“The things that have driven her,” he said, “we will probably never know.”
“I know. It was a voice. It was a fucking voice that I would have liked to kill if it wasn’t inside her.”
He nodded. “We’ve moved her to a display coffin. The room is cold, of course. May I add something else?”
“Sure.”
“Have you considered interment?”
“Where I’m going to bury her?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to put Bethany with my mom and pop.”
“May I suggest, then, cremation. We could then forward the remains to your funeral home.”
“I don’t know. I mean . . . cremation.”
“Well, I felt the option had to be extended. More and more people are embracing the return of the loved one to the elements.”
“Can I think about it?”
“Of course. And now let’s go downstairs.”
I followed Larry to an elevator, and we rode one floor to the basement. It opened onto another pleasant corridor, similar to the one upstairs. We walked down to a locked heavy wooden door. Larry opened it and switched on several lights. The room was icy, and goose bumps jumped over my bare legs and arms. There were several stainless-steel tables on wheels, long and narrow, arranged in a neat row against the far wall. Opposite them a bank of eight sliding body vaults, closed and locked. The ceiling of the room was new, white perforated tiles. The floor and walls that were not stainless steel were also white. On a cart in a corner of the room rested a coffin with the half top raised, so that in order to see my sister, I would have to walk to it and around it. A folding chair was set up next to it.
Larry stood behind me and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Will you be too cold?”
I shook my head.
“Then I shall leave you. If you simply pick up this phone on the wall, I will return to you.”
I nodded, and then I was alone in the room.
I stood very still. I could hear nothing. After a while I could hear the quiet itself. I walked on weary legs to the upturned coffin lid and stood again, quietly, looking at the wood and at the grain. I wondered if I had come close enough. On the other side of this wood was my sister. I had come this close. Was this close enough? And this is what I truly understand, now. You have to go all the way through. It’s too hard any other way. I stepped around to my sister.
Not even her eyes. Not even the few patches of hair. Or the curve of her lips or the bones of her chin. Nothing linked to my memory. A tiny thing in death and sadness, and not at all my Bethany, except of course the few teeth that corresponded to the dental records Pop sent out. Is that all that ever remains, then? Teeth? Cavities and despair?
“Oh, Bethany,” I whispered, brushing a few wisps of hair onto her pillow like I’d done with Mom in the hospital.
Larry and Al Ho had laid her in a pretty blue polka-dot dress that I knew couldn’t have been hers. They had rouged her and arranged the weak hair to fall over the space where part of an ear was missing. Her eyebrows were penciled on. They didn’t insult her with a smile. My sister looked stunned.
I put my face down close to hers, then laid my cheek against hers. She smelled like Mom’s lilac soap. I was crying into her pillow, and it was a good cry, and it was for Mom and Pop and Norma, too.
“I’m so sorry I never came over, Norma,” I said into the pillow. “I could spend the rest of my life being sorry for everything.” But I was not sorry that Mom was not here. I was not sorry my pop was not. I heard a voice. A soft call.
“Smithy.”
I thought I dreamed the voice, and I kept my face on Bethany’s pillow.
“Smithy Ide,” it said again.
I raised myself up and looked over the lid to the open doorway.
Larry Ho had brought Norma down to this room. She sat tall and alone in the corridor light. Across the cold room, I noticed that the white concrete floor glistened as if it were wet. We looked over the space at each other. She wore blue jeans and a green sweater. Her hair was short again. Her eyes glistened, too, only not hard like the floor. I tried to say her name, but I couldn’t.
Finally she said, “I’m coming there, Smithy. I’m coming to you.”
I looked at Bethany again and then at Norma.
“No. Please, Norma.”
Norma took her hands off the wheels of her chair and put them in her lap. Then she said with all her defiance, “I’m staying. I’m staying right here.”
I’m not sure about my face. What it does, I mean. Sometimes I feel a smile flip across it, but in a lot of ways it doesn’t seem like a smile. I looked at her, then bent down to my sister.
“I love you, Bethany. Hook will always be here.”
I kissed the stranger with my sister’s teeth and closed the coffin lid. I walked slowly across the room to Norma, on unsteady legs. She didn’t seem surprised that so much of me was gone or that I had a beard and beads hung off my head. I walked behind her and pulled her from the room. Larry Ho was waiting in the corridor. He switched off the lights, locked the door, and took us back in the elevator.
“Cremation is okay,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“I can call you with the information.”
“Yes.”
I pushed Norma out of the office and down a ramp. I pushed her back across the circular roadway and onto the bike path. I pushed her past the jugglers, and the vendors, and the muscle builders, and the basketball players, and the one-man bands. I pushed her fast, and then I was running. Over the beach, kites rose and soared side to side, and Bethany did, too, held only by string to the earth, and she dove and dipped and finally broke free of us, trailing the string behind. I stopped running and watched as my sister drifted up into a clear evening sky. Norma looked straight ahead, but her left hand flew over her right shoulder and held tight to my wrist. I looked down at the top of her head.
“I . . . love . . . you,” she said.
I knelt on the bike road between Venice and Santa Monica, and I was not going to be sorry anymore. I turned her face to me and kissed her lips.
“I . . . love . . . you . . . too,” I said.
And I said it again. And I did.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Peter Maloney, supporter of the act of writing. Claudia Howard, believer in dreams. Doug and Linda McLarty, who know. My agents and friends Jeff Kleinman, Sylvie Rabineau, Jeff Sanford, Richard Fisher, and Marilyn Szatmary. The extraordinary editor and guide Ray Roberts. All my new friends at Viking Penguin. The wonderful and generous Stephen King. And especially the great actress, confidante, and wife, Kate Skinner McLarty, who breathed new life and hope my way.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com
Ron McLarty, The Memory of Running
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends