Byron accompanied her to the elevators and hugged her. She kissed his cheek, and she was sniffling as the doors closed on her. He went back to Georgia’s room, and found her awake.
“I had a dream,” she said. Her eyes were blazing. “It wasn’t a good dream.”
He moved to the chair and took her hand again. “Tell me.”
“It’s silly. I was doing a calendar for someone. But then something went wrong with it. All the pictures kept dissolving, and I couldn’t pick them up. It swept over me, somehow. It was just awful. It was just a calendar I had ruined, but it was terrifying.”
He reached for her other hand, and they sat there. He thought she might be going back to sleep, and he felt himself hoping for it.
“I’m scared,” she said suddenly. “Oh, hell. I thought I’d dealt with this.”
“I’m right here,” Byron said.
She held tight, weathering it, enduring it; it swept through her in a trembling, her hand so tight in his that he marveled at how strong she still was. She’d shut her eyes, but was not sleeping. No, she was trying to put something away from her, inside, trying to master herself. When she opened her eyes again, they were still rounded and too bright. “Oh,” she said. “Damn it all.”
He stood and leaned over, trying to embrace her—she wouldn’t let go of his hand. “I love you,” he said.
“Read something to me,” she said. But she wouldn’t let go of him. So they remained that way until, at last, she seemed to let down, sighing, drifting a little, then jerking awake. Each time this happened, she squeezed tight again, and looked at him out of those brilliantly lighted eyes. There was something nearly supernatural in the way they shone.
After a long interval, she let go, and he sat back down. She was still awake. She stared at him as if not quite able to discern who he was. Then she patted the bed and said, “I’m sorry. Read to me?”
So he read some of the cards and letters, all expressing the hope—the faith, really—that she would come through this and be her old self. One of them was from a priest she had known in Europe before the war.
“I miss the consolations of religion,” she said, interrupting him.
“Do you—would you like me to see if—”
“If someone would take me?” She smiled, then. “Funny.”
He was at a loss. He went on reading the letter, but then saw that she was staring beyond him, at the door. He turned, expecting Marvina. It was Reese. Evidently he had waited until Byron saw him. He came forward into the room, with his own little gift of soaps and lotions in a basket. “For your hands,” he said to Georgia.
She raised one arm so he could come be hugged and kissed. It was always the way they had greeted each other. Byron took his clumsy embrace in turn, then opened a bottle of lotion for his mother. He and Reese watched Georgia put the lotion on her hands, being careful of the place where the IV went into the back of the right one. She looked from one to the other of them. There was still that unsettling brightness in her eyes, as if the fear were still climbing inside her, and she was choosing to pretend it wasn’t there. But then the nurse came in, time for changing things again, and she shooed them out into the hall. They stood there in the fading early evening light from the window at that end. Across from them several people were ranged around the bed of another woman, also old, and probably also dying; this was, after all, where they brought people from the assisted living part of Brighton Creek Farm.
Out the window was the building where she had come to stay ten years ago. They were both staring out at it. Byron feeling the pain in his lower chest, wanting not to show it, wanting to be far away from Reese. Perhaps he would go down to the cafeteria for something he wouldn’t eat, having no appetite now. But Reese might go with him. Or stay and be alone with Georgia.
“Remember when we brought her here to talk to them,” Reese said now. “That first time?”
Byron nodded, without quite looking at him.
“Who was that guy? I can’t remember his name.”
“Scottish sounding,” said Byron, who remembered perfectly well the name, McCutcheon. He said, “Mac-something.”
“I can’t recall it,” Reese said.
They were quiet. Georgia had sat patiently listening to McCutcheon talk about all the advantages of assisted living, and she had abruptly interrupted him to say, “Excuse me, are you quite serious?”
The man stared.
Georgia turned to Reese—yes, it had been Reese—and said, “This guy’s an ass, isn’t he?”
Byron remembered that now, and he knew Reese was remembering it, too. He almost said something. But the nurse opened the door again, and came out, and they could go back in to Georgia, who lay with eyes closed, in fresh sheets and fresh nightgown. Soon they would bring dinner. But she would probably not eat it. She had eaten a little of the clementine. Food was the one thing that had ceased to interest her particularly; it was such an effort to chew.
She opened her eyes. “Boys,” she said.
“Sister,” Reese said. That was what he had always called her.
“Tell me about it,” she said, looking at neither of them.
Reese began to cry. Byron went back out into the hall. He heard Georgia say his name, and hesitated. But when he looked back into the room he saw that Reese was bent over the bed, holding her hand, and she was saying something to him.
Byron felt a rage rising in him, and he went down to the cafeteria and ordered coffee. He sensed, with a small stab of regret, his own abruptness toward the slow lady behind the counter, who handed him the coffee with a lackluster shrug and went about cleaning the grill. He moved to a table alone and sat, hands shaking, sipping the coffee, which was too hot. He couldn’t believe his own anger. And he felt it at Georgia, too, for accepting Reese’s affection, knowing what she knew. It hurt him, at a level for which he was unprepared. How could she, knowing what she knew?
But then he remembered, with a sinking at his heart, what she also knew.
