I had been quite clear with the staff at Munson. Adamant, even. I told them I had PTSD, to which they replied, in their smug, I-have-medical-training way, that I could not yet have any such thing, since for PTSD there had to be a time-lag. As one resident put it, I had “to put the post in post traumatic”. My arguments were understandably less than convincing, since I could not very well divulge the truth, which was that I had now suffered through five centuries of grieving, obsessing, and generally being my most traumatic self. Nor could I explain that I was now two people but was not in any way schizophrenic.
Truth be told, the sensation of having a twinned or shared identity lessened daily, and even before Munson released me (with assurances that yes, the dressings on my face still needed daily attention, and that yes, even leaving aesthetics aside, my lacerations required extensive work) I felt mostly myself. That is to say, myself singular. With Elizabeth at the forefront, nearly every waking moment had been spent in dialogue, as it were, if not in speech, then in thought; I’d lived a sort of ongoing conference call, all within the confines of my own cranium. But now Elizabeth had drifted away, a muted if not entirely absent voice. I could once again hear my own thoughts with no hint of an Old English echo.
That isolate peace of mind did not last. Within an hour of my arrival home, an unwashed Ford Taurus sedan pulled into my driveway and parked. The road-dusty copper finish of the Taurus looked all the more dingy in such close proximity to my flawless Bug, and I peered with great curiosity through my lone front-facing window to see who on earth would emerge. Some parishioner, no doubt; maybe a board member with a new (used) car.
No. It was Angela Purvis. My throat didn’t go dry, the way lesser books claim must always happen in moments of surprise or stress, and my heart did not cease its relentless beat. I suppose I’m too much of an iconoclast for these normal, permissible reactions. No, what I did was become instantly cold, and Elizabeth, who had been so peaceable that morning, clawed her way to invisible prominence and demanded that I turn my visitor away at the door.
“Not a chance,” I said, aloud, and then I dashed to my bedroom to check myself in my only full-length mirror, the one I keep on the back of the door. For a man with a wad of white bandages plastered to his face, for a man lately freed from a mandatory hospital stay where he’d been questioned by police and pestered by one Dale Quist, I thought I looked, well, handsome. In my small, innocuous way. I had on khakis and a blue-and–white-checked short-sleeve shirt. My back-up glasses, wire-framed in purple, perched on my nose. (My regular pair had not suffered irreparable damage at the offices of Dr. Green, but after having been so soaked in the good doctor’s surely unnatural blood, I had not been able to bear putting them back on my face, and I had eventually consigned them to one of Munson’s brightly colored bins of dangerous hospital waste.)
When Angela rang the bell, the soft tones of wind chimes filled my wreck of a home. Piles of books sliding every which way, household items strewn hither and yon. Bonesy’s initial visit was still very much a present tense encounter so far as my domicile was concerned.
I didn’t want to appear to be in a rush, so I counted five seconds, and then made a dash for the door, as if by having delayed, I was now late—too late!—and she’d already have given up and gone. But she hadn’t. When I threw open the door, there she was, dressed in basic blue jeans and a loose maroon top that hid any sign of her developing pregnancy.
“Angela,” I said. “I’m so glad you’re here. Come in, come in.”
She smiled, which was something I’d hardly seen once in our time together in the Neil House, and all at once I knew that whatever happened next, whatever we decided—whatever she decided—it would all be for the best.
“Your face,” she said. “What happened?”
“I didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
I sighed, although I made an effort not to. “I’ll live,” I said. “Now please, come inside. I know you’ve had a long drive.”
Taking stock of my face had allowed her feet to grow roots on my walkway, but now she rallied, moved to the stairs, and stepped over the threshold. She said, as she entered, “You have a house. An actual house.”
“Yes.”
“You never told me.”
“There’s a great deal we’ve never told each other. Or so I imagine. But yes, I’m a real live middle-aged grown-up, and I have a house of my very own.”
She looked around, her eyes ostensibly on the walls, but she could hardly help examining the flotsam spilling across my floor. I even spotted a shard or two of shattered glass that I’d missed in my aborted attempts at cleanup in the days before San Francisco.
“If I were you,” she said, speaking so deliberately that for a moment I could not tell if she were serious, “I’d get a housekeeper. And fast.”
At the “and fast”, she cracked a sly grin, and I found myself chuckling in response. Not that what she’d said was so amusing, but to have her there, pleased to be present, was wonderful. So many anticipated moments fail to deliver, but here was one that lived up to its billing and then some. Angela Purvis had deigned at last to meet me, and I, on the far side of fifty, was once again head over heels in love.
