Among the Dead and Dreaming

by Samuel Ligon

  She looked at me and sort of shook her head—like, We’re not doing this—then looked away again. Fine by me. I didn’t know anything anyway. Not for sure. Long seconds passed. I had a memory in my mouth of Cynthia’s freezer burned forehead, even as I smelled Nikki through the humidity, vanilla or cinnamon, some kind of spice.

  “This thing tomorrow,” she said. She stood and scanned the lawn, raising herself on tiptoes to look across the water, then sat back down. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t go to Cynthia’s service. It just seems crazy to me—doing them one after another like that at the funeral home. I know they were friends and everything.”

  “I’m not going to Kyle’s either,” I said.

  We looked back to the pond, and then I couldn’t help myself: “What do you think they were doing on that motorcycle, anyway—after midnight on the Ocean Parkway.”

  She shook her head.

  “You don’t wonder?”

  She looked away.

  “My mind keeps circling that,” I said. “All the stuff we’ll never know.”

  “There’s plenty we’ll never know,” she said. “And they were close. So what?”

  “I just want to know something,” I said. “Where they were going. Where they were coming from. Anything”

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said, and I said, “But still.”

  I heard a woman clear her throat behind us and turned to see Cynthia’s sister.

  “There you are,” Beth said.

  The women embraced, Beth looking at me over Nikki’s shoulder as her eye makeup started to run. I knew Nikki had to know something. Just by how careful she was, how she pretended not to care. She had to wonder what was going on between them, even if she didn’t care. And her knowing and not caring made my knowing and caring seem more stupid and pathetic, her strength or indifference—or maybe just privacy—somehow feeding my weakness.

  Nikki

  Back in the banquet room, his eyes are on me all the time, something empty behind them, like part of him drained onto the lawn outside, and whenever I look up, whenever I wake from myself, there he is, looking at me. Cynthia’s family surrounds him, and rich people come and go, as if he’s been coronated, which makes me sort of sick, to think he’s been elevated by her death, but I’m probably just projecting that because of how disconnected I feel from Kyle’s family. Maybe her family’s always been like this with him, having taken him into their wealthy embrace long ago, something always so horrible in me regarding rich people and their money, because, I’m sure, of how the lack of it has governed my own life. Even now. Especially now. I look to his eyes fixed on me over Diana’s shoulder as she hugs him, and it’s like he’s lost, like he’s calling for me.

  Alina reaches out to me, and I squeeze her hand, both of us strangers in this room full of rich people, and shy, the only reason she clings to me. Burke said he’d arrive next week, and I still don’t have a plan for the money, still don’t know if I’m going to run. My job selling ads for the paper has led to writing reviews and interviews lately, the arts editor practically promising a move to the editorial side of the paper. I’ll never find a job as good if I run again. I just need to get to Kyle’s studio and see what I can find. It’s possible he’s got money stashed or something to sell, if the place hasn’t already been emptied by Celia.

  “When can we go?” Alina whispers.

  “Soon,” I tell her, petting her hair. She drops her head to my shoulder.

  Cynthia’s sister is pretty and flushed, and she keeps touching Mark, holding his hand, while the rich people say whatever they say to him and he looks at me. I wonder what he wants from me, what he has that the rich people want to touch. He obviously knows what I know, that there was something between Kyle and Cynthia, the way she touched Kyle the night the four of us ate together downtown, her hand on his arm, his shoulder, looking for a reaction from me every time she touched him. And her eyes in his paintings, too. I didn’t care. I didn’t have anything invested that could be taken away, part of why I should have just let him go, so they could have had each other. But I also wanted to love him like I hadn’t loved Bobby in Portland. I’ve been too careful too long, holding myself too tight. Mark was going to let it eat him alive, the way he looked at their hands on the table that night at the restaurant, the way he questioned me just an hour ago on the lawn. I didn’t care where they’d been or where they were going the night they died. Kyle and I loved each other—but I didn’t own him and he didn’t own me. We didn’t owe each other anything, except kindness and respect. But that thought makes everything so much worse, rubbing it in my face again, how I held him back and kept him from the real love he could have had with Cynthia. I put my hand to my face, shading my eyes, and let myself feel it all in this room full of rich people, trying not to shake Alina’s head on my shoulder and failing.

