sandwiches. He loved to cook, but sandwiches were his specialty. He made pilgrimages to special bakeries around Manhattan to buy theperfect California sourdough bread, Austrian dreikornbrot, Italian focaccia. He experimented with exotic ingredients and condiments like piri piri, wasabi, mango chutney. He poured thin trickles of specially prepared kurbiskernol onto bread and warmed it before he did anything else. He owned the most beautiful and ominous set of Japanese cooking knives I’d ever seen. I think he enjoyed sharpening and caring for them as much as he liked using them.
All of these things went through my mind as I opened the refrigerator door to look for something to eat an hour after returning from the hospital. One day he was dead. Four days later he was buried. Three days later I saw him standing in our backyard with a child who had never been born. One week. Exactly one week to the day ago I discovered I was pregnant and Hugh died.
On a shelf was a large slice of fontina, his favorite cheese. He would cut a piece and hold it in an open palm, telling me to look—look at this masterpiece of kдsekunst. Some of his “cheese art” and an apple. I would be able to eat those small things without getting sick, wouldn’t I? Dinner. I had not eaten for a long time. I wasn’t hungry, but I had to eat regularly now. For the child. For the girlinside me. Girl or boy, it was Hugh’s child and I would care for it with every cell in my body.
I wasn’t afraid to be in the kitchen again. Opening the front door an hour before and stepping into the house, I had been, but it passed. I turned on all the lights and walked from room to room. Sometimes I said out loud, too loud, “Hello?” But that had only been to fill the space and the silence around me. When I had seen that every room was empty, I was okay. I was even able to walk into the kitchen and look out the window at the backyard again. Night had come and there was nothing to see out there.
I turned on the radio and was pleased to hear the last part of Keith Jarrett’s Kцln Concert, one of my favorite pieces of music. Set the table and eat something so you have strength. I took a canary yellow place mat out of a drawer, and a large blue plate from the cupboard.
The refrigerator was full of Hugh’s things—the Lavazza coffee he liked so much, the fiery Jamaican sauce he used to make jerk chicken, sesame oil, lime pickle. I saw them and knew each could break my heart if I started thinking about them. There were the cheese and apples, and now it was time to eat. Take them out. Close the door. Remember to clean out the refrigerator sometime soon so you don’t keep bumping into those things.
When the Jarrett finished, some awful grating jazz replaced it. I switched the radio off. The silence around me was suddenly huge and rising like a tidal wave, so I quickly turned on the small television across the kitchen table. Hugh loved TV and made no excuses for watching infomercials, bowling, mindless situation comedies. Oddly, he usually watched standing up, even if it meant standing there for hours. At first having him standing two feet away while watching Friendsmade me uncomfortable, but gradually I grew to like it.
Part of living with someone is growing to enjoy their eccentricities. Hugh Oakley sometimes slept in his socks. He wrote notes to himself on his index finger in green ink, was suspicious of microwave ovens, and watched television standing up.
What do you do with your love for someone when they die? Or the memories they’ve left? Do you pack them up in moving boxes and write strange names for them across the top? Then where do you put them and the rest of a life you were supposed to share with a person who left without warning?
Switching through the channels, I thought of Hugh’s box marked “Tarzan Hotel” and how he enjoyed not knowing what was inside. He’d once said, “Never try to avoid the rain by walking close to a building. You always get hit by the big drops falling from the roof.” Thoughts, pictures, memories of him flooded me.
I would have been swept away if a high tweedly whistle from the television set hadn’t begun playing “Ring’s End Rose,” a happy Irish song about new love that was one of Hugh’s favorites. Before I focused on the TV to see why it was being played, I thought, This is what it’s going to be like now and maybe forever—everything will be Hugh Oakley. I’d better get used to it or it will drive sorrow and remembrance into me like a mallet driving a stake into soft earth.
On the television screen, Hugh sat by the side of a swimming pool playing an Irish pennywhistle. In the pool, Charlotte and the now familiar little boy held hands and danced together to his music.
Hugh looked ten years older—heavier and redder in the face, less hair, the kind of slow carefulness in his movements you see in aging people. He might have been in his late fifties. His great years had passed; he was at the age where you take what you can get. But his expression blazed happiness watching the two dancers, and it came through in the way he played.
Charlotte looked gorgeous. Although she was a decade younger than Hugh, she too looked older than when I had last seen her. Her still lovely figure was accented by a simple black one-piece bathing suit that emphasized her high square shoulders and long neck. Her platinum hair was cut very short and smart. She wore minimal, chic steel-rim eyeglasses. The severe, scaled-down look suited her brilliantly. It said, Yes, I’m older, but I know exactly what to do with it: pare my beauty to its essence so that what’s left shows only the best.
“Daddy, come in! You promised you’d come in.”
“Daddy’s happy playing for us, honey. Come on, let’s you and me dance some more.”
They did, and there was so much love around the three of them that I cringed. Hugh played “Foggy Dew.” Hugh was on television. Hugh ten years older, balder. Hugh still alive but with Charlotte again. And their son.
They danced and splashed and sang along. Still playing, Hugh stood up and did a jig by the side of the pool. The boy jumped around and threw himself into Charlotte’s arms. Her glasses flew off but with the most beautifully precise gesture she snatched them out of the air before they hit the water.
When he had finished playing, Hugh walked into the house. The boy grabbed onto the side of the pool and tried calling him back. Hugh only waved and kept going. He went through the kitchen, the living room, out to the front porch. Opening a mailbox there, he took out a handful of letters and magazines. Shuffling through, he didn’t stop until he uncovered an oversized postcard.
On the front was a photograph of a picturesque port with whitewashed buildings set against a green hillside and the bluest sky. He turned the card over. The handwriting was instantly recognizable. Mine.
Hugh,
I’m on Samos and it’s nice. Traveling here has been good for me because the Greeks are in no hurry. It’s easy to follow their lead. I saw a man drive his motorbike right into a taverna, they give you a whole lemon to squeeze over your calamari, and the air smells of hot flowers.
I often eat at a place called the Soapy Grill. They make a delicious gyro sandwich of pita bread, lamb, french fries, and tzatziki. It reminds me of the ones you used to make for us. What was that line? Even a single hair casts its shadow. In this case, it’s a single sandwich.
When does it end, Hugh? When will I be able to go around a corner of my life and not run into you, your sandwiches, your ghost, my memories, what was?
You once said, “everything flows.” But it doesn’t, Hugh. Too many things stop, and no matter how hard you try, they can’t be moved. Like memory. And love.
Miranda
He finished reading and clicking his tongue, shook his head. “Samos. Samos.” He said the word twice, as if trying it out on his tongue. The expression on his face was clear: relief. He wasn’t in the least sad I was gone.
“Darling, did the mail come?” Charlotte walked into the room followed by a young dalmatian that was growling and pulling on a pink towel she held behind her. Hugh held out my postcard. She looked at it and, raising an eyebrow, asked, “Miranda?” He handed it over with no hesitation. Tipping her head in a way that indicated her glasses were too weak, she read it quickly and handed it back.
“How long has it been since you last saw her? Eight years?”
He bent the card in half. “Nine. A long time.”
“But she’s been writing you ever since.” It was a statement, not a question.
He lifted a hand and shrugged as if to say, What can I do?
The dog put its front paws on him and stretched languorously. Hugh grabbed its head and kissed it.
Charlotte patted the dog. “Isn’t it strange? Miranda’s the only one of your girlfriends who’s stayed true to you. All the trouble and pain you had with her at the end, but a decade later she’s still sending you postcards from her travels.”
Tongue lolling out of its mouth like a long red belt, the dog started humping Hugh’s leg. They laughed. Hugh said, “Perfect timing,” and pushed him down.
The boy rushed into the room. “Dad! It’s getting dark outside. The eclipse is starting! Come on!” He took his father’s hand and, finding him immovable, rushed back out of the room.
Charlotte’s mouth tightened and she gestured toward the boy. “What if you hadstayed with her? Then we’d never have had him.”
Hugh reached out and touched his wife’s cheek. “But I didn’t stay with her. Don’t think about it, sweetheart.”
“I think about it all the time. Thank God you stayed.”
“You won, Char. Look at these postcards. She’s pathetic.”
She touched a finger to his lips. Be careful what you say.
THE TELEVISION PICTURE changed abruptly to a scene from Amarcord, Hugh’s favorite film. Above the TV noise, a sound rose behind me that was difficult to place. But then I knew it—toenails clicking across a wooden floor.
I turned as the young dalmatian entered my kitchen. He plopped down on the floor and stared at me. His tail began to thump. The same dog that had been on television with Hugh’s family a moment ago was now here with me.
“His name is Bob.”
Nothing is more ineffable than a voice, yet a few remain recognizable as long as we live. Even if we lost them a lifetime ago. James Stillman stood in my doorway. But this was James the man I had never known, the face I had seen only once, in a photograph.
He was thinner, hair fashionably short, the beginning of a few concentric wrinkles framing the corners of his mouth. But his eyes were the same. Eyes I had once memorized—a rascal’s eyes, the eyes of a guy who’s got tricks up his sleeve or a great joke to tell. He leaned easily against the door frame, hands deep in his pockets, one leg crossed nonchalantly in front of the other. He did it all unconsciously. His mother used to call it his Gary Grant pose. I smelled his cologne. I smelled the Zizanie cologne and somehow that was the most shocking thing of all. It made it all the more real. Dreams don’t smell.
The dog jumped up on him and scrabbled furiously for his attention. James picked him up. Bob went nuts. He wiggled and licked and twisted all at the same time. It was too much, and James put him down again but continued to scratch his frantic head.
“I remember your dog, Miranda. What was its name?”
“Oscar.”
He grinned. “Oscar! That’s right. Loudest dog I ever knew. Remember how he snored? And farted?”
“James—”
He held up a hand to stop me. “Not yet. Let me get used to you again.” He crossed the kitchen and came close. My God, that too-sweet cologne. His trademark. The first man I ever knew who used cologne every day. He used to steal the beautiful silver bottles from Grieb’s pharmacy. I hadn’t smelled it in years but the memory was like a flashbulb going off in my face.
Hands still in his pockets, he leaned forward until we were inches apart. What I wanted to know, had to know, was, how much was he here? If I reached out and touched him would he be skin and bones, real, or a ghost, a shade, my imagination gone screaming?
He shook his head and closed his eyes. “Don’t do it. You don’t want to know.”
I shivered and pulled back. “You know what I’m thinking?”
“No, but it’s in your eyes.”
I put my face in my hands and lowered it to the table. The wood was cold. My skin was hot. I no longer understood anything.
There was a deep, abiding silence.
Slowly I began to hear noises. The volume rose. Higher. Together, they were familiar. Years-ago familiar.
Rushing, the slamming of metal, everything loud, jarring. Many voices, laughter, scuffling feet, and movement. A clanging bell. School? The bell that rang eight times a day in my high school when class was over and you had three minutes to get to the next?
These sounds were so recognizable. I lifted my head and saw. It was all familiar, blood familiar, but because it was impossible, it still took time to understand, to register. I was back in school. I was back in high school!
Faces from so many years ago swirled and streamed around me. Joe del Tuto, Niklas Bahn, Ryder Pierce. A football whizzed through the air and was caught with a two-hand slap by Owen King.
“Mr. King, give me that ball.”
Miss Cheryl Jeans, the algebra teacher, stood in the doorway to her classroom. Tall, thin as a pencil, she gestured for Owen to hand over the ball. She was so beautiful and good-natured that she was one of the most popular teachers in school.
“Come on, Miss Jeans. We won’t do it again.”
“Get it after school, Owen. Right now it’s mine. Hand it over.”
He gave her the ball and kept staring at her even after she turned and walked back into her room.
School. I stood in the hall of my high school surrounded by many of the same people I had seen at the reunion months before. But there they had been adults, what they would turn into years after leaving this place and going out into life. Here they were teenagers again with the bad haircuts, braces on their teeth, and unfashionable clothes that had been so cool and necessary to us fifteen years earlier.
I stood transfixed. Kids I’d known, hated, loved, dismissed, worshipped, pushed by on their way to class, the toilet, out the back door to sneak cigarettes. Tony Gioe. Brandon Brind.
And then I walked out of a classroom with Zoe. Eighteen-year-old Zoe Holland and Miranda Romanac passed within two feet of where I stood. Both smiled conspiratorially, as if something funny and secret had just happened and they were savoring it between them. To prove it was real, I was blasted with the smell of strong perfume. Jungle Gardenia—that cheap stuff I wore every day to high school. The two girls continued down the hall and I followed. They didn’t notice. I walked parallel with them and neither noticed.
“I don’t believeit! Miranda, you’re telling the truth? You absolutely swear to God?” Zoe’s eyes were alive with curiosity. Miranda’s face stayed blank and emotionless, but then she couldn’t hold it anymore and burst out laughing. “We did it.”
Zoe brought her books to her face and stomped her feet. “Oh God! Come in here!” She pushed Miranda down the hall and into the girls’ bathroom. They went to the mirrors and rested their books on adjoining sinks. “And?”
Miranda looked in the mirror and made a moue. “And what?”
Taking her shoulder, Zoe turned her around hard. “Don’t fool around, Miranda. Tell everything.”
“When he picked me up last night he said we were going on an adventure. I went, ‘Uh-oh,’ because you know what James means when he says that. He drove to Leslie Swid’s house and parked down the block. It was dark inside the house because the Swids are out of town, right? James said we were going to break in.”
Zoe looked at the heavens. “Oh my God! And you did? You broke into their house with him? You’re a criminal!” She giggled.
“He promised not to do anything—we’d just go in and look. So we snuck around the back of the house. Naturally I was so scared the police were going to come that I had seven heart attacks. But James tried all the windows and found one he could open with this tool he had—this car tool thing. So he opened the window and we climbed in. It was scary, but exciting too. We went around the house just looking. When we got to her parents’ bedroom, he took me and pushed me down on the bed and… it happened.”
“Was it good? Was it great?”
“First it hurt, then it was nice. I was just basically scared, Zoe. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
I had never slept with James Stillman in high school. I had never slept with anyone in high school. Why was I lying to my best friend?
Something touched my shoulder. Adult James Stillman stood directly behind me.
“Come. I need to show you something.”
Although I didn’t want to leave, I followed him.
James hurried down the school hallway through swarms of kids and clamor. Through fifteen– and sixteen-year-old lives hurtling along toward anything that looked interesting, glowed, or blinked brightly, anything enormous or tempting or even dangerous, up to a point. Following him was like swimming in a sea of ghosts from a time of my life that was suddenly furiously thereagain.
None of the kids noticed us. Perhaps because we were adults moving through their world—which meant we were invisible. What we did was of no concern to them.
“Where are we going?”
“Outside.”
We walked down the hall to the back door and out to the school parking lot. It smelled of dust and fresh asphalt. It was a hot, still day. The weather would probably change later, because everything felt too thick and heavy. Insects chirred around us. The mid-afternoon sun glinted off a hundred car windshields. James stopped to get his bearings, then started off again. I had questions, but he clearly had a destination in mind, so I held my tongue and followed silently. We wove in and out of the cars and motorcycles. Here and there I recognized one from so long ago. Mel Parker’s beige VW. Al Kaplan’s Pinto with all the bumper stickers on it. One read: NEVER TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY.
James walked to the other side of the lot and only then did I see where he was going. The old green Saab his parents gave him when he got his driver’s license was parked near the exit to the street. How could I forget? He always parked his car there so we could make a quick getaway after school. I saw two people sitting inside.
James was sitting inside. Eighteen-year-old James, and a policeman. Although it was very hot, the car windows were rolled halfway up, but I could hear what they were saying. The policeman was talking. His voice was slow and genuinely sorrowful.
“There were two of you up there at the Swid house last night, James. You and a girl. So don’t keep denying it because then you’re insultin’ my intelligence. People saw you two and wrote down your license plate number. Are you going to tell me who she is? It’ll make it easier on you.”
“I was there alone, really!” James’s voice was respectful, eager to tell the truth.
The cop sighed. “Son, it’s going to be very hard on you this time. We’ve let you get away with a lot of crap over the years, but not this time. You broke into a rich man’s house and people saw you. You’re definitely going to have to do some hard time for it. Maybe if you tell me who the girl was, I can talk to the judge—”
“Honest to God, it was just me. I don’t know why they saw me with anybody.”
Adult James asked me, “You don’t remember this, do you?”
“No.”
“Senior year. Two months before graduation. We went out one night to eat ice cream. I told you I wanted to do this—” He gestured toward the car. “—sneak into the Swids’ house and look around. You were supposed to say yes, Miranda. We were supposed to go in there and end up having sex. That was to have been our first time. The night that would have changed everything. Because the next day I was supposedto be arrested. Arrested and sent to prison for breaking and entering.”
“But we didn’t do that, James! What are you saying? What is this?” My voice was shrill and frantic. It knew nothing but still it was denying everything. The sun was in my eyes. Any way I turned, it jabbed me like an accusing finger.
James shook his head, exasperated. “I’m saying everything’s written, Miranda. The biggest secret of life: Fate isdetermined, no matter how much you deny or try to fight against it. But you’ve challenged your fate your whole life. And gotten awaywith it!
“You and Hugh were not supposed to stay together. He was fated to go back to his wife and have that little boy with her. That’s what the scene on TV was for: to show you how his life was supposed to have happened. You two were supposed to have a quick, red-hot affair. You were supposed to end up writing postcards from exotic places telling him how much you missed him.
“But none of it happened. You were able to change things. You changed fate. Again. Hugh stayed past the time he was supposed to and then he died. No reconciliation with his wife, no little boy Oakley, mother Charlotte, father Hugh. None of it happened, Miranda.”
He stopped abruptly and the racket of summer’s million insects instantly filled the air. Behind it, young James and the policeman continued talking in the car.
“What about the birthday party I saw the first day we went to the house? What about that little boy?”
“Never happened because he was never born. He was supposed to be born, but he wasn’t.”
“But you didn’t go to jail either! That was good!”
“No it wasn’t. That’s where I was supposed to have straightened out. The experience would have terrified and changed me forever. I had always been dancing around the flames, being bad, taking chances. But going to jail would have thrown me into the middle of the fire. It would have been hell. When I got out, I was supposed to get a job I liked and meet a woman who was right for me. And then I was supposed to have died an old man.” He chuckled, but it was a black, bitter sound. He pointed to one side of his nose. “See this mole? The little one? When I was old it went cancerous but I didn’t take care of it and it killed me.” The same chuckle, even more venomous. “Not a hero’s death, but nicer than driving a car into a pylon when I was barely thirty, chasing after a mean bitch with Russian poetry tattooed on her wrist.”
A loud bell clanged inside the school. Within seconds, doors slammed open and hundreds of kids flooded out. Almost instantaneously the parking lot was filled. Cars started, horns honked goodbye, kids shouted and talked, hurrying toward the street and freedom. The necessary part of their day was over, and after hours in class, all were eager to get to the good part.
James and I watched them leave. It didn’t take long. I remembered that from the old days. You were out of the school building and somewhere else as fast as you could move.
Minutes later a few stragglers still stood around the back door chatting with my old chemistry teacher, Mr. Rolfe. A bunch played basketball at the other end of the lot. Several cars remained, including the green Saab. The policeman and young James continued talking. It was supposed to be the first day of the rest of his life.
But it never happened. Because of me.
McCABE AND I looked at each other, waiting to see who would go first. The nurse at the reception desk had given us directions to the room, but once we’d stepped out of the elevator, we stood still, each hoping the other would make the next move.
“Go ahead.”
“That’s okay. You first.”
“What was the room number again?”
“Ten sixty-three.”
Unlike other hospitals or rest homes I’d visited, this one smelled altogether different. It was unnerving. None of the blunt, spiritless odor usually so prevalent in those places—disinfectant, medicine, and sickness mixed together so that it reeked of nothing good, nothing that gave comfort. Unable to stop myself, I raised my head and sniffed the air like a hound trying to recognize a scent.
McCabe saw me and spoke without hesitation. “Turkey. Smells like a turkey dinner in here. I noticed it first thing when we came in. Come on, let’s find Frances.” He started down the hall looking left and right for room 1063.
I HAD AWOKEN in bed in the Crane’s View house fully dressed, a quilt over me, head on a pillow, arms at my sides. Normally it took time for my mind to clear, but not thatmorning. Instantly I remembered what had happened the night before with Hugh and his family on the kitchen television, and then going with James to visit our old high school.
All my life people joked that I looked dead while sleeping because of the position in which I lay. Once settled and asleep, I usually never moved. This morning I lay wondering how I had managed even to reach the bed. Then the telephone rang. Picking it up, I didn’t recognize McCabe’s voice until he identified himself and said Frances Hatch was in the hospital. She had called him from there and asked that both of us come to see her as soon as possible.