But you’re dead, said Elizabeth, from some whispery, cobwebbed garret deep in my brain. Dead people are forbidden romance.
“Shut up,” I said, then shook my head hard, terrified that I’d spoken aloud. Apparently I had not. Angela’s demeanor remained as it had been before.
“Okay,” she said. “I don’t know what we do next, but whatever it is, let’s get started. Because I have decisions to make, and I can only play dodgeball just so long.”
Decision-making, in the person of Angela Purvis, took the form of spending her waking hours with me, and her nights at the Baymont Inn on Division Street. I thought of suggesting that she rent a cabin at Shelter From the Storm, then discarded the idea. Why make a simple arrangement difficult? Adding Dale to the mix would surely render our already thin-ice situation all the more fragile.
She had, she said, seven days, and she left me free attend to what outside work I had—UU meetings and the like, Father Fred’s, book groups—but the rest of the time, she stuck close. We had the talks we needed to have, but in snippets, testing our terrain word by word and thought by thought, always on the lookout for bogs and tripwires. A jab here, a feint there: unnamed emotions, unexpected pregnancies, and wide-open futures are topics worthy of any boxer’s ring.
On Sunday—brave, very brave—Angela came to hear my sermon, but she arrived and departed separately, in her own vehicle, as if staking that small claim to her independence were the most important statement remaining in her life. I played along, going so far as to introduce myself and shake her hand in welcome as if greeting a stranger. Possibly some suspected otherwise; Angela and I had wandered the waterfront together more than once come Sunday, and frequented at least two area restaurants. At Sleder’s, I’d even instructed her, with theatrical gravitas, on precisely how to kiss the resident wall-mounted moose.
Her presence had certainly had a salutary effect. Elizabeth, especially once I mounted the salvaged scraps of Bonesy in a brand new frame and hung her on the wall, had dwindled to a murmur, an unobtrusive presence that I could attend to or ignore, at my choosing. As for my PTSD, I still felt moments of sweaty-palmed panic, as if at any moment some devil might shove an eyeball down my throat, and I tended to experience at least one terrorizing dream per night, but by and large, with Angela moving through my home and my life in her grounded, assessing way, talking sometimes about her family, or sometimes about her lab and the chemical vagaries of geology—she loved limestone and fossils especially—I began to feel not just calmed but rescued. After all, on this misadventure, no one had died—unless I counted Dr. Green, which I did not, and anyhow, I was skeptical that she could in fact be killed. The salient point was that Dale and I had done what proper investigators are supposed to do: we had returned a miscued world back to its original orbit. Was it possible that Angela, in the peculiar and inscrutable calculus of the universe, was in some way my reward? My karmic salvation, if I dared put it so, made flesh?
We kissed for the first time—for the first time since the lunacy of the Neil House—after church on Sunday, in my newly put-to-rights living room. We kissed standing up, not groping or hurried, just two adults expressing affection and testing to see if that snakeskin attraction might reveal, beneath, love.
“Your church,” she said, pulling away from my lips at last. “You do realize that place is completely off the chain.”
I nibbled her earlobe, nuzzled into her warm neck and said, “Is that a compliment?”
“Kind of. But I don’t know if it’s for me.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “Everybody there feels exactly the same way.”
We took a walk that afternoon, a sunny day of puffy, gray-bottomed clouds, all the way past Slabtown and down the long, woodsy dead-end of Randolph Street. She asked about my name, why I had one and one only, and I related the legend of my mother’s refusal to fill out the birth certificate beyond the one word “Renner”, which she wrote between the two lines for given name and surname, and I told her also of what a hassle this has been ever since. To the government, for tax purposes, I am Renner Renner, but in all other dealings, I remain a singular man with singular nomenclature.
“So Renner was your father’s name?”
“My mother swears not. I don’t know anything about him at all.”
On the return journey, we tested the uncharted waters of what it would be like if she moved to Traverse City. She was not optimistic about how a mixed race couple would be received in such a uniformly Caucasian community, and I must say that I wasted only minimal breath defending my adoptive home. But then, it was impossible for Angela to come north, not with her degree hanging in the balance at OSU. Perhaps I should be the one to relocate, to transplant south? Unfortunately, metro Columbus had two thriving UU congregations already, and neither was in need of a minister.
Tangled as the options were, we somehow kept things light, and as we turned toward home, my hand was happy to be clasped in Angela’s, and my feet and lungs were very grateful to be in the company of someone other than Iris Buckhalter.
