by A. E. Kaplan
We were in a strange place, then, without words. All our communication was touches and glances and sharp breaths. She was studying the space over my sternum with her hands, and I pulled her face up to kiss her, and there was an openness in her expression I hadn’t seen before.
There was a wet spot on her shirt from my hair, and without thinking I pressed a hand to it, and then her shirt was shinnying up over her head, and then her bra followed, and I was left looking at Willow Willow Willow with her long, dark hair falling over her bare shoulders, bare everything, and I couldn’t do anything except reach out and put my hands on her waist.
“God,” I said. “God.”
And with a million things I’d have liked to do running through my head, I just pulled her against me, because what I really needed was this: bare skin and bare skin and the sweat of a summer afternoon.
This was what I needed. Just skin. Just her and me and that warm, liquid melting of my muscles.
It stunned me so much I forgot I was supposed to be kissing her. So she kissed me instead, and her hands slid south.
There was knowing in the Tom Grendel/Michel de Montaigne sense and then there was knowing in the biblical sense, and I realized we were getting alarmingly close to the latter. My fingers traced under the waistband of her jeans.
She stopped my hand’s progress by taking it in hers, and I pulled back.
“I don’t.” She coughed and looked up at me and blinked with glassy eyes. “I don’t have…” She looked away quickly, and the mood snapped like a rubber band.
“Herpes,” I offered. “Please let that sentence be I don’t have herpes, Tom.”
She laughed and buried her face in my neck. “You’re horrible. I meant I don’t have…you know. Do you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have any condoms, no.”
She sagged against me and let out a breath I hadn’t realized she was holding. I turned my face to read her expression, but she was still hiding in my neck, so I couldn’t tell if she was relieved or disappointed. I ran a hand down her spine, counting the knobs of her vertebrae with my fingertips, feeling some tension go out of her, and after a few minutes, it went out of me, too.
“I’m so tired, Willow,” I said against her cheek.
“Then sleep. There’s no noise now.”
“Can’t. I can’t sleep during the day.” I had to stop to smooth her hair out of my face. “I couldn’t even nap when I was a little kid. Drove my mother crazy.”
She pulled me down to the mattress. “Just rest, then.” I lay on my side and she pushed her back against my chest, and my arm found its place around her waist. I threw the comforter over us, so all that was left uncovered was our faces, and I pressed my nose into her hair, which smelled like cinnamon and something else.
“What is that?” I murmured. “In your hair.”
She pulled my arm tighter around her. “Blood orange,” she said. Then, as if admitting something shameful, she added, “I get it from this store in the mall.”
I laughed into her hair. “Willow Rothgar shops at the mall?”
She elbowed me in the ribs, but I just nuzzled the back of her head again and kissed the space behind her ear.
I don’t know how long we lay awake, watching the rain through my broken window, if it was twenty minutes or an hour. I didn’t realize I was falling asleep until I woke up and it was four hours later, and I was alone.
Willow’s side of the bed had long gone cold, but my pillow still smelled like oranges.
I had to get up early the next morning to mow the lawns I’d missed two days ago; plus, Mrs. Minsk wanted me to weed the flower beds in her side yard. I had a quick breakfast, felt a twinge of jealousy that my sister was still asleep, girded my loins, and filled up my water bottle.
I was going through the kitchen door when I suddenly remembered that I’d promised myself I’d call Mrs. DeLuca the day before. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed, but it rang six times and went to voicemail, so I figured she was taking a nap, or maybe she’d gone out to breakfast with one of her friends. The local pancake house has a special for seniors who come in before ten. Maybe, I thought, I’d take her there for the second part of my interview. They have really excellent Belgian waffles. I left her an appropriately apologetic message and finally felt like less of a rotten bastard.
When I got to the end of my driveway with my mower, I could see a line of cars stretching all the way down the street, held up by the stop sign down the block. I went and knocked on the window of the closest car, which belonged to Mrs. Lee.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
She patted my hand, which rested on top of her rolled-down window. “Well, we’re on our way to the funeral, Tommy.”
I had a sinking feeling. “What funeral?”
“Oh, honey. Didn’t you get the message? Jo Coffey said she called you. Marianne DeLuca died three days ago.”
I stepped back from the car and felt like I was going to fall down. The edges of my eyesight started to blur. “I didn’t get it,” I said. “I hadn’t heard.”
I felt a sickness creeping up from my gut, because she’d been gone three days already and I hadn’t known. I thought of the calls I’d had from her over the last week, wanting to finish the interview, and her dirty house, and how I’d never gotten back over there to help out like I said I would. How I’d wasted the last hour I’d spent with her flirting with Willow, and left her asleep in her chair, all alone. How she’d asked if I was lonely. I’d been so wrapped up in the garbage with Wolf and Rex that I’d put it out of my mind until it had stayed there. I hadn’t even taken two seconds to leave her a message until it was already too late.
“Are you coming, Tommy? I’ll save you a seat, if you like.”
