While I Was Gone (16 page)

I noted with sausfactlon as I moved into and out of the house that the smell of coffee filled the kitchen. I could hear people walking around upstairs.

There was no sign of Daniel.

I put cheese and crackers out now and set the oven on preheat.

Then I crossed the twilit yard. I entered the open barn and went through the dark to Daniel’s door, where a knife of bright light gleamed along the bottom.

“Open up,” I called.

In a few seconds the door opened. Daniel had his glasses on, and his chin doubled as he looked over them at me. He held a pen and some loose papers.

“Checking in before the fun starts,” I said.

“Lovely.” He bent and kissed my cheek quickly, then moved back around his desk and sat down.

“You’re working on Amy’s eulogy?” I asked. I sat down opposite him, on a day bed he used when he napped or read. The room was slightly overheated. I slid my coat off.

“Actually, Sunday’s sermon. I saw a connection and wanted to make some notes.” He slid the papers on his desk around. He took off his glasses and poked fiercely at his closed eyes. Then he lifted his head and looked at me.

“How was your day?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“Crazy. I did some really neat surgery, though.”

“Ah! What?”

“A de gloving On a cat. The owners wanted the leg saved, and I got to do it. Mary Ellen assisted.”

He looked blank.

“It’s when the skin is accidentally just peeled off”—I gestured peeling a glove back from the arm—“so much that there’s no hope it’ll ever regrow. Usually you just remove the leg when that happens, but these people didn’t want that, so there’s a kind of elaborate but wonderfully commonsense surgery you can do—I’ve only just read about it before—where you open the fur on the side of the cat and bend the leg back under it.” I had been excited, actually, while I did this, and Mary Ellen and I had talked eagerly to each other through the fussy procedure.

“You make a kind of pocket, I guess you’d say.

And then you stitch the fur back over the leg. In a little while, voila! the skin attaches itself to the leg, so you can open the pocket up, release the newly furry extremity”—my voice put quote marks around this phrase—“and stitch the flaps back together, sans the leg piece.

Which also gets stitched together.” I sewed in the air for him.

“It pulls kind of tight, but cats are stretchy guys. This one was.”

“Stretchy guys,” he said, and laughed. I felt a bloom of pride at pleasing him. Daniel.

Then he stopped and shook his head.

“What?” I said after a moment.

“Sometimes all that effort for an animal just seems nuts to me.”

I was suddenly defensive.

“Love is love, Daniel, wherever it lands.”

“I know, I know.” He seemed weary, old suddenly, with his pale skin, his eyes reddened where he’d rubbed them. There was a nervous steady pulse in one lid.

“What’s the program tonight?” I asked.

“How can I help?”

“You’ve done enough. More than enough, with the food and the bedrooms. Everyone’s going to Amy’s for dessert around eight-thirty, so we’ll be out of your hair then. Till bedtime anyway.”

“I will be invisible at bedtime. In that I will be in bed.”

“Not invisible to me, my darling’ “I hope not. But where’s the rest of the family eating?”

“Well, the immediate family’s at home, with her parents.

But I think quite a few are coming here—I told them we had plenty.”

“We do.”

“Some are headed for the inn.” He shrugged.

“Probably worried the minister wouldn’t serve enough booze.”

“They hadn’t heard about the minister’s wife, apparently.”

He smiled.

“Just as well. We need to have our secrets.”

“So if everything’s ready by—what? Six-thirty?”

“Sounds good.”

“I’d better get going, then.”

He stood and began to rearrange his desk.

“I’ll be right over to “You don’t have to,” I called back as I shut the door.

The barn was a gloomy void after Daniel’s warmly lighted study. I stood still for a moment, letting my eyes get used to the dark and smelling the barn’s old, deep must. Piano music drifted to me from the house, the player picking out a piece Cass had done in recital once, a Mozart sonata. I went to the open doorway and looked across the shadowy yard. The windows were all lighted, and the house itself seemed flattened and two-dimensional in the twilight, as artificial as a stage set.

Someone—it was an elderly man—caught my eye, moving haltingly through the living room. After a few seconds, he reappeared in the kitchen and stood bent over the food on the table. As though it were his house. As though we had never been. As though he, and the person making music, and the woman I saw upstairs now, silhouetted for a moment in a bedroom window, were sufficient here.

