Paws before dying (7 page)

“So?”

“So Marie is not a very common Jewish name.”

“Maybe she was half Jewish.”

“I don’t think so, because his family wouldn’t have minded so much then, or at least I don’t think they would’ve, and they did. When he married Rose, his family sat shiva for him. You know what that means? For them, it was as if he’d died. Shiva is mourning. The family stays home for a week, to mourn. People bring food for them, and they visit, and, you know, pay their respects. It’s instead of a wake or visiting hours or whatever.”

“With the body right there? Yuck.”

I shook my head. “For Orthodox Jews, the funeral has to be right away, within twenty-four hours. This is after.”

“Is Jack doing that?”

“I don’t know.” I expected her to ask how we could avoid going, but she looked brighter-eyed than she had since I’d told her about Rose’s death.

“If he is,” she asked, “can we go?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m sure he’d appreciate it. And I’ll ask around and make sure it’s okay, but if you want to take roses, or send them, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We can do the traditional thing, too. We’ll take food.”

“There’s a slight problem with that, isn’t there?” She managed a quirky little smile. “You know.”

“I know what?”

“That you don’t cook, exactly.”

“Relax,” I said. “I know not to show up with homemade dog biscuits.” Actually, why not? In her own way, Caprice was presumably sitting shiva, too. “Anyway, it’s not such a bad idea.”

“No!”

“We can buy something.”

“Don’t you even have a cookbook?”

“As a matter of fact,” I said smugly, “I do.” I retrieved it from a kitchen drawer and handed it to her. It was one of those spiral-bound compilations of everybody’s favorite recipes, the kind of cookbook that PTAs sell to raise money, but this one hadn’t come from a PTA. It was folded open, and I handed it to Leah that way.

She read incredulously: “ ‘Preparation H works wonders on those little cuts and scrapes your horse is always getting.’ ”

“You’re in the wrong section,” I said. “It’s from a humane society. There’s stuff for people somewhere.”

She flipped pages. “Chicken salad, maybe? Unless it’s
for
chickens.”

“It isn’t,” I said. “Make a list.”

But the sadness hit us again, and that time, we both cried and hugged the dogs. Later, we shopped and cooked together, and for once, I didn’t mind and wasn’t bored because, Leah and I decided, we weren’t just cooking, but performing a ritual, one of the traditional rites of women. I also spent some time on the phone calling a few people who might not have heard and taking calls from others who wanted to make sure I had.

The ritual distracted Leah, but didn’t, of course, answer her original questions. When Steve showed up at six and I told him what had happened, the first thing she asked him was how much it had hurt.

Steve is always gentle. “People say that first, they feel nothing,” he told her. “That’s what this uncle of mine says. He was out on his tractor and got hit by lightning. First he didn’t feel a thing, and then it was like he got hit with a giant hammer. Sometimes there’s total amnesia.”

“Is he all right?” Leah asked.

“Reborn. His breathing stopped, heart stopped. Lightning death, it’s called. But one of the guys revived him, right away. What can happen is that the heart starts again, but respiration doesn’t, and then there’s brain damage. But some people just recover. Anyway, he decided since he’d died and come back to life, it was a sign. So he swore off alcohol and tobacco. You could say it basically improved his health.”

“So why did Rose...?”

“If it was a direct strike, maybe. Not a shock, but a direct strike. What tends to happen is that people are either killed outright or they’re stunned, like my uncle, and they make a full recovery, maybe because what they got was a shock, not the full force.”

“But,” I interrupted, “if it was because she was touching the metal fence...?”

“So how much did it hurt her?” Leah persisted.

“If she’d lived, she might not have remembered it,” Steve said. “Chances are real good that everything just stopped. Her heart stopped beating. She stopped breathing. Just like that.” His eyes were green and serious and fixed hard on Leah. “She did not lie there in pain. She did not struggle.”

Her eyes filled with tears, but the tension left her face, and when Jeff Cohen called to invite her to a party in Newton, I could tell that she’d had enough of adult grief and adult explanation.

