“She was in a car accident last night driving home from the hospital. I guess the other driver was drunk. She didn’t really have a chance, that’s how fast he was likely going.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She died soon after the paramedics brought her in. I’m awfully sorry, Doc. I don’t really know much more than that. Gee, Doc, was she a good friend?”
“No, not really. She was an associate,” I think I said.
“I’m very sorry.”
“That’s quite all right, Renny.”
“Listen, Doc, I’ll try to see you this afternoon. I have to go now. Will you be okay?”
“I’m fine,” I told him, and after some more chat we agreed to try to meet here at the pool. There was another thing he wanted to mention, but it wasn’t so important and could wait.
But later, as I drove on an errand before going to Sunny’s apartment in Ebbington to pick up Thomas, I began to find the information about Mrs. Hickey so profoundly untenable that for a few minutes I had to park along the side of the road with the engine shut off and the windows rolled up. The cars were steadily whizzing by me on the narrow two-way of Route 9, the muffled slingshot of their passing buffeted by the safety glass. I wondered which tight suburban road it was, if not this very one, that Anne Hickey should not have driven on late at night when everyone knows the saloon revelers would be speeding to the next place. I wondered why she hadn’t known to stay at home with her husband or in the intensive-care ward with her son, that good people like her should take the most extreme caution with themselves and practice wariness and avoidance for the sake of their beloved, and then, too, for the rest of us. And sitting at the wheel I became angry all at once, angry at her lack of care and circumspection, and if she had been in the passenger seat looking at me with her comely palish-pink face and sea-blue eyes, I would have scolded her as hotly as I wished to scold Sunny when she was a teen. But I found myself instead struggling for breath, the simple draw of it, my still weakened lungs smarting with each gasp, and whatever life-spirit I possessed at that moment I felt desperate to abdicate, if but for empathy and the wish for a penance that would likely never come.
There was still some time before I had to get to Sunny’s, and so I made a U-turn in the road and drove to Bedley Run, through town and then up the road past my house, and I kept going up the hill until the very end of the street, where there is a small Catholic cemetery, the pedestrian entrance to which is bowered by a delicate wrought-iron arch. It is pretty, and modest, like the well-tended plots inside the grounds. The elevation is high enough that from most every spot — at least on a clear day — you can almost make out the city skyline to the south, the high spires looming like the far parapets of a strange, empyreal country. And then, in the middle distance, when you view the dense overlay of towns and villages laid out in contiguous patches, the multiple strands of the interstates and the parkways running straight through the heart of some and bending deferentially around others, bounded and marked by the shimmering waterways and reservoirs and the gently sloped hills, you feel as though this place in which you stand is a most decent and comely kingdom, even as it is a solemn province of the dead.
The monuments are mostly severe and plain, and even the few miniature mausoleums are unadorned, dignified structures, squarish blocks of polished black granite fitted with engine-turned doors of patinated brass. As I gloomily thought of Anne Hickey and her unsettling, instantaneous end, I remembered, too, with a start, that it was in one of these tombs that the Dr. Bradley Burnses resided.
Mary Burns didn’t altogether favor the tomb her husband had pre-built for them. She would have preferred a simple set of headstones over any free-standing structure, but of course she was always typically dutiful and made sure to keep up its appearance. One spring day I accompanied her to help her plant several evergreen shrubs on either side of the tomb’s door. I called the owner of the local nursery to deliver the plants to the cemetery entrance, and Mary Burns and I each rolled a wheelbarrow up Mountview Street to pick them up. We must have appeared quite a pair, dressed in our heavy canvas gardening trousers and work shirts beneath our wide-brimmed sun hats, clodding along in black rubber boots like an odd pair of itinerant landscapers. Though part of me was distracted by the idea that our neighbors might be peering out their windows at us, wondering what the exact nature of our relationship was, I was also, to be honest, almost discomfitingly flushed with a sensation I had not believed I would ever experience again. For even as we set about the work of sprucing up her late husband’s gravesite, with all the typically complicated specters and notions attending such a task, I was in fact nearly giddy, and I believe she was as well. We were happily basking, as one might say, in the warm glow of our passion, our union still in the early, intimate weeks when there is not yet talk of past or future days but only the too-swift dwindle of the hours.
That day we walked up to the cemetery we didn’t go directly in, as the nursery truck hadn’t yet arrived with the delivery of shrubs. I sat on a bench to wait, but Mary Burns suggested we leave the wheelbarrows inside the wrought-iron gates of the entrance and take a brief hike on an old bridle path, whose almost completely hidden trailhead was a block or so back down the hill. I thought we should wait for the delivery, in case the driver was unsure of what to do, but she tugged at my hand and cajoled and even pecked me on the cheek, and soon enough I agreed.
It was clear that the trail was hardly used anymore, if at all. Mary Burns said that many years ago there were a number of people in the neighborhood who kept horses, and that you could see them on the weekends strutting up Mountview, fathers and daughters in rustic dress setting out for a day-long ride. Over time the riders had fashioned a clear path, which went up over Bedley Hill and down the far side, where it meandered through several square miles of undeveloped county land. I was surprised to learn that Mary Burns often took solitary walks here for hours at a time, and that she hadn’t until now invited me along. I was also a bit concerned for her as it grew quite isolated the farther we went, the path narrowing steadily until it was no wider than a deer trail, with the ever-thickening underbrush tugging at our trouser cuffs. For even here in Bedley Run, something terrible could occur, in a place like this all cloistered and shady. A certain kind of man could happen upon her in her light cotton sweater and willowy walking shorts and think he was exempt from the prevailing laws, that everything in the domain was his to master.
After we’d hiked a quarter mile or so, I said, “You don’t find it a little dark back here?”
“Are you trying to scare me, Franklin?” she said lightly, her eyes archly narrowed. “Because you should know I don’t frighten easily.”
“I’m not trying anything of the kind,” I answered. “It just is very much removed here. Our street seems already to be miles away. There aren’t any sounds but ours.”
“That’s why I like it.”
“How far do you usually go?”
“I don’t know,” she said, continuing to lead us. I was following closely behind her, the faint scent of perfume trailing her in the damp, spring air. “I don’t keep track, I guess. But don’t worry, I know where we’re headed to.”
“I don’t mind, Mary. Wherever you take us…”
“I’m glad,” she said, suddenly turning about. She put her hands up to brace herself but I ran straight into her. She went down with a crash, instinctively grabbing a branch of a sapling that snapped and tore along the trunk as she fell. I felt awful, even as she was fitfully laughing, and I knelt to examine her. She had a trickling nosebleed, and her eyes were teary, and I had her lean against my shoulder, her head tipped back.