The One That Got Away (22 page)

No mushrooms—not even canned ones—appeared among the funeral foods at Natalie's house. I appreciated her discretion.

I thought of all the community events and parties I'd been to with these same people. Bridget had always been there. Something hard hung in my chest, just below the hollow of my throat; hung like the unmoving pendulum of a clock stilled at the hour of Bridget's death. I moved through the room, listening for Bridget's voice, certain that at any minute she would emerge from Natalie's bedroom or kitchen.

“My ex's ex's ex is a nephrologist.”

I recognized the speaker from a couple of Bridget's parties.

“That's disgusting,” her companion said. “Light bondage is one thing, but dead people . . .”

“No, no—she's a kidney specialist.”

“Oh! You called her when you heard about Bridget?”

“No, all of us had brunch together on Sunday. Anyway, she said that alcohol can be a contributing factor to the toxicity of certain mushrooms. Well, did you ever see Bridget drink less than a six-pack at a football party?”

Angel offered to bring me some food.

“I'm not really hungry,” I said.

“I'm going to bring you something anyway.”

A short time later she reappeared at my side with a plate of triangles of thin brown bread topped with smoked salmon and dill, and slices of pumpernickel layered with whole basil leaves, fresh mozzarella, and sun-dried tomatoes glistening with olive oil.

“Word is Maxine spent last night here, with Natalie,” Angel said.

I shrugged. “Sometimes Natalie stayed with Bridget,
sometimes she stayed with Maxine. Sometimes Bridget stayed with Natalie. Other times both Bridget and Maxine stayed with Natalie. And yet, as far as I know, Maxine never stayed with Bridget when Natalie wasn't there too.”

“In other words,” Angel said, “Nothing for anyone to get their boi shorts all bunched up about. Nothing that adds up to anything you would want to swear to in court.”

Annalise wasn't satisfied with Natalie's approach to mourning. “This is foof,” she declared. “Some of us are getting together tomorrow to play touch football. We're going to dedicate the game to Bridget. Be at our house by two o'clock.”

“But I don't know how to play touch football.”

Annalise's laughter rose in the rarefied air of Natalie's apartment like a flock of startled birds. People turned to look at her. “You're a femme, B.D.,” she said. “Of course you don't know how to play touch football. I want you there because you loved Bridget.”

After the game we wound up at a bar that Bridget had favored, but Natalie refused to set foot in. Strings of flamingo Christmas tree lights drooped over grimy windows, and paintings on velvet hung askew on the walls. I was drinking cosmopolitans; a pretty drink that packs a punch. Bridget was a bit like that.

Before long people were singing Broadway songs that reminded them of Bridget, or that they knew she had liked. Natalie and Maxine may not have approved of Bridget's penchant for bursting into song in public, but to me, it was one her most endearing qualities. I was preparing to do “I'm Just a Cock-eyed Optimist,” from
South Pacific
, but when they handed the karaoke mike to me, I broke down and had to pass it on.

If I were lucky, Bridget would haunt me. I figured she'd make a swell, friendly ghost.

Chapter 26

“Natalie's invited me to go with her and Maxine to scatter Bridget's ashes,” I told Angel. “They're doing it as part of a mushroom expedition.” I didn't say that the combination of the two troubled my sense of propriety, despite Natalie's telling me this was one of the best times of the year to look for mushrooms. “I want to go because of what I feel for Bridget, but what do I know about mushrooms? I go to the supermarket and there they are in a blue plastic box with plastic wrap all around them, looking thoroughly sanitized, but of course I wash them anyway.”

“Why do you have to know anything about mushrooms?”

“They might have poisoned Bridget. They could poison me.” I paused to think about that for a minute. Natalie got to Bridget before I did here on earth, but up in heaven I could have first dibs. But then, Bridget had told me she wasn't going to heaven. “If I don't go, Natalie and Maxine might think I don't trust them.”

“Do you trust them?”

“No, but I don't want them to know that I don't trust them.”

“B.D., we've been over this,” Angel said. “It was an accident; a horrible accident. There's no way it was deliberate. If you're going to poison someone with mushrooms, you don't put them on a pizza you're serving to a dozen people. Besides, what would their motive be?”

“With Bridget out of the way, they could be together,” I said.

Angel sighed. “B.D., when someone is in a relationship and they want to be with someone else, they break up the relationship; they don't murder the person they no longer want to be with. Just imagine if we had dead bodies instead of exes.”

So I ended up going—because I'd decided there was something I wanted to do: claim just a bit of Bridget's ashes for myself.

Natalie and Maxine had bought a cottage together about a month after Bridget died. The surrounding woods and abandoned apple orchards were excellent hunting grounds for mushrooms.

I'd pictured a rustic wooden cabin, quaintly furnished with flea market finds. But when I walked into the front room, I found built-in bookcases, plush oriental rugs and a fireplace lintel that looked like marble. I made a mental note to tell Eduardo about the Waterford crystal hurricane lamps.