“It doesn’t seem very, um, respectful,” she said.

“Leah, Rose would not have minded,” I assured her. “She’d be glad to hear that you cried for her and that you’ll miss her, but you don’t need to stay home. Do you want the car?”

“Is that okay?”

“Fine.” One of the reasons I’d agreed to have her stay in the first place was that she did drive and wouldn’t have to depend on me to ferry her around. “But take Kimi with you. Not to the party. Just leave her in the car, with the windows open enough so she gets air but nobody can get a hand in to reach the locks. If you get a flat or something, and you have to walk somewhere, you won’t be alone.” (At night, with the windows open, fine, but never, ever on a hot day—dogs are horribly vulnerable to heatstroke.)

After Leah left, I told Steve some things I hadn’t wanted her to hear. “I keep worrying that she was burned, that when she reached out to the gate and touched it, what happened was like a horrible burn. I kept trying to tell Leah that she didn’t feel anything, but it keeps eating at me. And not only that it hurt, but that it hurt in some really intense, gruesome way, like those scenes in movies, electrocutions. It seems like the worst way to die. You downplayed it to her. I know you did.”

“In animals, it can shatter bones,” he said reluctantly. “Teeth. Most of the time, you don’t see burns or marks, but you can. It can be like I told her. But how do we know? We hear what people say if they survive. We don’t hear the others. It is fast. That’s true. And there can be amnesia, but not always. The truth is I think it can be excruciating. I’m sorry.”

Chapter 7

WITH the rigid formality of adolescence, Leah dressed herself in only one layer of nonathletic black and wound the indomitable radiance of her hair into a subdued knot for our visit to Jack Engleman. In lieu of attending the Sunday morning funeral (do I need to make excuses? I
could not
go), I’d had a fancy basket of fruit delivered to the house. It was a poor substitute, I know, but Jack wanted the funeral small and the burial private, Bess had told me, and she’d suggested that we visit sometime in the late afternoon.

“Are you nervous about it?” I asked Leah as she artfully mounded the chicken salad on a platter of lettuce.

“No. Why would I be nervous?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe you’d be afraid everybody would be crying. Or you wouldn’t know what to expect.”

“I don’t exactly know what to expect, but it won’t be anything I can’t handle,” said Leah, a human malamute, after all.

(“Projection,” my friend and tenant Rita commented later. “You project a lot onto that kid. Just who was anxious?” Obviously, Rita is a therapist, and not the physical kind.)

On my way out to the car, I saw Kevin Dennehy attacking the scrubby row of barberry between his mother’s yard and mine with a pair of rusty hedge trimmers. I once tried to talk Kevin into replacing the ugly, prickly stuff with something classy like hemlock or juniper, and I even offered to split the cost. He rejected the proposal, and although he never said so outright, I had the impression that I’d made a serious gaffe, like offering to pay for half of a new Audi to avoid the humiliation °f having his Chevy visible from my kitchen window.

When he saw us, he quit stabbing the barberry and lumbered over, holding the pruners with one hand and wiping the sweat off his face with the other.

He rumbled in my ear in what was, I think, supposed to be a whisper: “Can I have a word with you?” When Kevin lowers his voice, he adjusts the pitch, not the volume. When I sent Leah back inside to put out extra water for the dogs and make sure the answering machine was on, he said, “The wake?”

We’d seen him on our way back from shopping, and I’d told him about Rose.

“Sort of. Visiting the house.”

“Pacemaker,” he said.

“What?”

“Gadget implanted in her chest.”

“I know what a pacemaker is. Rose had one? So that’s why... What’s this secrecy business? A pacemaker isn’t a treatment for VD or something.”

“Eliot Park,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You still going to dog school there?”

