Every Last Cuckoo (13 page)

Amos read both documents aloud to Sarah. “This is my job,” he said. “I think Charles is watching.”

The will stipulated some modest bequests to environmental causes and a medical foundation. Otherwise the estate went to Sarah, who, in turn, would leave it to their children and grandchildren, as the two of them had discussed. Charles's personal letter went into greater detail. He chose the music for the opening and closing of his memorial service—Shostakovich first, Schubert at the end. He wanted to be cremated beforehand, so his ashes could attend in a discreet urn. Later, he would like his family to scatter these last remains in the long meadow in
warm weather. He wanted no flowers except an arrangement in honor of Sarah, which was not to look funereal. No mums, no glads. Anything else, in yellow, blue, purple, and white. There would be no formal speeches or prayers, please. Instead Amos would read another letter, written by Charles for his friends and neighbors, recounting his favorite stories about them and his appreciation for their affection.

These instructions were so like Charles, and his voice so audible in them, that Sarah and Amos laughed and cried throughout. They didn't break down until the very last, when Amos could barely get through Charles's coda.

My dear friend Amos, if you are reading this letter to my beloved Sarah, then your own similar documents remain sealed and you are still alive. In that case, I alone will know which of us has been right in all our arguments. Or, rather,
if
I know it, if I am someplace where consciousness and memory survive, the very knowing will prove me wrong. At least I won't have to face you yet. I will have time to develop a taste for crow.

If, on the other hand, I have gone to the eternal oblivion I anticipate, I will be proved right, but without the pleasure of gloating.

In case you think I'm a loser either way, let me say right now that I hope with all my flawed heart that I have been wrong, wrong, wrong in every syllable of my logic and conviction. Because, if I am wrong, I will be reunited with Sarah. I will lose nothing and no one. I will win, eternally.

Please care tenderly for Sarah. She will be in pain, but she is strong and a gifted alchemist. She will turn her grief into new forms of grace and courage. Just you wait.

Thank you for everything, Amos, friend. Sarah, thank you for marrying me, for being my darling and my life's greatest joy.

After the memorial, family and some friends went to Sarah's for a catered lunch—another detail Charles arranged. He didn't want another potluck. “My life was not haphazard,” he wrote. “It had a certain order, which I made with Sarah and loved for a great many years. Allow me to plan my final lunch with my friends.” And he did, setting out the menu and naming the wine. Charles had thought of everything.

Still, he could not orchestrate grief. Its crescendo and resolution differed for everyone, an emotional cacophony with as many different tempos and chords as loved ones. Sarah went numb after her animal dirge in the night with Sylvie and Ruckus. Lottie wept openly and often, and Luke acted out angrily or with sullen petulance. Tom went about red-eyed. Charlotte kept her tears to herself once the news sank in. She focused on seeing that her father's wishes were met to the letter.

Stephie, Jake, and their sons stayed for nearly a week. Stephie grieved more openly than Charlotte, but she found equilibrium in the stories that drifted like music or air throughout the house. All the while, she kept her eyes on Sarah. Tess was similarly attentive, and the two of them, in their shared concern, bonded quickly.

Stephie and Jake told Sarah they would teach one more year after this one, and then move back to Vermont. Their children were grown; many of their friends were moving away; they were homesick. “Besides, we missed out on too much time with Dad,” Stephie said.

During the hours after the memorial, Stephie and Jake held each other together for the sake of the guests, and Sarah. They became the hosts, refilling glasses, accepting condolences, plundering people's memories for tales, inciting laughter with recollections of their own, encouraging the guilty pleasure of humor.

Then there was David. He was inconsolable, his grief a motley parade of silence, weeping, and regret. Sarah at last saw the fire in him, which she had not known was there. She'd held him close to her the day after Charles died, when he arrived harrowed and shocked with Tess and Hannah beside him. She'd told him then about Charles's passionate identification with David as a father. And on the day of the memorial she had said to him, “Don't try to be like your father when you're not, or not completely. You have a different kind of imagination. He was a craftsman, but I think you are an artist.” She understood this only as she said it.