As we turned the corner onto my block, I spotted a third vehicle in my driveway, an off-purple PT Cruiser, its hind end sticking well into the street. Dale Quist, I thought, because only he would park so badly (he often parks directly on my lawn). But it wasn’t Dale. On my front stoop, sitting primly with her hands clasped over her knees, sat my sainted, godforsaken mother.
“Hello, dear,” she called, not bothering to wave. “It’s very inconvenient of you not to be home when I call. Inconsiderate.”
I stopped. In my tracks. Angela stopped with me, keeping a light grip on my hand.
“Mother,” I said, “you are not allowed to be here.”
“Of course I am. Didn’t I tell you? I’m moving. Moved, in fact. I’ve been here for days, and have you looked me up, or called, even once? No. What kind of son does that to his mother?”
I flashed back to our last phone call, the harried crashings, the sounds of furniture shifting in the background. A ruse, nothing more. An elaborate confection to boil my blood. But apparently that was dead wrong. She’d been telling the truth—and there was the proof, on her PT Cruiser: California plates.
“Nope,” I said, refusing to give in, “I’m not buying it. That’s a rental.”
“Renner, I bought this old girl in Redlands. Look her over all you like. You won’t find any Hertz stickers.”
My mother looked pert and fit, sitting there on my step, and she was wearing what I suppose I would have called, twenty years before, a tracksuit, royal blue with white stripes running down the sides. She wore a visor that pushed up her blowsy silver hair, and she looked as if she’d just come from golfing. Which she very likely had.
All in all, she appeared to be harmless and friendly, but this was Belle Sampson: never harmless, friendly only as it suited her. When Angela squeezed my hand and said, “Maybe we should be introduced,” my mother asked, as breezily as if she’d just inquired about the time, what I thought I was doing holding hands with a Negro.
I’m sure Angela didn’t mean for her hand to contract around mine in response, but I doubt she could help it. For my part, I was grateful my mother hadn’t said “darkie”, “coon”, or worse.
“Mother,” I said, “this is Angela Purvis. She’s a geologist.”
“Really? Looks to me like she’s trying to give you a palm reading.”
My mother stood up and brushed off her tracksuit as if the act of sitting had somehow made her dirty. “Come on, then. Open up and tell your housemaid to get us a long, cool drink.”
This time, Angela pulled free. “Excuse me?”
“Renner,” said my mother, ignoring Angela. “The door won’t open itself.”
A thousand plans raced through my head, none slowing long enough to show itself as better than the rest. I could run away, that was one clear option. On foot, or by car. I could grab my bicycle from the garage and flee on that. I could rush to the harbor, hire a yacht—or better yet, take a job on whatever fishing vessel or freighter happened to be at the docks, and vanish into the Great Lakes, Canada, anywhere. I could even take Angela with me. We could gut fish together, sleep in separate bunks, learn to chew tobacco. She could deliver our baby in a lifeboat.
Or, more realistically, I could start screaming. Charge my mother, drive her off. Create a scene, take out a restraining order (which I’d done before, many times), and summon the police. Once I had enough witnesses, a big enough crowd of gawkers, I could possibly trick her into attacking me, in which case I could get her arrested, and that, if nothing else, would give me time to think.
I could also play it cool. Allow and invite my mother into my home, where she had never been and was not now supposed to be, and then I could bide my sweet time and see if somewhere in that clap-trapped, fucked-up head of hers, there remained even a shred of compassion or common sense. Iris would council this path, and my congregants, thanks to my teachings, would expect the same.
“Renner.”
That voice. I realized I was quivering, shaking. The rebellion in my soul had my heart hammering, and this time, my throat went Mojave desert dry.
“Hey,” Angela whispered at my ear. “It’s okay. I can deal.”
The tremor in my voice when I told her she shouldn’t have to do any such thing only infuriated me further. My mother was not allowed to insert herself into my life, to risk whatever détente I’d achieved with Angela. She simply could not—again—do this to me.
But I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t reach for my phone to dial 9-1-1. I was in the first throes—and I believe I realized this even in the moment—of a full bore panic attack. And where did it take me? Inward, to one of the usual clichéd places, headaches and auras, self-induced semi-epileptic fits? Oh, no. I flew outward, straight to a certain scene of carnage and delivery in the year 1519, with me as attending clinician, and my mother’s leering, buck-toothed grin supplanting that of Catherine Lorimer’s as she splayed across the sweaty, blood-soaked sheets.