Lying with the Dead (22 page)

When my cheeks are numb, I toss the ice into a rattling trash can. Then I return to the room and listen at the door. Out of politeness, I knock before opening it.

Maury’s in the bathroom, readying himself for bed. Although I’ve eaten nothing since noon and long for another drink, I get ready too and am grateful when we are both in bed and the lights go out. The silence, the separate beds, the sense of words unexpressed—all this recalls the excruciating, drawn-out dissolution of many an old love affair. Now, as then, the distance between person and person, between what I’ve done and what I’ve failed to do, feels unbridgeable. The urge to apologize battles with an instinct that I’ve talked enough, that I’ve already done too much damage. Still, I dither. Do I owe it to Maury to reveal what Mom told me? Will it lift a burden? Or drive him to despair?

Had he known the truth, he might have agreed to Mom’s request. Nobody could blame him—nobody except the sort of merciless Furies who sentenced him to life in the first place. But rage and revenge aren’t Maury’s style. That’s me. That’s Mom. Maury’s no murderer. The fact that he was framed falls into the same category as my finding out that I have a different father. News he can’t use.

“Quinn,” he speaks up, as if from the end of the world.

“Yes.”

“I’m sad.”

“I’m sad too.”

“I’m sad that the last thing I did in her life was run away from Mom.”

“You did the right thing. You’re a good person,” I say.

“Why did she ask me to kill her?”

“She was so old, she was off her rocker and didn’t know what she was doing.”

Maury sinks into what I trust is sleep, but I don’t dare doze off for fear of nightmares. Mom was no more off her rocker at the end than she was at any point in her life. She had her reasons for choosing to die. Among them, I’d guess, was the habitual desire to absent herself. In this instance she took her toxicity to the grave and left behind something for Candy and Maury. As for what she left me, perhaps she believed that by dying at my hands she bound me to her for eternity.

I’ll never know. She was, after all, a liar from a long line of liars. As I reflect on all that I don’t know, I add to it all the people I never really knew before—Dad, my biological father, and in some respects Mom, Candy, and Maury. But at least now I know myself. I am a doting son. I’m everything Mom yearned for me to become. A success. A source of pride. An object of envy. The family moneybags. And obedient to the end.

I could argue that she asked for it. I could excuse it as a mercy killing. Or I might maintain that I acted out of the same twisted love as she showered on me. But none of this changes anything. I am a man who murdered his mother. At last the guilt I’ve felt for so long has found its crime; my dread has discovered its source.

Even if I were inclined to confess, who could I tell? Apart from an anonymous priest, who would it matter to? Not Candy. She doesn’t deserve another crippling blow. Not Maury. He probably wouldn’t believe me.

No, I’ll keep my trap shut and I won’t do the
Oresteia
. I’ve done it. I’m not going to ghostwalk through it a second time for the benefit of the BBC. But I’ll finish my memoir. I’ll restart it and stick to the facts. I’ll keep Tamzin on the payroll and, I hope, in my life, but I won’t depend on quotes to tell the story. Whether or not it’s what the publisher wants, I’ll recount my personal history as it happened, settling the debts that the dead bequeath the living. Primary among them is the truth about Maury, telling on the page what I cannot bear to tell him in person.

“Quinn,” Maury speaks up. “You said you have your own way of praying. Can we do that now? Pray for Mom your way?”

It’s too late to explain to him that I’ve lost my way and need to find a different one. So I recite the Hail Mary, and Maury joins in at the end, “Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.”

Candy

Did I cause it? Did I try to control it? Could I have cured it?

Rattling around in my brain, like pebbles in a bucket, these questions echo the key lessons I learned years ago at Ala-Teen. During Dad’s drinking days, Mom sent me to meetings where they taught the cardinal rules that you should never assume you caused or can control or cure anybody else’s problems. But as I kneel in a church pew examining my conscience, I feel guilty on all three scores; I’m to blame for Mom’s death.

Sure, she’d been hinting for years, not so subtly manipulating me. Her worst sin, it crosses my mind, may not have been her foul temper, her vicious mouth, or her relish at smacking around me and the boys. Her worst sin might have been her conviction that she had a right to bully us into doing her bidding right up until the end.

But why run on about her faults? Today isn’t about Mom’s sins. It’s about mine. And the darkest smudge on my soul comes from thinking that somebody owed me a favor. After nursemaiding Mom for years, I counted on Maury or Quinn to step up to the plate. I knew what she wanted. What I, deep down and in secret, wanted. So when Maury told me what Mom asked him to do, I could have warned Quinn by phone from the hotel. Instead, I took my sweet time driving home. If I hadn’t, Mom might be alive today.

Then where would we be? A lot worse off—reluctant as I am to say that out loud.

