Luck (9 page)

Eventually the women sleep, the new widow first, not because she is heartless or untroubled, more because after this strangest of days, trying to realize and disorientingly failing to realize, of trying and mainly failing to absorb a tidal wave, a tsunami of new ideas, new definitions, new words,
dead
being one,
widow
another,
alone
the big one—after all that, and despite having had the afternoon to herself, she is just bone-deep worn out.

Sophie lies awake longer. In her darkened room with the window overlooking the backyard and the workshop, she is aching, physically hurting, frankly, for skin. This is maybe a more acute pain than if she hadn’t lost touch in the first place. In the end she curves herself around a pillow, partly for comfort—touch—and partly so no one will hear her weeping her way, at last, into sleep.

Downstairs, Beth is awake longest. The living-room sofa is wide but has gotten quite lumpy—Philip was planning to rebuild it as soon as he had time between customers’ orders, so they’re stuck with it now. She tosses and shifts, trying to find a position in which barely upholstered bones don’t clash with springs. She is both less exhausted and less comfortable than the other two, and so sleeps less thoroughly. Despite her new upspringing of spirits, she is wakened several times in the night by unhappy images, she’s aware they are sorrowful although they’re gone as soon as she opens her eyes. Each time this happens, hope and optimism feel more and more squeezed, shoved about by a bullying sort of distress, and around four in the morning, that vulnerable hour, she, too, has a brief spell of weeping, although cannot think why.

And so Philip’s absence begins making its differences: to air, weight, volume, and the rotations and constellations of individual left-behind souls. Pull out one of several props and see what tumbles down. Or see what rearranges itself, compensating for unexpected imbalances—these things, like life or death in the night, can go either way.

N
ora wakens early in a strange narrow white bed in a strange narrow white room. Philip is not beside her. Oh. She leaps up, much the way she did yesterday morning, although without the scream. She has slept in her underwear. Now she puts on yesterday’s disreputable black clothes. This won’t do, not for the whole day, but it’ll have to for now.

Having slept and wakened and leaped, she is at a loss for where to turn next. She is, it appears, sadly inexperienced with events that cannot be controlled or undone. She has had a pretty smooth skate to this point—even death has previously come as a blessing as well as an occasion for sorrow, since when her mother finally took her last shallow breath, who could regret the end, any end, to her suffering? Who, also, could be surprised? This, though—this is a dive into the deep end of helplessness; or rather a merciless shove off a very high diving board.

Philip is dead!

Still, the quality of shock shifts on the second day after so unexpected and untimely a death. Brain cells zapped closed on the first day start popping open again, beginning
the necessary, chaotic work of absorbing severe injury, adapting to fresh facts, seeking new alignments and compensating adjustments. In this hit-and-miss effort, survivors become more of what they already are. Extremes bubble up in silent or noisy lament. Lurking weirdnesses step out of the shrubbery.

Out in the upstairs hallway, going quietly into the bathroom (it’s so early the sun’s barely up, let the others sleep), then down the wide staircase, Nora can feel Philip everywhere. Not everywhere in the sense of expecting to find him in the bathroom, or in the kitchen brewing their first shared pot of coffee, or slamming cupboard doors or rooting through the fridge or wandering about in his socks asking where his workboots or waders have disappeared to; but as if he has spread out and dispersed, becoming a scattered, benign but still assessing presence in the universe.

His absence is also everywhere, and so she continues to be startled that he is
not
in the bathroom, or downstairs making their coffee. The kitchen is, in fact, deathly quiet. She sits at the table, mug in hand, looking around as if she’s never been here before. The oak counters and cupboards, the pine table and chairs, the blue tiles on the floor, all those shiny appliances, the toaster, the coffee-maker, the food processor, the kettle, where did they come from? It’s as if she has taken bold advantage of someone else’s home to step inside and brew up this coffee and sit at this table. Look at the dawn light, the smooth shapes and bright surfaces, the way the space has its own swooping rhythm from window to countertop, up to doorway, down to table, touching the floor and swinging upwards again. Can it be that she has been regularly going in and out of this room for years? Has touched, hundreds and thousands of times, each of these surfaces?