S
IX WEEKS AFTER
C
HARLES'S
death, Sarah sat at the kitchen table and watched the spring snow come down, thick, fast, hypnotic. The dogs slept at her feet, Ruckus snoring lightly, Sylvie now and then taking a long breath and letting it out in a series of little, high-pitched woofs. Sarah half heard the other soft sounds of the house around her—the hum of the refrigerator, the electric whir of the clock over the counter, the ticking of the teakettle as it cooled. Now and then there came a slide of snow from the roof. Otherwise, all was muffled inside the house, inside the blizzard. Sarah imagined herself a tiny figure, sitting and sipping tea inside a glass globe. Someone had shaken her life up hard, and now everything was still except for the whiteness falling all around.

Sarah knew that life would go on for others even as it remained suspended for her. She had seen it happen before, the slow, cool shrinking back of friends when a person was thought to mourn too long, to fail at getting on with things. She could pretend when she had to, but nothing remained to be gotten on
with. She got out of bed each morning with heavy reluctance, hating the look of her side rumpled and Charles's undisturbed. She took to lying flat in bed, pulling the covers up smooth over her outstretched form, then folding the top sheet over the edge before slipping out from underneath. Thus the bed was as good as made and the absence of Charles was less blatant before she even stood up. With that accomplished, she had sixteen hours to fill before unmaking her side of the bed once more.

The house felt strange, food went bad, the oil furnace ran instead of the wood-burning one. Sarah avoided dealing with wood. It brought too vivid images of Charles raking the coals and tossing logs into the red mouth of the firebox. His clothing flashed similar scenes. A coat hanging limp from a peg in the mudroom would fill up with Charles as Sarah watched, and then Charles in that coat would take his stick and shoulder his pack and walk as no one else on earth walked, out the door and off to the trails in the woods.

This emptiness was as unnatural as a hole in water. Sarah returned again and again to Charles's prediction that she would transform her grief into something of value. She was letting him down. She remembered, too, the last words he had said to her, which lodged in her mind like a memory that would neither let go nor reveal itself.
Sarah, oh, you wouldn't believe what I . . .
What he had carelessly done to land at the bottom of a ravine? What he had seen in the woods that had fatally distracted him? What he could see before him, beyond the skin of life? Charles, a steadfast nonbeliever—had he seen more than he expected to? Had he died because he was too curious to resist a closer look?

Above all, Sarah remembered Charles's kiss in the woods and felt again her answering passion and caught her breath at
the sweetness of that fleeting moment and its passing beyond repetition.

These memories plagued Sarah. People persisted in trying to take care of her, but to Sarah they merely intruded on her obsession. They called, they stopped by. Politely, but with determination, she got rid of them. All but her children or Vivi.

So when the phone rang on this morning, Sarah meant to ignore it until she heard Vivi's voice on the machine. She made herself answer and sound better than she felt. Vivi would notice her false cheer but would not challenge it.

“I need to ask a favor,” Vivi said after their hellos.

“What's that?” Sarah felt wary, but something moved in her. The thought of being the one to help and not the one in need.

“How would you feel about renting out your cabin for a while?”

Sarah had thought Vivi would give her an errand to run or phone calls to make for some cause or other. She sat up straighter, marshaling objections. “Rent the cabin? To whom? Vivi, it's filthy, it needs work. Nobody has stayed there for years. There are probably animals living in the furniture.”

Scenes flashed like a slide show in her mind, summer images full of scattered light. She and Charles had sometimes moved into the cabin when the children were at camp or visiting grandparents. It had felt like a holiday right on their own property. Sometimes they slept naked on the screened deck, overlooking the pond. They made love in the afternoon, then swam with schools of small, tickling fish. Even now, the cabin and the pond bespoke Charles. How could she let anyone disturb the spirit of him, so vivid in that vacant, lonely spot?

