During the sick-and-well-and-sick-again yo-yo, Anna tolerated prayers and chants, any nonsense that her Valley friends insisted helped with healing. She didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but she never believed in any of it. Not smudge sticks or mantras. Not focused meditations. Not prayer circles. But she’d believed in her friends. She loved A.G.’s support even if it included dragging in Native chants she had no business singing. And Anna knew she was better for the hours spent on the porch with her closest friends, Connie and Layla. Always so much to talk about with them. Wednesdays and Fridays she speed-walked with Connie, Tuesdays with Layla. It was well known that Anna didn’t answer the phone, so the Valley women took to dropping by. When she couldn’t walk, they’d show up at her door in sneakers. The Friday Craft and Wine formed in Anna’s living room. They gossiped, drank, and glued shell boxes. Belly laughing—there was medical proof it made you well. Sometimes they sang. How many afternoons, a blanket bundling her and two pillows wedged to cushion all her bony jutting, had she closed her eyes and listened to the good sound of friends talking?
She had collected all these women. Like all the beautiful things in her living room. Friends and beauty, Anna had wanted more than more. More friendship. More talk. She was like that silly song about the new and the old. Sometimes she’d felt herself insatiable. But now, as the room buzzes, everyone trying to press close, everyone trying so hard, all the meaningful long looks, there’s nothing she needs. She doesn’t need the dear friends. She doesn’t need the room with its cathedral ceilings and thick wooden beams. Or the beautiful antique chandelier she’d found in a shop that sold mostly lace dresses. “Not for sale,” the shopkeeper declared. “It will cost you an arm and a leg.” Anna carried home the chandelier, telling Reuben a softer price tag. “Come on, Reuben, that’s what makes it beautiful,” she scolded when he asked how she planned to clean the murky and scratched lead crystals.
The chandelier, the dear friends—she has so little need of any of that now. All that loving, what had it accrued? And that bowl of starfish from Point Reyes—there’d been hundreds she and Reuben had come upon on the beach, collecting them in a baseball hat. She had moved those starfish from house to house, carefully unwrapping them so that not an arm broke. Now she can’t understand why they hadn’t left them on the sand.
She sees how everyone tries to keep the room bright and festive. The lustrous silver and gold of them. She sees fear on all the faces. But she’s not frightened. She’s finally free of the looping dread. Now she will stop eating. When she was alone with the nurse, she begged the woman to help her die. “I can’t,” the nurse said. “It’s not legal. But you can stop eating. It will move things along. That’s a choice you can make.” Yes, she will stop. Now, here is the party. She will keep this a party. After tonight she knows she won’t make it out to this living room again.
Dog
Ming stood in the doorway. “Are you out there, Zeus?”
The Other World
A car bomb that rocked Mogadishu. A bailout. A tumbling market. The traded accusations of Syrian government and rebel. The president spoke. Officials scrambled. The wounded. The killed. The mountain slipped down. Mud slid over sleeping families late Saturday morning, fifty miles north of Seattle. Violence flared in Myanmar. Refugees attacked in a Pakistani camp.
The news, the only news, was whether Anna had eaten, was she speaking, what had the hospice nurse said.
That March, for the Record
President Chávez of Venezuela died. Amanda Knox’s acquittal was overturned. Malala Yousafzai went back to school. Poachers killed eighty-six elephants in Chad. A Virginia marine base shooting resulted in three dead.
Friday Craft and Wine
Last Friday when the group convened, Marsha asked Anna in what way they could be most useful. Connie was knitting the second sleeve of a sweater Anna had begun in January. Anna lay on the love seat wrapped in one of her kids’ old Scout sleeping bags. She wasn’t napping, but her eyes were closed. It was time, Anna said, for them to take away the bead box, the collage papers, and all the other craft tools. “I’m done making new things,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Marsha said.
Layla gave Marsha an are-you-joking sneer.
“I’m sorry. But you asked,” Anna said. “Take all the stuff when you leave.”
