by Anne Calhoun
Which was what she’d wanted. Like pulling off a plaster, or resetting a dislocated joint, she’d wanted this done. In theory the pain would lessen quickly. But right now the pain lanced through her, sharp and irregular, taking her breath away with each unpredictable pulse as she hurried up the steps and through the front door of her town house to claim her bag, then turn right back around and get back in the cab, and head for Kennedy Airport.
A little stack of Daniel’s business cards sat on the table by the front door. Sorrow stabbed her when she saw them and realized that very likely when she got home they wouldn’t be there. Her brain shied away from the image, taking refuge in a fast-moving bike messenger matching pace with her cab. Details. She would note them and write them down, a unique part of New York to describe for Nan. A deep tan, blade shades, a helmet that had seen better days, tattoos on his upper arms and forearms, messenger bag slung across his back. Drafting descriptive phrases was enough to get her through the TSA’s pre-check line, into the terminal and to the gate where her flight to London was waiting for her. She settled into her seat, closed her eyes, and let the blessedly cool, humming interior of the plane envelope her.
—
She slept most of the way to London, landing in the summer’s evening, reaching for her phone as soon as the plane’s wheels touched down on the tarmac. She powered the phone on, and finished off the contents of her water bottle while she waited for it to boot. As soon as her phone connected with the network, it started to buzz frantically, downloading texts and emails and phone calls and voice mails all missed while she was in the air.
She checked her texts first, and found nothing of importance other than a text from Colin with the name, address, and phone number of the restaurant where she was to meet him and the leadership team from Quality. While she waited for the stewardess to open the cabin door, she checked her missed calls, scanning the list from bottom to top. Pauline, Penny, Pauline, Pauline, Mum, Pauline, Colin, Penny, Mum, a supplier, two friends, Pauline.
Pauline was the home health aide taking care of Nan. She’d never called before. Her mother rarely called, and certainly not after seeing Tilda the week prior. Her stomach cramped hard around nothing, as she missed all of the airline’s in-flight meals. With trembling fingers she scrolled to Pauline’s number and tapped call.
“’Lo?”
“Pauline, it’s Tilda.”
“Tilda. Oh, love. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. It was quick. I promise, it was quick.”
The man seated next to her got to his feet and started rummaging through the overhead bin for his carry-on items. Tilda startled when the plane jerked and shuddered as the Jetway connected with it. Beneath her, the cargo bay door flopped open so they could begin unloading the luggage. “What happened?” Tilda managed.
“Didn’t your mum call you? She didn’t suffer, I’m sure of it.” With that, Tilda’s mind snapped free of its mooring. Words like blood clot and ambulance and never seen anything like it free-fell through her consciousness, into her stomach, which threatened to vomit back up the water. “By then, it was too late,” Pauline finished. “I called you and when you didn’t answer I called your mother. I thought she’d call you.”
“She tried,” Tilda managed.
Her seatmate gestured for Tilda to precede him off the plane. She yanked her bag from the overhead bin and stumbled down the aisle. “I just landed at Heathrow. I’m here on business.”
“Well, your mum’s arranged the funeral. You know how she is. Efficient,” Pauline said, and hung up.
Tilda stood in the middle of the gate area, people milling around her, organizing their bags and coats and children, and stared at her phone. Then she called her mother next. “Tilda. Where have you been?”
“Nan’s dead?”
“I left you a voice mail, darling. Did you not listen to it?”
“What happened?” Tilda asked, her voice trembling.
“A pulmonary embolism, which was a complication following the surgery on her ankle.”
“What’s . . . a what?”
“A blood clot formed deep in her leg, broke free, and traveled to her lungs. She died. Apparently it’s a possible complication from prolonged immobilization. One can’t always trust these home health aides.”
“Pauline would have made sure Nan followed the doctor’s protocols,” Tilda said. She had. She’d been there for Nan, while Tilda had been everywhere and nowhere at all. “It’s not her fault.”
