Washing the Dead (42 page)

“Were there ever parties?” I asked wistfully.

“Maybe before your grandmother died, but I can’t say for sure.”

I felt like a kid who had been told that there was no such thing as Santa Claus.

“There were small dinner parties, though. Your mom and your uncle Norman would greet every guest.”

I pictured the two of them prancing about in thick cotton pajamas after their baths, my uncle carrying my mother piggyback.

Neil interrupted my fantasy by returning with Dr. Newton, a youngish man with thinning red hair and a prominent chin. While he examined my mother, we stepped into the hallway.

“Andy and I have been talking about our grandfather,” I said to Neil.

“What was he like?” Neil asked.

Andy gazed toward my mother’s door as if Joseph Fischer might appear on the other side. “My dad said that before your grandmother passed, he was always telling jokes. Liked to get in the kitchen on Sunday mornings and make his own pancakes, too.”

“What else do you remember about him?” I asked.

Andy kept staring at the door. “He was social enough when business friends came to the house, but he was mostly quiet, especially after Norman got sick. He worried about your mom and Norman a lot, always had doctors coming to the house to check one thing or another.”

Dr. Newton opened the door. “I’d like to talk to you two alone,” he said to Neil and me.

“Andy can stay,” Neil said.

“He’s her best friend,” I added.

Dr. Newton hugged his chart to his chest. “All right, then. Her aortic wall has been severely compromised, and her arteries are clogged.”

I stared at his lips as they moved up and down. They were
chapped. My mother’s condition had clearly gone untreated for months.

“What about surgery?” Neil asked.

Dr. Newton shook his head sadly. “She’s not a candidate. Her heart is too damaged.”

“So what does that mean?” Andy asked.

“It means that we try to keep her comfortable,” Dr. Newton said.

“And pray.” I wasn’t about to give up on my mother.

“Why don’t you all go home and get some sleep, maybe in shifts?” Dr. Newton suggested.

We nodded, but nobody made a move to leave. We were waiting for her to wake up. She’d open her eyes and look around at Neil, Andy, and me, and her lips would flower into my favorite of her smiles, not the June smile, but the one that lit her up from the inside out. I’d feel that old childhood rush of relief. Our patience would pay off. She’d come back to us, however fleeting her return. We were her family.

25

S
am and I fought when he phoned that night to tell me that he and Lili were coming straight home to help me take care of my mother.

“No need,” I said.

“Jesus, Barbara, you’re not letting anyone in.”

He was wrong. I’d let Andy in, and I’d begun to let my mother in, too. I thought of the clients for whom I’d cooked soufflés and chicken dishes and the tennis game I’d mastered so that we could play doubles every summer. “I trot well. Isn’t that what matters?”

“That’s a crappy thing to say.”

“I know,” I murmured. “I’m just wrecked.”

“It’s like you’re going AWOL on us.”

That stung. AWOL was the term I’d used to describe my mother’s disappearances. “Listen, I’m sorry. We can’t start fighting now,” I said.

“A little fighting might do us good.”

“You think so? What do you want to fight about?”

“Lili needs you right now,” he said.

The vulnerability in his voice broke me in two. “Just give me a little more time here, Sam. Come home on Sunday.”

I wanted to explain about the hole I’d fallen into when I’d allowed the rebbetzin and my mother back into my life and perhaps give him the coordinates. I couldn’t. I wasn’t finished with whatever I’d started. If Sam and Lili came home tomorrow I was afraid I’d get stuck down here, separated from them for good. And
somewhere deep inside, I knew that if I didn’t figure this out, Lili would end up here one day too.

Neil phoned first thing in the morning to tell me that since there was nothing to be done for my mother, Dr. Newton had sent her back to Lakeline for hospice care.

Bonnie was there to greet me when I walked through the front door. “I’m awfully sorry about your mom. Such a nice lady. She’s not back yet, but she’ll be here soon.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Fresh-baked cookies in the dining hall!” She pointed to her left. “Come on, I’ll walk you,” she said as though I might leave before my mother arrived.

“I’m not a flight risk, Bonnie.”

She grinned at me. “Of course you aren’t.”

In fact, I was a flight risk. I’d been running from my mother for years. Bonnie settled me in a comfortable chair and handed me a snickerdoodle.

A woman who looked to be a little younger than my mother sat at a table playing solitaire. Her hairstyle reminded me of Sally Rogers from the
Dick Van Dyke Show.
Fake Sally Rogers looked up from her cards and smiled in recognition of a handsome man in a suede jacket and a young woman, probably his daughter, with a mane of wavy brown hair and a diamond stud in her nose. She was about Lili’s age, and her loving smile revealed a mix of loss and relief that Sally was having a good day. She pointed to a play that Sally could make, and the old woman clapped her hands, and in that moment I knew that I needed to bring Lili to visit her grandmother. I went out into the cold, grateful for the fresh air, and called Sam.

“I’m sorry about last night,” I said.

“Me too.”

“What are you guys doing?”

“Well, Lili is sleeping, and Rose is on the treadmill, earning some activity points.”

I laughed. “Why don’t you come home tonight?”

“Seriously?” he asked eagerly.

“Yes, I want Lili to visit my mom.”

Silence.

“My mother’s dying. Lili needs to say goodbye to her.”

“I know,” Sam said, and then he gave me a speech he must have been rehearsing in his head. “Call me a shit for saying this. I want to be there for you, but I’m in no hurry to show up for June.”

“Sam, please. Not now.”

“I was
there
, Barbara, in the hospital after Lili was born. I watched you wait for her to show, and I held you when she didn’t. And I saw the phone bill and the calls to Stevens Point. Thirty seconds, long enough to hear her voice on her machine.”