“But that’s too hard to do,” said Marsha.
Steady
“Doing okay?” Caroline stood behind Reuben. She couldn’t help herself. Her caretaker neurons were firing.
“Haven’t you learned that’s a worthless question?” Reuben, cross-legged on the stool at the kitchen counter, a stack of envelopes, the checkbook ledger open.
“That A.G. seems to be chanting.” Caroline slung her arms around Reuben, and he leaned back into her but kept working in a frenzy, attacking the paperwork, his breath practically aerobic.
“Don’t get me started,” he said.
Caroline thrilled to get him started, to get that throaty growl out of Reuben.
“And listen, the neighbor lady, Susie, announced she’s convened her church prayer group and they’re working day and night for Anna’s soul to go to heaven. So just stop believing you’re the only one taking care of serious things, big guy.”
Cadence
Every hug, every concerned look. Caroline’s wrapping her arms around him and treating him like a sad sack. It was pathetic. He felt pathetic. A pathetic, sad sack. He sounded like a whiny guy. With a stupid to-do list.
Reuben wanted it over. Not Anna dead. Jesus, he wasn’t a complete asshole. But he wanted this dying to end. Wanted his life back. Was that terrible? Even this morning when he’d cleared time to get out on his bike, he’d spent most of the fifty miles humping the gravelly shoulder thinking about what he had to get back to and get done. He’d kept a brisk cadence on the brutal climb up Hilman Road. He pushed hard. Into the hill. Into the cut of wind. The metal blade of freezing air sliced down his throat. His quads powering. Every muscle in his legs twitching. Interval training. Wanted to push harder. Wanted to be lost in the sheer physical insistence. The azure blue of sky. The glacial boulders piled in the woods. But he couldn’t get out of his thick head. Dug in on the pedals. Spun up the tempo. A brighter cadence. Tried to find that zone, that rush of the physical. He loved that rush. Loved it biking, clipped in, that joined power of pedal and foot. Loved it heli-skiing. Loved it years ago when he’d surprised Anna with skydiving. Back on the ground after their first static dives, she’d thrown her arms around him. “I’ve found my match.”
Hell, being with Anna was a rush.
Or a shit storm.
Anna wanted it over, too. It was Anna who kept asking for ways to speed it up. The pacemaker. What the hospice nurse, Kate, mentioned about not eating. Sometimes it seemed he and Anna were the only ones who were clear-eyed. Everyone else tiptoed through rooms. Or Ming burst into tears and hurried out of rooms. Or Helen in a fury, on the verge of hysteria. Last weekend Anna’s brothers arrived revved up about some new experimental treatment. It took the whole weekend for them to understand they had no traction with Anna. The kids’ upset was rough, but he’d cut them every slack.
Only he and Anna knew fully what the others partly knew. They’d lived all of it. The initial onset. Three A.M. fevers and the ambulance stuck in a snowbank. The code blue. Then her trudge back to health. And after, Anna insane to be alive. Frantic to make up for all the lost months. Staying up all night. Crisscrossing the state to play every gig and then getting up in the morning to go teach math. She was selfish and thirsty. For everything. Who could blame her? He blamed her. She had nothing for him. Pushed him away. Then another recurrence, and she needed him. If they were tenuous before the illness, it broke them. It made getting back together or moving apart equally impossible. He saw that now.
But now, oddly, it was Anna and him. It would surprise everyone that after the friend
s left, after her brothers with their unraveled sorrow staggered out, she’d ask him to stay. She could say anything to him. She could be nasty with him. He didn’t flinch. However extreme. She counted on him for that.
She’d tried so hard with everyone. But not Reuben. She never tried with Reuben. Never had, that was part of the problem. But it was his gift to her now.
Tomorrow, after all the others had left, he’d sit in the chair by her bed and they’d sway from quiet to gossip. To quiet.
“So what was that bullshit of Helen’s?” Reuben will say.
“I saw you caught that.”
