Luck (3 page)

Or: there were no darker impulses until Nora herself made it otherwise. That was more or less Philip’s view.

By the time they moved here, the house, while firm in its foundations, was abandoned and ramshackle and required a
good deal of repair: their first big project together, if they didn’t count as a big project extricating Philip from his original wife. They sanded and painted, stripped wood and cleaned it, ripped out walls and built new ones in new arrangements, tore apart the small barn at the back and reshaped it into a workshop for Philip, designed and added a glassy second-storey addition to be Nora’s studio. Plumbers came and went; so did electricians, and building inspectors.

People carried casseroles and cakes to the door, and said how glad they were to see the old house coming to life. They advised on the subjects of fertilizers and soils and brought lists of service clubs and activities: Rotary, bowling, churches, needlepoint. “Shit,” Philip said, “service clubs, I don’t think so.”

Nora, though, already feeling free and rampant and overflowing with affection, or love, or something, and new to neighbourliness, was further warmed by this array of open hearts. Once she and Philip were more or less settled, furniture arranged, spaces divided between them and small habits and daily customs en route to formation, she set out to work, in fact, on a very bright, vivid painting, narrow but long, of open hearts on a slab. Veins were detailed, arteries large. The hearts were lush. Given their hearts’ desires, they would leap joyfully from butcher’s tray into somebody’s, anybody’s arms, willing to beat ecstatically in any embrace.

She wondered, even, if the piece was sentimental, over the top, positively gushing, but apparently not. The local butcher, delivering beef to their freezer, took a particular dislike to it; as if he, a man who dismembered raw flesh with his cleavers and hands, had been rendered by her painting into a sly subject of fun.

Thus the first aggravation, the first dent; leading, not irrevocably in Philip’s opinion, to the inflammations and extremes
of the past year or so; the ones that completed the transformation of an unremarkable town into an outpost of Philistines, a colony of the demented, a haven for trolls and bad witches.

“Double, double, toil and trouble,” Nora says now. Beth looks puzzled, but Sophie lets out one of her belly laughs.

“Fuck ’em,” says Philip—said Philip—heading into the night. Besides having a presence large enough to give pause to insult, he could in depths of ale, lager, Scotch be viewed in the after-dark eyes of men as quite the lad. Sufficiently capacious for life with three women; sufficiently brave. “And you know,” he told Nora, “you’re exaggerating. Even if you weren’t, being friendly reduces the chances of real harm being done.”

Depends what you consider real harm.

And where was his loyalty?

Where is his loyalty now, leaving like this?

Now it is into that town that Philip’s lucky and unlucky body has descended: in that town’s ambulance, followed by a cruiser and Ted Marlowe’s Jetta, to its hospital, and into the hands of its pathologist, to the ministrations of its undertaker and funeral home, to the rejoicings of its florist and to the depradations of its curious. Nora takes a deep breath, and another, and discovers these deep breaths are suppressed, withheld sobs—how long since she turned her head on the pillow and reached out and began learning that everything, everything will be different?

Not long. What does she mourn? What will she come to mourn? Because these are sometimes different things.

“So,” Sophie says, her voice tight, but practical as ever, “what do you think, should we plan a service for here?”

“I don’t know.” Nora shakes her head sharply.

“What? You don’t want to?”

“It’s not that. It’s just, I can’t believe this is possible. That it’s true.”

“Oh!” Beth cries, so that Nora and Sophie turn. What exactly caused that sharp yelp of, what, grief?

Nora ought to be grateful for Sophie’s offer, she
is
grateful, but she is also Philip’s wife. Was. Was wife, is widow, new definitions and tenses that will become clear and automatic in time but certainly not yet, not today. It should, anyway, be Nora’s role to act on funereal matters.

She and Philip fell so easily into letting Sophie take over tedious or bothersome chores.

Also having first Sophie, then Beth, move here meant Nora and Philip had less time to themselves than they used to. Then too, the time they did have, they may not have used entirely wisely. Or so it seems to Nora right now. It couldn’t have felt that way at the time;
the time
being anything up to last night.

