Emily, Alone

by Stewart O'Nan

  She didn’t need to stop at the office. Though she’d long forgotten his section number, she knew the way by heart, angling off as the drive wound through the terraced hills and woody nooks, splitting and then splitting again. She envied their spearlike poplars and torturous Japanese maples, dark as port. The grounds ran on and on, deep and wide as a park, an endless English garden in summer’s full, blowzy bloom, nature half tamed for the strolling patron’s contemplation. She passed lichened mausoleums and obelisks, nodding at favorites like the kneeling, harp-winged angel and Mr. Vandergrift’s absurdly heroic Corinthian pillar. The rough-hewn boulders and cracked marble sarcophagi, the ornate bas-reliefs—the grand permanence of it would always impress her. Here was Pittsburgh’s history in vaulted crypts and bronze war monuments, the industrialists and artists, the actresses and architects. Coming from Kersey, she’d thought it would be an honor to be buried here, and still did. As morbid as it sounded, she’d be proud, one day, to lie beside Henry.

  She knew it was an illusion, the idea that he was here. Henry wasn’t one to linger. His spirit or soul had flown, off to happily tackle whatever work was needed. And yet, as she turned the last gentle curve and slowed, pulling to the side, she felt a flutter of anticipation comprised equally of excitement and dread, as if he might chastise her for being late.

  Her door unlocked automatically—the one thing she didn’t like about the car. She was alone, and stepped out of the air-conditioning into a suffocating stillness. The pond, several rings below, was carpeted with lily pads. In the trees cicadas whined, a shrill, simmering thread. From a distance, like a passing train, came the low, shifting rush of the city.

  She popped the back, the metal of the hatch searing her palm, making her snatch her hand away. She’d brought a watering can, along with her gardening basket. Neither was heavy, but with the cosmos, she’d have to make two trips. Against her instincts, she left the hatch open, thinking she’d be right back.

  Three white marble steps flanked by urns led her up onto the lawn—a lush green despite the lack of rain. The section dated from the midnineteenth century, when Henry’s great-grandfather had secured the family plot with oil money. As far as she could see, nothing had changed since her last visit. The stones she passed were older, the names raised rather than graven, letters edged with soot. CHALFANT, KNAPP, ATWATER—families lost to history, as she and Henry would be, ultimately. The idea made her bite her lip. Why, here, surrounded by its symbols, did she doubt the promise of eternity?

  The slope was steeper than it appeared, and shadeless. Wanting to look nice for him, she’d worn the wrong shoes, and had to be careful, taking little mincing steps, carrying the cosmos out before her with both hands as if it were a hot casserole. As she neared the Maxwells’ plot, even before she could read his name, she saw the flag on Henry’s grave. It was her doing, indirectly, having let them know he was a veteran, and yet its presence stung. She thought it was wrong that someone else had visited him when she hadn’t.

  Beside him, his parents’ graves were naked, and she wished she’d thought to bring something for them. She was a poor guest, her mother would say. The Maxwells had taken her in when she was just a raw girl from the sticks. For a moment she stood there shielding her eyes from the glare, recalling holidays they’d spent together, Lillian in her pearls and apron flitting about her kitchen with a tumbler of gin, waving away Emily’s offers of help. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’ve got my own system.” It might have been last Christmas, yet—could that be right?—she’d been dead nearly thirty years. She was so much what Emily had wanted to be, cultured and unflappable. Without her, what would Emily have become? It seemed too great a debt to ever repay, and here she’d brought her nothing.

  Lillian and Gerald’s headstones were matching, cut from a single block of Vermont granite. When Henry had died, Emily had done her best to find the same stone but it was impossible, and the slight difference in color bugged her like a flubbed note. She’d included the bill of sale in the folder with her will so the children would know where to go for hers. She could rely on Kenneth. She’d reminded him of it several times over the phone, and while he wasn’t as responsive as she might have wished, he knew it was important to her.

  Why? When was the last time they’d come to see Henry? After her funeral, when would they ever come back to Pittsburgh? It wouldn’t matter to her then, so why did it matter now?

