“Leave Delores out of this. She’s a good person. She deserves better than me and Jada Fossum and everyone else she tries to help, but the thing is with Delores, she doesn’t know that. She thinks she’s lucky that people like us need her. She thinks that’s what life is all about. She really believes that, that people can be better. Me! And a kid like Jada, that we can be just like everybody else. You know? She does. She really does,” he added with a rueful chuckle.
“Same as me, Gordo.” His voice cracked. He rapped on the table a few times, then continued. “That’s all I’m trying to do, give you a fighting chance here, that’s all.”
Gordon looked down, then finally back, struggling to meet Dennis’s gaze. “Then trust me. Please?”
It was a raw, windy day, spring now after the long, stormy winter. The little stone house they passed was not a house at all, he realized when he saw the wide double doors in back. It was the repository where caskets were stored when the frozen ground couldn’t be dug. Their footsteps over the crushed white stone seemed all the noise on earth as he followed her down the hill. She knew exactly where it was, she said, clutching the gold-foiled pot of red and yellow tulips. There, there it is, she called with orange pollen on her chin.
Her grave was on the lower slope, in the shade of a tall tree just beginning to leaf. There were two dates under Janine Walters’s name, under the baby’s only one. The stone of polished gray granite was smaller than he had expected. Modest, like those around it, no hint of the violence, no image or engraved lament of the terrible wrong that had been done. There should be something, he thought, looking around, something more than this. What, though? Why did it bother him so? What awful arrogance had made him assume she in any way belonged to him? Life was commemorated here. And at least in this she had communion with all these others, he thought, not with relief or solace, but with a painful, humbling submission.
He kept glancing back, afraid one of her relatives might appear over the hill and be horrified by his presence. It had been Delores’s idea to come. She set the pot close to the stone, then knelt down and crossed herself. He couldn’t kneel or pray. The wind blew through his jacket with a rude flapping noise. He was ashamed to be invading her solitude once again.
You need to do this. It’ll be good for you, Delores had coaxed. But she was wrong. He did not belong here. The dead cannot forgive, and the living have no right.
“Gordon?” Delores said, looking back. To appease her, he bowed his head until she rose to leave.
“What a beautiful place,” she said as they drove through the ornate iron gates. “And her plot, it’s so peaceful there on the hill. Not like some places. My aunt and uncle’s is right next to the highway. Well, there’s a fence, of course, but it’s right there, all that traffic whizzing by. But in a way it’s kind of funny, because my uncle . . . well, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, you’ll think it’s in the genes, but my uncle was a car thief—well, not your regular car thief, more like a specialist, kind of. The owner would have him steal the car, then he’d push it in the river or burn it, whatever, and the owner’d pay him from the insurance. And until the day she died, my sweet aunt Hazel told everyone he was a safety consultant. Which I suppose he was in a way, when you think of it. I remember once my father lent him his car to take one of his kids somewhere, and he was a nervous wreck until the car got back, and my uncle Fred, he goes, ‘For God’s sake, Lou, what’d you think I was gonna do, dump your car? You’re not a client!’ ” she roared, laughing, chin still smudged, her windblown hair a mess.
He eased his head back and closed his eyes, settling into her nearness. It’s always best this way on a long drive. Even though he cannot see the passing trees and signs and towns, he hears them in her voice. He is as often amused as rankled by her insistent vision of a world in which selfishness is the greatest sin. It’s amazing how this woman can talk, on and on, sometimes not even pausing for breath, as if possessed for so long of her own indomitable universe that she must give it all to him, filling the gaps with her exuberance, investing him, who has none of his own, with a history, people he doesn’t know, places he has never been, on and on it goes, as relentless as the girl Jada, the way she hits the tethered ball with the wooden paddle, fifty times, fifty-one, fifty-two, to a hundred sometimes, a hundred one, a hundred two, faster and faster, desperate to keep it going and going and going, because—because they must. It is as simple as that, Delores tells them.
A Hole in the Universe Page 41