As with, probably, having children: the more people involved, the more distracted, diffuse, a household becomes.

Not one of the three women at this kitchen table is a mother. Perhaps that’s why they don’t automatically fall into embraces and other solacing gestures they might have known how to make if they had children. Or perhaps that’s not why. For the most part everyone has learned, with greater and lesser degrees of effort, and with greater and lesser degrees of sincerity, to suit each other’s purposes, fit into each other’s hollower spaces, but they have not been quite this harshly tested before.

Also that was with Philip alive, when they were four. Death changes everything. Suddenly Nora is a forty-three-year-old widow. Suddenly Sophie, ten years younger, only has one employer. Suddenly Beth, four years younger still, and
aalready surplus to requirements, is further exposed within this smaller, disrupted group.

Each is bound, too, to have different perspectives on Philip himself. Even physically Sophie met him nearly eye to eye, while Beth was chin-height, while Nora’s head dipped nicely into his chest, comforting and obscuring. Also, Sophie and Beth have only known his middle age, a more limited point of view than Nora’s. Sophie thinks of him with B-words like
bulky, brawny, boisterous;
plus several non-B words. Beth, coming from a world of thin female beauty, found him, more negatively, too loud and too looming. Neither of them knew the man who did odd jobs around town when he and Nora first moved here because they needed the money and he was not too proud to build a deck here, paint a porch there. “It’s all work,” he said, “it’s all cash.” They did not know the man who made the bold decision to earn his own living, minimal in the early days, then rather splendid, designing and building sofas and loveseats, chairs and mantels and buffets and tables which, being unique and individual and very expensive, put his work in demand among those who could choose to afford it. “Snob appeal,” he laughed, although he was serious about the work itself.

As with Nora’s paintings, his market was not in this town. Here, people evidently do not care for her work, and could not afford his.

All three women jump when the phone rings—if death waits for no man, not even a relatively young one like Philip Lawrence, neither do its demands. When Sophie, who answers, hands the receiver to Nora, she says, “It’s the hospital,” and for an instant every heart shifts. Could they have been wrong, might Philip, with some clever medical handiwork, have come alive? Just for a second, an eyelash of time, they
each hear fast heavy feet on the stairs, they hear Philip’s voice. He would head first for the coffee pot. Then he would look at them in their various poses and say, “What’s up for the day, then? Not much, I guess, if you’re all still hanging around.” He wouldn’t mean this unkindly. It would just be a remark. Among the many things already missing is the deep, anchoring tone of the male voice adding heft and timbre to the higher-pitched choir.

“Hello?” Nora asks cautiously—what if, what if?

It’s a young-sounding voice, a man’s, an employee, he says, of the hospital’s morgue. So that’s that.

“I’m sorry to trouble you,” he says, and maybe he is. “But there’s a question with regard to your arrangements.”

“Arrangements?”

“I mean who to release the body to when the time comes. We’ve already determined it was too late for organ donation, but it’ll probably be ready by mid-afternoon or so, unless there’s something unforeseen, which I need to advise you is always possible. So do you know yet where it’ll be going?”

What is he, a student, a trainee? “I see,” Nora says.
It
, says this voice. Not
Philip Lawrence
, or
Mr. Lawrence
, or even
your husband
, but
it.
“Well, I’m afraid we’re not quite as efficient as you people. Would you be able to hold on to him a little longer if necessary, or is there a risk of losing his place in your fridge?”

Most unpleasant; the townspeople, guilty or otherwise, do bring out the worst in her. The young man’s voice drops to a matching unfriendliness. “Not at all. At your convenience. It’s merely a courtesy to advise when the autopsy should be completed and the body available for release.”

Autopsy. Nora puts down the phone. There will be no fast heavy feet on the stairs. Her head wants to rest its new great weight on the table. “It must have been a heart attack, don’t
you think?” Sophie says. “Or a stroke, I suppose. It’s strange. He seemed so healthy, didn’t he? Robust.”

