Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  ‘Come on in.’

  So I do. The baby jumps up, and I pull her into my arms. I give her the doll, which she takes shyly and then hugs. I tell her that I missed her. I ask her about the flight. Questions that Madeleine cannot answer. She shows the doll to her mommy. Her mommy says hello to the doll. The human drama is so obvious to me now, how to direct it.

  We have a suite. We put Madeleine to bed. I tell her a story. Once upon a time there was a frog and a centipede. And the frog fell asleep, and the centipede crawled into the frog’s mouth looking for a warm place to rest. And the frog closed his mouth and swallowed the centipede, and the centipede tickled the frog from the inside and said, Let me out, and the frog opened his mouth, and the centipede came out, and then they were friends.

  And Madeleine is just barely satisfied with the story, but she lets me kiss her on both cheeks, and she holds the new doll – a penguin? a teddy bear? a bunny? – and lets me leave her in the strange new room with the door open just a bit. And then her mommy goes into the room and stays for a long time, half an hour, until Madeleine is really asleep, and then she comes out of the room, with a smile back at her daughter, and then she slaps me across the face, one hand, then the other hand, and tells me she wants a divorce, that I’ll never change, that I’m a loser.

  And I tell her what does she know about losers? She hasn’t crossed the fucking police barricades, she hasn’t walked through the devastated houses.

  I’m fine the way I am and I like myself, I yell at her. And I could hit her, I could slap her face too if I want, but I don’t. So she slaps me again, and she tells me she never really loved me, that from the day we met she wondered who I really was, and that a week doesn’t go by when she doesn’t ask herself why she stays with me, sometimes this is the only thought in her head, for days, maybe she never has another thought in her head except that one, not since the wedding. Well, you’re dead now, I say, so I don’t have to listen to this. And she says, Yes, you do.

  I go back to the knock on the door. Put the baby to bed. Finish with the frog. Anna follows. She comes out of the room and looks at me. Again, I keep my eyes away from hers. She says nothing for five minutes. A long time. I say, I can’t stand this. I need to know. I need for her to tell me what she’s thinking. She could say, The letter must have been hard to write. So I can shrug. I don’t know if I could have written that, she says, if I had fucked around. The word hurts. Is she building up to something, the attack again, the slapping? I shrug again. The little boy. Is it really over? she asks. Yes. And were you having lunch with her? Yes. Did you kiss her goodbye? Yes. On the tongue? Please. But would Anna have asked that? No. Because she wouldn’t want to know? Or because her imagination did not search for humiliation? How well did he know her? How long were you seeing her? A while. Six months. Why did it end?

  He liked these questions, they were honest, and begged for honesty. All he had to do was keep his bargain with the truth. It ended because I wanted to have a real marriage. Because I wanted to be a father again. How do I know I can trust you? You can’t. What an answer! How do I know you won’t fuck another woman again? You can’t. So why should I stay with you? I don’t know. Did you mean it about having another child? I think so. Not a definite yes? I can’t be definite about anything right now. Then why are you here? I want to try. So you’re trying something with me? Yes. But then you’re really just experimenting with yourself. I hope not. But you might be. Yes. Then I’m just an experiment, and if the experiment fails, you’ll have me pregnant again, or with a second child, before you realize that this was all a mistake. I don’t know. But you do know. I don’t think so. Then if you don’t know, you’re asking me to take all of the risks, because if you back out, I’m the one who loses. I suppose so. That’s right, you see it, I’m right. Yes. So there’s no reason to stay together, because I can never trust you. I’m sorry. I’m sure you really are sorry, I’m sure this tears you apart, I’m sure you feel miserable. I do. I know you, of course you do, but look at this, here I am, feeling sorry for you, and you’re the one who broke his vows. I am admitting the affair. Are you telling me that you haven’t slept with anyone else? Never. Is there any hope for us? Probably not.

