Aftermirth (3 page)

“He's not from the company, Esteban. Don't you recognize him?”

Esteban squinted at me, and his scowl got deeper and, if possible, even more menacing. “You a TV reporter?”

“No, I, I'm a—” I fell silent, unable to think of a single word or phrase that would complete the sentence, and then it came to me: I was a nothing, a no one. And had been ever since the day Jess died.

“He's an actor,” Elena said. “He was in that show
Trainers,
remember?”

“Yeah, I remember you,” Esteban said finally. “Funny guy who turned out not to be so funny. That why you came here today, huh? You looking for some laughs?”

I felt like I was falling—into whiteness, nothingness, into a vat of dough. What had I hoped to find here, among these total strangers? Kinship? Some sort of communion of the damned that would make me feel less alone?

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I shouldn't have come.”

“You got that right,” said Esteban.

I knew an exit cue when I heard one, but I couldn't move, because Elena's grave, considering gaze held me in place. Her brows were furrowed, like something was niggling at her. And then her expression changed, and her eyes widened and softened, and I saw Jess slide into place behind them.

“She died,” Elena said. “Your wife.”

“Yes,” I said. My own eyes were burning.

“I remember, I saw it on the news. It was horrible.”

“Yes.”

“How did she die?” asked Esteban.

I shook my head, unable to speak the words.

“Tell him,” Elena said.

“I can't.”

“You can,” she said.

I started to say,
You don't understand,
but of course she did. They all did.

As if she were reading my thoughts, Elena gestured at the watching crowd. “Tell them. How you lost your wife.”

I looked past her at the roomful of mourners, their faces now a swimming brown blur. “She was killed by a lightning strike because . . .” My voice cracked.

“Say it,” Elena said.

“Because she was wearing an underwire bra. It electrocuted her.”

There were some murmurs, and then Esteban's hand came down on my shoulder. “Shit, man,” he said. “That really sucks.”

His eloquence undid me, and I started crying like I hadn't cried since Jess's funeral. Esteban raised his voice and translated (I didn't speak Spanish, but I could make out the words
esposa
and
electrocutada
), and I heard more murmuring and felt a small, soft hand take hold of mine.

“Come, Michael,” Elena said, tugging me forward. “Come and meet my mother.”

As I moved through the room and felt the other hands touching my back and shoulders, I thought of the people I'd seen leaving the funeral home. Maybe, I thought, they'd looked better than the ones going in because they'd left a tiny bit of their sorrow here, behind them.

I
DIDN'T STOP
mourning Jess, but what had been a howling pain settled into something between a moan and a whimper, still constant but endurable. I kept the mortgage paid and Izzy in gourmet kibble with voiceover work: a couple of Nissan spots, a radio campaign for Coors Lite. Nothing funny; I told my agent not to call me in for those jobs. Michael Larssen was out of the funny business.

Elena and I had exchanged numbers and promises to stay in touch, which neither of us had kept. What did we have in common, really, besides bizarre misfortune? And attraction—there was that, but I couldn't deal with that. We'd both felt it, and it had made our parting awkward. After we hugged she'd reached up and laid her hand against my cheek, and I'd felt a sudden urge to grab hold of it and press her palm to my mouth. I didn't do that, of course, I just stammered hot-faced thanks and good-bye. Whenever I thought of Elena, and I tried not to, I felt squirmy. So when I got a voice mail from her some four months later, I was both pleased and rattled.

“Hey Michael, it's Elena Santiago. Can you meet me for coffee this week? I have something I want to ask you.” Coffee, not drinks, and she sounded serious and not the least bit flirtatious. I ignored the twinge of disappointment I felt and called her back. Her manner was the same on the phone, and when I tried to probe her about the reason for her call, she said she'd rather speak to me about it in person.

We met at a coffee shop she suggested on 114th and Broadway. She was already seated when I got there, and I gave her a quick and only slightly clumsy peck on the cheek before sitting down across from her. She was as pretty as I remembered, and as sad.