He couldn’t decide what to do with his own emotions. He drank the coffee, which burned his tongue, and he sat there feeling childish. He actually had the child’s thought, I’ll go away and then they’ll be sorry. “Stupid,” he said, aloud. Then put his hands to his face and wept.
When he went back up to the room, he found the door open, Reese gone, Georgia lying there staring out the window. He went to the chair and sat down. They had brought her a meal, which she hadn’t touched—a roll, mashed potatoes, three slices of turkey, all of it looking like a frozen dinner. She’d had a little of the apple juice, which she had apparently asked for.
“You didn’t eat,” he said.
“Don’t be mad at me, son. I’m unable to select anymore. Don’t want to.”
“I don’t understand,” he told her, because he didn’t.
“I don’t know what happened with you and Reese,” she said. Then she took a deep breath, so weighted with exhaustion that he was alarmed, and thought she might pass out. “I don’t want to send anybody away from here,” she said. “Not now. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m not convinced.”
“No,” he said. “I do.”
“Byron the lyron,” she murmured. “You know I always meant it, that you were brave.”
“I’m not brave,” Byron said.
“Yes.” She raised one hand, almost as if to wave at him. “I’ll be the judge of that.” It was automatic now, and she was falling asleep again. He moved the tray of food away, and then sat watching her sleep. Marvina came back in at last, with her mother. Alma wanted to say hello. Marvina had brought cards, and when Georgia woke, the two of them played a couple of slow rounds of gin rummy, on Georgia’s dinner tray. Later, Reese came back, and stood off to one side, watching the card game. Everyone was gentle, and in the pauses when Georgia slipped off to her fitful sleep, they were quiet, and quite still, almost as if frozen that way in a photograph.
They all left at the end of
the evening visiting hour. Georgia was sound asleep. Very still, breathing very easily. Reese kissed her cheek. Marvina and Alma did, too. Byron held her hand again for a while, and then kissed her himself. Outside the room, he took Reese by the arm just above the elbow. For a second, it was almost impossible to draw in air. Marvina and her mother had gone a ways down the hall. “I’ll be right along,” Byron said to them. They went on. Reese was looking at him with a kind of resigned alarm.
“I want you to be here for her,” Byron said, low. Scarcely able to get it out. “She wants it, and I want it. No standing to the side. No hanging back. Please.”
Reese nodded, his eyes widening slightly.
“I don’t want any confusion about it. Nothing is changed between you and me if you’re here for her. Only don’t let her see you hanging back. This is about her bravery. Not yours, or mine.”
“Thank you,” Reese said, with a deep sigh. “You have always been—” He didn’t finish. He just looked down and repeated the phrase: “Thank you.”
Byron let go, and they walked side by side down to where the other two waited. He rode with Marvina and her mother back to the house. Reese had gone off to wherever he was staying now in the city.
When they got to the house, they saw that the Ewings’ dogs and cats where setting up a ruckus. Marvina hurried her mother in, and then came back to where Byron was standing on his porch. He’d had the sense she wanted to speak with him.
“Reese is seeing someone else,” she said. “I hope I’m doing the right thing telling you.”
He bent slightly at the waist, from the pain. He turned from her, and looked out at the lights of his town.
“I’m sorry, Byron. And I think he’s miserable.” Byron couldn’t get enough air again. He faced her, breathless, all dark inside, a desolation—a man losing everything. Marvina walked over and put her arms around him. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Want me to stay tonight?”
He shook his head. “I told him to keep coming to see Georgia. She wants it.”
Marvina shrugged; her expression seemed to say that it was hard to explain.
No, Byron thought. It wasn’t really so hard to explain at all. Georgia had said to him, quite honestly and gently, what she required. It wasn’t too much to ask. He could find a way to do what she wanted. He was Byron the lyron.
Georgia Susan Michael Townsend Mailley passed away in the middle of the night, almost exactly one week later. There was no warning; it happened quite suddenly and peacefully. Her son was downstairs in the cafeteria, with Marvina, drinking coffee. Reese had left, with a promise of returning in the morning, first thing. Everyone had settled into a pattern of visiting with the failing woman, who seemed at the end to be growing stronger, and holding on. She was alert when awake, and herself, right to the end.
After her passing, the people who had stood with her at the edge of her darkness drifted to other lives, as people do—Marvina took her mother’s advice and sold her house. The two women live in a duplex in the old town section of Charlottesville, Virginia. Reese went out to California with his new companion for a year or so, and then came back to Virginia. He took a job teaching art in the local high school, and continued to make money with his painting. Byron moved to New York again, and worked for a magazine there for a few months, then settled in a little walk-up flat on a narrow street in Rome. He still lives there, and not always alone. Now and then he walks out near sunset and takes pictures of the old part of the city, those ancient buildings, with their long history, their beauty and complication, their tragedy and triumph, their songs and their sorrow.
REVEREND THORNHILL’S WIFE
Keeping strictly to the early-morning ritual, Diana prepared coffee, boiled one egg, and lightly buttered two slices of toast for him, then put cereal on for the girls, and went and dressed for the day, while they ate. When they were finished, she rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. In the usual rush, she saw the twins off to school, brushing Lauren’s hair for her, and nagging Kelly about brushing her teeth thoroughly to get the food particles that had lodged in her braces. All as usual. So much the exact pattern of her mornings. The ordinariness of it made her happy, and it surprised her. It also increased her sense of unreality.
