And Sam says, “You think the Catholics are right?”
Nobody answers.
“Is Grandpa damned now?” Sam asks.
“No,” Kelly says.
“Not for this,” Mama says.
And that night. The night of the day of her father’s funeral, Kelly lies next to Michael in their bed in their house on the Bayou Texar, their bodies not touching, him reading papers from the office. Finishing that, from the sound of it, the rustling of the papers, the stretching of his body to put them somewhere. Her eyes are closed.
His voice. “Are you ready to sleep?”
“No,” she says.
She can feel him waiting for words from her. He’d rather not, of course. About things that matter, he’d rather silence, always. She gives him silence.
“I had to finish,” he says.
He thinks she’s pissed that he was doing work in bed on this night.
“I know,” she says.
“I’m sorry about your father,” he says. “I really liked the man.”
He waits for her again.
She’s prepared simply to say good-night. Michael’s trying here. But he is Michael. She’ll thank him and she will sleep. And now something unexpected wells up in her. “Do you think he loved me?” she says.
“He was your father,” Michael says.
“Do you think that’s an answer?” Kelly says this quietly.
He does not reply.
“You were around us both,” she says. “You’re a father. Do you think my father loved me?”
“He did what a father has to do,” Michael says.
Kelly hears herself. She has been in this life a long time, long enough, plenty long enough to see the irony of asking these questions of her husband, and she knows she’s talking to both these men, and she knows she better shut up, she’s known for a long while to shut up in these situations and she better shut up now, because she doesn’t want to ask questions when she’s afraid of the real answers. So she says nothing more. And she expects Michael to be true to himself and let it drop.
But he says, trying to explain, trying to be helpful, “He had his own burdens. Serious ones, obviously. In spite of all that, he did what he had to do.”
And she cannot help herself. “So are you saying he loved me?”
“Yes,” Michael says.
She takes this in.
And then Michael says, “Whatever that word means.”
And Kelly hears one beat of her heart and another, as if they are filling the room, and another, and Michael says, trying to be helpful, “It’s just a word.”
Her head is cacophonous with the beating of her heart now, and, rather like a deaf person, shaping words she cannot hear, Kelly says, “You can turn off the light.”
Michael does.
And in the dark Kelly finds herself at the very edge of the water, with New Orleans vanished behind her like the setting moon. She has come down some wooden steps flanked by mooring bollards. She has stopped on the last dry step, though they continue into the dark water and she imagines she could simply descend to the bottom of the river as she would descend the staircase into the reception hall of her house, as casually as she entered the Alabama River on another afternoon, when she was sixteen, drawn to the river’s edge very near the place where her father lifted her and would not put her down. There are half a dozen picnic blankets scattered on the grass behind her this time and they are filled with her yammering friends and Kelly is in a summer dress and her hair is a careful, feathered shag and she has gone off alone to the water’s edge and has crouched beside it and the river is blue on this day and it races past, knowing where it is bound, to a conclusion somewhere, to a distant sea, and she rises and she steps into the water and she stretches forward and simply lies down and she is sweeping onward in the Alabama River but she does lift her face and she does now open her arms and roll onto her back and look upward into the empty bright sky and she does move her arms now and she does move her legs — though she knows she need not do these things, she knows she can choose to do these things or not do these things — and later she is on the shore and there are people around her and she realizes her Farah Fawcett hair, which took forever to do, is ruined. And now Kelly crouches flat-footed before the Mississippi and she puts her arms on her knees and rests her head on her palms and she cannot see the water moving before her in the dark but she knows it is rushing onward to the Gulf, which is very very near.
∼
Michael listens to Kelly’s cell phone ringing, trying to run some choices through his head of where she might be. With her mother. With her sister. With a man. Alone in a jazz bar on Bourbon Street with a key to Room 303 in her purse is as far from the list as the dark side of the moon. As the phone rings, he prepares — just in case — to keep his voice calm, to put on the tone he would take with a crucial, frightened, reluctant witness. It is now that Kelly turns off her phone in the bar on Bourbon Street, but Michael, of course, simply hears the phone ringing yet again and again, and then her answering-service message begins. Kelly’s voice. “I’m not available …” And he’s still not ready to say anything to her this way. Not on this day. Tomorrow maybe, if he hasn’t gotten through to her. He hangs up. He holsters his phone.
He turns his face toward the plantation house. Only a perky garble of voices floats this way: the musicians seem to be on a break. He appreciates the relative quiet. He wishes he could be talking this out with Kelly now. And he thinks to call Sam. Perhaps she knows something. Sam. He turns his back on the house and walks further away from the voices and the light. Seeking a still better place to call his daughter, he slips into another undercurrent of the past. He stands at the back railing of the deck of his house, looking across his lawn at the dark water of the bayou. The deck is new, smelling powerfully of teak. The house is done at last. He and Kelly are at last in the place where they expect to grow old together. He hears the soft rustle of her behind him.
“Sam’s asleep?” he says.
“She was full of chat,” Kelly says, beside him now.
“The rigors of first grade,” he says.
“More pleasures than rigors tonight.”
“Good.” He turns and, without a word, steps away from her, crosses the deck to a Grundig boombox and starts the cassette he put in late last night. Stephane Grappelli’s sweet, slow, improvised jazz violin version of “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
He turns back to Kelly, who has followed him part way and is now settling into a deck chair. “I’m tired,” she says. “I almost finished the last of the boxes today.”
He moves to the deck chair beside her, but before he can sit, Kelly says, “You should play the Ella version.”
“No lyrics tonight,” he says.
She hums an assent, turning the hum into a following of the tune for a few bars.
“The harpsichord is the genius touch,” Michael says.
“Dance with me,” Kelly says.
“I thought you were tired.”
“Not too tired to dance,” she says.
Michael offers his hand. She takes it and rises and they hold each other close and they move a little, slow dancing for a time with small, improvised steps. The harpsichord begins to riff with the bridge and Kelly puts her lips to Michael’s ear and says, “Thank you for all this.”
He stops their dancing. He pulls away just a little, enough to look her in the eyes and then to kiss her. She returns the kiss and presses it into him, opening their mouths to it for a moment, and then they begin to dance again.
And a wee, clear voice picks up the lyric on the precisely correct beat and begins to sing, drawing out the words to fit Grappelli’s ornamentations as he glides into the final repeat of the chorus. “Follow my lead, oh how I need …”