‘Has neither of you ever heard of a conference call?’ Maurie retorted, waspish as always when her academic routine was interrupted.
‘Berthe, if you want to try contacting the phone company to set up a conference call, go right ahead.’
‘All right, all right.’ Maurie relented. ‘It’s exactly two weeks since Mom disemboweled the darkest secret of her backyard. I suppose she has something momentous and weird to share with us. Did she ever tell you her skeleton was actually a boy?’
‘What? No!’
‘Oh, yes. A boy buried in a dress, a boy named LeeVon, with a sister named Bonnie Jo.’
‘Why didn’t she tell me!’
‘The police put a gag order on her. But she slipped up, talking to me, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t know. The sister, Bonnie Jo, came to the house, saw the portrait and recognized her dead brother.’
Berthe, Cassie noted to her astonishment, actually sounded more whimsical than sardonic. But she let that go, saying, ‘I suppose that was in response to her ad.’
‘What ad?’ Whimsy had fled.
‘She took a photo of the portrait and put it in the local paper, along with her phone number—’
‘You cannot be serious!’
‘Calm down, Berthe. Of course I’m serious. I am talking about our mother. What did you think she would do? Like, keep out of trouble?’
‘Simplistic of me,’ Maurie admitted. ‘OK, call me tonight and we’ll find out what else is new.’ She clicked off.
Maurie’s moment of nonchalance was feigned. Her apprehensions – what else was new? What had Mom done now? – piled into an unstable frame of mind, a tottering mental structure ready to topple under the weight of a single incautious word. Luckily for Maurie’s marriage, Rob had to work late and was spared an unwary encounter with his wife.
By the time the phone rang, Maurie might as well have been a gorgon: coiling snakes for hair, bronze claws for fingernails, bronze fangs for teeth.
‘How are you both, sweeties?’ Mom said that evening, her voice wafting in a sort of speakerphone wind as if from a wilderness.
‘Fine, Mom,’ said Cassie.
‘Medusa mode,’ said Maurie between clenched jaws.
‘Oh dear, honey. Why?’
As was to be expected, Maurie’s tower of concerns tumbled out, squashing courtesy flat. ‘Mom,’ she demanded, ‘what do you want?’
‘Nothing!’ Mom sounded only a bit surprised, not miffed. ‘I’m not asking a thing from you two except the use of your ears, dears. I thought it would be easier to fill you in on the funeral and everything both at the same time.’
‘Funeral?’ asked Cassie.
‘Everything?’ barked Maurie. She had tried to make herself comfortable in her favorite window seat but could not seem to stay there. Phone to ear, she paced the perimeter of her living room.
Mom said, ‘I suppose “everything” would include my selling the Montclair house to your Aunt Gayle after all.’
There ensued momentary hubbub. Maurie said pejorative things that she knew she would regret later, Cassie said plaintive things Maurie didn’t hear, and as they were both talking at once, their mother paid no attention to either of them.
‘Shush,’ she told them. ‘Relax. I needed money to give LeeVon a funeral, and I need to give him a funeral because I can’t have him hanging around the house indefinitely. Well, I suppose I could, but it wouldn’t be good for him.’
Maurie did not believe in the afterlife and knew her mother didn’t either, yet realized that the situation Mom was describing implied the opposite, and a sort of mental gridlock prevented her from speaking. Cassie was quiet, too, maybe for the same reason, as Mom went on to explain how the coroner had arranged for a plot in the potter’s field. ‘I looked up why they call it a potter’s field. It’s because in old times, once potters dug the clay out of a field, it was useless for anything else, so that’s where they buried the stray bodies.’ She told them about the beautiful handmade coffin and how Nick – ‘the deputy who hauled me in to the psych ward!’ – would bring it over in his pickup truck and it could sit on the coffee table in the front room, and Marcia was coming to the house with the bones to arrange them in the coffin, and she, Mom, had taken the Ferees shopping for some things and expected to provide pizza. ‘Tomorrow,’ Mom said, then added in a low, maybe awed tone, ‘I feel like I’m in a Broadway musical or something. All sorts of people just coming together, even the children. Their names are Chloe, Emma and Liam, and they are very different and just beautiful. I’m wondering whether we should have a wake.’
‘Wake?’ asked Cassie in a small, stunned voice.
