“You got my note,” he says.
“I’m so sorry,” Darla says. “How is he?”
“I just arrived. I’m still in the parking lot.”
Darla is standing, sweating, in the foyer, just returned. It occurred to her to shower first. But she carries a memory, not so much in her mind as in her body. She stood in the doorway of the bedroom in their first house in Tallahassee, a rental near Lake Ella, and there was only darkness before her. She’d just spoken to her brother Frank on the phone downstairs. Dead. His voice. Both of them. And she’d said Oh. She stood in the doorway and she realized that this single word might not have been the right one. Perhaps she’d said more. But she could not remember any further words with her brother, nor any details of her passage from the phone downstairs to this doorway. She thought: We need an extension up here. She stood there waiting for something, but she could not imagine what. And then he emerged from the darkness. Robert. She blinked hard at him. She thought: I haven’t been seeing him very clearly lately. And Robert knew to say nothing, he knew instead to step very close. He smelled of Ivory soap and flannel and coffee on his breath. He should brush better. And his arms came around her, one at her waist, his hand coming to rest in the small of her back; the other under her arm and angling across her shoulder blades, that hand landing on her shoulder, cupping her there, and his hand on her back rose and moved farther around her and he drew her against him, and as soon as he did, she could remember what had happened, and she fell into him, fell a long way into him. Their first death. The first close death that comes to a man and a woman who are sharing a life. The first death brings all the future deaths with it. Brings all the deaths in all the world. And he held her close.
She does not remember this consciously now, as an event. Her body remembers, in the muscles, on the skin, simply as something it owes. Darla knows what the broken hip in Thomasville likely will mean for Robert, who has gone deep into his life without a close death of his own, and so she has not showered before making this call. She says, “Shall I come?”
“Thank you,” he says. “But no. Not yet. He’s probably … I don’t know. It’s going to be all about Mom. It’ll be about her. You don’t need to come. Please just do what you need to do today.”
She says, “Perhaps I need to be there. Not for her. For you.”
“Weren’t you doing something? A field trip?”
“Did I say?”
“Last week. Something.”
She thinks. Then, “Ah. Monticello.”
“You want to meditate there, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Go. Be a Southern belle.”
“Not quite.”
“Whatever you need.”
She doesn’t answer for a moment. From the prompting of her body, she tries to think if she should ignore what he’s saying. If she should go to him anyway. But her body also feels a sharp-scrabbling chill. He keeps the thermostat too low overnight. Always. She should turn it up before she runs, but she never seems to remember. She doesn’t want to go to Thomasville. “All right,” she says.
“I’ll see you later,” he says.
“Are you sure about this?”
“I’m sure.”
They fall silent. But they do not immediately hang up. They aren’t good at ending phone calls. They both hate phones, in fact. They can’t read each other’s body or face, which is crucial to them, to inflect their silences.
“Really?” she says.
Just enough silence has ticked by between them that it takes a moment for Robert to place the really into its proper context.
While he tries to, she interprets the few beats of his silence to mean he’s not really sure.
“I’ll come,” she says.
“No,” he says, figuring it out. “I’m really sure. Thank you.”
And he hangs up.
I do that too, she says to herself about the abruptness of his ringing off. She won’t worry anymore about him for now.
She touches the off button on the phone and places it in its cradle.
Robert finds his mother sitting on an upholstered couch beneath the skylight halfway down the entrance corridor. Peggy Quinlan rises at his approach and comes to him and they hug in the way they’ve hugged for decades, leaning to each other at the waist, cheek to cheek, patting each other behind the shoulders, as if always consoling each other. The patting is firmer this morning.
“Thank goodness you’re here,” she says. “They’re preparing him for surgery. The doctor is coming down to talk to us.”
They let go of each other. She takes his hand and leads him to the couch. “I need to sit,” she says.
They do.
Robert turns mostly sideways to face her.
“Are you okay?” Robert says.
“A little shaky. I didn’t eat.”
“Ma,” he says. “You have to eat.”
“After the doctor.”
“How’s Pops doing?”
She smiles faintly at Robert.
He sees it. “What?”
“‘Pops,’” she says. “It’s just good to hear you call him that again.”
He was unaware. He’s not sure it’s good. “How’s he doing?”
“He’s pissed,” she says. Then she quickly adds, “I put it that way because it’s how he says it.”
Robert wags his head at her. “You can say ‘pissed’ for yourself.” And he regrets niggling. Why make a point of this now? But he knows the answer. The artifice of her. This is not the time for her to be working on her image.
As she often does, Peggy quickly co-opts Robert’s irritation with her by claiming it for her own, criticizing herself. “Of course,” she says. “What a silly time to hear the whisper of the priest. Piss piss piss. There. I’m pissed too.”
Though part of him recognizes her self-deprecation, antically adorned, as just another strategy of image-making, Robert gives her credit for it. “Good girl,” he says.
“But he’s more than pissed,” she says. “He’s scared, darling.”
“He’s a tough guy.”
“You don’t see him like I do. He’s not so tough.”
This is hardly the first time she’s claimed this. Robert has always doubted that it’s so. He has understood her assertions about the inner life of William Quinlan simply as her taking the opportunity to project herself onto the blank screen of her husband.
“He’s faced death before,” Robert says.
“It’s not about the dying,” she says. “It’s about leaving other things unresolved.”
“Jimmy.”
“That,” she says. “And more.”
Robert nods at this. But he does not even try to think what those other things would be. They could be legion.
Peggy waits.
Robert stays silent.
She says, “I called Jimmy.”
“What?”
“I called him.”
“How?”
“Your grandson.”
She waits again, and Robert can only do likewise in response. He refuses to drag the story out of her. She is prone to this sort of drama.
She says, “I asked Jake if there was a website. He found one. It’s like the white pages for Canada.”