“And how do I get Ming to stop bawling?”
“Cut her slack, Reuben. Let her keep making soup.”
“No, but—”
“Enough,” Anna will snip. “Can’t you ever let something be enough?”
She’ll drift. Then startle—“No. No.” Arms bunchy and twisting to fight something terrible off.
“Anna, it’s okay.”
“Oh, you’re here? You stayed. Aren’t we done with this yet?”
He’ll tell her it will be done soon. He wasn’t sure when. Soon. For both of them, he hoped he was right.
1982, the Valley
Once upon a time, before Anna and Reuben, Helen lived in the Valley, too. Just out of college, she’d stumbled into a sixty-five-dollar-a-month rental in a drafty farmhouse with four roommates. A painting studio nearby was another accidental story. Suffice it to say that life was dirt cheap in the middle of nowhere.
By February, Molly called crying that her girlfriend of two years had gone off to Chicago with an idiot finance guy. A room in Helen’s house had unexpectedly opened. They hadn’t begun interviewing potential roommates. Molly drove up the next week from Washington.
They lived that winter with plastic sheeting on the farmhouse windows, the thermostat turned down just to the point where the pipes couldn’t freeze, and a woodstove that needed constant attention. One roommate played his stand-up bass till two in the morning and left cereal bowls stacked and crusty in the sink. Another roommate was a local organizer. Most nights a motley affinity group argued labor rights, making leaflets at the dining-room table. Helen could hardly justify feeling abandoned when, in June, Molly loaded up her car heading to Boston University’s Ph.D. program in psychology. A generous research stipend and fellowship to boot.
Helen wanted to leave, but she had nowhere to go. Where else could she live on the paycheck from three afternoons teaching art in a school for troubled adolescents? She painted the woods and fields around the studio. In the summer she drove to Quabbin Reservoir to paint the shoreline. It was beautiful, but she kept thinking about the abandoned towns below the surface and the six thousand graves that had been relocated.
The following spring Anna and Reuben visited from California. They announced that they were getting married at the end of summer. They had the next five years planned out. Moving east, a wedding, starting right in on a family. “Finally she’ll give me a baby.” Reuben squeezed Anna close. Helen’s stomach dropped as she watched Anna innocently looking up at Reuben.
Before they left, Helen took Anna and Reuben to the studio and asked them to pick out a wedding gift. Anna chose a large landscape from a new monoprint series where Helen worked over the prints with oil pastels and glazes. A field ablaze with ocher and crimson. Helen pointed to the field out the studio windows. “This is that.”
Anna looked back and forth from the painting to the field, the tall grasses stalky and brittle from the winter, the browns dull and monochromatic.
“I love how twisted and mysterious you make a plain old field.”
“I’ve got to get out of this old field or I’ll be doing a full-on van Gogh, and it won’t be pretty,” Helen said.
Alternative Preparations
Marsha knew of a local death midwife, a deathwalker who worked energy, though rest assured it was gentle, nothing scary about it. A shaman called to offer an ancestral guide. The space needed clearing. There were residues of older sorrow in the room. The crystals that hung from the living-room windows needed washing. Dust clogged light, and that occluded the spirit. An altar was arranged with Anna’s pearl earrings for wise emotion. Rose quartz for love.
The shamans, Marsha explained, differed from the Wiccans. That said, Wiccan perspectives were not all aligned—Norse differed from the Dianic, who differed from the Alexandrine and the Circle Sanctuary.
A.G. wanted everyone to draw next-life wish paintings in a copper bowl filled with sand.
The Friday Craft and Wine claimed that Anna’s transiting spirit would be calmed by song.
Most of the Valley Jews were Ju-Bus or Bu-Jews and told Reuben they’d be reluctant at a gathering to recite the Shema or kaddish.
Anna’s band offered to set up and rock the house.
Dog
Was that Zeus at the hill’s crest, a dark, windswept mass hardly larger than a pile of leaves among the trees?
