There. See.
You have your answer.
No lie. You know it’s no lie.
“I can’t describe it,” she sent. “How do you describe how someone smells?”
A pause.
“But it was them. I just knew it was them. By smell. Am I crazy, Nick?”
Yes, you’re fucking crazy. We’re both fucking crazy.
She knows, I said aloud. She’s telling you the truth.
Believe her.
“No,” I sent at last. “You’re not crazy.”
Not crazy.
Then what?
Now what?
I can’t.
I can’t do this.
You said you’re not doing this, and I can’t do this. But you are doing it. Fuck. But I can’t.
“Fuck,” I sent and quit.
Exit chat.
Close out.
Shut down.
Exit. Close. Shut. Fuck. Out.
I put my head on the desk and wept.
22
I smelled bacon. Frying bacon.
Here we go, I thought, opening my eyes. Here we go. Saturday morning, 1984. Again. Except, where’s the rest? I smelled bacon, and toast maybe, but not the pancakes or the creamy sweetened coffee, or the snow shovel and the bitter air.
Incomplete.
Strange.
Very strange.
Was this the diminishment of sharing? If Robin was getting the ghosts, too, was she taking some of mine away?
My God. That’s right. Robin had said she was getting this, too. That happened. It wasn’t a dream. She did say that.
Yes, I’m sure. She did.
The whole of the previous evening came rushing into consciousness at once. Dad. The sleepovers. My room. The diary. Jesus Christ. The diary. And then the smells. She said she was getting the smells. Mom and Dad. Like they’d been in the room, she said. Like they’d been in the room.
But I could hear sounds.
Shuffle, pat, twang, shuffle.
There were definitely sounds. Coming from where? The kitchen? Utensils, pans, cupboards? Back and to the right.
Yes, the kitchen.
Shush, scrape, muffle, twang.
Definitely the kitchen.
I’d never had sounds before. Only smells.
What the . . . ?
I lifted my head from the desk.
Sticky.
The side of my face was sticky, and the desk, too.
Vomit.
Yep.
Sleep in your own sick.
Again.
Lucky.
You’re still breathing.
I wiped my face with my T-shirt, also vomitous, shrugged it off and into the trash basket.
The usual receptacle.
Schlop.
Clean it later.
Now, I said, see about the sounds.
Now.
Stand.
Oof.
Bump.
Right yourself.
Steady.
Don’t be a pussy.
Go.
Go in there and see your illusion.
Walking around.
I stumbled wall to wall in the hall into the kitchen.
Dizzy, weak, thick-tongued.
I looked.
Shit.
Sure enough.
There was someone.
There was an old woman standing at the stove with her back to me, humming softly.
Was she? Really humming?
No.
Could she?
She was humming that song. What song? I knew it somehow, I knew the lyrics. But from where?
Spring will be a little late this year,
A little late arriving in my lonely world over here.
This is how it happens, I thought. This is how you go mad. It starts with dreams and smells, then escalates to sounds and sights. Songs you know and people you don’t. Togetherness in the kitchen.
Am I dreaming or waking?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I have dreamt this dream before. I remember, this dream of waking, being awake, while all the while I was sleeping.
This has the quality of a dream. Surely. An old woman at the stove humming an old song that Mom sometimes sang around the house. My mind’s extrapolation of what my mother would look like now, except that I can’t picture it quite, so I can’t see her face. Her face is the back of her head even when she turns around. Isn’t that how it goes? She can turn her head like an owl, all the way around, and I will only ever see the back of her head.
So interpret the dream then, I said. Yes, interpret, if it’s a dream.
But can you interpret a dream when you are in one?
You can if you are dreaming about dreaming.
But am I?
Who cares? Do it anyway.
Okay, okay. Ease off. I’m frightened. I feel sick.
So what? Go on. Tell me. Go on. Now. Tell me.
All right, all right. Fuck.
Umm.
I see . . . [smell of bacon still, spoon clanking, pot rustling, a figure of a woman]
I see the back of my mother’s head. Why? Because . . . [still humming—that creepy humming]
I see the back of my mother’s head because my mother never faced me, because my mother didn’t have a face.
Is that right?
Maybe.
So?
So what else?
What do you mean, what else? What what else?
So can she talk, my old lady?
Find out if she can talk.
I . . .
“Hello?” I said tremulously.
Aloud?
Must have.
She turned abruptly.
“Well, hello there,” she said, flashing a reassuring smile. “At last.”
A face.
She has a face.
It’s not Mom.
It’s not Mom at all.
It’s Mrs. Bloom?
Mrs. Bloom was in my kitchen.
Did she die in the night over there, in her green kitchen across the street, and now she’s in my kitchen over here?
“Mrs. B.?” I croaked.
Definitely aloud.
She turned back to stirring what she had on the stove.
