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I had just finished telling her everything. From the day I saw the ghost of James Stillman on the street, right up to the impossible sounds I had heard out in the hall. Once I’d started, the whole story leaped out like an animal that had been trapped in a cage too long. Simply recounting all of the strange events made me feel better.
Frances was silent throughout and spoke only after a long pause. “I knew you were pregnant the day we went to Crane’s View. I don’t know if you remember, but when we got to my house I stood on the porch and asked to be alone while you two went in.”
“I remember that. Hugh mentioned it.”
“I didn’t want you to see my face because I might have given it away. That’s when I knew.”
“How, Frances? Are you psychic?”
She shook her head. “No, but when I was a young woman in Romania I met people. Shumda introduced me and they taught me some things. That was the greatest mistake of my life: they were willing to teach me much more but I wasn’t interested. Incredible. Incredibly stupid.
“Shumda was Romanian. He had been raised in the country, and to country people, real magic is no big deal. Things like that shouldn’tbe a big deal. They are to us because we’re so sophisticated and skeptical that we’re above all that primitive hocus-pocus.
“But there isanother world, Miranda. Most of us refuse to accept that because it scares us. It threatens to take away our control. But that won’t make it go away. Let me read you something.” She walked to a table and picked up one of the many notebooks she kept around the apartment. She called them daybooks and filled them with her thoughts and quotes from things she had read and liked. She leafed through this book. “Here, listen to this: ‘Maybe what comes from elsewhere will make me do crazy things; maybe that invisible world is demonic and should be excluded. What I can’t see, I can’t know; what I don’t know, I fear; what I fear, I hate; what I hate, I want destroyed.’”
“But Frances, I do believe in those things. I always have. I’ve just never had any contact with them until now. Did you really know I was pregnant that day? How?”
“Your smell. And the color of your fingertips.”
“What does a pregnant woman smell like?”
“Like hope.”
I smiled and felt my spirit lift. “It’s possible to smell hope?”
She nodded. “When you know how.”
“And what about the fingertips?”
“Look at them.”
I held up my left hand but saw nothing at first. Then I gasped. The tips of my fingers were changing colors—the colors of clouds on the sky. As if a strong wind was pushing fleecy clouds across the sky, clouds that were white, purple, orange-red. They moved over my fingertips in a passing rush. The colors of storms, sunsets, early morning. All of them together flying across my fingertips.
I guess I made some other noise because the moment I did, the colors disappeared and my fingers returned to their proper color. I kept staring at my hand. Eventually I looked at Frances again but with a whole new perspective.
“ That’swhat I saw when we were in Crane’s View. You can’t because you haven’t been trained. I did it to you now so you could see for yourself.”
“All women have that? On their fingers? All of them when they’re pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“And you learned how to do that in Romania?”
“Among other things.”
“What else, Frances? What else do you know?”
She sighed loudly. “Not enough. I was too young to appreciate what they were offering. Knowledge pursued me, but I was faster. When you’re young you’re only interested in parlor tricks, Miranda, things that can impress others or get you in the door.
“But these people, and they were from all walks of life, were willing to teach me incredible things because I was with Shumda. If only I’d had the patience and dedication! I met a Yezidje priest, people in the Sarmoun Brotherhood… You can’t imagine who I knew when I was there. But none of it penetrated. The young are like rubber—everything bounces off them.
“Shumda called me bimba viziata, his spoiled child, and I was.” She sighed again and rubbed her hands up and down her sides. “You talk to shadows too much when you get old. Old memories, old regrets. I could have learned so much when I was a young woman, but I didn’t and that was a great mistake. But I do know some things. I knew you were pregnant. I know that what you’re going through now is a result of that pregnancy.”
“And James’s ghost? Or the noises I heard outside? The little boy in our house?”
“They’re part of it. Believe me, it’s all necessary for you now. Something enormous is about to come into your life and all of these things are part of the overture.” She walked over, put her hands on my tense shoulders, and kissed the top of my head. It was the first time Frances had kissed me.
WHEN I GOT back to Crane’s View, the rain was having an intermission and the sky was full of black fat thunderclouds. After getting out of the train I stood on the platform and stared at that turbulent sky, remembering my fingertips and what had happened in Frances’s apartment earlier. The day had exhausted me, but I decided to walk the mile to our house. I wanted the exercise. The air smelled delicious and ripe as it always does in the country after rain.
