A Certain Slant of Light (17 page)

  
James found me waiting in his room. He appeared in his
towel and took clothes from his drawer and closet. He smiled at
me. "Close your eyes now."

  
I sat facing the windows, watching him in the reflection
there. I didn't realize he knew I was peeking until he'd buttoned
his pants and then pantomimed a strong-man pose looking at the
window before he put on his shirt. I turned to him, unable to
truly feel ashamed.

  
We came into the kitchen and found Mitch drinking a cup of
coffee. "You ready?" he said to James.

  
"What for?"

  
"Third Sunday," said Mitch. "Just 'cause you didn't go last
month doesn't mean you get to blow it off. I'm not hanging out
with Verna by myself."

  
James paused. "Verna. Okay." Obviously he didn't remember
this monthly ritual. "You get off work okay?"

  
Mitch frowned at him. "What?"

  
"You work on Sunday mornings."

  
Mitch gave him an odd look. "They know about Mom," he
said. "I've had Third Sunday half-day for four fucking years.
What's the matter with you?"

  
"My name is Billy, and I'm a recovering drug addict."

  
This made Mitch laugh, almost spitting his coffee on his shirt.

  
James seemed pleased. They made breakfast together, not speak
ing much. As they ate toast and eggs, Mitch began to wind down, like an abandoned clock, his eyes fixed at a distance. By the time
they were getting in the car, Mitch was so pale, James asked,
"You okay?"

  
"I hate Third Sunday," was all Mitch would say.

  
We drove for several minutes in silence, past the business dis
trict and toward the suburbs. As we were entering the next town, Mitch pulled into a small shopping center.

  
"Be right back," he said. The small grocery store Mitch en
tered was the only shop open.

  
"I have no idea where we're going," James said to me. But the
next moment, Mitch was walking back toward the car with a
bouquet of pink carnations.

  
"We must be going to his mother's grave," James whispered.

  
Mitch got in, looking taut, and tossed the flowers on the seat
between them.

  
"Nice color," said James.

  
This made Mitch laugh again, for some reason. James
watched him as we drove on. A few blocks later, we pulled into an
apartment building lot, and a freckled, beaming woman of per
haps fifty waved to them from where she sat on a cinder block
wall. She had a rubber-tipped cane and a shopping bag.

  
"Here's Aunt Verna," said James, fishing for information.

  
"Aunt?" Mitch shot him an annoyed glance.

  
James watched the woman limp toward them, leaning into
her cane. "Wasn't she Mom's best friend?" he asked.

  
"Do we have to talk about this?" Mitch reached behind him
to open the back door.

  
"Hey, boys." Verna got in, sitting forward to see James's face
better. "You look okay," she smiled.

  
The car pulled back out into traffic. The woman buckled her
self into the seat beside me. She wore her auburn and gray hair
back in a ponytail and dressed like a house painter.

  
"How are you, Mitch?" she asked.

  
"Getting by," he said.

  
As we neared a huge lawn lined with headstones on the right,
James stiffened, his eyes scanning each row of graves, but Mitch
didn't pull into the gate of the cemetery. We passed it, and the
county hospital, pulling into the parking lot of the third building.
The sign read: St. Jude's. It was a cement slab, made no cheerier
by the clown-colored flowers choking its entrance.

  
James looked confused, Mitch looked ill, and the woman with
them looked quite happy, as if she were going to a party. They
parked in a space marked VISITOR, and I followed them toward the entrance. The boys politely slowed their pace for their friend.

  
"Billy, could you take this?"

  
James took the woman's bag, and she shifted to pushing with
two hands on the cane. When they entered the glass doors, Mitch
and the woman went immediately to the front desk and signed a
sheet of paper on a clipboard.

  
"Good morning, Karen," said Verna.

  
The girl behind the counter smiled. "How's the knee, Verna?"

  
"Could be worse," she said.