“I came by earlier,” she said, turning toward me again, seeming to notice for the first time that I was half caked in my own puke.
She grimaced.
“I rang the bell for a long time, but there was no answer. Then I tried the door and it was open.”
She returned to her stirring.
“I hope you don’t mind terribly, Nick. I wouldn’t normally just walk into somebody’s house uninvited, but when I stuck my head in and called your name, I was—” She paused, editing herself. “Well, I was overwhelmed by the smell, to be perfectly honest, and I got worried.”
She laughed nervously.
“You know, all this time I’ve been thinking that I was the one they were going to find rotting in my house someday, no one the wiser, and I guess I panicked. I thought, God, he could be dead in there, or dying, and no one would know.”
Her eyes widened with concern. She laughed again, more genuinely this time.
“So, anyhow, I thought I’d check on you. I tried to wake you several times, but it was no good, so I thought I’d clean up a bit and cook you some breakfast while you slept it off. Of course, you had nothing in the fridge, so I went back to my place and brought over this.”
She gestured at a carton of eggs, the pack of bacon, some milk, bread, margarine, and orange
juice.
“That’s very kind, Mrs. B., really,” I said, suppressing a gag. “But I’m feeling pretty rotten and—”
“And I thought to myself,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, “I bet he hasn’t had a home-cooked meal in years, and a proper breakfast in longer than that.”
She fixed me with that piercing stare of hers, seeming to reprimand and console at the same time.
“Am I right?” she said flatly.
“I’m—” I stammered. “I’m really not a breakfast person. I’m hardly ever up before evening.”
Why was she here? Why was she really here? This wasn’t just weird because I’d woken in a lake of my own sick and someone other than Dave had found me that way, or because I was standing clueless and horrified in my kitchen feeling as though I’d just slept with my grandmother. It wasn’t even weird because I’d thought I’d smelled a ghost and found it rattling my pots and pans. It was just weird. Period.
“Why don’t you go and get cleaned up,” she said, seeming to sense the need for a better explanation. “I’ll have this ready in a minute. Then we can talk.”
Why don’t you get out of my fucking kitchen, I thought, still staring, still only half believing that she was real.
“Gatorade,” I said, afraid to approach.
She looked puzzled.
“There’s Gatorade in the fridge,” I explained, extending a limp arm.
She nodded, opening the fridge. She crossed the kitchen with the bottle and handed it to me with a worried frown.
“See you in a few minutes?” she asked.
I took the bottle and said nothing.
I spent a long time in the shower, drinking and puking, drinking and puking. Rinse and repeat.
When I shuffled back into the kitchen at least forty minutes later—probably more like over an hour—I was sure Mrs. B. would be gone. But there she was, sitting at the table, drinking a cup of coffee and looking pensively out the back window into the yard.
Please no Miriam yet, I thought, panicked.
I looked. Nope.
Remembering our promise not to be polite and feeling immensely grateful for that now, I checked the impulse to apologize. Instead I said:
“This is what I do.”
“Yes,” she said resignedly. “I see.”
She had put away the breakfast things and either dumped or eaten what she had made, because there was nothing on the table or the counter for me.
“I’ve been in touch with Robin,” I blurted, surprising myself.
She blinked over the rim of her cup, took a sip, and set it down.
“I thought you might,” she said calmly.
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know, because she brings chaos in her wake. Always has done.”
I grunted, pulling a face.
“Yeah, well, I do pretty well on the chaos front myself, as you can see.”
She smiled weakly and looked away.
“But you only hurt yourself,” she said.
“Not true, not true,” I objected. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve left a trail of half-wits in my wake that you wouldn’t believe. AA meetings all over town are filled with my rejects.”
She chuckled politely but said nothing. She let her eyes rest on the floor, staring blankly.
I was out of excuses and not-so-charming repartee, so I sank heavily into a chair across from her at the table. I thought about getting up to get another Gatorade, but couldn’t bring myself to move, so instead I stared at a fixed point on the horizon out back, hoping to quell my nausea the old-fashioned way.
The silence grew heavy and uncomfortable between us.
Whatever she had come for, it was bad. Really bad. Her former equanimity was gone, replaced by an emanating dread. Looking at her full on, I could see why she had waited out my shower. She was spooked. Deep down spooked in that childish, afraid-of-the-dark kind of way that makes you park yourself in the lobbies of public buildings or doctors’ offices because you’re just that desperate for company, and because you’re under the mistaken impression that the bogeyman doesn’t do groups. I knew that feeling well. I’d sat for hours in all kinds of places where I didn’t have appointments, just so I could loiter unnoticed and soak up the bland solace of the herd.
Mrs. B. was here for that. Because she needed somewhere to be, and someone—anyone—to be with. It didn’t matter where or whom.
“How long have you known?” I asked.
