Lightning People (52 page)

His father had destroyed his mother, but Joseph had Del to save him.

“TAKE WHAT YOU want,” Raj said. Del stood by the elevator bank in Madi's apartment. A layer of dust had settled over every inch of her place—the coffee maker, the answering machine, her black Mac laptop closed like a briefcase on the kitchen counter, the embroidered screens, the gold peacock whose feathered crown held up the glass coffee table; all of it looked outdated and decaying under the coat of grime. It occurred to her how quickly time took the living out of rooms. People had to fight to keep anything alive and present; otherwise it drifted into dust from lack of contact, resentful for not being used.

The same could be said for the quiet that hung between Del and Raj. He was standing behind a barricade of empty brown boxes, his arms crossed over a yellow T-shirt.

“Are you going to keep the place or sell it?” she asked him, removing her sunglasses. She wanted to keep them on but knew avoidance would be Raj's first point of attack.

“I haven't decided,” he replied, scanning the loft with the indecision of a potential buyer, uncertain whether the four walls and the raftered ceiling would constitute a happy home. Not that a happy
home had ever been a consideration for Raj before. “You know, it's funny,” he said. “I feel a responsibility to settle her belongings. So I got these boxes. But it now strikes me, settle it how? I suppose that means get rid of it. Belongings,” he whistled like he only just got their joke. “You buy this stuff and think you're going to own it forever. But you really don't leave any instruction on what anyone's supposed to do with it when you're gone. I really don't know what to keep.”

“Whatever you don't want, you could just put on the street,” she advised. “I'm sure there's still that great economy of garbage pickers who make sure it all gets a home. Or donate it to a charity. Madi did a lot of volunteering for Angel Outreach, which gives all the money it earns from estate sales to women living with HIV.”

What was she talking about? Del listened to herself ramble on about charity mission statements to compensate for what she couldn't say, couldn't even find words for in the roaring stream of consciousness of her mind. Stream? More like a river. She hadn't wanted to see Raj, not yet. In the week since she last left his apartment, she had avoided his calls, answering only periodically to tell him that Joseph was very ill and she wasn't sure yet what she had decided to do. That, of course, was a lie. In the hot, incoherent days of late August, Del rarely left the apartment, sleeping next to Joseph at night, and when she did run out to the grocery, her body started to show signs of a stoop, a tightening and hunkering of the shoulders that seemed to remove her from the prospect of new possibilities. She often kept her phone turned off. But when Raj called asking if she'd help him deal with Madi's apartment, she had no choice but to consent. Now she forced herself from the entryway with such hesitant, careful steps, it seemed clear that she couldn't be expected to gauge the value of a single bookend.

“You don't want anything?” Raj asked.

“I guess I do. A piece of her jewelry would be a nice way to remember her. I don't know. I don't feel right picking through her things for myself. Wait. The gold peacock.” She pointed to the obese metal bird standing guard in front of the couch. “I'd throw away the glass and just keep that horrible thing as a little Madi memorial.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” he said smiling. “She really developed quite a taste for the gaudy at the end of her life, didn't she? She would accuse us of being brainwashed Western minimalists. I can hear her now. ‘Oh, no, it has an ounce of character. It might actually suggest I have a personality. Banish it from my sight.'” He kicked a cardboard box to clear a path toward Del and brandished a package of neon paper squares. “I brought Post-its. Let's put them on the stuff we don't want and give that to the charities. You and I can fight over the rest until we've completely destroyed her legacy in a greedy wrestling match between the two people she loved most.”

