Watch a woman pack in a floor-through apartment, in V V Brooklyn, midwinter. An old duffel bag sits precariously on a tangle of an unmade bed. The curtain rod beside the bed has broken, and in place of curtains there hangs a tacked-up sheet of printed leaves. There are clothes strewn over the lamp shade and all over the dusty wood floor, but it’s immediately apparent, and maybe surprising, that this is an efficient packer. She stuffs socks into shoes, folds T-shirts and underwear with retail precision, even separates clothes by color. Watch how you think you’ve seen her—this pale blur of a woman packing—you think you might have seen her before. She is tall and not skinny. She is soft and pale, with dark red hair prone to being frizzy, and she wears black boots, a black skirt, and her father’s sad smile, inherited pearls and inherited silver; she is the picture of inheritance. She wrote her English dissertation on Anton Chekhov, or at least she might as well have. She is the kind of woman whom other women feel very comfortable calling beautiful, and whose uneven features—most often referred to as “unusual” or “dramatic”— are, in fact, misleading. When she closes her eyes, she is petite and doe-eyed; she is ordinary verging on invisible, but when she faces a mirror she sees a curvy character that attracts men with at least slightly gothic sensibilities, men whose charms— both punitive and extravagant—tend to send her running.
Her name is Alice Green. She hasn’t been in her apartment for more than twenty-four hours in the past eight months. The apartment is littered with mail and lists and—like Alice— has the distinct aura of neglect. Her hair (which tends to grow out instead of down) hasn’t seen scissors in months; her skin is dry, her cuticles ragged, and she’s put on an even ten pounds. As Alice packs, she thinks of her mother, whom she never once saw packing even after Alice began to identify all the signs of imminent departure. It is impossible for Alice to simply stuff clothes in a suitcase without invoking the spirit of those hallowed exits and entrances, without having them rise up again and again like the banging of a door puncturing dreams through a windy restless night. Charlotte Green has been dead for fifteen years and it still feels as if packing is something that belongs to her, to the stash of ordinary acts made meaningful because they were carried out away from Alice. Here is a daughter who has not successfully stopped wanting more from her mother, even if—or especially because—her mother is no longer living.
She’s packing to see August.
Here is the beginning of a story, a beginning even she can recognize: now it’s Alice packing and only Alice, and she’s go- ing to see her brother with no clear understanding of why. Here is the middle of a story—the beginning, middle, and end—a move made from fear as much as from freedom. And Alice—she can feel it, even though she is quite lethargic—can feel herself lurching forward and pitching herself through the gray and slushy afternoon. She has always had the vaguely morbid nature of one who can recognize disaster and even name it, but somehow cannot avoid it.
The house was too big. Whatever room Alice found herself in, whatever task she undertook on the long bone-chilling trajectory from the kitchen or study to her father’s bedroom, Alice couldn’t help but at least once take note of the house’s absurdly hollow nature. The collections still maintained authority; no one had moved the Chinese shoe trees or Turkish prayer rugs, embroidered pillows from forgotten Irish counties, Balinese puppets, Deruta pottery, or African dung sculptures. Yet without Charlotte’s homecomings, the exotic objects failed to become animated. They sat in corners and on shelves like the molted skins of snakes—now merely colorful evidence of a former life. These carefully chosen objects—having once been packed so delicately between layers of Charlotte’s undergarments, or carried on daylong flights along with her bare essentials—were shells of their former selves.
Her family had never grown into all of the rooms, and left to his own devices her father had stopped trying to make the space anything other than what it was—a drafty renovated barn with rooms and additions added on (quite seamlessly, colonial style) up until the 1940s. He’d seemed to embrace the morose nature of his solitude, never (as far as Alice knew, anyway) entertaining any guests besides an occasional exceptional scientific young mind, along with Charlotte’s ghost. He was the lonely old genius with the beautiful dead wife. The floors were sagging, the salt air had corroded the window frames, and the roof was caving in. To put it another way: There was no shortage of knocks on the door each Halloween.
As Alice carried a photo from her father’s study to his bedroom, she paused at the front hall table where there was still a bowl of mini chocolates that she’d brought out only weeks ago for the eager and morbid neighbor children. She had actually started coming home for Halloween night a few years ago, when she was still living in the city teaching and researching, when she was very much on track and—more important—when such a track seemed like it actually existed and mattered. To make the trip midweek for only one night had seemed like an ordeal back then, but she hadn’t liked the idea of her father having to open the door all night long, answering questions from young suburban Wiccans regarding rumors of the house being haunted.
This year, living at home as she was, she’d almost forgotten about the holiday, and although she’d managed to scrounge up some candy, after eight o’clock she stopped answering the door altogether. There was a Goebbels special on the History Channel that she’d watched with her father from the vantage of his bed in a silence punctuated only by the faint sounds of the bronze door knocker knocking and knocking away.