After the sacrament of confession was repackaged as reconciliation, I expected it to become more popular. I mean, no more breast-beating, no more shame-ridden whispering. Just a friendly chat with a priest about toning up your soul. Not that different from talking to a personal trainer about losing weight. But this Saturday afternoon, the traditional time for penance, the church is practically empty, and the parish has cut down on its utility bill by dimming the lights. I almost trip over three nuns in black habits gliding quietly up the center aisle.

When I slink into the confessional, it’s not an old-fashioned cubicle, dim and hushed, with an unpadded kneeler and a screen between the penitent and priest. It’s a bright canary yellow room with two armchairs and a pole lamp in the corner. Any chance I’ll feel at ease flies out the window when I find that Father Ramos is on duty. I was hoping for the pastor, not the priest who anointed Mom on her deathbed.

He grins and gestures to the empty chair. I mutter, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” and staring at my boots, I let go. What pours out of me seems hideous. “I loved my mother,” I say, “but sometimes I hated her, too, and wished she was dead. I’ve got to admit I wished one of my brothers would kill her. And that’s what I’m afraid happened. I’m afraid my younger brother killed her.”

“Why do you say that?” Father Ramos cheerfully inquires.

“Just, you know, an intuition.”

“Is there any proof?”

“No.”

“Have you told anyone else?”

Do I dare be honest? Maybe Father Ramos won’t grant me absolution unless I run to the police and rat on Quinn. “I haven’t mentioned this to a soul.”

“Good.” His smile brightens. He’s so young and beardless, I have the uncomfortable feeling that I’m confessing to a child.

“For sure, you’re sad about your mother,” he says. “You were very close to her. But the closeness between a mother and daughter can be hard and confusing. Such talk belongs here, though, under the seal of the sacrament, not outside where it could cause trouble for your brother.”

“I blame myself, not him,” I say. “I really did wish she’d die so I didn’t have to take care of her anymore and I could get married and move to North Carolina.”

“You deserve a husband. Your mother wished that for you.”

“Still, I’m worried about my brother and what will become of him.”

“That’s between him and his conscience, between him and his confessor.”

“He doesn’t have one. He lives in London.”

“There are priests in England.”

“He doesn’t go to Mass.”

“Maybe he’ll start. Pray for him.”

“I will. I do. But I feel guilty.”

“That’s natural when a parent dies and a child goes on living.”

“Father, I’m no child.”

“You’re still God’s child. You’re your mother’s child,” he says in a fake paternal voice that doesn’t match his hairless face. “This will all pass with time. Now say a decade of the Rosary for the repose of your mother’s soul and make a good act of contrition. Go in peace and God bless.”

And that’s it. After he absolves me and I say my penance, I’d like to claim I feel cleansed, that, as the talk shows say, I’ve achieved closure. But it’s crazy to think I’ll ever recover from Mom’s death.

Still, I don’t have the luxury of falling apart. Too much remains to be done. She named me executor of her will, and I have to obey her wishes. Like always, she spelled them out in no uncertain terms. She wanted no wake, no open casket. She wanted cremation and a requiem mass. She wanted hymns at the service, and one old-time torch song, “Laura,” which, in my opinion, belongs in a cocktail lounge, not a church.

As for her estate, she divided it between Maury and me. The house, Lawrence estimates, will in this inflated market fetch the flabbergasting sum of a quarter of a million dollars. Her insurance policy will pay us fifty thousand apiece, and in the biggest shock, her savings account contains a hundred thousand dollars hoarded up from Quinn’s monthly checks. By rights this money should be handed back to him, but Quinn says no, it’s my dowry and Maury’s trust fund.

The other dreary, teary details I’ve postponed until after the boys leave. Before I put it in the hands of a real estate agent, the house has to be cleaned and repainted. There’s also the rust-bucket Chevy that has to be towed from the driveway and Maury’s sawdust boat that needs to be … I don’t know, shoveled out of the attic. What I dread most is sifting through Mom’s personal belongings, giving stuff to Goodwill, getting rid of junk, and deciding who keeps what. It figures to be summer before I’m free of worry.

• • •

As if I didn’t have enough on my mind, at the last moment on the drive to church for the memorial service, Quinn volunteers to say a few words. It stands to reason that he’s the one to do a eulogy. I couldn’t speak without falling to pieces, and Maury talking in public would be a nightmare for everybody, especially him. But while Quinn has the stage presence for the job, I’m frantic that he’ll spout stuff totally off the wall or slip into one of his accents or imitations. That’s the thing about Quinn—you never know which one of him will show up.

Dressed in solid black, he’d be easy to mistake for a priest. Or since he’s not wearing a Roman collar, a Protestant minister. Lawrence looks nice in his blue blazer and gray wool slacks. Sadly, only Maury seems out of it in his Windbreaker and jeans, kneeling at the end of the pew like the church custodian.

