I see you everywhere (42 page)

perhaps skimming what I saw as the gory parts, missing the awe she felt at her own admiration for what had been accomplished. In a matter of hours, this massive creature is stripped of its skin for muktuk, butchered and divided precisely among crew and helpers, loaded on sleds and taken back to town. Women with sharp knives glean all the last fragments of meat from the skull and spine. Finally all that remains on the ice is a large stain of bright red and a few naked bones. When the ice moves out, these will be gone too.

Campbell and I were married for two years before we imagined—out loud, to each other—what Clem’s and Janie’s last hours and moments were like, once they had turned the final corner, the point of no return. We rarely drink anything stronger than wine, but friends had given us Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 283
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a bottle of fine golden tequila, which stood untouched in a cupboard for months. And then, toward the end of one exquisitely autumnal Saturday, the boys away with Campbell’s parents for the weekend, I suggested margaritas. I bought Grand Marnier and a sack of limes. I made our drinks in a blender with ice and poured them into large stemmed glasses the color of twilight, a wedding present we’d never used.

We were in a festive mood. We had walked aimlessly all afternoon, following the byzantine warp and weft of our neighborhood streets. The shaded alleys were bracingly frigid, the promenade along the river alluringly warm. The fragrance of newly spent leaves and the harbor’s salty tides filled us with nostalgia for the past—so much of which we hadn’t shared—and exhilaration for the future, less tentative than when we’d met. As we made our way together, in virtual lockstep, I was gratified by Campbell’s height, by the feel of his sturdy ribs through his shirt against the fingers of my enfolding hand. He is slim, the way my teacherhusband was, and he has the smooth brown hair of my ex the stuntman, but in so many other physical respects he is reassuringly different. We took our margaritas to the roof terrace of our building. Remarkably, no one else was there. The sunset was every color a sunset should be. We drank and talked and laughed. It was perfect. We stayed on the roof till the sky matched our glasses. My sister, I remembered but kept to myself, had been famous for her killer margaritas. In the elevator, returning to the loft, I felt dizzy. My face was taut from too much sun, and I hadn’t eaten in many hours. Yet I took the blender from the freezer and filled my glass again. A chicken was roasting in the oven, not quite ready.

In a blink, the tequila went from my head to my heart. As if a valve had literally burst in my chest, I cried, cried, and cried—into my hands, then into Campbell’s shirt, and then, after he took away my drink and steered me toward the couch, into a large red pillow.

“You need dinner,” he said, sitting beside me to stroke my back.

“I need Clem,” I said. “I always need Clem. Even when I don’t. I need her to
be.
Halfway around the world, wherever!”

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“Yes, Louisa, I know.”

“And you need Janie. Say it. It’s all right.”

“No,” he said. “I do not need Janie. Luke and Max might need her, they always will, but they’re okay.”

“Why did she
do it,
” I sobbed, knowing full well that this no longer deserved to be a question. “Where was she, where the hell was she when she thought that was a
good idea.
”

“Somewhere she’d thought about going for a long time.”

This was something we’d talked about just after we did not go back to the group. It was Campbell who pointed out that, killing herself twice over, Clem had not been waving for help.

He held me while I cried myself out. I pictured Clem, in the garage, then in the cab of the truck, making elaborate preparations, taking precautions: the hose, the IV line, all the seals, all the carefully taped connections. The exhaust pipe. The rearview mirror. A vein in the back of her left hand. The light switch. The pure, merciless dark—or had there been a window in that garage? Was there a moon?

I could see a list in her handwriting:
1, 2, 3.
As I entertained these morbid visions, I began to smell Campbell’s roast chicken. He’d basted it with orange juice, mustard, and the Grand Marnier with which I had made those foolish drinks. I told him to go to the kitchen, to see if it was done.

I followed him. I wiped my face on a dish towel, and I drank a glass of water. I watched him take the chicken from the oven, move it to the cutting board, then check the artichokes. I took a deep, corrugated breath. “I want to know what tipped her over the edge. It drives me crazy not to know.”

My husband looked at me but did not reply. His face was red and moist from the steam in the pot of artichokes. His eyes were sad. He stood motionless at the stove for a moment and then surprised me by saying, “Exactly what do you see when you think about the end of it, the end of her? Tell me.”

I told him what a planner Clem had always been. I described the list I’m sure she made. I told him about the lumpy envelope the funeral Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 285
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director handed me: the silver earrings inlaid with black designs, the abalone ring, the black leather thong from around her wrist, its clay beads a souvenir of some pristine faraway place. “She knew precisely how it would all work,” I said. “She’d have had that thin smile on her face. She could have been humming. She could have had a cup of coffee in the beverage holder of the truck, to keep her alert, to make sure she didn’t mess up. Maybe she left on the dashboard light. Oh God, the radio . . .

“I wish I’d asked to see the truck, everything in it, the way it was. I wonder if she left a last-minute note, there, that we never got to see. The police were idiots.”