It was especially difficult to care for her father in this enormous and drafty house.
The house was 187 years old. Alice’s father had bought it for less than a quarter of its value in the early 1970s from his college mentor—a badly behaved and wealthy cripple by the name of Dr. Norton Flowers. Dr. Flowers was the one dying then, but he’d had no devoted daughter, he’d had no children at all. He loved Alice’s father nearly as much as he loved his decrepit house, and he didn’t care about taking more money to the grave. All of which was practically unheard-of and very exciting, except that her parents had felt as if they really had no choice in the matter of whether to stay. It was too stunning to sell (even if they hadn’t promised Dr. Flowers they’d “make a go of it” there), it cost a small fortune to heat, and it was often talked about in the terms one employed when discussing an elderly relative; it was as if Dr. Flowers were living on the third floor, a proud and necessary burden, watching their lives unfold.
The house had, in no uncertain terms, fallen into disrepair. The Historical Society (the Hysterical Society, as her father referred to them) had been fining him for years and pressuring the town to enforce its ordinances on account of the barely maintained roof. There was usually someone who took pity on their family, who referenced poor Charlotte at a meeting, or listed the stellar accomplishments of Dr. Alan Green’s career. He was a respected, if puzzling member of the community and a handsome widower, and as such he usually slid by without suffering full rancor, year after year. Even as the area went through the roof on the real-estate market, her father remained steadfast. He quoted his old mentor who sold him the house, his favorite example of a “man of character,” and became a kind of mascot for the small band of properly owners who, as their area became less of a port town and more of an upscale suburb, shared a renegade sensibility. He was the old and odd exception to almost every rule. But not dying, Alice had told him. You‘// die if you don’t look after yourself which you have to admit is much easier in a small and stable environment.
And because her father insisted on staying, and because his bedroom was far from the kitchen (he refused to move his bed downstairs), once he was confined to his bed, which had been only a matter of time, eating became impossible without someone there to feed him. It was colon cancer that was pulling out all the stops, that—after years of high blood pressure, a low white-blood-cell count, and eventually the onset of diabetes— had finally come to get serious. He’d been in poor health essentially since Charlotte had died, and had made a shocking transformation from an exceedingly youthful fifty-eight to an ancient seventy-three. At some point within the last five years he’d begun to eschew town and everyone in it, insisting with shocking intensity how he’d always thought, all along, that the neighbors—the same neighbors who’d brought him food and conversation for years after Charlotte died—were anti-Semitic.
For a while she’d tried to hire someone to come in and care for him so she could live in her apartment at least part-time, but there was so much running back and forth between the bedroom and kitchen, the kitchen and the cellar (to adjust the hot-water heater, to bang the gas tank), that it was tough to ask anyone else to do it, even for a decent salary. The brokers called weekly, and the brokers made such promises, promises that verged on threats when her father categorically refused to sell. Believe me, he said once to Alice when she begged him to take an offer, I, of all people, know how little I can control anything, but I will do what I can; I simply want to die here.
And so, after he’d refused the last round of chemo, Alice— having just dragged her feet through the end of her twenties— quit sleeping with a boy eight years her junior, “took a break” from completing her dissertation, and came home. She embarked on bathing her father, on crossing into the underworld of washing soiled sheets and pillowcases and carpets, of mashing tablets into chocolate ice cream and listening to doctors’ instructions. She decided whether or not to give him all the whiskey he asked for, and the decision always seemed to be yes. They watched CNN and CNBC and reruns on cable. She heard about his postdoctorate years, an English rose called Polly who liked walking in the Chilterns, the remarkable adventures of old Dr. Flowers, who, before selling him the house, had inspired his years in Paris.
And now it was November.
The last of the warmth had been squeezed out of the landscape, and no matter how extravagant Alice was with the heat, a chill was ever present. It seemed her father held on through his favorite season, when the leaves fell orange into blue water and the summer people all went home.
He’d recently become interested in objects. Two days ago she’d spent an entire afternoon in search of a few missing items—a tennis racket, a painting—which he’d decided with touching insistence that he needed her to have. And her most recent mission, what Alice held in her dry pale hand: a photograph of this house’s original owners, a photograph from his study that he’d decided in a panic that he needed to see immediately. The photograph had always lived on the same top shelf in his study, where it was poorly lit and rarely taken down for a closer look. Dr. Flowers had been given the photograph by an elderly neighbor when he’d first moved in. The elderly neighbor had become affianced in the house during a Christmas party in the early 1920s and had somehow ended up with the portrait, which depicted a five-member family wearing attire that called to mind the phrase landed gentry: the mother and young daughter wore starched white shirts; the father and boys donned suspenders. A black, jowly dog sat obediently facing the camera. Mr. and Mrs. Frank Storrs and family was carefully printed on the back of the photograph (now hidden by the frame), 1825. Alice was surprised that it was this photograph and not an obscure one of Charlotte that her father wanted to see. His bedside table was full of Charlotte: at the beach, in moody profile, with Alice in her arms, with Gus going clamming in the bay. He liked to analyze the photographs, commenting on what made them particularly good.