And Philip did, too?

There is something hard inside her that bitter coffee does not dissolve. What do other widows do on the second day?

They go shopping for funeral outfits, or get their hair done, or sleep under sedation, or helplessly weep. Or they are responsible for comforting children. Nora has all the black clothes she needs, her hair is fine, she is not sleepy, she is beyond tears at the moment. She has no children to comfort, or anyone else. She doesn’t even have funeral arrangements to attend to. Sophie takes care of details. They hired her, thanks more to Philip’s income than Nora’s, to be keeper of the household, a resident practical person in a situation intended to be of mutual benefit. She was a cousin of friends in the city who described her, with sympathy and fascinated relish, as a woman rendered distraught and unstable by a mysteriously inflexible desire for virtue that had recently been overwhelmed by experience; a smart and competent person who needed a quiet place and clear, simple tasks of no moral weight whatsoever until she recovered.

Has Sophie recovered?

She was supposed to leave Philip and Nora free for what they supposed to be their more urgent and happy pursuits, and to do so unobtrusively, which for the most part she has; so quiet, at least in the earliest months, that they could be startled to come upon her padding about just when they might have forgotten her. To be sure, there are the shrieking nightmares occasionally startling them awake in the night, but basically she has been, and done, what she was supposed to be and do. Or as Philip kept saying, “Isn’t it great to be free just to work?” Of course. Nora nodded.

But now Philip has abandoned all his urgent and happy pursuits; leaving Nora with what? Sophie takes care of the
details, and Nora’s own pursuits make no sense at the moment. It’s beyond her what material, which stitch, colour, shape, shade or texture could possibly depict the weight of being so much at a loss. It would have to be something extraordinary she has never yet seen in her palettes or threads or baskets of scraps.

Her fingers drum on the table, she stands to look out the window, she paces, she sits down at the table again. Something needs doing, but what?

Upstairs, Sophie is still in bed, but awake. She heard Nora go in and out of the bathroom, was alert to her quiet footsteps slipping downstairs. She’s damned if she’s going to worry about whether there’s enough coffee. She has wakened from her dreams with an idea. This is different, obviously, from waking up wondering if this is a day Phil will make a small gesture, or they’ll have one of those glances, or something will happen that unexpectedly leaves them alone together for an hour or so, but her intentions do nevertheless involve Phil’s skin, and his hands.

Has it been only a day?

Unlike Nora, Sophie does not feel him scattered and dispersed, either everywhere or nowhere. In her mind’s eye he is focused and precisely observing, her specifically. Never mind where he’s looking down from, which isn’t a place exactly, more like he’s a camera mounted above her, the way he himself could be mounted above her. Only the past couple of months, and not so often. There could have been a lot more times if he—they—hadn’t felt the need to be exceedingly careful. Beth, for instance, has to be clubbed like a seal before she notices most things, but if she did get a clue, she would either go running to Nora or more likely blurt something out accidentally. Phil said, “Watch out, she has too
much time on her hands.” One of these days someone—Nora—would have had to tell Beth her time here was up.

Who’d have guessed Phil would be the first gone from the house?

Sophie doesn’t want him, mounted overhead, to see her behaving poorly. She also hopes he didn’t see her throwing up on the kitchen floor yesterday. She knows how offputting it can be, seeing someone throw up. He’s so close she could nearly reach up and touch him, she could nearly draw him down to her. The volume and flagrancy of her rolling, pale, freckled flesh is less evident and intrusive when she’s on her back like this. Gravity is useful. It was nice when he revelled in her, it was good, him diving in.

“I miss you,” she whispers upwards. She feels him pleased to know that, although
miss
isn’t quite right. “I’m doing my best,” she tells him, “I’m not letting you down”—how relieved he should be to know that even now she has little inclination towards havoc.

Interesting, though, the capacity for havoc. There’d be nothing he could do about it, no improving words or good lies he could say, no moves he could make to protect himself. She imagines reputation is important to the dead, although on second thought perhaps not, perhaps they don’t care a bit. In her experience people dying in awesome number are too busy perishing to indicate particular expectations—why would it be different for someone who dies in awesome semi-solitude?