  Frank is silent again, but this time without any kind of plan. They sleep in the same bed but do not touch. He is careful not to try.

  In the morning they have breakfast in the dining room that looks out over the beach. Madeleine brings her doll but spills marmalade on it and cries. The pineapple is dry. He drinks three cups of cinnamon-flavoured coffee, and his stomach burns. Anna arranges herself prettily, in profile to Frank, knowing that he hates the affectation of the pose, and she watches the sea. Frank eats too much from the buffet, three servings of a spicy omelette with peppers and chorizo. This hurts his stomach too. Madeleine drinks her juice and flirts with a six-year-old girl at another table.

  Everyone goes to the beach in the morning. Frank rents an umbrella and chairs. He orders drinks from a cabana boy. Anna has a margarita, and reads magazines, Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest, which she bought at the airport in Los Angeles.

  Madeleine plays with a few little girls. Frank drinks too much and falls asleep. Anna drinks and sleeps. Someone wakes them up, the cabana boy.

  There has been an accident. Please come.

  Frank sees a crowd at the water’s edge, in a circle. The crowd shifts, and Anna cries out. Madeleine is dead. She had been playing in the water, no one was watching her when the wave knocked her down, it happened so quickly.

  No one was watching her.

  There is nothing to be done.

  The parents stand by helplessly as the police take the body away, and then the hotel’s manager helps make the arrangements to return home. They fly home with the body in a tiny coffin. Lowell meets them at the airport in Los Angeles. Everyone asks them how it happened. They tell the same story, that Madeleine was with a babysitter, and the sitter couldn’t swim, and when Madeleine was caught by a wave, she was gone before help could save her.

  Everyone tells them to sue. Frank’s mother forces them to see an attorney. The attorney advises them of the difficulty in a lawsuit. Whom will they sue? The hotel? Or the Mexican babysitter? Some campesino’s daughter who lives in a house with dirt floors? ‘This is one of those things,’ says the lawyer. ‘If this had happened in America, and they had contracted for the sitter through an American hotel, then they might have had a case.’ He is sorry. So are they.

  They go back to the house, put the baby’s things away, and then Frank moves out, to a motel. In three months they are divorced.

  Or he did not miss the plane. And Lonnie Walter forgot his rage, in the parking lot, he put his gun away, and thought of his family, thought of his sister, and could not bring himself to so dishonour them, and returned home, and found a kind psychologist, and rebuilt his life, and trained for a new job, and made peace with himself. And Frank buys Madeleine a toy in the airport gift shop, a key chain with a plastic surfboard ridden by Mickey Mouse. He helps her with a colouring book on the flight. He gives her gum to chew for the descent into Acapulco. There is time for a swim in the afternoon. While Anna is in the shower, Frank tucks the letter behind the extra pillows on the shelf in the closet. Everything is just as it should be. That night they have a pleasant dinner looking out at the sea. He makes love to Anna, starting with a slow massage of her feet and ankles. They exhaust themselves. He makes a lot of noise when he comes, like a buffalo, a heavy grunt, and then a series of strangled cries. When he’s finished, he laughs. In the morning he takes Madeleine for a walk, leaving the letter behind. When they return, the room is empty. On the back of the letter he had left for her, Anna has left her own note. It reads:

  Dear Frank,

  I have gone home to Los Angeles. We took a vow of fidelity when we married. You broke that vow. I have decided not to forgive you.

  Anna’s flight back to Los Angeles crashes. Wind shear, whatever that means, though the weathermen on television try to expla
in. Some freak of nature, a sudden shift in the air, and the plane loses its lift. And Frank is now a single father. He sues the airline. He makes a lot of money, enough to build a recording studio in his house. Through a friend at a record label, he is introduced to a singer, and helps the singer make a demonstration tape of one song. The label likes it and hires Frank to produce the singer’s album. The record sells well. Frank meets many beautiful women, and is happy. Or he would be happy, but he learns how weak he is at being a father, how inadequate. Madeleine will not let him forget that she misses Anna. Nothing helps her, because she knows that her father doesn’t really love her. That her father would always rather be some place else, doing something for himself, not for her, not with her.