Alice took the last of the stairs two at a time (she was always in a hurried state whenever she approached his room), and then, having not broken the habit, leaned on the wooden ball atop the banister, which, as the wood had begun to seriously rot, came right up and off in her hand. She rescrewed it precariously, as she’d done for weeks now, and joined her father on his bed once more.
“You found it,” he managed, his voice hoarse and low.
“Of course,” Alice said, handing him his reading glasses. “No one moved it,” she said, forcing a smile. “It was right where you left it in your study. Why did you want to see it so badly?” she asked, smoothing out on his forehead the still-thick unwashed hair.
He didn’t answer; he only watched the faces in the picture as if at any moment they might impart some secret wisdom.
“It’s amazing to think they all lived here,” Alice said, trying to encourage him to speak. Lately he’d fallen into silence for hours at a time. Even his pleas for morphine were muted.
“I’ve always hated old photographs,” he said.
“Why?”
“You’re familiar with those old formal photographs of banquets you see sometimes? The ones with a sort offish-eye lens and everyone in the room is facing the camera?”
Alice nodded.
“I used to detest those especially. I was only able to think of how all those people, so … earnest in their black tie and their gowns, so somber and even pretentious for the camera— they’re all dead. That’s what I always used to think about this photograph too. They’re all dead. I never thought much more than that.”
“Oh”—he smiled— “oh, well, now I think—they lived.” And after putting forth a little laugh, he began to cough. Alice propped him more comfortably on his pillows. “Your mother always thought like that. These people in the photograph, they were more alive to her than half our neighbors. She formed stories about each of these people based on the way they looked in the picture. Oh, what was it?” He looked at the picture more carefully, pointing to each person. “I think this brother was jealous of that brother because he was a better athlete or whatnot, while the brother who was athletically superior often came to blows with the father. I can’t remember what she made of the mother and daughter. They were no doubt the most interesting ones.”
“Certainly the mother,” said Alice.
Her father dismissed this with a slight grimace and a shake of his head. “Your mother saw everyone as being alive but in different degrees. I never really understood that.”
“Yeah, well, she was a mythmaker,” Alice said.
It had been a week of rain—days all like this one where morning, afternoon, and evening melted into one another without distinction. It occurred to Alice that she couldn’t be sure what day it was. Eleanor had come on Tuesday, she knew, wearing a bright pink boat-neck sweater and carrying a huge bouquet of gerber daisies that now sat on what remained Charlotte’s side of the bed, already dropping petals. Eleanor was still her best friend, the now pixie-chic gamine who was a successful producer for children’s television. When in the midst of New York name-droppers, she liked to mention, with a straight poker face, how she had a close personal relationship with Big Bird. So Tuesday had been Eleanor. Was today Thursday? Saturday? With his thin long fingers gripping the Storrs family photograph, her father turned to Alice as if he’d just remembered something important, but when she met his eyes he only returned his gaze to the strangers in the picture sitting on his front porch.
“I need you to promise me something,” he said quietly.
Alice swallowed hard.
“No reception here. Not here.”
“What do you mean?”
“After,” he said. And when Alice refused to understand: “The funeral.”
“Fine.”
“Fine. Now I need you to get something for me.”
“Of course,” said Alice, her voice hoarse and unfamiliar. “Anything.”
“The attic,” he said. His fingers were shaking. His skin was yellowish green. “Two boxes—there are two boxes on the landing. One for you and one for your brother.”
Alice climbed the familiar stairs—noting how the temperature significantly dropped and how the wind could be heard whistling through the treetops, rattling the old storm windows. She’d been making trips up here more and more frequently and was surprised, as her eyes lit upon them, that she hadn’t noticed the boxes before. Two plain brown packing crates sat side by side: Alice, one read, in her father’s purposeful hand; August, read the other. They were both lined and filled with newspaper, and as Alice lifted hers she could see smaller boxes inside—stamped tin, velvet, carved balsa wood—containing, she knew, her mother’s clip-on pearls and costume beads— Charlotte’s personal treasures that had been too sad to previously consider. The good stuff, as Charlotte had called it, was housed in a bank safe and had been formally passed along to Alice, but the daily baubles—Charlotte’s colored glass, her Lu-cite bangles—they had seemed too much a part of her, and over all these years they’d remained in their little boxes that Alice had so loved. There was more, but she couldn’t yet let herself look. She picked up Gus’s box and, placing it atop her own, made her way back down the stairs. His box didn’t weigh much, and when she peered inside, she was surprised to see nothing more than a framed picture of Charlotte and Gus clearly taken right before she died, and a manila envelope marked For August in her father’s hand.