“I know what you’re worried about. The graffiti, right? You think there’s some sinister connection with dog training at the park, between dog training and the graffiti and what happened to Rose. Well, the only connection is that Rose lived near the park and trained her dog there, so she’s the one who arranged to have the club use it. If we’d never been there, she’d have been training in the tennis courts. The club had nothing to do with anything. But obviously her death was less of a freak accident than we thought. I mean, a pacemaker? With water and electricity?”

He shrugged.

“Hey, how did you know that Rose had a pacemaker?”

But Leah came down the back stairs, and Kevin wagged his big head back and forth. He apparently didn’t want to discuss an autopsy in front of her. He managed to lower the volume of his voice for the duration of two syllables: “Inquest.”

The woman who opened Jack Engleman’s front door had coarse salt-and-pepper hair swept away from the thick, moist skin of her face, and short, stubby fingers with blunt nails. She introduced herself as Charlotte Zager, told us she was Jack’s sister, and then grabbed my hand and twisted it as ferociously as if it were a decayed molar with stubborn roots that was resisting extraction. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she was a dentist.

The smallest of the three or four baskets of fruit on the tables in the hallway may have been ours, or maybe some of the apples and pears piled in a great silver bowl on the living room coffee table had come from the one I’d sent. Protestant death smells like gladioli, Jewish death like fruit. The oddest thing about all of those pineapples, all of the dozens of bunches of grapes and bananas, and the hundreds of pears, grapefruit, oranges, and apples was that no one seemed to be eating any fruit at all. In the dining room, people were helping themselves to bagels, lox, cream cheese, and tomatoes, and some of the people in the hall and living room were eating brownies and pastry, but everyone was treating the fruit as if it were made of wax.

Rose’s death had dimmed the glow of Jack’s skin, and when you looked in his eyes, it was easy to tell that he wasn’t there. Even so, he welcomed us. Had anyone spoken to him the word Kevin had whispered to me? I felt shy and took his hand, but Leah threw her arms around him and held him, then sat with him on the long flower-print couch opposite the empty fireplace. It seemed to me that he was comforted by her youth and that with no sense of age at all, she offered him a timeless, immediate grace that I’d have been glad to give if I’d known where to find it—if I had it in me at all.

Then Heather marched in holding Caprice in her arms and said rather loudly, “Holly, what do you think of a trophy? Nonantum’s trial’s November nineteenth. There’s lots of time. People’ll give. Everyone knew Rose.”

She stretched an arm to the silver bowl, plucked out a polished Granny Smith, and drove large, gleaming incisors through it. The apple made a loud crunch.

“What I have in mind,” she added, pointing to the silver bowl, “is something like that.”

Caprice’s bright black eyes sighted down the line of her outstretched arm as she wondered which piece of fruit she was supposed to retrieve.

“Vera won that.” Bess Stein had been sitting on a love seat talking quietly with Jack’s sister, but a lifetime of training dogs ad made her intolerant of gross misbehavior in any species. , had also taught her to read the minds of hypercompetitive handlers. To Bess and me, Heather’s intentions were as clear as if she’d been a hungry terrier eyeing a thick steak: She meant that memorial trophy for the highest-scoring poodle in Utility, and not just any highest-scoring poodle, either. Especially with Rose dead, the top poodle was apt to be her own.

“You know,” Bess added, almost as if changing the subject, “Rose was the most graceful, unassuming winner.”

“She was very tough and very gentle,” said a dark-haired, lanky young man I didn’t know. “I’m Jim O’Brian. I did my student teaching with Rose. In other words, I lucked out.”

As the rest of us were introducing ourselves, Charlotte Zager ushered in a couple of women who also turned out to have been colleagues of Rose’s and who joined Jim in eulogizing her. “She had that wonderful, wonderful voice,” one of them said. “Musical,” someone agreed.

“You wanted to keep hearing it,” the first woman said. “When you first met her, you’d almost think she was kind of a pushover, she was so quiet, so unassuming. But people found out soon enough! I think she was the most patient, persistent person I’ve ever met. And such an optimist! So
positive.
But talk about determined!”