  She runs her hand up and down my back, sniffling, “Can’t we just go?” and I pull myself together and say, “In a minute,” because I haven’t spent enough time with Kyle’s father. I don’t want to close any doors.

  I watch the rich people come and go, Mark looking at me like, Get me out of here, and for just a second, I see myself in that look, a sort of recognition washing over me, and I wonder if maybe, with all the rich people around him, if maybe—because it’s only fifty thousand, impossible for me and nothing to them, Burke out there waiting to be paid, what I have to take care of before I can feel or do anything else, but as I look at Mark still looking at me, as helpless as I am, I dismiss the possibility of asking for anything, promising Alina and myself in my head, almost like a prayer, that we’ll be okay, we’ll be okay, we’ll be okay, that we’ll survive this bullshit with Burke unscathed, intact, that we’ll come out of it stronger and better than ever. And then I’ll let myself feel the loss of Kyle and forgive myself, maybe, hopefully. But Mark won’t stop looking at me. And I can’t tell if I recognize something in him or if I’m just seeing money.

  11

  Bobby

  Nikki was just a kid when we met, and I was approaching middle age, but she had a presence that made her seem much older, probably because of her mother being sick throughout her childhood. She showed me one of the crazy letters—her mother writing about flying to Portland in her ruined body ship—and told me a tiny bit about her childhood, but whenever I pressed for more, she’d shut me out completely.

  It took a long time to get to know her and there was plenty I never did know, whatever it was she kept locked down so tight. She wouldn’t tell me where she lived for months, and when I did find out, I couldn’t believe she was staying in such an awful place. I asked her to move in with me, practically begged her, even though there was nothing romantic between us. And even though she said no, she let me walk her home that night, a first. She made us tea and sat me on her couch and put my hand on her belly to feel Alina kick. I told her I loved her. She looked at me a long time and said, “I know you do, Bobby.” She was the only person who called me Bobby since kindergarten. She kissed me, another first. We kissed each other. “I love you, too,” she said, but I knew her love for me was less than mine for her. It didn’t matter. I would have done anything for her.

  Later, when she was going to school at night, leaving me with Alina—who I loved as much as Nikki or myself—all I could do was give her space and try to hold on, which was impossible. I knew I was coming on too strong, my love becoming desperation, a repellent weakness, but I couldn’t stop myself. You can’t make somebody love you the way you want to be loved, and you can’t stop loving somebody the way you already love them. You can try to hide your love, but it won’t do any good. And I was never able to hide anything. Nikki hid everything. I heard her crying in the tub one night maybe a month after Alina was born, these coughing, choking sobs she was trying to contain, breaking my heart for her, but when I asked about it later that night, she pretended nothing was wrong.

 
“A lot of women get depressed after they have a baby,” I told her, “because of their chemistry—a change in their hormones. My mother had that with my brother.”

  “I don’t have that,” Nikki said. “I don’t feel that way.”

  “What do you feel?” I said, and she said, “Do we have to talk about my feelings?”

  She smiled her radiant smile at me, her whole face lighting up. “Come sit with me on the couch awhile,” she said. “Everything’s good. Everything’s fine.”

  We watched TV together, talking and laughing. There were times I could hardly stand to be in the same room with her, I loved her so much. But those feelings mostly came later, when I knew I couldn’t hold onto her. Earlier, it wasn’t so clear.

  Before bed that night, she said, “Are you feeling better?”

  “I was never feeling bad,” I said. “You were.”

  “I wasn’t feeling bad,” she said.

  Neither of us moved from the couch.