I took a deep breath and held it. Of course I wasn’t going to the funeral. I hate funerals, desperately, probably because I still remember my mother’s. I’d stood in the front row with Dad and Zip while the guy who gave the eulogy said a bunch of sanitized things that had nothing to do with Mom at all. It’s like the last gasp of your humanity is stripped away, and no one is supposed to remember anything about you that wasn’t perfect. Once you’re dead, no one is supposed to remember that you picked your nose when you drove, or that you had a bad temper and always screamed at everyone before you had your morning coffee. You were a perfect angel who rode unicorns and gave your life in the service of others.
It’s like they take whatever memories are left of you and kill those, too, so that you really, truly are dead.
I don’t need funerals to remember the people who died. That’s what my books are for.
Or what they were for. The bag of torn-up bits of people’s lives was still next to my bed. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to leave it out with the rest of the trash.
I looked down at my stained shorts and my T-shirt, which gave me the excuse I needed. “I—not like this. I’ll try,” I said, knowing full well I wouldn’t.
The car in front of Mrs. Lee was moving, so she started to pull up. “Okay, then, Tommy. I’ll look for you.” She slipped a piece of paper out the window, on which she’d scribbled the time and place of the funeral. I tucked it into my pocket.
That thing in my gut twisted again, because I hated lying, but I said, “Thanks, Mrs. Lee,” and turned around to go inside.
I pulled off my shirt, sat down on the edge of my bed, and cried. Loss and guilt pinballed back and forth inside of me until I didn’t know which was worse.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and listened to her last voicemail again. She’d called me on the day she died. And I’d never bothered to call back. I pressed my face into my pillow and let out a garbled shout of grief. I stayed like that for a long time.
Then I remembered that Marianne DeLuca’s notebook hadn’t been with the others on the shelf under the window; it was still in my desk drawer along with my mother’s. They were the only two that I had left.
I pulled it out and flipped through it. The
interview was incomplete and my notes were a mess, but I had the digital recording. I thought about what Zip said, how she called the interviews a vanity project, and I wondered if that had to be true. I took the world’s fastest shower, burned a CD with my dad’s computer, and got in the car.
I’d expected Mrs. DeLuca’s funeral to be at the Catholic church in Chambliss, but the paper from Mrs. Lee said that it was at the Laurel Haven Memorial Park, which was basically a cemetery with a chapel attached to it. When I walked in, the service had already started and everyone was doing that horrible responsive-reading thing where the clergyperson reads a line and then the congregation reads back in this dead monotone. It always makes me wonder if anyone would notice if you replaced the prayer books with Led Zeppelin lyrics.
The minister—I don’t think it was a priest—got up and gave his canned eulogy (I wondered if it was “Dead Wife and Mother, Number Six” or something like that), but I barely listened. Mrs. Lee was sitting toward the front of the chapel with Mrs. Coffey, and most of the pews were filled with our neighbors, along with some other old people who might have been friends from bingo night or whatever. In the front, there were a few middle-aged people; the man in the black suit was probably her son, I guessed, and the two women in their thirties who kept checking their phones were the granddaughters.
I clutched my notebook to my chest and sat down in the back. The last several rows were empty.
Finally, the minister finished telling everyone that Mrs. DeLuca was now at peace, which would have made me feel better if any of us had done anything to make sure she was at peace, you know, while she was alive. And then they played a recording of a choir singing a song in Italian, and that part was actually pretty nice.
After the song was over, everyone got up to leave, and people were shaking hands and hugging the family, who looked tired and plausibly sad. I waited until they were passing my row before I said anything.
“Um. Excuse me,” I said. “Um. I’m very sorry for your loss. I was one of Mrs. DeLuca’s neighbors?” I don’t know why that last sentence came out as a question. “My name is Tom Grendel?” Another question. This was not the place for me.
The man I still figured must be the son shook my hand. “Thank you, Tom.” He started to walk away, followed by the bored granddaughters.
“Um. Well, there was this thing I thought you might want,” I said. I offered him the notebook, which he seemed determined not to take. “It’s…I was doing an interview of Mrs. DeLuca, and, um. I didn’t have time to finish it, but I have my notes and a copy of the audio part of the interview. Anyway, I thought you might want them. She talks a little about her childhood and stuff.”
(Needless to say, I’d edited out the part about not being sure she should have married her husband. I’m not heartless.)
He reluctantly took the notebook. “This was a school project?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“Well, thank you, Tom. I appreciate that.”
I nodded, and he nodded, and he left.
Afterward, Mrs. Lee sidled up to me. “That was her son,” she said in a voice that dripped with disgust.
“You know him?”
“I lived four houses down from Marianne for twelve years. He visited exactly ten times, and that’s all.”
“I thought he came at Christmas and Easter.”
“He was supposed to come at Christmas and Easter. Sometimes he did. Sometimes he didn’t.”
“Did he live far away?”
“Arlington,” she said. About two hours. Zip and I had driven farther than that twice in the last week.
“She didn’t want to move closer?”
“Real estate’s too expensive up there. And I don’t think his wife liked her much.”
I didn’t remember seeing anyone the right age to be a wife. “He’s married? I didn’t see—”
“She didn’t come.” She scowled. “Had to work, or something.”
