by Chris White
• • •
Adrian sits at his desk, printing out his sky-high ticket from Orbitz and anticipating another dreadful night in the guest room when Stella approaches him from behind. He turns to see her standing with her arms crossed in front of her breasts.
She says, “Don’t you even want to talk about it?”
He steels his jaw. He has been craving this, almost. Nothing can be worse than the silence.
“It . . . It was only two times,” he begins, standing out of deference and fear. “I didn’t—”
“About your mom.” She steps back. “Don’t you want to talk about your mother. Dying.”
He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t understand.
“It must be terribly painful, Adrian. Losing her,” she says. Her eyes gloss over with tears. “You’ve got to feel this, you understand me?”
Feel it? He finds himself shaking his head. Why isn’t she asking him about Deborah? What kind of bizarre punishment is this? “We weren’t close,” he says, almost pleading.
“Adrian . . .”
“What?”
“She stopped calling, yes, and that was hard for all of us, but what the hell does it take?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, I get that you don’t care about me anymore, that you don’t love me, that you . . . found somebody you want to fuck—”
“Please—”
“None of it surprises me. At all! This conversation isn’t going to be about that, not who she is or how old she is or how many times you fucked her in what position when you decided you were ready to ruin everything. But your mother just died, Adrian. She died, in her early sixties, and all you can say is, ‘We weren’t close’? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He watches her quivering lips, then blurts, “I think she’s been trying to call me.”
“Recently?”
He nods, searching her eyes, telling the truth.
“And?”
“I didn’t pick up, Stella. I didn’t know she was sick.” The ringing in his ears is so loud, he wonders if she hears it.
“Well, that’s heartbreaking,” she says. “For you both. I hope you can feel that too.” Her head rocks back and forth a little.
“Go with me to the funeral, Stella, please.”
She looks him sadly in the eye. “You must be out of your mind.”
• • •
On a whistling cold day near the Hudson, Adrian and Evan stand at their mother’s grave with the group of eight people they met at the small memorial service at First Methodist Church: Bob and Lenora Burcham (who own the stationery store where June bought her paints and brushes and canvases); Willa Hunt (the portly widowed neighbor one house east of June’s, who discovered her dead); Drew Simon (June’s eighteen-year-old private painting student from a local high school, recently enlisted in the navy); Hillary and Julianne Michaels (two sisters with whom June raised money for a local homeless shelter three years in a row); and the Palladinos (neighbors from across the street whose cat June fed and watered for two weeks every summer while they were on vacation in Santa Fe).
Adrian wondered whether he’d have to face Suzanne, his mother’s ex, but Suzanne didn’t (or couldn’t) come. Maybe no one told her. Maybe she’s dead too. She’d sent Adrian cards with a little money tucked inside on his birthday for a decade, then finally stopped a few years after his mother and she broke up. In any case, no one is shoulder to shoulder. This was a small life and it is over. June had no siblings, and her parents are both long gone.
Evan, who isn’t much of a speaker, gave the primary eulogy at the church:
“Mom was a great mom when we were kids. She was the kind of person who would give you the clothes off her back, which some people think isn’t that great of a trait sometimes, but when you’re a kid, it works out pretty good. She found her own way in life, though. After her and my dad got divorced, she started all over again, up here in Kingston with two kids to raise on her own. Some people think she’s a pretty good artist, also. I’m proud to say four of her paintings hang on the walls in my house, and when people come in, they’ll say, ‘I love that painting of the candlesticks on the table’ or ‘I love that painting of the pelicans.’ She did a whole series of pelican paintings, matted three of them, and put them together in one big frame—pelicans in different moods or just from different angles—which is really top-notch, like my mom in general. Truth is, she got kind of quiet these last few years, but that’s her prerogative. She earned that right. I guess I don’t need to say the obvious, but she went too soon, and me and Adrian are her only kids, and we’ll both miss her. When your mom’s gone, things will never be the same. But as you also probably know, she had incurable cancer, so hitting her head on the dishwasher was probably a blessing. May she rest in peace, and may the wind be always at her back.”
The minister didn’t seem to know June, but after Evan spoke, there were a few words from young Drew saying how much June had helped him with his oil painting, and how she’d been supportive of his “plans to enlist and serve our country.” This didn’t sound like Adrian’s mother, this patriotism. Then Drew took a trussed-up cluster of sage from his pocket and lit it. The minister looked panicky. Smoke curled up and away, and nobody knew what to do but watch until Drew walked down the aisle of the church and out.
At the cemetery, Adrian, Evan, Drew, Bob Burcham, James Palladino, and a middle-aged male member of the funeral-home staff carried the coffin to the graveside. There was more disparity in their height than was ideal, and the coffin shifted a little from one side to the other as they walked, the cold air numbing Adrian’s ears, his fingers numbing too with the weight of his mother’s body and its container. Once they lowered the coffin to the snow-dusted ground and Adrian moved back into the small group, he began to hyperventilate again. He held his breath to retain more carbon dioxide, counting in his head. Pure panic, that’s what it was, feeling it. As though he had been ambushed, as though a shot had been fired from one dark place into another dark place. The years rose up full between him and his mother. Had he hoped to reunite with her? To confront her? To forgive her? To deliberate her certain denial? He had hoped for all of those things over the years, back when he allowed himself to think of them at all. None would be possible now.