“I’m back,” she said, and Alice tried to smile, tried not to allow her face to betray how, on entering this room, his weakened appearance still shocked her.
How he sighed then, as she set the boxes down, a wheezy, stilted sigh. “Thank you.”
Alice nodded, looking at how carefully he’d assembled these boxes, how their labels were taped neatly with packing tape. “When did you do this?”
He shook his head and mumbled.
She realized they were both looking at Gus’s box. Alice was fingering the edges of the newspaper while glimpsing the unfamiliar photograph of Charlotte and Gus. Charlotte was laughing and Gus was not; his arm was firmly wrapped around her shoulders. Their father must have found this picture— maybe even on an undeveloped roll of film—and had it framed especially for him. This gift was breaking her heart. The very nature of such thoughtfulness was painful in light of her brother’s long absence.
“Gus is coming Sunday,” she said suddenly.
After he was quiet so long she thought he’d drifted off, he muttered, “Is that right?” as if he knew she was lying.
“He is.”
“Baby,” he said carefully, “I am past pretending.”
Oh, no, you’re not, Alice thought, glancing at the photograph of a smiling, happy Charlotte, a fun-loving-mother
Charlotte, a Charlotte-as-pretty-wife. But what she said instead was, “He called earlier when you were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you. He said he was coming tomorrow.” There was no need, she thought, to start being truthful now.
He shrugged. “He has his reasons, I’m sure,” he said, as he’d said so many times before, regarding Gus’s distance from this house, their lives.
“You and your reasons,” Alice said, but she said it too softly for him to hear. Her father, as opposed to being made angry or distraught by Gus’s absence, seemed nearly cooperative about maintaining the distance. He was always the one who made excuses for why August didn’t follow through on his plans to come home. When the plans themselves stopped, Alice had finally decided that how her father reacted was actually quite contrary to being understanding. In truth, he seemed ambivalent.
It’s as though you can’t handle one more absent person, Alice had said to her father last year. But he’d fixed her with such a meaningful stare, a look that said, We’ll go no further. Now their discussions of August were no more extensive than what had just transpired. In the face of such dramatic inaction (or action, depending on how she chose to view Gus’s behavior on any given day) what was there, really, to say?
As it happened, Gus hadn’t been home since he’d eked out a graduation from high school and followed Cady DeForrest to Providence. They lived together there in a house cool beyond reproach, a blue Victorian with three housemates and a turret where they slept on a king-size mattress taking up the entire floor. When Alice visited, she had been instantly taken with how many people were always coming by. Gus wasn’t enrolled in college and this didn’t seem to bother him. On the contrary, he was held up (dangerously high, thought Alice) as a paean to the free spirit—surfing the freezing waves of Rhode Island beaches, learning to cook as a souschef, reading Don Quixote and Tolstoy, a hodgepodge of social and historical texts, plus some science for good measure. His friends and Cady were reading basically the same material and paying (or having their parents pay) thousands of dollars for a designer degree, was his argument in a less than gracious mood. When Cady broke up with him, when the inevitable finally happened, he left for Indonesia, naturally, where from what Alice could gather he surfed big waves, became dangerously promiscuous, and came to believe in animism before finally moving again. Much traveling—the privilege and curse of this shrinking world— ensued, before Gus signed a lease in Santa Cruz. When Cady came to Stanford for architecture school when they were twenty-three, they immediately started up again, showing up at each other’s apartments on late Friday nights, turned on and even moved by the increasing unlikelihood of their future as a couple. Since then, for the past ten years, Alice heard about Cady only intermittently. There’d been one other “real” girlfriend named Liz, a social worker in Berkeley who, not twenty minutes after meeting Alice for the first time at a cafe, asked her (as Alice took a bite of her lunch) if eating a turkey sandwich didn’t make her feel generally toxic. There’d been restaurant jobs, construction jobs, and most recently a brief stint as a marijuana farmer on a massive operation up in Humboldt County which ended when the peaceful hippie landowners pulled out heavy artillery and told Gus that he’d best learn to operate it, because there was no way of knowing when the shit would go down.
August was thirty-three and hadn’t come home since high school. He’d written letters to their father—long, ponderous letters in his always surprisingly beautiful handwriting, and at first he’d made promise after promise to visit, but never followed through. It was easy enough for the first couple of years when Alice and their father visited Providence, California, even Bali once—he gave them good reasons to travel, and they all pretended as if there weren’t any particular reason why Gus never came to them. But since her father had fallen seriously ill, it was conspicuous and embarrassing that Gus wasn’t pacing the same warped wood floors as Alice. He insisted, with his absence, on drawing even more attention to their past—as if, Alice couldn’t help but feel, he was staking some claim on sorrow, maintaining distance to prove the point of just how tormented he was. But then again, he was tormented. Alice could tell he was angry with himself for not having come home sooner, but the longer he’d waited to come back, the worse his fears had become. He never came right out and said so, but Alice knew that it was elaborate fear that had kept him away, and she knew he had waited so long now that his homecoming had, at least in his mind, become a thing of mythic difficulty.
