With that, Benji stood. Dropping his M&M’s like empty seed husks into the grass, he left everything — lunch sack, orientation packet, campus map — where it lay and, ignoring Tammy’s surly protest, started the long walk back to parking lot D.
She sat on the edge of Henry’s bed and read the letter aloud. She’d been working on it since the day Max died, since the day she watched her opportunity to tell Claudia the truth come and go on that endless drive to the store. Evelyn might have unburdened herself then, though she couldn’t shake the notion that telling would do nothing but add to her load. And not only hers. Claudia, too, would bend with the weight; Evelyn’s bold and upright girl brought to the ground by a forty-year-old lie.
Excepting the reverend who married her, never had Evelyn admitted to anyone that she had opened the door one day and took into her arms another woman’s child. Never had she wanted to. Never had she seen the need. She and Henry had worried for a time that the secret they kept from Claudia would be exposed by nasty children or gossiping neighbors or the self-appointed scourges of a small upstate town. But the elderly neighbors who knew of Jane’s disappearance had, miraculously, moved on or gone demented or died before her daughter reached the age that may have tempted them to disclosure. And the young families who took their place had never seen the woman named Jane. They knew of no scandal, no secret, and so Claudia grew, as Henry and Evelyn intended, with a sense of belonging she had no cause to doubt.
Except, on some level, Evelyn knew, she did. As soon as Max appeared at her door, Evelyn couldn’t avoid seeing just how much her daughter did. Why else would Claudia keep such an enormous and essential predicament from her? Why else would she turn from her mother’s guidance? Her love? Why else would she leave buried the lie of her own child, year after year, decade after decade, until the child came crashing into their lives like an avalanche? Evelyn came to see Claudia’s secret as retribution for her own. For now that Henry’s mind had dissolved, and with it the oath he insisted they keep, the fault rested entirely on Evelyn’s shoulders. Thus, the letter.
What started as a rambling six-page admission of and apology for burying the bones of her daughter’s history — a truth Evelyn felt compelled to offer in a sort of tribute to Max — had swelled, in the weeks following his death, into an imprecation of her very own existence. It was her fault, she said, rejecting the comforting thought that Henry shared (and possibly deserved even more of) the blame. It was all her fault.
But who was her admission for? The further she read, the more she wondered who stood to benefit from what she had to say. Was it for Max, who was gone? Was it for Claudia, who had the rest of her life to live? By confessing her heart, Evelyn alone stood to feel lighter. Claudia had lost Max. Claudia had lost Henry. And now Evelyn stood ready to take away what was left. She read the letter through to the last words. Love, your mother. Your mother: what was left after that for Claudia to lose?
Evelyn gave no more thought to tearing up those pages than she would about pulling her hand away from a flame. She did it instinctively. She shredded the letter, bit by bit, her eyes spilling over at the sight of the awful confetti raining down into the trash. How could Max forgive her? Tired, she shifted her position on the bed until she was lying by Henry’s side, her head pressed to Henry’s head. He looked at her then, and she wondered who he thought he was looking at. If he realized he was looking at anyone at all. Maybe she was, in Henry’s mind, his wife. Maybe she was Jane. Maybe she was a girl he never thought to mention, a girl who lived in his mind eons before she walked into that apartment off the garage and met the boy with the suitcase full of books. But no. Evelyn wasn’t Jane. She wasn’t even Evelyn. She was nobody, just as Henry now was nobody. She curled next to him and drew his arm around her. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, as if readying for sleep. Now perhaps, at last, they could rest.
By the time Benji arrived, his mother was gone. He stood in the doorway, stunned by a smell that made his stomach lurch every time: floor cleanser and beige food and, somewhere deep underneath, the dark offense of human shit. He closed his eyes and opened them again, as if this brief respite might make the yellowish light oozing from blister-like sconces less terrible and the man in the bed, nearly unrecognizable to him under his thin white sheet, more like his father. He’d spent his lifetime wishing his father would disappear, and now that Henry had, Benji wanted little more than to get him back. He didn’t like coming here, so it surprised him to find that, lately, here was one of the only places he could stand to be.
Once Benji overcame his body’s reflexive response to the indignities of dying in a leased room with lemon-colored linoleum, he found himself sitting sentinel over his father, in the vicinity of a precious calm. He stepped forward and peered down from Henry’s side into a face washed clean of recognition. Gone, the disappointments. Gone, the wit. Gone, the sharp-toothed eminence. All the lasting things, it turned out, did not last. His father’s mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, like a fish mouthing clear, silent bubbles into the air. Benji pulled up a chair and sat. This was the vigil he never dreamed of keeping. And this was the last.
Benji had, since the fire, set to rereading his father’s books. From beginning to end, first to last. He’d never admitted to Henry that he’d made a first lap with the old man’s oeuvre and now, a quarter of the way into the second, Henry couldn’t understand him if he did. In his twenties, when the exchange of Henry’s infamous birthday books struck his son as especially pointed, Benji secretly dipped into the pages of Nuisance and The Skirmishes; if Henry had corked a message in some bobbing literary bottle, Benji took his chances on finding it here, in the pages of Nostomania and Derelict’s Fee rather than anatomies of postwar America or bloated Russian doorstoppers. Perhaps Benji, like the disinherited Dimitri Aster in Nostomania, had come to wait for his father’s last words.
For 513 pages, for 212 days, Dimitri stands over his father’s bed, patient for the bastard whose gambling partners have beaten him into a coma to open his eyes and say what he has to say. And then, 212 days after Dimitri’s vigil begins, after 212 days of tortured reflection on Phelan Aster’s paternal shortcomings, the father opens his eyes and says to his son, whose mouth is loaded with the gob of spit he’s dreamt of launching into his failure of a father’s face (no matter what the old man croaks), “And now what?”
Dimitri swallows his spit, sensing in the question the first signs of melting a glacier-size impasse, then looks up at the beeping heart monitor to see the thorny green vine of his father’s sinus rhythm snake into a smooth, straight line. A 513-page joke. And now what? And now nothing. Some joke.
Benji, who’d spent more than 212 days of his life hawking up a final, Dimitri-ish send-off spritz of his own, regarded the absurdity. The more you remember, the more you’ve made up: this, from The Skirmishes. The father he’d grown up with differed from the father before him differed from the father as husband or artist or teacher or man. Benji had a death grip on a single part of Henry, a few lines he’d redacted from the whole of the text that made the whole more legible to him. He found it hard to fit that piece into the puzzle that lay before him, to complete the portrait of Phelan Aster or Henry Fisher or whatever enigmatic monster Benji had whittled down from a much longer, more complicated story: he saw no trace of that man in the figure before him (who wasn’t, as Benji expected, raging against the dying of the light but slipping as gently, as slowly into it as one can).