by Sue Miller
‘Aaah, I don’t know. I just … proceeded through, you know. I proceeded through. I didn’t ask myself anything. Why, for example. Aside from the basic. I’ve been pretty, well, rapacious, I guess you’d have to say, this last year. In England too. I think I was –’ he lifts his shoulders – ‘using sex, or something. To make me feel better.’ He’s speaking slowly, thoughtfully. ‘Like I had some control, or something. Anyway. I didn’t look at myself doing it at all. And now all of a sudden I have to. And it’s like seeing myself again. Like in England. Seeing myself. And I’m glad for it, I suppose. But I also wish it had never happened.’ He’s been twirling his glass on the table. Now he looks up at Lottie quickly. ‘I mean, of course I wish Jessica’s dying had never happened. But I mean also that I’d never had to see myself.’
‘To grow up.’
‘I suppose.’ And then he suddenly seems embarrassed. ‘Of course, I’m so very grown up now. I’m sure that’s what you’ve been saying to yourself all summer long, right, Ma? How grown up I am?’
There’s a painful quality to this. He’s really asking her. She reaches a little way across the table and smiles. ‘On alternate days, darling, of course. At least as frequently as I’m grown up.’ Almost simultaneously, they finish their beers. Lottie looks at her watch. ‘We should get back, honey. I want you to call Cam for me, to be sure he’s still there. Being good.’ She waves to the waiter.
‘What am I supposed to say?’
‘Say you’re looking for me. Maybe ask him if I’m there, or if he knows where I am, or something.’
As they’re walking out, he says from behind her, ‘How did you get so good at being devious, Mom?’
‘It’s in the genes,’ she says. ‘Look at my dad.’
Back at home, while Ryan calls Cam, Lottie stands grinding her teeth in the front hall, feeling the pain in her filling as familiar, almost comforting.
Ryan sounds natural and relaxed. ‘Mom’s not there, is she? I wanted to know if I could take the car.’ He pauses, then says, ‘Okay, thanks,’ and hangs up. Lottie steps into the room. ‘He says you might be having a drink with Elizabeth. Otherwise he doesn’t know.’
She looks at him a long moment. ‘You’re pretty good at this devious stuff yourself,’ she says.
‘Hey, they’re my genes too,’ he answers.
Lottie laughs, but she’s also oddly touched by this. She crosses to the bottom of the stairs. ‘I’m going to head up, sweetie,’ she says. ‘Don’t stay out too late. We’ve got the service tomorrow.’
‘I’m not going anywhere tonight anyway.’
‘Oh! This is a first.’
He looks sheepish. ‘Well. You know, it seems like it might be good – I don’t know – just to be around.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen, honey.’
‘Whatever you say, Ma.’
‘Sleep tight.’
‘You too.’
Lottie reads for a while before she turns out the light. But she doesn’t fall asleep right away. She’s restless. She gets up twice to look out the window at Elizabeth’s. Her light is on until very late, a flickering, dim glow through the leaves outside. She hears Ryan too, several times, walking around downstairs.
Just as she’s falling asleep, she imagines it clearly: Cam moving into Elizabeth’s room the night before, the dark shape that’s Elizabeth on the white bed turning away from Larry’s humped form, lying suddenly awake on her back with just the sheet over her. She lies very still; she’s hoping only that he hasn’t come to hurt her, to hurt Larry. Cameron stands there a long time. His breath is ragged but regular. He sees they are naked. It is four-thirty. Light has begun to incandesce in the white things in the room: the sheets, the clothing heaped in a pool on the floor. He remembers how it felt to lie in this bed next to her, to get up and move through the darkened house on his way out at this time of the night – of the morning. He remembers how it felt to fuck her when the pressing need for silence made them wilder, as though it were some equivalent to moaning aloud, to crying out. He watches the sheet rise smoothly and fall again across her breasts; he watches Larry turn slowly away from her, move his legs, the shadows shape-shifting. He is his breathing imagination, frozen and made to see it – and Lottie is Cam, she feels his murderous heartbeat flutter in her rib cage, seize her breath; and she wakes to a sense of her true self.