His voice was edgy and irritated. “What I don’t understand is why she’s not in Manhattan. She’s up in a place near Bronxville called Fever Glass or something. Strange name like that, but I’ve got it all written down. She gave me directions. Can you be ready in an hour? I’d like to get going.”
THE BUILDING WAS one of those expensive, ludicrous copies of a Tudor mansion only rock stars and other momentary millionaires buy or build these days. First we passed through high, scrupulously trimmed hedges that hid the grounds from the street. Then, at the top of a long curving driveway, Fieberglas Sanatorium sat on a small rise amid acres of beautifully tended land that must have cost a fortune to maintain. Looking around, you got the feeling it could have been a golf course, an expensive research facility, or a cemetery. Or maybe all three in one.
McCabe pulled into one of the many empty parking spaces in front of the main building and turned off the motor. He had been playing a Kool & the Gang CD and the abrupt silence was unsettling. It emphasized, Here we are and now we have to do something.
He looked in the rearview mirror and ran his hands through his hair. “Pip-pip. Tut-tut. This place is all English wannabe. They wishthey were Brideshead Revisited. Wouldn’t wanna be sick here. I’m sure they’re big believers in high colonies.”
I looked out the window. “You’re sure she’s here? It doesn’t look like a very Frances place.”
“True, but this is it.”
We got out and walked across immaculate white gravel to the front door. McCabe opened it and motioned for me to enter. Inside, I was surprised to see large numbers of people milling about the entrance hall. Some were in robes and slippers, others were fully dressed. We went to the reception desk and asked for Frances. Checking a computer, the nurse apathetically tapped a few keys. I glanced at McCabe. He was a handsome man, no doubt about it. I wasn’t crazy for the gelled hair, but in his double-breasted suit, white shirt, and black silk tie he looked very dashing.
“I’m sorry, but she’s not allowed visitors right now.”
McCabe took out his police badge and held it up for the woman to see. When he spoke, his voice was low and kind but there was no mistaking the authority it carried. “Just tell us the room number. And the name of her doctor.”
The woman twitched uncomfortably in her chair. But there wasn’t much she could do. “Ten sixty-three. Dr. Zabalino.”
“Zabalino. That’s great. Thanks very much,” He took my arm and neither of us spoke until we’d reached the elevator across the hall. He pressed the orange button and stared at his feet.
“What if she really istoo sick for visitors?”
The doors slid opened. The car was empty. We stepped in and they shut quickly. I pressed three.
“Miranda, how long have you known Frances?” He stood too close to me but I didn’t mind because it wasn’t male-female or sexy in any way. McCabe was in close on all accounts; he touched, he poked, he patted people on the shoulder. Most of the time I don’t think he even knew he did it. He also spoke in a tone of voice that said he knew you intimately; you could tell him anything and it would be okay. He made contact in all ways, and even if you had done something wrong his touch or voice held you in place. It was nice.
“Not that long. A few months. Why?”
“I’ve known her twenty-five years. She’s the world’s most independent person. But when she does ask for something, do it and don’t let anything stop you. She calls up and says she wants to see us here? We run, Miranda.”
Several doors were open as we walked down the hall. In one room a very old man lay in bed with his eyes closed. Seated next to him on a wooden chair was a small girl. She wore a large red watch on her wrist and stared at it, eyebrows raised. She spoke to the old man and I realized she was counting seconds for him. Although his eyes remained closed, he was smiling.
Two doors down I was startled to see a small black dog sitting alone in the middle of a perfectly made bed. There appeared to be no one else in the room. I couldn’t resist touching McCabe’s sleeve and pointing. When he saw it he did a double take and stopped.
“What the hell?”
The dog saw us and yawned. McCabe stepped to the door and peered at the small shield giving the patient’s name. “Frederick Duffek. Is a Duffek a breed of dog?” He took a step to the right so he stood in the center of the doorway. “Frederick? Where’s your master?”
“Yes?” A gigantic middle-aged man appeared from behind the door a foot from McCabe. His bald head shone like it was oiled and he wore pajamas the color of old ivory. McCabe wasn’t fazed. “Hey! I saw your dog there on the bed and was wondering—”
The man put a hand on McCabe’s chest, pushed him back out into the hall, and shut the door in his face. Frannie looked at me, delighted. “What a fucking nutty place, huh? That guy looked like Divine. Maybe the dog’s part of his therapy.”
“Maybe we should find ten sixty-three.”
But there was one more snapshot before we reached Frances’s room, and that one stayed in my mind. All the other doors on the hall were closed except the one next to 1063. It was wide open.
Inside was a young woman. On first sight, her back was to us. She wore a baggy black sweat suit and her legs were spread wide. She looked like an inverted Y. On the floor in front of her was a very large blue-gray stone shaped like a rough egg. It would have been a strange sight anywhere. In that quiet, forbidding place, it was outrageous.
She panted hard three times—hoosh hoosh hoosh—bent down, and like a seasoned weightlifter hoisted the stone up to her stomach. Then she blew out the same three short pants and lowered it to the floor. Pause, then three pants and up again. McCabe hissed, “Jesus!”
The stone was almost to the floor. Letting it thud down, she spun around. She was remarkably beautiful.
“Dr. Zabalino?” She had a marvelous smile. When she saw us, it fell noticeably. “Oh, hello. I thought you were my doctor.”
McCabe stepped into the room and looked quickly behind the door to check if anyone else was there. “Why are you lifting a rock? In your hospital room? Is that good for you?”
“It’s part of my meditation.”
“ Meditation? Who’s your guru, Arnold Schwarzenegger? Ooh!” He smiled lewdly and reached into a pocket. “My telephone’s ringing. I love vibrating phones. I could let it ring all day.” He took out a small gray one. It sprang open in his hand. “Hello? Well, hi, Frances. Where are we? Not far. We could be there in, oh, eight seconds. Yeah, we’re here. Next door to you, with the woman who picks up the rock? Uh-huh. No problem.” He closed the phone and looked at me. “Frances says she’d like to talk to you first. I’ll wait outside.”
The woman put her hands on her hips and frowned. “Excuse me, but who areyou two?”
Walking toward her, McCabe spoke quickly, as if he didn’t want her to get a word in edgewise. “We’re visiting your next door neighbor, Frances Hatch. Would you mind if I tried that before we go?” Bending down, he put his arms around the stone and made to jerk it up. His eyes widened and he spluttered. “How heavy is this thing?”
“Seventy kilos.”
“A hundred and fifty pounds! You can lift it up and down like that? How do you do it?”
I caught his eye and gestured I was going. The woman asked me to close the door. Outside, I walked the few steps to Frances’s room. As I reached for the knob, someone nearby went, “Psst!” and I looked up.
Hugh and Charlotte’s little boy stood in a doorway across the hall. He wore the same striped swimsuit he’d had on when I saw him on television in the kitchen. His feet were bare. Worse, there was a small puddle of glistening water beneath each foot. As if he had just stepped dripping wet out of a swimming pool.
Instinctively, I looked at his hands to see if he held another rock.
“I’m not gonna go away.” His voice was a child’s, and held the terrible note of unending threat only a child’s voice can. Do you remember that? Do you remember how frightening and all-encompassing it was to be threatened by a classmate you hated because you feared them all the way into the marrow of your bones? You knew you could never defeat them, never, because they were stronger or prettier (or stronger andprettier), or smarter or bigger or horribly, monstrously mean. And because you were young and knew nothing of life, you knew this person your own age—seven, eight, nine—would always be nearby and a permanent menace until the day you died.
That is what I felt and the feeling was not small. A paralyzing dread came over me because this boy did not exist but was there nevertheless, ten feet away, looking at me with loathing in his eyes.
He began to sing. “In Dublin’s fair city / Where the girls are so pretty—” His voice was sweet, mischievous.
I took a step toward him. “I don’t know what you wantfrom me! What can I do? What do you want me to do? I don’t understand.” Unintentionally I reached out toward him. Arm extended, palm up, a beggar’s hand: Please help.
His face was blank. He gave me a long look, then stepped out of the doorway and walked away. His feet left wet prints on the linoleum all the way down the hall. He began to sing again. “—I first laid eyes on Sweet Molly Maione.”
“Please stop.”
Nothing.
“ Tell me what I can do!”
He never turned. Reaching the door, he pushed it open and was gone.
WHEN I ENTERED the room, an imposing woman stood above Frances, taking her pulse. She had a big sweep of lustrous black hair spun up and around her head like a cone of soft ice cream. Thick eyebrows, large eyes, small features, white skin. She wore a black Chanel suit that contrasted vividly with numbers of gold rings on her fingers and bracelets on her wrists. If I saw her on the street I’d have thought, Money, showoff, businesswoman, or wife with an attitude. Attractive without being special, her black eyes announced she knew exactly what she was doing. When she spoke the timbre and authority of her voice reinforced that.
“Can I help you?”
“Doctor, this is my friend Miranda Romanac. Miranda, Doctor Zabalino.”
The doctor turned one of the bracelets on her arm. “The boy is telling the truth: he won’tleave. You must make him go away.”
Appalled that she knew what had happened outside, I barked back, “How do you know about that? Who are you?”
Frances feebly propped herself up on her elbows. “Don’t be afraid, Miranda. I called you here because I’m sick. Very sick. The doctor says I might die, so I have to tell you some things. It’s essential you know them.
“The first is, if anything happens to me, Zabalino can help you. If you need advice, or a place to stay, you can always come here and you’ll be safe. From anything.
“But now you have to go back and live in the house. Stay there until you’ve found who you are. After that it’s your decision whether to stay or leave.”
“What am I supposed to do there? Help me, Frances. Give me some direction!”
“I can’t because I don’t know. But the house is the key, Miranda. The answers are all there.”
“Is that why you gave it to us?”
She shook her head. “No, but it’s the place where Hugh died and that’s its importance. The same thing happened to me in Vienna with Shumda fifty years ago. I had to stay until I discovered who I was.
“Tell Frannie I can’t see him today. But tell him his wife is very ill and must have a thorough examination. She can still be saved but mustbe checked immediately.”
The door opened and McCabe strode in like the mayor of the place. “Hiya, Frances. What’s going on, girls? Am I supposed to stay next door with Rock Woman?”
I heard something. I couldn’t recognize whatbut instinctively knew it was bad. The way your head snaps back from a revolting smell before the brain registers.
The noise got louder.
“What is that?”
They all looked at me. The women traded glances.
McCabe shrugged. “What’s what?”
“Don’t you hearit? That breathing sound? Loud breathing?”
He rubbed the side of his chin and smiled. “Nope.”
Frances and the doctor were not smiling. They looked as upset as I felt. “Miranda, you have to go. Right now, get outof here! Take Frannie. Go back to Crane’s View. Go to the house.”
McCabe was facing me, his back to the two women. “What’s goin’ on?” He looked happily baffled, as if a prank was being played on him.
Behind him, Frances called his name. He turned. Nothing passed between them—no look, touch, word, or gesture. But he suddenly spun back to face me and his expression was four-alarm fire. “We gotta get out of here! Miranda, come on. Come on!” He took my arm and tried to push me toward the door.
I hesitated now, certainly frightened, but also determined to find out something. “What is it, Frances? What is that breathing sound?”
Zabalino spoke in a warning rush. “It’s you. It’s part of your self waiting outside. You must go now and find answers. It won’t hurt you, or us, if you leave now.”
“But Frances said if I was in trouble I could come here—”
“Later. Not now. Until you find out certain things and then decide what to do, none of us are safe while you’re here. It’s waiting. It can’t touch you while you’re inside. It’s as close as it can get and wants you to know that. Fieberglas is a haven, but not for you yet.
“Frances never should have asked you here. First you need to know who you are. Until then, it—” Zabalino pointed outside, where a frightening and unknown part of myself was breathing loud and close against the walls of this dubious place.
Fear made my feet feel like they weighed two hundred pounds. Strangely, a line from childhood shoved its way to the front of my mind and kept shouting itself over and over. It was the Big Bad Wolf’s threat to the Three Little Pigs as he stood hungry and full of murderous confidence outside each of their houses, knowing he was about to eat the inhabitant: “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.”
“Miranda, come on.” McCabe took my arm. I shook him off.
“Frances, did I cause Hugh’s death?”
“No, definitely not.”
“But you have to help me! I don’t know what’s happening!”
Outside the noise got louder. The breathing faster, somehow thicker.
“Go back to Crane’s View, Miranda. The answers are there. If not, then I don’t know anything. It’s the only thing I can tell you that might help.” She was about to say more but Zabalino touched her arm to stop. Frances Hatch licked her thin lips and stared at me with pity. And apprehension.
WHEN I WAS a girl I contracted meningitis. One summer day I came in from playing with Zoe Holland to tell my mother I had a headache and my neck hurt. She was watching television, and without taking her eyes from the set, she told me to go lie down. When her program was over she would come in and take my temperature. I went to my room and quickly fell asleep. When my mother came in she could not rouse me. The most interesting part of the experience was that although I had slipped into a coma, all the while I was completely aware of what was going on around me. I simply could not react to it. When mother panicked because she could not wake me up, I heard everything. I just couldn’t open my eyes or mouth to say, I’m here, Mom, you don’t have to scream.
I was aware of the ambulance men coming in and working on me, of being carried out of the house and the sounds we made while leaving, of the ride in the ambulance to the hospital, everything. It was not like a dream so much as like being behind glass or some kind of thin curtain, half an inch away from the regular goings-on of life. Two days later I woke from the coma when I felt the urge to go to the bathroom.
Riding back to Crane’s View with McCabe, I thought about those days and what it had been like to be conscious but in a coma at the same time. There but not there—cognizant but completely cut off. Now much the same thing was happening. Since witnessing the phantom boy’s birthday party, I had been watching my life take place from the other sideof something. Something impenetrable and mysterious. My life was over there, not where I was. Or it was life as I had once known it. And there was nothing I could do to get back to it. What would going back to the house in Crane’s View do to help? But what alternative did I have?
THE ACCIDENT MUST have happened only minutes before we came around the bend. Smoke was still rising in a sinuous cloud from beneath the crumpled silver hood. A sharp thick smell of hot oil and scorched metal filled the air. The song “Sally Go Round the Roses” blared from inside the car. No one else was around. The song bored through the strange silence surrounding us on that narrow road a few miles outside of Crane’s View.
McCabe cursed and slewed hard to the right a hundred feet behind the wreck. We bumped onto the unpaved shoulder of the road and stopped amid a loud whirl of flying stones and dirt. Without saying anything, he jumped out and ran across the road to where the BMW was rammed so hard into the telephone pole that its front end was two feet off the ground. Some kind of grim liquid dripped steadily out the bottom of the car. I assumed it was water until I saw the dark color. I looked up the length of the telephone pole. Strangely enough, birds were perched on the black wires, looking busily around and chirping at each other. The wires jiggled a bit under their slight weight.
McCabe ran to the passenger’s side and bent down to look in the window. I was right behind him, my hands pressed tightly against my sides.
He spoke calmly to whoever was inside. It was almost beautiful, how sweet and warm his voice was. “Here we are. We’re here to help. Anybody hurt? Anybody—” He stopped and stepped abruptly back. “Bad one. Bad one.” Before he turned to me, I saw inside the car for the first time.
Hugh Oakley was impaled on the exposed steering column. His head was turned in the other direction so I couldn’t see his face, thank God. Charlotte Oakley had not been wearing a seat belt and had gone full force into the windshield. The safety glass had stopped her, but her head had hit with such impact that there was an enormous crystal spiderweb on the glass. What was left of her beautiful face looked like a piece of dropped fruit. A section of the black steering wheel lay in her lap, evilly twisted, looking like some odd tool. The child, their boy, was in the backseat, dead too. He lay on his back, both arms above his head, one eye open, one closed. He wore a T-shirt with a picture of Wile E. Coyote holding a stick of dynamite in one paw. The boy’s head was bent at a fatal angle. But most important, he was older than when I had seen him only an hour before in the hall at Fieberglas. He had aged.
Staring into that car full of bodies, I knew what this was.
What would have happened if Hugh had lived, eventually left me, and gone back to Charlotte? This.
They would have had the boy and been happy for some years. Maybe eleven or twelve, maybe thirteen. Then one day they would go for a ride in the country in their elegant new silver car. And it would end like this: a face like a burst plum, Wile E. Coyote, the wrong beauty of a cracked glass spiderweb.
When McCabe walked back to his car to get a cell phone and call in the accident, my “coma” still surrounded me, protecting me. In any other situation, seeing Hugh Oakley like that would have driven me mad. Now I just stayed by him and listened to the eerie, beautiful song coming from the radio. I didn’t even feel bad, because I knew this was not true; this was nothow it happened. He had died with his hand on my head, quietly, just the two of us, at the end of a summer evening rainstorm. That way was better, wasn’t it? Quietly, in love, with the second half of his life to look forward to, living with someone who loved him more than she ever thought possible? I would have given him everything. I would have pulled down planets to make our life work. I looked at him. I had to ask a question he could never answer because he was dead. Dead everywhere. Dead here, dead in my life.
“Which life would have been better for you? Which one would have kept you whole?”
Unconcerned, the birds above us hopped on and off the wires, chatty and busy with the rest of the day.
I RETURNED TO Crane’s View with a member of the town’s volunteer fire department. McCabe remained at the scene of the accident. After the fire truck and ambulances had arrived and the personnel had done everything they could, he’d arranged for me to go home with a friend of his.
We rode in silence until the man asked if I knew the victims. I hesitated before saying no. He tugged on his earlobe and said it was a terrible thing, terrible. Not only because of the accident, but because the Salvatos were fine people. He had known Al for years and even voted for him when he ran for mayor a few years before.
Baffled, I asked whom he was talking about. He threw a thumb over his shoulder. “The Salvatos: Al, Christine, little Bob. Hell of a nice family. All dead in one crash like that. Heartbreaker.
“Being on the fire department, we gotta be at most of the pile-ups. ‘Specially the bad ones. But these are the hardest. You come onto an accident scene, which is bad enough, but then you look in the car for the first time and you knowthe people? Jesus, there they are, dead. I’m tellin’ you, sometimes it makes me think about maybe quitting.”
I turned 180 degrees in my seat and gaped out the rear window; then I turned back. “But did you look insidethe car? Did you actually see your friends in there?” It was a demand, not a question, because I had seen it too, them– Hugh, Charlotte, the whole horror.
“Sure I saw it! Lady, waddya think I’m talkin’ about here? I pulled Al off a steering column that was about two feet deep up his chest! Damned rightI saw. I was six inches away from his face.”
I watched him silently until it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything else. I swiveled in the seat again to look out the back window. We were almost to Crane’s View.
When we drove through the center of town I remembered how excited Hugh and I had been the day we moved in. We wanted to do everything at once—unpack the truck, go into town and check out the stores, take a long walk to get a feel for what Crane’s View was really like. Because it was a nice day, we chose the walk and ended up by the river watching boats pass. Hugh said, “Nothing could be better than this.” He took my hand and squeezed it. Then he walked away. I asked where he was going but he didn’t answer. I watched as he wandered around, his eyes on the ground. Eventually he leaned over and picked up a small brown stick about the size and width of a cigar. Holding it up, he waved it back and forth for me to see.
“I’ve been waiting for just the right moment to look for this. Now’s the moment. Here with you, the water, the day… The perfect time to find my first Miranda stick.”
He came over and handed it to me. I rubbed my thumb over its surface and then impulsively kissed the stick. “I hope there will be a lot more.”
He took it back and slid it into his jeans pocket. “This is one of the big ones for me. I’ve got to take care of it.”
I GOT OUT of the car wondering where Hugh’s stick was. I waited until the car had gone around the corner before I turned to look at our house. I felt nothing—no dread or anxiety, not even the slightest shred of curiosity. Judging by the events of the last two days, there was no other option but to go back inside and face whatever was waiting for me.
Staring at the place I had so recently and happily thought would be our house, our home, for the rest of our lives, I remembered something Hugh had done that disturbed me.
One night in my New York apartment, he called to me from the bedroom. When I got there, he stopped me with an arm across the door.
“Do exactly what I tell you, okay? Look quickly and tell me what you see on the table next to the bed. Don’t think about it. Just look and say.”
Puzzled, I complied. Something dark and odd-shaped was exactly where my bedside lamp usually sat. I squinted once to see better but it didn’t help. I had no idea what it was. My wondering went on until he dropped his arm, walked to the bed, leaned over, and switched the lamp on. It wasmy lamp, only he had laid it on its side in such a way that it was impossible to recognize from a distance.