• • •
Seven p.m., his mother’s house. He sits in the rental car with the motor running and waits for Evan with his head on the steering wheel. Adrian sees his brother infrequently in his adult life. Evan’s been married and divorced twice (no children). Always working overtime for his contracting “company,” too poor to travel. They’ve spoken on the odd Christmas or a couple of times when Evan was looking for money. Adrian always sent him what he asked for; it wasn’t much in the scheme of things.
The shadowy trees are enormous now, the snowflakes floating through them. Someone’s put up a privacy fence on the west side. He scans the dim landscape for some rise or depression a few feet out from the biggest oak where he buried his chemistry set. His favorite gift from June, it had come in an almost indestructible metal box that latched closed, tight as a submarine. Each clinking test tube and chemical held in place with metal clasps, each tightly stopped with a cork. Eyedroppers, tweezers, tongs, burners. So complete. He could open the sides and it would stand on its own, upright, easily accessible. He made healing potions, poisons, immortality serums. Only a year after he received it for his birthday, back in the old house in North Carolina, his father shot it full of holes, target-practicing right into its shining hull. Though it was ruined, Adrian saved the chemistry set carcass, dragging it along when they left Greenville. Originally, he saved it to remind him to guard against his own naïveté. Later, after his father’s letter, he couldn’t stand the sight of it, so he buried it near the tree a couple of months after his fourteenth birthday.
Unable to sit any longer, he finds his mother’s key under the welcome mat, stuck into a fine compost of frozen leaves. He twists open the lock, then wa
lks warily through the front door—not knowing what he’ll find.
He flips on the entryway light. The two off-white half walls visible from his vantage point are hung with June’s own paintings—watercolor landscapes of forests and meadows, seascapes in oil, domestic still lifes, and birds: more pelicans, a heron eyeing a fisherman’s catch, sandpipers chased by a wave.
On another wall, the fireplace wall—he progresses to the living room, squinting, then flips on the lamp by the couch—hang dozens of framed color photographs. Evan and Adrian as teenagers. Stella and Adrian in their early marriage. Zander and Michaela as very young children. June with her grandchildren, each gathered under one arm. Floor to ceiling.
Adrian is stunned. How had June continued to live on as his mother like this, as if they were all still together, their family whole? How is it possible? It’s as if a part of him had remained here, though he hadn’t known it. As if she had performed some kind of spell, summoning him here daily with his image, and the images of his children, keeping him. Maybe that was why he could never let her go, though he had tried and tried, could never forget, though he was over forty years old. Then in a sudden stab of awareness, Adrian hurtles down the hallway to his mother’s room.
It’s nearly the same—dresser, vanity, mirror. He rushes to her bed—now with a large Native American dream catcher centered over the headboard, and a plastic hospital bed guard, which he removes and tosses away; he crouches to the floor and threads his arm under the mattress on his mother’s side, searching for the letter from his father he hid so many years ago.
He finds nothing. He probably remembers the exact whereabouts wrong, so he moves to the left side of the mattress instead and thrusts his arm under and all around in a fan shape. Shuffles around to the foot, searching under the third corner of the mattress—then to the last—finding nothing. Flashing on all the lights in the room like some drug-addled thief, he pulls open the bedside table drawer, rummaging through pills (taking none), lotions, earplugs, dental floss, more pills, toenail clippers, pens, magnifying glass, bookmark, unopened correspondence from the hospital. He falls to the floor and peers under the bed, picking up lint and threads on his wool jacket, sliding and scooting, breathing bits of down into his nose and mouth, until he relents. The letter is gone.
He walks back down the silent hallway and past the wall of photos, out again to the car, where he continues to wait, confounded, his throat burning, tears shored up against the back of his eyes, unwilling to fall. Had she found the letter? Ten years ago? Two? Last month? When the bed guard was put in. Maybe that was when she called him.
He takes out his phone and presses her voicemail again.
I really need you to come home.
I really need you to come home.
I really need you to come home.
• • •
Twenty minutes later, Evan walks right past Adrian’s rental car and throws open the front door like he owns the place. Maybe he does now. Adrian gets out of the car and speed-walks in behind him like he used to when they were kids, trying to reach the screen door before it latches closed, and they stand together in their mother’s house for the first time in fifteen years.
Evan’s eyes are red and puffy from the funeral. His lip hangs low on one side like he’s had a stroke, though he hasn’t. He smacks Adrian on the shoulder, looks at him a little cross-eyed, embraces him roughly, and says in his ear, “This just fuckin’ sucks.”
His coat smells like sawdust and the outdoors. Adrian doesn’t remember the last time he was embraced by a man.
Adrian says, “You want a scotch?”
“That’d be great, yeah.”
