When I start to imagine myself in my place, I take another pill. The way it makes me feel reminds me of how I saw the world, and how the world saw me, when my wedding veil was over my face, before Glen lifted it. The blusher, they call that piece of the veil that covers your face and gives everything around a soft whitewash. Sometime soon I am going to stop taking the pills. But not at night. I can't imagine how I will ever sleep again otherwise. I take the sleeping pill, and then I pick up a book, turning the pages in the exact rhythm of someone who is reading. I have no idea what has happened on the page, and suddenly I am asleep for five or six hours. Alex doesn't know it, but there is a baby monitor under his bed. The receiver is under my pillow, turned up as high as it will go, so that any sound would wake me from my drugged sleep. Before I take the pill, I listen for a half hour. I watch the clock. There's never any sound.
Ginger rearranges herself against the stove and drops her head heavily on the floor. I stir the soup and then move into the little living room and sit down on the sofa. My mind whirrs and stops, whirrs and stops, like a broken clock. I lose time all the time now, the way I did that night, the way I did in the hospital. But I'm awake when it happens. I look across the room at the beveled frame of a mirror or the oval doorknob and I'm in a waking dream, except that there's nothing in it, no people, no feeling. From time to time I hear a familiar voice, and when I do I shiver and the waking dream is over and I find something to do, even if it's only to stir the soup again. Sometimes when I move I realize that my face is wet. I wipe it with a paper towel. I can't think of it as crying. The good thing about living in this new place, where I still don't know how to shift the oven racks or set the thermostat exactly right, is that I don't feel like this is my life. It's some suspended animation, between what was and something else, something I can't think about. I don't think of what comes next, except that there is a recipe for chili in a cookbook on the shelf here that I might try. Chili, tomorrow. Or maybe even today.
It's not even noon yet. I wonder how I will fill the rest of the day, and I think that maybe I will put Ginger in the car and drive around the mountain roads, passing some of the houses where I have planted things in the past. You can do things in a car that you can't really do anywhere else. Scream. Curse. Talk to yourself, or to people who aren't there. No one can hear you in a car, although at traffic lights it's important to stop so that the person in the next lane won't look over and think you're crazy. "Poor Mary Beth Latham," the person might tell everyone, at school, at the club. "I saw her talking to herself at the corner of Main Street and Valley Road."
The first time I went out in the car, I made sure to get back by three-thirty so I could be home when Alex came in. I heard the doors of Olivia's Suburban slam, and I arranged myself in the kitchen, by the little table but not at it, and I told my brain to give my face a smile, and it did, although when I told it to put my left hand on the back of one of the little ladder-back chairs it refused. Ginger whined, and after ten minutes Alex had not come, and I ran up the hill in a pair of thin driving shoes that were sodden by the time I got to the back door of Olivia's house.
"What?" Olivia said when she saw my face and heard the dog barking shrilly.
"I heard your car," I said, "but Alex hasn't come home. Do you know where he is?"
"Basketball," she said, very low and slow, her hand still on my arm, her eyes locked on mine as she pulled me into the house. "They have basketball this afternoon." Her precise English voice is so calm that I understand, and believe. In the hospital and then afterward, when she had stayed with me, I noticed for the first time that Alice's voice is glissando: up the scale, down the scale. It made my head hurt and my heart beat faster. "When is Aunt Alice going home?" Alex had asked one night as we ate sandwiches again for dinner, and I said without thinking, "Tomorrow." Liam was living with his Trinidadian nanny, but he cried each night when the sun went down. "I'll be back soon, babe," Alice had said as she kissed me.
Olivia's voice is as measured and restful as Olivia herself. She saved my life, too. She gave us both a place to stay. When Alex came back from Colorado, with a toffee-colored tan, when I was still in the hospital, she put him in Ben's room, and for the first three nights she slept on an inflatable mattress in the hallway just outside the door. "He says he doesn't want to talk about it," Ben had told her. We don't talk about it. Alex goes to school. I cook his meals. Together, the week after I left the hospital, we went to the memorial service. I held Alex's hand tight throughout it. It felt lifeless in mine. That's mostly what I remember. Sarah spoke, and Ezra, and Nancy and Bill together, and Glen's brother Doug, and the high school choir sang. I think it was "You've Got a Friend," although I am not certain. I took a lot of pills that day. But I remember Alex's hand, and the big bouquets of amaryllis and evergreens on the stage at the community center, and the photographs of Glen and Ruby and Max on easels. There was a picture in the center of all five of us together in London. Max was looking to the side. Ruby's hair was in her face. "Is that the best one?" Glen had asked when I chose it for our Christmas card. "Everyone's moving in every one of them," I'd replied. "This is the one with the fewest people moving."
Ruby's friend Jacqui, the girl she roomed with at the summer writing program, read a poem of Ruby's I had never heard before:
How can I ask for more
Than this minute, when the stars lie bright against the velvet
Without the curtain of cloud
And the earth beneath smells ripe and full
Of both of us, lying here,
Looking toward heaven.