As I walked and breathed deeply of the thick air, I kept thinking about what she had told me. More than anything else, “there is another world” kept chiming in my head like a clock striking twelve. Like it or not, that world had become part of mine. I would have to accept it and go wherever it led me. But how would it affect my relationship with Hugh? And our child?
Frances told me about a dull man she knew who suddenly, in middle age, was able to see what people would look like when they were old. For the rest of his life he had to live with that … talent? Curse? What would you call it?
Another man suddenly developed a frighteningly accurate ability to read palms. That lucky fellow went mad because it reached a point where he could see nothing else but people’s palms and the certain fates that awaited them.
“Need a ride? You look tired.”
I looked up and saw Chief McCabe leaning on the roof of his car in front of the bakery. He held a French cruller in one hand and a small carton of milk in the other.
“No, thank you. I just got off the train and this walk is bringing me back to life. But I have a question.”
He grinned and nodded. “You don’t want a ride but you got a question. Okay. Shoot.”
“Have you ever known anyone with special powers? People who could tell the future or read palms, that sort of thing?”
He didn’t hesitate. “My grandmother. Spookiest person I ever knew. Always knew when you were lying. The family legend. No one of us ever lied to her because she always knew. Worst part was, if you did lie, she hit you. Lie—BANG! When I was a kid she must’ve got me a thousand times! Shows how smart I was, huh? Why do you ask?”
I didn’t even know McCabe, but for a moment I wanted to tell him everything. Maybe after what had happened that day, I just needed a friend.
“Oh, yeah,” he went on, “and Frances Hatch too. She gets tuned into weird channels too sometimes.” His car radio squawked and he bent in to listen. I couldn’t make out what it said.
“Gotta go. Someone’s screaming up on Skidmore Street.” He popped the rest of the cruller into his mouth and took the milk with him when he got into the car.
He drove off before I could tell him. It was a Japanese woman. A Mrs. Hayashi. I had never seen her before. She had taken too many pills and the hallucinations were driving her mad. Her children stood on windowsills in a high building waving happily to her down below. Bye-bye Mama. Then one by one they jumped. She watched as they dropped through space and hit the ground directly in front of her. I saw her face, the wide open mouth screaming to her sanity to help.
Outside her small house on Skidmore Street, neighbors stood worriedly at the window watching her on the floor, pulling her hair and screaming in a language none of them understood.
I saw it.
FIVE HOURS LATER Hugh came in looking pale and very drawn. He went into the living room and sat down in his new chair and let out a low groan. I got him a drink and asked if there was anything I could do. Unsmiling, he kissed my hand and said no. Sweet man that he was, he looked up with weary eyes and apologized for not being able to make lunch earlier. He’d had an awful day. An important deal for a rare Guadagnini violin fell through. He had argued with his assistants. Charlotte called and accused him of terrible things.
I sat on the floor next to him and leaned my head against his leg. I had wonderful news to tell him but didn’t. After dinner. I would cook and it would be wonderful, the most delicious meal I’d ever made. After dinner, when we both felt better and the day was ours again and the moment was right for such a surprise. Then.
We sat in silence. It started to rain again. When he spoke, Hugh’s voice was flat and toneless, as if it had been washed of all color.
“Know what I love? In the summer when you leave the windows open in the bedroom and go to sleep. There’s a breeze blowing you can just feel on your face. As you’re drifting off, the wind picks up, but you’re too sleepy to do anything about it.
“Then in the middle of the night, a big bang wakes you up in a second. A storm’s ragingoutside and all your windows are flapping back and forth. Like they’re applauding. Like they’re applauding the storm.
“So you get up, sleepy as hell but wired from the shock, and go around closing them. Everything’s wet, the windowsills, the floor.… While you were sleeping this thing blew in and drenched everything.
“The best part is standing at the open window and getting wet. I put my hands on the sill and stick my head out into it. The wind’s whipping, things are tremendous out there. It’s three in the morning and no one’s around to see it. Only you. The whole show’s just for you.”
I put an arm around his leg and squeezed tightly. His hand was on my head, ruffling my hair. Neither of us moved for minutes. The only things that changed were the sounds of the wind outside. Hugh’s hand stopped moving. The rain gradually slowed and stopped too. Everything stopped. The silence was thick as fur. Despite all the surprises and excitement of that bizarre day, the next minutes were the most peaceful and fulfilling I ever knew.
When I finally moved to get up, because my back was beginning to hurt, because it was time to cook our dinner, because afterward I could tell Hugh about our baby, his hand slipped from my head. I saw that he was asleep.