She had done just the opposite.
Alice had gone to college in Manhattan, just a train ride away. She’d gone to graduate school there too. She could have left, at least for a while. Her father had, in fact, given her every encouragement to apply to schools as far away as Scotland. She stayed close by with the same kind of fervor that Gus had stayed away.
Alice now tried to relate to Gus and his fears, tried to remember how he’d felt in her arms when he came home that morning to Charlotte dead, and how he couldn’t breathe as he tried to say, I can smell her hair. She tried to relate, she tried to forgive, but instead found herself, not five minutes after she could be certain her father had dozed off with that old photograph still in his hands, going a few rooms away and dialing her brother’s number.
Earlier in the year, when Gus had promised regularly to “look into the details” about coming home, most of their nightly conversation time had been monopolized by Gus keeping Alice abreast of what had to have been the most fruitless job search in history. Alice hadn’t done too much graphic detailing of their father’s demise, as she’d been truly concerned with the magnitude of his debts and his ever-present lack of a job.
But after this past week of her increasingly adamant nightly requests, and after he still wasn’t here, Alice cut short any notion of pleasantries. “You’ve gone to Fiji and Bali and Costa Rica at a moment’s fucking notice,” she heard herself saying, tears blurring her vision and snot blocking up her nose, “but you can’t get it together, you cannot get yourself motivated to fly home and deal with your father?” She was yelling and it felt exactly right. She hadn’t yelled like that at anyone in a long while. She yelled only at her family; she was invariably polite to doctors and nurses and home-care attendants, with all kinds of strangers and service professionals no matter how rude they were. After hanging up, she gave Gus twenty minutes, and when she called back he had done what she’d requested. He was coming in on the red-eye. She slept in her father’s room that night.
At four A.M. her father called out her mother’s name while Alice was awake and staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sun to rise. “Oh,” he cried, in a voice she’d never heard. His face was painted in pieces of moonlight shining in through the windows, the effect of which was harsh and haunting. “Oh, goddamn it,” he whimpered, and crying, crying, “you, you—”
“Shh, Daddy, I’m right here.”
He looked at her plaintively, with the eyes of someone who knew the meaning of finished, could feel the velvet curtains closing on his face.
“You’re dreaming,” she told him, as if that were a comfort, as if dreams were inferior or held any less meaning than the stasis his life had become.
“Please stop,” he said so quietly and wetly, she almost asked him to repeat himself. “Please …”
“What is it?” she said pointlessly. “What can I do?”
“Charlotte,” he whispered, his tone suddenly stern, “where are you going?”
Alice was unsure of what to say. Cancer talked; everyone knew this. Cancer had a reality and a language all its own. And then the face of recognition emerged, the look of simultaneous panic and relief, as he reentered the room with his disturbed soul in tow, accepting the weak and faulty body in the bed as his own.
“I loved her,” he said. “I loved her.”
“Of course you did.”
And her father fixed Alice with eyes that belied his drugged, slackened face. They were eyes experienced in all types of half-truths and justifications and every manner of deception. “She needed me,” he said.
By eight A.M. it was over; his surrender was quiet and effortless. Spin the yellow Lab had put up more of a fight, and he was 112. Alice watched her father’s last rounds of breathing and thought of how her father had held Spin in his arms and graciously injected him in the paw, ridding him of such suffering. The vet had been unreachable on a holiday weekend, and her father had driven to the lab to get the necessary poison, leaving Alice briefly alone to watch Spin breathe in and out just like her father breathed then. Alice had watched the rise and fall of her father’s blue pajama top, the loosened skin at his sallow neck. As the world of her father rose and fell, she saw nothing else; there was no weather, no light. She couldn’t have said whether the sky was flooded with sun or pouring rain when he stopped breathing. She couldn’t have said whether she was hot or cold when she drew the covers up around her father and herself, cocooning them together. She sat up on the bed, in the space he left next to his body, even after nearly fifteen years. She looked from her father to the insistence of a new day out the window, and she tried to forgive Gus for not coming earlier, for being stuck in mundane Long Island traffic not far from LaGuardia airport, the moment their father let them go.
As she remained beside him, nearly as silent and frozen as he was, there was a phantom car in the driveway one too many times, so that when Gus and his taxi finally arrived Alice wasn’t surprised. She rose for the first time and went to the window. She was prepared for Gus, for his sullen and potentially defensive behavior. She was prepared for him to lose it completely, to even take it out on her. What she wasn’t prepared for was that he’d brought someone.
Staring out the window, Alice saw Cady DeForrest. There was Cady looking offensively appropriate after all these years, her hair pulled back—a study in carelessness just short of austere. They let themselves in and called out through the house. Alice couldn’t find the voice to answer, and it seemed like minutes before they finally came upstairs.