Campbell nodded slowly, respectfully. He turned off the gas under the artichokes and removed the lid. He stepped back against the sink and folded his arms. “But what if it was more like this,” he said. “What if she phoned three friends that evening and she said to herself,
If any of them
answer, I won’t do it.
But they didn’t—she got their machines—and then she went to the fridge and she opened a bottle of wine that she’d meant to save for a dinner with her lover, that married guy with the dogs. She thought, To hell with him. Maybe she thought a glass of wine would cheer her up, shake her loose. She turned on the TV, but there wasn’t anything worth watching. She drank a little wine, and she got out some old letters. And then she drank more wine. And maybe she tried her friends again, and maybe they still weren’t in. And the radio—yes, the radio. Maybe she turned it on, and there was Bob Dylan. ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.’ Or Bob Marley. ‘So Much Trouble in the World.’ And she finished that bottle of wine.”

He was looking at me fiercely. The chicken, on the cutting board, had slumped to one side.

I said, “And she thought, I’m awake now, I might as well go to work.”

“So she did.”

“And she turned on the fluorescent lights in the lab, and she felt even lonelier. That Edward Hopper light. And she saw the anesthetic on the counter.”

“And she heard something in the garage—a mouse—and she opened the door.”

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“And there was the truck. Waiting.” I shook my head. “But I still can’t believe, I just can’t believe—”

“Who can?” Campbell reached for me across the narrow kitchen. Briefly, he held my shoulders. “So you see.”

“You mean, that I will never know.”

“We both know that.”

I took two plates from the cupboard. He moved toward the counter, to serve our dinner.

“What about Janie?” I said.

“Let’s sit down,” he said.

I look up from my sister’s letter. Ralph’s binoculars lie on the coffee table.

“Oh,” I say, aloud. I pick them up. I look out the window. On a roof nearly a block away, I am able to inspect the tiniest buds on the birch tree someone planted bravely in a large wooden box. I search again for the two nests and watch them, one and then the other, till I detect motion. The mother pigeon paces a ledge beside her brood. I can’t hear her cooing, but I can see her throat swelling again and again, like a beating heart, as she keeps up her maternal chatter.

I think of my Great-Great-Aunt Lucy’s house in Winooski, Vermont. I haven’t thought of it in so long. It was shabby outside, pretty and spotless within. But I’m thinking of the bird feeders she hung from the trees in the yard. Maybe, for just that one summer, Clem and Aunt Lucy were soul mates. Absurdly, the memory makes me jealous. They are both gone, long gone.

Like a cop on his beat, the mother pigeon struts her ledge.

“Guys!” I call out. “Come have a look at something!”

Henri, at full tilt, is the first to arrive. I hold the binoculars to his eyes, bending over to get the view right, my head right next to his. “Baby birds,” I whisper. His hair smells like the sandalwood incense that Luke burns in a jar on his desk. Beside the jar is a picture of his mother; Max’s Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 287
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picture of Janie, a different one, sits on top of his dresser. They still go to a therapist, but only twice a month.

Max and Luke saunter along, barefoot, hair in their eyes, reluctant to leave the hypnotic world of the screen, but then they hear Henri’s exclamations of delight. They take turns scanning the skyline. Henri points out the pigeon nest. “Awesome,” he says.

The phone rings. I’m pretty sure it will be one of the two fathers calling. Luke crosses the room to answer; he greets the caller happily—

“Hey, ’sup, dude?”—and carries the phone back to the window, looking out at the rooftops with Max and Henri.

I stand back, filled with possessive love for all three boys, none of whom is technically, biologically, genetically “mine”—but what does it matter? Before she died, I thought of Clem as mine—my sister—but that gave me no say in her fate. I think of all the sad, desperate people in that support group, the repetitive litany:
my father, my son, my mother, my
friend . . .
all the broken illusions that because those people were somehow “ours,” we were the ones with the power to hold them. No one belongs to us, and we belong to no one—not in that sense. This should free us, but it never quite does.

I look at Clem’s letters to Ralph from Alaska, a stack of ordinary paper on an ordinary table. I haven’t finished reading them, but already I know they hold no clues, no predictions of doom. In all likelihood, they will be the last words of hers—the last that are new to me—I will ever encounter. Seeing them, these words written so long ago, when she was so young, so clear-eyed, so forward-looking, I understand that what I’ve secretly imagined since her death was that she herself would pop up somewhere—in a dream, in that support group, on a rush-hour subway—and give me a logical explanation.

One, two, three: a list.

And that’s when I understand, in every grieving nerve, in the bustling nest of my heart, that in this life, the only life there is—Clem and I disagreed often, but we agreed on that—the last word is mine, and it is a gift.

Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 288 Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 289 a note about the author

Julia Glass is the author of
Three Junes,
winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, and
The Whole World Over.
She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her short fiction has won several prizes, including the Tobias Wolff Award and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella. She lives with her family in Massachusetts. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 290 Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 291 a note on the type

The text of this book was set in Ehrhardt, a typeface based on the specimens of “Dutch” types found at the Ehrhardt foundry in Leipzig. The original design of the face was the work of Nicholas Kis, a Hungarian punch cutter known to have worked in Amsterdam from 1680 to 1689. The modern version of Ehrhardt was cut by the Monotype Corporation of London in 1937. Composed by Creative Graphics,

Allentown, Pennsylvania

Printed and bound by Berryville Graphics,

Berryville, Virginia

Designed by M. Kristen Bearse

• Cover
  
• Also by Julia Glass
  
• Title Page
  
• Copyright
  
• Dedication
  
• Epigraph
  
• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Note about the Author
  
• Note on the Type