During the mass, Mom’s ashes rest in a wooden urn on the top step of the altar, next to her favorite photograph—a full-length shot of her in her wedding gown. That’s not how I’ll remember her. At her best—and she did have good moments—I think of her down on her knees, not in prayer, but planting roses and azaleas in front of the house. She loved flowers, and they knew it and flourished in her care. Tears come to my eyes.

After the last amen, Quinn strides up to the urn and takes the measure of what has to be the smallest audience in his experience. Apart from the priest, an altar boy, an organist, and a couple of choir members, there aren’t a dozen of us under the steepled roof of the A-frame. Everybody else Mom knew is dead. Yet Quinn throws himself into this performance like he’s speaking for the ages on a worldwide broadcast.

“As the poet Horace wrote,” he starts off, and I cringe, afraid he’ll quote that rhyme about how our parents fuck us up. “Every one of us walks on a fire hidden by treacherous ashes. We’re never sure what lies beneath our feet much less how painful the path is for others. We don’t know what’s ahead of us and half the time we’re blind to what we’ve left behind. But we all know we’re going to die, and so we mourn the death of those we love because we miss them and realize we’re bound to end up like them.

“My mother, I feel confident in saying, is in heaven. She was a saint who raised three children as well as she could under very difficult circumstances. But she was also a human being and she had her faults. I don’t need to dwell on them now, and it’s not my place to judge her. That’s God’s job, and as the church teaches us, there’s nothing that He won’t forgive. There’s no sin too great, no crime or betrayal or failure beyond absolution.

“Mom knew that, and from the time I was a little boy she swore that if I told the truth, she’d always forgive me. Even if I killed somebody, she said, she’d love me just the same. She said this so often I wondered whether she had someone in mind that she wanted me to kill. But of course she was just impressing on me that she was forgiving and God is forgiving. I hope it won’t sound presumptuous then if I say I forgive my mother even as I pray that I am forgiven.”

For my money Quinn should’ve stopped right there. But he’s on a roll. Like an Oscar-winning actor who loves the sound of his own voice, he rattles on and on, throwing in a quote from, of all books, the Koran. The Prophet, Quinn says, wrote that God is as close to a man as the vein in his own neck. He swears that Mom, in death, will stay that close to him.

Well, let him speak for himself, not me. I need space. I need to marry Lawrence and wave farewell to Maryland. I don’t care to think that Mom is as close as Quinn claims. This is a happy ending. The answer to my prayers. I refuse to let anything ruin it. Quinn will return to London and Maury to California. May God guard them both and grant them good fortune. And please grant me the strength to move on.

Maury

Mom asked not to be buried in a box. She left word to burn her. But her ashes come back in a box. A little wooden one. So she’s going to be buried in a box after all.

Once the funeral mass is finished, the three of us go to Candy’s kitchen, and she opens the box lid and spoons some of the gray powder into an envelope. In her will, Mom wrote for her ashes to be sprinkled over the grass at Dad’s grave. But the cemetery said no, that’s illegal. They don’t mind, though, if we spread a handful.

Candy jabs the spoon and hits a hard spot and makes a face. It sounds like a rock or a root. But it’s bone. At the bottom of the box, there are solid chunks of Mom, and when I hear the spoon hit them again, I hurry into my room and hold onto the floor.

I bet Candy and Quinn believe I hurt Mom and that’s why she died. I half believe it myself. But I know I didn’t. Like Quinn said, I’m a good person. People change.

In church the priest told us Mom was dust before she was born and now she’s dust again. He doesn’t say what she was in between. My mind’s on the frogs in the woods that sleep underground in winter, then wake up in spring and squirt black eggs on the creek. In a couple days the eggs grow fishtails, then legs. Then the tadpoles lose their tails but not their legs and become frogs for a summer before they go back underground. Over and over, year after year. I’ve changed. I’m different and I’m not dust yet.

On the trip to the graveyard in Candy’s car, Quinn tells me I’m not riding the bus back to California. I’m flying. They’ll drop me at the airport at domestic before he boards at international. “We’re all too old to waste time traveling by road,” he says. “You’re a rich man now. You can afford it.” Then he asks, “Is there somebody you trust?”

“I trust you.”

“I mean somebody in the States.”

“I trust Candy.”

“He means somebody out west,” Candy says, “who’ll look after your money.”

“There’s Nicky.”

“Maybe we should fix it,” Candy says, “so you get paid in installments. That way you’ll have what you need each month.”

“Whatever you want.” Cars tear past us with a tire noise that I’d like to imitate.

“It’s not what
we
want,” Candy says. “It’s your money. It’s what
you
want.”

“Send me a little every month.” The tire noise is like a Band-Aid pulling off a cut.

