He looks at her. “No.”
“Well. I didn’t. It was a closed casket. I needed to look at him. It’s a good way to get things straight in your head so he won’t hang around in there.”
Robert tries to take this in. He’s not sure. He stalls by quibbling.
“Still waiting for the suggestion,” he says.
“You weren’t with him at the casket for very long,” she says. “Just make sure you did enough tonight.”
Robert looks off in the direction of the far wall. In the middle of the room, a clump of assisted living visitors with plates of Irish stew blocks his view of the casket beyond. But he’s thinking Darla may be right.
She says, “It’s not about good guys. I had as much trouble with my dad as you did with yours. More.”
“Okay,” he says. “You’re right.”
Robert and Darla would both agree: This is one of the paradigms of the two of them at their intellectual best with each other. A difference. A discussion. Patience over a semantic quibble. One sees the other’s point. And concurs. Sealed with a moment of contented silence.
That moment ends, but before they part she says, “Does she need me, do you think?”
“Mom?”
“Yes.”
“Not right now. I think she needs to be alone.”
“I’ll go dip some stew.”
“I think you’re starting to like it.”
“Please,” she says.
She begins to turn away.
Robert puts his hand on her arm. “Hey.”
She looks back at him.
“Thanks,” he says.
She nods.
He heads off toward the wall with the casket.
She moves in the other direction, toward the buffet room. But she puts only a few steps of separation between her and the back door of the visitation room before her department chair intercepts her and hugs her as if the dead father were Darla’s own. Darla figures the warmth is mostly about department politics, which means a conversation is imminent. She gives up the hope of hiding immediately behind the stew.
Robert veers wide around the group of old women in hats and old men in wide ties from Longleaf Village. He keeps his face averted; he’s met a couple of them and this is not a time to chat.
He’s past them now and he looks toward the casket.
A man is standing there, his back to Robert.
Robert does not recognize him.
Just a man. A lanky man wearing a leather jacket, his hands clasped behind him, his pewter-gray hair thick-curled and shaggy at the collar.
Robert stops. He’ll wait till the man moves off.
Robert looks about to see if anyone else is waiting to view the body.
A few steps off to the left is a pretty, pale-skinned woman, her dark hair spilling from beneath a knit cap. He takes her for an art theory student of Darla’s. Perhaps she has a concealed sketchbook, waiting to capture a dead man.
Robert thinks to walk away now.
But he returns his gaze to the man.
He has not moved.
Well, yes. His hands, in their clasp, have begun to twist, have grown fretful.
And now Robert has a thought. This man is not from FSU. Not from assisted living. Not one of Bill’s generation. Wearing leather at a funeral home visitation, he’s not from Peggy’s church. Robert looks at the woman again. Her gaze is fixed on the man. They are here together. And she’s older than he thought at first glance. Robert looks closely at her jaw, looking for his father’s, his own, his brother’s. Looks at her eyes. He’s not recognizing a Quinlan, but he’s never met Linda. This woman’s features could be from Linda’s genes. He follows her eyes back to the casket. The man’s hands cling to each other to quell their restlessness. Robert suspects his own hands were just as restless when he stood there. It’s him.
Jimmy has not been here for long. He is still breathless, standing in the presence of death. Not realizing, not quite yet, that its immanence in this casket is a major reason why he’s here. All he presently understands is that the face of his dead father is largely an unrecognizable face. Not a man at all. Not even a good caricature. All the features are bloated and blurred and slathered over. Features he last saw forty-six years ago. Features that would have been nearly as unrecognizable last week, when Bill was still walking around, unawares, in death’s anteroom. Jimmy once more asks himself the basic question: What the hell am I doing here? And since the dead body is not providing an answer at the moment, Jimmy works his way along. Closure. Sure. But I’m here because Linda left me. I’m here because I found Heather. Here because I found her only very recently and she’s not yet enough. Blood ties are overrated. But that’s about the inefficacy of blood, not about the need for ties to something. The something was once Linda and Canada. I still have Canada. Oh Canada. Unarmed, universally doctored, killingly polite Canada; grumbling-not-hating Canada; minding-its-own-fucking-business-in-the-community-of-nations Canada. Tolerant, come-find-a-refuge-and-your-own-identity-here Canada. Not enough. I know that. Canada and Heather may eventually be enough. But for some reason I had to come stand here before this man. Only blood connected us. Not part of the real equation. I did dream of him. And my mother. And my brother. But you can dream about an old girlfriend or a high school teacher or a crooked auto mechanic and it doesn’t mean you need to seek them out before they go into the ground. Still I came to this man, his corpse waiting to rot. Because he’s dead; he’s dead so he knows something important, something no one alive knows. Right now. What is it? Is he wedged into the dark matter, pressing his face against mine? Has he run off to be someone else, somewhere else? Or maybe he’s nothing at all. Or just made new. Maybe death is like when they knock you out for a colonoscopy. You’re counting backwards one second and awake the next and they tell you it’s all done and you don’t remember a thing. Maybe you die and you wake and this life you lived is utterly forgotten like that lost hour. Life in the USA and life in Canada. Life on planet Earth. Life is just the camera up your ass that you won’t even remember. So what actually happens after death is fucking academic. If there’s nothing afterward or if it’s something that you’ll totally forget, then it’s all the same. Okay. What the hell am I doing here? I’m here to look at the bag of bones my father has become so maybe I can stop thinking about this thing I can’t stop thinking about. I came to face death.
Another thought, flowing from these, begins to shape itself. About his brother.
And someone is standing next to him.
“Hello, Jimmy.”
Jimmy turns to his brother. Jimmy’s impulsive few nights of Googling — yielding images of Dr. Robert Quinlan at academic conferences, on a book dust jacket, from the university website — have prepared him only a little for the changes of nearly five decades. The abrupt, palpable presence of Robert’s graying and slackening and weathering, his leap from twenty-three years old to seventy: These twist the knife of mortality in Jimmy’s brain. His own face in the mirror each day is much the same as this one. But even as he’s struggled with the thoughts of death, he could look in the mirror and convince himself, I’m pretty good for my age. I can put off dying. But he got to that understanding of his own face gently, gradually. Jimmy regards this man before him, this man of Jimmy’s blood, this man in the same pretty good shape as he, and sees him as mortally old.
“Hello, Robert,” he says.
“I didn’t expect you.”
“It was last-minute.”
They need a little break from each other already.
They have a corpse for that.
They both look in its direction.
All the possible small talk coming to Robert’s head sounds potentially touchy or argumentative: So what changed your mind? Mom will be very pleased. Is Linda with you? Who’s the woman? Well, there he is. Was it worth the trip?