She lies in the dark for a few minutes, and then she gets up and pulls a pair of jeans on, tucks her T-shirt in. She picks up her sandals and carries them down the dark stairs with her. Her purse is in the dining room. She goes outside and stands on the front porch. The porte cochere light is on at Elizabeth’s, but all the house lights are off. There are no cars except her own parked on the street. She thinks of Cam, walking quietly up the driveway, turning his key in the locked door. Suddenly she is remembering her own craziness each time Evelyn had another stroke. The calls, the nighttime drives down the dark alley with the headlights off so no one would spot her. If she’d had the key, if he’d been sleeping with Evelyn, mightn’t she have wanted to look?
What had her drives been if not the same old thief-in-the-night routine? Who is she except Cam’s sister? While others are grappling with the Grim Reaper, Cam and she apparently are destined to sneak around.
‘It’s in the genes,’ she’d said to Ryan. And for a moment Lottie smiles in the dark at the idea of some kind of nature-versus-nurture argument about herself and Cam. Is it perhaps a genetic predisposition? The son and daughter of the thief succumbing to their chromosomal fate?
Or maybe it was simply being raised in a house so bland, so emptied of emotional valence, that is was inevitable they’d be Peeping Toms of the emotions. Sorrow? I want to look. Love? I want to be a fly on the wall.
She disgusts herself. But he is her brother. And she, it appears, is her brother’s keeper.
Lottie gets in the car, starts the engine. Once again she makes her drive through the empty Square, along the dark, glinting river. Here and there in the South End, as she approaches Cam’s part of it, she sees shadowy figures moving on the streets. At a stoplight she rolls up her window, locks her door, and reaches over to lock the others.
Cam’s car is on the street. She parks behind it and turns off her engine. She slides across the seat to peer up at his windows. There is a light on dimly somewhere deep in his apartment. She watches, but no one moves in the windows.
For a while she sits in the silent car. She sees the hulked, monster shapes of what she thinks is earth-moving equipment parked behind a chain-link fence under the expressway. Suddenly a tiny light flares among them, orangy, and goes out. A match, she tells herself. Someone is there, lighting a cigarette. A homeless person, most likely. She is straining. She thinks she sees figures moving among the backhoes, the bulldozers, a flicker here and there in the shadows. She focuses so hard that they suddenly take on an entirely different aspect; they seem to waver, then disappear, like the images in heat shimmers. Lottie squints, she tries harder, but they’ve been swallowed by darkness, her eyes can’t pick them out. It seems to her she’s imagined them, her whumping heart the only evidence that something, someone was there. Though she’s unaware of it, she makes a noise in her throat, a caw of fear.
She sees a lone car swishing by on the expressway, going south. She thinks of her mother, asleep in the nursing home; or awake, perhaps. It didn’t matter, did it? Either way, since everything she has to live through must have the same reasonless quality of dream life to her. She thinks of Jessica’s mother then, of Dorothea Laver – how she may wake in the morning and for a second or two, before she remembers, feel whole and right, as though the terrible thing might only have been a nightmare, just a neurological event in her dreaming brain.
She looks up again at Cameron’s window. She’s done everything she can, hasn’t she? He’s here, Elizabeth is there, presumably sleeping soundly. Why should she be the only one awake, worrying?
She knows this is pointless. But she sits for a long time in the locke
d car anyway, looking as blank and still as an animal in a trap, waiting, in case something should happen.
CHAPTER XII
It seems initially that all of Jessica’s high school class has turned out. Groups of people that age stand clustered together on the steps of the church; there are long embraces being shared as Lottie and Ryan pass through the narthex, and Lottie hears weeping behind her. Once she and Ryan are seated, though, she looks around and realizes that there are many more young women here than men. And that a good number of them are wearing white – the effect is almost like that of some mass ritual wedding.
Ryan has shaved this morning, and a lemony smell rises off him. Lottie looks over at his face. His eyes are skittering back and forth, taking it all in. He looks like a frightened animal. She leans back against the hard pew and lets her own eyes blur, looking around the room again. The men’s summer sports coats are spots of pastel color – mostly pale blue – and the flowers mounded in front of the pulpit make hectic splotches. Everywhere, too, are the glistening wood colors – blond and walnut – of long, American girls’ hair, streaking down their backs in smooth, flat panels. You can hear, scattered through the room, the shallow insucks of air: people sobbing quietly. Lottie’s tooth throbs with her pulse.