From the doorway, she watched them climb on the bus, hauling their book bags. They waved to her from the windows, as they always did, and she waved back, and the motion of her own small hand crossing the plane of her vision seemed to swipe the ordinary feeling away. She felt the truth, a shock, though it was thrilling, too. Clutching her blouse tight at her throat against the slight chill, she watched the bus move off. Then she went into the living room and sat with her hands clasped tightly over her knees, waiting for him to finish shaving and dressing.
When she heard the bathroom door open, she hurried into the kitchen and pretended to be just finishing there when he came down the hall. He kissed her on the cheek. “Have fun,” he said, as he had said every morning for going on twelve years.
“You, too,” she told him.
She watched him cross the shady lawn to the car. He waved, going away, and she held up one hand. She was in this now, and she did not feel guilty. After the car turned at the end of the road, she closed the door and went through the rooms, making sure the place looked right. She took some personal items of his—hairbrush, cologne, a Bible concordance—and put them in the hall closet, along with a wedding picture and several family photographs. At last, taking a deep breath to ease her trembling, she made the call.
“I’m alone.”
“I’ll be right over.”
“Where are you?”
“Midtown. I looked up the directions online. Can’t wait to see you.”
She breathed into the line. “Hurry.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, and hung up.
She headed for the bathroom, slipping out of her clothes as she went. It was all delicious action, bright with purpose and anticipation. In the bathroom, she folded the clothes and set them on top of the hamper. On the wall opposite the shower stall was a print of four Indian maidens washing clothes in a stream, the pristine rush of blue-white water over stones. Behind them was an orderly procession of trees, mountains, and sky. She looked at the picture as if it belonged to someone else. Everything was under way; it was going to happen. She turned to the mirror and put a dash of light-pink lipstick on, standing naked at the sink, and, with a few soft strokes of her fingers, arranged her hair.
In the bedroom, she opened the closet, brought out a robe, and draped it over herself. She stopped in the hallway, held on to the wall, inhaling and letting it out slowly, repeating this five times, counting.
Movement was best. She went into the living room and lifted a blade of the closed window blinds only a fraction of an inch to look out at the street. Phyllis Copperfield, crazy Phyllis, a woman who lived by the clock, had come out of her house with the baby in a running stroller. She wore spandex slacks, and had a bandanna around her head, her hair tied in a ponytail that swung from side to side when she walked. At the top of the street, she began to run, and she was gone.
Phyllis had been one of her chief worries. They had been friendly, and Phyllis knew things, had gleaned something of Diana’s dissatisfactions. Phyllis herself was by her own account going slowly crazy. Her husband was often out of town—sometimes for weeks at a time—and she was alone with a baby whom she hadn’t wanted and whose demands made her miserable and sleepless. She would say terrible things about her husband, her mother, the baby, neighbors, herself, and they would have been off-putting if they weren’t also funny. About the husband, whom Diana had seldom seen, she was particularly brutal: he was a man whose sex appeal improved the farther away he was; on the telephone, calling from another time zone, he was astounding. Up close, you wanted to think up a trip for him to make. A thousand miles away, he was rockets and flares. Home, he was slippers and boxer shorts with a pattern of clover on them, and beers, burps, and the rest, too. Away, he was all the primary colo
rs. Up close, he was beige.
It was disturbing how often Phyllis’s jokes about her life struck through Diana as containing truths about her own.
• • •
Now she poured coffee for herself, and sat on the sofa in the living room, one leg crossed carefully, languidly, over the other, slowly sipping the coffee. He would be no more than twenty minutes. And abruptly she decided that she wouldn’t greet him like this, drinking coffee, so she hurried to finish it, put the cup and saucer in the dishwasher, and returned to the bathroom, where she ran her fingers through her hair again, and brushed her teeth.
She was waiting at the door when he pulled up. He parked down the street a little and walked back, carrying a small briefcase, keeping to the sidewalk. There was a stockiness about him that hadn’t shown in the photographs online. He wore a gray sport coat, light-colored jeans, a black T-shirt. She opened the door and stood back for him, and when he came through, she experienced a coursing of blood to her head. She closed the door and engaged the deadbolt, watching her own trembling fingertips. She had never felt such excitement. He put the briefcase down and faced her where she leaned against the door. For a moment, neither of them spoke. His eyes trailed down her body and then back up. “You’re taller than I thought you’d be.”
She breathed, “I told you how tall I am.”
He smiled. “You look taller.”
They moved together into the living room and he looked at everything, removing the sport coat. “Nice house.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “My God, we’re actually together.” She couldn’t catch her breath.
He sat down on the sofa and rested one arm on the back of it, and she saw that he was nervous, too. “Took me just less than three hours. I was eighty-five miles an hour all the way.”
“I’m sorry about not wanting to meet you in a motel.”
“Forget it.”
“It’s just that I’d have felt cheap.”
Something Is Out There Page 5