“Isn’t that strange? Just the smallest twist of the dial away from normal—one click—and everything we know for certain vanishes. Same damned thing happened to me this morning. There’s a vase in the office we’ve had for years, a nice Lalique piece. But someone knocked it over or whatever. When I saw it like that today, on its side, it was unrecognizable. I couldn’t tell whatthe thing was. I stood in the hall glued to the spot, wondering, What-the-hell-is-that? Then Courtney walked up, righted it, and there it was again—the vase.”
I wasn’t very wowed and he must have seen that in my expression. He put both hands on my face and squeezed my cheeks. “Don’t you see? Nothing is ever finished. It’s all evolving; everything has a hundred new angles we’ve never seen. We get jaded, but then something jarring like this happens and we’re bewildered by it, sometimes even pissed off, or delighted. That’s what I keep trying to be—delighted by what I don’t know.”
It was a sweet and very Hugh insight, but it didn’t do much for me. I kissed him, straightened the lamp, and went back to cooking our dinner.
That night I was awakened from a deep sleep by a touch—across my face, between my legs, up and down my side. My tingling body and foggy mind were rising in happy concert and I was moaning. When it happened, either the sound or the cause froze me and I threw my arm out to the side as hard as I could. It smacked Hugh on the forehead a great resounding wap! Crying out in surprise, he fell back holding his head. A moment later we were laughing and touching and then ended up doing what he had intended in the first place.
Afterwards, Hugh went back to sleep but I was marooned awake. In the silent boredom of three in the morning, I reran the events of the day, remembering what had happened earlier with the crooked bedside lamp and what he said about it. Waking to his touch was the same thing. Unlike him, I had not been delighted by what I didn’t know. On the contrary: unexpectedly caressed by my lover in the middle of the night, I had come awake swinging. Unable to stop the line of thought, I scrolled through other memories, realizing I could apply this dismal insight all over the way I had lived. I lay there feeling as stiff and inflexible as an old woman’s neck.
ON THE SIDEWALK in front of our house, I remembered this. What would Hugh have said? What would he have done if he’d been in my shoes the last few days? I didn’t know anything about what was going on in my life anymore. He was dead and that same crooked lamp sat by our bed upstairs. Such a nice house too—square and solid like a dependable aunt. With a porch that was perfect for a hammock and small talk, iced tea in the summer, a battered bicycle leaning against the wall. A porch for children to play on. If I closed my eyes I could hear kids chasing each other across the wooden floor. Be careful! Slow down! How many children would we have had? How many bikes would have been leaning against the wall, sleds?
I took a step toward the house, hesitated, then took another. Finally I took big fast strides. A car horn honked nearby. I jerked my head but raced up the stair. At the top I avoided looking in the windows. What if there had been something inside, something new that would deter me from going in again?
Jamming my hand into my back pocket, I pulled out the New York Mets key ring Clayton Blanchard had given me when I worked for him. Just thinking his name calmed me some. If there was still Clayton, then there was still New York and old books, some kind of order that existed, hot coffee and cold soda, a place where you could step and not fall off the edge of the suddenly flat earth. Love was in that place, sanity too. I needed to get back there both for myself and our child. Memories and this baby were Hugh’s legacy to me. Neither could function in the strange reality I had been shoved into.
I put the key in the lock and turned. Or tried. Because the key would not turn. Couldnot turn. I tried again with no success. I twisted the doorknob. It would not turn but it was warm. As if someone had been holding it just before I touched it. I shook it, pushed in and out, tried the key again, tried turning the knob. Nothing.
Leaving the key in the lock, I stepped over to one of the windows and looked in. Nothing. Inside, the house was dark. I could just make out the shadowy shapes of our furniture in the living room: Hugh’s new chair, the couch. Without warning I felt a sheer need to be inside the house, no matter what waited in there. I went back to the door and tried everything again, this time with the fury and strength of impatience—the lock, the knob, push, shake. Nothing.
“Temper, temper! What are you doing, trying to kill the door?”
Both hands on the knob, I looked over my shoulder. McCabe stood on the sidewalk with his arms crossed. He slipped a hand into a pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes.
“What are youdoing here? I thought you had to stay… back there.”
“I did what was necessary. You tell what you saw; they fill out their forms.… Only so much you can do. I was worried about you, so I thought I’d come by and see if you were all right before I went down to the station.”
“Thanks for your concern! Listen, did you know the people in that accident?”
“The Salvatos? Sure. She and the kid were sweet, but Al’s no loss to mankind.”
“Salvato? That was the name? They’re from Crane’s View?”
“Yeah. Al owned a couple of stores downtown. Green Light Al Salvato. We grew up together. Why?”
“I… don’t know. When I looked in the wreck, I thought I knew the people.”
McCabe took a deep breath and let it out quickly, his cheeks puffed out. “That’s a tough moment for anyone. Especially if it’s your first time. I never get used to it. I guess you were confused.”
I knew full well it wasHugh and his family in the silver car. There was no doubt about it.
“I saw you fiddling with the key. Is there a problem?”
Gesturing toward the door, I gave a defeated laugh. “I can’t get into my house. Something’s wrong with the lock. The key won’t turn and neither will the doorknob.”
“Can I try?” Flicking his half-smoked cigarette away, he climbed the stairs to the porch, took the key, and tried it himself. Once. Nothing. It was a small gesture but I liked him for it. He didn’t try to be a manabout it by fooling with the key for five minutes until the lock submitted and he had shown me up. He tried once, failed, handed back the key.
“You got two choices, then. We call a locksmith for, like, fifty bucks even though I know a guy who’ll give you a discount. Or you can pretend you don’t see this.…” He brought something out of his pocket and showed it to me. A lock pick—I recognized it from a hundred TV shows. “You want to give it a shot?”
“I’m happy to save fifty dollars.”
“Well, let’s see.”
He slipped the awl-like thing into the lock and wiggled it around a couple of times. He stopped, made one more small movement with his hand, and there was an audible click. He turned the knob and the door opened.
“Cha-cha-cha.” Standing back, he made a sweeping gesture toward the door. “Open sez me.”
I started in but stopped. “Look, I’m sure you’ve got a million other things to do. But would you mind coming in with me just for a few minutes? I’d feel so much better if I had company in there awhile.”
He looked at his beautiful watch. “Sure, I got time. We’ll give the place a once-over.” Without waiting he walked in. A moment’s hesitation and then I followed.
“Uh-oh, did you leave something on the stove?”
“No.”
“We better look in your kitchen first.” He went right toward it. For a second that confused me until I remembered McCabe had often been in the house when Frances lived here.
As if reading my mind, he said, “This house used to be full of weird smells. You never knew what would hit you when you came in. Sometimes ambrosia, sometimes Perth Amboy. Frances ever make you pecan pie? Sometimes great, other times absolute dog food. You’d be cleaning your teeth for three days. She was the damndest cook. Great soups, terrible meat. Never let her cook you meat! Once for my birthday—” He shoved the kitchen door but nothing happened.
“You lock this?”
“No.”
We stared at each other.
“Interesting.” He pushed again, but nothing happened. Under his breath he began whistling the Beach Boys song “Help Me, Rhonda.” He slid his hands into his pockets and immediately took them out again. He gave the bottom of the door a small kick that sounded way too loud in the silent house. He whistled some more. “This is interesting. Maybe it explains why you couldn’t get in from outside.” Taking a magenta credit card out of his pocket, he slipped it in the crack between the door and the frame and slid it upward. There came a small metallic clinkon the other side.
“There you go! I remember there’s a hook and eye on this one because I put it in for Frances years ago.” He pushed the door open.
First came the smell, then the smoke. Not much of it but enough to stiffen the neck and make you scared. Brave McCabe walked straight into the room. Seconds later there was a metallic scraping, a crash, and he fell down right in front of me.
“What the fuck–“
Pieces of metal covered the kitchen floor; glass too. Some were whole, others broken or in jagged fragments. Many were blackened, others actually smoking. The largest was immediately recognizable—a silver trunk lid from an automobile with the BMW insignia emblazoned on it. There were more silver pieces among the others—the silver of Hugh’s wrecked car.
McCabe stood up, hands bleeding. Dazed, he looked at me. “What is this shit?”
I knew what it was. I knew too well. I never should have brought him into the house. Whoever was in here, whoever was in charge, wanted me alone in the house. Without knowing it, I had broken the rules. Now poor McCabe and I would pay for my mistake.
I turned and walked quickly out of the room to the front door. Of course it was locked. I grabbed the doorknob and tried turning it, but nothing moved, not an inch. It felt welded shut. I knew it was useless to try finding another way out of the house.
I went back to the kitchen. McCabe stood at the sink washing his hands. He did it slowly and precisely. Despite what was happening, he appeared in no hurry. I couldn’t think of anything to say because whatever came out would sound absurd.
With his back to me, he murmured, “It’s here again, isn’t it? That’s what this is all about.” He took a red dish towel off a hook by the window. Drying his hands, he waited for my answer.
“I don’t even know what itis. Strange things have been going on ever since Hugh and I moved in.”
“Is that why Frances wanted us to come see her? Tell me the truth, Miranda.”
“Yes. But how do you know about it? What is it?”
“Frances called it the Surinam Toad. That comes from some line by Coleridge—the poet? She made me memorize it. ‘My thoughts bustle along like a Surinam toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, sides, and belly, vegetating while it crawls.’
“When I was young it tried to kill me, but Frances saved my life. It happened here in the house.” He sat down at the table. He slowly looked at the debris around the room and pursed his lips. “Here we go again. I thought all that was over a long time ago. The fuckin’ toad is back.”
I went to a drawer and took out a box of Band-Aids. I handed them over and sat down across from him. “Can you tell me about it?”
“I haveto tell you about it now. Remember when you asked me if I knew anyone who had powers? Frances has powers. She—”
There was a loud scraping sound. I jerked in my seat and looked across the room. The trunk lid was moving. It dragged slowly across the floor toward us. The other pieces began moving too. The room was filled with the racket of this terrible slow scraping sound everywhere, the long high screech of sharp metal edges digging a path. A deep white line appeared behind the trunk lid as it gouged a wavy path across the wooden kitchen floor.
I reached across the table, and slid my hand across his cuts. Blood was still oozing from them; it spread onto my fingers. Standing, I walked to the closest piece of metal and wiped the blood across it. The movement, the sound, everything stopped instantly. The silence was immense.
McCabe stuck his hands under his armpits, as if trying to hide them. “What’d you do? Why did it stop?”
I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t sure. Instinctively I had known how to stop the pieces from moving, but howI knew was unclear. My mind worked furiously to put it in focus.
A house! It was like a house I’d lived in all my life. It had a certain number of rooms I knew by heart, every angle, the view from each window, But suddenly this house contained twice as many rooms, all filled with unfamiliar things. But it was my house. It had always been my house—I just hadn’t known about these extra rooms and what they contained.
McCabe glared at me, hands still hidden. “Huh? You know things too, don’t you, Miranda? How did you know what to do?”
“Blood stops it. I… I just know blood stops things.”
“Yeah, great. But what now? What the hell happens now?” Without waiting for an answer, he left the room. I stood and listened while he did exactly what I had done—went to the front door and tried to open it. I heard his steps, the door rattling, curses when it wouldn’t open.
His steps crossed the floor again but instead of returning to the kitchen, they began climbing the stairs. He was talking but I couldn’t make out his words. I looked at the debris around the kitchen and part of my mind thought it was funny. Miranda’s junkyard. Come into my kitchen and find a bumper for your BMW. Then I’ll make you lunch. Part of you stops being scared when the sane world of a moment ago goes mad.
If Hugh had been in the backyard the other day, he might still be around. I had nothing to lose. “Hugh? Are you here?”
Nothing.
“Hugh? Can you hear me?”
The kitchen door swung open. But it was McCabe.
“Come with me. Hurry up.”
I followed him out of the kitchen and trailed behind as he started back up the stairs.
“You like dolls?”
His question was so absurd and out of place that I stopped climbing. “What?”
“Do you like dolls? I asked if you like ‘em.” His voice was urgent, as if everything depended on my answer.
“ Dolls? No. Why?”
Narrowing his eyes, he stared at me as if he didn’t believe it. “Really? Well then, that’s bad news. ‘Cause they’re in the same room as before. So I guess the same goddamnedthing’s happening again! Only Frances isn’t around to get us out this time.”
“What are you talking about, McCabe?”
“You’ll see.”
Then the realization hit me. “I did. I used to love dolls when I was a girl. I collected them.”
When we reached the first floor he walked down the hall to Hugh’s and my bedroom and threw open the door. “ Somebodylikes dolls.”
Before moving to Crane’s View, we had bought a new bed. There should have been only two things in that room—the new bed and a small leather couch I had owned for years. Nothing else.
Instead, our bedroom was full of dolls. On the new bed, the couch, most of the floor. They were stuck on the walls, across the entire ceiling, the windowsill. They blocked most of the light from coming in the window. Hundreds, maybe even a thousand dolls. Large ones, small; flat faces, fat faces, round; with breasts, without; wearing jeans, dirndls, evening gowns, clown costumes…
All of them had the same face—mine.
“Leave me alone in here, Frannie.”
“What? Are you crazy?”
“That’s what they want. They want me alone in here.”
He glared but didn’t speak.
“The same thing happened in here with Frances, right? In thisroom. The same thing. Were there dolls?”
His eyes dropped. “No. People. People she said she knew from a long time ago.”
I was about to respond when the first voice spoke. A child’s, it was quickly joined by another and then another until we were surrounded by a deafening cacophony of voices saying different things at once. We stood in the doorway listening until I began to make out what some of them were saying.
“Why do we always have to go to Aunt Mimi’s house? She smells.”
“But you promisedI could have a dog.”
“Dad, are stars cold or hot?”
On and on. Some voices were clear and understandable. Others were lost in the surrounding swirl of tones, whines, whispers. But I understood enough. All of them, all of these words and sentences, were my own, spoken in the various voices I had owned growing up. The first one I disentangled was the line about the stars. I knew it immediately because my father, an astronomer, had loved it and repeated it to others throughout my childhood.
My Aunt Mimi didsmell. I hated visiting her.
My parents finally relented and gave me a dog, which was stolen three weeks later. I was nine at the time.
If I had remained in that bedroom long enough, I assume all the words of my lifetime would have been repeated. Instead of life passing in front of my eyes, my words were entering my ears. Some of them tweaked memories, most were nothing but the verbal spew of twelve thousand days on earth. I once read that a person speaks something like a billion words in the course of a life. Here were mine, all at once.
“Go out. Wait downstairs.”
“Miranda—”
“Do it, Frannie. Just go.”
He hesitated, then put his hand on the doorknob. “I’ll be outside in the hall. Just outside if you need me.”
“Yes. All right.”
The moment he closed the door behind him, the room fell silent.
“Miranda, would you do me a big favor?”
There had been so much noise, so many loud and clashing voices seconds ago that this one with its simple question rising so suddenly out of the new silence was especially disturbing. Because it was a man’svoice and very familiar.
“Sure. You want a backrub?”
“No. I’d like you to go with me to the drugstore.”
“Right now? Dog, I’ve got to be at the airport in a few hours and you know how much I still have to do.”
“It’s important, Miranda. It’s really important to me.”
My back was to the door. Turning around, I saw an entirely different room behind me: a hotel room in Santa Monica, California. Doug Auerbach sat on the bed in there. A game show was yapping on the television. Doug was watching me as I came out of the bathroom wrapped in a white towel.
It was the day we went to the drugstore because he’d dreamed about doing that together. The day I flew back to New York and saw the woman in the wheelchair by the side of the freeway.
I stood in the corner watching a part of my life happen. Again. Only this time there were two me’s in the room—the one living the moment and the one who watched.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” James Stillman said as he walked out of the bathroom. Dog Auerbach and Miranda continued talking. They did not react to him. “Where’s Waldo?” James smirked, and that look, that one precise facial expression I remembered so well down the years was as frightening in that moment as anything else.
“Why am I here, James? What am I supposed to do?”
“Stop whining and asking questions. You’re here because someone wantsyou here, Miranda. Figure it out! Stop playing the poor little puppy. You waste so much time crying why me.”
His voice was cold and mean. I stared at him and he stared right back. I began to move around the motel room, looking carefully at everything, hoping for a clue, listening to the two talk. Light from the window lit the half-filled water glass on the night table. An orange candy bar wrapper lay twisted on the floor. A book. A green sock on the bed.
“Can I touch things?”
James smirked again. “Do whatever you want. They don’t know we’re here.”
I reached out and touched Doug’s arm. He didn’t react. I shook him, or rather I shook but he didn’t move. He continued talking. I picked up an ashtray and threw it across the room. It banged loudly against a wall but neither of them acknowledged the sound.
I walked to the window and looked out. The afternoon sun was a used-up yellow-orange. Out on the sidewalk a bum wearing a brightly colored serape and a black beret pushed a supermarket cart filled with junk. Two kids on skateboards whizzed by. He shouted at them.
The first surprise was that I could hear every word the bum said, although the window was closed. Next was the realization, like a hard, unexpected slap in the face, that I suddenly knew everything about this man. His name was Piotr “Poodle” Voukis. Sixty-seven years old, he was a Bulgarian йmigrй from Babyak who had worked as a janitor at UCLA for twenty years until he was fired for drinking. He’d had two sons. One was killed in Vietnam.
On and on, my mind flooding with every detail of this man’s life. I knew his most intimate secrets and fears, the names of his lovers and enemies, the color of the model motorboat he had built and sailed in Echo Park with his sons when they were young and life was as good as it would ever get for him. Then I saw the room at UCLA hospital where he spent desolate months sitting by his wife’s bed as abdominal cancer dissolved her insides until there was nothing left but a dark and fetid pudding.
Everything about him, I knew everything in his now dim and addled brain.
Aghast, I turned away. The second I did, my mind emptied and I was myself again. Onlymyself.
For a moment.
James said something and without thinking I looked at him. At once I saw the rushing view through the windshield of his car as it sped toward his death in Philadelphia. I saw the tattooed words on his last lover Kiera’s wrist. I experienced his feelings for Miranda Romanac—nostalgia, resentment, old love… all wrapped tightly around each other like leaves on a cabbage.
As with the bum on the street, the moment I looked at James Stillman I became him.
This time I screamed and staggered. Because of a fear that was not my own: James was absolutely petrified of me. Having become him, I knew why he was afraid and what had to be done. I am not a brave person and have never pretended to be, so what I did next was the bravest act of my life. I have regretted it ever since.
Looking around, I saw what I needed, but was so unbalanced that I scanned the room twice more before it registered. A mirror. A small oval mirror above the desk.
I looked into it.
A MAN IN a black suit and floor-length silk cape stood alone in the middle of the stage of a giant theater. He was tall and handsome, immensely alluring in a frightening way. Everything about him was black—his clothes, patent leather shoes, gleaming hair like licorice. Even the intense whiteness of his skin accentuated the darkness. Just looking at him, I knew here was a man capable of real magic.
Staring directly at me, he said my name in a thundering voice. How could he know my name when I had never seen him before this night? With one languid hand, he beckoned for me to join him on stage. I looked at my mother and father, who were sitting on either side of me. Both smiled their permission and enthusiasm. Father even put his hand against my back to move me more quickly. The audience began to applaud. I was terribly embarrassed to be the center of attention, but loved it at the same time. I sidled out of our row and walked down the wide aisle to a short staircase on the side of the stage.
At the top of the stairs an easel supported a large poster announcing the name of the performer:
THE ENORMOUS SHUMDA
SHUMDA DER ENORM
BAUCHREDNER EXTRAORDINAIRE
As I climbed the stairs the audience clapped harder. Worrying I would trip and fall in front of everyone, I walked carefully to center stage, where the man in black stood.
He put up a hand to stop the applause and it died instantly. There was a stop while all of us waited for what he would do next. Nothing. He simply stood there with his hands behind his back. It went on too long. Unmoving, he stared into the audience. We waited restlessly but it went on and on.
Just as people began to whisper their dismay, shifting impatiently in their seats, a dalmatian wandered out onto the stage. It darted back and forth sniffing the floor excitedly and came to us only after it had jittered around like that awhile. Some in the audience laughed or scoffed out loud.
Shumda did nothing to stop the titter. He continued his silence and staring. We stood in front of hundreds of people but the only thing that had happened since I’d stepped onto the stage was the arrival of the dog. When it felt like the whole theater would explode with tension and exasperation, the dog leaped in the air and did a perfect back flip. On landing, it bellowed out in a beautifully deep man’s voice, “Be quiet! Have you no manners? What’s the matter with you people?”
Deadpan, Shumda looked at the dog, then at me. He gave me the smallest possible wink. He looked back at the audience, same deadpan, and slipped his hands into his trouser pockets.