Princess
The band showed up. Big, clean scrubbed guys with day jobs—a carpenter, a tech guy, a gastroenterologist. The drummer, Jon, was a middle-school librarian. Jarrett, the lead guitar, handed Anna a CD he’d mixed.
“Hey, Princess,” he said.
They all called her Princess.
The band wouldn’t sit. Or couldn’t. They hugged the walls. Kept their hands stuffed down in the pockets of work pants like they might break something. No thanks, each politely balked when Helen offered a drink.
Anna had been called Princess ever since that first night when she’d gone with Connie and Layla to what Layla had heard was a decent dance band playing the Shelburne Falls Grange.
“You’re pretty good,” Anna found herself telling the drummer and lead guitar during the first break, “but your band could use a little girl charm.”
“And I thought being in a band would get me admired by women,” the drummer joked. “So I suppose you sing?”
Before she could say no, that it wasn’t what she’d meant, Connie jumped in. “Think Bonnie Raitt meets Phoebe Snow.”
“She’s got serious pipes,” Layla added.
No matter then whatever Anna said to backtrack—that she didn’t sing or she did sing but only acoustic harmonies with a woman friend—the band guys said, “Okay, then just get up with us and be charming.”
Anna finally rose to their bait. “I’ll be a hell of a lot more for you than charming.”
Up onstage that first time, she was so nervous she wasn’t sure she could get out one note, let alone charm. Then Jarrett, the lead guitarist, quietly said to her, “Okay, Princess, show us what big balls you’ve got.” She howled, “You’re on!” The music started, and when Anna reached for the microphone, she forgot she was basically a local math teacher and a mom. She forgot to be scared.
“How’re the gigs coming?” Anna moved her gaze from one dopey-eyed, concerned guy to the next. Like something straight out of The Wizard of Oz.
“We’re not gigging much.”
They didn’t lie well. There’d been a barn wedding in Colrain two weeks ago. They’d been hired to do all Grateful Dead.
“You know how that kind of night goes,” Jon said.
“How’s Theresa working out? Is she getting the parts down?”
“She’s no you, Princess. That’s for sure.”
“Well, that’s fucking lucky for you, assholes,” Anna said. “Two dying singers and a band starts looking creepy.”
The guys laughed. This was their Anna, rough-mouthed, a girl-guy kind of woman. No pity allowed. That was her only rule. She who came back, more than once—a blue wig and a black miniskirt—“Sugar Magnolia” sweet off her tongue. She made skinny-as-shit look hot.
“Give us the say-so, Princess, and Theresa’s fucking toast,” Jarrett said.
“Oh, you big jerk-offs, get with the program,” Anna
said. “There’s no say-so for me to give. You’re going to have to boner up for her like you all lust for me.”
The men roared. She’d pay later for this much effort. But with these men Anna needed to make them feel good. To make it easy for them. She flirted, sometimes like an older sister, sometimes as if something could maybe happen in a snap if only everyone weren’t so entirely married. Even in these odd, separated years with Reuben, Anna hadn’t strayed. I love men, she told the band more than once. I just can’t help that, ultimately, I love Reuben more.
“You should get some rest,” Jarrett finally said. He looked like he needed to be tucked in for a nap. “We’ll be back.”
“No,” Anna said. “Let’s say the big good-bye now.” She sounded downright cheerful.
They all shuffled up to her. The men were awkward and lumbering. She looked too breakable to kiss. But one by one the big guys leaned in and kissed Anna and said, “Later, Princess.”
Lesson
This, Helen thought, this is what Anna will do. She will teach us all how to do this thing we don’t know how to do.
4
The Hill
Helen and Reuben tramped up the back hill. The ground muddy and slick with ice crust. Their boots cracked through. Weak light splintered through the trees, laying down purple shadows like rhythm.
“I’ve wasted more time searching for a dog I never agreed to.” Reuben pulled his wool cap over his ears. His curls tendriled out from the brim.
Before Everything Page 9