“Sam, stop,” I said as if he were physically hurting me.

“And what about Lili’s bat mitzvah, when she showed up like some distant cousin? Or when she put on her coat immediately after those brunches you made us endure?” His voice shook with a pent-up rage I never knew existed.

“Sam!”

“Your daughter is veering off the rails, and I know you want me to give her a good talking-to, and I will, but where the hell are you?”

“You’re right, Sam. You’re a shit for saying all of this.”

“It had to be said.”

“Not really.” My voice shook. “After years of pain that you’ve clearly been documenting, I’m finally finding peace with my mother, and you, my supposed best friend, are resisting me? What the hell is wrong with you?”

A thick silence hung between us before he answered me, his voice full of remorse. “I don’t mean to get in your way, but you’ve been scaring the hell out of me these past months.”

“I know.”

“Come back,” he begged. “From wherever you are.”

“I’m trying, baby. I’m trying,” I said, and hung up.

I was about to go back inside when Andy appeared. His breath smoked in the cold as he told me that he’d just come from
the hospital, and that Neil and Jenny were following the Lakeline van that was transporting my mother.

“It’s going to be a few more hours,” he said.

“Oh.”

“You don’t look so good.”

I waved my hand in front of my face as if I were shooing away a fly. “My husband and I just had the roughest fight in our marriage.” My eyes burned from lack of sleep.

“I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

I knew exactly what he could do, and just thinking about asking for this favor made the nerve endings in my body dance as they had when I called Daniel or saw the rebbetzin after all these years.

“Yes. Take me to the mansion.”

Since Mrs. Kessler’s tahara, the surreal had become normal, and minutes later I was sitting in the passenger seat of Andy’s truck. The cab was as spotless as a rental, but this car was too old for a rental, and there was a cassette of
Blood on the Tracks
in the well under the tape deck. I put on the tape and listened to Bob Dylan singing “Simple Twist of Fate.” Andy thumped his hand on the steering wheel and concentrated on the road. He clenched his jaw as we approached the last flat stretch before the mansion.

“It’s okay.” I wanted to reach over and touch his arm, but I didn’t.

He pulled into the driveway and parked in his old spot. It was Sunday, and the house was quiet. I wondered if the rebbetzin would find us, but it didn’t matter. I thought she would understand how I’d come to this place. She’d directed me here.

Andy turned off the engine and pointed to the basketball hoop, now a bare, rusted rim. “Your uncle Norman, he was quite a ballplayer. Strong legs. Quick.” He shuffled his feet like a boxer.

I imagined the boy in the photo and a younger version of Andy playing one on one out here in the cold.

Andy shook his head. “Damn shame. He taught me how to shoot.”

Tzippy and I used to watch Andy giving Neil pointers on shooting free throws. Back then, the rim was bright orange and the white net intact. “And you taught Neil,” I said.

“Sure did.”

We got out of the car without discussion and walked along the bluff. Gray clouds filled the sky, and the wind howled along the lake, chopping up the water into little waves. The lake stirred something inside me as it always had, making me feel once again like anything was possible.

Andy’s jacket was open, but he wasn’t shivering. He picked up a rock and hurled it toward the water. His voice shimmered with a sweet nostalgia when he talked about playing on the bluff with my mother and Norman. “They called us the Three Musketeers,” he said. “Of course, we were quarantined because of the polio epidemic, so that made us even tighter.”

I stopped walking. “This is where my mother posed for the photograph.” It was also where I’d spotted her, years later, emaciated and smoking in her baggy blue coat.

“I took that picture with the camera Norman got for his sixteenth birthday, just months before his polio hit.”

As we walked on, the cold dead grass crunching under our feet, I asked Andy how he and my mother found each other again, and he told me that she showed up at his father’s funeral. She’d begged him to take the job as the Schines’ caretaker because he was the only thing she had left of her past. I hugged my coat tightly around my body. The rebbetzin, my father, her neighbor in Stevens Point, Mr. Beckerman—nobody could resist taking care of my mother. Her smile had won me dozens of Mrs. Beckerman’s special rolls and hours of special attention from my teachers.

“Let’s go inside,” I said.

The back door of the mansion was open, and Andy followed me into the kitchen. We stood in the pantry, and I listened for his breathing, praying that he would come downstairs with me.

“I’m not sure we should do this,” he said. “This is private property.”

I imagined that my mother had led him to this very place, and that he’d spoken the same words to her. “This pool belongs to my family,” I said.

I opened the pantry door, and the steps, more swollen than ever, groaned beneath our weight. I didn’t care if the rebbetzin heard us. She would understand. Andy reached for the key to the mikveh and handed it to me. I unlocked the door. I was about to turn on the light when Andy stopped me. “Please, I want to be in the dark.”

We stood in the spot where I’d seen my mother’s cigarette ember, only a few feet from the water. It was too dark to see Andy’s face, but I could feel him next to me.

“You asked what was between your mother and me.” His voice was raspy.

I waited for him to go on.

“Your mother and your uncle used to come here together.”

“Without you?” I stared at the still black water.

“My job was to carry your uncle down the steps.”

“You didn’t swim with them?”

“No. This was where your mother talked to the dead.”

I remembered the whispering. “Do you mean to her mother?”

“Yes. She convinced Norman that your grandmother was watching over them and could heal him.”

“I always knew there was more to the story.”

Andy didn’t speak for a few minutes. The room was so quiet. And wet. I unbuttoned my coat.

Finally he said, “The night your uncle Norman died I came down here to look for your mother.”

My breath caught in my chest.

“We swam here every night between Norman’s death and your grandpa’s.”