I looked for family members and finally recognized Douglas’s Jack Lemmon look-alike father in front, dressed in banker’s dark blue. He seemed terribly pious, hunching down low for the prayers and staring blankly ahead the rest of the time. There were two dark-complected women in the same pew who matched the description of his mother, elegant, he’d sneered to us in group, so fucking elegant you could eat whipped cream off her asshole.
Family was fatal but they created you after all. Who would I be if it hadn’t been for Monkey King, if I didn’t have his breadth and bones and blood, if he hadn’t made his mark on me? It was useless to try to imagine how things would have turned out had I been born to another family, not only useless but impossible. I was what I had come from. When I had tried to leave I’d ended up in other families that would define me in different ways—my friends at boarding school, Carey, my group at Willowridge, Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard. I was destined to leave them all and at the same time never to leave. There was no escape, except for that one I had tried to take, that Douglas had succeeded in taking.
I imagined him planning this, giving his father’s credit card number to reserve the cabin, packing the bear rifle into a duffel, his only luggage. On the bus down, sitting alone because no one dared take the seat beside him, not caring that people shunned him, because he was aiming so precisely now, aiming past them to the end.
One of the dark women got up to read the Twenty-third Psalm.
Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil
I was thinking of a painting in progress, red with violet in it, the strokes as sinuous as the cold flames of hell, if I believed in such a place. But I didn’t, and not in heaven either.
The minister said: “Let us say a silent prayer for the soul of Douglas Abercrombie and for all those dearly departed.”
Although I could not pray for Monkey King, I could pray for my father. And while I was sitting there I thought of the others to whom I’d never had a chance to say good-bye: Nai-nai, Darcy, soon Uncle Richard, and of course, as Hopkins said, myself. Sealy. It is Margaret you mourn for.
Douglas’s mother turned out to be the woman who’d read the psalm. She stood beside his father in the back of the church as we filed past to offer our condolences. “A tragedy,” I kept hearing. I supposed there were a limited number of things to say in a situation like this, and Douglas’s life, after all, had been so short. I tried hard to think of a correct remark. Had any of the mourners at Daddy’s funeral been as ill at ease as me?
When our turn came Mel spoke for all three of us. “We knew your son at Willowridge. We’re all so sorry.” For all the father knew we could have been staff. I could see that Mel, as well as being comfortable in church, was familiar with the rituals of death. That was one of the advantages of coming from a large family.
Douglas’s father extended his hand to each of us in turn, his grip firm but clammy. His mother’s hand was limp and warm and lotiony and she barely looked at us. I could smell her perfume.
“Cold bitch,” Mel said when we were outside.
“What do we want to do now?” I asked. It was so strange, the three of us standing there in the sunlight of this lovely woodsy town, stranger than it had been first seeing Mel in Florida.
Lillith shaded her hand over her eyes and said, “I’ve got to be getting back. I only have a two-hour pass.” I still couldn’t get over her plumpness. It was as if she were a different person.
“We’ll drop you off at the train station,” Mel said. The teal Oldsmobile was around the back, in the church parking lot. “Sorry about this old heap,” he said to me, as if I’d never seen it before, as if we hadn’t logged hours in it together. “Someday I’ll get a silver Triumph.”
“Don’t,” I said.
Because she was getting out first Lillith insisted that I take the front seat, and I had to crane my head around to look at her.
“Well,” Lillith said. “He made it.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. I knew what she meant. Douglas had made it where we had failed. I had tried only once, she had tried at least once a year since she’d hit puberty.
“That was bizarre,” I said. “The ceremony, I mean. Meeting his family.”
Lillith said: “It’s always bizarre to meet the family.”
“Was there any warning?” I asked. “Did anyone know?”
“He was pretty incommunicado,” said Mel. “You should have seen him after you guys left. He looked like those people you see in pictures of death row, who don’t give a shit anymore, don’t exercise or anything.”
“How come they discharged him?”
“Why else? His insurance ran out.”
“They shouldn’t have let him go.”
“What could they do? His family isn’t poor, but you know Willowridge costs an arm and a leg.”
No one said anything for a while, and then I asked Lillith how she was doing.
“Same old same old,” she said. “I’m a fucking walking chemical factory. There’s this new drug, I can get it for free if I’m in the FDA trial, so they’re giving me that plus lithium. It kind of spaces me out.”
“Sorry.”
She yawned. “Oh, and I have a part-time job. They make you, at this place. I tutor math at an elementary school.”
“I didn’t know you did that.” It didn’t seem, somehow, to jibe with Joan of Arc. Then I remembered. “I got your postcard. The one with the ice cream sundae. It took a while.”
“I got yours.” There didn’t seem to be anything more to say, and I was actually relieved when we pulled up in front of the train station. I missed the old Lillith, not like she was at the end, unintelligible, but the zany girlie one who had made food sculptures and a string bikini and braided my hair.
After we’d let her out and watched her walk onto the platform Mel leaned back in his seat and stretched. “You hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Maybe by the time we get to New York you will be.”
“Yeah.”
I felt his fingertips brush the back of my neck and got a lump in my throat.
“Hair’s getting long,” he said.
“I know, I keep forgetting to have it cut.” We watched the train pull up and Lillith get on. “How’s the prom queen?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Bethie? She’s fine. She’s decided she wants to go to dog-grooming school.”
“Sounds like a hot career to me.”
“Yeah, well, you know we’re not serious.”
“Like it wasn’t serious with us?”
Mel was silent for a moment. Then he said: “You know I’d slay a dragon for you, Sally.”
And I for you, I thought, but didn’t say. Instead I asked, “You want your poetry book back?”
“What? Oh, that. No, no, you keep it. Think of it as a memento.”
The drive to the city was much too short. Mel told me funny stories about the restaurant, where he was working that summer, and then tuned the radio to a salsa station and translated the songs for me.
“You speak Spanish?” I asked, and he nodded.
Miracle of miracles, there was a parking space right in front of my building. Mel eyed the street dubiously before we went up and then watched, incredulous, as I went through my ritual with the three locks. Inside, he shucked his jacket and draped it over the baby rocking chair. Everyone loved that chair. When he sat down he said, “This is more comfortable than it looks.”