Indeed. Nora regards Sophie, contemplating the possible extent of Philip’s health and robustness. “Where there is smoke,” she asks, “is there fire?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Okay, so listen, I should start calling around. It sounds as if we need to get moving.” She’s right, of course, but what a bully Sophie can be. Too much time, maybe, spent striding among the desolate, picking and choosing, doling out and withholding, every life on the edge, not excluding her own. She is useful on many grounds, not least when it comes to cutting through crap, but still, Nora sometimes thinks,
Poor refugees. On top of massacres, starvation, deprivation—Sophie.

A
side from her bedroom—they each have their own bedroom—Sophie’s only private space in this house is her little office, a room off the front hall that would originally have been a coat-and-hat-and-boots room for earlier, more sociable occupants and their guests. Now it contains desk, chair, phone, computer, shelves, filing cabinet.

Everything in it has a sharp connection to Phil. Among other things he refinished this old oak desk and its matching chair with the curving arms and spindles and upright back that he found at an auction. When Sophie arrived four years ago, there was space to spare when she sat in the lap of this chair. Now her hips touch each side, she damn near fills it up.

At the moment she also feels stuck to it, glued in place. “You’ll find things much simpler and quieter here,” Nora said when she and Phil hired Sophie. Simpler, anyway. For the most part.

It’s perfectly simple to reach for the phone book and look up funeral homes. One small, manageable task at a time. A little too simple are the rules of engagement Nora has set out in such brittle fashion she might still have been talking to the
man from the morgue: “No visitation. Closed casket. Day after tomorrow if that’s at all possible. And cremation.”

In which case, what’s the point?

“Make sure the funeral home understands about visitation especially. I won’t have these people staring at him.”

Sophie and Nora are both divided and bound by their local disasters. Common experiences, some known, some not, make them comrades, but adversaries as well. Never mind that Sophie offered to do this, if she’s going to organize funeral arrangements, Nora might have given her a say in what exactly she’s organizing. “Are you sure? Cremation, that’s kind of a big decision.”

“No, it’s what he would want. Burn whatever doesn’t get used, which I gather is everything—that’s what he’d say. If nothing else, he didn’t like waste.” That’s true. He built a huge wood-and-plastic-framed composter at the very far end of the yard, and got mad if he found eggshells or coffee grounds in the trash. There he is, hollering, “Okay, who threw orange peels in the garbage?” There are his stomping footsteps, there’s the back door slamming behind him as he pounds out with his handful of peelings.

Here is the silence of that voice not yelling, those footprints failing to flatten the grass.

Funny to discuss his funeral and yet be startled to remember he’s dead. Not funny-funny, of course; funny-strange.

“Day after tomorrow, that might be hard.” For the funeral home, Sophie meant, to make whole what was presently being dismembered. Also an unseemly hurry to have Phil disposed of. That kind of hard, too.

“Maybe. But it’s what I’d prefer.”

“What about people from out of town? It’s awfully short notice.” Not a mob of mourners, necessarily, but Phil
was a gregarious person, with friends and acquaintances here and elsewhere. Here they’d be people he drank with and guys he played poker with every week or went fishing with now and again. Elsewhere he had clients, suppliers, all sorts of people attached to him professionally who grew attached personally.

“They can change their plans on the fly. Or have a memorial in their own good time, if they want.”

“But won’t no visitation seem odd?”

“It’s a little late to worry about what’s considered odd around here, don’t you think? Anyway, I have no intention of standing around for people to gawk at.”

“Even his friends?”

“They’re not mine.”

And whose fault was that, and what did it have to do with Phil?

Another funny thing: this felt as close as Sophie and Nora have come to an actual quarrel. They were more amiable with the living Phil than the dead one, it seems. But it’s early hours yet. There’s a lot to absorb. Phil is dead. As Nora said: how can this be?

There is only one funeral home, called Anderson and Sons, in the phone book. Having the local death monopoly must make for brisk business—what if they can’t fit Phil in at short notice? Although Sophie supposes it’s basically a business built on short notice. Has she met Andersons? Might an Anderson, or an Anderson son, be the proper owner of one of those bags of shit left on the doorstep not so long ago; could an Anderson tyke have been among those scrawling rude words on the fence in the dead of night?