After the dog spoke, gasps and shocked yelps of laughter burst from the audience.
The dog then sat down and adjusted itself until it was comfortable. It continued in the same pleasingly virile voice that was not at all like the ventriloquist’s. “Since you seem displeased with Shumda, I will now take over the show. Master, if you please?”
Shumda bowed deeply first to the audience, then to the dog. It dipped its head as if acknowledging the bow. Then the man in black turned and left the stage.
When he was gone and there was no possible way the ventriloquist could be within fifty feet of the animal, the dog spoke again.
“And now for my next trick, I would ask the young lady—”
Pandemonium. How could the dog speak if the ventriloquist was now off the stage?
The animal waited patiently until the audience quieted. “I would ask the young lady to step to the front of the stage and hold her arms out from her sides.”
I did it. Four feet from the edge, I stopped and slowly lifted my arms. Because I was standing so far forward, I couldn’t see the dog when it spoke again. I looked out over the sea of attentive faces and knew they were looking at me, me, me. I had never been so happy in my life.
“What is your favorite bird?”
“A penguin!” I shouted.
The audience roared and applauded. Their laughter continued until the dog spoke again.
“A formidable bird, certainly; one with great character. But what we need now is a championship flyer. One with wings like an angel, able to cross continents without stopping.”
I licked my lips and thought. “A duck?”
Another gale of laughter.
“A duck is a brilliant choice. So, my dear, close your eyes now and think of flying. It’s daybreak; the sky is the color of peaches and plums. See yourself rising off the earth to join your fellow pintails on the journey south for the winter.”
I closed my eyes and, before I knew it, felt nothing beneath my feet. Looking down, I saw that nothing wasbeneath my feet: I was a foot, then two, five, ten feet above the stage and rising. I was a child and was flying.
As I rose, I began to float out over the audience. Looking down, I saw people with their heads bent back, all of them staring at me in wonder. Mouths open or hands over their mouths, hands to their cheeks, arms pointing up, children bouncing in their seats; a woman’s hat fell off.… All because of me.
Where were my parents? I could not find them in the dark mass of heads below.
I continued to float out until I’d reached the middle of the theater. Once there, I rose even higher. How did the birds do this? How heavy humans were! Gently I rose again. My hands were spread in front of me but not far out—more like I was playing a piano. I wiggled my fingers.
My body stopped as I floated seventy feet above the crowd in the center of the theater. No wires attached to my back, no tricks, nothing but the genuine magic of a talking dog.
Time stopped and there was complete silence in the theater.
“What are you doing? Are you mad?” Below, Shumda marched quickly out onstage, looking up at me and then at the now cowering dalmatian.
“But, Master—”
“How many times have I told you? Dogs cannot do these things! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
Tentative laughter from the audience.
“Bring her down! Immediately!”
But I didn’t want to come down. I wanted to stay weightless for the rest of time while people below looked up and wished they could be me. Staring forever, rapt, at me the angel, the fairy – I could fly!
“Bring her down!”
I dropped.
Falling, I saw only faces. Horror, surprise, wonder frozen on their faces as they saw me drop straight at them. The faces grew larger. How fast does a child fall? How long does it take till impact? All I remember is fast and slow. And before I was scared, before I could even think to scream, I hit.
And died.
“DARLING, ARE YOU all right?”
The words poured slowly into my mind like thick, glutinous sauce. Brown gravy.
With great difficulty I opened my eyes and squinted hard at the first thing I saw. It was awful. Jarring and fragmented, the colors were a bad, gaudy, incomprehensible mix adding up to nothing but mess. If they had been brass instruments, their squawks and squeals would have made me cover my ears and run away.
But as my head cleared, I remembered with a terrible sinking feeling that what was in front of me was mine—I had painted it. I had beenpainting it for months and months, but nothing I did made it better. Nothing.
Maybe that’s why I had been having the blackouts with increasing regularity. Lying on my back longer and longer each day painting the fresco on the ceiling of the church. The church I had connived Tyndall into buying. The fresco that, when finished, was supposed to have convinced the others I was a real painter. Not just everyone’s mistress. Not just the great pair of tits who the famous ones let stay because I was always available. The Arts Fucker, as De Kooning called me to my face. But when I was done, they would see. See that I was far, far better than any of them had ever imagined. My fresco would prove it.
It had begun as such a wonderful idea. And the only reason for continuing to see Lionel Tyndall. Let him screw me to his heart’s content. Make him crazy for me; make myself into his drug. Then when he was hooked, use him. Use his money and connections to get what I really wanted—the respect of the likes of de Kooning and Eleanor Ward, Lee Krasner and Pollock. Yes, even that bastard.
One of the few interesting things Tyndall ever said was about them, the great ones: They had no empty space around them. He was right. My dream was to bring them here and show them what I had accomplished. How good the heaven was I had painted on the ceiling of Lionel Tyndall’s church. The church he bought me out of the deepness of his lust and his pockets.
In a sketchbook, I had written a line from Matisse that became my essential rule: “I tend towards what I feel: toward a kind of ecstasy. And then I find tranquillity.” Since beginning the church project, I had done everything I could to follow my instincts, to “tend towards” what I felt. But sadly what I felt was nowhere near what I had painted. Worse, I could no longer imagine even getting close. No empty spaces around them? There was nothing butempty space around—and in—what I had created.
What’s worse, going through life trying to find your passion but never finding it, or knowingwhat you want but no matter how hard you try, never being able to accomplish it? I had wanted to be a painter for fifteen years and had done everything I could to achieve it. But it hadn’t happened, and, horribly, it was beginning to look like it never would.
“Darling? Are you all right?”
Tyndall’s voice sniveled up from below and made me shudder. He didn’t care if I was all right; he wanted me to come down so we could go outside and make love in his car or under a tree or in the water or somewhere. That was our unspoken deal. He bought the abandoned church outside East Hampton and gave me everything I needed to paint it. In return, I was expected to climb down and play with him whenever he called.
But the blackouts I’d been having? Those dangerous spells once or twice a month where everything simply fell away and I came to with no memory of them happening?
“Why don’t you come down and we’ll have some lunch. You’ve been up there since seven this morning.”
I stared at the ceiling and thought about his hands, his breath on my neck, the thin musky smell of his body when he got excited.
I turned on my side to look down at him. As I did, there was a loud sharp crack from below. Alarmed, I tried turning completely over. But all at once there was a second crack, a high wheee-yowof scaffold metal bending, and everything collapsed.
I dropped.
The last thing I saw, before a metal bar snapped off the scaffolding and flew through my throat, was one of the faces I had painted on the ceiling.
SCREAMING. THERE WAS screaming all around and not just human. Metal—the scream and grind of metal against metal for seconds, then gone. Nothing breaking or snapping this time, only meeting. Meeting for earsplitting seconds in a fast hot sparking touch and gone. We flew. The car rocketed forward. I opened my eyes again onto bright sunlight after the tunnel’s blackness. We twisted, rose, turned. A fresh gust of screaming from the children in our car. We went up up up, almost stopped, then fell into the intricate loop and swing of the roller-coaster track.
I looked at James. His hair was flattened against his head. Staring straight ahead, he wore a crazy adrenaline smile. As we sped along I kept watching him, trying to find in his face what had been palpable all day but not clear until now. The moment he turned and looked at me, I knew: I no longer loved him.
It was my eighteenth birthday. James had suggested we go to Playland to celebrate. It had been a wonderful day. We were leaving for different universities in two weeks and had never been closer. But now I knew we would not go beyond those two weeks. No matter what we’d said about writing and calling and Christmas vacation isn’t so far away… I no longer loved him.
As the roller coaster curved and fled down the track toward the now visible end of the ride, I let out a sob so strange and violent that it sounded like a bark.
“Do YOU KNOW what I love about you?”
We sat on a bench eating cotton candy and watching people pass by. I pretended to be busy working a piece of the sweet pink gunk off my fingers and into my mouth. I didn’t want to know what James loved about me, not now, not anymore.
“I feel famous in your arms.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I just feel famous when I’m in your arms. When you’re holding me. Like I mean something. Like I’m important.”
“That’s a really nice thing to say, James.” I couldn’t look at him.
But he took the cotton candy out of my hand and turned my face to his. “It’s true. You don’t know how much I’m going to miss you next year.”
“Me too.”
He nodded, assuming we were thinking the same sad thoughts, and that made me feel even worse. I felt my throat thicken and knew I was about to start crying. So I squeezed my eyes closed as tightly as I could.
INSTANT SILENCE. IT was huge after the roar of the amusement park ride. When I looked, thirty-year-old James sat in the bay window across the Crane’s View bedroom watching me. All of the dolls were gone. It was once again the room I had shared too briefly with Hugh Oakley.
“Welcome back. What’d you learn on your tour?”
“All those women were me. The little girl flying, the painter, me with you at Playland… All lived different lives but they were the same… person inside. And the only thing they thought about was themselves. They were all total egotists. Were there others? Have I lived other lives, James?”
“Hundreds. They would have shown you more of them but you’re smart—you saw it with the three most recent.”
“And all of the people in them were connected.” I touched my ten fingertips together. “Shumda was Frances’s boyfriend. The little girl went to his show. And the woman painting the fresco was Lolly Adcock, wasn’t she?”
James nodded and said sarcastically, “Who tragically fell to her death just before the world recognized her talent. She died in 1962. Miranda Romanac was born in ‘62. The little girl died in 1924. Lolly was born the same year.”
“You were involved in that scandal about the fake Adcock paintings. And Frances owned a real one.”
He pointed at me. “So did Hugh, but didn’t know it. Those four pictures of the same woman he had? Lolly painted them when she was studying at the Art Students League.”
“They’re paintings of the little girl who fell at the theater, aren’t they? What she would have looked like if she’d lived and grown up. Lolly thought she was imagining them. That’s why I felt so strangely about those pictures. Like I knew the woman in them even though I’d never seen her before.”
James winced and drew a short harsh breath. “How do you know that?”
“ How? For God’s sake, James, what do you think I just went through? What do you think all this is all about? Don’t play games. I thought you were here to help me.”
“No, you’re here to help me. Miranda. You’re here to get me the fuck out! I’m not here for you—I’m here for me. Let me go free, please! I’ve done everything I can. I’ve shown you what I know. You knew about those paintings; you knew who the subject was. I didn’t. Don’t you see? I’m done. I’ve given you everything I’ve got. So let me go now. Free me!”
“Why is all this happening to me now? Why suddenly now?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Where is Hugh now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who am I?”
Leaping up, he started toward me, furious. “I don’t know! I’m here because I was supposed to tell you what I knew. What I know is, you’re reincarnated. Everything in all of the lives you have lived is interconnected. Everything. And each time you’ve lived you cared only for yourself. The girl in the theater was a bratty, selfish kid. Lolly Adcock used people like toilet paper. You… Look what you did to me, even after you knew you didn’t care anymore. And Doug Auerbach. The guy with the video camera who came into your store and hit you. You broke up Hugh’s marriage because you were selfish and you wanted him.… Always you first, no matter what.”
“Why did they make you come for me? Who are they?”
“Miranda? You all right in there?” McCabe’s voice through the door made both of us turn. James gestured toward it.
“Your friend’s waiting.”
“Who are they, James? Just tell me that.”
Lifting his chin, he slowly twisted his head to one side, like a confused dog.
“Miranda, open up!”
“I’m okay, Frannie. I’m coming.”
James’s voice was a high plea. “Please – let me go.”
Without looking, I opened my left hand. Lying on my palm was a small silvery-white stick. Written on it in perfect brown calligraphic letters was James Stillman.
It began to smoke. It flared into rich flame. Although it burned brightly in the center of my hand, I felt no heat or pain. It was hypnotic. I couldn’t take my eyes away. The flame danced and grew and spread up my arm. I felt nothing.
Someone said my name but I only half heard the man’s voice. James? McCabe? I looked up. No one was there—James was gone.
Then pain came like a roaring explosion. My arm was agony. I screamed and shook it, but the flame only ate the wind thus created and blossomed upward. My skin went red, orange, molten, and shiny as oil.
But from somewhere inside, from someoneI was but had never known, I knew how to stop it. Sweep the fire away like a live cigarette ash. With my free hand I brushed it and the flame that devoured my arm slid slickly down and dropped onto the floor like some kind of jelly.
The door behind me banged open and McCabe was there, pulling me by the collar out of the room. I could barely move. My arm did not hurt anymore. I wanted to watch as the flame spread across the floor, caught on the throw rug and jumped to the bedspread.
“Come on! Come on!” McCabe jerked me and I stumbled backward into him. The bedroom smoked and burned, flames rising high off the blazing bed, licking, blackening the ceiling.
As Frannie pulled I knew what had just happened to me but could not frame it clearly in my mind. When James asked me to free him and without warning I felt the stick in my hand, I was the other person. The one who had conjured stick and flame from nowhere. The one who had lived all the lives and understood why. The one capable of hearing impossible noises in Frances Hatch’s building. The one I would soon know too well and fear.
She knew how to free James Stillman and keep pain away from a burning hand. But the moment I heard my name called and looked up, I was Miranda Romanac again and shewas only mortal.
Out in the hall, McCabe slammed the door shut behind us and looked worriedly around. “Should we try to put it out or just get the hell out of here?”
“We can’t get out, Frannie. The house won’t let us. It’s haunted. By my ghosts now. I brought them in when I came.”
He remained silent. The fire crackled two feet away.
“It’s the same thing that happened to Frances when I was a kid.”
“The same thing?”
“No, but it’s the same, believe me. You’re right, we can’t get out of here now. Yougotta figure a way to do it.”
“What did Frances do?”
“She went to the attic. Did something up there. I never knew what.”
I looked toward the ceiling. “There is no attic.”
McCabe looked up. “Sure there is, I been there a hundred times.”
“It’s gone. There’s no more attic, Frannie. The house changes.”
He opened his mouth to answer but a muffled thumping explosion behind the bedroom door stopped him. “What the fuck are we gonna do, Miranda? We gotta go somewhere!”
“The basement. It’s in the basement.”
“ What is?”
“ Idon’t know, Frannie, I’d tell you if I did. But it’s in the basement.” I saw my arm. The one on fire moments before. There wasn’t a mark on it.
“Wait a minute. Just wait a second.” McCabe sprinted down the hall and around a corner. Everything stunk of smoke. It poured from beneath the door into the hall, oozing along the floor.
I had been in the basement only a few times. There were two large rooms. Hugh said when we had some money we would do something interesting with the space. Hugh. Hugh. Hugh… There was a light in each room down there and one at the top of the stairs. I tried to picture it all and what could possibly be down there that was so important.
Frannie jogged back down the hall looking baffled. “You’re right, there’s nothing there anymore. Used to be a door in the ceiling with a latch you’d pull and a folding ladder would come down. But it’s all gone. There isno fuckin’ attic!”
“Forget it. Let’s go.”
“The house is going to burn down and we’re gonna be in the goddamned basement!”
I led the way. Down the front stairs, a left turn, and just before the kitchen, the white basement door. McCabe reached for the knob. I stopped him. “Let me go first.”
The dank odor of damp earth and stone. A place where the air never changed, a breeze never blew through. Clicking on the light at the top of the stairs did little good. No more than a sixty-watt bulb, it illuminated only a few steps down and then the rest fell away into a brown darkness. I took firm hold of the rickety banister and started down.
“I hope to God someone’s called the fire department by now. They’re having a busy day.”
“Be quiet, Frannie.” The only sound then was the muted clunk of our feet going down wooden stairs. At the bottom, the basement floor was bumpy and felt like hard-packed earth. It was about ten feet from the stairs to the first room. The door was half-closed but the light from inside sent a weak ray out across a patch of floor. I walked over and pushed the door open.
Days before, I had helped Hugh carry things into this room. It had been almost empty but for a couple of broken lawn chairs and an archery target with only one leg. We stacked our empty boxes and suitcases against moldy walls and discussed whether we should even try to clean the room a little. Years of neglect had left it looking like a typical moldy basement room where you store unimportant things and promptly forget them forever.
But the room I entered now was luminous, transformed. Painted a happy pink-orange, the once-shabby walls were covered with pictures of Disney creatures, giant George Booth bullterriers, Tin Tin and Milou, characters from The Wizard of Oz. On the spotless parquet floor sat a pile of stuffed animals and other cartoon characters: Olive Oyl, Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck.
In the center of the room was the most extraordinary cradle I had ever seen. Made out of dark mahogany, it must have been hundreds of years old; it looked medieval. Particularly because of the intricate carving that covered every square inch of its surface. Angels and animals, clouds and suns, planets, stars, the Milky Way, simple German words carved with the most devoted precision: Liebe, Kind, Gott, Himmel, unsterblich.… Love, child, God, immortal. How long had it taken the artist to create it? The work of a lifetime, it said everything about love any hand could express. It waslove, carved out of wood.
Overwhelmed, I crossed the floor thinking about nothing else but this exceptional object.
“Miranda, be careful!”
His voice and the sight of what was in the cradle arrived simultaneously.
“Oh my God!” The child living in my body, Hugh’s child, lay in that cradle. I recognized her the moment I saw her. I touched my belly and began to tremble uncontrollably. None of this was possible, but I knew without question that this was our baby, our daughter. Even my jaw was shaking when I managed to say quietly, “Hi, sweetheart.”
She lay on her back in a pajama the same happy color as the room. She played with her fingers and smiled, frowned, smiled, all concentration. She looked like Hugh. She looked like me. She was the most beautiful baby in the world. She was ours.
But she would not look at me even when I moved to the cradle to stare. Having controlled my shaking, I reached down to touch her. As my hand moved toward her, she began to fade. No other way to explain it. The closer I got, the paler she grew, then white, transparent.
When it first happened, I snatched my hand back. She returned. Everything about her became visible again. The cradle, her bedding, the room—all remained as it was, but not our baby. I could not touch her. It was not permitted.
Out loud but only to myself I said, “But I have to touch her. I need to touch my baby!”
“You can’t.” I looked at McCabe. His face was twisted in fury. “Don’t you understand? It’s a setup, Miranda! Just figure out what you’re supposed to do. We’re standing below a burning house. That’s the only real thing here.”
I could not accept that. I reached for my baby again, but the same thing happened. She faded. She never looked at me. My hand stopped. “She doesn’t see me. Why doesn’t she see me?”
“Because she’s not here, goddammit! The room’s a trick. The baby’s a trick. It’s all illusion. Let’s get out of here! Let’s look in the other room and then get the hell out.”
“I can’t. I have to stay here.”
“Not possible.” He stepped around me and picking up the cradle threw it against the far wall. It bounced off, hit the floor, and rolled over face down. One piece broke off and skidded back almost to my foot.
Horrified, I rushed to the cradle and turned it over. It was empty. Aghast, I put my hands in, but there was no child, no blanket or bedding, nothing but the empty smoothness of the wood. I was so confused I didn’t even think about McCabe or what he had just done. The baby was gone. Where was my baby?
“Can we go now? They’re waiting.” The voice behind me was different. I turned and saw… Shumda. The Enormous Shumda, Ventriloquist Extraordinaire, Frances Hatch’s lover, the man who killed the little girl who was once me. McCabe was nowhere to be seen and I knew why.
“It was you all along, wasn’t it? Upstairs, with the fire and the talking dolls? The whole thing wasa trick; McCabe never came back to the house after he dropped me off.”
He bowed. “Correct. I’m good at voices. But we really do have to get going.”
“Where? Where’s my baby? Where did she go?”
“That’s for you to decide. Let’s go!”
“I’m not going with you.”
“Oh, but you must. Clarity awaits, Miranda!” He said it with the exaggerated voice of a bad actor making a thunderous exit.
I didn’t move. His expression slid from big smile to not happy.
“It was my baby, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Come along now and you can see her in the next room. She’s there.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You can believe him.” Hugh appeared in the door holding the baby in his arms. She was chuckling and hitting his nose with a tiny open hand. “Miranda, you have to do this. There’s no other way.”
I stretched out both hands to him. Hugh. With our baby.
He smiled. “It’s all right, Miranda. Shumda’s telling the truth—go with him and it’ll help you understand everything.” Before he turned and left, his eyes fell on the cradle. They moved to the piece of wood that had broken off. It lay near my foot. He looked at me and I knew he was saying something important.
“All right.”
The three of them left. I picked up the wood and slipped it into my pocket. I walked out of the room and across the cellar. The only sound was my shuffling footsteps. The air smelled heavily of dirt and damp. My face was very hot. I could smell my own sweat.
The door to the other room was closed. I grabbed the knob and tried to pull the door open. It was very difficult to move and scraped loudly across the uneven floor. When it was half-open I stopped to take a slow deep breath. I wasn’t ready for this but it had to be done. My heart did a few strange misbeats in my chest. I pulled again, hard, and the door came fully open.