  Because, like the stone, it did. The problem, she thought, was that she couldn’t draw a solid line between life and death, or, approaching that line herself, hopefully refused to. She was sure it was selfish, and ungrateful, given the eternal peace she prayed would be granted her, but she didn’t want to leave. All she’d ever wanted was a quiet, dignified life. She thought she might finally achieve that here.

  She would be on his right, replicating the way they slept, Arlene in the very next plot. Even here, Emily couldn’t escape her.

  Though she knew it was foolish, rather than tread on their graves, she detoured around the edges, walking an imaginary aisle between the plots, as if they could hear her tromping around above them. She stopped at the head of Henry’s, resting one hand on the arched top of his stone as if it were his shoulder, then, bracing herself, bent over, the motion squeezing out her breath for a second, and set the pot on the grass. She hoped he didn’t mind the pink.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, but then, as she gingerly picked her way down to the car, felt silly. When she’d first come, she could still hear his voice in her head, and indulged in conversations they might have had at home. “I don’t know what to do about Margaret,” she’d say, and hear him answer, “She’s an adult, you don’t have to do anything about her.” Now she heard only herself, and she sounded doting and maudlin, neither of which Henry had any patience for, even before he fell ill. “Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot,” he once scolded her from his hospital bed. “I’m dying, not stupid.” She understood him exactly. She was as practical as he was, and as angry, or had been then. She feared that the years alone had warped her, turned her sentimental, as they’d done her mother, staying on in the old place, growing stranger and stranger each time they visited, talking about people who were long dead as if that morning she’d run into them at the IGA. The danger was just this, retreating into the netherworld of the past, but what else was there?

  Even with the back open, the car was an oven. She had to set the basket and the watering can down to close the hatch, then climbed the three steps again and trudged uphill. The weather was wrong—it wasn’t lunchtime and it was already hotter than they said. She imagined how bad Grafton Street was, with the noise and the dust, and was grateful she was here.

  “Here we are,” she said like a nurse.

  She hadn’t brought her stool, and stiffly folded herself down on the grass, falling backward the last few inches, her outstretched hand tipping the basket, spilling a jumble of gloves.

  “Very graceful, Emily.”

  Somewhere beyond the pond a mower sputtered to life, then throttled up, buzzing. She straightened her visor and tugged on her gloves, chose a spot in the center and got to work with her spade. Under the grass the ground was baked hard. She chipped at it, taking little divots.

  Why did she think it would be easy?

  There was a spigot behind the Spruill crypt, and she carried the watering can over and filled it halfway. She could barely lift it with both hands, and had to stop on the way back to flex her fingers.

  She emptied the can over the beginnings of the hole. Rather than soak in, the water pooled and ran like quicksilver through the grass.

  “Honestly now.”

  She tried the spade for a while, then went and got more water, stopping twice this time. The water seemed to soak in, yet when she settled herself and started digging, the ground refused to yield. She rested, catching her breath. The sun was higher now. She was sweating and her gloves were muddy, and she was tempted to just pack it in and come back tomorrow with a
shovel.

  To stand, she had to first get on her hands and knees, lean back and free one foot so it was flat on the ground, then brace a hand against Henry’s stone and half pull, half push herself upright. She was tired and hot, and it was an effort, though, as Dr. Sayid always said, she weighed almost nothing. She was not quite all the way up, remarking on how little strength she had—what few reserves a person her age possessed—when a wave of dizziness struck her. Her vision dimmed, a shadow passing between her and the world. With both hands she held on to the stone, afraid she’d pitch backward and hit her head. She clung to it, hoping the spell would lift, seeing, as she waited, Arlene at the Eat ’n Park.

  She thought, wildly, that if she was going to die, she was glad it would be here.

  Did she really believe that? Because she didn’t want to die at all. She wanted to go to Chautauqua. She wanted to see the children. She was just being dramatic, as her mother so often accused.

  She waited, stock-still, suffering the rush, and gradually her senses returned, like blood filling a sleeping limb. She touched a hand to her throat. Her pulse was fine. She’d just stood up too quickly.

