Mary Ann in Autumn (20 page)

Chapter 30
The Anna She Remembered

T
he guys had been so sweet to her. They had built a nest for her on their sofa and plied her with chick flicks and foot rubs and goodies from the chocolate shop on Castro Street. Almost immediately, she and Michael had begun taking therapeutic walks around the track at Kezar Stadium, though she never stopped being aware of the absence she was carrying. When, on the third day, Dr. Ginny called to tell her the “wonderful news” from the pathologist, she sat down on the bleachers at the stadium and cried in Michael’s arms.

When the guys were at work, she busied herself with her Facebook friends, commenting on their cute pets and cake-smeared children. She didn’t once mention the cancer, or even the fact that she was recuperating, since she didn’t want an avalanche of Rumi poems from people she barely knew, however well-intended they might be.

Her silence on the subject was not like her mother’s silence. She was building a new world for herself from the inside out, and she wanted to do so at her own pace. She had already phoned Robbie at NYU and apologized for texting him about his dad’s affair with Calliope. Robbie had been incredibly sweet about it, saying she would always be his mom, that he understood her feelings, this was strictly between her and his dad. He didn’t seem especially surprised when she told him that she would be hiring a lawyer. He didn’t seem especially surprised about anything. She wondered if he had already known about Bob and Calliope, having heard it from his dad in a scotch-fueled buddy-buddy moment, and had been anxiously waiting for her to find out on her own.

But Robbie wouldn’t do that, would he? He had always been her ally when things got iffy with Bob. Unless, of course, there were no sides to be taken anymore, because Calliope was already a fait accompli. Maybe he was just keeping his head down, bracing himself for the new administration the way his dad was doing with Obama.

“Are your classes fun?” she asked brightly, trying to show that she still cared about his life.

“Yeah. Pretty much. It’s a little overwhelming.”

“I’m thinking of staying at the city apartment for a while . . . while things are getting sorted out, I mean. Maybe we can grab some coffee in the Village.”

“That would be great,” he said, though not convincingly.

“I’ve got a few more days here, but . . . it won’t be long. I’m dying to see your new digs.”

“Yeah . . . well . . . it’s kind of a mess right now, but—”

“I can help with that. We’ll go shopping . . . get you some nice things.” She heard herself speak this obscenity in her own mother’s voice, and it made her blood run cold. “Sorry,” she added penitently. “Clingy mom. Just what you need right now.”

•••

H
ER ENERGY HAD INCREASED BY
the end of the week, so Michael took her with him to Mrs. Madrigal’s house when he went to pick up Jake Greenleaf for work. Anna had been alerted of Mary Ann’s arrival, so she—or someone—had laid out tea and sugar cookies on a red lacquer tray in the living room. Once Michael and Jake were gone, Anna made her entrance under her own steam, inching across the room in a pale blue satin kimono, as if to prove to her guest that she was still capable of doing it. Her white hair, encircling her head like a blizzard, was adventurously secured with two large tortoiseshell combs.

“You look wonderful,” Mary Ann told her as they were hugging.

Anna chuckled. “What is it they always say?”

“About what?”

Anna’s long fingers clutched Mary Ann’s wrist. “I need help with this part, dear.” She meant sitting down, so Mary Ann held the old woman’s elbow as she eased into her armchair. “What they always say,” said Anna, picking up the thread, “is that there are three ages of man: youth, middle age and ‘You look wonderful.’ ”

Mary Ann smiled. “Well, just the same . . . it’s true.”

“Thank you, dear.”

“Your hair has always been amazing. I remember those fabulous chopsticks you used to wear.”

Anna wore a look of amused chagrin. “I’m afraid Mr. Greenleaf won’t let me wear those anymore. I took a little tumble one night and almost harpooned the cat.”

This was very much the Anna she remembered: warm and self-mocking and completely present. And somehow that made it even harder to accept how frail she’d become since Mary Ann’s last visit. The spirit was still there, blazing away, but her shrinking body seemed barely able to contain it anymore. Only two years earlier Mrs. Madrigal had somehow wrenched herself out of a stroke-induced coma with nothing to show for it afterward but a few more roses in her cheeks. But that was then, and she had changed considerably. There was no denying what time was taking from her.

“Help yourself to tea,” Anna told her. “I can’t trust myself with the pouring.”

“That’s okay. I had coffee at Michael’s. I’ll take one of these, though. They look yummy.” She nibbled on a cookie, mostly so Anna could feel like a hostess.

“Are you holding up, dear?” Those Wedgwood-blue eyes were fixed firmly on Mary Ann, expecting nothing less than the truth, as usual.

“How much did Mouse tell you?”

“He said you have a clean bill of health . . .”

“Yes . . . well . . . yes!”

“ . . . and you’re leaving the . . . uh, Republican gentleman . . . because you saw him having an indiscretion on the Internet.”

Mary Ann grinned ruefully. “Close enough.”

“So how are you holding up?”

