Everybody clapped and cheered and Josh stepped forward and walked across the room. Leo handed him the microphone and Iris gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“You look fabulous,” she whispered. “Go kill ’em, kid.”
Then everything went quiet and Josh felt a spasm of nerves. He looked at his notes, took a deep breath, and cleared his throat. The microphone made a little squawk of feedback, then settled.
“Thanks, Leo. I don’t have many jokes to tell you about Mom. Growing up with Mom was a serious business.”
There was a little laugh, but not what he’d hoped for.
“I could tell you how I threw up all over her first edition of Tender Is the Night, but I was only two and don’t really remember doing it.”
Now they laughed. That was more like it.
“Or I could tell you about the day she dropped the car keys down the drain outside Kmart and the fire department had to come and drill up the road and take us all home in a fire engine.”
A great laugh.
“Best day of my life, as a matter of fact.”
They roared. This wasn’t so tough, after all. He glanced up at the mezzanine. Nikki grinned and blew him a kiss. Josh stuffed his notes into his pocket.
“The truth is, growing up with Mom wasn’t a joke, it was just plain happy. Every single day. She ran the bookstore, ran the house, helped us do our homework. To be honest, with me, it wasn’t so much helped. She actually did it. The only A’s I ever got were when Mom had done my homework. In fact, everything I don’t know about literature is thanks to Mom. She always made everything seem like fun. Even when, I guess, it wasn’t so much fun for her.”
He paused and looked across at her. She was smiling and he could see that she was trying hard not to cry. He wondered if he ought to skip the next bit, but he went on anyway. Ghosts didn’t go away however much you tried to ignore them.
“And if Abbie was here tonight, she’d say the same.”
You could have cut the silence with a knife.
“She loved Mom with all her heart. Just as I do. Because our mom has been the best any kid could ever want. She’s beautiful and funny and incredibly wise and clever. And she has the biggest heart any mom ever had. She was always there for us. Always. And she still is.”
Christ, everybody was crying now. He even felt like crying himself, but that might be a bit of a bummer. He’d been intending to go on to say something about the other ghost in the room, his dad. Nothing dramatic, just a little mention, but maybe he’d better quit while he was ahead. He looked around and Julian McFadyen discreetly handed him a glass of champagne.
“So. If you’ve got a glass, let’s all make a toast. To these two great, incredibly old, and incredibly wonderful women. Iris and Sarah.”
Everybody repeated the toast then the whole room erupted in applause and suddenly Josh was being mobbed and kissed and cuddled and his back was being slapped and for the best part of five minutes, he didn’t really know much more, except, finally, when the crowd parted and he saw his mom, tears streaming down her face, opening her arms to him. And he went to her and hugged her and held her for a long time.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you so much.”
Lying in his bed much later when the party was over, tired but too wired to sleep, Nikki snoring softly beside him, Josh thought what weird creatures human beings were. How they could be all these different things at the same time, feel all these conflicting emotions. Love and hate, joy and despair, courage and fear. It was like we were some great whirling disc, of every imaginable color, on which the light constantly shifted and danced. He pictured all those faces, young and old, laughing and crying at his speech. It didn’t seem to matter how old you were, seventeen or seventy, the disc was always there, whirling away. Maybe all that happened was that as time went by it just got a little easier to figure out the colors and know for sure which one you were looking at and what it might mean.
He was probably only thinking this way because he wasn’t taking those damn pills anymore, the ones his doctor had prescribed last year after what happened with Abbie, the ones that leveled the world into a kind of muddy sameness. Josh preferred the whirling disc any day. The only downside was that he didn’t sleep so well now.
He used to think it was because he was frightened of what he might dream. When he was little he used to have a list of about ten or twelve things that he would recite to himself at bedtime—witches, werewolves, Mrs. O’Reilly (the kindergarten cleaning woman with the glass eye and whiskers), that kind of stuff. The idea was that if he thought about them, he wouldn’t dream about them. And for at least six months after he came back from Montana that fall, even after Charlie Riggs had come to see him and told him he wasn’t going to do anything and that he would talk with Ty and it would be their secret, Josh had every night deliberately pictured Rolf twitching and bleeding in the snow and rising slowly from the lake, his leprous face half-eaten by fish.
Perhaps because his conscious summoning of these pictures was so vivid, the dream had never come and he no longer bothered with this nightly incantation. Charlie had worried that the burden of the secret might be too great, but it didn’t seem that way now. To see his parents both happy again in their divided lives was compensation enough.