  
I hovered behind James. "Maybe Billy's mother isn't dead,"
he said. These sounded like hopeful words, but I could feel a fore
boding in his voice.

  
Mitch started to follow Verna down the hall to the left, but he turned back to James.

  
"Hurry up." He gestured not so gently with the flowers and a
bit of petal flew off.

  
James went to the counter, picked up the pen attached to the
clipboard by a thin chain, and printed on the line below Mitch's
name: William Blake.

  
I saw that the girl, Karen, seated behind the desk, was hiding
a book under a file folder. Not a hospital text but a dog-eared paperback with a creased corner to mark her place. For one discon
certing moment, I saw my own hands tearing the brown paper off
a small blue book as if having to wait one more second for a new novel would drive me mad. As quickly as the vision came, it was
gone.

  
We followed his brother down the hall, and now it was James
who was looking ill. We came through a white door into a sani
tized room where a woman in a nightgown printed with tiny
Eiffel towers sat motionless in a mechanical bed. Mitch dumped
the flowers on the tray beside the patient and took refuge in the
chair against the wall, the farthest away. Verna went right to the
bed and kissed the staring woman on the cheek, wiping off a
smudge of lipstick, the only color in the face. "Hi, Sarah," she
said.

  
James stood in the doorway.

  
"We're all here, sweetie: Mitch, Billy, and Verna." Verna
dragged the chair beside the bed right up to the metal rails and
took the limp hand. The nails were cut short and there was a
wedding band on the third finger.

  
"I brought you some surprises." She motioned for James to
bring the shopping bag.

  
James did and stayed close to the bed, lingering at the foot.

  
"I have the alumni newsletter and a letter from Belle and a
recipe I think you'll like." Verna rummaged in the bag and
brought out a thin magazine. "The boys brought you flowers.
Pink, your favorite."

  
Now James glanced at Mitch, but he was brooding and did not
look up. There was such a strong pulse to his anger, the room was
pounding with it.

  
"Why don't you read to your mother?" Verna gave James the
magazine and the chair. "I'll put these in water."

  
She took the flowers into the small adjoining bathroom, and
James looked at the cover of
Alumni News
without opening it. He
reached over and gently touched the hand of Billy's mother.

  
"Class of seventy," said Mitch quietly.

  
James flipped through the pages until he found the right year.
"Announcements," James read aloud. "The planning committee
for the thirty-fifth reunion will be meeting in February for a
weekend in Lake Florence. Please contact Vicky Hanson if you would like to volunteer. V Hanson at home dot com." James
glanced at the waxwork woman.

  
I moved slowly to the other side of the bed and looked at
Billy's mother. She would have been very beautiful if she weren't
ill. I reached down to touch her arm but was startled by Verna
passing through my body to display the white plastic pitcher of
flowers on the bedside table. I retreated to the doorway.

  
"Deaths," James continued to read. "David Wong died of
heart failure August first in Livingston, Vermont. He's survived
by wife Greta Zenner Wong, their two children, and four—"
James stopped reading as Verna touched his shoulder. He let her
have the chair.

  
"Thank you," she whispered. Then in a much cheerier voice,
she scanned the page. "Let's see. Business. Mark Hogan has
opened his third BMW dealership in Seattle and would welcome any Coif ax alums to apply for jobs. Especially those who made
fun of his sixty-five Ford pickup."

  
James kept watching Billy's mother. He paused at the end
of her bed again and leaned forward, lightly touching the shape
under the covers that was her foot. Her eyes were open, but she
didn't blink.

  
"Remember Mark Hogan?" Verna asked Billy's mother.
"They called him wing-nut because of his ears." Verna read a let
ter out loud from a friend named Belle about her daughter di
vorcing a gambling addict and their dog Chloe's leg amputation.
James sat in the chair on the other side of the bed from Verna,
unconscious of me since we had entered the room. The longer the
visit stretched, the more it wore on Mitch. He leaned forward,
resting his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor, rubbing his
fists together as if he were waiting for a jury to convict him.