They worked for three hours attaching Post-its to Indian tapestries and teak dining-room chairs, to copper plant basins and cushioned wicker stools. They each took a side of Madi's long linen couch and carried it toward the elevator as the first essential piece to donate to Goodwill. Working this way, laughing as they wielded stained-glass lamps and overstuffed sequin pillows, Del could almost imagine a different reality, one where she and Raj were in a similar New York loft, moving things in and not out, choosing items to position on shelves and side tables and window ledges, arranging their lives together as a young couple in love with all of the unspoiled days ahead of them. Del couldn't resist acknowledging that a part of her wanted it. Wanted it desperately, even still. Bookcases filled with Raj's photo monographs and her biology encyclopedias, Greek bric-a-brac under black-and-white portraits, the insidious gold peacock standing in front of a new leather sofa. Her rock albums could go underneath the windows, and they'd put the speakers in the rafters, and the bell jar from Raj's fly sculpture could hold candles, which they could light at night for dinners. That's how their future would have been built.

They ran through an entire pack of Post-its before they set foot in the bedroom. Del entered Madi's walk-in closet, picking through hangers and sliding her foot over the army of shoes that lined up across the floor.

“Your jurisdiction,” Raj said from the door frame.

“She's got all of these wonderful saris. We should send those to an Indian charity, don't you think?”

“Whatever you say.” He eyed her from the edge of the closet. She held her breath as he watched her, keeping her focus confined to the hangers. “Hold on,” he said. “I have something for you.” He disappeared into the living room, while Del slipped a vintage party dress over her head, its tight black architecture barely fitting over her ribs, so much so it must have never fit Madi. She must have just wanted it, the black bodice curving into lace that swept down to her toes. Del walked out to model it for Raj. He was removing an item from the large oak dresser, which he had already claimed as the sole piece of furniture he wanted to keep.

“I have something for you,” he repeated, taking a step toward her. “It was Madi's.” He opened his palm and picked up the ring between his thumb and forefinger.

It was a simple platinum band she wore on her right hand. Del remembered Madi buying it with some of the first money she had made working in the financial sector, when the idea of doing anything with her literature degree had finally been dismissed as the dream of an impressionable student who didn't understand how little poetry suited real life. Raj grabbed Del's wrist and slipped the ring onto her finger. It fit perfectly.

“She was wearing it when she died,” Raj said, still staring at it. “They gave it back to me. We put it on her at the funeral but these goons come out just before they close the coffin to take all of the jewelry off. Anyway, I want you to have it. She would have liked that.”

Raj held her fingers in his palm and gazed into her eyes, dripping blue icebergs, once so inhospitable but now begging for her to tell him what he wanted to hear.

“I can't leave him right now,” she said suddenly, terrified that if she didn't say it right then she would never find the courage. “Joseph's very sick. He needs me to take care of him.”

“Is that how it is?”

“Yeah. That's it.”

“Just right now or . . . ?”

“I'm not leaving him.” She reached her hand up to touch his cheek, but he pulled his head back in defense, dropped her fingers, and
turned around. “I'm sorry, Raj. I guess there wasn't going to be a part two for us in the end. I thought there could be for a while, but we were both just fooling ourselves.”

“No,” he said as he walked toward the oak dresser. “I wasn't fooling myself. You were. You were fooling both of us.”

“Maybe,” she replied. “I didn't know what was going to happen. I'm sorry.” She struggled to lift the dress over her shoulders, fighting with the fabric until the lace skirt covered her head. In that second, when the room was blocked out by a curtain of fabric, she gave herself a moment to shut her eyes and let out a hard, silent cry that cramped every muscle in her face and left her jaw open in the volts of the loudest ache. Then she collected herself, snapping her mouth shut and pinching the water from her eyes, as she threw the dress on the floor. Raj stood by the dresser with his back to her, pretending to rifle through papers.

“You can come back another time and go through her clothes,” he said with the coldness of a legal agreement. “Just take what you want and leave what you don't. I'll get people to move it all out this week. And take the peacock too or else it will go with the rest.”

She picked up her purse from the dining-room chair. Clutching the strap, she walked quietly over to him, reaching out to touch his arm.

“There's so much I want to tell you,” she said, trying to hold back her tears. “It's just not the right time for it. You have to believe me.”

“There is never the right time for it. Is there, Del?” He didn't look up but flinched as her fingers pressed against his skin. “I think you should go.”

