I could not work on Doris the day I brought her here. And after delaying even more today, Pop finally knocked on my bedroom door to tell me, “You ought to at least say hello to her.”
For the first time since Robert and I carried her from the bedroom, I lift the sheet.
“Hello,” I say.
The room sways. I hold the edge of the metal table and close my eyes. Breathe. Breathe. It’s as if I’ve never seen a dead body and must experience the shock of looking into blank pupils, of feeling skin that does not respond to touch.
I try again. Open my eyes. Take in Doris, still and cold, her arms and hair flecked with paint. I miss her warmth. Her drunken truths. Her dancing in beads and that long, red scarf.
Through most of my childhood, I thought of Doris as the lady with the chickens. At dusk, she stood in her yard and clapped to get her hens into the coop for the night. They never went until they were ready, not a minute before.
We like to believe we have more control over our lives than we do.
We think if we don’t smoke, we’ll be spared of lung cancer. We think planning and hard work will bring fruitful crops and good prices for livestock. We think change will wait till we’re ready for it.
I wash, slip on gloves, and tell Doris, “We knew we’d have this time together, didn’t we?”
Her hands have been balled into fists since I felt for her pulse and Robert turned off the oxygen. I gently open the left, uncurling the fingers one by one, then massaging the palm, the wrist, each digit. Then the same with the right, I unfold her fingers, and out rolls a surprise. A small bottle of nail polish.
“For me?” I ask.
I check the color, Strawberry Ice, then breathe in long and slow, taking her hand in mine.
I sit with her withered lungs, the scar she was ashamed for me to see. How beautiful she is, even with hair that’s coarse and bent when she wished it were soft and straight. One body, that’s all any of us get. One beautiful, maddening container for all we are and hope to be.
I don’t know when I grabbed her second hand. I only notice I’m standing now and holding both to my cheek. We carry so much through this life—sorrows we don’t feel we can bear, apologies we can’t speak, habits we can’t break. But there are joys that sustain us. And I will never forget the three of us drinking wine together and sleeping in one room.
I’ve never been sure what I believe happens after death but find myself wondering where Doris has gone. Perhaps she is carried by the wind. Taking full breaths. Reaching low to feel the tickle of grass. And slowly lifting, lifting, until she finds an opening in the sky. A door to somewhere else.
I gently return her hands to the table and prepare her bath, choosing sponges, nailbrush, shampoo. I run the water until it’s just the right temperature and then wet a cloth, load it with soap.
My hands go to work. Wash, flex, bend, apply lotion. I am gentle with the scar. I’m familiar with its shape. Two others have come to me after surgery on their lungs. It is like an L down her chest and under a rib. My sponge finds other, smaller marks, and I wonder what stories they tell—a spill from a bicycle, a shove from an angry hand, the constant rub of a toddler’s shoe when she carried the child on that favored hip?
I fill, stitch, conceal. Day one turns to two, then three. I don’t remember time passing, don’t remember going up or down stairs, sleeping or eating. Her death is a physical pain in my body, a mass, here, under my rib, and here, where my breath feels crushed.
Pop moves slowly down the steps, using the rail to keep weight off the bad knee. He pauses near the door as if giving Doris some privacy.
“Have you eaten?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
I haven’t felt hungry or full. I’ve only felt the mass inside.
“Mary, come here, honey.”
I stand before Pop, hands wilted at my sides.
“Do you want me to finish?” he asks.
“No.” My feet feel the soles of my boots and the floor beneath them.
“Just tell me if you do.”
I can only nod.
“I have errands to run before the storm really takes off,” he says. “Are you still coming to the game?”
“Game?”
“It’s okay,” he says.
He touches my arm before he leaves and I notice snow collecting in the window wells.
I try once more to wash off the paint, though I’m fond of these stubborn flecks. Dots of yellow cling to Doris’s bangs and ear and forearm on the right side, where she held her brush. I’m so deep in concentration, my whole body jerks at the sound of the doorbell.
“Can you get that, Pop?” I ask.
When he doesn’t answer, I realize I have no idea how much time has passed since he was here. I hurry Doris into the fridge, then remove my gloves, wash my hands. Could it possibly be time for the viewing already? I race upstairs and reach the door as the bell rings a second time.
I find Robert, the gray clouds behind him so dark I can’t tell if it’s day or evening.
“What time is it?” I ask, trying to slow my breath.
“Four, I think,” he says, confused. He checks his watch. “Almost four. I came over because I found a photo I’d rather use.”
“Come in.”
He kicks the snow off his boots and steps onto our welcome mat.
“I looked through all our photo albums today, hoping for anything without my dad in it,” he says. “Went through every cabinet and drawer, and there it was.”
He holds out an envelope from the Agate photo shop. I open it, and my shoulders sag.
“I didn’t realize the story was true,” I say. “There really was a photo taken that day.”
He nods. “Actually, your father was there when we took it.”
“Pop?”
“He helped bring Eddie straight to the house from the grain elevator. Ma wanted to have this picture taken. It was a bad idea, but how could anyone say no to her?”
I shut the door and invite him into the parlor. He moves with a weariness of someone who has spent many hours gathering up sheets, soiled with excrement, standing in rooms filled with silent medical equipment and pills no one will swallow. We both sink into the lopsided cushions.
“Your dad was in our back room. He helped dress Eddie in the clothes she’d chosen for him. Eddie really wasn’t in shape for pictures.”