“How've you been?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Not great. I've had to take a leave of absence from school. I just can't seem to focus.”

I nodded; I knew that feeling. “Where are you in school?”

“Here,” she said, waving her hand in the direction of the campus across the street. “I'm in the law school.”

“At Columbia?” It came out more incredulous than I'd intended.

“
Sí,
at Columbia,” she said acerbically, in an exaggerated Spanish accent. “For every floor I scrub, they let me take a class.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean—”

Her mouth twisted in a rueful grimace. “No, I'm sorry,” she said. “That was rude. I've been rude a lot lately.”

“Have your friends stopped calling you yet?” Elena gave me a puzzled look, and I said, “Master my proven techniques, and in just thirty days you can alienate your friends, co-workers and your entire family too, or your money back.”

That earned me a half smile. “How are
you
doing, Michael?” she asked.

“Better, actually. I think it helped, meeting you and your family.”

Something flashed in her eyes. “That's why I wanted to see you.” She rooted in her purse, pulled out a piece of paper and pushed it across the table. It was a printout of an Internet article called “The 10 Most Bizarre, Ludicrous Deaths of 2010.” They were listed in reverse order. The last paragraph was circled:

#
1
: DEATH BY FEMININE HYGIENE???!!!!

On September 27, chronic snorer Jim Harbuck stuffed tampons up his nostrils in an effort to quiet himself, not knowing that his condition was caused by sleep apnea, which closed up his throat and suffocated him. His wife, who might have saved him, was sleeping on the sofa downstairs, having been driven there by his thunderous snores.

As I read I could feel Elena's solemn gaze on me. I met it reluctantly. I knew where this was headed.

“Her name is Roberta,” Elena said. “She lives in Durham, North Carolina.”

“And you want to go meet her.”

“Yes.”

“And you want me to come with you.”

She nodded. “Will you?”

Her dark eyes entreated me. I looked away from them. “I don't know, Elena. I'm trying to move on, you know?”

“I am too,” she said, “but I'm stuck. I need to do this, Michael. And I can't do it on my own.”

“What about your cousin?”

“Esteban thinks I'm
loca.
Maybe he's right.” Her eyes were glistening suspiciously.

Well what would you have done in my place, sat there and let her cry? Anyway, I owed her one—a fact I reminded myself of as I pulled onto her block of West 111th Street less than forty-eight hours later, grumpy and late. I'd had to get up at six, which has never been my finest hour, and in my befuddled, undercaffeinated state I'd forgotten Izzy's food and had to double back and get it. He was riding shotgun with his head hanging out the window and his tongue flapping ecstatically in the wind, trailing a glistening rope of drool. As I drove up the block, looking for Elena's building, it occurred to me to wonder whether she liked dogs. I hadn't told her Izzy would be coming with us, and I decided right then that if she minded, the trip was off, because I wasn't going without him. I'd been doubting the wisdom of this little expedition from the moment I'd agreed to it, and damned if I was going to spend eighteen-plus hours in a car with a person who didn't have the sense to like—no, forget like—to
love,
to fawn slavishly all over my sweet, eminently lovable dog. I vowed that if she even so much as brushed his hair off the passenger seat, I was going to tell her to forget it. Anyone who was put off by a little dog hair on her clothes—or, for that matter, slobber or pee dribbles on the bedspread or stepping barefoot into the occasional pool of vomit on the rug—was not someone I wanted in my life, not for two days, not for two minutes. You see where I was going with this. By the time I reached Elena's building I'd pretty much convinced myself she was a dog-hating bitch who could find her own way to Durham. If she hadn't been standing on the curb waiting for me, I might have driven right past her building and back to Brooklyn.

But there she was, looking lovely and a little anxious, and when she caught sight of Izzy she smiled, and when she saw that he was with me her smile got wider. I stopped the car, and she went to the window and let him whuffle her hand before bending down to say hello. “Nice to meet you too,” she said, when he licked her face. “And who would you be?”

“That's Izzy,” I said.

