Enon

by Paul Harding

  Enon is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Paul Harding

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harding, Paul.

  Enon / Paul Harding.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-8129-8460-6

  1. Families—Fiction. 2. Grandsons—Fiction. 3. Bereavement—Fiction.

  4. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.A72535E56 2013

  813′.6—dc23 2013007985

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Anna Bauer

  Cover photograph: Marc Yankus

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  1.

  MOST MEN IN MY FAMILY MAKE WIDOWS OF THEIR WIVES AND orphans of their children. I am the exception. My only child, Kate, was struck and killed by a car while riding her bicycle home from the beach one afternoon in September, a year ago. She was thirteen. My wife, Susan, and I separated soon afterward.

  I WAS WALKING IN the woods when Kate died. I’d asked her the day before if she wanted to pack a lunch and go to the Enon River to hike around and feed the birds and maybe rent a canoe. The birds were tame and ate seeds from people’s hands. From the first time I’d taken her she’d been enchanted with the chickadees and titmice and nuthatches that pecked seeds from her palm, and when she was younger she’d treated feeding the birds as if they depended on it.

  Kate said going to the sanctuary sounded great, but she and her friend Carrie Lewis had made plans to go to the beach, and could she go if she was super careful.

  “Especially around the lake, and the shore road,” I said.

  “Especially there, Dad,” she said.

  I remembered riding my rattly old bike to the beach with my friends when I was a kid. We wore cutoff shorts and draped threadbare bath towels around our necks. We never wore shirts or shoes. We would have laughed at the idea of bike helmets. I don’t remember locking our bikes when we got to the beach, although we must have. I told Kate, all right, she could go, and she told me she loved me and kissed me on the ear.

  KATE DIED ON A Saturday afternoon. The date was September 1, three days before she would have begun ninth grade. I spent the day wandering the sanctuary without any plans. Enon had been in a heat wave for a week and I had been up late the night before watching West Coast baseball, so I took it slow and mostly kept to the shade. I thought about Kate going to the beach so much over the summer, working on her tan, suddenly conscious of her looks as she’d never been before. The milkweed in the sanctuary had begun to yellow, and the goldenrod to silver. The edges of the green grass were about to dry to straw. Silver and purple rain clouds rolled low across the sky and piled into towering massifs. The slightest wind pushed ahead of the weather, eddying over the meadow, lifting dragonflies from the high grass. Bumblebees worked on the fading wildflowers. I hoped for rain to break the heat.

  Chickadees wove around one another, back and forth between the bushes along the path. I hadn’t brought any seeds to feed them. I remembered telling Kate about the first time I’d fed the birds from my hand, when I’d been in seventh grade, with my grandfather. We didn’t have seeds because he’d forgotten about the birds. When he remembered, he and I stood still on the path, with our hands out, and the birds came to us anyway. The episode had happened so long ago, and I’d told it to Kate so many times, since she’d been a little kid, that I thought it might be fun to try it again, just so I could tell her and bring up the story about my grandfather. (Kate said once, “I never met Gramps, but you talk about him so much I feel like he’s somebody I know.”) It was getting late and I still had to run to the market to buy food for dinner. Carrie’s coming home with Kate, I thought, if they’re both not too tired from being in the sun and the bike ride. I decided to buy salmon and asparagus and a lemon and potato salad, and the corn Kate had asked me to get. I figured that if she was hot and tired, she’d want something light. Susan’ll like that, too, I thought. I’ll get a carton of lemonade, pink if they have it. Kate always said it tastes sweeter, less tart than the yellow kind, although I could never taste the difference.

  I had almost reached the end of the boardwalk, at the boundary of the marsh, where the path took up again through the trees and led back to the meadow, where by then swallows would be lacing through the sky, feeding. Although I felt like I didn’t have the time, because I didn’t want Kate to have to wait too long to eat, I stopped and stood still and held out my empty hand, like I had twenty-one years earlier, eight years before Kate was born, fifteen years before I brought her there. It suddenly seemed lovely, the thought of standing there, coaxing even a single bird, if only for a fluttering instant, just so I could go home and cook dinner and when Kate came out to the picnic table, fresh out of the shower, her hair still wet, maybe even staggering a little to be silly, groaning and saying something like “Argh, I’m so tired,” I could say, “Hey, I tried to feed the birds without any seeds, like that first time with Gramps, and it worked!” In the two or three minutes I allowed myself, one bird approached my hand and pulled up short and rolled off back into the bushes when it saw I had no food. I decided that that was close enough and hurried toward the car, glad at the prospect of making Kate a good meal that would comfort her after a long day.

  I came out of the woods and hiked up the path alongside the meadow, which was studded with a grid of numbered birdhouses where swallows nested every year. The sun blazed behind the towering thunderheads and backlit their silhouettes. The sky above the clouds was a bright, whitish yellow. The birdhouses and goldenrod and milkweed were suffused in granular, golden, pollinated light, and the swallows spiraled through it, catching insects on the wing. I reached the gravel parking lot and smiled at a woman urging her young son the last few yards to their car. He looked about three or four years old. He tottered and whimpered. The woman stopped pleading and picked him up and murmured something soothing to him and squeezed him to her and kissed his cheek and carried him. I walked across the lot to my station wagon and when I reached it I dug into my pockets for my keys. I saw my cell phone on the passenger seat.