The brothers move awkwardly to June’s kitchen. Adrian opens three cabinets looking for glasses, then takes out two jelly jars in lieu of something more traditional. He unsheathes the bottle he bought on his way from the airport, and they sit at the table by the window amid the smells—red wine vinegar, old spaghetti sauce, rotting apples. Adrian wants another Klonopin, but he’s already had two (one on the way to the airport and one on the way here) plus four Vicodin (two this morning and two at the funeral). He’ll take another Klonopin when he goes to bed, with a weak Lunesta chaser.
“What are you up to these days?” he asks, steadying himself as he pours, thinking how he forgot to turn off the lights in the bedroom and left the bed guard in the middle of the floor. Hoping Evan will sleep in there so he won’t have to.
“Workin’ hard, you know. Trying to keep the business from going under. Nobody’s building.” Evan takes a long pull of his drink. “I guess you’re making a shitload of money.”
“Guess so.” Adrian doesn’t want to tell Evan about his faltering marriage, about Deborah, about his mother’s call or the forever-lost note, about anything, if he can avoid it. He’s just glad to be sitting down, drinking, so his legs stop buckling.
“You guess so, huh.”
Adrian glances past Evan into the living room at one of June’s paintings—a gleaming tea tray with an orange cat sitting between two cups and a pot—and the faces of his wife and children staring at him from the walls.
“You gonna be okay about Mom?” Evan asks. “I know how you can be.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? How can I be?”
“Just . . . weird. Don’t let it make you more weird.”
“Oh, okay. I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Probably tripped on those two steps right there on her way from the mudroom. Hit her head on the open dishwasher.”
They both watch the dishwasher, imbued, now, with something ominous and strange.
“Pancreatic cancer is caused by mutations to the DNA,” Adrian finds himself saying.
“What?”
“If it’s not inherited, sometimes it’s environmental. Was she a smoker?”
“Was she a smoker? You know Mom wasn’t a smoker,” Evan says, curling his lip.
“Or heavy drinker?”
“No more than you, my friend.”
“Because it’s also been linked to herbicides—DDT and more recent ones,” Adrian says. “People who work with herbicides and their spouses are at high risk. Remember how Dean used to spread that shit before he started construction? Probably came home with it all over his clothes.”
“Adrian, are you serious?” Evan’s eyes are wide a moment; he looks like a boy again.
Adrian thinks how Evan has no real family but his mother. He thinks about the power of the assertion of fact. And about herbicide-immune superweeds taking over the countryside. “There’s no way of knowing.” He drains his glass.
“She never stopped communicating with the guy, you know,” says Evan.
“Who, Dean? No way.”
“Telling you the truth.”
“That’s bullshit. Why would they talk to each other?” Adrian feels betrayed but can’t say precisely why or by whom.
“She was a lesbian for years and still called him up. You never knew that? Who the hell knows why people do the shit they do.” Evan unscrews the bottle, pours himself a little more. “All I know is with the cancer all through her like that, the way she went was a blessing. She didn’t have to go through a bunch more medical bullshit for nothing. No offense.”
Adrian watches the lights of a car slither up the snowy roadway outside. “How long did she have it?”
“What do you mean?”
Adrian shrugs. Evan peers at him, confused.
“I didn’t know,” Adrian mumbles into his knuckles, already regretting saying so.
“What are you talking about?” Evan stiffens, glares at him. “She told me she called you. I tried calling you a bunch of times myself, but I’m used to you never calling me back. She never got you? You never talked to her?”
“Take your foot off the cushion, your boot’s filthy,” Adrian kicks at Evan’s foot.
“She knew for six months. Are you out of your fucking mind?” Evan shoves his glass across the table. “She was dying. You can’t take a break from yo
ur perfect little life long enough to call her back?”
“I didn’t know she was sick.”
Evan stands, knocks back his chair. “That’s the point. She was closer to you than anybody. You were two fuckin’ peas in a pod.”
“You have been oblivious since day one,” Adrian says, shaking the peas image from his head.
“Oblivious to what?”
“I don’t see her anymore, Evan. She never mentioned that? I wonder why.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s not so fucking innocent,” Adrian says.
Evan steamrolls over him. “You know what, from what she told me, you got pissy as shit when you were a teenager, like you had to do your own laundry, because she couldn’t do it good enough for you, and you never wanted her to come to your shit at school, and when you were in college you always had to go on some vacation with your friends or internship or whatever and never came home, and every time I saw you after that, like that time in Charlottesville, you were way too fuckin’ smart for everybody else. Just couldn’t be bothered. Now you’ve got everything you want, a big-ass house and a big-ass paycheck, and you decide your own mother’s not even worth a phone call? What part of this is her fault?”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” Adrian says, definitively.
Both their lower lips jut out, middle-aged men in suits in their mother’s kitchen.
“Yeah, so, where the hell are Stella and the kids? They got a soccer match or something?”
“Stella and I are in a rough patch. And you can leave my kids out of your sarcastic remarks.”
Evan nods, exaggeratedly, paces across the kitchen and back. “You know what, man? It is your life.”
He opens the dishwasher, looks inside, and slams it closed.
Adrian watches, waiting for him to move again, but he just hunches over a little from the shoulders. Adrian doesn’t want to do any harm. He doesn’t.
“I didn’t mean to say anything against her,” he says.