“How could you bring someone?” Alice yelled without thinking. She hadn’t realized she’d been crying until she tried to speak. “He’s already gone,” she said; and then more softly, “He’s dead.”
“Alice—” Cady said, coming toward her.
She didn’t want Cady’s frosty hug, her practiced line of condolence. She hadn’t exactly been coming around much lately. “This is a family situation,” she appealed to Gus.
But Gus was kneeling by the bedside with open eyes. He looked more curious than overwrought, as if he didn’t quite believe it.
“August,” Alice nearly shouted, anxious as she was, thrown beyond any kind of reason at Cady’s being present for this moment.
But he only looked up at his sister, offering no response but confusion.
“Do you hear me?” Instead of losing steam, Alice gained momentum.
Cady said, “Alice, listen—”
“My father is lying here dead,” she nearly screamed. “Do you mind leaving the room?”
“Have you called anyone?” asked Cady.
Alice shook her head.
“I’ll do it,” she said, and Alice didn’t argue as she watched Cady head for the door.
But when Alice looked down at Gus, who was kneeling at the bedside with closed eyes, she nearly lost her breath. Gus looked as if he was begging for forgiveness, begging for something so much larger than he could ever name. “I’ll leave you alone with him,” she whispered, before slipping out the door. And as she moved no farther than the dark hallway, she stood consciously breathing, smelling cedar and a puzzling trace of what she could only imagine was Cady’s favorite blackberry soap, the same after more than a decade. Alice ran her finger against the splintering molding on the wall, over and over until her finger was raw. The increasingly palpable gap between Gus and her father—she had always told herself there was nothing too unusual about it; sons and fathers, fathers and sons, pairs of them had been reinventing this strained male distance for years.
When Alice reentered the bedroom, August remained kneeling, not having seemed to register her presence. But eventually he stood up, wiped away tears with the hem of his sweater, and said, “Cady and I were married.”
“We got married,” he said, and—still managing not to smile, not to give away what surely must have been a poor excuse for a badly timed joke—he nodded that yes, it was true.
“She married you?”
“What is that supposed to mean? We married each other. Last week, in Vegas,” he said, and finally gave up a grin. “And it was great.”
Cady knocked before opening the door. “They’re coming now,” she said. “They’ll be here any minute.”
He was buried next to Charlotte on a beautiful day, a day too beautiful for Alice. She wanted rain clouds, gusts of wind, water seeping through her shoes. A rabbi spoke at length, perhaps buoyed by the cloudless sky. After the list of scientific accolades, after the much-deserved praise, the rabbi spoke about questioning God, how the living had every right to rage. His passion was admirable but it made Alice tired. The sun was so bright she could barely keep her eyes open.
She was grateful to her father for his unorthodox request that the mourners not repair to their home, and Alice was beginning to think he’d made that request entirely for her sake. She knew that the tradition existed to bring the grieving family some comfort, but, for one thing, there weren’t enough people, and more than a few of them looked as if they hadn’t left a laboratory in years. She didn’t want strangers. She knew what to do. After everyone had thrown a shovel of dirt over his terrible coffin and had made their way toward the cars, Alice thanked the rabbi, letting his kind words pour through her. She thanked an old man, a man who was honestly too old to be walking. She let three women hug and kiss her; she was grateful for their softness, for their pliant, powdery skin. Then she remained—in her uncomfortable pumps, in the hard autumn earth—and lost track of time. She found that the air was perfectly still and that she was simply too tired to stand.
With her legs crossed awkwardly beneath her flimsy crepe dress, and her coat splayed on each side, she was sitting on the ground, growing very cold but feeling closer to her father, to the fresh wound in the soil. When she felt a hand on her shoulder she knew he’d been there all along, that he hadn’t moved either. “August,” she said, without looking. She registered bark, spearmint breath mints, the feral darkness of his hair. When she finally looked up, he was all that she saw; he’d successfully blocked out the sun.
“So strange,” he said, sitting down beside her.
Alice nodded and noticed that Cady was leaning against a tree—out of earshot in her slim black ensemble—patiently waiting. Alice was briefly overcome by this lovely display of etiquette. Cady would know what to say to the brainy colleagues, the frightened neighbors—this assorted well-meaning assembly.
“Everything looks the same,” Alice said. Then she started to cry.
He inched closer to her. “It’s okay.”
“I feel like everything’s over.” Her mother’s headstone looked almost mocking in its austerity. They’d brought white lilies for her grave, and the other mourners had also brought flowers for Charlotte—roses, peonies, and a smattering of carnations at which, Alice couldn’t help thinking, Charlotte would have rolled her eyes. “Is everything just … over for us?”
He shook his head calmly. He did not ask what she meant.
“It isn’t?”
“No,” he said. “Everything’s not over. Nothing is over, I promise.”