I remember I wept then, and Alex's hand became rigid in mine, and he had a hard and angry frown, the face that men make when they're trying not to break. Glen's father had the same look. Behind him Stan sat with his arm around my mother and heaved into an enormous handkerchief, and my mother patted his big, meaty leg as though it were a baby that required comfort.
I never spoke to Jacqui after she read at the service. Somewhere on the little desk in the living room of this little house, in the big pile of papers, there is a lovely letter from her, and a note from that boy Chip that Ruby met at the college writing program, and the girl Max liked at camp. The pile was much much bigger in the beginning, but Nancy went through it every day after work for a week, and took out the religious tracts about a better place and life everlasting, and the messages from inmates who wondered if I wanted to correspond, and the letters, in their unmistakable spiky block print, from the schizophrenics who needed me to understand that my family was being held prisoner in a nuclear facility in the desert. "There are so many pathetic crazy people in the world," Nancy had said through clenched teeth, and for a moment I thought she meant me.
She never saw the letter from Deborah Donahue or I'm sure she would have thrown it away, perhaps even burned it. "You killed my son," Kiernan's mother wrote, in a block print not unlike those of the crazy people. We'd always been in unlikely sympathy with each other, Deborah and I. There was a year there, when the kids were small, when even our menstrual cycles were in sync, and we made a pact not to go to each other's house at those times because we were both so out of sorts that we would certainly quarrel. Now we are both bereaved mothers who had seen disaster creeping up and had somehow convinced ourselves that it was an optical illusion.
Kiernan's father came to the memorial service. He tried to hug me afterward, but I turned away from him. I do remember that. There was a large ring of public avoidance around him, as though he had a contagious disease, or gave off a force field. "I can't believe he had the unmitigated gall to come to this," Nancy had said, loud enough for him to hear.
"It's fine," I whispered, and moved away. What did it matter to me? What did anything matter to me? Except Alex. This is what I have to keep reminding myself. In the hospital, my mother had heard one of the nurses whispering that my whole family was gone. "She has a son," my mother said coldly. "She has a son."
I have a son. He will be hungry. Because of the hospital,
and our shut-up house, and the police, and the questions, people had not come to us with casseroles and cakes the way they do after someone has died. When I look in the packed freezer, I realize I am making my own funeral meats.
I carry most of the pot of soup up to Olivia's house, and she answers the door and says, "I've just put the kettle on." Ginger comes in, too, and lies between the two of us beneath the kitchen table. I don't think Ginger should be left alone. The house is so quiet between our sentences that I can hear the grandfather clock in the hall tick, but Olivia doesn't always try to fill the silence. She is a good listener, except that I have nothing to say, or nothing I can say aloud. When the ticking becomes too sharp, I go back down the hill with no memory of what we've talked about. I sit on the sofa again, Ginger's head on one of my insteps. I finger the long scar on my shoulder and think, Glen is gone, Ruby is gone, Max is gone. It's the way I used to memorize poetry when I was younger. It's like I am trying to teach it to myself so I will understand.
So this is what it is like not to be medicated, or, at least, medicated less: The light feels like shards of glass, the glass in the windows looks like mirrors, the mirrors reflect back a gray woman with black eyes. I'm wearing the same dress I wore to the memorial service, and as I zip it awkwardly, trying to snake my good arm up the middle of my back, I tell myself that I will throw the dress away in the morning. "Give it to Goodwill," I know my mother will say but I think its fabric now holds its history, so that it would be like donating a sweater full of moths or a chest of drawers with woodworm.
I pull into the lot in front of the lawyer's office, and as I do men in dark suits emerge from a line of cars. The slam of metal doors is my welcome. They converge on me, and I think they look like pallbearers: Glen's father; his brother Doug; my brother, Richard; Nancy's husband, Bill. The men are here to mourn the way that feels most useful to them, by taking care of business. One by one, they kiss my cheek. They have come together in a caravan from Nancy's husband's insurance office, and I wonder if their cars had the lights on like a funeral procession as they came over the back roads.
My brother moves in to take my hand and we walk, entwined, into the large, glistening lobby. He announces us. Glen's father smoothes back his hair with the flat of his hand. His jacket is open, and I'm certain his suit would not button if he tried. I think it's the same suit he wore eleven years ago, when his wife died of breast cancer. Even then he didn't cry. "They did everything they could," he repeated to the mourners, and "She fought it to the very end." The widows have been bringing him pots of stew and plates of cookies ever since, but he still lives alone and runs the roofing company with Glen's brother Peter, still climbs the ladder and straddles the eaves. Peter's wife buys his clothes and arranges for his cleaning woman and does his grocery shopping, so that his life is not so different than it was when his wife was alive. I used to say that to Glen all the time, but now I'm ashamed, because now I know that there is something about having another person in the house, even if you barely speak to them, barely notice them, that is far far different from being in the house alone.
"How are you doing, Dad?" I say, and he coughs, to hide his bloodshot eyes, and because I hardly ever call him this, and the kindness makes him feel exposed.
"Okay for an old man," he says, as usual, but he squeezes my shoulder.