She didn't take the peacock. She pressed the call button and when the doors split open she walked into the elevator and struggled to find any last words that would sum up everything she wanted to say. Only when the doors started to shut and she saw him rounding the corner, his neck craned sideways to watch her go, his skinny body casting a long shadow across the concrete floor, his eyes not angry or excited, only then did she find something to say. In the last inch of Madi's apartment she said “good-bye.” Then the room and Raj disappeared into a crack, and the elevator brought her down.

THAT NIGHT, SHE and Joseph lit candles and ate from takeout boxes on the living room floor. Thunder made only a purr that trembled the windows, but lightning struck deep, momentarily turning the room into flashes of white and green. Del had bought two bottles of wine on her way home from Madi's apartment, and she ignored the Chinese food for the task of finishing one bottle all on her own. She hadn't told him about her interaction with Raj, and it hardly seemed worthwhile to speak about it now. She took long sips from her glass, as Joseph mentioned the appointment at INS.

“It's still set for December 1,” he said. “That's three months away.”

“Yeah,” she replied from behind her glass.

“What's wrong?” he asked, dropping his fork into the container and staring worriedly over at her. “Don't you still want to go through with it?”

She took another sip and changed the subject.

“Did I ever tell you that rattlesnake venom is being tested to cure heart failure?” Del had been thinking about that irony all week, how the venom in her favorite animal was being studied to treat the disease that had wiped out Joseph's family. That had been only one of the many ironies that left her smoking cigarettes while staring out the window at the same tenement building across the street as if she were trying to commit the view to memory. She told Joseph of the advances Dr. Isely had been making in her underground lab up at Columbia, milking snakes to locate the molecules that slowed the blood supply and relaxed the muscles in the heart. “Maybe it will be a reality in five or ten years. Who knows?” she said, as she poured more wine in her glass. “Maybe one day rattlesnakes will be the cure everyone's been waiting for.”

“Jesus,” he said, reaching across the floor to wrap his fingers around her ankle. “I hope it's true. Do you know what that could mean?” She didn't answer. “That could be your next job, Del. Why don't you call up this woman and ask if you can be a part of it? There can't be many people around with your specialties. They could probably use you.”

She put her fingers on his hand and smiled faintly as she pulled her foot away. It meant something that Joseph suggested it, but she had already signed off on that dream.

“No,” she replied. “That's not going to happen.”

She looked at him as she poured the last of the wine from the bottle. Outside, lightning flashed across the windows, bouncing off buildings, leeching through metal until its current dispersed deep below the sidewalk. Was it true that lightning couldn't strike a person if they weren't grounded, feet in midair, no part of them anchored to the earth? In midair, a person was safe. Lightning strikes weren't random. They hunted for things with roots to correct an imbalance between the land and the sky. Lightning was an atmosphere looking to settle a score.

She took a sip and smiled. How could she not smile now, not want to laugh out loud at the shit-spitting humor of the world? Up until a few weeks ago, Del had dreamed of a green card, and now a meeting at INS scheduled for December was the last option on her mind.
It was amazing what life gave you
, she thought.
Almost as amazing as what it took
.

The truth was Del had already said good-bye that afternoon through the closing elevator doors of Madi's apartment, and she meant to keep her word. She gulped the final remnants from her glass. It had been quite an experiment. She could remember watching 1999 turn into 2000 from a rooftop in Tribeca, feeling all of the promise of that new invisible century finally arriving. She had been looking north toward the glowing halo of Times Square, and Madi had grabbed her by the neck and said, “Stop staring at the place where some stupid ball dropped. It's not there, it's right here.” Madi had been right about the future, for a while anyway, but now it was time to say good-bye. She could feel things dying, the power leaking out of her, leaking out of buildings and store windows and the trees lining the sidewalks, out of the new glass high-rises along the piers of the Hudson River and out of the back doors of the yellow cabs racing down FDR. It was all ending—her version of it, her time with it, that future they once waited until midnight for—washing quietly away.