“Oh . . .” Mary Ann made a mumbling noise that was meant to tell the truth without overtly complaining. “I’ve had better centuries, I guess.”

Anna chuckled. “Haven’t we all?”

It surprised her somewhat to hear Anna say this. “C’mon. You live in the moment better than anyone I’ve ever known.”

Anna shrugged. “We don’t have much choice, do we? But that doesn’t mean I don’t have . . . my special favorites when it comes to centuries.”

Mary Ann laughed.

“This one is too complicated for me,” Anna continued. “Thank goodness for Mr. Greenleaf. I wouldn’t know how to make so much as a phone call.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Are Michael and Ben taking good care of you?” Anna asked.

“Oh yes. More than I deserve.”

Anna frowned. “What do you mean?”

Mary Ann felt a tightening in her throat. It was not that far removed from how she felt on mountain roads. She dreaded making this hairpin turn, but she had to, if she was ever going to get off the cliff. She was leaving in a few days, heading home to mop up the mess of her second failed marriage, so postponement was no longer an option. It was not unreasonable to think this could be the last time she’d ever see Anna.

“I treated you all so badly,” she said at last.

“Who?”

“All of you. Brian and Shawna . . . Michael . . . who was sick, for God’s sake, maybe even dying.”

“How did you treat us badly?”

“By leaving. By running away and never looking back.”

“Twenty years ago, Mary Ann. You were following your heart’s desire. I did that myself, dear, need I remind you. I left a wife and a two-year-old daughter without explanation.” Mrs. Madrigal’s face clouded over. Mary Ann knew she was remembering Mona, the daughter in question, whom she’d lost to breast cancer back in the nineties.

“But you made up for it,” Mary Ann said. “You brought her back into your life and made a home for her.” Now Mary Ann herself was remembering Mona, the flame-haired free spirit who had done a “reading” of Mary Ann’s garbage the morning they first met in the courtyard at 28 Barbary Lane. There was another one she had carelessly lost forever, without even knowing the actual moment she had lost her.

Mrs. Madrigal gave her a meaningful look. “Daughters, you’ll find, are surprisingly retrievable.”

She was talking about Shawna now, Mary Ann realized. “I gave it a shot,” she said with a sigh. “I invited her out to Connecticut. It’s perfectly clear she doesn’t approve of me. Why should she? I don’t approve of me myself.”

Anna fussed with the edge of her kimono, looking impatient. “If you came here for a spanking, dear, you’ll have to look elsewhere.”

In its own way this felt like an absolution, so Mary Ann smiled at the person who’d bestowed it. “I came here to tell you I love you.”

“That’s more like it,” said Anna.

Chapter 31
Unscattered Ashes

A
lmost a week had passed since Shawna left the note at the house on Tandy Street, but so far no one had called. She had told the whole story in her blog, complete with a photo of Alexandra, but she’d thought it best to omit the address, since she didn’t want her crusade to degenerate into an act of harassment. This ambiguous ending to her tale of the streets only enhanced its poignancy, she felt, and several of her readers had told her as much. Of course, there was still the issue of Alexandra’s unscattered ashes.

Her relationship with Otto was getting wobbly. The first rumblings had come that day on Tandy Street, when he’d accused her of being capable of romance only in the abstract, or worse yet, only for the purposes of her blog. How could she have addressed that without being unkind? How could she have told him that her problem wasn’t with romance per se but with Otto himself—or, rather, the thought of permanency with Otto. She loved what they had—the sex certainly, the laughs, the warm body at night—but she had never been able to envision whatever was supposed to come next. Outright rejection wasn’t usually in her repertoire, but lately Otto had been forcing the issue.

“Hey, listen,” he said, without looking up. He was hunched over a burrito at the Roosevelt Tamale Parlor, his skinny shoulder blades jutting out of his shrimp-colored T-shirt like little wings. “Remember my buddy Aaron with the awesome place in Bernal Heights with the open plan and the industrial skylights?”

“I think. Yeah. Sort of Rob Thomas-y.”

“I meant the apartment.”

“Oh . . . yeah . . . sure. We dropped off those tumbling mats.”

He finally looked up at her. “It’s all ours if we want it. He’s going to Costa Rica for a job. All we have to do is pick up the rent . . . which, by the way, would be a fuck of a lot cheaper than our two rents combined.” He took a bite out of the burrito and waited.

All she could think to say was: “There are clowning jobs in Costa Rica?”

Otto didn’t smile. “It’s a very eco-friendly country.”

“And . . . what? . . . he’s an eco-clown?”

“I don’t know what he is, Shawna. Why aren’t you answering me?”

“Because this isn’t about the rent . . . and I don’t know what to say to you.”

He looked crushed. “Guess you just did.”

She reached across the table and took his hand. “C’mon, dude. I love our two or three nights a week. I do.”

“What is it? Are you bored with me? Do you wanna be with a woman again?”

She rolled her eyes, trying to keep things as light as possible. “If I do, I’ll get one. And you’ll be the first to know.”