‘Yes. Then the funeral and the burial will be the next day. Well, you know, LeeVon’s pretty much nocturnal, so …’ A lot of the joy leached out of Mom’s voice and anxiety crept in. ‘So I figured, give him a chance. It’s up to him. But what I’m hoping for is so – so apocalyptic – I can’t talk about it.’
Maurie broke through her mental gridlock rather explosively. ‘What the crazy are you trying to do, Mom? Morph the kid from a ghost into an angel?’
‘No!’ Then more quietly, ‘Not at all, honey. I think he’s made it pretty clear that the afterlife is hell for him, but as regards any kind of heaven … No, I just hope that death ultimately can bring him peace. That I can help his spirit to rest.’
Much more gently, with all traces of gorgon gone at least temporarily, Maurie asked, ‘What do you want us to do, Mom?’
‘Nothing! Maurie, Cassie, I don’t want you to do anything. I just thought you’d want to know how things stand. This burial – I hope it settles something. The police haven’t decided what to do about his mother yet and neither … neither has he.’
Implications stunned Maurie once again speechless. And maybe Cassie felt the same way. There was an awkward silence before she said, ‘Mom, please let us know how it goes, OK?’
‘Of course. But either way, I think I can handle it and it won’t be necessary for you to come kiting down here, OK? I’ll call you in a couple of days.’
I didn’t sleep very well, and got up quite early the next morning, walking into my studio by the pearly pink light of dawn to see whether LeeVon had left any enigmas for me.
He most certainly had. Instead of a weeping heart, a broken heart or a heart afire, he had depicted a heart that was full. He had drawn, with paint, a big horizontal heart loaded like a popcorn bowl with colorful contents, but I couldn’t tell what they were. Either the paint had run, or LeeVon had become an impressionist, or he was channeling Klimt. I thought I could distinguish compact human and animal figures, and round bright things that might have been fruit or flowers or, who knew, marbles? Mushrooms? Eyeballs? And why was the heart lying down like a cornucopia? LeeVon intended it that way; I could tell by the direction the paint had dripped.
I had no idea what it meant. But luckily it was so early in the morning and I was sleepy enough, so I easily turned off my analytical mind and, relaxing deep in my Joseph chair, I thought without words and began to feel hopeful that a full heart, especially a heart full of such color, was turned sideways maybe because it was ready to launch. Take off. Set sail. Something like that.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I dressed in mom jeans, a pink T-shirt with a pony on the front and pink Skechers: comfort clothes. I wanted to make the next couple of days comfortable for everyone involved, especially LeeVon.
After breakfast I cleared the front-room coffee table, removing stacks of huge books about art plus my Hoberman ball and Russian nesting dolls and ornamental Slinkies and my geodesic art-glass fishbowl full of Beanie Baby horses. But I didn’t put the toys away. I distributed them around the room, on the floor when necessary. Because of rearranging things, I even dusted, which to me is a nonsensical activity, moving perfectly normal and righteous housedirt from one place to another. Luckily, Nick Crickens put a quick stop to this by driving his Ford pickup to my front door. In the truck bed, all swaddled in blankets and strapped
in place like a papoose, was the coffin.
Nick unloaded it and carried it into my house on one shoulder. Following my cues, ever so gently he set it on the coffee table.
‘It’s just beautiful,’ I said, which was true. Handmade of plain wood polished to a golden shine, the casket could not have been more lovely.
Bashful, Nick just smiled. He showed me how to work the hasps on each side of the lid, then took it off and leaned it against the coffee table. ‘See y’all in the morning then,’ he said, tugging at the bill of his camouflage cap, and he headed out the driveway at the same time as Bonnie Jo’s old clunker of a car headed in.
I walked out to meet her and help her carry several armloads of stuff into my house. ‘How are you, Bonnie Jo? I mean, how are y’all?’
This got a small smile out of her. ‘All of me is all right all right except what ain’t.’
‘Well, that’s as good as can be expected, I guess. Would you like a cup of coffee?’
‘Let’s do this first,’ she said, standing beside the coffin and stroking it very softly with one hand as if it might be frightened of her. What we intended was to blanket it with softness. The previous day, shopping, we (meaning mostly me) had not been content just with what we found at Wal-Mart. So we had discovered a consignment store with handmade crib quilts and baby afghans. I had bought oodles, because we wouldn’t really know what we needed until we saw how they fit in the coffin, and I looked forward to giving the leftovers to Sukie for her grandchildren.
