The Last Maharajan (Romantic Thriller/Women's Fiction) (20 page)

“Hmm. I don’t think she’ll mind. I don’t think she ever minded really.”

“She went a little crazy in here didn’t she?” She laid her hand on the design their mother had painted on the walls.

“I don’t know.”

“It seems she’s painted every hard surface in the place.”

“Well, yeah. So.”

“Stars and moons. They’re everywhere.”

“It was her cosmic stage – her universe stage. She would tell me, ‘Keep positive vibes flowing out to the universe and they’ll flow back to you threefold.’ It was as if she were excited about dying. She somehow welcomed it. Does that make sense?”

“Well, she sure seemed to suffer there in the end.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe not. She had a smile. Did you see?”

“Yeah.” She blew on her tea. “The colors in here are so cheery. You’d be hardcore to get depressed in this place.”

“Her house was her biggest piece of art. She loved this place. I mean, she loved Phoenix too, you know, the warmth in the winters but she thought this place was the closest she’d ever been to Heaven.”

“Well, it looks as though you’re right again. I’m going to love staying here.”

“Can you stay longer than a week?”

“There’s work and the kids.”

“The kids are teenagers, Enaya. Anyway, aren’t they staying with Jimmy’s parents?”

“Yeah.”

“Do they do okay with them?”

“Oh God. They hate to come home after being there.”

“Would his mom and dad be okay if you stayed a little longer? God knows you packed for it.”

“Shut up. I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“There’s a small washer and dryer upstairs in the loft. You’d never be without clothes.”

She shook her head but smiled at her sister’s teasing. “I’ll check with Jimmy when he gets here tomorrow. It would be nice. Anyway, he doesn’t have to stay longer if he doesn’t want, right? I mean, he could go home and take care of the kids for a few days without me. Right?”

“Right.” She grabbed hold of her sister’s hand and squeezed.

“I’ll see what I can swing.”

“I sure do miss you Enaya. It would be so great to have some time together after the funeral.”

“Well, like I said, I’ll see what I can swing.”

“We have a lot to do tomorrow.”

“It’s not going to be fun.”

“No.”

CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT

Dreams from early morning were more like visitations than dreams. She’d had them before but none so crystallized or succinct with people and surroundings as in this morning’s dreams. The “visitations” were as if people came to her in the nighttime lying there suspended in her semi- hallucinogenic state seeming more like cameo appearances by old dead actors from black and white movies. But, once awake, they remained in Euly’s head as though she’d just turned off a movie with the plot dangling in her memory and fixed in her subconscious long after it ended.

It all started with a dead friend calling her. Her ex-husband was there. He answered the phone and said, “Hold on, hold on, she’s right here.” It seemed he needed to scream into the phone. When Euly grabbed the phone her voice echoed loudly into the mouthpiece, “This is Euly!” She was yelling too over the din of television noise in the background.

“Hello! They’re holding it for you right now!” Someone said on the other end, but the blaring noise of the TV made it impossible for Euly to hear him.

“Hold on, I can’t hear you. Will you repeat that?” Euly covered one ear.

“They’re holding it for you.” He repeated. “Wait, oh I’m sorry Andy, but it’s loud in here. Let me walk into the other room.” But she walked outside instead. “Okay, there. I can hear you now.” And as clear as day, she was talking to her friend who had died two years before.

“They’re holding it for you.”

“They’re holding what?”

“They’re holding a spot for you.” And although the conversation was disjointed, Euly understood. When she thought about her dream later, she knew the dream was about life. It was interesting to her that the message was delivered by a dead friend and lacked a sense of foreboding.

The morning’s dream stayed with her as she heated water in the microwave, as she steeped her tea and added her creamer, and as she sipped it and curled into the arm of the sofa. The clouds rolled in and rolled out skipping across, covering and revealing an iridescent blue sky, stealing then offering each spotting breathlessly. No matter what, days continued to fall off the calendar. Time, she’d heard, heals broken parts of hearts. Still, as clouds passed through and her days would step further away from these moments, the pain remained as it did that millisecond, in their final moment together. The moment they held each other one last time, took that one last breath together. And, she knew she merely existed in a daze of days.

Tears streamed whispers down her cheeks. She wondered when the well would run dry, when she’d no longer find herself going under in a pool of tears. It was a two weeks before Thanksgiving. She always felt sad around the holidays but this season would be sadder because their mom died yesterday. She hoped her sister would stay with her longer than she’d planned to.

Euly asked Enaya if she wouldn’t mind if she wrote the obituary. Her sister agreed that she could. Her first task of the day however would be a simple act, an act that seemed to overwhelm her just thinking about. She needed a shower.

Later, Enaya and she were to meet with the mortician about funeral arrangements and, after that, they were to visit the priest. If they had time, they would begin selecting songs and photos and decide on cards and flowers and needed to make a list of people to whom they would send announcements. The day was already full but Euly was thankful she had help – her sister was there with her.

She cleaned off a spot on her wooden library desk. It sat in the center of a lovely large bay window that looked out over a sprawling grassland behind the house. The swale led to an area that had become a refuge for animals near the pond about three hundred yards off in the distance. In the early morning it filled up with deer, raccoons, fox, eagles, geese, mallards, and the occasional snoopy mink. The days always seemed to start out this way, foggy and misty, and lazy and it seemed that’s how they ended too.