  “Do you want to sleep in my room tonight?” I asked her. “Nothing has to happen. It would just be—you know—for the warmth. Or whatever you want.”

  “I don’t think that would be smart,” she said, and I said, “I think it would be smart,” and she smiled again—you’d do anything to make her smile like that—and even though she didn’t follow me into my room that night, she did follow me a month or so later, and I was able to delude myself for a while that she was falling in love with me.

  Later, after she left, I kept a picture of the three of us on my bureau, taken when Alina was ten months old and we’d gone to Mount Hood for the day, Alina perched in one arm against my shoulder, and Nikki wrapped in the other, all of us smiling on the stone steps leading up to Timberline Lodge. I never tired of looking at that picture. I hoped Alina had a picture to remember me by, too, but even if her memories of me had faded to nothing, my love for her grew stronger—which helped me overcome my loss. I didn’t blame Nikki for leaving like she did. She was the most private person I ever knew. And I kept trying to get her to open up, knowing I was pushing too hard, unable to stop myself. The least I could do was give her space to get back in touch with me if she should ever so want to, which she never did—my own fault and nobody else’s.

  I marked Alina’s birthday each year with a trip to Timberline or Cannon Beach. Every girl in Pioneer Square reminded me of them, the girl Nikki had been and the girl Alina was becoming, the two of them sort of passing each other in my memory, crushing me and filling me all at once. Love like that’s a blessing, whether you can hold it or not. And even though I couldn’t hold it, I kept my love for them pure in my heart, careful not to spoil it with bitterness or regret, the sweetest joy of my life.

  12

  Burke

  I landed at Kennedy Airport a week before I was due, people in the rent a car line bitching about the heat and humidity, but it was nothing compared to Texas. Every minute since Nikki and I talked was a minute I spent wondering where she was and what she was up to, and what she thought I might do to her in the days ahead. I studied the map of the island, guessing it’d be like Corpus, with hotels everywhere, and since it was my first vacation in years, I figured I’d be staying in one of them swank places with a tiki bar on the sand. But there weren’t hotels like that. A dude at a gas station directed me to the Royalty Motor Lodge on Sunrise Highway, with microwave ovens and refrigerators in the rooms, cable porn and patio decks, whores coming and going for the short stay rate and a liquor store less than a mile away, all of it just about perfect. I sat on my patio deck mixing vodka and Coke, looking at pictures of Nikki and feeling part of this movement sweeping me along, jangly and coiled, like when you’ve just crested the rise on a roller coaster and are about to go swooping down. There was a lot of light left in the day. I thought about trying to score some blow. I was all peaceful and wired and calm up there, perched on the edge of my future, as happy as I’d been in I don’t know how long.

  13

  Nikki

  The boat’s all the way out in Port Jefferson and belongs to a friend of the family, Burl or Merle or somebody, forty-some people on this enormous white boat motoring out to the Sound on a perfect, ninety degree day in September, what feels like the last day of summer. Alina can’t stop crying, and I’ve been crying too, but time’s running out and I hate myself for scheming about how to approach Gino, wondering if I should just take Alina out of school and run. If Burke finds out about her, I don’t know what he might do, don’t know if he’ll try to claim her by proving me an unfit mother—a murderer. There’s no reason for her to know any of that ugly past. I don’t ever want her to wonder whether she came out of love or not. Because she did come out of love. Mine. I sit with her on a white cushioned seat at the back of the boat, way out in the Sound, as Celia tips the urn, what looks like a martini shaker, blubbering, Kyle’s ashes floating into the air, up and swirling before settling over the boat’s wake and dissolving.

  Mark

  I saw Nikki in the long hallway of the funeral home between services, carrying herself like Bianca Jagger, beautiful, distraught, strong for the moment, on the verge of collapse. I wondered how much she really knew, how much she cared. She’d been devastated the night we learned of the accident, but she seemed too self-contained to ever need anyone, the way I once needed Cynthia. Maybe if Kyle had died alone or never been born, Cynthia and I would have found a way to be happy. Maybe we would have gotten married and had babies and done the things people do. A week before she died, the idea would have been laughable, but now I couldn’t quite tell. Because now I kept reaching for her, even though she seemed to be everywhere.