‘Let’s put the plain fleeces underneath and the pretty things on top of them,’ Bonnie Jo said, and for the next hour or so that was what we did, arranging in the coffin a nest for LeeVon. Both Bonnie Jo and I adored some pastel crib blankets crocheted in shell stitch, but we put them aside and finished instead with what we thought LeeVon would like: a bright quilt made of cowboy-print squares of flannel.
Finally satisfied, we were sitting in the kitchen sipping coffee and eating blueberry muffins when Marcia showed up carrying LeeVon in a box on one shoulder, just the way Nick had effortlessly carried the coffin.
I ran to open the front door for her. But rather than set her burden down, she stood gazing at the coffin. ‘It’s just perfect,’ she murmured.
I stood with my hands upstretched. ‘Please, let me help you with that.’
‘He’s not heavy.’ She set the box sideways on top of the coffin.
‘Coffee?’
‘Later. Let me do this first.’
Sometimes, not nearly often enough, I feel an actual physical reaction, a special sort of frisson, just from watching a person do something with great and consummately skilled concentration. I felt it that day as Bonnie Jo and I stood by, both of us barely breathing as Marcia took LeeVon’s bones one by one and arranged them in his coffin with perfect symmetry and meticulous respect. Skull, neck bones and backbones, collarbone and ribs, shoulder blades, arms … When she got past the pelvis to the legs, I held the box out of the way for her.
At the very end, she arranged wisps of tan hair around the skull. I saw tears seep on to Bonnie Jo’s face, although she did not make a sound except to murmur, ‘He still has his fingernails and toenails. Some of them, anyways.’
Marcia gave her a wordless hug, then asked me, ‘Are you going to cover him with something?’
Still staring, intent on seeing her brother again, Bonnie Jo barely nodded. I led Marcia away toward the kitchen. ‘Coffee? Pepsi? Iced tea? Heck, while I’m at it, I might as well fix lunch.’ Which I did, making tuna salad. After a while, Bonnie Jo came in, sat with us and drank Pepsi but shook her head to food.
‘Thank you for lunch,’ Marcia said when she was finished. ‘I guess I should be going.’
‘Hold on just a minute till you see what I got in the car.’ Bonnie Jo headed out and came back in carrying Wal-Mart bags from which she pulled a brand-new pair of boys’ blue jeans, which she laid on top of LeeVon’s legs as if he were wearing them. Then she pulled out a bright plaid shirt, western-style with collar, unmistakably meant for a boy.
‘Oh my God,’ murmured Marcia to me, ‘please tell me the media aren’t coming.’
‘The media are so not coming. I so did not announce this in the newspaper or anywhere else. I haven’t ordered flowers or a memorial – not yet – or anything that could spread the news. Stop worrying.’
Bonnie Jo placed the shirt on LeeVon, and white tube socks covering his feet, and Nike running shoes beside them. She glanced up at Marcia. ‘I ain’t going to try to cover his face. We got to look at him honest. But these here was the clothes he showed us he wanted.’
‘Showed you?’
I said, ‘Yeppers,’ and trotted into the back room, the studio, to bring my line drawing that he had altered to depict himself, a boy.
But when I saw it, my eyes widened, and I had a speechless moment before I called, ‘Marcia, never mind.’ I returned empty-handed to the front room, ready for her to leave. ‘Thank you so much for everything you’ve done. Not just releasing the remains to us, but coming here to lay them out. I can’t thank you enough.’
Bonnie Jo said thank you too, and both of us hugged Marcia on her way out. As soon as my front door closed behind her, Bonnie Jo shot me a saucer-eyed look. I put a finger to my lips, waiting until Marcia was in her car and driving away before I told Bonnie, ‘Come see.’
She was already on her way into the studio, and her long legs got her there ahead of me. I heard her exclaim, ‘Oh!’
‘Yes,’ I said, walking in to find her hovering over the line drawing. Sukie still wore her yellow-and-aqua striped dress, Bonnie Jo still wore her polka-dot one, LeeVon stood there in his plaid shirt, blue jeans and running shoes, but the figure of Ma on a gibbet had been negated, crossed out, X-ed out heavily with black marker.