There’s a portrait of Jessica propped on an easel just below the pulpit – probably her high school graduation photo. It isn’t precisely unretouched, and the sense of skylike roil behind her is clearly false, the backdrop in some artist’s studio. Still, it catches something in Jessica’s face that draws Lottie’s attention, something she would have had no way of noticing, given the nature of her encounters with the girl: a sort of eagerness, but with an edge, a determination. ‘What’s next?’ she might be asking. But even more important than that, Lottie thinks, maybe also, ‘When?’ Lottie is oddly touched by this. She wants to see Jessica as having, in some sense, begun to shape her own little life – it’s too pathetic to think otherwise – and the Jessica in the photograph might have.
Ryan fumbles with the program, opens it, pretends to read. Looking over his shoulder, Lottie sees that they’re listening to a prelude by Bach. The pews fill in, slowly. Ryan and Lottie have arrived a little early because she was worried that she might not be able to find the church. But it was easy. Three high white spires towered visibly over the center of town even before the approaching road opened on to the green, and she had only to circle the little park once to locate the Congregational church – the largest of the three.
Inside, it feels even more huge. The windows rise tall and narrow in a row on each side, the clear crazed panes palsying what would otherwise be the trees’ slow drag in the light wind outside. There’s a balcony above and a little behind Lottie and Ryan, and she can hear from the thumps and creaks that it’s filling up also. Looking directly overhead, she sees the immense dazzle of a chandelier suspended high above them all.
Lottie glimpses a familiar head of hair out of the corner of her eye. She glances in that direction and sees that Elizabeth has arrived. She and the children are walking slowly behind an elderly woman with a cane. Elizabeth is holding little Emily’s hand, and the boys are behind her in matching navy-blue blazers, white shirts, and ties. Elizabeth has on something darkly vibrant, striped. Lottie can see only the top of Emily’s head, the brownish-red hair the color Elizabeth’s was in youth. Elizabeth stops by a pew four or five rows in front of Lottie but on the other side of the center aisle. She gathers the boys toward her with her arm – Lottie sees the gleam of one of her silver bracelets – and they move ahead of her into the pew. When she sits down, she bows her head forward immediately, as if in prayer.
Finally the music ends; it begins again, with the organ unstoppered. Everyone rises, and in their midst Lottie can see the preacher and several others, these without robes, walking down the aisle, producing a muffled thunder on the bare wood floor. They step up to the chancel, and when the processional stops, the minister moves forward into the pulpit and blesses the congregation, says a brief prayer. They all sing a hymn together, they sit down. The smothered sobbing in the room has intensified. Someone opens a window with a loud squeal, then another. Lottie turns slightly and sees that it’s an elderly man with a long pole, the kind her teachers had used to raise the enormous windows in her grammar school.
Now several of the girls in white move toward the chancel from various places around the room. They gather in a group of five directly below the pulpit. Lottie can hear one of them hum a note; together, audibly, they fill their lungs. And then they begin to sing, a cappella, a sweet, slow version of ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.’ Even Lottie feels her throat clog as their voices mourn, ‘Bring back, bring back, O bring back my bonnie to me.’ They stop a moment after the last chorus; and then launch into ‘Yesterday.’ These seem odd choices to Lottie, though there’s a painful poignancy to them. She looks on her program. It says, under the song titles, that Jessica sang with this group in high school. They’re called the Minute Maids.
When they’re finished, two of the girls mount the stairs to the chancel, while the rest disperse. Behind the pulpit, one sits down and drops from Lottie’s sight line. The other steps forward and sets a paper down on top of the immense Bible in front of her. Her eyes sweep the congregation – she looks frightened – and she begins.