He was dead.
PART TWO
7. SIN TAX
8. FEVER GLASS
Frances was silent throughout and spoke only after a long pause. “I knew you were pregnant the day we went to Crane’s View. I don’t know if you remember, but when we got to my house I stood on the porch and asked to be alone while you two went in.”
“I remember that. Hugh mentioned it.”
“I didn’t want you to see my face because I might have given it away. That’s when I knew.”
“How, Frances? Are you psychic?”
She shook her head. “No, but when I was a young woman in Romania I met people. Shumda introduced me and they taught me some things. That was the greatest mistake of my life: they were willing to teach me much more but I wasn’t interested. Incredible. Incredibly stupid.
“Shumda was Romanian. He had been raised in the country, and to country people, real magic is no big deal. Things like that shouldn’tbe a big deal. They are to us because we’re so sophisticated and skeptical that we’re above all that primitive hocus-pocus.
“But there isanother world, Miranda. Most of us refuse to accept that because it scares us. It threatens to take away our control. But that won’t make it go away. Let me read you something.” She walked to a table and picked up one of the many notebooks she kept around the apartment. She called them daybooks and filled them with her thoughts and quotes from things she had read and liked. She leafed through this book. “Here, listen to this: ‘Maybe what comes from elsewhere will make me do crazy things; maybe that invisible world is demonic and should be excluded. What I can’t see, I can’t know; what I don’t know, I fear; what I fear, I hate; what I hate, I want destroyed.’”
“But Frances, I do believe in those things. I always have. I’ve just never had any contact with them until now. Did you really know I was pregnant that day? How?”
“Your smell. And the color of your fingertips.”
“What does a pregnant woman smell like?”
“Like hope.”
I smiled and felt my spirit lift. “It’s possible to smell hope?”
She nodded. “When you know how.”
“And what about the fingertips?”
“Look at them.”
I held up my left hand but saw nothing at first. Then I gasped. The tips of my fingers were changing colors—the colors of clouds on the sky. As if a strong wind was pushing fleecy clouds across the sky, clouds that were white, purple, orange-red. They moved over my fingertips in a passing rush. The colors of storms, sunsets, early morning. All of them together flying across my fingertips.
I guess I made some other noise because the moment I did, the colors disappeared and my fingers returned to their proper color. I kept staring at my hand. Eventually I looked at Frances again but with a whole new perspective.
“ That’swhat I saw when we were in Crane’s View. You can’t because you haven’t been trained. I did it to you now so you could see for yourself.”
“All women have that? On their fingers? All of them when they’re pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“And you learned how to do that in Romania?”
“Among other things.”
“What else, Frances? What else do you know?”
She sighed loudly. “Not enough. I was too young to appreciate what they were offering. Knowledge pursued me, but I was faster. When you’re young you’re only interested in parlor tricks, Miranda, things that can impress others or get you in the door.
“But these people, and they were from all walks of life, were willing to teach me incredible things because I was with Shumda. If only I’d had the patience and dedication! I met a Yezidje priest, people in the Sarmoun Brotherhood… You can’t imagine who I knew when I was there. But none of it penetrated. The young are like rubber—everything bounces off them.
“Shumda called me bimba viziata, his spoiled child, and I was.” She sighed again and rubbed her hands up and down her sides. “You talk to shadows too much when you get old. Old memories, old regrets. I could have learned so much when I was a young woman, but I didn’t and that was a great mistake. But I do know some things. I knew you were pregnant. I know that what you’re going through now is a result of that pregnancy.”
“And James’s ghost? Or the noises I heard outside? The little boy in our house?”
“They’re part of it. Believe me, it’s all necessary for you now. Something enormous is about to come into your life and all of these things are part of the overture.” She walked over, put her hands on my tense shoulders, and kissed the top of my head. It was the first time Frances had kissed me.
WHEN I GOT back to Crane’s View, the rain was having an intermission and the sky was full of black fat thunderclouds. After getting out of the train I stood on the platform and stared at that turbulent sky, remembering my fingertips and what had happened in Frances’s apartment earlier. The day had exhausted me, but I decided to walk the mile to our house. I wanted the exercise. The air smelled delicious and ripe as it always does in the country after rain.
As I walked and breathed deeply of the thick air, I kept thinking about what she had told me. More than anything else, “there is another world” kept chiming in my head like a clock striking twelve. Like it or not, that world had become part of mine. I would have to accept it and go wherever it led me. But how would it affect my relationship with Hugh? And our child?