‘What’s that mean?’ Bonnie Jo asked.
‘I guess he doesn’t want …’
Not sure of anything, I looked at a picture stuck to the wall, the original depiction LeeVon had done of him and Bonnie Jo and Sukie, with their mother towering over them, lashing a belt, raging, her mouth wide open with shouting, looking as if she might eat them.
Only she wasn’t there anymore.
She was just not there. Not in the picture. Gone as if she had never been.
Momentarily unable to speak, I pointed.
Bonnie Jo saw, made an inchoate sound and stepped back. ‘Oh my God, let me out of here,’ she whispered. ‘I gotta go get Sukie and the kids.’ She bolted.
I could not stop gazing at the picture, and even though Bonnie Jo was gone, I blurted, ‘The children all have hands now. And they have mouths. And they’re smiling.’
Cassie would be so glad. I thought of phoning her to tell her, but at the notion of mother speaking to child, unaccountably I started raining tears.
I didn’t phone Cassie. Sometime I would tell her what had happened, but not yet; it still made me too shivery. I didn’t want to talk to anyone for a little while. Lucky for me, then, that Bonnie Jo had left me alone in the house when she fled.
Without conscious decision, acting in a kind of LeeVon-induced trance, I went to the craft room for scissors and gluestick. I pulled the picture off the wall, the one in which the children, newly empowered, were smiling, and I trimmed it to eliminate the space where Ma had been. Then I carefully glued it without a single wrinkle to the inside of LeeVon’s coffin lid where his skull could look up at it. Who says those without eyes cannot see? Then I just sat on the front-room sofa to keep LeeVon company until I heard the sound of Bonnie Jo’s asthmatic junker coming down my yard. I turned to look and yes, she had Sukie and the kids with her.
Sukie walked into my house carrying Liam, supporting his butt with both arms while his head lay on her shoulder, moist and heavy in sleep. Without a word, she gazed down at LeeVon in his coffin while Chloe and Emma peeked in. I stood across from them and saw the tops of their faces, their wide eyes framed by their fingers curling like pale, exotic flowers over the coffin’s edge.
/> ‘Careful, girls, don’t joggle him,’ Bonnie Jo said, standing behind Sukie with a couple of plastic shopping bags dangling from her hands.
Sukie, still intent on LeeVon, didn’t turn around but said, ‘He looks real nice, sis.’
Emma asked, ‘What is it?’
Chloe retorted, ‘A skeleton, silly, like at Halloween.’
‘But today’s not Halloween. Is tomorrow Halloween?’
‘No, no! Skeletons aren’t just for Halloween. Remember we ate the chicken and it had a skeleton?’
Emma pointed at the one in the coffin. ‘Who ate him?’
‘Nobody ate him. Somebody boiled him, that’s all, like Gramma boiled the chicken for soup.’
This was so awfully close to the truth that I winced; Bonnie Jo turned so pale that age spots made her face look pinto, and Sukie said not very steadily, ‘Shush, girls. You’ll wake Liam.’
Detecting untruth, both girls turned to peer up at Sukie.
To distract them – heck to distract all of us – I picked up the coffin lid and displayed the artwork I had applied to the inside. ‘That’s your grandma’s brother LeeVon in the coffin,’ I told the girls, ‘and he did these pictures.’
‘They’re nice,’ Chloe said doubtfully.
‘Bonnie Jo, Sukie, is what I did here OK with you?’
Sukie said firmly, ‘It’s way better than OK.’ Bonnie Jo gave me a thumbs up. Little Emma piped up, ‘I can paint a heart!’
‘That, young lady, is a wonderful idea.’ I guided the girls to the table and provided them up with paper, paints and LeeVon’s much-abused brushes, then sat down along with them to make hearts and flowers. Soon Liam joined us and created less identifiable representations. I hovered, making sure everybody let Bonnie Jo and Sukie alone. When the three children got tired of painting, I cleaned them up, took them back to my bedroom, ensconced them on the bed and electronically anesthetized them by means of a Muppet Show video on the TV.
Walking back to the front room, I saw Sukie and Bonnie Jo, each with an arm around the other, standing by LeeVon’s coffin. Both turned to smile at me. Sukie said, ‘I put a few more things in.’
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