She started slightly at the sound of my voice.
“Known? About what?”
“About Robin. That she was alive, I mean.”
She looked relieved.
“Alive?” she said knowingly. “Oh, Lord. Since she left, I suppose.”
She closed her eyes wearily and pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger. She looked up at me, blinking away the fatigue.
“I realize that it’s become something of a cliché to say this, but it’s true in my case. A mother knows.”
She searched my face, as if for confirmation.
I nodded attentively.
“When your child dies, a light goes out,” she said, nudging her coffee cup away toward the center of the table.
She kept her eyes on the cup.
“I knew about Karen days before they came to tell us. I knew in the middle of the night. Sat bolt upright from a deep sleep, wide awake, and I knew.”
She paused thoughtfully.
“It was like drowning. I couldn’t get my breath. I wanted to scream or cry out for help. I didn’t know what was happening to me. But I couldn’t make a sound. My throat was closing and my tongue was like sodden bread. Suffocating. Heavy. It was horrible.”
She draped her opened palm across her throat and stroked it, soothingly.
“And then, just as suddenly as it had come, it passed,” she said.
She let her hand fall to her lap.
“Everything relaxed. Everything in me went limp and weightless and—do you know?”
She looked at me intently, seemingly amazed again by the memory.
“I felt more whole and complete than I have ever felt in my entire life before or since. It was the profoundest peace I have ever known, and it was the moment—I’m sure of it—that my only daughter left this earth, the moment she let go of all the pain and struggle of her short, troubled life and just went.”
I hesitated to point out that she wasn’t talking about her only daughter now. She was talking about her granddaughter. Surely a grandmother didn’t just know. But clearly, Mrs. Bloom drew no distinction between the two. Robin was her own as much as Karen had been, telepathy of the womb be damned.
“You know,” she said, taking another long, pensive sip of coffee. “When I was a girl, my mother gave me a necklace for my fifteenth birthday. It was in the shape of a heart, a silver heart, and at the center there was a stone set in it. A large square aquamarine. On the back she’d had the jeweler engrave the words ‘My heart walking around.’ That’s what she always called me, you see. She’d say, ‘You’re my heart walking around.’ It wasn’t until I became a mother myself that I understood what those words really meant. She meant them quite literally. Having a child is like having one of your vital organs out walking around in the world. The vital organ, and when it stops, you stop, too. That’s what happened the night Karen died.”
She placed her palms flat on the tabletop and looked at her arthritic hands. Her eyes wandered regretfully over each bulbous swelling, each cruel bend of bone.
“With Robin, nothing stopped,” she said. “On the contrary, it went on and on and on, and it’s still going. Every day, I can feel it here in my chest, like the sound of something very loud but very far away, rolling on. Robin is alive because her pain is aliv
e and it has a presence in the world like a germ or a shock wave, spreading where she sends it.”
Her face clouded and she looked out the window again toward the sky. She squinted against the light.
“This morning it was very close to home,” she said.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s not just one thing. It’s a lot of things. Little things. Things you’d easily miss if you weren’t attuned to them. Things that build up and cluster at certain times, or have done over the years. Or maybe I’m just getting old”—she smiled, waving her hand to indicate her unsavory surroundings—“and smelling death everywhere.”
I smiled, too, sheepishly. The smell of my own accumulated sick in the morning, overpowering, and I wasn’t even aware. That’s when you know you’ve gone morbid—when your stink is completely undetectable to you and yet strong enough to draw the neighbors.
“I saw something in the paper,” she continued. “An obituary for an old family friend I haven’t thought about in years. I saw the picture. It wasn’t a particularly recent picture—he must have been at least five years my senior—so he looked much the way I remembered him. Startlingly so. Like someone who shouldn’t have died. Like someone popped out of my memory as big as life, and there he was in a notice telling me he was dead.”
She sighed and patted my arm.
“When you get to be my age, Nick, this is what happens. More often than you’d care to acknowledge, you start seeing people you know in the obituaries column.”
She shuddered.
“And you feel a cold, sharp thrill go through you.”
She turned her gaze back to me and blinked concertedly, as if trying to bring me and this moment back into focus.
“Anyway, there he was, looking out at me, big as—well, big as death, I guess, and . . .”
She trailed off.
And when you thought of death, big as death, you thought of me, I thought. Thanks a lot. I’ll just go over and see Nick, big as death over there, still clinging to life but barely. Practically putrid. Jeez, you can smell him from here.
So kind. Really, thanks.
“That’s terrible,” I said at last, trying to sound sympathetic, and failing. “Is there going to be a service?”
“I expect so, but I couldn’t go.”
“Why not?”
“It’s complicated,” she said. “It’s been far too long, for one thing. Far, far too long. I should have been in touch ages ago, I suppose.”
Thy Neighbor Page 27