“Oh,” I said, even though I couldn’t really criticize. This was the first funeral I’d been at since my mother died, despite my geriatric social circle. These things were usually more complicated than they seemed from the outside. For all I knew, Mrs. DeLuca might have treated her daughter-in-law like dirt until she got old and realized she needed her. Still, though. It did seem a little harsh.
“Are you coming out to the grave?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t think I can. I have, um.” I didn’t finish the sentence. Mrs. Lee just nodded. “Okay, Tommy. I’ll see you back at home, then.”
“Sure,” I said, then sat back down in my pew, because I didn’t really want to leave until everyone else was gone.
I looked around while I waited. At the front of the chapel, there was a big floral arrangement next to a blown-up picture of Mrs. DeLuca with her husband on their wedding day, and the pews were littered with programs that people had been given but hadn’t bothered to take with them.
There were two stained-glass windows on either side of the altar; the first was one of Mary with baby Jesus, but it was the second that caught my eye. It showed a giant rose, and inside one layer of petals was another, then another, then another, and then way inside was an angel blowing a trumpet.
It made me think of that crack Zip had made about the kernel of the soul, and how there were layers upon layers inside everyone, peeling away like petals (or, possibly, like an onion, but the flower was prettier, so I went with it). And it suddenly occurred to me that the thing at the heart of the flower, that kernel Zip had mentioned, wasn’t any more important than the parts on the outside. They were all parts of the same whole, and who was I to say which part was more real?
Maybe that was my problem. I was so interested in getting at the angel with the trumpet that I was ignoring all the other layers.
It was silent outside, and I guessed I’d sat there for a good half hour before I got up to leave. Then, for some reason, I really wanted to see the grave. I knew there wouldn’t be a stone yet, but I just wanted to see the spot. I hoped it was nice, maybe with some trees or flowers nearby. Plus, I kind of wanted to see who else was buried there.
The burial had already broken up by the time I got out there, and the grave was half filled in. I looked at the graves in her row, wondering if any of my other neighbors might be buried there, but I didn’t recognize any names. Old people, mostly, with birth dates in the ’10s and ’20s and ’30s. A few younger people, like my mom, who’d died of heart attacks and strokes and cancer and car accidents. I’d never know for sure, because they don’t put stuff like that on headstones. How you died is never considered as important as when. Usually, you got a date range—1935 to 2010, or something like that—and a few words about your relationship to other people. Beloved mother and grandmother. I wished they would say something more personal, like Hated beets or Obsessed with model airplanes. Something to distinguish one block of granite from the next.
I was three graves over when I found my notebook leaning against the headstone of Michael Mortensen. I bent down to pick it up, opening it to see if, I don’t know, maybe they’d taken the stuff out of it before they left it. They hadn’t.
I looked up and saw Ed coming up the path with his hands in his pockets. He was wearing his Fifty States uniform minus the apron. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey. What are you doing here?”
“I went by the house, and Zip said you left her a note. I just thought maybe…” He shrugged.
I held the notebook out to him. “They left it here,” I said. “I gave it to them, and they left it.”
He took it from me and leafed through it. “Maybe it was an accident. They were probably pretty distracted.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”
“Sorry, man.”
We started walking back toward the parking lot. The clouds were rolling in again and I guessed we were due for another thunderstorm.
“You know, she was dying, and I think she knew it, and I never went back to see
her. I was so busy with the crap with Wolf and Rex, I blew it off.”
Ed kicked at the gravel as he walked, which scuffed his newly shined dress shoes. He didn’t seem to notice, or he did but didn’t care. “You’re doing that for your dad,” he said. “Not for yourself.”
“I guess so. But that doesn’t make it any better. I was just…I don’t know.”
“Myopic?”
“Yeah. Myopic. I forget sometimes that I have more than one responsibility.”
“She wasn’t really your responsibility, though, was she?”
“Well, yeah. She was. I mean, once I went over there and knew she needed someone, she was my responsibility. And I blew her off to get vengeance on Wolf Gates. I feel…I don’t even know. Awful.” From far away, I heard the rumble of thunder, and the wind started to pick up.
“At least you went over there in the first place. You were trying.”
“Ed,” I said. “I appreciate this, man, but you aren’t going to make me feel better.”
“I think you don’t want to feel better.”
“No. I don’t.” I reached out for the notebook and he handed it back. “I guess they probably knew most of this stuff already, but there was a recording. You’d think they would want that. You know?”
“Is this the first time you ever tried to give one of those away?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged, then looked up and squinted at the sky before putting his sunglasses on, even though there was absolutely no sun. “Knowing people the way you want to know them,” he said, “makes some people uncomfortable.” He messed up his hair, making it stick straight up in the front. “Most people would rather not know their mother’s secrets.”
“Do you feel that way?”
He put his hands back in his pockets again. “Sometimes, I guess.”
“Why, though?”
“Why don’t you want to see people naked? I mean, most people. Obviously, there are a few…Never mind.”
I thought about that. “That’s different, though. That’s about sex.”