  Stupid—lucky no one took it, I thought, but then laughed at the image of a mild, pale birdwatcher in a sun hat and khakis smashing out a window with his walking stick and making off with the phone.

  Lightning forked into the meadow and thunder blasted over the field and parking lot. The little boy and his mother shrieked. Rain poured out of the sky as if from a toppled cistern.

  I unlocked the door and ducked into the car. The rain sounded like buckets of nails being dropped onto the roof. The backs of my legs felt tight, as they always did after hiking. The screen on the cell phone showed there was a voice mail from Susan. I dialed for the message and wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder so I could unscre
w the bottle of spring water I’d left in the car. The water had warmed in the heat so it tasted stale and slightly impure. The phone sounded the sequence of tones for the voice-mail number. I screwed the cap back on the water bottle and tossed it onto the passenger seat.

  “Blech,” I said, irritated, and took the phone in my hand. I put the car into reverse and twisted around to back out of the parking space. Susan’s voice came over the phone. It was hard for me to hear what she was saying over the noise the rain made as it hit the car.

  “Charlie, Kate was killed. She was on her bike, near the lake, and a car hit her and killed her, Charlie.” Susan’s voice broke. A car honked its horn behind me and a woman yelled. My car was moving backward. I stomped the brake. A woman out in the rain, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, still wearing sunglasses for some reason, pounded on my window.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Are you crazy?” she yelled at me. “You nearly ran that mother and her kid over!” Susan’s voice started speaking again, telling me to get home, that she was there with two police officers. The woman in the rain looked ferocious, water soaking her hair and her clothes and her expensive training sneakers and streaming down her face. I felt as if I’d been struck on the head and could not shake my brain back into place.

  The woman pounded on the window again. I looked at her, and even as I understood what Susan’s voice was telling me on the phone, even as I was already thinking, No, no, no, this can’t be true, I thought, Aren’t you determined to get your pound of flesh.

  The woman stomped her foot in the muddy gravel, yanked her glasses off, pointed her finger at me, and yelled, “Roll down your goddamned window!” and spit away the rainwater running over her mouth. I cranked the window down and looked her in the eye. Rain poured through the window into the car, spattering the steering wheel and dashboard, drenching me. The woman must have seen something in my face, because she did not launch into the tirade she’d clearly intended. I held up the phone, allowing the rain to pelt it, as if it might be an adequate explanation.

  “My daughter,” I said. “This—that’s my wife saying my daughter just died.”

  The woman frowned and her face went slack and she slapped at the car door. She slicked her hair back and pointed her forefinger at me and dropped it.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “You’d better not be—Oh, God. Go; go.”

  I have remembered many times the sight of that woman in the rearview mirror, standing in the rain and looking at me, clearly unsure whether she’d been duped or I had told her the truth. That was the first thing I remember seeing as I was thinking, I had a daughter and she died.

  THE MORTICIAN WHO TOOK care of Kate’s funeral was the son of my grandparents’ next-door neighbors. On the day Susan and I went to make arrangements for Kate’s cremation and funeral, he wore a charcoal gray suit. He had close-cropped, receding hair that had turned mostly white over the course of the four times I had met with him in my life: when my grandfather died, when my grandmother died, when my mother died, and now when my daughter died. He smelled faintly antiseptic. He held his hand out and I shook it. His hands were very soft and clean, as if he regularly scrubbed them with pumice. His nails were manicured.

  “Hello, Susan, Charlie,” he said. “Come right into the office. Would you like anything to drink, coffee, spring water?”

  “No, thank you, Rick.” I was embarrassed to call him Rick. The family had always referred to him as Ricky, as if he were still a little kid, the son of the neighbors, Ricky Junior. I didn’t know what name he went by as an adult. It occurred to me that I had no idea what name I’d called him when my mother had died, which was the first time I had dealt with him directly, as the person making all the decisions about services and burial. When my grandfather had died, my grandmother had made the arrangements, and when she had died, my mother had done so, calling Rick Ricky, I remembered clearly, but as one adult speaking familiarly and affectionately to another with whom she had shared some of her childhood.

  “Please, sit,” he said, waving his hand at a burgundy-colored leather sofa. Susan and I sat.

  “We have taken care of everything. I just need to ask you about an urn, and if you could bring us something loose-fitting and comfortable for Kate to wear, pajamas or something similar, for the cremation.”

  Susan said, “She liked to sleep in a T-shirt and cotton pajama pants—I don’t know what you call them. Ha, they’re those things the kids wear to bed but to school, too, if you let them.”

  “Yes, yes, I know all about those. Lounge pants.” I didn’t know whether Rick was married or if he had children. There was a gold wedding band on his left ring finger. If he had children, they’d be my age. So, I reasoned, if he knew about kids wearing pajama bottoms and fleece slippers to school, it would be because he had grandchildren Kate’s age or even older. I nodded. I had no idea what to say. Susan continued.