I was aware, suddenly, of feeling canceled out, lost. I had a moment of what I suppose I must call grief, a powerful sorrow. For myself and the girls and Daniel. For what had been our life in this place and was already—this is what I felt—passing. Had always been passing.

And then I forced myself to walk forward through the dark yard to the back door, putting a warm smile on my face, getting ready to be the minister’s wife.

IT WASN’t UNTIL BEAT TIE MENTIONED THE DATE AT WORK the next morning that I realized it was Halloween. I’d done nothing to get ready. I skipped lunch with her so I could drive to the drugstore in another tiny mall, closer to town, and buy treats. The bags of small candy bars made expressly for this holiday were heaped in bins by the register. I bought two of them—forty treats in all. Surely enough, thought. But then, just as the heavy adolescent girl at the register had finished ringing me up, I reached back and grabbed another bag of twenty. On Halloween, people drove in from the countryside and parked around the green, to move from house to house in town. Out where they lived, everyone was too widely spaced. The checkout girl—Melanie, her plastic name tag told me—sighed in irritation and started her process again.

At the end of the workday I hurried home, but I could see as I pulled into the driveway that the little halting figures in groups of five or six were already making their way in the dark, some carrying flashlights—their beams skittered and leapt wildly here and there.

I’d probably missed quite a few.

Quickly I set up. A big bowl to dump the treats in. Four or five candles lighted in the front hall and on the stoop—we hadn’t had a pumpkin in years, not since we found ourselves carving it alone in the kitchen, the bored girls having drifted off to TV or the telephone or homework. The bell rang almost right away, and I answered it, squealing in energetic fright at a small monster in a store-bought costume, the oldest of his troop and therefore the leader. I distributed candy to them all. Two of them were tiny children, toddlers really, who’d been utterly silent as their older siblings brayed “Trick or treat!” and who seemed not to know what to do now in front of this strange, noisy woman. (“Hold your bag up, dummy!”) Both of these little ones wore their masks tilted back on their heads for greater comfort, like beanies with faces. Their mothers were waiting on the walk, chatting with each other, pretty young women. They called out “Thank you!” and “Happy Halloween!” as I was shutting the door.

When they’d gone, I went to the closet off the living room and recovered my own mask—Olive Oyl. I prized it for its expressionless innocence. It also made my life easier. I could just make Olive Oyl’s high squeaks as I distributed treats—ooh, ohh, mmm—and be liberated from true conversation.

Daniel came home around six-thirty, and we had a quick supper, just sandwiches. We took turns rising to answer the bell several times.

I asked him about the funeral, how it had gone.

“Harrowing,” he said. Apparently the oldest child, seven, cried loudly through the whole thing, sometimes even calling for her mother. I imagined it, Daniel speaking calmly in his rich, soothing voice and the child answering, filling the air with her desperation.

There could be no comfort for anyone else in the service—not in its solemn sorrow or its shared rituals or the old consoling words—with such scorching and entirely reasonable pain on display. Daniel seemed beaten, physically smaller, the sharp bones in his white face more pronounced than ever.

After supper, he left for church to go over the Sunday service with the choir, who were at Friday-night rehearsal.

As the evening wore on, the numbers of kids dropped off and their ages went up. Now I had children ten or twelve—big children, unaccompanied by adults, in elaborate costumes they’d made themselves, swathe in bloody gauze, dolled up as a French tart, swaggering in wide lapels and homburg as a thirties-era gangster.

By eight-thirty I had no candies left. Quickly I gathered up and put in Baggies all the cookies in the house, left over from last night’s company. When those were gone I gave away all the apples and oranges and pears. Still the tricksters came. A few sullen teenagers rang, costumes replaced by thuggish behavior. I should have realized that since Halloween fell on a Friday this year, it would become the evening’s activity of choice for many more kids than usual.

The last treats I gave out were an orange and two bananas, to three boys who’d left their unmuffled car idling deafeningly at the curb while they came up the walk.

“Treat,” they grunted in almost bored unison when I opened the door. There was a little silence when I handed the fruit over into their bare hands—they had no bags, of course. I was glad for my mask, for the distance it created between us.