  “Slow down, leadfoot,” she said, as if she were talking to Rufus. “It’s not a race.”

  She heeded her own advice, taking a break before she lugged the can over to the spigot, and then filling it only a quarter of the way. She made four trips, thoroughly saturating the ground before sitting down again. It seemed to help. Slowly but surely she was making progress. She dug and rested, dug and rested, switching the spade from hand to hand. She leaned in over the hole, chopping at the sides, scooping out the muck. She was sure that anyone watching would think she was a crazy woman, stabbing at Henry’s grave in her get-up. She didn’t care. There was no guarantee the cosmos would last the week, let alone the winter, but she was already a mess, and this was what she’d come to do. She wasn’t leaving until she was done.

  OLD HOME DAYS

  There was nothing like crossing things off her list to raise her spirits, and her sights. Days after visiting Henry, fortified by her success and spurred by the rapidly dwindling calendar, she loaded a pair of cosmos into the Subaru and set off for Kersey.

  She left early in the morning, before the workmen arrived, taking the shortcut through the zoo. The sun over the reservoir was blinding. Already there was traffic backed up at the bridge. Once she was across the river and headed north on 28, it dissipated, and soon, except for the occasional school bus or coal truck, she was alone on the road, the windshield filled with blue sky.

  It had been a good ten years since she’d been back, and Henry had driven then. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d made the drive by herself, though she’d done it enough when the children were little, piling their sleeping bags and pillows into the station wagon. 28 had been a winding two-lane then, snaking over the hills and through the hollows, slowing for every crossroads hamlet. Now the lower half was practically an interstate, bypassing places like Slate Lick and Ford City, whose drive-ins and billboards they’d ticked off like mileposts. To pass the time they played games. “I spy with my little eye” was Kenneth’s favorite. How disappointed he’d be. On both sides the woods ran unbroken, a grassy strip down the middle. There was nothing to distract the driver, and while it made the trip that much faster, she thought it was a loss, and was glad when, outside Kittanning, the two lanes became one, funneling her into a bumpy chute that led to a stoplight she remembered once being new.

  From there on, the road was familiar, each curve and dip an old friend. Junkyards and Christmas tree farms, hunting camps and log cabin taverns. It was like going back in time. She was pleased to see the Twin Pines was still going strong, and tickled that the black barn advertising Mail Pouch tobacco was still standing, the sign faded yet legible: TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST.

  “Yes,” Emily said, “why not?”

  She was happy to be out of the city and on her own, going somewhere, a foretaste of Chautauqua, mere days away. From Spaces Corners to Distant, she knew the lonely houses and windbreaks and cornfields, the dusty lanes that led off into the hills. In New Bethlehem the few changes she noticed were on a large scale—a huge addition to the high school, and right past that a hideous commercial strip with a Wal-Mart and a sprawling gas plaza. The train tracks they used to have to slow for to save the car’s shocks were paved over, weeds sprouting between the ties, but outside of town the Shannon Dell looked ready for business, the giant cone on top freshly painted. The old round-shouldered gas pumps by the butcher shop, the dollhouse-sized church on a pole that marked the turn for a real one—she reveled in each rediscovery, as if these treasures had been preserved for her. It was a mystery. She’d been driving this road her whole life, fleeing or returning, her every passage fraught with guilt. It was only natural that the landscape would hold some residual tinge, yet, rather than feeling pursued by those old ghosts, she felt welcome, as if, imperceptibly, over the intervening years, there’d been a shift within her.

  “I’m sorry you don’t like coming back here,” her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they’d had. How could Emily explain: it wasn’t her mother or Kersey she’d disowned, but her earlier self, that strange, ungrateful girl who strove to be first at everything and threw tantrums when she failed. From the moment she left home, Emily had tried to distance herself from that child, taking on the calm mantle of privilege and sophistication, an impersonation impossible to sustain there, where everyone knew her as a teacher’s pet and a crybaby. Perhaps Emily had finally forgiven her. Or it might be, she thought, having lived long enough, she’d come to think of everyone close to her with a helpless tenderness, accepting that life was hard and people did their best. Certainly it was true of her mother. Was it a sin to extend that pity to herself?