What I expected was another room the same size as the last. That’s all. No real idea of what would be in there, but definitely not what was there.
A ramp—a wide gray concrete ramp leading upward to lights. Brilliant lights against a black night sky illuminated something I couldn’t see yet but which appeared to be… a stadium? A playing field? Giant banks of lights at fixed intervals shone down on what I could only guess was a field. I walked through the basement door and onto the ramp.
Stopping there, I looked left and right. It wasa stadium. Walkways went off to either side and connected to other ramps. I had been to football games in college and later to Yankee Stadium with a boyfriend who was crazy for baseball. This was a very big stadium. I had walked through a door in the basement of my house in Crane’s View into the bowels of a colossal sports stadium.
There were no other people around, which made things even more ominous and disturbing. Thirty feet away I saw a brightly lit concession stand, but no one was there—no salespeople or customers.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
What was I supposed to do? I walked farther up the ramp to see what this was about. Hugh said I should do this. Shumda said I could see our baby if I entered this place.
My heart kept misfiring in my chest. I put a hand over it. Okay, it’s okay. After a few steps I stopped, and looked over my shoulder to see if the basement door was still behind me. It was. I could go back. I hesitated. But nothing was there; everything was in front of me. I walked up the ramp, into the stadium.
MY FOOTSTEPS ECHOED around me until I was almost at the top of the ramp. Then the noise inside the stadium rose up like a wave. You know it because you’ve heard it before: at a baseball game or rock concert when you return to your seat after buying a hot dog or going to the bathroom. That big noise is there but it’s in the background for the moment. Your own steps are louder till you reach the top of the ramp and walk in. Next twenty thousand people and their life-sounds envelop you in a second. Talk, movement, laughter, shuffling, whistles—all together in one mighty hullabaloo.
The stadium was packed with people. I stood at the entrance and paused to soak up the picture. Thousands of people. Every seat appeared filled. In that first glimpse I did not look at anyone carefully because I was taking in the whole picture. I was surprised to see nothing laid out down on the field, no football goalposts at either end of a marked field, ten-yard line, end zone. No baseball diamond with home plate and perfect white lines marking the base paths. The field was a manicured lawn with nothing but the greenest grass glowing even greener beneath the blazing arc lights. I heard snatches of conversation and laughter, feet scraping across the stone floors, clapping. Someone far away hooted. More. So much more. The human rumble of tens of thousands of people in an enclosed place.
Hugh stood out on the field holding our baby. There was no one else out there but the two of them. They looked so small in all of that green space. He was staring at me but made no gesture for me to join him. I gave a little wave. He made the baby’s arm wave back. What was I supposed to do? Why were we all here? Who were these people? What was this stadium?
As these thoughts tumbled around in my head, the noise dwindled, decreased slowly, wound down to almost nothing. It was almost quiet. That’s when I looked around to see how others were responding to the new eerie quiet. And something else. Cologne. The scent of an exquisite and very familiar men’s cologne made me search for its source. Diptyque. I even remembered the name.
Looking to the left, I was shocked twice. Because everyone was watching me. And because I saw my old friend Clayton Blanchard, the man who had introduced me to both bookselling and Frances Hatch. It was hiscologne I had smelled. Sitting no more than three feet away, he was dressed beautifully, as usual—perfectly pressed dark suit, multicolored silk ascot, white shirt. I mouthed his name and a silent question: Clayton? Here? He smiled.
Next to him sat a boy I didn’t recognize at first. But all at once I did. Like a swimmer struggling up from deep water, my memory rose to the surface, slowly but when it broke through I knew him. Ludger Pooth. That was his ridiculous name. His family lived next door to mine on Mariahilferstrasse in Vienna in 1922. He and his friend Kuno Sandholzer once lured me to the attic of our building and made me pull down my underpants. They thought they were making me do something terrible, but I didn’t mind. Just so long as they paid attention to me. Ludger wore a brown tweed golf cap that he kept tugging on. I remembered the gesture very well.
Next to him was another person I didn’t initially recognize, but his name too quickly came to me: Viktor Petluchen, the first man Lolly Adcock ever slept with. Scanning the hundreds, the thousands of faces watching at me, I soon recognized everyone I saw. Names. More and more of their names came to me and with them the stories that went with the names.
In my past lives I had known every one of these people. I began to remember those lives, these faces. How we met and parted, what they had meant to me. All of them were in this stadium.
How many people do we meet in a lifetime? How many have an impact on us, and vice versa? Imagine being surrounded at one moment by every person you have ever known—some for an instant, some your whole life. All of them are watching you because the only thing that links them together isyou. You are their thread.
Now imagine there is reincarnation. Imagine all the people of allyour lives, together…
It grew even quieter. There was noise, a quick cough, a shoe scraping across the floor, hurried whispers. We were all waiting for what came next. I could not stop looking around because each new face brought back another memory.
These people wore the clothes of their time, so there was an incredible array of dress and looks. Men were decked out in worker’s overalls, in rough linen, rags, and double-breasted suits from Huntsman of Savile Row. Thick mustaches or shaved heads, fur hats, astrakhans, baseball caps, sandals, wooden clogs, spats, leather boots up to the knees. They carried guns at their sides, briefcases. Women wore high powdered wigs, bonnets, dirndls, floor-length robes, a pink Chanel suit, a T-shirt advertising the rap group Black-Eyed Peas. People’s names I had said hundreds of times sometimes hundreds of years before came back like forgotten facts: Viktor Petluchen, Henry Allison, Jasna and Flenda Sukalo. Elzbieta Dudzinska. My friend Dessie Kimbrough, the English ambassador’s daughter, who fell from the Reichsbrucke and drowned in the Danube on New Year’s Day, 1918. 1949, 1971, 1827, 1799… Each of my lives, all of my years, all the living and the dead people I had ever known, together in that stadium. The thousands and thousands.
When I could bear it, I turned back to the field, feeling their eyes on me, waiting to see what I would do next. Down on the grass Hugh stood next to a young woman I did notknow. The baby was no longer in his arms. Watching this new woman, I tried to remember her face, but nothing came.
“It’s your daughter when she grows up.” Hugh’s son with Charlotte, my nemesis, walked up the aisle toward me.
I glared at him, not trusting one word. He sensed it and his expression hardened. “It’s true. I don’t care if you believe me. Go see for yourself.”
I made a wide circle around him and walked down the stairs. There was a small open gate at the bottom. I went through it and onto the field. Hugh and the young woman watched me, smiling. She looked at Hugh and he nodded eagerly. She touched his forearm and came toward me. I stopped and caught my breath.
She was tall and plain-looking and had big hands, my hands. Her smile was lopsided and heartbreaking. She had her father’s brown eyes and eyebrows that turned up at the ends.
“Mama?”
As I was about to say “Yes, yes, yes, it’s me, I amyour mother,” the world behind us erupted. For an instant our eyes met and I’m sure we both wore the same terrified expression. It was the crowd. The tens of thousands of people gathered together were suddenly screaming their collective fury, their hatred and resentment of me.
Because somewhere in the course of their lives I had selfishly used every one of them. Used them in small or large, forgotten or impossible-to-conceive-of ways to get whatever it was I wanted at the moment. I had loved them and tricked them or hated them and forgotten them, had ignored them, paid them court, stolen their hearts or said no when they offered them. I had gone into their lives blind; I had gone in knowing everything. I took their love, I took their hopes, I took their time, and I paid them no respect.
Some of them had asked for something back, some for a lot back. Each time I gave only what I wanted or had a surplus of and wouldn’t miss. They gave what they cherished or what kept them alive, what made them tick or gave them faith. What they got from me in return was nothing, wrapped in a fine empty box with tinsel and glitter on it. Most people steal because they believe what they steal should belong to them anyway. To me it wasn’t theft, it was barter: I’ll trade you what I don’t need for whatever it is about you I want. That’s fair.
They shook their fists; some faces were purple or dead pale. One woman was so furious she wept. One man, driven mad, was throwing something at me. Nothing. He held nothing in his hand but was trying to throw something anyway. He did it over and over. Their hatred was crushing, resentment as thick as stone, hot as flame.
And all of it was my fault.
In the midst of this frenzy, Hugh’s son walked out onto the field and stopped a few feet from me. Another casualty. A child my selfishness had stopped from being born. He brought two closed fists up to the sides of his mouth. Then his index fingers came slowly out and pointed down. Like teeth. Like fangs.
“You’re a vampire.”
And I heard the word above the roar because I had already realized that was what this was all about.
I spun around to see if Hugh and the girl had heard, but they were gone. I stood looking at acres of perfect green grass, wishing with all my might they would reappear so I could say something, anything, to them to explain. But there was no explanation. There was only that black word and it was the truth. Vampires take the one thing that keeps a person alive. Sometimes it is blood, sometimes hope, love, ambition, or faith. I took them all.
Behind my back the noise stopped. Not even the sound of the wind. When I turned, only the boy was still there. The stands were completely empty. He stood in the same spot, his hands at his sides.
I took a step toward him but this time hepulled back, afraid I would touch him.
I tried to speak but my throat was thick and dry. “What’s your name?”
“Declan.” He said it beautifully, melodiously, as if it were the easiest word in the world to say. “It’s the name of a saint.”
I smiled, remembering Hugh and his saints.
“I’m going to go now, Declan. I understand why they wanted me to come here, but I don’t need to see any more. I understand everything. Is that all right? Can I leave?”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
I walked back across the field, through the gate, up the steps past the empty seats. At the top I almost turned around for a last look, but I knew that might kill me and there were things I had to do before I died.
OUR HOUSE WAS not on fire when I reached the top of the cellar stairs. No surprise. But what did startle me was how I perceived the house and the objects inside as I walked through it on the way to the front door.
Before Hugh and I ever became intimate and I was wrestling with whether or not I should let myself fall for him, I said, “I don’t want to fall in love with you. It would be too big a memory.”
Now as I walked through our home, everythingwas too big a memory. From the antique brass letter opener on the side table to the four paintings of young Lolly Adcock on the living room wall, it felt like I was walking through a museum of myself. Almost everything held brilliant, crushing memories of the time when I didn’t know the truth about myself, when I was only a woman in love with a man and a vision of life with him I thought sound and possible.
I stopped and picked up things because the impulse was irresistible. A pair of scissors we’d used to open boxes, a postcard from the electric company saying we were now registered customers. Artifacts in my museum, objects and ephemera from a stone age when I guilelessly believed in a just God, believed that people had only one life to live, and evil was a word most suited to the Bible, history books, or silly movies. Charming and quaint as a hand-carved cradle, our house and what it contained was the beautiful dream you had last night that, on waking, you ache not to forget, but inevitably do within minutes.
As I was passing the living room, something nudged my mind and I went in to find a book Hugh had once shown me. Favorite Irish Names for Children. I looked up the boy’s name.
Heaven gave Saint Declan a small black bell, which he used to find a ship for himself and his followers. Later, that bell overtook the ship and showed Declan where to establish his monastery off the Waterford coast. Declan Oakley. The kind of beautiful name a child hates when they’re young because it’s strange and foreign-sounding, especially in America. But he would love it when he grew older. Declan. I said it aloud.
“Actually, the formal name is Deaglan. Emphasis on the second syllable.” Shumda stood outside on the porch. The window was closed but I heard him perfectly. I hadn’t paid close attention to what he looked like the first time I saw him in the cellar. He appeared to be about thirty-five and similar to the portrait on the old poster Hugh had found for Frances. But if he was thirty-five in the 1920s, he would be well over a hundred today. The man on the porch did not look a century old.
“Come outside. It’s a nice night.”
“Why are youhere? Where’s James?”
“You set him free, Miranda. Remember? Now he’s just a puff of smoke. Good closure! Besides, he’s not one of us. Not one of the chosen few. He’s only dead. Dead people are not high on our food chain.”
“But why did you come?”
“Because they told me to escort you through the next stage of your… pilgrimage. It’s more involved, but that’s enough of an explanation for now. You know those stories about after-death experiences? How dead loved ones come to greet you and take you toward the Light? Beautiful, and not a word of it is true. But in your case it is, sort of. Although you’re not dead. And neither am I.” He threw up both hands in quick denial. “That’s the beauty part. Oh, I think you’re going to like this. It just takes getting used to. Are you going to come outside? Should I come in? Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.” He ballooned his cheeks and closed his eyes.
“Go away.”
He stretched both arms out to the sides hands closed. He opened them slowly and in each was a small black bell. Saint Declan’s bell. Fingers extended, he gave each a shake. Their tinkle was light and crystalline. “I can go. But what if you have questions?”
“I don’t want you to answer my questions.”
Pouting, he jingled the bells again. “Brave girl. Dumb girl.” He put the bells on the windowsill, crossed the porch, and went down the stairs to the street. I hurried to the window to make sure he was gone.
Then I picked up the telephone and made two calls. I needed a taxi and I needed to make sure Frances Hatch was still at the Fieberglas Sanitorium.
“I GOTTA TELL you, lady, this ride’s gonna cost you money. It’s about a half hour, forty-five minutes from here.”
“I understand that. Could we go now?”
“You betcha.”
We had been under way a few minutes before the cab driver spoke again. “You ever heard about bed mites?”
“Excuse me?”
“Bed mites. Ever heard of them?” We traded looks in the rear-view mirror. “Neither did I till the other day. Was watchin’ this documentary on TV about allergies. Ever notice how people think they’re intellectual because they watch the Discovery Channel? Not me; I just like finding out about the weird way the world works.
“Anyhow, there was this show on about human allergies. They got a new theory that things called bed mites cause a lot of them. They’re these microscopic bugs that live in our beds and pillows, the sheets.… They’re not dangerous or anything, but they leave droppings, if you know what I mean. And it’s the droppings human beings are allergic to. Strange, huh?”
Taken aback, I couldn’t stop myself from rudely blurting, “Did you make that up?”
“Nah, really, I saw it on this show! They suggested all these ways of protecting yourself if you’re allergic. Wrap your mattress and pillows in plastic, get an air cleaner to catch any droppings that might be floating in the air… No, it’s really true.”
Again we looked at each other in the mirror, and he nodded enthusiastically.
“That’s horrible!”
“Not for the bed mites.”
I laughed. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about them, despite all the chaos surrounding my life at that moment. I envisioned a beautiful woman getting into a freshly made bed and falling asleep. And then, like a scene in a David Lynch film, the camera goes in close on her pillow. Closer and closer until we see thousands and thousands of tiny white insects scurrying around, living their lives despite a huge human head in their midst.
I knew from high school biology class the world is infested with horrid microscopic creatures living happily off and in and on human beings but, thank God, we never know the difference. Yet sooner or later some of their droppings or their germs or their simple existences dotouch us. If we’re lucky all we do is sneeze. If we’re not, they kill us. The metaphor, especially at that moment in my life, was clear and forbidding.
All the conscious lies and forgotten promises we breed, the cruel gestures, small and large. The lack of gratitude and unwillingness to share, the kindness not repaid, the slight returned. The selfishness, the chosen ignorance, the pointless theft, the fuck-you-I-come-first attitude that taints so much of life. All of them are bed mites wecreate. Growing up, we’re taught to accept them as a given. Age-old. Been around forever. They’re part of life. But they aren’tbecause in most cases when we stop and think, we’re instantly aware of how to avoid producing more of these revolting bugs and their shit.
As far as other people’s behavior is concerned, we learn how to “wrap our mattresses in plastic”—we learn how to protect ourselves. But more important is filtering our own words and conduct so that our “droppings” don’t enter others and make them sick.
What I had learned in one hideous moment at the stadium was that life is not usually ruined by any one crowning blow, KO punch, or single act of savagery. It isruined by the thousands of “bed mites” our cruelty, indifference, and insensitivity breed in the beds of those we love or know.
“Do you have any music?”
He looked down at the seat next to him. “I do, but I don’t think you’d go for it. I got Voodoo Glow Skulls and Rocket from the Crypt.”
“Could you turn on the radio?”
“Sure.”
Thoughtfully, he searched through the channels till he came to classical music. Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival” was on, and for a while it calmed my heart. The night landscape did too as it slipped by outside in intermittent patches of glitter and dark. Towns at rest, people going home. A man leaving a liquor store. A boy on a bicycle rode furiously in front us on the road, turning again and again to see where we were, trying to keep ahead, red reflectors on the pedals. The lights in one house came on like an eye opening. A van pulled into a driveway, its exhaust smoke gray over night black.
“That’s funny.”
“What is?”
“The drive-in movie over there. They usually stop running it at the end of summer. Who wants to go to the drive-in this time of year? It’s too cold.”
I looked where he was pointing and what I saw meant nothing for a moment. On the giant screen, people bustled around inside a busy store. Then Hugh Oakley entered the picture. Standing in front of a full-length mirror, he tried on a baseball cap. It was the day we almost slept together for the first time, when we went to the Gap store in New York instead and made out in the dressing room. I come up behind him with a pair of trousers in my hand and say something. He nods and follows me to the back of the store.
At a drive-in theater in Somewhere, New York, a scene from a day in my life was showing on a screen forty feet high.
“Look at that, willya? No cars in there! Who are they showing the movie to?”
The parking lot was empty.
“Could you turn the music up, please?”
THE PARKING LOT of Fieberglas Sanatorium was not empty. We arrived around nine at night, but there were still many cars parked. We pulled up to the brightly lit front door. I looked at the building and was surprised at the stillness in my heart.
“Are you visiting someone in there?”
“Yes. An old friend.”
The driver ducked his head so he could see the building better through the windshield. “Must have money to be staying in a place like this.”
I looked at the back of his head. The hair had recently been cut—it was all precise angles against perfectly white skin. From behind, he looked like a soldier or a little boy. “What’s your name?”
“My name? Erik. Erik Peterson. Why?”
“Could you wait here while I go in, Erik? I’ll pay you for your time.”
“You know, I was planning on waiting for you anyway. Didn’t think you’d want to stay around herevery long, especially this time of night. You’ll be going back to Crane’s View?”
He turned and smiled at me. A neighborly smile, nothing behind it but a kind and considerate man.
“Yes. Thank you. But I might be a while.”
“No problem.” He held up a Watchman miniature television. “The last episode of Neverwhereis on in ten minutes. Gotta see that.”
I got out of the taxi and started toward the door. Behind me he called out, “What’s yourname?”
“Miranda.”
“I’ll be right here, Miranda. You take your time.” I took a few steps and he said, “When we drive back home, I’ll tell you about hyacinth macaws.”
“Are they related to bed mites?”
“No, they’re birds. Another documentary I saw afterthe bed mites.” He looked down. The dancing gray-blue flicker of the television screen reflected off his face. I was so glad he was there.
Opening the heavy front door this time, I was immediately struck by how quiet and empty the place was. My leather heels on the stone floors were a riot of noise. A middle-aged nurse sat at the reception desk reading. No one else was around. I walked over and waited for her attention but she didn’t look up. Reading a page of her book upside down, I saw it was poetry. The first line of one poem read: “Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night.”
She continued to ignore me.
“Hello? Excuse me?”
“Yes?”
“I would like to see Frances Hatch.”
“What room is she in?”
“I don’t remember.”
The woman sighed mightily and consulted her computer. She said the room number and immediately went back to her book.
“That’s a nice line.”
She looked up. “What?”
“’Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night.’ It’s a nice line. It pretty much says it all.”
She looked at me, her book, me. She snapped it shut and grew a suspicious look. I walked away.
The elevator arrived with a pingand the doors opened on Frances’s doctor. “You’re back.”
“Yes. I have to talk to Frances. But first I have a question: Could you tell me, what exactly is this place? Who is it for?”
“It’s a hospice. Of sorts.”
“People come here to die? Frances is going to die?”
“Yes. She’s very weak.”
“But why here? She loves her apartment so much. Why would she come here?”
“Do you mind if I go up with you? Just up to her floor? Then I’ll leave you alone.”
“All right.” I stepped into the elevator. She pressed the button.
When the door closed, she turned to me and asked in a low voice, “Do you know about your lives?”
“Yes.”
“Would you tell me how you learned?”
I briefly described returning to the house in Crane’s View, the fire, the stadium, and the word Declan had used there that explained everything. I said nothing about Hugh’s and my baby. While I spoke, she crossed her arms and lowered her head almost to her chest. When I finished we were standing near Frances’s door.
The doctor slowly shook her head. “Extraordinary. It’s always different.”
“This is common?”
“Miranda, everyone here has experienced the same thing as you. It simply manifests itself differently every time. All of your lives have led you here. Now you must make a great decision. You can stay here as long as you like and you’ll be safe. That’s one of our purposes—to protect you while you decide. The other function is to care for those who have made the decision and choose to end their lives here.
