Women ask for explanations, over and over, when love goes. There is no explanation. The explanation is: It’s gone.
The whole thing, from the time they met at the little movie to the end, took sixteen months.
Back in her apartment, she’s cold. It’s a cold spring, wet, dark. She doesn’t cook, she doesn’t sleep well, she doesn’t read, she doesn’t see many friends. She gets her hair cut to just below her jawline, knowing it’s an angry, masochistic thing to do, but hoping that it will somehow make her feel better. (And also because she can’t bear now to attend to it: shampooing, brushing.) She talks to two people, her assistant from the bookstore who has had something of a front-row seat for all this—she used to raise her eyebrows at Rebecca all those months ago when Ben would come in, buy books, and leave without saying anything—and an old friend from the school where she used to teach. Both of them are kind, but both seem to be saying, without saying it, “What did you expect?” (In fact, they’re not saying this. They’ve been watching Rebecca all this time with some concern because she has seemed so engulfed in Ben and remote from everything else, but they have also been rooting for her, wanting it to work. The “What did you expect?” is coming straight from Rebecca herself, spoken in a voice not unlike Harriet’s.)
Summer comes, then fall. Rebecca still can’t walk by the store that sells the chocolate eggs.
“What’s wrong?” Harriet asks over the phone. Her voice is feebler these days, hoarse.
“Nothing,” Rebecca says. “I’m just tired.”
“You want to hear something shitty?” Harriet asks.
“What?”
“They’ve stopped giving me physical therapy. They say I’m not making any progress. I said, ‘Well, how the hell am I supposed to make progress if you stop giving me physical therapy?’ But you want to hear something wonderful?”
“What?”
“When Ralph comes over, he moves my legs for me. And he makes me do arm exercises. So I don’t atrophy.”
The nursing home calls.
“We’re calling to let you know your mother is in the hospital again—she had a fever, and so we sent her over to the ER.”
The hospital calls. Harriet once again has a urinary tract infection that has gone undiagnosed—she can’t feel any pain, because of the paralysis—and once again she’s in severe septic shock. They’re putting her on antibiotics.
Harriet calls. Her voice is weak and shivery, but animated, excited. “Oh, my God—did you hear about the tunnel?”
“What tunnel?”
“It collapsed. Turn on the TV. It just happened, at the height of the morning commute, they said.”
“Where was this? What city?”
“I don’t know. It was my roommate’s TV, so I couldn’t hear very well, and then the nurse or someone came in and shut it off. But it sounded awful. People were killed, they think some people may still be trapped in their cars. You need to turn it on.”
“Mom, we don’t even know where it’s happening.”
“It’s in a commuter tunnel. The main one that leads to the city, they said. Or maybe it was the bridge that collapsed, the bridge that leads to the tunnel. But everybody goes through the tunnel.”
That night the hospital calls. Harriet’s fever isn’t coming down. They’re going to try a different antibiotic.
Early the next morning, Rebecca is trying to decide what to do—call in the assistant, or close the store for the day, so she can go to Connecticut? Stay here and keep in touch with the hospital and Harriet by phone?—when the hospital calls again and someone tells her in a clear, soft voice that Harriet is dead.
She sits there.
She needs to call Cath. (Who will say, “Do you think we need to do a funeral?”)
She needs to call Ralph. (Who will cry. Who will be heartbroken. Who will now begin to decline very fast.)
She wants to call Harriet.
It has all gone on for so long without Harriet dying that Rebecca lost track of the fact that Harriet was going to die.
Guilt: if she hadn’t gotten tired and distracted—if she hadn’t let herself be so easily dazzled—if she had not relaxed her vigilance, this would not have happened.
Even in the moment, she recognizes this guilt as irrational, bogus; but it pierces anyway.
Harriet died when Rebecca wasn’t looking.
She sits there.
She wants to call Harriet, more passionately than she would have believed, an hour ago, that it was possible to want that, or to want anything.
The only other person she finds she wants to call—and of course she can’t—is Peter.
She will, though. Not now. Not until almost a year from now.
She will wrestle during that time with questions having to do with forgiveness. Can she forgive herself for what she did to him?
(For the most part, yes. The two of them made their polite, inhibited, explosive mess together, she believes; it ended the way it might have been expected to end, although the particular trigger could not have been predicted.)
(But oh, the folly of that particular trigger.)
Can he forgive her? No way to know. She puts off the phone call for so long partly because she is afraid to find out.
She keeps pitting his final “Don’t call me” against his penultimate, “Don’t call me unless you mean it,” trying to figure out which one carries more weight.
And she gets tangled in that “unless you mean it.” Which she didn’t even really hear when he said it; which she has discovered in her memory since then. Unless she means what? She can’t define it explicitly, the thing that Peter insisted she had better mean—but she does feel she understands what he meant by that insistence, and it gives her hope.
By the time she finally does call him, she will know that she means it, even though it will be a scary phone call to make, and even if she still won’t be capable of saying clearly what exactly it is she does mean.
Harriet would have been quick to tell her, accurately or inaccurately. To guess, to analyze, to explain, to make predictions. Harriet was always the one who wanted to talk about the news, from Spain, or from the Vatican, or from some uncertain city where something had collapsed—from any place, really, where anything of interest might be going on.
CALLAN WINK
Breatharians
THERE WERE CATS in the barn. Litters begetting litters begetting litters—some thin or misshapen with the afflictions of blood too many times remixed.
“Get rid of the damn things,” August’s father said. “The haymow smells like piss. Take a tire iron or a shovel or whatever tool suits you. You’ve been after me for school money? I’ll give you a dollar a tail. You have your jackknife sharp? You take their tails and pound them to a board, and then after a few days we’ll have a settling up. Small tails worth as much as large tails, it’s all the same.”
The cats—calicos, tabbies, dirty white, gray, jet black, and tawny—sat among the hay bales, scratching and yawning like indolent apes inhabiting the remains of a ruined temple. August had never actually killed a cat before, but, like most farm boys, he had engaged in plenty of casual acts of torture. Cats, as a species, retained a feral edge, and as a result were not subject to the rules of husbandry that governed man’s relation with horses or cows or dogs. August figured that somewhere along the line cats had struck a bargain—they knew they could expect to feel a man’s boot if they came too close; in return, they kept their freedom and nothing much was expected of them.