  She wondered, less charitably, if her good mood had anything to do with the fact that this could be the last time she made the drive—as if she might be free of these questions once and for all. The idea troubled her, and she cleared her throat and refocused on the road.

  Near Brookville, where 28 met I-80, she poked along the busy strip of truck stops and fast-food boxes, afraid she’d miss her turn. The interstate would always be new to her, an intruder from the future. In the sixties when it was being built, the chamber of commerce imagined it would fuel a boom, belatedly bringing industry to Kersey. All that was needed was another interstate running north-south, which, as her father enjoyed pointing out, no one but the chamber of commerce had ever imagined. “If wishes were horses,” he loved to say, “beggars would ride.” Since I-80 went in, Kersey, like all the towns around it, had only grown smaller. Henry called the cluster of gas stations around the interchange the last bastion of civilization. “Everybody wave,” he told the children, a joke she didn’t appreciate, dreading, as she did, sleeping in her old room.

  She slowed to read the green signs. “East,” she said to double-check, and swung up the ramp.

  At the top she had to merge, but didn’t see a gap, and waited, stopped, as several pairs of tractor-trailers whipped past, neck and neck, rocking her car. A big SUV rolled up behind her, and though she pulled out as soon as she saw an opening, before she was fully in her lane the other driver slid wide and roared past as if, like Arlene, she were going too slow. She checked her speedometer and was even more annoyed. She was already going the limit.

  She stayed on the interstate for just one exit. Technically she’d never left 28; it was a jog to let through-traffic skip downtown Brookville, which she didn’t miss at all. She stuck to the right lane and, getting off, was happy to leave 80 to the truckers and speed demons.

  After the turn for Munderf, the road climbed into the rugged hill country, winding through deep woods, the asphalt humped and rutted by logging trucks, muddy turnouts for trailheads and deer-crossing signs everywhere. By a shuttered ranger station, Smokey the Bear stood guard with his shovel, holding her solely responsible for stopping forest fires. She was close now, another twenty min
utes at most, and congratulated herself for making it this far. There was still time to turn back—but why would she think that? She hadn’t come just for them, out of strictly filial obligation. She was here for herself as well.

  Brockway was the last big town, pallets of different-colored bricks stacked high beside the old glass factory, and then she was out in the sticks again. Toby Creek ran alongside the road, looping wide in oxbows, then cutting back underneath. Mile by mile she was following it, like her life, upstream to its source. As she passed through Crenshaw and Brockport and Challenge with their consignment shops and bait ponds and used car lots, she thought that this was all hers, all home. She wanted to apologize to her mother, and wondered if it was too late.

  The cemetery was on Skyline Drive, just over the line from Dagus Mines. In high school it had been the big make-out spot, the view supposedly an aphrodisiac (she would never know). As she crested the hill, all of Kersey spread before her in miniature, glinting in the sun: Main Street and the courthouse dome, to the west the roof of the new school and its giant parking lot, the blocks beyond dotted with cheap swimming pools. Her house was down there beneath the shade trees on Taylor Street, and as she neared the entrance she had the urge to go see the old place first, and just as quickly vetoed the idea as cowardly. She’d have time later. First things first.

  DOGS MUST BE ON LEASH AT ALL TIMES, a sign welcomed her. Inside the listing iron fence, the grass was burnt yellow and badly mowed, tufts sticking up everywhere, the drive narrow and crumbling at its edges. Having just visited Henry, she couldn’t help but compare the two cemeteries. There were no heroic columns or pillared crypts, no obelisks or angels, just row on row of modest stones. No one famous was buried here. Like Kersey, it was homely and remote. You’d only find it if you already knew the way.

  She parked and turned off the car, popped the hatch and stepped out, expecting silence, but was met instead by the rhythmic clanking of a pile-driver rising from town. Between blows an engine chuffed—twice, three times, gathering steam—and then the hammer banged down again. She supposed it was good: someone was building something. Her father would be pleased.