“Hospices for people like you have existed for as long as recorded history. A hotel in the Pyrenees, a youth hostel in Mali, a hospital in Montevideo. There is an inscription over one of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt—”
“What decision are you talking about?”
“Frances will tell you, but I think you already know. All of those people in the stadium hated you because you took something essential from the life of every one of them. People use the word vampirebecause it is something so foreign, so impossible to imagine really existing that we shiver at the thought and then laugh it off as idiotic fantasy. Dracula? Sucking blood and sleeping in a coffin? Silly. But if you look up the definition it says ‘one who preys on others.’ Everyone does that, but we have nice rational explanations for it. Until you look more closely.
“I think you must talk to Frances now. She’ll answer the questions you have.” She turned to leave. I touched her arm.
“Wait! But who are you?”
“Someone like you. I was in the same situation as you are but made my decision a long time ago.” She touched my hand. “At least you’ll have clarity now. I learned how important that is, no matter where it leaves you in the end.” She walked soundlessly down the hall and out the door at the other end. The same door Hugh’s son had used earlier. Today. All this had happened in one day.
I knocked softly on Frances’s door and pushed it open. The first thing that hit me was the perfume. An aroma like the most wonderful flower shop. I hesitated in pushing the door further. The flood of colors and shapes drowned the eyes. For a second I couldn’t even find the bed. When I did I had to smile because Frances was sitting up straight reading a magazine, looking totally oblivious to the paradise surrounding her.
Then I heard music. It was classical, lilting and summery, something I had never heard before. It reminded me of Saint-Saens’s “Aquarium.” Before speaking, I let my eyes and ears calm down.
Still flicking through her magazine and without lifting her eyes, Frances said, “Close the door, girl. I don’t want people seeing me in this nightgown.”
“The room is so beautiful, Frances. You always know how to do up a place.”
“Thank you. Come in and sit down. There’s a chair in here somewhere. Just shift some flowers.”
“Who sent them to you?”
“The Shits. But we have other things to talk about. I assume that’s why you’re here in the middle of the night?”
“Yes. But could you turn off the music while we talk?”
She stared at me blankly, as if I had said something complicated in a foreign language. “The music! No, I can’t do that. It’s piped in. There’s no control.”
“What if you don’t want to hear it?”
She started to say something but stopped. “You grow used to it. Forget the music, Miranda. Tell me what happened to you. And give the details—they’re very important.”
I told her everything, including seeing Hugh and our child. It didn’t take long. It was disturbing to finish as quickly as I did. In the end, each of us has only one story to tell. It takes a lifetime to live that story but sometimes less than an hour to tell it.
The only time Frances showed real emotion was when I told her about Shumda. She grilled me on what he looked like, what he said, how he acted. Normally very pale, her face grew redder as I talked. Eventually she put a hand over her mouth and kept it there until I finished describing the last thing he said to me before walking off the porch. She stared at the window and seemed to be putting both her thoughts and her emotions together.
“Your name in Vienna was Elisabeth Lanz. Your death was the most celebrated scandal of the day because so many people were in the theater when you fell. Shumda was a great star then. People came from all over Europe to see him. The chief of police was in the audience that night and personally arrested him.
“The Landesgericht. Shumda used to like to say that word to me when I visited him in his cell. He spoke perfect Hochdeutsch, of course. He was a superb ventriloquist because he loved languages. He spoke four. He could be happy just saying words in different languages because they were so delicious to him. Some people love the taste of chocolate; Shumda loved the taste of words. Landesgericht, crйpuscule, piombo, zvinka. I can still see him: lying in bed after we’d made love, rolling difficult words off his tongue and smiling. He liked to talk as much as he liked to screw.
“He had led a charmed life, so he never truly believed they would punish him for your death. But it was a political year in Vienna and politicians love a scapegoat. Here was this showman, a ventriloquist from Romania, who had killed one of the city’s young flowers in front of hundreds of people. The case against him was clear. There was no question they would have executed him if I hadn’t saved him.”
“How did you do that?”
“I traded my life for his.”
“How did you… What do you mean?”
“Look at your hand, Miranda.”
I looked but saw nothing.
“No, turn it over. Look at your palm.”
It had no lines. Every one had vanished. My palm was smooth as paper. Smooth as skin anywhere else on your body, but not the hand. Not where your past and future are supposed to be mapped out by fate and will.
Disbelieving, I could not raise my eyes when Frances spoke again.
“Miranda!”
“What is this? Why—”
“Listen to me: There werelines on your hand when you entered that stadium. They disappeared when you realized what you are.”
“A vampire? When I realized I had lived all these lives? That’s when the lines disappeared?” I needed to repeat what she had said so I could fix it somewhere in my reeling mind. Despite the effort to remain sane, my voice teetered on the brink of something very bad. I could barely control myself.
It felt like the big bang theory was being played out all over again—in my brain. Everything I knew was speeding outward toward the farthest reaches of space. Maybe in a few billion years the fragments would have slowed and cooled enough again to allow some life again, but right now they were only flying out.
Frances held up her own right hand, palm out. Covering it were lines and ridges, highways crossing and separating, a lifetime of lines on skin, a detailed albeit chaotic map of the many days of Frances Hatch.
“What are you saying, Frances?”
She slowly raised her left palm. It was blank. I looked quickly at my left but it was as blank as my right.
She brought the hands together and folded them in her lap. “Palmists disagree about what the individual lines on a hand mean, but most concede those on the left indicate what you’re born with and the ones on the right are what you’ve done with them. Left hand,” she raised her blank one. “Right hand.”
“Why are both of mine blank?”
“Because now that you have discovered who you really are, you haveno fate anymore. Everything from this point on is up to you.” She licked her lips. “You’re different now.”
“From what I learned today, I’ve been different all my life. All my lives!” I said the last word like a hissing snake.
“But now you know the truth about who you are. That changes everything. Now you can do something about it, Miranda. Everything is up to you from this point.”
I looked at my smooth palms again, not sure of what to say or ask. “Tell me about you and Shumda.”
“I haven’t seen him for seventy years. Not since the day I saved him. That’s part of how this works—if you sacrifice yourself for another person, you will never see them again. In most cases, because they never want to see youagain. They don’t like to be reminded of what you did for them. But if they’re young, they never know it happened, because they don’t understand.
“In other respects it’s tolerable. Yousimply become a normal human being and live a normal life. You get flu, pay taxes, have kids if you want.… And sooner or later you die. For good. Welcome to the ‘mortal coil.’ No more VIP lounge for you. Watch out for cholesterol.
“I was extraordinarily lucky, Miranda. I gave my immortality to Shumda, but then went on to live a gorgeous life. Now it’s over. I have no complaints.” Her eyes betrayed her. As soon as she finished speaking, they shifted to the flowers as if the beautiful clusters knew a secret she didn’t want told.
“But Frances, I died! I fell in the theater. I fell off the scaffold in the church—”
“And you came back. Again and again. Normal people don’t. They live once and die. Welive and die and come back. No one else does that, only us. But that’s why people believe in reincarnation—because some of us doreturn, just not the ones they think. Unsterblich.”
“What?”
“Immortal. The German word for it. Shumda loved that word. He said you had to wrap your tongue around it like a kiss.”
“That word was on the cradle. It was carved on our baby’s cradle.”
“I’m not surprised. Everything we experience links up sooner or later. Our separate lives, the smallest details… nothing is left out. You met Hugh because of a discussion about your James and Lolly Adcock’s paintings. You met me because of her work too. Remember those connect-the-dots coloring books you had as a child? That’s us. Everything connects.”
“Why now, Frances? Why am I learning this now?”
“Because of love, dear; because you’re finally in love and have the opportunity to be selfless. It happens only once in a lifetime, any lifetime. There are big loves and small ones, but only one selfless love. In your case, I assume it’s for your child. I would have thought it was for Hugh, but it wasn’t, because you had this revelation afterhe died.”
Without any warning I felt violently ill. I was going to throw up. I slapped a hand over my mouth to try and stop it. I did, but only just.
So much had occurred since I’d learned I was pregnant that there had been no time to reflect on what it meant. But I knew what Frances said was true. The child inside me meant everything. The daughter from the man I had planned to spend the rest of my life with. The baby I had wanted all my life but avoided thinking about because the possibility of long love and children had faded as I grew older. It was a joy I tried not to think about. Getting older means you have fewer beginnings. Children are the beginning of everything again, no matter how old you are or how fixed in your ways.
The day I learned I was pregnant I had another, altogether different revelation. Riding home on the train to Crane’s View, I considered the best way to tell Hugh. Somewhere in the middle of that planning, I was embraced by the thought: I will never be alone again. With this child in my life, I wouldnever be alone again. It was the most warming, intimate, reassuring sensation I have ever known.
While Frances spoke, I unconsciously put both hands on my stomach, but whether for reassurance or protection I didn’t know. In a whisper I said, “What’s so bad about being normal?”
“Nothing. But it is entirely different from what you’ve known.”
“Different how?”
She thought it over. Once her right hand flew up off the bed as if reaching for something in the air. Only after it had floated back to her lap and she thought some more did she speak. “Being human is a deeper, richer, much sadderexperience than you know. Somewhere inside all of their souls, their genes, inside their cells, human beings understand this is all there is. But most of the time they can’t figure out what thisis. Your spirit is comfortable because it knows that when this dance is finished there’ll be another for you. And another.”
“What exactly would I be giving up?”
“Your immortality. You would give it to your child. You give it to the person you love as much as yourself. I gave mine to Shumda. They were going to kill him. I couldn’t let that happen because I realized I loved him more than my own life.”
“How do you give it up—is there some special way?”
She shook her head. “No. It’s always different, but instinctively you’ll know what to do when the time comes. It’s not anything you have to think about.”
“What did you do, Frances?”
She closed her eyes. “I set a dog on fire.”
“ Why?”
“I can’t tell you. But it was necessary. When I realized that was what I had to do, I also understood it would cause the change. And it worked. As soon as I had done it, a lawyer appeared and said he could save Shumda. Herr Doktor Pongratz. I’ll never forget that name. He said he had read about the case in the Viennese newspapers and had found a little-known law in the Austrian judicial system that would exonerate Shumda. And it did.”
“But couldn’t someone else have found that law too?”
Frances straightened up and smoothed the sheets around her. “No, because no such law existed until Pongratz found it.”
“Can you give your immortality away to anyone, or does it have to be the one you love?”
“To anyone. Once you realize who you are and what you have, it’s your decision what to do with it. You can give it to whoever you choose.”
We sat silently amid her flowers and the piped in music. I had so many questions to ask.
“Can I have the baby even being who I am? Without giving up the immortality?”
“Yes! Of course you can, Miranda. But you’ll destroy it. You’ll love it and care for it and do everything in your power to give it a wonderful life. But eventually you’ll destroy it because you are what you are. Your ego takes precedence over everything else. And as you’ve already discovered, it’s not always obvious. You can’t fight the instinct, no matter how hard you try. It’s like pushing against the ocean.
“Whatever you give your daughter you’ll end up taking back, times two. Often you won’t even know you’re doing it, but shewill. As with everyone else in your life, you’ll ruin things that are fundamental to her well-being. You’ll ruin her dreams, sabotage her feelings of self-importance. You’ll suck her dry. When she’s your age, she’ll tell cynical, embittered stories about her mother the bitch. She’ll finish by saying she loves you of course, but the less she sees you, the better.
“As an adult, she’ll believe the articles in women’s magazines and think she’s missing everything. She’ll wear too much jewelry and her voice will get louder over the years as she realizes fewer and fewer people listen to what she says.
“Look around you. Watch how people function and interact with one another. You’ll see this is going on everywhere all the time. People devour each other in the name of love, or family or country. But that’s an excuse; they’re just hungry and want to be fed. Read their faces, the newspapers, read what it says on their T-shirts! ‘I think you’re mistaking me for someone who gives a shit.’ ‘My parents went to London but all they brought me back was this lousy T-shirt.’ ‘So many women, so little time.’ ‘Whoever dies with the most toys, wins.’ They’re supposed to be funny, witty, and postmodern, Miranda. But the truth is they’re only stating a fact: Me. I come first. Get out of my way.”
“So vampires are everywhere?”
“Everywhere. They just don’t have fangs or sleep in coffins.”
“What will happen if I give the baby my immortality? Will she live a happy life?”
“There’s no guarantee. She willbe a vampire. But you’ll be giving her an enormous chance because, if nothing else, she would have all those lives. In a way, that’s happiness. Very few of our kind have been willing to make that sacrifice. Even when we find the love of our life, we refuse to give them our immortality.”
I told her about the cab ride from Crane’s View and seeing my life on screen at the drive-in theater.
“You’re doing that to yourself. It’s the immortal part of you with the unbelievable powers. The part that was able to free James Stillman. The part that was outside this building staring in the last time you were here. It knows you must decide now and it’s afraid you’ll make the wrong choice.”
“But why show me thatscene? Hugh’s dead. I can’t do anything about that.”
“I don’t know. But those kinds of bizarre things will continue until you choose. Your magical side can be very persuasive, believe me.”
“Frances, that music is driving me crazy. Can you call down to the front desk and ask them to turn it off?”
She held up a finger for me to be quiet. The pastel-colored, ethereal music filled the room. Saint-Saens, Berlioz, Delius—it could have been composed by any of them. It perfectly complemented the brilliant mass and whirl of the flowers.
I watched her face. It remained expressionless most of the time, but now and then she flinched slightly or gave a faint smile.
“It reminds me of things I’ve forgotten and what I’m going to lose when I die. ‘Only in hell is memory exact.’ I suppose this is how my trip to hell begins. We forget so much over a lifetime. So many brilliant moments and stories. How could we forget, Miranda? Why do we let them go without a struggle? They make us, deepen us; they define who we are. But we live these moments and forget them. We mislay them like a set of keys. How is it possible to be so sloppy with our own life?
“Before you came in, for the first time in fifty years I remembered an October afternoon I spent in Vienna with Shumda. It was right after we’d arrived there, and he hadn’t started performing yet. We took a tram to the last stop in Grinzing, then walked up through the vineyards to the Wienerwald and Cobenzl. There’s a magnificent view from there down over the whole city.
“On the way home, we stopped at a Heurigenand had a lunch of fried chicken and new white wine. Shumda loved to talk. Almost nothing could stop him once he got going. But in the middle of our meal, right in the middle of taking a bite of chicken, he saw something behind me and absolutely froze. I’d never seen anything like it. I spun around to see what it was, but there was nothing there but two nondescript men sitting at a table drinking wine. Shumda wiped his hands carefully on a handkerchief, then reached into his backpack and took out the book he had been reading the whole summer. It was Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which had just been published.
“He asked how he looked. I said ‘Fine, what’s the matter with you?’ He bit his lip and it was plain he was extremely nervous about something. Shumda was never nervous. He was the most self-confident person I’ve ever known. He took the book, stood up, and walked across the courtyard to the two men. As he approached, a chow chow came out from under the table and stared at him. Obviously it was protecting the men, and for a moment I thought it was going to bite him. But it was on a leash, and one of them reined it in close.
Shumda looked at the dog and then the men. He held up the book, but instead of speaking, he made the dog talk for him. Itsaid, ‘Dr. Freud, you have written a masterpiece. I’m in your debt.’ Freud, who wasn’t famous for his sense of humor, was bewildered. He kind of harrumphed a bit, said thank you, looked suspiciously at his dog, and finally asked Shumda if he was a performer. Shumda said yes very meekly and invited him to his show when it opened at the Ronacher Theater. Freud tried to smile and be gracious but he really didn’t know what to do.
“We left the Heurigenbefore they did. As we were walking out, Freud and I made eye contact. Passing their table I leaned over the great doktor, whom I didn’t know from the man in the moon, and said, ‘You really should come to his show. He’s a genius.’ I often wondered if he was there the night you fell.”
“You said you forgot things, Frances. Sounds like you remember very well.”
“I’m remembering everything now. The music has been doing that to me. It brings back Freud’s smell when I bent over to talk to him. The yellowness of the chestnuts on the ground in the courtyard of that Heurigen. They fell from the trees in spiky shells. You peeled, them open and inside was a shiny brown chestnut. People collected them and fed them to the animals at the Schonbrunn zoo.”
“Do you like remembering these things? You sound so sad.”
“Well, it is sad watching your house burn down. When there’s nothing you can do about it, you have to stand and watch. You remember the things inside you’re losing. It’s hard, but it reminds me of how rich my life was. God, I had a good one.”
“But I’m looking at your face, Frances. You’re not remembering only good things, are you?”
She wouldn’t answer.
Is it better to remember all we’ve lost? Especially when we know it’s gone forever? And what about the bad memories? The bad times, bad people, bad choices, bad plans—should we be reminded of them?
I didn’t think so, especially not in Frances’s case. In her retelling, even her good memories, the Freud stories and their like, trailed an aroma of melancholy and loss that stank. Even in a room filled with the most exotic flowers.
“I’ll go now. I’m going back to Crane’s View.”
She closed her eyes and nodded. She knew I had no other choice. “If you leave here tonight, you can’t come back until after you’ve decided. You won’t be protected.”
“I don’t want to be protected.” I bent over and kissed the old woman high on her forehead. She smelled of talcum powder. “Thank you for everything, Frances. Even after all that’s happened, I still love you very much.”
“And I love you. The one thing I always regretted was not having a child. A daughter. Now, having known you, I know what it would have been like and I regret it even more.”
I touched her cheek and left. I walked into the hall and closed the door behind me.
After two steps I started shaking so much I couldn’t move. I wasn’t ready yet. I had thought I was but I was wrong. Five more minutes with Frances. A few more questions. I just needed five more minutes with my friend. Then I would be all right and able to go on to whatever was next. She would understand that. She would know how to stop my shakes and push the demons back.
I returned to her door and opened it. The music was playing. Frances sat with her face in her hands weeping so hard her whole body shook violently.
“Oh Jesus, Frances!”
She looked up. Her face was crimson. Her cheeks were shiny from tears. She waved a hand at me to leave. I did not know how to help, how to save my friend from a fate so hopeless and decided. But I could fetch the doctor. Maybe the doctor had something that could calm her down and at least let her rest.
Dr. Zabalino was downstairs in the lobby talking to the receptionist. The sight of me racing toward her must have said everything. I started explaining what happened but she was hurrying for the elevator before I was three sentences in. I started after her but she stopped and slammed a hand against my chest.
“No! If you want to stay here and be protected, don’t move till I get back. But you cannot come with me! Think of Frances. Something you said obviously upset her. She’s very weak and this is bad for her. I don’t want her seeing you again now.” She took her hand away but kept both hands wide open at her sides, as if ready to shove me again if I tried accompanying her. She walked to the elevator, entered, turned around and faced me. As the doors slid closed, she said, “Don’t go anywhere. Stay here and you’ll be safe.”
The light above the door illuminated the floor numbers. When it stopped at Frances’s, I turned and walked to the receptionist. She wasn’t ignoring me or reading poetry this time. Her eyes were bright and alert, like those of a small animal that’s just realized a much bigger one is very close.
“What happens now?”
“What do you mean?”
I slapped my hands down on the desk loud enough to make her cringe. “Don’t give me shit! What happens now?”
“Usually the doctors can fix things. Dr. Zabalino is very good. She’ll know how to help your friend. But it’ll be harder to help you because you haven’t chosen yet. That’s the worst. Making up your mind, because there are so many reasons for and against it. That’s why you should stay here until you’ve decided. Fieberglas is the safest place for you. Outside it’s very, very dangerous. There are things out there—”
“Tell the doctor I left.”
“You can’t!”
“I don’t want to be here. I’ve got to—Just tell her I left.”
“But—”
The clatter of my heels against the stone floor rang out again in that quiet place as I walked to the door. Through a window, I saw Erik Peterson in his taxicab, the light from the portable TV flickering on his face. I pushed open the heavy front door. The air outside was cold and smelled of pine and stone. I felt no desire to return to the “safety” of the building.
“Erik? Let’s go home.”
He looked up. “You finished?”
“Yes. Do you mind if I sit next to you?”
“Not at all. Hop in.” He reached across the passenger’s seat and threw open the door. The overhead light came on a weak yellow. I walked around the front of the car and got in but didn’t close the door. I needed a moment just sitting before my life could continue.
“How’d it go in there, Miranda? How’s your friend?”
“Sick. Is this your family?” On the dashboard was a small metal frame with three oval photographs inside. A boy, a girl, a wife. The girl wore a cheerleader’s sweater and flirted with the camera. The pretty woman looked straight at it, expressionless. The boy—
“Yes. That’s my wife Nina, our daughter Nelly, and Isaac.”
“He looks like you.”