Silence on the other end of the line, then Tilda said, “When?”
“The funeral is scheduled for the day after tomorrow. Can you be here in time?”
That’s not what she meant. She meant When did Nan die? But her mother missed the connection, and Tilda couldn’t go back and reclaim it. “I’m already here. I’ve come to London to close the deal with Quality.”
“That’s a stroke of good luck.”
Tilda barked out a laugh, then covered her eyes with her hand. “What if I hadn’t been able to make it? Would you have buried her without me?”
“Tilda, darling, it’s just a funeral.”
“Mum, it’s not just a funeral. It’s when we—” she said, and even as she spoke the words, knew herself to be a hypocrite of the worst sort. She’d treated Daniel’s funerals with no more care than her mother was treating Nan’s. She swallowed but her voice still came out, heavy with an emotion her mother would deplore. “Celebrate her life. Say good-bye. Be there for each other.”
“There’s no point in discussing this, darling, because you’re here and can attend the funeral. I’ve emailed you the arrangements. Based on that tedious noise in the background, I presume you’re at Heathrow. Can you make your own way to Cornwall? I need to finish a book review before I go there myself, otherwise, I would offer to pick you up and drive you there.”
Tilda’s breath left her in a rush. “I’ll be fine, Mum,” she said.
Her mother hung up. Slowly, Tilda drew the phone away from her ear and stared at the screen. The call time flashed, then faded away. She knew she should feel something, that her mother’s behavior was inappropriate, but right now she couldn’t feel anything other than bereft shock. Nan was dead. That fact, as unfathomable as it was, kept hitting her, little stinging darts to her chest, her gut, the nape of her neck. She looked around the terminal, filled with people coming and going, alone, in pairs, or as families.
Daniel. She should call Daniel. He would want to know. She tapped on his contact information and called his mobile, but the call went straight to voice mail. She left a message, not even sure what she was saying as she spoke, but trusting him to get the necessary information.
She caught a glimpse of a woman in the mirror, tall and slim, with tired black curls, and a stricken expression on her face. After a moment Tilda realized the woman in the mirror was her, and her soul had finally caught up with her. Moving slowly, feeling the ache of sheer exhaustion in her joints, she started walking to the bus stop that would take her to the station to catch the train to Cornwall.
—
Daniel braced his hip on the corner of his desk and plucked his phone from the stack of paperwork threatening to tip off the other side. “We need proof. In writing is best. Audio if you can’t get it in writing. Ideally we want both.”
Ryan Malone, top Wall Street trader turned whistleblower braced his head in his hands, scrubbed at his scalp with his fingers, then sat back and blew out his breath. “I don’t know. If I push too hard, they’re going to figure out what I’m up to. They never talked about it to me, you know?”
“So we’ll develop a strategy,” Daniel said. Tilda had called. He tapped the voice mail playback button and waited for her voice to come out of the ether. “I saw you in the Post with what’s-her-name, the new face of Ralph Lauren.”
Ryan shrugged and flashed him a grin that was starting to look ragged around the edges. “I
t’s the best cover I could come up with. Watch the wolf of Wall Street tear it up over here,” he said, making magician moves with his hands, “and ignore all the questions he’s asking over there. Girls like her are a dime a dozen at the kind of party I go to,” he said. “Want me to hook you up?”
Tilda’s voice, oddly shaken, slid into Daniel’s ear. Daniel felt a pain so deep and hollow it took his breath away. He was married to a singular woman he loved and needed as much as he needed air, so no, he didn’t want an introduction to the kind of girl who came a dime a dozen. Receiver pressed to his ear, he waggled his ring finger at Ryan, then reached for a pen and paper to take a message.
Nan died
Pulmonary embolism
Funeral tomorrow
“You okay?” Ryan asked.
He sat there with the phone to his ear while the cheery automated voice ran through his options. Press one to replay. Press two to forward. Press three to delete. Press four to return to the main menu.