She has a soft, little-girl voice, whispery as Jackie Kennedy’s. She talks about how she and Jessica used to go into Harvard Square by train together in high school, how Jessica would always pretend to be someone other than herself. She’d change her voice, she’d sometimes actually fake an accent. She’d walk differently. She’d be loud and boisterous, or painfully shy. The girl’s voice trembles, and she bends her head; she seems to be smoothing the paper. Then she looks up again, her lips tight and determined as she begins to speak once more. She says she wasn’t able to do anything of the kind, that she was always the straight man, setting things up for Jessica. But once she asked Jessica how it was possible for her. ‘And she told me that it wasn’t as if she was acting at all. What she said was, “They’re all me, really.” ’
The girl pauses. She looks over their heads. ‘When I heard that Jessica had died, I thought about that, about how she didn’t even get to be who she was going to be, but even so, there was so much to her. And I wanted to say today, “Jessica, we’ll miss all of you.” ’
She steps back a little, and then the other girl stands up and slings a guitar around her neck. She tunes it for a moment, and over the notes, you can hear people blowing their noses, the pews creaking. Lottie glances over at Ryan. He looks miserable.
The girls sing ‘Amazing Grace,’ their two voices in a tight, yearning harmony that comes as close as anything audible to heartbreak.
Then the minister stands in the pulpit again and leads them in the Twenty-third Psalm. He says a long rambling prayer, talking about Jessica, naming the members of her family – there are four or five siblings, apparently. He looks down at the front rows on Lottie’s side of the aisle as he speaks. Lottie wonders which of those heads looking back at him is Dorothea Laver’s; whether she’s let herself weep or cry out her anguish yet. Lottie thinks about her voice on the telephone again, tries to understand what it must feel like to be her. For a fraction of a second, she tries to imagine the void and hurt of somehow losing Ryan. And then stops herself. It is unimaginable.
She looks at him again, at the reddened patches on his cheek and jawline, the set of his face. He is frowning, trying to understand something too. His face is earnest, attentive. And private. Whatever he is thinking is his own. He is, of course, lost to her, but in the way he should be. In the way Lottie still has not worked out her acceptance of, she realizes.
They have another hymn. Then several other people speak in turn – a teacher, a friend from college, who talks about Jessica’s struggle to figure out what she wanted to do with herself.
Ryan sits, riveted, and Lottie wonders what he’s getting out of this, whether he’s getting anything. F
or a moment – she can’t stop herself – she thinks again of the way they looked in bed together. Then she thinks of what she told him about her father’s funeral – how unknown he’d still been to Lottie after everything was said. Cameron had cried, she remembers now, and that had horrified and fascinated her. Cameron never cried, not even when their mother hit him. Sometimes, yes, tears came up and glittered on the lower rims of his eyes; but then his face would redden violently and – Lottie thought of it this way at the time – it was as if his eyes swallowed back the tears.
But he had cried when their father died, even though their father had been gone from home for four years then, and Lottie had understood finally that Cameron had loved their father, in spite of his being a criminal. She had envied Cam, she remembers. Partly because at that age she would have liked the drama of being the one weeping; but also for the feeling that made him weep, which Lottie, who remembered so little of her father, couldn’t share.
And then she thinks of Evelyn again, of her death, a year ago now. Her service had been held in a big church in Hyde Park, and Lottie could easily have gone: no one would have known who she was except for the only couple who saw Lottie and Jack together socially, Jack’s closest friends. But it had never occurred to her. Instead she stayed at home and tried to keep busy that afternoon. She’d done load after load of wash, filling the apartment with the smell of soap and bleach. She and Jack hadn’t yet discussed what Evelyn’s death would mean to them.
Now she finds herself looking again at Ryan and wishing earnestly that she had done what he is doing. That she had gone – come late, left early, sat in back – and listened to them talk about Evelyn. Jack had told her that the children had all taken part in it, that Charley, who had been fourteen when Evelyn had her first stroke, had talked about her eloquently; that Matthew had read scriptures. Jack had asked Megan to read one of Evelyn’s favorite poems. Friends had spoken too, Lottie remembered his saying. He had not. Lottie had asked him what poem Megan read, and she looked it up later. It was by Elizabeth Bishop; it was about a moose that stops a bus on a highway in the night. She had liked it too – she found it funny and austere – and it made her think she understood something about Evelyn that she hadn’t known before.