“Isaac died of meningitis two years ago. One night he didn’t feel well and went to bed. The next morning he was gone.” He gestured for me to close the door. I hesitated so as to have another, closer look at Isaac in the dim light. Erik started the car. The strong smell of exhaust fumes filled the air.
“I’m so sorry. What was he like?”
“Interesting you ask. Most people when they hear about it just say they’re sorry. They’re embarrassed to ask questions. Or they feel uncomfortable.
“What was he like? He was a pistol. You couldn’t keep the kid down. He woke up at five every morning and went full tilt till you threw him into bed at night and shut his eyes for him. I guess he was hyperactive, but my wife said he was just too interested to sit down. We miss him.”
I pulled the door closed and we drove away from Fieberglas. The gravel crunching beneath the car tires sounded very loud. As we drove onto the street I looked down at my hands in my lap and saw they were both clenched into fists. I was fearful something might stop or hold us back, but that was egotism or paranoia. Nothing stopped us; nothing met us but the night in front of the headlights.
“Once when Isaac was a little boy, I mean really little, I walked into the bathroom and saw him standing next to the toilet barefoot. The seat was up and he was dangling a foot over the bowl. I asked what he was doing, because with that kid, it coulda been anything. He said he’d bet himself he couldn’t put his foot in the toilet. For some crazy reason he was frightened of doing that. So there he was standing, daring himself to do the thing that scared him most.”
“Why was he afraid to do that? Had it been flushed?”
“Oh, sure.” Peterson took a hand off the steering wheel and gave an airy wave. “But you know how it is when you’re a kid: you got different monsters than the ones you got as an adult.”
I slid forward to get as close as possible to the photograph. The boy did look like his father, but even in the picture there was a wildness in his eyes that said he wasa pistol.
We returned to Crane’s View the way we had come. Passing the drive-in theater, I worried that something would again be playing on the giant screen, but it was blank. Erik continued talking about his son. I asked questions to keep the conversation going. I didn’t want to think about what to do because I knew my whole life would depend on that decision once we got home.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked.
“No. God, cigarettes! I’d love one too.”
He pulled a pack of Marlboros from beneath his sun visor and handed them to me. “I think I got two left in there. Have a look.”
I slid them out.
He pushed in the cigarette lighter on the dashboard. “All the things we’re not supposed to do anymore, huh? You know what I say? Cigarettes are gooood!”
The lighter popped out and he handed it to me. I lit up for the first time in years and took a deep drag. The smoke was harsh and raw in my throat but delicious. We sat in a nice silence, smoking and watching things pass by.
“There’s a 7-eleven up here a-ways. Would you mind if I made a quick stop and bought more smokes and some other things? I told the wife I’d bring them home and she’ll be real mad if I don’t.”
“Please, of course stop.”
He sighed. “That’s one of the bad things that’s happened since Isaac died. Nina gets real upset about small things. Before, she was as calm as summer, but now if even the slightest thing goes wrong, she has trouble with it. I can’t blame her. I guess we miss people in our own ways.
“Me, I think about all the things I’ll never be able to do with the boy. Take him to see the Knicks, watch him graduate from school. Sometimes when I’m alone in the house, I go up to his room and sit on the bed. I talk to him too, you know? Tell him what’s been going on in the family, and how much I miss him. I know it’s stupid, but I keep thinking he’s near me in that room. Nina cleaned it out completely after he died, so it’s only a small empty place now, but I can’t help thinking he’s around there sometimes and maybe can hear me.”
“What do you miss most, Erik? What do you miss most about him?” A question I had asked myself again and again since Hugh’s death.
“The hugs. That kid was a hugger. He’d grab hold of you tight as a vise and squeeze. Not many people really hug you.” He smiled sadly. It looked like his whole life these days was in that smile. “There aren’t that many people in life who really love you either.”
I felt my throat swell and I had to look away.
“I’m sorry, Miranda. I’m just talking. There’s the place. I’ll be out in a minute.”
We slowed and pulled into a large parking lot. The store was brilliantly lit. It glowed, and the vivid colors of the products on the shelves radiated out into the night. I watched Erik walk in. He stopped to speak with the man behind the counter and in a moment both were laughing. I looked around the lot. There was only one other vehicle parked there, an old pickup truck that looked like it had traveled to World War Three and back. I twisted the rearview mirror to have a look at myself and was surprised to see my head was still on my shoulders and I didn’t have big Xs over my eyes like some cartoon character that’s just been knocked out.
I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Far across the parking lot, a kid on a bicycle came weaving slowly into view. My first thought was, What’s he doing out so late, but as he got closer my mind froze. It was Erik Peterson’s son Isaac.
He was dressed in an orange-and-blue windbreaker and faded jeans. Riding in loopy circles around the lot, he got closer and closer to the car. I knew who he was, but since I could not believe it, I looked again at the picture on the dashboard. It was him. Inside the store, Erik had disappeared back among the shelves. Outside, twenty feet away, his dead son rode a bicycle.
I opened the door and swiveled to get out. The boy stopped abruptly and put his feet down to keep from tipping. Looking at me, he shook his head. Don’t move. I stayed where I was and he slowly rolled over.
“That’s my Dad in there.” His voice was high and sweet. He lisped.
“Yes.”
“He’s nice, huh?”
“He’s… He loves you very much.”
“I know. He talks to me all the time. But I can’t talk back. It’s not allowed.”
“Can I tell him you’re here?”
“No. He couldn’t see me anyway. Only you. Remember you saw me before? When you were driving the other way, I was racing you. I kept up with you pretty long. I mean, I’m pretty fast for my age.”
He was so sure of himself, this ten-year-old big talker out for a spin on his bike at night, checking to see if anyone was watching. It wrung my heart.
“You know Declan?” he asked.
“Yes.”
A green Porsche growled in off the street and stopped a few feet away. A woman wearing a man’s fedora got out. Looking straight ahead, she walked into the store.
“Women are the stones you use to build a house, men are the sticks you use to start the fire and keep the house warm.”
Distracted by the jarring noise of the car, I wasn’t sure I’d heard what he said. “Excuse me?”
“That’s what Declan’s father said.”
I stiffened. “You’ve seen him?”
“Sure. He and Declan are together all the time. He said that today when Declan asked the difference between men and women. They were talking about why Declan never got to be born.
“See you!”
Erik came out of the store carrying a brown bag and glancing over his shoulder. Pushing the bike backward, the boy came within two feet of his father. He looked at the man as he walked past. He reached out a hand and pretended to slap his arm.
Erik stopped. For a moment I was sure he knew who was there. Isaac watched him with calm eyes. Erik moved to the left, stopped, moved to the right. He was dancing! He turned in a circle. “Do you hear it, Miranda? From inside the store? Martha and the Vandellas. ‘Dancing in the Streets.’” He continued swaying back and forth as he approached the car. “One of my favorite songs. Isaac loved it too. I hear it all the time now. Funny. More than ever before, I think.” He opened the back door and laid the grocery bag on the seat. “You ready to go?”
The boy nodded at me, so I said yes. His father got in and started the motor. “I got everything. Some more cigarettes too if you want one.”
“Erik, if you could, what would you say to Isaac if he was here right now?”
Without hesitation he said, “I’d say I’m living, but I’m not alive without you.”
ONE OF HUGH’S favorite quotes was from St. Augustine: “Whisper in my heart, tell me you are there.” I suppose it has to do with God and his unwillingness to show his face to man. But in light of what had happened, I took it to mean something entirely different. I was sure “Women are the stones you use to build a house, men are the sticks…” was meant for me, not Declan. I was sure Hugh was whispering in myheart, suggesting what to do. I had already come to the same conclusion by then but his words only strengthened my resolve.
When we arrived in Crane’s View and Erik dropped me off, I entered the house no longer frightened or upset. There is a calmness that comes with surrender. A peace that actually revitalizes when you know there is no other way. I knew what to do now, and no matter what happened to me afterwards, the child would be safe. That was all that mattered—the child would be safe. I would give it what I had, willingly!
The house was spotless, no sign of anything that happened there earlier. I walked into the kitchen and remembered it had all begun after I’d made myself dinner—how many hours, days, lifetimes ago? When I turned on the television and saw Charlotte, Declan, and Hugh by the swimming pool.
So what? It had to begin somewhere and that’s where it did. Move on. Other things to think about now. Hunger shook a scolding finger at me and I knew I would have to eat before doing it. Opening the refrigerator door, I was greeted by an incredible array of the most extraordinary and exotic food—Iranian caviar, a box of pastries from a place called Demel in Vienna, plover eggs, Tunisian capers, olives from Mt. Athos, fresh Scottish salmon, Bombay lemon pickle, more. I had bought none of it, much less tasted most of the food on those shelves, but it didn’t surprise me. The time for surprises was over. I sniffed and sampled a great deal before choosing a fresh baguette, prosciutto cut thin as tissue paper, and the most delicate mozzarella I had ever tasted. The sandwich was delicious and I ate it quickly.
There was a bottle of Lambrusco too, one of Hugh’s favorite wines. I opened it and poured some into a small glass that had once held creamed chipped beef. Odd as it may sound, I wanted to toast something. That’s what you’re supposed to do at the end of the banquet, aren’t you? Toast the host, the lucky couple, the birthday girl or the glorious country. But what could I toast on this, the last night of some preposterous part of my existence? My past lives? Here’s to all the good and bad times I had but forgot and learned nothing from. Here’s to all the people I knew and hurt—sorry folks, I can’t remember any of you. Or how about, Here’s to me—however many of us there have been.
Hugh taught me an Irish toast:
May those who love us love us.
And those that don’t love us,
May God turn their hearts.
And if he doesn’t turn their hearts
May he turn their ankles
So we’ll know them by their limping.
One toast came to me that was appropriate. I lifted my glass and said to the empty room, “Here’s to you and the lives you lead. I hope you find your way home faster than I did.” I drank slowly and emptied the glass.
On the floor in Hugh’s workroom was a cardboard box filled with tools and chemicals he used to restore things. I went through it, pulling out the many different bottles, reading the labels, choosing the ones that contained alcohol or any kind of flammable substance. Our house was made of wood. It would go up quickly. I went around the ground floor pouring the strong-smelling chemicals over everything. Hugh’s new chair, a couch, boxes of books, the wooden floors.
I kept spilling and watching the liquids stain new fabric, pool on the wooden floor, eat into a turquoise plastic Sky King ashtray I had given Hugh as a present. When all of the bottles and cans were empty, I stood in the front hall smelling the incredible stink of all those deadly chemicals splashed over everything in the world that had mattered to me.
I went to a window and looked out onto the porch. A car drove by outside. A white car. It reminded me of a white horse. Heroes rode white horses, heroic knights. That reminded me of Hugh’s unfinished story about the plain-looking knight who fell so in love with the princess that he was willing to sacrifice everything for her. How he went to the devils and traded them his courage for her happiness. I remembered the last line of his incomplete story. “Life is full of surprises, but if you’re convinced all of them will be bad, what’s the point of going on?” I wanted no more surprises. I didn’t trust them, any more than I believed I would be able to change anything for the better if I continued living. I would give up my immortality to the child and then I would finish it.
Still staring out the window, I felt ebullient and relieved. The world was mine because I no longer wanted to be in it. I could do this tonight or tomorrow or next week. It didn’t matter when because the decision had been made and was final. No, it had to be tonight. I did not want tomorrow. I went looking for matches.
What was the name of that famous children’s book? Goodnight Moon. Good night Hugh. Good night Frances Hatch, good night Crane’s View, good night life. My thoughts chanted these lines as I searched for matches. Good night Erik Peterson and Isaac. Good night beautiful books and long dinners with someone you love. Good night this and this and this and this as I wandered through the house. The list got longer and longer as I slid open drawers and cupboards looking for something to burn up the world in which these things existed.
Just as I began to grow frustrated, I remembered seeing a pack of matches in Hugh’s box of chemicals. A half-empty pack with green writing announcing Charlie’s Pizza. The place where we’d had lunch with Frances the first day we visited Crane’s View. The first time I saw Declan. The first time we met Frannie McCabe. First time. First time and now the last time. I would never see Declan or Frannie again. Never see this this that. A spotted dog or a marmalade cat. Goodnight life.
I found the matches and stood up, wondering only where to do it. The living room. Sit on the couch, start the fire there and finish. The walk from Hugh’s room to the living room seemed five miles long. It felt like I was walking underwater. Not bad or disturbing, only slow-motion and incredibly detailed. I saw everything around me with extreme clarity. Was it because this was the last time I would see these things? Good night hall with the beautiful wood floors. Hugh got down on his knees right there and, sliding his hand back and forth over that floor, looked up at me with the happiest smile. “This is all ours now,” he said, his voice full of wonder. Good night staircase. Stopping, I looked up and remembered the day we had made love at the top. I wished I could smell Hugh in that final air. Would I see him where I was going? How wonderful to smell him one last time. I looked up the stairs and remembered him on top of me, his weight, the softness of his lips on my throat, his thumbs holding down my hands. He’d had keys in his jeans pocket that day. When he moved on me they cut into my hip. I asked him to take them out. He tossed them across the floor. They rang out as they hit and slid. Good night keys.
In the living room I stared into the empty fireplace a moment and then put my hand in my pocket. It was there. It was time, so I took it out. Because of all the mad things happening when I picked it up in the basement at Hugh’s silent urging, I hadn’t looked carefully at the piece of wood I now held in my hand. I had more or less forgotten about it until I was standing in the lobby of Fieberglas talking to the nurse about Frances. Then the only way I can describe what happened is that the wood came to methe way a good idea or real fear comes. All at once, as if through every pore in your body. Yes, it had been in my pocket the whole time, but suddenly I became aware of its presence again. Or maybe I just remembered it and, in doing so, grasped its real importance and what to do with it. A small piece of wood about seven inches long. Dark on three sides, light on the other. The side where it had broken off the baby’s crib when McCabe/Shumda threw it against the wall.
There was a fragment of a figure carved on it, but the way the wood had snapped off made it impossible to decipher what it was. The back half of a running animal. A deer perhaps, or a mythological creature that fit the rest of the extravagant, fantastical world that had been carved on that wonderful old cradle. Our child’s cradle, our baby girl. I thought of her, the only sight of her I would ever have. Then I thought of Declan and what his father had said. And I knew what I had to do, and it was right, but if I were to somehow survive what was about to happen, I would regret doing it forever. I looked at the wood in my hand and because I felt I had no other choice I said, “I’m sorry.” I had two pieces of wood to burn. Two pieces for my marriage of sticks: The one in my hand from the cradle, and the one from Central Park I had picked up the day we knew it was going to happen. Two sticks were enough for a marriage. More would have been better. I would have loved to have a huge bundle of them for a world-sized bonfire when I was eighty years old and at the satisfied end of a marvelous life. But I had only these two and they would have to be enough. They were important though—as important as anything. One symbolized Hugh, this one our child. Where in the house was the Hugh stick? I thought but then realized it didn’t matter because soon it would be gone too.
Without knowing why, I knew when I lit it, this wood would ignite as if it were made of pure gasoline. Breaking off a match from the pack, I put it to the striking pad and flicked my hand. A flame snapped open, flaring and hissing a second before taming down to the size of a fingernail. Lit match in one hand, the wood in the other. Good night life.
I looked up one last time. At the window were faces. Many many many of them. Some were pressed to the glass, distorting their features—bent noses, comical lips. Others hovered in the background, waiting their turn to get close as they could to the window, to this room, to me. And I knew all of the faces wereme, all the me’s from past lives who had come to watch this happen. To watch the end of their line, last stop, everybody out.
“Good-bye.” Calmly I put the match to the wood and the world exploded.
I heard the blast and saw a blinding flash of light. Then utter silence. I don’t know how long it lasted. I was somewhere else until I was back in the living room, sitting by myself on the couch, holding both empty hands in the air in total surprise. It took time to realize where I was and of course I did not believe it. Everything was so still. My eyes readjusted to the normal light in the room and the colors, the things around me, everything was exactly as it had been.
I dropped my hands to the couch and felt its rough wool beneath my palms. Turning my head slowly from side to side, I took in the view. Nothing had changed. Frances’s house, our possessions, home again. Even the smell was the same.
No, there was something else. Hugh. Hugh’s cologne was in the air. Then I felt hands on my shoulders and knew instantly that they were his. Hugh was here.
The hands lifted. He came around the back of the couch and stood in front of me. “It’s all right, Miranda. You’re all right.”
I stared at him and could only repeat what he had said, because it was true. “I’m all right.” We looked at each other and I had nothing to say. I understood nothing but I was all right.
“You’re not allowed to kill yourself. When you burned the wood, you could only give them back what was theirs. Now you have the rest of your life. That belongs to you.”
I looked at him. I nodded. All right. Anything was all right.
“Thank you, Miranda. You did an incredible thing.”
I looked at him and I was empty as death, empty as an old heart that’s just biding its time.
Somehow, from some place I didn’t know I had, I was able to whisper, “What now?”
“Now you live, my sweetheart.” He smiled and it was the saddest smile I had ever seen.
“All right.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out something. He offered it to me. Another piece of wood. A small long silvery piece that looked like driftwood. Wood that had been floating in some unimaginable sea for a thousand years. I turned it over in my hand, examining it carefully. Shapeless, silvery, soft, old. Yes, it must have been driftwood.
When I looked up again Hugh was gone.
THERE WAS A nice song on the radio years ago. They played it too much but I didn’t mind because it kept me company and I’m always grateful for that, I often found myself humming it without realizing. The title was “How Do I Live Without You?”
I have come to realize this is an essential lesson: In order to survive, you must learn to live without everything. Optimism dies first, then love, and finally hope. But still you must continue. If you were to ask me why, I would say that even without those fundamental things, the great things, the hot-blood-in-the-veins things, there is still enough in a day, in a life, to be precious, important, sometimes even fulfilling. How do I live without you? I put you in the museum of my heart where I often go, absorbing as much as I can bear before closing time.
What more can I tell you that you need to know beyond what I already have? I had a life. I never married, had no children, met two good men I might have loved, but after what I had experienced, it was impossible. I was proud of myself though, because I honestly tried with real hope and an open heart to fall in love again. No good.
I went back to selling books and I did well. Sometimes I was even able to lose myself in what I was doing, and that was when I was happiest. All the time I thought of Frances Hatch and how she had done it—lived a full and interesting life after she had cut the thread. So many times I wished I could have spoken with her, but she died three days after we last met.
Zoe married Doug Auerbach and they were happy for a long time. When he died ten years ago, I moved out to California to live with her. We became quintessential L.A. old ladies. We ate only free-range chicken and took too many vitamins. We spent too much time in malls, went to aerobics classes for seniors, wore thicker and thicker eyeglasses as the visual world became foggier and surrounded by increasingly soft edges. We made a life and watched the sun set over it.
I always woke earlier than she and made the coffee. But she was punctual, and by nine every morning she joined me in the backyard to read the newspaper and talk about what needed doing that day. We had a garden, there were a few friends, and we reminisced unendingly. Of course I never told her any of my real story.
For my birthday one year she bought me a pocket telephone. On the package was a note she had written that said, “Now you’ll really be a California gal!” When I opened the box and saw what it was, I asked who on earth would ever call me? Zoe said sexily, “You never know!” And I loved her for her optimism and I loved her for the lie. I knew she had given it to me because she was worried. I had been having fainting spells, swoonsshe liked to call them, and they were getting worse. My doctor, an Irishman named Keane, joked that I had the blood pressure of an iguana. Sometimes I pretended I wasn’t feeling well just so I could visit him.
But death winds the clock and one morning Zoe didn’t show up for coffee. She was a robust woman and I don’t think she was ever sick the whole time we lived together. When I went into her room at ten-thirty that morning and saw her lying peacefully on her side in bed, I knew. Her children, neither of whom had even the slightest trace of her goodwill and energy, came to the funeral but left on the first plane out.
THE DOORBELL rang. The old woman looked up quickly from the notebook and frowned. She did not want to be interrupted, especially not now when she was so very close to finishing. What an amazing notion—soon she would be done.
No one ever rang her doorbell anyway, that was a given. Once in a great while someone wearing a brown United Parcel Service uniform brought her a package from Lands’ End or another of the mail-order companies that supplied her with sturdy practical clothes made out of warm materials like Polartec or goose down. She needed all the warmth she could get because her body felt cold almost constantly now, despite the fact that she was living in the desert heat of Los Angeles. Sometimes at night she even wore a pair of electric blue Polartec gloves while watching television. If someone had seen her they would have thought she was crazy, but she was only cold. More than wisdom, irony, grace, or peace, old age had brought cold, and she was never really able to escape it.