I popped the trunk and went to get her luggage, which consisted of a backpack that weighed next to nothing. The sight of our two small bags sitting in the cavernous space of the otherwise-empty trunk put a hollow ache in my gut. Jess would have brought a couple of anvil-filled suitcases, a computer bag, a cooler crammed with food and a purse the size of a beer tub and considered it traveling light. What the hell was I doing, going on a road trip with this backpack-toting woman I hardly knew?

“Look, Elena—” I said, but before I could tell her I'd changed my mind, I saw her reach out with her thumb and wipe the gritters out of Izzy's eyes, and then just as casually wipe her hand on her jeans.

She turned and looked at me, brows raised. “Yes?”

I sighed. “We should get going. We've got a long drive ahead of us.”

I
T WAS UNSETTLING
at first, having a copilot after more than two years of flying solo. Elena was a smaller, quieter presence in the car than Jess had been, and her perfume was stronger and flowerier. I kept my eyes on the road, hyperaware of her beside me, but she seemed totally at ease, and after half an hour or so I started to unclench a little. She asked me about my family and I sketched the basics: second son of two Yuppie doctors, one an orthopedic surgeon and the other an English professor at NYU; Upper East Side, upper middle class, mediocre test scores and grades unbefitting a Larssen; cut-up and chronic underachiever until my early twenties, when I'd discovered comedy.

“So did you go to college?” Elena asked.

“Of course. I majored in beer and girls, but I managed to graduate.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Just the way you said that. So . . . offhandedly.”

Good job, Michael,
I chided myself
.
Elena's father had been a factory worker. College wouldn't have been an “of course” for her, and she wouldn't have diddled her way through it like I had. “I must sound like an entitled jerk,” I said.

“Not at all,” she replied, fairly convincingly. “That's just how you grew up, in a world where college was no big deal.”

“Were you the first in your family to go?”

“Yes. I had a full scholarship to Wellesley.”

“Wow. Your parents must have been incredibly proud of you.”

Elena didn't answer, and I glanced over at her. She was biting her lip, fighting tears. “I'm sorry,” I said, feeling like the world's biggest ass. “I shouldn't have brought him up.”

She shook her head. “It's all right. I want to talk about him. If you don't mind listening.”

“Tell me,” I said.

And so she told me about her father, Julio Santiago, Santa to his friends. He'd grown up dirt poor in a small village in Puebla, where he'd met and married Elena's mother. He'd emigrated illegally to the States in 1981, leaving his pregnant wife in Mexico, and worked whatever jobs he could get—busboy, farmhand, janitor—sending money home to support his wife and daughter. Elena hadn't even met her father until she was six years old, when he became a citizen under the Reagan amnesty and was finally able to send for them.

“He sounds like an amazing guy,” I said.

“He was. He'd have given you the shirt off his back if you needed it. That's one of the reasons everyone called him Santa, because he was so generous. That, and because he was always laughing. He was a small man, but he had this big, booming laugh. You couldn't hear it and not laugh with him.”

I thought of Jess and was silent.

“I never understood that,” Elena went on. “His joy, I mean. He worked so hard for so long and had so little to show for it.”

“He had you.”

“Yeah, his malcontent of a daughter, who wanted things he couldn't give me and a life that made no sense to him. How could I be happy without a husband, a family? He didn't understand it, because he wouldn't have been. My mother and I were the center of his universe.”

“So . . . do you not want to get married and have kids?”

“Sure I do, but I'm not even thirty. I've got plenty of time.”

“Yeah, I thought that too, once,” I said, around the balled-up sock lodged in my throat.

Elena touched my shoulder. “Hey—” she began, but I cut her off.

“I really don't want to talk about it.”

“Okay, then we won't talk about it.”

She retrieved her hand and sat back, but if she was stung I couldn't sense it. The silence between us was surprisingly comfortable, and after a while I realized I was no longer brooding about Jess but thinking about Elena and how easy it was to be with her and what it might be like to kiss her, which set me to brooding again. She left me to it. She was so quiet and still that I thought she must be asleep, but when I stole a glance at her she was staring pensively out the windshield.