This day, however, the fog hung thick over the pond, whipping cream thick, in clumps like ice cream floating in a punch bowl. From her view, Euly thought she knew what Heaven might look like, what it might feel like.

But, then, she felt weak. Her stomach quivered and her jaw tightened. The desk was covered with paper, papers about dead people. One was a man who’d died in an auto accident who left behind an aging wife, four children, and seven grandchildren. Another was a child who died of leukemia – her family found it important to mention her love of movies about Dracula and had only one best friend. She left behind her grieving mother, father, sister and brother. Another was a woman, a wife and mother. She died of breast cancer. Her children were barely teenagers.

Euly wondered why she did it, why she wrote obituaries. The practicalities were valid – the money was good, but why obits. Was it a sense that reading about other people’s death made her feel alive? She wasn’t sure anymore. She wasn’t sure about anything except that she had to write her mother’s obituary today – now before her shower. Everything else would wait.

Euly sat down and stared at a blank page that blinked on the computer. She rested a pair of reading glasses on the bridge of her nose. She angled her head up to see the words then down so she could see farther off. She sat with her hands in her lap. The screen pulsed, anticipating her words. She heard the whirring of the disk spinning inside its chassis. Nothing came to her.

She gazed over toward her mother’s cottage. The wooden sign Belle had painted swung lazy in a soft breeze and dripped from the wetness brought in by the fog.

Art is Life, Period.

Belle had painted the words in big bright crimson letters. It hung on brass chains above her door that squeaked when it was windy. Euly imagined the noise it was making now as she sat at her desk watching the sign quake in a light rhythm and seesaw in the morning’s wind.

Bird droppings trailed down in a line under the eave from swallows of springs past and looked as if tears down a clown’s face. Her mother had gone so far as to buy mealworms for the birds. She’d attached a dish close to a window so she could watch the birds eat.

Euly smiled when she thought about that day – about the ladder that leaned against the wall and Belle balancing on a rung as she reached over her head swinging a hammer. She wore a leather tool belt with a loop that held the hammer. It had a pocket for nails that snapped close. It was odd to see her aging mother still doing the things she used to do when she was younger.

“Mother, what are you doing?”

“Putting up a bird feeder. I have swallows!” She was so excited when she said it and Euly remembered her thinking her mother was crazy.

“Swallows can ruin your eaves.”

“Well, then when they leave, I’ll fix the eaves. No harm. No fowl! Get it? No fowl?”

And, Euly responded in an overly casual tone,

“Yes, mother. I get it.”

But today, Enaya was there, inside Belle’s home, possibly rising or having coffee, reminiscing or preparing, possibly crying. She never understood her sister – never got her – how she removed herself, how she stayed above the action of family business. She wondered if Enaya was that way with her own children or if they weren’t subject to her submerged emotional state. But mostly Euly wondered if they too would perpetuate that same sense of reserve and coolness so prevalent in her sister. When she thought back, she couldn’t remember if Enaya was that way when she was younger or if she’d developed it after she’d gotten older.

Then, a memory struck her as if she’d been shot through the heart, it was a recollection of the party, the one in that photo. Parts of it flashed in her head like a slideshow projector – their family’s metal-framed pool, their father digging by hand a hole twelve feet in diameter and three feet deep, Uncle Teddy and Clive helping him and using every care necessary, and Aunt Moon with Sandy and Belle serving food and supplying the men with refreshments. And the careless coffee stain.

The men kept their eyes on the kids and warned them not to get too close to the hole. Their childlike minds wandered once again to the games they were playing. As the men struggled long and hard into the dark they’d finally finished digging, to fit the metal siding along the perimeter of the hole, just to pull it out again and correct it. They were tired and hungry but refused to give up the task until it was done. There’d be no tomorrow working on the pool. After they’d gotten the siding into the hole the next step was simply a matter of back-filling in dirt around the edges to stabilize the structure, after that they would hang water-blue nylon lining inside it and, finally, fill it.

Nearby, the kids were laughing, Micaiah was stuffing an entire hotdog into his mouth just to see if he could and, he could. Enaya and Euly roared as they ran in circles around him. He was chasing them with part of the bun hanging out of his jaws. Then, something went wrong. She’d lost track of where she was running and wasn’t paying attention. Euly remembered slipping. Her foot slid between the metal siding and the edge of freshly dug hole. She’d been warned but couldn’t stop her body as it fell into the siding, folding it in on one side and creasing the metal.

Her father went ballistic. He yelled at her in front everyone and she remembered crying and running inside. She remembered Enaya screaming back at their dad, defending Euly and running after her inside to console her. They’d been a team once. They had been close.

Yet, as they grew they were two branches splitting a tree at the bole growing outward and away from each other. Enaya had a way of distancing herself, walking outside a margin of family dangers where Euly would step waist deep into the quicksand and end up sucked into its pull.

And, there she was in mother’s cottage, a place Euly hadn’t ventured since a week after Belle moved into the hospice over five months ago. Now, her sister was deep in it and for the first time in a long time and Euly was the one circling, not ready to deal with the realization that her mother was gone for good. The woman who hummed lullabies to her as she rocked her to sleep, had left for good.