  He tries to find someone to marry, but no one ever really loves him. He calls Mary Sifka a few years after Anna’s death, to say hello, to tell her he has survived, and she is pregnant and happy. There is nothing between them any more, or rather, he tests her and finds that she has no feeling for him, other than a genial good cheer, which Frank believes is proof that she once loved him, and that he should have left Anna for her. After the call he can never quite stop bothering himself with the scenario of a life that turned on a passion. He asks himself, What if I had told Anna that I loved another woman, that whether or not I married this other woman, the love itself, a real love, proved to me the death of my marriage, that I could not be a model to my own daughter if I stayed married against the instinct of every cell in my body? He thinks, Well, I wouldn’t have said that part, about the cells in the body, but what if I had said the rest?

  He starts to drink. Madeleine becomes a withdrawn and confused child, and even with the help of psychologists her sombre and arid character cannot be changed. Frank sends her to a private school that specializes in offering paid sympathy to the damaged children of the rich. Her grades are only average, and the friends she makes are colourless, bored with each other. They protect themselves by mocking each other’s enthusiasms. After three years at an expensive but mediocre college, she gets a job, with the help of a friend’s father, working as an assistant to a casting director in Los Angeles, who encourages her to see all the movies and plays she can. Madeleine buys the tickets, or accepts free tickets from the theatres, but never sees the plays. The casting director gently talks to Madeleine about ambition, and finally Madeleine tells her that she prefers the routine of the job. She explains to the casting director that she has no interest in running a business. At some point in her thirties she goes into analysis, at her father’s suggestion. In therapy she discovers that she has blocked herself at work because her father provided so few lessons in life for her. With deeper examination she analyses the complex structure of her family and discovers that Frank, as the always self-deprecating brother to the tycoon, never trusted his own abilities. Far from hating Frank for his weakness, after a few years on the couch, Madeleine defends her father’s contribution to the business, in ways that would make Frank cry if he could hear, since her compassion for his loss, the death of her mother, his struggle with a domineering and difficult brother, reveals something like love for him. Finally she tells her father that she knows how hard it must have been to raise her without a wife, and that she knows that he did the best he could. He wants to tell her that he could have done better, that every time he left her for something else, every time he could have read three stories to her instead of the one he did, every time he could have spent another half-hour with her on the floor, colouring, instead of letting her watch cartoons, he knew what he was doing, that he was sinning against her. But he does not say this.

  Following the paths along this circuitry of possibilities made Frank happy, but then he heard the analyst ask Madeleine, How did your mother die? Madeleine tells her, In a plane crash. And where was she going? She was going back to Los Angeles, from Acapulco. And why did she leave before you and your father?

  Yes, this is the issue in his daughter’s life, the great unanswered recurring question. The analyst comes back to the same questions: how did your mother die? She was killed in a plane crash. Where was she going? She was going to Los Angeles. We were in Mexico and she had to go home early.

  Frank watched sadly as Madeleine learned the truth.

  For the second year of her analysis this comes up often, her mother’s death, around which grows an aura of rage, which the analyst understands as the natural surfacing of long repressed feelings, blah blah blah. But the analyst herself has a dream of the mother’s death, and then she asks Madeleine why the mother was alone on a plane from Mexico to Los Angeles. Madeleine cries, and for three sessions she refuses to talk. When she does, she says, One of my cousins, on my father’s side, my cousin Julia, told me that my parents were having a fight, that my father wrote a letter to my mother telling her about an affair he’d been having, and that my mother left without saying goodbye.

  Frank could never have kept that story a secret; he would have shared it with someone.

  So the story ends not with the daughter forgiving the father for his sins, but, through the analysis he has paid for, perhaps paid for out of the trust fund established with the insurance settlement from her mother’s death, his daughter finds the courage to reject him totally, without apology.

