I didn’t speak. I didn’t look at her. She didn’t speak, either. It seemed we’d agreed to start back at Square One: just be together, at first. Just sit. Don’t talk; don’t ruin things. Just sit there side by side and watch the world go by.
Picture two statues in some Egyptian pyramid: seated man, seated woman, facing forward, receptive.
We watched three old ladies in flowered dresses and huge white spongy jogging shoes, taking their exercise walk. We watched a teenage couple strolling by so entwined and interlaced that you had to wonder how they kept from falling on their faces. We watched a mother scolding a little boy about nine or ten years old. “I just want you to know,” she was saying, “that I’m going to have to apologize to your wife every single day of your marriage, for raising such a selfish and inconsiderate person.” We sat a long, long time together, absolutely still.
She didn’t leave, exactly. It’s just that, after a while, I was sitting alone again.
Now that I’d learned to see her, she began showing up more often. It wasn’t so much that she arrived as that I would slowly develop an awareness of her presence. She would be the warmth behind me in the checkout line; she’d be the outline on my right as I was crossing the parking lot.
Think of when you’re threading your way through a crowd with a friend — how, even if you don’t look over, you somehow know your friend is keeping pace with you. That’s what it was like with Dorothy. It’s the best I can describe it.
Let me say right here and now that I wasn’t crazy. Or, to word it a little differently: I was fully aware that seeing a dead person was crazy. I didn’t honestly believe that the dead came back to earth (came back from where?), and I never, even as a child, thought there were such things as ghosts.
But put yourself in my place. Call to mind a person you’ve lost that you will miss to the end of your days, and then imagine happening upon that person out in public. You see your long-dead father sauntering ahead with his hands in his pockets. Or you hear your mother behind you calling, “Honey?” Or your little brother who fell through the ice the winter he was six, let’s say, passes by with his smell of menthol cough drops and damp mittens. You wouldn’t question your sanity, because you couldn’t bear to think this wasn’t real. And you certainly wouldn’t demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you’d been feeling that one touch was worth giving up everything for. You would hold your breath. You would keep as still as possible. You would will your loved one not to go away again.
I discovered that she seemed more comfortable outdoors than indoors. (Which was the opposite of how she had been before she died.) And she stayed away from Nandina’s, and she never came to my office. Understandable in both cases, I guess. She and Nandina had always had an edgy relationship, and I think she’d felt like an outsider at my workplace. Not that anyone there had been unfriendly, but you know that office clubbiness, the cozy gossip from desk to desk and the long-standing jokes and the specialized vocabulary.
Harder to figure, though, was that she didn’t visit our own house — at least, not the interior. Wouldn’t you suppose she’d be interested? The closest she’d come was that time on the sidewalk. But then, one Sunday morning, I caught sight of her in the backyard, beside where the oak tree had been. It was one of the few occasions when she was already in place before I arrived. I glanced out our kitchen window and saw her standing there, looking down at the wood chips, with her hands jammed in the pockets of her doctor coat. I made it to her side in record time, even though I seemed to have left my cane somewhere in the house. I said — slightly short of breath—“You see they removed all the evidence. Ground the stump to bits, even.”
“Mmhmm,” she said.
“They asked if I wanted to replace it with something, a maple tree or something. Maples are very fast-growing, they said, but I said no. We’ve never had enough sun here, I said, and maybe now—”
I stopped. This wasn’t what I wanted to be talking about. During all the months when she had been absent, there were so many things I had saved up to tell her, so many bits of news about the house and the neighborhood and friends and work and family, but now they seemed inconsequential. Puny. Move far enough away from an event and it sort of levels out, so to speak — settles into the general landscape.
I cleared my throat. I said, “Dorothy.”
Silence.
“I can’t stand to think that you’re dead, Dorothy.”
She tore her gaze from the wood chips.
“Dead?” she asked. “Oh, I’m not … Well, maybe you would call it dead. Isn’t that odd.”
I waited.
She returned to her study of the wood chips.
“Are you happy?” I asked her. “Do you miss me? Do you miss being alive? Is this hard for you? What are you going through, Dorothy?”
She looked at me again. She said, “It’s too late to say what I’m going through.”
“What? Too late?”
“You should have asked me before.”
“Asked you before what?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
Then Mimi King called, “Yoo-hoo!” She popped out her back door, waving. She was all dressed up in her church clothes; she even had a hat on. I waved back halfheartedly, hoping this would be enough, but no, on she came, stepping toward us in a wincing manner that meant she must be wearing heels. I said, “Damn,” and turned back to Dorothy. But of course she wasn’t there anymore.
I knew it was because of Mimi. Why, even while Dorothy was alive she’d had a way of ducking out of a Mimi visit. But somehow I couldn’t help taking her disappearance as a reproach to me personally. “You should have asked me before,” she’d told me. “It’s too late,” she’d told me. Then she’d left.
This was all my fault, I couldn’t help feeling. Mimi was tripping through my euonymus bushes now, but I turned away with a weight in my chest and limped back into my house.
7
In September, we held a meeting at work to plan for Christmas. Most of us found it difficult to summon up any holiday spirit; temperatures were in the eighties, and the leaves hadn’t started turning yet. But we gathered in Nandina’s office, Irene and Peggy on the love seat, Charles and I in two desk chairs wheeled in from elsewhere. Predictably, Peggy had brought refreshments — homemade cookies and iced mint tea — which Nandina thanked her for although I knew she didn’t see the necessity. (“Sometimes I feel I’m back in grade school,” she had told me once, “and Peggy is Class Mother.”) I accepted a cookie for politeness’ sake, but I let it sit on its napkin on a corner of Nandina’s desk.
Irene was wearing her legendary pencil skirt today. It was so narrow that when she was seated she had to hike it above her knees, revealing her long, willowy legs, which she could cross twice over, so to speak, hooking the toe of her upper shoe behind her lower ankle. Peggy was in her usual ruffles, including a sweater with short frilly sleeves because she always claimed Woolcott Publishing was excessively air-conditioned. And Nandina held court behind her desk in one of her carriage-trade shirtwaists, with her palms pressed precisely together in front of her.
“For starters,” she said, “I need to know if any of you have come up with any bright ideas for our holiday marketing.”
She looked around the group. There was a silence. Then Charles swallowed a mouthful of cookie and raised his hand a few inches. “This is going to sound a little bit grandiose,” he said, “but I think I’ve found a way to sell people our whole entire Beginner’s series, all in one huge package.”