  “And the slippers, too. Fleece-lined, open-back things. She tried to wear those to school, too.” Kate’s favorite clothes to sleep in had been a white pair of pajama pants with different flowers and their Latin names written under them in black, and a thin, soft T-shirt silk-screened with the word SUPERGIRL on it, both of which I knew must be on the floor next to her bed, because she’d been wearing them the night before she died, when she’d come downstairs to use the bathroom between three and four in the morning while I was watching a late Red Sox game. She’d have changed out of the pants and shirt and into her bathing suit and denim cutoffs and bright green, short-sleeved polo shirt, the clothes in which she’d died, it occurred to me, and in which she must still be dressed, unless the morticians had removed them.

  “Can she wear the slippers, too? Can we get her slippers?” Susan asked. “We’ll go get the clothes right now.”

  “Yes, of course, Susan. That’s fine. And we can talk about the urn when you come back.”

  “Great. That’ll be great. Perfect.”

  Susan and Ricky stood up, and I followed. They shook hands and I put my hand out to Rick and took two steps in his direction. He stepped toward me and put his left hand lightly on my shoulder for a moment and shook my hand.

  “Very good, Charlie. Just let me know whatever we can do.”

  “Thanks, Rick. I’m sorry, I can’t really talk. I really don’t know what to say—”

  “It’s okay, Charlie. That’s fine.”

  When we arrived back at the house, Susan went to the basement to get the clean laundry from the dryer. She said she’d washed Kate’s underwear.

  “Will you go and get her T-shirt and pajama pants?” she asked.

  I went up to Kate’s room. There were some flowers for pressing on her desk, chicory and a magenta-colored zinnia and an orange tiger lily, and some seashells she must have picked up at the beach. I opened the middle drawer of her bureau. I looked at her small, colorful, neatly folded T-shirts and my knees gave out. I almost dropped to the floor. I squeezed the edge of the drawer and closed my eyes for a moment and took a couple of deliberate, deep breaths and opened my eyes again and took a top and a bottom from each pile, without looking at them more than to confirm that neither had cartoon characters or some other inappropriate design on it. What could be inappropriate, though? I thought. What’s appropriate? Who at the funeral parlor’s going to undress and dress her? Rick? Some guy in a rubber smock and gloves? There might well be health codes or laws about what clothes people can be cremated in. Ricky might have been humoring us and he won’t even put Kate’s slippers on, just throw them out. Who, I thought, is going to trundle my daughter into the fire? Then my legs really did give out and I sat down on the rug in the middle of Kate’s room. I sat with my legs under me and the clothes I’d chosen for her in my lap. My body shook and I could not hold myself up. I lay down on my side until Susan found me, fifteen minutes later.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I can’t do anything,” I said.

  “We need to, Charlie,” she said. She came
into the room and knelt next to me. She’d been crying. She combed her fingers through my hair. “We have to do all this stuff.”

  “I don’t think I can, Sue. I want to, but I can’t even get myself to move.”

  SUSAN’S PARENTS AND HER sisters were gigantic Finns from Minnesota. Sue herself was tall, but not as tall as her parents and siblings. Her dad was six foot five and her mom was five foot eleven. Both of her sisters were nearly six feet tall. Sue was the shortest in the family, at five nine (“Five nine and three-quarters, Charles,” she’d remind me), and that was still two inches taller than me. Her family skied and biked and hiked together and looked people straight in the eye and were in intimidatingly good physical and moral health. They were always affectionate toward me but I was certain they were disappointed that their daughter had taken up with me. I felt like I must look puny and sound as if I did nothing but mumble to them. My deeply ingrained habit of proceeding by irony was lost on them, and when I was with them I deliberately had to make an effort to be straightforward. Luckily for me, Susan was just enough unlike them to want to keep a loving but firm distance. When we visited Minnesota or they came east, they mobbed her and tried to get her to go off on some alpine excursion or other. Or so it seemed. Her sisters, both of whom looked like Olympic athletes, would get on either side of her and take her by the elbows as if they were going to whisk her away to a ski lodge. “Sue,” they’d say, “you look pale; you need to get some oxygen in your blood.” Susan’s father, a tree of a man, with a white mustache and a white halo of hair running from ear to ear and a perennially sunburned and freckled bald-topped head, used to look around at my stacks of books and maps and say, “The scholar. Charles Crosby, you need some exercise, too. You’ll get water in your lungs.” He’d give me a pat on the back with his huge hand that felt like being belted with a wooden oar.

  When Kate died, Susan’s family stayed for three nights at a hotel off the highway two towns over. They came to the house the day before the funeral. Susan and her mother and sisters sat on the couch and went through the shoe boxes of family pictures we had and chose the ones she liked best so they could make a display for the funeral. Susan sat in the middle and her mother and sisters pulled stacks of photos from the boxes and shuffled through them and showed them to her.