Glen says that when he was little he thought his father was a giant, and he's still a big man, aging the way big men do, with a hard medicine ball of a belly and a thick neck thrust forward like a raptor's. He insisted on coming. So did my brother, although the way he keeps putting his hand to his heart, to the breast pocket where he keeps his phone, tells me his office is buzzing him incessantly. I like and admire my brother, but in that way you do someone you see twice a year at parties. He feels the same about me. We would do anything for each other but are grateful that we have never really had to.
"How's Alex?" asks my father-in-law in the elevator. "Is he getting much playing time?"
"He's only a freshman, Pop," says Doug.
"For a freshman, he gets a lot of playing time," says Bill. "Unless he gets injured, he can probably wind up playing in college. Not Division 1, but one of the smaller places."
"I don't know," my father-in-law says. "They got monsters playing college ball now. Freaks of nature. You have to see how big he gets."
My brother sees the look on my face and squeezes my hand. Without the pills the squeeze feels hard, more like he is trying to bring me to my senses than to comfort me. Maybe he's afraid that I'll scream if I hear another word about whether Alex can play college basketball. Maybe he's simply concerned that I am going to scream. Even those who know me best look at me now as though they are afraid. They are afraid of me, afraid that if I broke down under this great weight it would be a horrible thing to see. They can't know that I spend all my time and energy now making certain that that doesn't happen, for Alex's sake. "She has a son," my mother told the nurses.
I remember the lawyer's office from the signing of our wills, five or six years ago. His name is Reinhold. It seems amazing to me that I have been able to recall that, even though it is written on a file I am holding in my lap. I can't remember his first name, but it doesn't matter. "Hello, Mr. Reinhold," I say, and he says, "Please, call me Larry." "Larry," I repeat dutifully. He comes around the desk, leans in, murmurs, "Mary Beth, I'm so sorry." I wave a hand in the air to stop him from saying more. People don't understand words--how empty, how useless, how awful they can be. Words don't soothe; they only set us apart. Please, I want to say, be quiet, so I can be ordinary again, so we can act as though this is business as usual, so I can go back to the sofa in Olivia's guesthouse and make my mind blank.
People's looks are just as bad. When I go out, which is still not often, their looks are like words, too. Once their eyes would move over me unthinkingly, an offhand observation of a look--glib, empty, the equivalent of "Have a nice day." Now they stammer as they try not to stare: smooth, smooth, stop, back, stop, back, stutter, slide down. It's like a dance move: Oh my God, oh my God, do you know who that is, that poor woman. Even the receptionist out front did it. I am like a burn victim, except that they are all imagining my scars. And I am feeling them, feeling the skin gone, the nerves exposed. I have to get back to the house.
Our lawyer has decorated his office as though he is a British barrister: mahogany desk and credenza, red leather chairs, hunting prints. I think Glen and I joked about it after we left the last time, but for a moment I hear Glen's chuckle and I make my mind blank again. Some straight chairs are brought in from the conference room to accommodate all the men. The medications must stay in your system. I will have to concentrate very hard to follow the conversation.
"Do any of you happen to be attorneys?" Larry Reinhold asks.
"We're businessmen," says my father-in-law.
It's all quite simple, really. There's no need for these men to be here in the first place. Perhaps they felt done out of some ceremonial role when I decided, in the hospital, that I would have the bodies cremated quickly. The bodies, I said to myself over and over again as though it would make me believe it. "I wanted to say goodbye," said my father-in-law, whose wife had appeared in her open casket in her Easter suit from the year before, her usual lipstick--Coral Reef, I think it was called--on her thin lips.
I had already said goodbye. I said goodbye to Max when we were leaving for the New Year's Eve party at Nancy and Bill's. Max had been behind the door of his room, and I could hear him shuffling around, waiting for us to go, and I tell myself now that it is all right that I didn't push my way in, nuzzle his neck, tidy his hair, drive him wild with my affectionate meddlings. I said goodbye to Ruby as she put on her coat over her dress to leave for some other, younger, better party. I said goodbye as I held her close, her hair tumbled over my face, and I tell myself now that it is all right that I didn't remind her to be careful, to come home early, force her to turn on me with her impatient face and shut off my nervous burbles. I said
goodbye to Glen as he rose in a temper, his spot in the bed warm beside me as I fell back to sleep, and I tell myself now that it is all right that I didn't say to him, one last time, the way I did when we were young, with my heart and not simply my lips, "I love you."
"Would you like to see them?" they had asked me in the hospital, and suddenly, with terror and revulsion, I had known that they were there, in the same building, waiting to be claimed, waiting for someone to make some decision. I suddenly understood that, if I stumbled into the hall and then the elevator and rode down to the bowels of the building, I could find their bodies--not them, just some terrible battered empty facsimile. "No," I said. "No." For a moment I thought that terrible noise would begin again, now that I knew that the noise came from inside myself.
"Are you certain?" Nancy said. "It might help." Help what, I thought even through the haze. Help to kill them forever, to turn my laughing, loving family into a silent parade of the sightless and the still?
"Stop," I'd said, and Alice had looked at Nancy with horror and what looked like hatred and said, "Just leave her alone. Leave her alone."