The Canterbury Sisters (2 page)

And it is, at least at first. But after a week or so, life goes back to what people call normal, and only then do you start to realize that
going
was easier than
gone.
It’s only then that you face the final silent emptiness that’s at the heart of every human death, and it’s not just a matter of the extra hours that suddenly appear in the day, strangely difficult to fill, it’s also that there’s nowhere to put the mental energy that circles around the space your mother once occupied.

And Diana occupied a lot of space.

I stare at the urn. We want our mothers to see us for who we really are—or at least that’s what adult daughters always say.
Why doesn’t she understand me?
we agonize.
Why does she never even ask what I think?
But when our mothers try . . . when you get that occasional weak, tentative question, that unexpected “And how are you?” always uttered at the end of a conversation that was largely about her, inserted after the hanging-up ritual has begun—you realize that understanding wasn’t what you wanted after all. You shut this pallid attempt at real conversation right down, you say a quick “Great, Mom,” and tell her you’ll be there on Sunday as always. But then comes the day when your mother is finally dead, not dying but dead, not fading but invisible, and you know that she is absolutely not, never will, flat-out is not going to ever get you . . .

So here we have it. Twelve bottles of Syrah, none of which I’m likely to enjoy, a book about a cathedral I don’t want to visit, a shaky command, and an urn of my mother’s ashes. I pick up my phone and press the button at the bottom.

“Siri,” I say. “What is the meaning of life?” The little purple microphone flickers as I speak.

And then she answers,
I don’t know, but I believe there’s an app for that.

Great. I’ve reached a point in my life where my own phone greets me with sarcasm.

EVEN AFTER the arrival of the ashes and my mother’s strange note, I’m not sure I would have made the decision to go to Canterbury. Not if something else hadn’t happened the same day.

It came in the form of another letter, this one delivered not by UPS but by general mail, sent not to my office, but to my condo. I had arrived home from work and dropped the six untasted bottles of wine and my mother in the foyer, then snapped a leash on my Yorkie, Freddy, so I could take him straight out for a walk. Since my keys were still in my hand, I circled by the mail station to see if there was anything in my box.

I don’t check my mail every day. I bank online and no one writes letters anymore, so I doubt I drop by the mail station more than once a week. And even then there’s usually nothing more than ads and pleas for charity. I’m saying something to Freddy, who’s a jumper and a barker, as I slide the key into the box and swing the little silver door open and . . .

Suddenly I’m engulfed in bees.

It takes me a minute to realize what’s happening. One stings my hand, just in the fleshy part of the palm between the thumb and first finger, and four or five more swarm out behind him, swirling around my head. Freddy is going nuts. The mail has dropped at my feet, the heavy thud of newsprint circulars and some flyer informing me that I can provide Thanksgiving dinner for a homeless man for just ninety-two cents. And then the strangest of all possible things falls to the ground beside them—a personal letter. I look down at the envelope in a kind of frozen shock and recognize the handwriting on the front as my boyfriend Ned’s. Why is he writing me? We Skype every other night at eight, right on schedule, and of course we text throughout the day. He sometimes sends a card, but this is clearly a letter. The envelope is long and businesslike, with the address of his law firm in the corner.

I swat at the bees and another catches my shoulder, reaches me through my shirt, while a third is trapped in my bangs. It doesn’t occur to me to run, but it occurs to Freddy, and his leash pulls from my hand. I am screaming, batting at the bee in my hair. I’m ordinarily not much of a screamer—this may be the first time since childhood that I’ve let go with a total shriek—and then I hear the blast of a car horn, the echoing squeal of tires.

Our lives can sometimes turn in a moment, just like this. A stab to the palm, the slide of a leash, a letter that falls at our feet.

Don’t worry. Freddy wasn’t hit by the car. There’s darkness in this story, but that isn’t it. The car was driven by one of my neighbors, a woman with dogs of her own, and she has managed to stop in time. She jumps from the driver’s seat, shaken and crying at the close call, and grabs the leash. Freddy is happily leaping, and this woman and I are both babbling.
The bees,
I say,
they came from nowhere. They were in my fucking mailbox. The dog,
she says.
I almost didn’t see him. He came from nowhere, just like the bees.