Frances told me about a dull man she knew who suddenly, in middle age, was able to see what people would look like when they were old. For the rest of his life he had to live with that … talent? Curse? What would you call it?
Another man suddenly developed a frighteningly accurate ability to read palms. That lucky fellow went mad because it reached a point where he could see nothing else but people’s palms and the certain fates that awaited them.
“Need a ride? You look tired.”
I looked up and saw Chief McCabe leaning on the roof of his car in front of the bakery. He held a French cruller in one hand and a small carton of milk in the other.
“No, thank you. I just got off the train and this walk is bringing me back to life. But I have a question.”
He grinned and nodded. “You don’t want a ride but you got a question. Okay. Shoot.”
“Have you ever known anyone with special powers? People who could tell the future or read palms, that sort of thing?”
He didn’t hesitate. “My grandmother. Spookiest person I ever knew. Always knew when you were lying. The family legend. No one of us ever lied to her because she always knew. Worst part was, if you did lie, she hit you. Lie—BANG! When I was a kid she must’ve got me a thousand times! Shows how smart I was, huh? Why do you ask?”
I didn’t even know McCabe, but for a moment I wanted to tell him everything. Maybe after what had happened that day, I just needed a friend.
“Oh, yeah,” he went on, “and Frances Hatch too. She gets tuned into weird channels too sometimes.” His car radio squawked and he bent in to listen. I couldn’t make out what it said.
“Gotta go. Someone’s screaming up on Skidmore Street.” He popped the rest of the cruller into his mouth and took the milk with him when he got into the car.
He drove off before I could tell him. It was a Japanese woman. A Mrs. Hayashi. I had never seen her before. She had taken too many pills and the hallucinations were driving her mad. Her children stood on windowsills in a high building waving happily to her down below. Bye-bye Mama. Then one by one they jumped. She watched as they dropped through space and hit the ground directly in front of her. I saw her face, the wide open mouth screaming to her sanity to help.
Outside her small house on Skidmore Street, neighbors stood worriedly at the window watching her on the floor, pulling her hair and screaming in a language none of them understood.
I saw it.
FIVE HOURS LATER Hugh came in looking pale and very drawn. He went into the living room and sat down in his new chair and let out a low groan. I got him a drink and asked if there was anything I could do. Unsmiling, he kissed my hand and said no. Sweet man that he was, he looked up with weary eyes and apologized for not being able to make lunch earlier. He’d had an awful day. An important deal for a rare Guadagnini violin fell through. He had argued with his assistants. Charlotte called and accused him of terrible things.
I sat on the floor next to him and leaned my head against his leg. I had wonderful news to tell him but didn’t. After dinner. I would cook and it would be wonderful, the most delicious meal I’d ever made. After dinner, when we both felt better and the day was ours again and the moment was right for such a surprise. Then.
We sat in silence. It started to rain again. When he spoke, Hugh’s voice was flat and toneless, as if it had been washed of all color.
“Know what I love? In the summer when you leave the windows open in the bedroom and go to sleep. There’s a breeze blowing you can just feel on your face. As you’re drifting off, the wind picks up, but you’re too sleepy to do anything about it.
“Then in the middle of the night, a big bang wakes you up in a second. A storm’s ragingoutside and all your windows are flapping back and forth. Like they’re applauding. Like they’re applauding the storm.
“So you get up, sleepy as hell but wired from the shock, and go around closing them. Everything’s wet, the windowsills, the floor.… While you were sleeping this thing blew in and drenched everything.
“The best part is standing at the open window and getting wet. I put my hands on the sill and stick my head out into it. The wind’s whipping, things are tremendous out there. It’s three in the morning and no one’s around to see it. Only you. The whole show’s just for you.”
I put an arm around his leg and squeezed tightly. His hand was on my head, ruffling my hair. Neither of us moved for minutes. The only things that changed were the sounds of the wind outside. Hugh’s hand stopped moving. The rain gradually slowed and stopped too. Everything stopped. The silence was thick as fur. Despite all the surprises and excitement of that bizarre day, the next minutes were the most peaceful and fulfilling I ever knew.
When I finally moved to get up, because my back was beginning to hurt, because it was time to cook our dinner, because afterward I could tell Hugh about our baby, his hand slipped from my head. I saw that he was asleep.
He was dead.
PART TWO
7. SIN TAX
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.
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.
8. FEVER GLASS
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?”
“Go ahead.”
“That’s okay. You first.”
“What was the room number again?”