The sky was too blue, the ground was too cold, and it seemed that nothing would ever feel quite right again. There were bells in the distance—someone else’s wedding, someone else’s prayers—a trace of leather in the air.
“Come on, Alice, I’m here.”
She looked at him then, and for at least one moment her eyes were as sharp as their mother’s headstone, as raw as her father’s grave. “Finally,” she said, “you are.”
After the funeral Cady didn’t stay long. Her aunt had died years ago; she had no one left to visit and she had to be back for work, so it was three days of her making phone calls in the study, and providing the days with a kind of controlling— albeit appealing—structure. She made eggs. She made waffles. She fixed strong cocktails after five, served with a little something, if only a hunk of cheddar cheese and a small silver knife. She didn’t make a fuss over these elegant ministrations, and Alice couldn’t help but again admire her efforts.
“Thanks,” Alice told her for the tenth time that third afternoon, as Cady handed Alice a dirty martini after placing a bowl of Spanish olives at the center of the scratched and lopsided bay window table.
“It’s nothing,” Cady said, sipping her own neat glass of whiskey. “I’m just a fool for cocktail hour, the whole ritual; it’s in my blood, I guess.” Gus was under the table, sticking a folded-up piece of paper underneath the wobbly table leg. Cady looked down at him with a wan and complicated smile before addressing Alice again. “So your father really took shabby-chic to the next level, huh?”
Alice was so used to how the wallpaper was halfway peeled off right there by the kitchen phone, how the wooden floors, which were slanty to begin with, were now giving way in earnest. She was used to the dust in the Oriental rugs, to the moldy saltwater evening smell emanating from upholstered furniture. Alice was so accustomed to the empty hooks and hoops of faded color left where pictures had fallen due to the warping of walls, that taking it all in through Cady’s eyes, she became nearly shocked. And it wasn’t only decay that marked demise. You had to look a bit harder to see the additions, but they too were there. In the cupboards there were sippy cups, the kind for children and the sick, and there were no children here. In the bathrooms there were safely bars installed on either side of the toilet—the one bit of home construction their father had finally approved.
It was difficult to remember how everything had looked the last time the three of them had sat there.
“So you’re going back to work?” Alice blurted—more statement than question.
“Someone has to, right?”
“Poor Cady” Gus said, now standing in front of the refrigerator and looking inside, as if waiting for a craving to declare itself. “I keep telling her to take some time off, come away with me….”
Alice snapped, “She can’t exactly take time off whenever she feels like it. Cady has actual responsibilities.” Why Alice was suddenly Cady’s defender was beyond her, as Cady had never returned Alice’s two phone calls, never sent her so much as a postcard after she and Gus had originally split. “Am I right? Cady?”
Cady just laughed. “Look, I like my job,” she said, in a tone that suggested that Gus had implied otherwise many times before.
“You’re always complaining about the people.”
“Yeah, well, my fellow workers tend to take their choice of chunky or wire-thin eyeglasses so seriously that matters of design begin to feel like religious fanaticism, but I do like it.”
“You just like the free meal,” Gus teased, coming to sit beside Cady with a bag of mini carrots in hand. “In her office,” he explained, “lunch is ordered in on the company dime. If you drop in around one there is sushi all over the place.”
“It definitely boosts morale,” Cady said, opening her mouth.
Gus left her hanging for a second or so before feeding her a carrot. “You have all that fresh fish to consider,” he said, his voice softening, his lips by her ear.
“Exactly,” she said, before crunching down, hard.
With Cady gone, it was meetings that measured the days. There were meetings with their father’s lawyer and accountant, and everyone cooperated to get it all done quickly. The vocabulary was simple and orderly and it bore no resemblance to the mess they were left to sort through. The real-estate agent called, offered her condolences, and in the same breath let Alice know that there were interested parties waiting. For three days people arrived in four-wheel-drive vehicles and didn’t bother to conceal their surprise when they saw the falling shingles, the sunken dank floors. Alice hated all of them and behaved with curious charm.
Each night after they’d all gone, Alice and Gus ate pizza and drank beer, and Gus swore he really was married. “We had a really good day,” was his explanation as to how it had happened. “Hadn’t seen each other in about six months. She was dating a jerk named Albert. French. So one Saturday morning she shows up at my place, all flushed in the face and full of plans—you know how she can get—and the day was so good I won’t even try to describe it, and the next morning I felt the same way. I wasn’t depressed the way I usually feel after spending a good day with her, and so I asked if she’d like to go to Las Vegas. A lot of people talk about that kind of spontaneity but we really did it. I can’t help being proud.”
He didn’t seem surprised by the question. “Cady is an architect. She works in one of the best firms in the city. She is probably bored with my life, my routines, how everything revolves around the weather and swells and throwing myself around just like I did when I was sixteen. I don’t even think she was ever all that impressed with my daredevil shit anyway. That wasn’t the draw for her. So … it’s clear that I know nothing and could not care less about matters of architectural design, and yet I consider myself somewhat of an expert on being interested in Cady. To be honest, I can’t imagine ending up with anyone else.”