“That opens out into a bed,” Maxine said, gesturing toward a massive, brown leather sofa.

“Wait till you see the kitchen,” Natalie said.

At one time, the kitchen probably had a white, enameled stove and sink and a refrigerator that knocked and hummed. But Natalie had banished them to appliance limbo. The sunlight streaming through the Andersen windows now reflected off stainless steel and Portuguese tile.

I followed Natalie into the bedroom, noting
immediately that there was one queen-sized brass bed. But what did it matter anyway, now that Bridget was gone?

Natalie had offered the urn with the ashes to Bridget's mother, but Mrs. McKnight declined. She was one of those people who need a place to leave flowers and a marker to look at, so she'd arranged for an empty grave with a headstone for Bridget in the family plot. I was glad. Remembering my visit to the McKnight house with Eduardo the day of Nancy's wedding, I didn't want what was left of Bridget to be surrounded by those porcelain figurines.

Natalie went outside with the urn alone. When she returned about a half hour later she gave me the urn. “Here, you can sprinkle the rest of her as we go along.”

“Or, if you see a particular spot that you think Bridget might like, you can dump what's left all at once,” Maxine said.

Natalie and Maxine were carrying baskets, small trowels, and pocketknives. Maxine had a roll of wax paper and a couple of field guides in a small knapsack.

Though the woods were a better location than a living room or den, I couldn't help feeling that the rim of a volcano would be the ideal drop-off spot for Bridget's ashes. But I wasn't going to be near a volcano anytime soon.

The trees were at their full fall glory—shades of yellow and red glinting in bright sunlight. Off to my left, a flock of black birds swirled up and over to another spot.

I had brought a small brass box that had belonged to my aunt Rose with me. While Natalie and Maxine were stooped over something, presumably a mushroom, I poured some of Bridget's ashes into the box, which I put back into my jacket pocket.

As I caught up with them, Maxine was reading one of her field guides. I heard Natalie say, “Really? Do you think that's what it is?”

We spent a couple of hours in the woods. I scattered all of Bridget's ashes except for the ones in the box in my pocket.

When we returned to the cottage, I watched Maxine remove the mushrooms from the basket. Natalie was doing something with a skillet.

“Since we didn't have any lunch,” Maxine said, “we'll have some mushrooms with our tea.”

“Because of Bridget's death, we know that we have to be really, really careful about eating any mushrooms we're not one-hundred-percent sure we can identify,” she added.

“That one's blue,” I said.

“It just got a little bruised in the basket,” Maxine replied.

“I don't want to eat it if it's blue.” I was trying really hard not to whine.

“I'll cut the blue parts off before I cook it,” Natalie said.

I went into the living room and sat down on the brown leather sofa, wondering how I was going to get out of this. Soon Natalie came in from the kitchen with mushrooms on three small plates. Maxine followed her carrying a tray with a teapot, three mugs, spoons and honey.

I looked at the mushrooms. I looked at Maxine. I looked at Natalie.

“They got a little burnt, but they should taste fine,” Natalie said.

Natalie was looking at me. Maxine was looking at me. The mushrooms might have been looking at me too, all of us awaiting our fates.

Maxine began eating. I watched her carefully for a couple of minutes. Then Natalie started in.

I put a forkful of mushrooms in my mouth, chewed carefully, and quickly swallowed them. “Very interesting.”

“Tea?” Natalie asked.

Everything was fine until I noticed that the flames in the fireplace were forming fiery Rorschach patterns. Trying to decide what they represented made it hard to focus on what Natalie and Maxine were saying. I wondered if I might be dying. Was I breathing normally? Should I ask to go to the emergency room? If there even was one around here?

I guess I must have looked a little strange because Maxine went into her mom mode, which involved concentrated fussing and concerned cooing. I had seen her do this with other people, and being on the receiving end was as pleasurable an experience as I had imagined. I decided that I wasn't dying after all. What with the tea and being so close to the fire, I was very warm and a little dizzy so the two of them helped me out of my clothes and into the sofa bed. I kept trying to ask them to get my pajamas out of my backpack, but they probably couldn't understand what I was saying.

What happened next was almost certainly a dream. It's embarrassing to have to tell about it.

The moon was pressed up against the windowpane, smiling in at me with Bridget's face. Stars had fallen through the roof and into the room. Something smooth and cool was swirling over and around my body, and somehow my hands became tangled in it. Someone slipped a blindfold over my eyes, yet I continued to see.

Bridget was a graceful many-armed goddess, flicking a golden tongue in time with one that would dart across my right nipple from time to time. As my body arched toward that tongue, flower turning up to sun, another mouth closed over my left nipple and began a gentle sucking.

I was staring into Bridget's eyes, I was looking into the ocean, I was floating with my legs spread wide and the water lapped up against me and I heard gulls crying. Or maybe that was me?

“I had a really weird dream last night,” I said, as I cut into the perfectly cooked herb and cheese omelet Natalie had set before me. “It was one of the most intensely sexual dreams I've ever had.”