He returned to his burrito for a while, coming back with his final shot:

“That apartment is really sick, ya know. There’s even two bathrooms. It wouldn’t have to mean anything.”

Yes, it would,
she thought.
Yes, it would.

T
HEY PARTED COMPANY AFTER DINNER.
Not in any dramatic way, but Otto clearly wanted to sulk in private. Shawna walked back to her apartment and worked off her frustration by washing the dishes that had piled up in the sink. Why did he have to be this way? Why couldn’t he just be content with what they had and not keeping angling for more? When people started making demands of each other, that’s when the trouble started. Lucy had been that way in Brooklyn, and Shawna had grown sick of it.

She rolled a joint from her stash and smoked it contemplatively as she stared at Alexandra’s ashes. She wanted this to be over now, so she considered driving to Dolores Park and scattering the ashes on the grassy slope at the upper end, where the gay boys liked to sun in the summertime. There was a great view of downtown from there, and the moon would soon be rising above the urban labyrinth that Alexandra had roamed for the last years of her life. To give her ashes on that swath of green, high above the fray at last, would be just the imagery Alexandra deserved. Dolores Park, Shawna remembered, had even been a cemetery in the old days, and the name itself meant “sorrows” in Spanish.

It was perfect.

But as soon as she was in the car and heading for the park, that voice in her head, her own instinctual GPS, began directing her back to Tandy Street. She had been there only in the daytime, after all. There would be a much better chance of finding someone home after dark. How could it hurt to check one more time? She wouldn’t even have to get out of the car if there were no lights on in the house. She could just keep on driving, say her good-byes to Alexandra, and be back at her apartment in time for Conan O’Brien.

As it happened, there
was
a light burning at the unnumbered house on Tandy Street. It wasn’t in the front window but somewhere in the back of the house. Shawna couldn’t see the window itself, since the space between the houses was so narrow, but something was illuminating the blind wall of the neighboring house.

It was much harder to park there at night, so she had to comb the neighborhood for a while to find a space. As she was walking back toward the house, it occurred to her that she had never confirmed that the unnumbered house was, in fact, 437 Tandy Street. It was too late for quibbling, though. If her cryptic note about a dead woman had landed in the wrong hands, at least she’d have a chance to explain herself.

Remembering the broken doorbell, she rapped on the door three times.

A dog—
that
dog from the last time—began to bark from somewhere in the back of the house. It was silenced very quickly by a gruff male voice yelling, “Quiet!”

Moments later, the door opened. A large, stoop-shouldered old man stood there glowering at her, holding the little dog under one arm. He was wearing the red Snuggie she had seen through the window. It gave him an absurdly ecclesiastical look.

“I’m sorry to bother you at night,” she said. “I’m the person who left the note last week.”

He just gaped at her, swaying. She realized he was drunk.

“You’re Sheila?”

“Shawna.”

He beckoned her in with a wave of his ecclesiastical arm. This was too much for him to handle at once, so he lost his balance and had to steady himself against the door. When both the dog and the Snuggie escaped to the floor, Shawna was relieved to see that the old man was wearing something underneath: a short-sleeved white shirt and worn-shiny trousers. He was eightyish, she figured, but probably had not been handsome at any age. When she tried to pair him mentally with the stunning Alexandra, the most charitable she could be was
Beauty and the Beast
.

“Sorry I didn’t call,” he said, closing the door. “I’ve had some sorting-out to do.” He was slurring his words, so it sounded more like “shorting out,” which Shawna thought was a good description of his emotional state. She could practically hear the sparks.

“I understand,” she said.

“I can’t ask you to sit down. I have to go somewhere. There’s something I have to do.”

“That’s okay . . . really.”

“How did you know Alexandra?”

“I didn’t, exactly. I brought her to the hospital once. I visited a few times. I just felt a sort of connection with her. She seemed like a good person.”
Why give him the gory details?
she thought. He was suffering enough already. “She was your wife, right?”

He nodded dolefully. “Once upon a time.”

“Before the drugs took over.” Shawna spoke these words softly, almost reverently, not as a question but simply to finish his thought.

“Did she say anything about me?” he asked.

He looked so pitiful and ruined that Shawna couldn’t bring herself to say no. “She saved a letter you wrote her. A love letter. She must’ve loved you very much. You can have it, if you like. Well . . . you wrote it, but still . . . it means something.” She was glad Otto wasn’t here to watch her scrambling so shamelessly for her happy ending. “I have several of her things, in fact. Photos, mostly, but you’re welcome to them.”

“That would be nice,” he said.

He looked so grateful that she was emboldened to go all the way. “I also have her cremains.”

“Her what?”

“Her ashes. She was cremated.”

“Oh.”

“It’s up to you, of course. There might be someplace you’d like to scatter them.”

He seemed to think about that for a moment. “Where are they?”

“In the car.”

“Get them, please.”

She all but sprinted there and back.

He took the ashes from her on his doorstep, holding them close to his chest as if they might somehow escape from him.

“I’m so glad I found you,” she told him.

He went back into the house without a word.