The cemetery has a big clock at the gate, and everything except the circling red hands is made of flowers. In this freezing weather, they have to be plastic is my first guess. But up close they’re cabbages, pink, purple, and yellow cabbages planted in the shape of numbers. The cold wind that bends the tree branches and kills the grass doesn’t bother them.

On the roads going past gravestones and statues and stone houses with iron-spear fences I don’t notice any street names. But Candy knows the directions. She drives real slow, and even though there aren’t any other cars, she switches on the blinker light at each corner. I like it best when she turns right then right then right. When she goes left it feels wrong in my head.

Dad’s grave marker lies flat on the ground, like the cover on a well. You can’t read the carved writing on the stone unless you stand right over it and stare down where it says Beloved Husband and Father. He was young. Forty-something. And here I am almost an old man. Candy with her gray bangs and Quinn with his bald head look old too, and tired. We’re all ready to sleep a long time.

I expect Quinn to start talking, like he did in church. But he keeps his mouth pressed into a tight line. Candy undoes the envelope and before she has a chance to sprinkle the ashes, the wind blows them everyplace. Not much ends up on the grass. It dusts Candy’s hair and the front of Quinn’s coat, and they both cough. When I breathe in, it shoots up my nose. You’d think ashes would smell like smoke. Instead, they sting like fire and I sneeze. Still, a lot stays inside, in my chest.

Candy cries a little, and Quinn wraps an arm around her. When the wind slaps at my hair, I imagine it on his shaved head. His skin is purple-red with cold. He looks like he’d rather be on the plane, flying home to London. I’m the same myself, ready to be up in the air and going back to Slab City. People complain there’s no color, nothing growing in the desert, just sand and sky. But they should see this cemetery in Maryland when the grass is dead and clouds cover every inch of blue sky. Cabbages and nothing else grow in this weather.

Candy shakes the ashes from her hair, and Quinn brushes at his coat. I feel like I should be doing something too. But what? Mom said she had something to tell me and something to give me. Well, she told me to kill her and she gave me money in her will. It wasn’t what I wanted but it’s too late now.

On the ride to the airport, Candy asks again if I packed all my stuff. Do I know my flight number? Did I phone Nicky to pick me up? Do I understand I have to take off my shoes at the metal detector?

“The security guards may frisk you,” Quinn says. “Don’t get upset or say anything suspicious.”

“Don’t scare him,” Candy says.

“He’s not scared. Are you, Maury?”

“No, I went through plenty of pat-downs at Patuxent.”

“Better not mention that,” Candy says. “You don’t need to check your bag. It’s small enough to carry on. Just go to your gate.”

“I have to buy something first.”

“What?” she wants to know in that voice she has when something’s wrong.

“A present for Nicky.”

“Don’t wander around and miss your flight.”

“Like me to keep you company?” Quinn asks. “I could wait with you until they call your flight.”

“No, I’m okay.”

“Sure, you are.” He smiles at me from the front seat.

Near the airport, planes roar over the road so low they look like they’re about to crash on our car. I can see the windows, but not the people behind them. The wheels hang down like bumblebee legs with balls of pollen. The noise zooms into my ears and zigzags off where Mom’s ashes are.

Candy parks at a curb crowded with families and cabs and suitcases and black guys carrying people’s bags. The two of them climb out to say good-bye. Quinn shakes my hand and seems about to say something, but doesn’t. Candy puckers up for a kiss and I let her have one. There’s already so much electricity forking through me, I barely feel it. A traffic cop blows a whistle and hollers for them to move it.

“Visit me,” Quinn calls out in his London voice.

“Phone me soon as you land,” Candy says.

They pile back in the car and wave, and I wave too, flinching as a plane roars past.

In the terminal, a two-seater plane dangles from the ceiling by cables. It’s full-size and has a pilot wearing a helmet and goggles. It doesn’t take a minute to realize that the plane’s real, but the pilot’s a dummy.

In the shops there’s clothes and shoes and food and beer. Carts up and down the hallway sell sandwiches and salad in plastic boxes. I find what I’m looking for at a newspaper stand. A tiny airplane on a key chain. It’s silver. Even the windows are silver, and when I look in them it’s like a mirror, only so small you can’t make out more than a slice of your face. To see inside, I scratch the silver off one of the windows, and the girl at the cash register says, “You break it, you own it.”

I pay her three bucks and go to my gate and sit on a bench and snap the key chain off the plane. This cracks a hole in the side. Careful not to poke the wing in my eye, I hold it up close and have a look.

“Watching the in-flight movie?” asks a man beside me, much too near.

I slide away from him and take a second look at the inside of the airplane. It’s like the bus—a bathroom in back and a seat for the driver in front. Now that I know where he’ll be and I’ll be, I feel the noise dying down. Mom’s still in me, but her ashes aren’t stinging and I’m not afraid. I’ve always wanted to fly. I’m just waiting for my call.