Pausing a moment, she remembered she had ordered nothing, so whoever was at her door now could only be mistaken or a nuisance. Would you like to subscribe to this magazine? Would you like to believe in my God? Would you happen to have a dollar for a guy down on his luck?
The bell rang again—so loud and annoying – ding-dong ding-dong! There was no way to avoid it. Grimacing, she put down Hugh’s fountain pen and reached for the cane leaning against her desk.
She was fat now. Recently she had even begun calling herself that, although she’d known it for a long time. She was an old woman who had grown much too fat. She liked to sit. After Zoe died she had stopped going to exercise class. She liked cookies. Hugh once said, “Eating is sex for old people.” Now it was true for her.
Her knees were weak. And her hips and God knows what else. It was an effort getting up or sitting down. When you were as old as she was, everything was an effort, and when you weighed twenty-five pounds too much you did a lot more with a groan than ever before. The year she died, Zoe had given Miranda the cane for Christmas. It was a very nice one too—made of oak and slightly crooked, so that it had a kind of jaunty character. It reminded her of something an Irishman would use. Ireland. Hugh always said he was going to take her to Ireland—
The doorbell rang again. Damn! She was sure she was almost finished writing her story, but now this interruption would disturb her train of thought. She didn’t know if she’d be able to get back into it later. Writing demanded her full attention. More and more, her memory played hide-and-seek with her. She felt compelled to get everything down on paper as soon as she could before something inevitable and dreadful like a stroke or Alzheimer’s disease roared into her brain and like a vacuum cleaner sucked it empty.
Leaning hard on the cane with one hand and pushing down on the desk with the other, she raised herself out of the chair. After a few small, unsteady, dangerous steps, she moved slowly across the shadowy room.
The room never got full sunlight. She liked it that way. She kept two lamps burning in there almost all the time. At night when she was exhausted and going to bed she would walk out and leave them on on purpose. She liked thinking her workroom was always lit. As if some kind of bright spirit was in there guarding the important things like the diary and her thoughts. Yes, she felt she left her most important thoughts in that room because it was where she did all of her diary writing. How silly. The silly thoughts of a silly old woman.
That’s what she was thinking as she gradually made her way across the house to the front door. Who could it be? Why did they have to come calling now? What time was it anyway? She stopped walking and looked at her watch. It was an enormous thing, the watch with the largest face in the store—bought so that she could read the time without having to put on her glasses.
“Wow!” It was five in the afternoon. She had been writing for hours. That was good news because it meant she was inspired, anxious to know how she would end her account. That end was so near now. She felt she could reach out and touch it. When she was done, Alzheimer’s or heart attack or whatever horror could take over and she wouldn’t care. Really, she wouldn’t care.
She peeked through the window in the front door but saw no one. If this was a prank by a neighborhood kid—ring the bell and run—she would be annoyed. But better that, because then she could go right back to work. Or maybe she would make one quick detour into the kitchen to see—the bell rang again. How could it? She had just looked and no one was there. A short circuit? Whoever heard of a doorbell short-circuiting?
Maybe someone was trying to trick her into opening the door. These were dangerous times. Terrible things happened to old women living alone. They were such easy prey. Watch the news any night and it was easy to be frightened. She had many locks on her door, but so what? Life had certainly taught herharm comes in any door it wants and doesn’t need a key. Yes, she grew quickly worried, but again it was only because she hadn’t finished her diary. Her prayer, if she had been a religious woman, would have been, “Please let me finish. Give me the strength and the time to finish. The rest is yours.”
Uneasily, she peeked again through the window in the door and saw something odd. The first time she had looked only straight ahead. Now she moved from side to side and saw that the steps leading to her front door were covered with cookies.
“Waa—” bewildered she pressed up closer for a better view. Cookies. That’s right. From the sidewalk across the small but perfectly kept front yard to the door were sixteen octagonal paving stones. She had liked those stones the moment she first saw them. They reminded her of an English country cottage or a magical path in a fairy tale. Zoe had liked them too, and when it was necessary to dig up the entire yard years ago to repair the septic tank, both women insisted the workers replace the stones exactly where they’d been.
Now cookies covered each one. Well, not exactly covered. With her bad eyes, she could clearly see five of the stones leading to the house. On each stone were four? Yes, four cookies, big ones, like the kind Mrs. Fields and Dave’s sold in their stores. Miranda loved them. Chocolate chips. With dark or light chocolate chunks, macadamia nuts… it didn’t matter. She loved big chocolate chip cookies and here they were on her front walk!
An unfamiliar dalmatian loped onto her lawn in a hurry to get somewhere. But he must have caught their scent because, slamming on his brakes, he started gobbling. Dogs don’t eat when they’re excited, they inhale, and this guy was no exception. He ate so fast, jumping from stone to stone, that Miranda began to giggle. She didn’t know who’d put them there but she doubted they meant the cookies for this fellow.
“Follow the yellow brick cookie. They’re your favorites, right?”
She froze. The voice came from directly behind her. She didn’t know this voice, but it was a man’s and it was definitely right behind her, nearher.
“Don’t you recognize him? It’s Bob the dalmatian. Hugh and Charlotte’s dog. Say hi to Bob.”
He spoke calmly, his voice quiet but amused. She had to turn around because there was nothing else she could do.
Shumda stood five feet away wearing a gray sweatshirt with “Skidmore” printed across the front, jeans, and elaborate blue running shoes. He had not aged at all from the last time she had seen him, decades ago.
“I had a whole little scene planned out with a follow-the-yellow-brick motif but it didn’t include old Bob. Cause I know you loves dem cookies.”
What could she say? It was all over. The time had come for her to die. Why else would Shumda have come? How many years had it been? How many thousands of days had passed since she last saw this handsome bad man on the porch of the house in Crane’s View, New York?
“What do you want?”
He touched both hands to his chest and put on a wounded expression. “Me? I don’t want anything. I’m here on assignment. I’ve been given orders.”
“You’ve come for me?”
“Voilа. Es muss sein.”
“Where… What are you going to do?”
“I’ve come to take you for a ride in my new car. It’s a Dodge! I asked for a Mercedes but they gave me a Dodge.”
She hated his voice. It was a nice one, deep and low, but the tone was mocking and arrogant. He spoke to her as if she were a stupid child who knew nothing.
“You don’t have to address me like that. I’ll do what you say.” It came out hard, steely.
He didn’t like that. His eyes widened and lips tightened. Something between them had shifted and he hadn’t been prepared for that. He’d probably expected her to whine or beg, but that wasn’t her way. His unsure expression changed to a leer and suddenly he was back in charge. “I told you I was coming, Miranda. A long time ago. Don’t you remember that dog you liked that was set on fire?”
“That was you?”
“Yes. I thought for sure you’d know that it was I with thatone. What bigger hint did you need? Don’t you remember that Frances saved me by burning a dog?”
“You killed a dog just to tell me you were coming?”
“It was dramatic but obviously not very effective. Anyway, we have to go now. You won’t need to take anything. We’re not going far.”
The fear came. It rushed up through her like water and she immediately began to tremble. She hated herself for it. Despite the staggering fear, she hated herself for letting this appalling man see her shake. She started a deep breath that stopped halfway down her throat because she was so afraid. Still she managed to say “May I take something with me?”
“You want to pack?”
“No, I want to take one thing with me. It’s in the other room.”
He looked at her a long tormenting moment, then smirked. “Do I get three guesses? Is it bigger than a breadbox? Go on, but hurry up.”
Somehow she mustered her meager energy and shuffled toward the back of the house. Thank God she had the cane, because her body now felt like stone. It did not want to move; it did not know how to walk anymore. But she moved. She walked slowly and unsteadily down the hall to her workroom.
She went in and for several seconds stared at the desk and on it the open diary. She would never finish. She would never be able to complete it and put it away in a safe place where one day they would find it and know the whole story. Never. All over. Finished.
“All right. It’s okay. Just walk away.” She said it out loud as she walked over to a dresser pushed up against a wall. She slid the top drawer out and reached in for the piece of wood. The silver piece of wood Hugh had given her the last time she saw him. She had since collected other pieces over her long life, but they would have to stay here. She didn’t know what she would do with it wherever she was going but she needed to have it with her. Closing her fingers over it, she left the room.
Shumda was waiting by the front door. When he saw her he opened it. Bending forward at the waist, he gestured with an exaggerated sweep of his arm for her to go first. She shuffled forward, leaning hard on her cane. She was so scared. Her knees ached. Where were they going? She heard him close the door. Gently taking her arm, he helped her down the one step to the front yard. The dog was gone and so were the cookies. A few minutes ago it was all strange and funny—chocolate chip cookies on her footpath—but now funny was gone. Soon everything would be gone.
They walked to the street, where he told her to wait. He strode away and around the corner. She looked at the sky. An airplane had left a thin white contrail across the blue. A car peeled out somewhere, its long screech filling her ears. Then it was silent, and soon some birds began singing.
A shiny green van drove up and stopped in front of her. Shumda was at the wheel wearing a San Diego Padres baseball cap. He got out, opened the passenger’s door, and helped her in. She had trouble getting into cars but rode in them so rarely now that it made no difference.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“I don’t want a surprise. Just tell me. At least give me that.”
“Be quiet, Miranda. Sit back and enjoy the ride. You haven’t been outside in a long time.”
Folding her hands in her lap she looked out the window. When Shumda spoke again she ignored him, wouldn’t even turn to look. As soon as he realized she wouldn’t respond, he chattered on nonstop. Told her what he had been doing all these years, told her what shehad been doing all these years (“They said to keep tabs on you”), told her everything she didn’t want to hear. She looked out the window and tried with all her might to ignore him. If this was to be her last ride, she didn’t want his voice nattering in her ear. A hamburger stand, a gas station. Why had it come so abruptly? Couldn’t they have given her some warning? A day. If they had given her one more day she could have finished everything and been waiting at the door when he arrived. A yellow convertible driven by a beautiful brunette passed them. Then a Volkswagen that looked as though it had been driven around the world six times. The driver was a man with a shaved head. His hands danced back and forth across the top of the steering wheel. A used book store. One day would have been enough. Today while she was working, her stomach had knotted up several times because she knew in her secret self that she would be finished soon, and then what would she do with her days? Why had Shumda been watching her for years? She was no threat. She had never been a threat. Besides, all thathad been so long ago. Soon after it was over she’d started forgetting things and despite having written this diary, so many memories of that time were like Greek ruins to her by now.
She had never planned to reread her account, but riding along now she grew furious that she would never even have the choice. All that work, but now she could not go back to relive for a while certain experiences that she might already have forgotten. How much can an old brain hold before it begins to spring leaks from the weight of so many years?
Honey-cooked hams, discount sunglasses, Mansfield Avenue, street signs all flew by the car window. He was driving faster now. Where were they going? She remembered Frances Hatch in her hospital room surrounded by flowers.
Maybe Shumda would drive her someplace but then drive her home again. A flutter, a hummingbird’s heartbeat of hope raced through her but was gone just as quickly. It was over. Whatever he had waiting for her would be appropriate and terrible, she was sure. She remembered walking back into Frances’s room and seeing her crying.
He turned left on La Brea and accelerated. Evening was beginning. The sky was still bright but when they walked to the car from her house the air had been cool and still, already starting to settle for the night. Down La Brea past the cheap furniture stores, cheap drugstores, cheap fast-food places. More people stood out on the sidewalks here waiting for buses, waiting for friends, waiting for some kind of luck or change that would never come.
Miranda had been lucky and she knew it. She had traveled, she’d had an interesting job and been her own boss. She’d made money. For a short time she knew and was loved by a remarkable man. Hugh. If this was the end, she wanted to spend it thinking about Hugh Oakley. As if he knew what she was trying to do, Shumda interrupted her.
“Why did you do it?”
“Why did I do what?” Her voice came out cranky—she wasn’t interested in answering his questions, especially not now when there was so little time left.
He lifted a hand off the wheel and let it fall back again.
“You’re not alone, you know. There were others who did what you did. But I’m just interested, you know? What would possess anyone to voluntarily give up the life you had for this one?” His hand rose again off the wheel and batted the air as if flicking away a fly. “And you didn’t even know who you were giving it to! That’s incredible. You handed over your immortality to a stranger. Someone you never even met!”
Coming to a red traffic light they slowed to a stop. He glanced at her and made a face. She ignored him and looked straight ahead. The light changed but instead of accelerating, Shumda continued watching her.
Eventually she said, more to herself than to him, “I never really thought about it. The moment came and it had to be. That’s all. Isn’t that interesting? I was always fighting with myself—my head, my heart. Sometimes one won, sometimes the other. But with that there was no fight. There wasn’t even a question.” The old woman beamed. Her whole demeanor changed, as if whatever inner storms had been raging had now passed and she was at peace. Shumda had never seen anyone in her position at peace, and he had seen his share. Oh yes, he had seen quite a few.
“Life is about to spit in your face, Miranda. I wouldn’t be too smiley about that.”
They were silent the rest of the ride. To her great satisfaction, out of the corner of her eye she observed that he kept looking at her to see if her expression would change—if the enormity of whatever terrible thing was about to happen to her had finally sunk in. Why hadn’tthe great final fear wrapped her in its arms as it always did with the people he had escorted to their destruction?
It took another ten minutes. He kept looking over but her pleased expression never changed. All right, so it didn’t change. Wait till she got there. Wait till she saw what waited!
The road suddenly became hilly and there were oil wells all up and down those hills doing their slow work. The land was khaki-colored, sun-parched. It was a strange part of Los Angeles, neither here nor there, a kind of oddly empty no-man’s land between downtown and the airport.
Signaling with his blinker, Shumda slowly merged into the right lane and then pulled off the road onto the shoulder. He cut the engine and sat there, savoring what came next. He grinned at her. “Remember this spot?”
Miranda looked around. “No.”
“You will.” He opened his door and got out of the van. It was all she could do not to watch him. He walked around to the back and opened the two rear doors. She heard him push and slide something metallic.
“Be with you in just a sec. Sit tight.”
Slowly reaching up, she twisted the rearview mirror so she could look out the back. He was fooling around with something and it took her a moment to realize what it was. He did something and the thing went pop and suddenly unfolded into a wheelchair.
Cars zoomed by, some close, others far away, all of them loud and smooth, rushing and dangerous. And then of course it dawned on her.
So many years ago she was in one of these speeding cars on her way to Los Angeles airport. She had been in bed with Doug Auerbach that day and afterwards they went to a big drugstore together. Afterwards she rode to the airport in a taxicab and the driver, like Shumda now, wore a San Diego Padres baseball cap. She was so young then, so young and busy, and she hadn’t met Hugh Oakley yet. She hadn’t met Hugh Oakley and she hadn’t seen dead James Stillman alive again. She was flying back to New York that night and only days later her entire life changed forever. So long ago. All of it so long ago, but now all of that day and what followed was crushing her and she couldn’t stop the memories and the results, all of them crystal clear.
Shumda pushed the wheelchair around to her side of the car and stood there waiting.
When they drove to the airport that night so long ago, it was just about this time. She remembered the woman sitting in a wheelchair by the side of the road.
“Let’s go, Miranda. Time to watch the traffic.”
But there was no traffic. Unbelievably, all of the cars had disappeared from the road, every last one of them. A strange silence surrounded them, as if the sounds of the world had simply vanished.
“I can open the door and pull you out, or you can get out and make things easier for both of us.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. I’m going to put you in this chair and I’m going to leave. And you’ll be alone. To tell you the truth, I have absolutely no idea what’ll happen next. But I’m sure it won’t be pleasant. It never is.”
“Shumda, was it me? Was it me that night, here, in the wheelchair?”
“I don’t know. I just do what I’m told. Let’s go, get out.”
To her great surprise, the only thought she had was, Do whatever is in front of you and do it fully. Commit yourself to the moment and if you are lucky—
Her door was flung open. He took her roughly by the arm. “Don’t touch me!” She pulled away from him and slowly heaved herself out of the van.
The road was empty. Up on a hill an oil well pumped, and now she could hear the roll and heave of the machine. A flock of sparrows fled across the sky cheeping loudly. Those were the only sounds—the machine and the sparrows. She made it over to the wheelchair and, taking hold of the two arms, lowered herself into it. The seat was much too narrow for her wide bottom. She tried to move into a more comfortable position but there wasn’t one. She gave up trying and looked up into the evening sky again. What if that night years ago they hadstopped to help the woman? Would it have changed anything? Had it been she that night? If they had stopped and she had seen the other woman, would she have recognized her?
Shumda pushed the chair closer to the road. “I’d love to stay and see what happens next to you, but I’ve got things to do.” He looked at his wristwatch. “Enjoy the silence. The cars will be back in a couple of minutes.”
He looked at her and his face showed nothing. He turned to leave.
“Shumda!”
“What?”
“Did you love her? Did you ever love Frances?”
For a moment it appeared he was about to respond. Instead he turned around and went back the van. The door was open and he reached in for something. He pulled out a red book, her red book, the diary. When had he gotten it? When had he taken it? He pretended to skim through the pages. His face grew serious and he rubbed his chin. In a perfect imitation of the silly lisp of Daffy Duck he said, “Fath-sin-atin’!” and then in a pitying voice he asked, “Did you really think thiswould change anything?” He flung the book back into the car. He got in, the engine came to life, and he was gone. She watched the van climb a hill and disappear.
Everything seemed to be holding its breath. She looked up, but the birds were gone. When she looked toward the oil pump it had stopped moving. Silence. Gripping the arms of the chair, she shut her eyes. She remembered that Hugh’s piece of wood was in her pocket, so she took it out. Everything that had ever mattered to her lived in that wood. She gripped it tightly in both hands. How smooth it was. Smooth and warm and the last thing she would ever hold. How would they do it? Would they come from behind, or from over the hill, or the other side of the road? What would it be?
She could have tried to get up and move away from there—but what was the use? If they wanted it to be tonight then it would happen tonight no matter where she was. And how far could she get on her old legs?
She thought of her diary and what she might have said to finish it. An intriguing question that might have comforted her, or taken her mind away from what was imminent. But then she heard it: the deep rumble of many cars coming her way that grew louder every second. It would be the cars. Something to do with these cars would be her end.
She wanted to close her eyes but knew she mustn’t. A moment more and it would all be over. The rushing sound grew and then she saw them. She saw them coming and had never heard anything like it. An eruption of noise so impossibly loud that it filled the world. Wham thump wham wham thump! They slashed by her at astonishing speeds: trucks, cars, motorcycles. All of them beating her down into her chair with their power and threat until she felt there was no more air to breathe.
Close. They came closer by the second. Was this it? Was this the second? Or the next? The next? Whump! Wham! Whump! Whump! The draft off their speed slammed her face, pushed her body back into the chair. She started to hyperventilate. She wanted to stick her fingers in her ears and make the sounds go away. But how could she? How could anyone block out the end of the world? She tried to swallow but there was no liquid in her mouth.
Because there were so many, she didn’t notice the blue car until it veered from its path and came right at her. Headlights straight on her face, it still didn’t really register until it flew up to within feet of her—and stopped. There was a wild shush and scrabble of sand, gravel, and dirt flying into the air all around it. Cars on the road hammered by. But now there was this one, so close. Was thisit? Time passed—seconds? And then the door opened and first she heard a shrill ting-ting-ting of a bell inside telling the passenger something was wrong.
The overhead light came on and she saw the driver inside. A man. He was staring straight at her and did not move. But then he was getting out of the car, careful to look behind so he would not be hit by the slam of oncoming traffic. He pushed the door closed but not enough to stop the ‘ting’ inside.
He walked slowly toward her. A middle-aged man. There was something in his face, something familiar but so distant and remote that her pounding heart couldn’t figure it out. Something…
“I didn’t know if I’d get here in time.”
She said nothing, only stared at him and the noise was brutal and all over but something she knew, something on the tip of her mind said, Look harder, find it. And she did. She recognized him. “ Declan?”
Only when he smiled did she know for sure it was Hugh’s son, because he wore his father’s smile. She would have recognized it if she had lived to be a million years old.
“We have to hurry, Miranda. They’re coming and I don’t know how much time we have. I’ve broken every rule in the book—”
“How did you know I was here?”
“You know everythingwhen you’re one of us. Being immortal has its advantages.” He looked worriedly behind him.
“How can you know already that you’re immortal? You’ve only lived one life! That’s why I was writing the diary! So you’d find it and know and then you could avoid—”
“ We have to go, Miranda! There’s no time. Tell me in the car. We have to get out of here right now. They’re coming.”
“Why, Declan? Why are you doing this?”
He spat out the words. “Because you gave me my life! Because you sacrificed your own daughter so that Icould live. How could I not at least try to help you?”
A pause. Recognition. Amazement.
All she could do and it was done without thinking was hold out the stick his father had given her. Declan would understand what it was.