He was drowsy now. He thought about waking Nikki so she could go back to the guest room. But it seemed too cruel and he liked her lying next to him and anyway his mom was cool about these things now and wouldn’t be embarrassed if she found out. He closed his eyes and with the disc of life still whirling in his head, but more slowly now and fading gently into the distance, he fell at last into a dreamless sleep.
Ben could have driven the route with his eyes closed. But in the six years that had passed since he lived here, there were already changes. Different stores popping up along the strip malls, a new office block by the railroad station, Bahnhof’s Deli sadly closed down at last, a kids’ cooking school there in its place. They had planted a row of cherry trees around the edge of the park, sturdily staked and wrapped to the knees in white plastic to protect them. Memories at every turn of the road.
And now there was the house he’d built, all those years ago, looming out of the silver birches they’d planted, the leaves already starting to turn. The Korean dogwood in the driveway looked leggy and a little tired. Maybe they should have put a magnolia there instead. It wasn’t such a bad house, though he’d do it differently now. He saw Sarah at the window, and by the time he had parked the little Honda he’d rented at the airport, she was coming out of the front door. He got out and walked to meet her.
She looked lovely. A blue linen skirt and a cream cashmere V-necked sweater. She was carrying a bunch of white lilies. Ben had chosen the same. His were lying on the backseat.
“You look nice,” he said.
“So do you.”
She put her hand on his arm and kissed his cheek and he noticed she was wearing a different scent from the one he always used to buy her every Christmas.
“All set?” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
He opened the passenger-side door for her but for a moment she didn’t get in. She was frowning at the dogwood.
“That damned tree,” she said. “It’s got to go. I was thinking I might put a magnolia in there. What do you think?”
Ben nodded thoughtfully.
“Yeah. I could see that.”
“They take such a long time though. You know, to be any good.”
She got in and he shut the door.
The cemetery was on the other side of town but the morning traffic wasn’t too heavy and the sunlight was of the kind that could make even Syosset’s meaner streets seem mellow and calm.
“I hear Josh was a knockout at the party.”
“He had them eating out of his hand. I tell you, if he’s that good in court, he’ll be one hell of a lawyer.”
It was Josh who had designated this last day of September as the date on which Abbie should be for
mally remembered. It was the day of the big snowfall two years earlier in Montana and it seemed to them all a more fitting anniversary than the random date of her funeral. That wretched day that all of them would rather, but would never, forget. The photographers and film crews all lined up waiting in the parking lot, jostling and yelling questions in the rain as he walked with Sarah to the waiting black sedan, her face beneath the netting, wet and whiter than their buried child.
The parking lot was all but empty now and they left the car and walked with their twin bouquets of lilies through the gates and past the uniformed attendant, who smiled and gently nodded them through. The sprinklers on the perfect green grass were whirring and flicking rainbows across the sunlight and making oval patches on the path that led up the little hill to Abbie’s grave.
“How’s Eve?”
Ben wondered if he’d heard correctly. It was the first time she had ever asked.
“She’s fine.”
“Are you two going to get married?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s not something we talk about a lot.”
“But you do talk about it?”
“Hey, what is this?”
She laughed and shrugged.
“It’s okay. I wouldn’t mind.”
“Well, I appreciate you saying that.”
“You’re welcome.”
They walked awhile in silence. A young gardener was clipping the roses and he smiled and said good morning as they passed.
“God, he’s making a mess of that,” Sarah whispered. “Why don’t they teach them how to prune properly?”
Ben laughed.
“What about you and the sheriff?”
She gave him a look.
“Me and the sheriff. He’s nice. It’s early days.”
“I’m happy for you.”
She tucked her arm inside his and they didn’t speak again until they reached the grave. Josh had already been here before going in to work. His pink roses were propped against the simple granite headstone. They laid the lilies side by side and stood in silence looking down at them, their arms still linked.
“Josh told you, didn’t he?” she said quietly.
“About the phone call? Yes.”
Two nights ago, he had called Ben in Santa Fe. He said he had something important to say that for a long time he’d kept to himself for fear of upsetting them. He had just told his mother and now wanted to tell him. It was about Abbie. Before she died, Josh said, she had phoned to say she’d run away from Rolf and was going to give herself up. She wanted to say how sorry she was to all of them for what she had done. And to Ben especially for being so cruel.
“I wonder if he just made it up to make us feel better,” Sarah said.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
He put an arm around Sarah’s shoulders and she put hers around his back and gave him a little hug.
“Do you see what he’s written there?” she said.
Ben put on his glasses and knelt beside Josh’s bunch of roses. There was a little card attached. It said simply, Peace.
Nicholas Evans, The Divide
(Series: # )
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