He replayed the message, and this time he heard the quiver in her voice, the careful, slow way she spoke, as if repeating what she couldn’t believe.
Nan was dead. This was going to tear Tilda apart.
“My wife’s grandmother just died,” he said.
“God,” Ryan said, his face immediately serious. “I’m sorry.”
Daniel took a deep breath and forced his attention back to the man sitting in front of him, the man who held the keys to the case of his career. “I have to go. Right now.”
– TWENTY-FIVE –
Tilda heard only her pulse, fluttering in her ears, her irregular, shallow breathing. The vicar’s voice barely registered. Tilda wondered if he was closer to Nan, if that’s why he sounded like he was speaking from the other end of a tunnel. His lips were moving, his Book of Common Prayer open in his hand as he led the mourners through the funeral rites, but sound came to her oddly distorted, an audio track out of sync with the video. She knelt beside her mother, folded her hands, bowed her head, but all she heard was the odd discordant silence that rang when loud machinery was shut off. Not echoes but rather the tympanic hum of the bones in her inner ear quivering with the strain of trying to hear something that was no longer there: Nan’s voice.
“In the midst of life we are in death; from whom can we seek help? From you alone, O Lord, who by our sins are justly angered,” the vicar said. He was young with a shock of ginger hair that stood out against his black robes, the black-clad mourners, and the walnut coffin, and painfully solemn about the rites, as if not quite comfortable with them yet. That makes two of us, Tilda thought. I am not comfortable with this at all.
Then the ringing began again. “Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitterness of eternal death,” the congregation repeated. The opening notes of a hymn burst into her consciousness, booming against her eardrums. She startled, heard voices behind her take up the first stanza of “Amazing Grace,” Nan’s favorite hymn. The music seemed to envelop her in an echoing drum. The notes ran at odd angles to each other, and tearing the sheet would leave jagged, uneven lines, pressing against her skin, her inner ears, her nostrils. She felt that if she opened her mouth the dark notes would slide down her throat, course through her stomach into her intestines, until she burst from it.
The last notes died away, intensifying the ringing in Tilda’s ears. The pallbearers came forward to lift the coffin containing Nan’s slight body and bear it out of the church. The vicar paused by their pew. Nan’s Book of Common Prayer clasped in her gloved hands, Tilda followed her mother and grandmother as she’d always done. As she walked she saw bodies in black and navy blue, but faces were a blur.
The sunshine was grotesque, blinding her until she fumbled on her sunglasses. The procession moved slowly down the steps, the pallbearers pausing to keep the coffin level, a gentleness that closed Tilda’s throat until it seemed like the ringing in her ears came not from the organ or the abrupt silence but rather from what she throttled in her own throat. The slate pathway was uneven, requiring all her concentration to keep her balance as she placed one foot in front of the other, the solid ground an unfamiliar and inhospitable place to be. She followed her mother, who followed the vicar, who followed the coffin to the graveyard, where the pallbearers set the coffin on the hoist that would lower it into the ground. She would send them notes edged in black, when she could find the right words, the right paper to say the unsayable. The vicar would know their names, addresses.
The thought of writing another letter made her stomach heave. Letters were for what was real. They were for Nan. Tilda had built her whole life, her whole career around the one thing that had grounded her since she was eight years old, and now Nan was gone.
Her mother sank into the first chair beside the grave as if her knees gave way at the sight of the obscene gash in the ground and the bald mound of dirt beside it. Perhaps the dirt made it real for her, as it did for Tilda. Tilda did not have the strength to push past her to the second chair, so she locked her knees and stood beside her mother, waiting while what seemed like the entire village formed a rough semicircle around the grave. A breeze shivered through the leaves.
She couldn’t do this alone, and yet she deserved to do it alone. After all, she had left her husband to deal with his own grief not once, but twice. She’d been there for Deshawn’s funeral only in body, not in spirit.