He picks at the corner of the photo. The couch in it is the same one I slept on the other night. Same lamp beside it. A dog’s tail shows in the lower left-hand corner. When I can stand to look closely at Doris and her sons, I notice her runny nose and tortured stare, her lips and teeth in a painful grimace. Robert’s face is red with anger and disgrace as he sits rigid in a misbuttoned shirt. And the brother he fought with earlier that day slumps between them with a horribly pitted face and eyes open, looking nowhere.
“He’d been in that hot bin for too long, and your dad was trying to pluck the grain that had lodged into his skin.”
I can’t move my eyes from the image.
Robert tells how his parents fought about where the camera was and about the whole idea of taking a photo at all. His ma dug frantically for the Pocket Instamatic in what they called the junk drawer, filled with everything from rubber bands to expired coupons to spare keys. The camera was a wonder when they bought it but, soon after, it became a forgotten thing.
“I went to the back room, wanting to get out of the way, and there they were, your father removing the kernels from Eddie’s skin and putting them in his pocket. I guess he didn’t want anyone to come across them in the trash. By then I was wearing my stupid button-up shirt, and I flopped down in a chair. I preferred that awful room to any my dad might walk through.”
When it was time to take the photo, Robert propped his brother against him, the skin dimpled so hideously, he didn’t want to look. His mother tried to stop herself from crying while his father paced and swore, telling them to hurry and get themselves set up. With his brother tucked in close, Robert realized that, except for occasional shoving and punching, this was the only time in nearly a decade that they’d touched, and the only time, possibly ever, that Robert had put an arm around Eddie.
They lined up on the couch, Eddie between them. Doris petted his beard with both hands, whispering, My baby, my baby. And then they sat and faced the camera. Just before the picture was snapped, Robert was told to remove his arm from around his brother because it pushed Eddie’s head toward his lap.
“I could tell the moment my father agreed to take the picture that he would leave us.”
He was leaving them already as he stood behind the camera, saying, “Goddamnit, Doris,” and she begged him, “Please, please, one more. It’s the last time we’ll be together.”
Robert remembered, as he felt his brother’s weight, and watched his mother trying to smile when it was so wrong to smile, that he could see in his father’s brief, hateful glances, the way he’d only address his words to Doris, that if he had to lose a son, he’d lost the wrong one.
“The package had never been opened,” Robert says.
His father must have taken the film to Albertson’s grocery store in Agate, where, two days after you dropped it off, you could pick up the prints, glossy or matte, three by five, or five by seven. Mr. Golden had ordered them in the smallest size.
“Did you look at the rest of the roll?” I ask.
He pulls the pictures back out. They span several years: Eddie wearing his basketball uniform; Eddie sitting with friends in the shade of a tractor; Eddie, with his big grin, biting into a raw potato. The photos of Robert are a blur, his back to the camera, heading up the tree house ladder or down the road with a broken appliance in his arms.
“I was an oddball,” he says. “No one knew what to make of me.”
He quiets when we come to several shots of Doris, skin and eyes still soft before the tragedy. Hair thick and straight, before aging and chemo. I look at Doris bending over in the kitchen so her nose and the dog’s touch, Doris smiling as she gardens, Doris standing with arms open.
“I remember that moment,” he says. “She was calling me and Eddie for a photo, and we refused.”
When I flip to the next image, we are back to Doris in that awful photo with one dead and one damaged son.
“Can you get a frame for this?” I ask. “So I can set it out for the visitation?”
The town needs to see this mother and her boys not as a game but as real people struck by grief and tragedy. And maybe Robert needs to see it most of all, until he remembers how very young a fourteen-year-old boy is.
We sit a while longer. Neither of us seems able to move though we are done talking. I try to imagine my father as a part of that tragic photograph. While I had played in the yard with my dolls, he helped bring Eddie’s body to the Golden residence. He could not have understood grief the way he does now. The man I know would never withhold comfort from a boy who feels he’s at fault. Pop would know a boy like Robert needed his comfort most of all. But he was still young himself. Like the rest of Petroleum, no one got it right that day.
I’d like to know this man who pulled the kernels from Eddie’s eyes, nose, ears, mouth. Who would have slapped his dead face to revive the dimpled skin. Who likely combed Eddie’s hair, his beard, and positioned him so that his head wouldn’t fall forward or back. Who chose not to comfort young Robert. Who left their home with kernels in his pockets. I want to meet this real, complicated man who disappears into the trance of TV and whiskey. I want to hear the honest state of our funeral business. I want to hear stories about my mother, and even the woman he likes to sneak into our home.
“The basketball game!”
“What?”
“I forgot,” I say, standing quickly. “I promised Pop I’d meet him at the game.”
I feel wrong letting him know we plan to watch basketball before Doris’s service, wrong for shouting when we are feeling the devastation of his brother’s death and his family’s grief.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“No, it’s all right.” He gets up off the couch. “I’ll hunt down a frame.”
“Yes.” I search for a dry hat in the hall closet. “I’m sorry. I . . .”
“It’s all right. I’ll let myself out.”
“I’m glad you came by,” I say.
And he is gone.
I open the hamper. No hat, but there are both the suits I’d meant to wash. The blue one smells strongly of perspiration. His happy suit is wrinkled but wearable. I find a wooden hanger for it and smooth it out, then leave without a hat.