It’s also her experience, though, that people may well want to leave messages. Martha Nkume, for one, thoroughly blasted by catastrophe, watching over her wrecked daughter, holding her dying son, that crumpled, pot-bellied child who might have been six months old or three years—Martha
understood endings, and her bones clasped Sophie’s wrist. “My children, say them be care.” Sophie took this to mean, “Tell them to be careful,” or “Tell them to take care of each other,” but in any case neither message was deliverable: she had no idea where Martha Nkume’s other children might be, or whether they were in any state to hear messages from their mother or anyone else.

What if Martha and her Mary and her Matthew and all her other children, whoever and wherever they were, what if all the suffering multitudes are gathered around Phil, a great crowd of the tormented looking down on Sophie also? Reaching down?

Oh no. That gets her up wide-eyed on her feet.

She can be nothing to them. They have other people, in different places, to hover over and watch. More people than there are stars should be out there haunting and being haunted: slaughtering armies, kidnappers of children, torturers of men, rapists of women, bombers of villages, how do they sleep, how do they rest for the multitudes of the dead gazing down, touching their nightmares with cold muddy bones?

Nora begs ill-will and baits mobs with no notion of how easily cataclysms can be aroused, far beyond shit on the doorstep and awful words on the fence. Nora thinks she can do anything, she imagines she’s free, she
presumes
that her desires will have no terminal ends.

Well, she knows better now. Now she has something terminal on her hands.

Sophie’s own hands fly up—such vengefulness, such meanness, where does that come from? And with Phil watching.

With luck his capacities are confined to surfaces, not what lies beneath. Sophie stretches her naked body, she moves her hands to her breasts, raising them upwards towards him; she
lets them fall, passes hands over her thighs, digs in her fingertips, hard. Was he handsome? Not really. His eyebrows were too thick, his nose a little broad, and his eyes were growing smaller within an increasing middle-aged fleshiness. What he had were energy and the kind of size that is beneficent and feels almost safe. And gifted hands. In her own hands her skin feels excessive. It is too rampant, it is soft. Not quite repulsive, but she has made more of herself than she ever intended.

However thoroughly and ravenously she set out to grow this plush armament, it never has fended off the terrible thinness of limbs, the luminous reproach of eyes in the night. Neither did it fend off Phil, who said, “I’m happy there’s so
much
of you, Sophie,” and touched her here and there; here, too.

The abrupt beginning of pleasure and the abrupt end of pleasure—can it really be true? People often exaggerate when somebody dies, making the dead person, or themselves, either too large or too small. Still, it is nearly the case that throughout this whole summer Sophie has been aware of Phil each waking moment, and some sleeping moments, causing her to step more quickly, watch more sharply. For weeks she has been thrillingly alive. Sophie moans, and the sound snaps her back. She knows better than to conjure hovering spirits. Anyway, she has plans.
Reduced expectations.
The best she can do.

Beth hears Sophie moving about overhead, and thinks she heard the coffee-maker cha-lunking in the kitchen a few minutes ago. So the others are up. But Beth, who yesterday was so light-hearted and hopeful, is severely and thuddingly earthbound this morning.

This occurred overnight, its cause a mystery except for the sofa being so uncomfortable it disrupted her sleep. Then too, dreams, even vanished dreams, have waking effects. Her body
is stiff and she has aches that are unfamiliar. She is, oh God, nearly thirty. There are all sorts of pains and debilitations ahead, along with losses of skin tone and other aspects of beauty. What happens to someone like her as she gets older? Philip is dead. This can happen, it has happened to him. Without the most enormous care, there may come a time when Beth will not be widely admired or scrutinized or painted or praised—and then beyond that, she will still have to die?

Now, finally, and not before time, death comes shockingly home to her; now that it applies specifically and surprisingly to herself. Although if the time comes, still unimaginably off in the future, when she is not widely admired, scrutinized and praised, death may just be a blessing. Aging is terrible, involving shrinkages, crumplings, witherings, losses, invisibilities. Beth shivers. She neither cares nor envisions where Philip is at the moment, if anywhere. Time is short. Despite August, she is cold. She pushes herself upright as slowly as a creaky old woman.