My hand is throbbing as I take the leash from her.
I’m so sorry,
I say, as I bend to pick up the mail. I tell the dog I’m sorry too. He strains against his collar, unperturbed, only wanting to finish his walk.

Put ice on it,
the woman tells me.
Scrape a credit card against your skin to make sure the stingers are out. And take a Benadryl, just in case. Thank God,
she says.
Things could have been so much worse
. She says this over and over.

NO DOUBT you’re way ahead of me on all of this. No doubt you’ve seen what was coming from the minute you learned that the letter was sent from an office. Maybe it was his name, Ned, so minimal and careful, or the fact that he’s a lawyer, or maybe you even picked up on the bit about Skype as evidence that we live in different cities, which everyone knows is the relationship kiss of death. But I was still preoccupied with the stings and the dog and the fact that I looked like an irresponsible fool in front of my neighbor. I crammed the letter in my jacket, threw the rest of the mail in the trash, and took Freddy on the long loop, the one that goes around the man-made lake and through the landscaped woods.

It was not until hours later, when I was in bed with the lights off and almost asleep, that I even remembered Ned’s letter.

I turned on the bedside light, to the dismay of the dozing Freddy, got the letter from my coat, put on my reading glasses, climbed back into bed, and ripped open the envelope. Three pages, typed and single-spaced, followed by a fourth one containing numbers. An estimate of how much it would cost one of us to buy the other out of our vacation cottage in Cape May.

And that’s how I learn what you’ve undoubtedly already figured out.

That I am being dumped.

THE GIRL Ned is leaving me for is named Renee Randolph. He wants to make sure I know the facts right up front. He isn’t going to make excuses or pretend she doesn’t exist. He respects me too much to go through all the standard stuff about us growing apart or how it isn’t me, it’s him. He wants, he says, “no artifice between us.” We are far too good friends for that.

They met in a gym, he explains, and then adds that this fact will probably amuse me. I can’t imagine why, until I remember that he and I met in a gym, or at least the workout room of a hotel, each of us on side-by-side treadmills. And at that point I begin to skim. I can’t seem to keep reading from left to right in any sensible fashion—I hold the paper in front of me and words and phrases swarm up from the page one by one, like a thousand little stings.

This woman, this Renee, it would seem she has a bad husband. Worse, she has a bad foreign husband. He comes from one of those countries where they divorce you for having only daughters and then they try to kidnap the daughters. She lives in fear, he writes, never knowing when this man will appear, or send some sort of heavily armed emissary on his behalf. The teachers at her children’s school have been instructed not to let the girls leave the campus with anyone but Renee.

Yes, she’s got a bad husband and then she trumps that by being sick. Something is wrong with her. She has some unpronounceable disease—more of a syndrome, really, the sort of thing that’s tricky to diagnose, the sort of thing they decide you must have when you don’t seem to have anything else. But this syndrome, this illness, it may require him to give her . . . I don’t know, something. Something vital. A cornea, his bone marrow, access to his most excellent health insurance. My heart.

She needs me.
The words float up from the page, accompanied by their silent echo,
and you don’t
.

He’s right, in a way. Since we met six years ago, each of us on a business trip, walking side by side on those treadmills, staring up at CNN, Ned and I have had a partnership, a friendship sweetened by an almost epic sexual compatibility. I liked it and I thought he did too. The way we left each other alone through the week to work, but how on vacations we would meet in so many interesting places—Napa, Austin, Miami, Montreal, Reykjavík, London, Key West, Telluride, and Rome.

When we bought the cottage in Cape May we put sunflowers on the table and a hand-braided rug on the floor. Our furniture was old, good wood but old, and we painted each piece burgundy or moss green or Dutch blue. Van Gogh colors, that’s what Ned called them. It was a perfect little world, made complete by a couple of carefully planned imperfections, the kind you throw in just to make it clear that you aren’t, you know, Those Kind of People. Each Sunday morning we would walk down to the corner café for two copies of the
New York Times
so that we could sit at our table, racing each other through the crossword. We were well matched. Sometimes he won, sometimes I did.

