At ten, that last night, he opened his eyes after rolling in pain for hours. He said, “Eileen! Watch out, you’ll tear your dress”—he’d been talking to Gran, Wiloma remembered, as if Gran were there in the room with them — but then he said, quite lucidly, “Wiloma. Am I going someplace after this? Will I know you’re all right? Will I see you?”
This, when after Gran’s sudden death he’d begged to follow her. All his bark had vanished, all the flinty reserve that had made her hide her heart from him, and she looked into his cloudy eyes and lied. Or said what felt to her like a lie: “Yes,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“I just know,” she said, thinking of the times, all through high school, when she’d dreamed of leaving Coreopsis. A hundred times she’d imagined taking her diploma, leaving the stage, setting aside her cap and gown, and picking up her suitcase. Taking a bus to anywhere, leaving that life for another. She tried to offer Da a similar version of comfort — not the one she would offer now that she had the Church, but the best she could manage then. “You have to have faith,” she said.
He shuddered and she knew what was troubling him: he’d been raised a Catholic but had scorned his church since the reservoir had drowned it.
“Not what the priests told you,” she said. “Just faith. That there’s something else, another place.”
“What does it look like?”
And she tried — she’d been so young then, so ignorant, it had been the best she could do — to invent something pleasing. “There’s a valley,” she said, and as she spoke she saw it clearly in her mind. Gran had told her and Henry a story when they’d first come to Coreopsis. A boat, a journey, a secret place. Talking animals. The land of the blessed, Gran had said. The country of the young. Henry had sat on the chair beside them, rocking, waiting, and she had curled around Gran’s legs, listening to her tales.
“There’s a tree,” she told her grandfather. “In the valley.” His lids were transparent and the veins in them branched like coral. She told him about the fields and flowers and streams, the animals grazing, the flocks of birds. How the sun shone all day, how it was never too hot or too cold; how at night it rained just enough for the plants and how fruit hung from the branches.
“Are there people?” he asked.
“Lots,” she said. “No one ever grows old there. No one ever dies.” He grasped her thumb with his finger and held on. “Gran is there,” she continued. “And my parents, and yours. It will feel like you’ve come home.”
The words seemed to comfort him, and he fell back to sleep before she could say anything else. The stars moved; his fever rose. When she went to take his pulse, his arm felt cool and waxy, and she couldn’t find the flutter she’d counted with her fingers for so long. She brushed her hair from her ear and pressed her head to his chest — there was his heart, beating still, but muffled and much too fast.
He coughed from time to time, wet gasps that cleared nothing. She understood that he would not wake again. She wished — she had wished then, and she wished it even more strongly now, had felt it more and more every year — that she’d held his hands and stretched the truth and said, “We were happy here. We loved our lives. We hardly missed our parents once we had you,” He had given them what he could, everything he had. Mimi jumped on his bed and crept among the pillows wedged beneath elbows, hips, and knees; pillows meant to take the place of flesh and keep bone from metal, bone from bone. Da’s head fell sideways, his neck so stiff she couldn’t move it back.
In her book. Da’s book. Da had marked the last page, where the author had bidden his readers farewell. Here, my friend, our labors close, she remembered reading. She read out loud; she slipped a hand between Da’s cheek and the pillow it was pressed against. She read slowly, her lips at Da’s ear. It has been a true pleasure to have you at my side for so long. In the sweat of our brows we have often reached the heights where our work lay, but you have been steadfast and industrious throughout. Here and there I have stretched an arm and helped you to a ledge, but the work of climbing has been almost exclusively your own.
Parents and children, Da had written on that page. Or maybe it was parents are children — his handwriting was so bad it was hard for her to be sure. He drew one last breath after she read those words, and then he was silent. She looked up from her book. Silence. His hands and feet were cold and his skin no longer felt like skin. She laid her head on his chest again and heard only her own blood, rushing in her ears. Air filled his open mouth — air, not breath — and when she pushed his lower jaw gently up, his mouth would not stay shut. She closed his eyes with her right hand and bathed him one last time. His left hand was bent in the shape that had held her thumb, and she unfolded it and dressed him and settled the blanket around his feet.
Mimi jumped up on his chest, she remembered, and his right eye floated open, but there was nothing left, it wasn’t him, it was flesh, stone, clouds. The wind blew through the open window and caught his spirit, which spiraled up like a moth and took part of her with it. Ice to water, water to vapor, vapor to snow and rain. Here then we part, she read over his shelclass="underline" the last words in the red-bound book. And should we not meet again, the memory of these days will still unite us.
He was gone before she could say all she’d meant to, gone years before she’d had any knowledge of the Church or of how she might have eased his Spirit’s passage. She would not, if he were dying now, have told him a fairy tale about a valley or read to him from a red book that was full of pretty words but had no substance. She would have read to him from her Manual. She would have said what she still had a chance to say to Brendan, the words Christine would recite with her as a part of the Healing: Our bodies, consisting of flesh and bone, are made of the dust of the earth and have no significance. Without the light of the Spirit they are corrupt and mortal. Every creature is created Spirit and shall return to Spirit, swallowed up like a drop in the ocean. She would have said to Da — she would say to Brendan, she would not let him die as Da had, comforted clumsily by an ignorant girl—Paradise is not a place but a state of mind, in which all manifestations of Spirit are immortal and in harmony. We are as angels there, pure shafts of ethereal light.
But in order to say that, she had to circumvent Henry. Henry, with his transparent excuses, had left her all alone when she’d most needed him. Now, when Brendan most needed her, he had stolen Brendan away. In the darkness of her motel room, she thought of Henry as he’d been when they’d first arrived in Coreopsis. A little boy, but still older and wiser than her, he had whispered no as they hid in their rooms and puzzled over Da’s outbursts.
“Does Da hate us?” she remembered asking Henry then.
“No,” he’d said. “Da misses Dad. We remind him of him.”
Henry had understood that, but he didn’t seem to understand anything anymore, and she was, she realized now, afraid of him. Afraid the way she’d fear a cobra or a Martian: afraid they no longer shared any common speech or understanding. She would charm him, she thought. Lie to him if she had to; fight him if it came to that. But she would not let her uncle die alone.