  Clear of the foggy past, Madeleine can advance at work, find a man to love, without using him to play out scenarios of revenge against her father. The analysis ends with Madeleine asking the therapist if she is obligated by some standards of psychological health to reconcile with her father, and the analyst assures her that she is not, unless she wants to.

  Perhaps some years later she comes to Frank to apologize, but perhaps not.

  In this projection into the future, Frank assumes that Los Angeles muddles along without the big earthquake, that America muddles along without a military coup, that life goes on as it usually does. Frank dies, and the nurse in the next room hears his last word: ‘Mary.’

  The phone rang. Frank said hello to Julia Abarbanel.

  ‘Frank, it’s Julia.’

  ‘Why did you have to tell her?’

  She asked him, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The letter.’

  ‘What letter?’

  Frank wondered how Julia had even known about the letter, since he had torn it up and flushed it down the toilet. Anna had written her note to him on the back of the letter. But of course, she had seen the letter in the newspaper, when the plane crashed. But which plane had crashed? The one going or the one coming home? Why had he bothered telling his wife the truth? The truth had destroyed his life.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Frank, ‘I was having a dream.’

  ‘A nightmare.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘At Auschwitz the prisoners in the cell blocks wouldn’t wake someone up if he was having a nightmare, because reality was always worse.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’ What else was there to say?

  ‘I’m sick over this,’ she said.

  ‘It’s hard on all of us.’

  ‘I’m glad you said that. Nobody in the family really knows how to talk about this.’ At family dinners, at Passover or Thanksgiving, when there were fifteen people at a long table, he could talk to Julia, even with Anna there, and a bubble would form around them, and inside this bubble they could say anything about anyone at the table, and they couldn’t be heard. Now he was free. He thought they would be fucking soon. How was her body? She was what, thirty-five? Did she exercise? Was she firm?

  ‘Are you coming in?’ he asked. He wanted to see her.

  ‘Tomorrow. Your mother said there’s this thing in San Diego, but I can’t get in to LA until the afternoon.’

  ‘You don’t need to be here. The airline is throwing it. It’s not a funeral. It’s for the cameras.’

  ‘What do they know about the guy with the gun?’ Her questions were getting almost too casual, and Frank, as much as he wanted to scrape the crust from every facet of the event, wanted to set the limits, to maintain the fa
mily’s respect for his sorrow.

  ‘I haven’t actually followed that.’

  ‘Every airport in the country is putting security checks at all the employee entrances now.’

  ‘It’s a little late.’

  Julia was quiet. So she was embarrassed, he thought. She returned to Lonnie Walter. ‘They recovered the flight-recorder,’ she said.

  ‘I hadn’t heard that.’

  ‘They haven’t played it yet, but they have it. There’s a report that the control tower has it all on tape. I heard on the news that he came into the cockpit.’

  ‘Was it a bomb?’

  ‘A gun, that’s what they think. And he knew where to fire it, where the fuel lines run through the walls, where to blow out the windows, so he turned the plane into a bomb.’

  ‘Everyone must have seen it.’ If he had said this to his mother, she would have told him not to think about it, because she didn’t want to have the picture of a terrified Anna and an ignorant-of-the-crisis Madeleine watching the crazed black gunman forcing his way to the cockpit with a flight attendant. But it was something he could say to Julia, and a way of exciting her, getting her ready for bed.

  ‘What a shitty way to die,’ she said.

  ‘At least it’s fast,’ said Frank. ‘That’s the only blessing I can find. You can’t even imagine how scared they must have been, but then it’s over. It’s not like starving to death in a lifeboat.’

  ‘Did you see the letter?’ she asked, skipping to another subject.

  ‘Which letter?’

  ‘There you go about letters again,’ she said, lightly. ‘The letter this husband wrote to his wife?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, Mom and Dad said something about that.’