Was I in love? I think I was. I must have been. It was a very modern sort of romance, or at least that’s what I told myself as I traveled back and forth, always in some car or train or airport. And we laughed . . . dear God, Ned and I laughed all the time.

And when you laugh that much, when you finish every puzzle at precisely the same time, when you look up across the painted table and your eyes lock in satisfaction . . . it has to mean something, doesn’t it?

I’m sure I loved him on the weekend that we bought Lorenzo. Lorenzo was a lobster. We got him from one of those roadside places where the signs read “
FRESH
” and they have a bunch of hand-drawn pictures of smiling seafood. He was packed in ice and Styrofoam, his claws bound shut with big rubber bands, and I had begun to feel regret over the whole idea before we’d even managed to pull Ned’s Lexus back on the road.

“Do you think it can breathe in there?” I’d asked, and Ned had said, “Lobsters don’t breathe.”

Well, that’s ridiculous. Everything breathes, in one way or another. But I didn’t say anything and after a mile or two Ned said, “If he needs anything, it would probably be water.”

Of course we were silly to be so concerned about the welfare of a creature that was hours from its execution, but I knew even then that we’d never bring ourselves to boil Lorenzo. You can’t boil something you’ve named. We went ahead and made several more roadside stops, collecting our lettuce and tomatoes and lemon and herbs and sourdough bread, and by the time we pulled into the driveway of the cottage, Ned had already taken to talking to the lobster, pointing out landmarks we passed along the way, as if Lorenzo were a weekend guest. We made the salad and opened the wine and even set the big pot of water on the stove to boil, but it was a lost cause. We ended up snipping Lorenzo free from his bands and tossing him into the bay.

“You know,” Ned said, raising his wineglass in salute as Lorenzo drifted out to sea, “we need to stop thinking of this place as an investment and start thinking of it as a home.” The next weekend we went out and bought Freddy.

Now he says that he wishes me the best, but the best is what I thought we had. No, “the very best,” that’s what he writes. That he wishes me “the very best of everything.” According to him, I deserve nothing less.

Is he telling me the laughter didn’t matter? Nor the friendship, nor the sex? We worked crosswords together, for God’s sake. We had a lobster and a dog. He’s the only man I ever dated that my mother liked.

But evidently that’s all out the window now that he has found his wounded bird. Now that he has stooped to rescue her, now that she is fluttering in his hand. And he has written to inform me that he has never been happier.

I think
, he writes with a killing simplicity,
that she may be The One
.

Yes, he capitalizes it, lest I miss the point. The. One.

I LIE there in the dark for hours, my heart pounding, my legs numb. He will call me on Monday, the letter says. We have many things to discuss, but he didn’t want to drop them on me unawares. That’s why he has written in advance, to give me time to absorb the news. Which, of course, is utter crap. He sent the letter because he didn’t want to hear me wail or cry or attack him with questions. When did this happen? How long has he known her? Were there times when he came from her bed to mine, and did she thus win him slowly, in tiny incremental ways, or was her victory over me accomplished in one swift stroke? And which answer would be harder to accept?

It’s almost light when I emerge from my bed. I open another bottle of the Syrah, slosh some in a juice glass, and go to my desk to turn on the computer. For a minute I fight the urge to google the girl, to learn all about Renee Randolph, but I stop myself. She is undoubtedly beautiful. Beautiful and tragic is such an appealing combination, the natural stuff of romances, while average-looking and tragic is just . . . average-looking and tragic. Certainly not compelling enough to drive a man to upend a life as pleasant and convenient as the one Ned and I shared. So she must be beautiful. Nothing else would make sense.

I take a long, slow draw of the wine and consider the search line where I’ve typed
REN.
What could Google possibly tell me about this woman that I would find comforting? If she is more accomplished than me, that will sting . . . but what if she’s less accomplished? Somehow that would be even worse. Finally I delete
REN
and enter
PILGRIMAGES TO CANTERBURY
instead.