“You are dust, and to dust you shall return. All of us go down to the dust, yet even at the grave we make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” The vicar bent, his movements both awkward and real, and grasped a handful of dirt, letting it trickle through his fist, onto the polished walnut. He glanced at Tilda. She was supposed to do the same. It was a ritual, comforting, an anchor for the living in the scent and feel of Cornwall dirt, where it all began.
Could she claim an earlier beginning than the one she’d had in a hotel room in Tokyo?
Her mother’s rigid shoulders forced Tilda to push the question aside. “Mum,” she said softly. “Come on, Mum.”
Like a child, she led her mother to the mound of dirt, where they reached down. Her mother gingerly scraped her palm over the dirt, her hand trembling while the little palm full of dirt clattered onto the coffin. Tilda scooped up a greedy handful. She had to feel something, the bite of a pebble into her palm, the grit under her fingernails, and nearly put the dirt to her mouth to swallow it, shove back the wail that threatened to claw its way out of her throat.
She’d lifted it. Everyone was staring at her, the vicar, her mother, the mourners.
Daniel.
Sunlight glinted off his gold-and-silver hair, refracting off the tears on his cheeks. He stood outside the semicircle of mourners. Tilda stared at him, her cupped hand spilling dirt into the trampled grass at her feet.
Daniel was there, and he was crying.
She made a choked little sound, swallowed hard, and he was in motion, striding around the mourners to stand beside her. “Shhh,” he said. “It’s okay.”
His voice was deep, thick, like hot earth, dialing down the noise in her head, and his arm was steady around her waist. She let herself sag just a little, felt him catch her, then he cupped her fistful of dirt, his fingers gentle and strong on hers. He didn’t force them open, just held her, let her tremble.
“I can’t,” she said, and clenched her fist more tightly. Nan loved this earth, loved the small world she lived in, a world so small that Tilda was the highlight, and Tilda couldn’t bring herself to throw it into her grave. Tears streamed down her cheeks, ran along her throat to pool in the hollow. She was sniffing, her throat working, she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t. The clanging in her head was going to drive her insane if it didn’t stop.
Then Daniel bent his head to hers. “Tilda,” he whispered.
Her name. The name he’d used on the ledge a year earlier, trying to establish a connection when
he thought she was going to jump, not knowing she was already falling. The name he’d spoken at their wedding ceremony. The name he used when he was exasperated, amused, angry, aroused. It husked into her ears, mouse-quiet and clarion-clear, slicing through the roar like a pen on paper. Other sounds returned. A bird singing in the tree overhead, Daniel breathing, his heart thumping, or perhaps that was her own heart.
She extended her arm over the gaping wound in the ground and relaxed her fist. Dirt trickled into the earth’s wound, pattered against the wood, slid to the earth underneath. The bird trilled above her. She opened her hand, and let it all stream into the grave.
“Sit down,” he murmured. “Tilda, sweetheart, sit down before you fall down.”
He supported her while she stumbled to the chair, and sat. The vicar’s voice took up the unfamiliar cadences of the funeral rite. The bird sang. Daniel hunkered down on his heels next to her while she stared into the grave, and gently brushed the earth from her palm, into the grass.
—
She woke up in her old bedroom at Nan’s house without any memory of getting from the graveside into the bed. She wore her dress but no shoes, and had the old quilt tucked around her. Twilight filled the room, casting the furniture in shadows, and the scent of Nan was so strong she forgot what had come before.
She untangled the quilt from her legs and sat up, then bent forward against the pounding in her skull. When the pain receded she got to her feet. Her stockings snagged on the floorboards as she shuffled to the door and leaned against it. Daniel sat at the counter in the kitchen, his suit jacket draped over the back of one of Nan’s kitchen chairs, shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows. A cup of instant coffee sat beside the local newspaper. Her last letter to Nan leaned against the salt and pepper shakers. He looked up, his gaze skimming over her, but she couldn’t read it. Read him. For the first time in their relationship, he was utterly unreadable.