“Peter's cousin,” Vivi was saying. “Mordechai Luz. He's taking
a sabbatical from the University of Tel Aviv. He's writing a book and needs a quiet place to stay, starting in a month or so. He wants to get out of Israel for a while. The elections are just over and everybody's euphoric about Barak. Mordechai worked on the campaign. Now he's tired and wants a break.”

“I don't know,” Sarah said. “It's such a mess.”

“Hire Lottie and her friends to clean it up. Rent one of those furniture shampooers. It can't be that bad.”

“Why doesn't . . . Mordechai, was it? Why doesn't he stay with you and Peter?” Sarah knew the question was ungracious.

Vivi paid no attention. “We asked him to. He says he'd never get any work done if Peter was around all the time. They haven't seen each other in about three years, and they'd never stop yammering and bickering and one-upping each other.” After a short pause Vivi added, “That really is true, Sarah. Mordechai does need the quiet. But my darling, patronizing Peter also thinks you need a man on the place.”

“Oh, for Pete's sake,” snapped Sarah. “
Peter's
sake. Kick him for me.”

“Done. Just let me say that Mordechai isn't like that. He won't try to be your watchdog.”

“Well. What
is
he like?”

“You met him once about ten years ago, you and Charles, but it was only for an evening. He was up from a quick trip to New York to give a paper. He's . . . not ordinary. Sweet. Easy. But . . . I don't know . . . an Israeli. Or at least no longer an American. A hybrid.”

“So he was born in this country?”

“Yes. In New York. He's seven or eight years younger than Peter, sixty-one, I think. He was born Mordechai Nussbaum,
but he changed his last name to Luz when he moved to Israel in the late sixties. There's some story about the names. Nussbaum means ‘nut tree,' and I gather ‘luz' is a kind of nut tree that grows in Israel. Mordechai and his wife did the kibbutz thing for a while. Her name was Rachel Skolnik. I don't remember whether she changed it or not.”

“Where is she?” Sarah asked, trying to recall this cousin of Peter's.

“Oh, she died ages ago. Along with their baby. Mordechai never remarried.”

Sarah was sure she had never met anyone named Mordechai. A man who had experienced a grief perhaps worse than her own. A young wife, a baby. But by now an old sorrow. Sarah drew a breath and sighed and said, “All right. I suppose so. I'll have to go down there to see what needs doing.”

E
ARLY IN
A
PRIL THE
warm breath of spring released ice and snow in torrents from their frozen imprisonment. Rivers and streams ran fast and muddy, breaching their banks in low places but otherwise furiously contained. Like the rivers, Sarah's grief ran fast and readily spilled over in low, private moments. She could picture herself sinking into sorrow as she'd done over her stillborn son. It was so easy; she could simply lie back and let herself go dark. Death moved ceaselessly at the edge of her awareness, just out of reach, stalking her. She would startle when its immovable reality met her squarely in her thoughts. Surely she would be next. She was ashamed to feel so afraid. She half hoped she would lose her wits before her life. If dementia claimed her, she would never see her own death coming. There would be nothing to fear. Already she was not herself. How much was left to lose?

A
S THE SPRING RAINS
came down, the dirt roads braided themselves with glistening, axle-deep ruts full of sucking mud.
Sarah began walking in the early mornings to stir herself out of her torpor. She stayed along the edges of the mucky roads but still came back with her boots caked over their tops. With her blood beginning to flow again, whether she wanted it to or not, she sought escape from the stale misery that was everywhere indoors. With no other intention than to flee, she soon made a habit of walking. As the cold that had encased her grief gave way, so did its anodyne effect. Now Sarah's pain rose up fast and raw, undiluted, unrelieved.

Hating her bleak self-pity and likewise her fear of giving herself fully to sorrow, Sarah clung to the hope that the worst would pass when the days warmed further and she and her family could scatter Charles's ashes in the long meadow. But first she would look for the return of the bobolinks, Charles's favorite birds. This was another reason to walk each day, to visit the meadow when she got back home. When she saw the first bobolinks, she would begin checking the weather forecast for an extended period of fine weather—unlikely but not impossible in Vermont's fickle spring—when her family could come from however near or far. Sarah was on edge, waiting.