  The last day I saw her alive we attended a party at her parents’ place in Cove Neck, a fund raiser for the Metropolitan Opera, a thousand dollars a head, fifteen hundred per couple. Out on the lawn, eating cake under an enormous white tent, Cynthia said, “This isn’t going to last forever, you know.”

  “What isn’t?” I said. We’d been there three and a half hours. It seemed like it already had lasted forever.

  “This freedom,” she said, “to do what we want.”

  The operatic music had finally ended and now professional partiers surrounded us, beautiful event-specialists in polka dotted clown clothes, on stilts, in sparkling leotards, the theme of the event being Summer Circus Spectacular. They smiled and laughed and blew noisemakers and wrapped the donors in purple boas, pulling them to the dance floor for booty-shaking to the bad, disc-jockeyed music. A contortionist contorted herself on a raised platform in one corner of the tent. It seemed obscene, something the authorities should be made aware of, but when I looked around the tent, I realized the authorities were all there.

  “What freedom?” I said. We’d entered a stage in our relationship where every conversation, every word, was a potential fuse for the pending explosion.

  “To get out of here,” she said. “To walk away. Someone had to set this up, you know, draft a guest list, mail out invitations, hire caterers.” She took a sip from her water bottle. “Then she has to wait for these people to leave. This is what adults do. Years ago, it was children to worry about. This is the same thing—waiting for the children to go to sleep, waiting for the sliver of day that’s yours to breathe in. And I don’t want to talk about kids again. You know how I feel. I’m just saying, there’s an inevitability to things. Kids included. Kids especially.”

  I saw Diana in her gold lame dress, working the tent, touching ladies’ forearms, men’s shoulders, as she sparkled through the small talk, her face tight and radiant. She made her way toward us, greeting us each with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. I noticed Kyle across the lawn at a glass-topped table with Denys and a neighbor woman, Marilyn, whose husband had been murdered on the Long Island Railroad in a shooting rampage several years earlier.

  “When did Kyle get here?” Cynthia asked her mother.

  “I don’t know, dear. He looks wonder
ful.”

  For once he wasn’t wearing leather pants.

  “Come on,” Cynthia said.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  Across the lawn, Kyle stood to offer Cynthia his chair, then grabbed another one for himself. They talked. They laughed. She touched his leg, his arm, his hand. Marilyn, the neighbor with the murdered husband, looked like she was about to cry.

  Cynthia’s youngest niece, Tamara, approached me with a juice box. “Can you open this, Uncle Mark?” I punctured the box and handed it to her. She took a drink, staring at me, then wiped her mouth and said, “Do you know where the wind comes from?”

  Cynthia sat adoring Kyle at their table across the lawn.

  “The motion of the earth?” I said to Tamara.

  “No,” she said.

  “Clouds?”

  “No,” she said. She took a hit of juice, then pointed over my shoulder. “Look up.” I turned and saw the maples rippling.

  “See the trees moving and shaking like that?”

  “Yes,” I said, and she said, “They wake up and start shaking.”

  “That’s cool,” I said, and she said, “I know it is.”

  Later, Cynthia and I walked to the Sound while Kyle gave her nieces rides on his motorcycle. She took my hand and told me she wished I was coming to Lake George for her family reunion. “The girls love you,” she said. “I think they make Beth a better person—less selfish. I’ve seen that change.”

  We walked in silence for a while, until she let go of my hand and said, “I’m just so tired of everything we do,” and I thought, Okay. Let’s get this over with, and she said, “Drinking and looking at art and finding new ways to stimulate ourselves . . . when all we really need is babies.” She took my hand again. “I think I’ve figured out what everyone probably always knew—that babies are just these fantastic love generators.”