“I’m surprised that you see yourself ending up at all.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Where are you going to, you know, live? Are you going to move to the city?”
“I love her, Alice,” he said soberly.
“Good,” Alice replied. “Because you promised to spend the rest of your life with her.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Without even telling me.”
“It just happened that way. Would you have said, ‘Yeah, go to Las Vegas; that’s a great idea’? Of course not. You don’t even like her.”
“Cady? Come on, I like Cady. She is inherently likable. This isn’t about if I like Cady. You married someone who … You couldn’t even come home all this time, to this house, to us. She’s—”
“I know. Move on, right? Move way on—”
“Forget it. May you have many happy years together.”
“Could you lighten up on the sarcasm please?”
“I’m not being sarcastic; I just can’t get over it. Are you sure she’s not pregnant?”
“I told you before—I am sure. This is about the two of us.”
“So where are you going to live?”
“Not sure. It’s one of the many things we haven’t really worked out.”
“I see.” Alice nodded. “So now you’re going to tell me you really do have to head back. You need to sort out living with Cady starting this life together, et cetera.”
“I’m leaving you to deal with all of this. Which you knew I’d do. You knew it. All of these things she brought back from who the fuck knows where. All of the photographs, all of it. And I’m sorry.”
“And I’m sorry you never came home until now.”
He nodded. “Couldn’t,” he said, his voice cracking. “Stupid,” he said, “fucking upsetting, I know.”
“Wouldn’t,” Alice muttered.
“What?”
“You wouldn’t.”
Gus finished the last of his beer, pulling on the bottle a little too long. “That was, is, and always will be,” he said, “a very fine line.”
“Couldn’t and wouldn’t? Not from where I’m sitting. I’m telling you—”
“Alice, do we have to have this conversation again?”
“I just think you’ll regret leaving so soon. I think that you should stay.”
“I know you think so,” he said. “And I understand; I do. Part of me definitely wants to stay. But Alice, you have no idea what this is like, being here after so long.”
“You’re right,” she said, “I don’t.” Keeping her eyes locked in his direction, Alice let a question escape: “Do you remember that night when … when she locked herself in the bathroom?”
He shook his head.
“Come on,” said Alice softly, “the year before she went to Oaxaca when Dad was off giving a paper somewhere. She was in their bathroom and she was … well, she was crying. She broke something and I heard it break and I went to the door … and she wouldn’t let me in. I kept begging her to let me in and she wouldn’t. She ignored me and then she yelled at me to leave her alone. Finally I gave up, or I didn’t give up but I went to get something to drink. When I came back I realized you were in the bathroom with her. I heard you,” she said. “She’d let you in.”
“I’m sorry,” Gus said.
“I don’t want you to be sorry. I don’t care. I just want to know.”
“Know what?”
Alice pushed her chair back from the table, balancing on the wobbly back legs of the chair.
“Be careful,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“What it was like,” she said, exasperated. “What she was like.”
“You know. …”
“No,” Alice said. “I have no idea.”
He sighed, and, opening another beer, he said, “We played cards. I brought in a deck and we sat on the floor. Alice, please stop. I don’t know why she didn’t let you inside. We played cards and it was like … it was like nothing. She smoked her head off and didn’t say much of anything and neither did I.”
She remembered cigarette smoke in the hallway, how she’d listened at the door, how she’d counted to one hundred over and over again. She recalled how everything was as quiet as the soundless high pitch of a scream.
“I’m tired, Alice,” he said. And he looked tired. His eyes were bloodshot and heavy-lidded; his nostrils flared with a yawn. “Let’s finish this in the morning, okay?”
Each night since the funeral, she’d heard him. She’d heard August in the kitchen, in the TV room, in the halls. She’d heard him in their parents’ bathroom, opening the medicine cabinet, shutting it, letting the water run. She’d heard him frying food on the stove, dialing numbers on the rotary telephone. She was already tracking him, as she’d done with Charlotte, the way she hadn’t done for years—visualizing her mother from room to room, bracing at the faintest sound. She had habitually guessed at Charlotte’s activities during those late-night wanderings; and as she’d listened so keenly for the difference between sleeplessness and restlessness, Alice had tried to discern just what each wandering meant in the context of her mother leaving. And now it was her brother whom she’d grown accustomed to hearing late at night. Despite herself, she listened.
But tonight she heard nothing.
Tonight he was opening a letter. Tonight he was gazing at his father’s solid writing on the outside of the envelope. He was splitting open the top of the envelope with uncharacteristic patience and precision. He was sitting on his bed. He was unfolding a letter. He was standing in the center of his childhood room—sharks still tacked up on the walls. Tonight he was reading.
By morning he’d be gone.