“A banana,” one of them said.

“Is this some kind of fucking joke or something?”

“Trick!” I squealed in Olive Oyl’s high-pitched voice, and shut the door quickly.

I blew the candles out after that, and there were no more visitors.

When Daniel came home at ten, I tried to amuse him with this story, standing in the bathroom doorway as he brushed his teeth.

“Whooo,” he said carefully, his mouth full of white foam.

I had thought we might talk that night, but he was tired, and we went to bed almost right away, without talking, without making love.

I lay awake for a while, listening to his damp breathing, to the cars and voices in the distance, to the occasional raucous shouting, which might have signaled a trick for the adults to clean up in the morning-eggs or soap, or toilet paper wrapped around a tree.

THE NEXT DAY, SATURDAY, WHEN BEAT TIE CALLED ME FROM

the exam room to the phone, she whispered dramatically, “It’s that Jean Bennett again.” As I followed her down the back hall, I realized by the rush of disappointment I was feeling that I’d been hoping for Eli—to see him, to talk with him. That had been part of the arc of expectation I’d ridden through the long week, on Saturday, my other life would come back to me.

Jean Bennett wanted to report on Arthur. Her voice sounded resigned. I heard in it, too, as I hadn’t when she was in my office, that she was from the Midwest.

“No better at all,” she was saying.

“Though he seems relaxed. In fact, he seems happy, poor old guy.”

“Well, I’m not surprised, honestly. I’m very sorry, though.”

“Yes. Anyway. My husband—Eli—said to tell you he’ll try to see you, early next week, he thinks. He had to stay on in San Francisco for the weekend. But he’ll come in Tuesday, most likely. To figure things out. I told him I didn’t want to be in charge, nor did I want to be translating from you to him. He said he’d call, to let you know exactly, and to see what will work with you, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“And in the meantime, should I just keep on with the steroids and stuff?”

“Yes, let’s do the whole round, just in case. And if the Valium is keeping him mellow, I’d stick with that too.”

“Yes,” she said.

I asked her if she needed a refill. She checked. She didn’t, if Eli really could see me Tuesday, so we agreed to wait and said goodbye.

After I hung up, I felt the weight of my disappointment—an empty feeling. I thought about it as I worked through the afternoon. What had I been imagining? Surely, when he came in, Eli and I would have talked mostly about Arthur, after all. But eventually, I thought, eventually we would have come to Dana. Dana, and who we were then, and all that had happened. Surely that was so, difficult as it was to imagine how we would begin. Remember the day after Dana was killed, when you got sick toyourstomach because of all the blood? Remember the way the police went after Duncan? Remember how it felt to be the ones left alive?

And now that it would all have to wait, I discovered how impatient I was.

IS IT TOO LATE TO TALK?

Daniel had left the kitchen right after we’d cleaned up, gone back to his study for a while. When he returned, he’d gotten immediately into bed. Now he was staring blankly, an opened book Lying on the quilt that covered him. The light fell across his chest and over his hands on the sheet. He looked peculiarly like an invalid, which somehow irritated me.

“I’m pretty tired,” he said.

“But I thought we would, tonight.”

“I’m sorry.” He’d come late to dinner, too, after I’d called over to the barn several times. He was preoccupied, he said, about his sermon.

“It’s just I’ve been alone with this all week.” I was standing at the foot of the bed, trying not to sound impatient.

“Alone with what?” He was frowning.

“With Dana’s death. With Eli’s coming back.”

“Oh, that.” He nodded. Yes, yes, yes, yes. That.

“Oh, that.” I tried to sound amused.

“I’m sorry. It’s just… it seems, in the context of all this”—his hand lifted—“so… remote.”

Now I nodded. I nodded and nodded, and then I left the room. I moved through the house, turning off lights. I came back to the bedroom doorway. He was reading. At any rate, he was holding the book upright. I said, “This is exactly what pisses me off about you, He lowered his book. He took his glasses off and looked at me. I was leaned against the doorframe, arms folded.

“I don’t think I knew this, Jo—that there’s something that pisses you off about me. As in all the time, I assume.”