Imagine Me Gone (42 page)

“Cheers,” I replied, aware of the closeness of their bodies to mine—Seth’s father’s big frame, Rick’s barrel chest and thick legs. These two men I had only just met were granting me an unspoken acceptance, giving me that minimal respect of belonging with them. But only in the narrowest sense. I’d earned the right in their eyes to be treated as a man. As a participant in the basic competition among all men.

Just noticing this, not letting it pass as an ordinary fact of meeting strangers, unclenched something in me. A fist in my gut. A bracing against attack.

I tried listening to their talk about suppliers and the housing market but I couldn’t focus on their words. I saw their lips and eyes move, their weight shift, and as I watched them I understood clearly and for the first time that this was the reason part of me had come to loathe Michael. His refusal to be like other men. His refusal to compete. To live in the grip of that fist, the way I always had, and the way these men did. And I glimpsed what I had never allowed myself to admit before, which is that somewhere in me lay a hatred of my father, too, though for the opposite reason—for playing the game but being too weak to win it. A hatred I’d kept hidden from myself as a boy but never let go of, and which his death and my pity for him had prevented me from owning up to all these years.

“But on the whole,” Seth’s father was saying, “it’s not a bad life.”

Rick, as seemed to be his role, agreed with his father-in-law.

Behind me I heard Seth’s footsteps and a moment later he was standing next to me, our circle widening to admit him.

“Sethy,” his father said. “Get yourself a glass.” He topped off all of our drinks and poured one for his son.

As the four of us raised our glasses, his father once again gave me that quick nod. But I didn’t play my part this time. Returning the gesture seemed too small a response, and too cold. It was a kind of acting—a kind of life—that had led me, without my realizing it, to despise the men I loved.

Instead, I put my arm over Seth’s shoulder and said to his father, “I want to thank you for having me here. I love your son very much.”

Margaret

I find it remarkable how time works its way into a place. And thus how blank of time new places can be. This ceiling, for instance, here in my bedroom in the morning light of September. It means almost nothing. It is new, like the light fixture at its center, and the double-glazed window that the light comes through, and the louvered closets either side, which have so much less in them than the ones in Walcott ever did. All of which is right, and really as it should be.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes
—

Those quotes Michael carried with him everywhere on sheaves of paper in his messenger bag turned out to be declamations, mostly, about the lasting evils of slavery. But there were others, too, on music and art, and life more generally. A few of which have stuck with me since I read through them last winter, in the months after he died. They were like notes to us that he had written but never delivered. Or delivered by speaking them only after I had stopped listening.

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—

That is how it was for a time: abstract. Moving through tasks at a great remove. Meeting with Veronica, the real estate agent. Tidying the house for the prospective buyers she brought around to view it. The hardest, of course, was going through Michael’s things. Discovering from the pile of correspondence with his creditors, and his handwritten lists of the status of each loan and the amount outstanding, how he had tried right up to the end to manage his debts.

It took Alec less than a day to dispense with them all, except the one that I had cosigned. It required nothing more than a death certificate.

And then there were his records, in the gray milk crates along his walls, in boxes in the study and Alec’s old room, all around the edges of the basement, too—thousands of them. I have no room for them here in the new place, but we weren’t about to throw them away, so they sit in storage until we find them a home, where hopefully they can be kept together, and played.

In the new bathroom, the tiles are grouted a perfect white. The medicine cabinet is a perfect mirrored rectangle reflecting the snowy-white walls. I took baths before, but now there is only this glass stall shower, which the water beads on, catching any light in the room.

Are you sure you want to move? Alec asked, over and over.

I did consider staying, a while longer at least, mostly for his sake. Because he tried so hard to allow me to keep it. But I couldn’t live in those rooms anymore.

Here, I walk to do my shopping, or along the wooded path around the reservoir. The neighbors have had me in for meals. I’m getting to know the mail lady. Best of all, Dorothy is only five minutes away. A few months after I moved, she told me she’d had enough of the suburbs and wanted to be closer to Boston, for concerts and museums. We see each other at least twice a week, for which I couldn’t be more grateful.

After showering and dressing, I tiptoe past the guest room and hear Celia and Paul beginning to stir. Paul could have stayed with his mother on the night before his wedding, but he and Celia wanted to be here together. I cross the dining room and close the French doors quietly so Alec and Seth can keep sleeping there on the foldout.

I baked the muffins yesterday afternoon, I just need to warm them in the oven, slice up the fruit, and start the eggs. I offered to do a larger breakfast, at least for their friends Laura and Kyle and for Paul’s parents, but Celia said there was no need. Once my sister arrives from her hotel, the six of us will eat around the old dining room table that I brought with me, along with most of the other furniture that would fit. (Alec wheezes here as well, and says maybe it wasn’t the mold in the basement that forced him to wear a mask, after all, but something in the rugs.)

“Let me do some of this,” Paul says, coming into the kitchen in sweatpants and a T-shirt. He takes a melon from the counter, and a knife from the block.

“It’s all right,” I tell him, “I’ve got it.” But he’s found a cutting board already and starts in.

Despite the many Christmases he has spent with us, I’ve rarely spoken to him on his own, Celia or the others always being around. We did talk more when they had me out to San Francisco back in March. He was as attentive as I’ve ever seen him, to me and to Celia, making meals and arranging outings. I suppose some parents would worry about their daughter marrying him, given the financial instability of the sort of work he does, but I could never drum that up in myself, and I certainly can’t now. I’m just glad for the fact that the two of them have decided to make the commitment, and glad to remember how well he got along with Michael, how he always laughed at Michael’s antics.

On one of those outings, walking on Stinson Beach while Celia played with the dog ahead of us, I found myself telling Paul how I wanted Dr. Gregory and Dr. Bennet and Dr. Greenman, and the people who’d invented all those drugs, imprisoned for what they had done. I hadn’t said it like that to anyone before. Even to myself. And he took it in stride, saying that he understood.

He hands me the melon and I slide it into the bowl with the apple and the berries. “Really,” I say, “you should go and do whatever you need to, I’m fine.”

Seeing me infrequently, he is still solicitous of the grieving mother in a way that those nearer by no longer are, now that it’s getting on toward a year. For them, Michael’s death has been absorbed into the everyday.

I listen to the four of them moving about the house as I set the table and get started on the eggs. It’s the first time they have all been here together. I’ve been looking at the forecast all week, keeping my fingers crossed, and so far the prediction of a clear day is holding.

After Penny finally appears, we gather, and I wait until everyone has been served before helping myself to a little fruit. When Alec instructs me to eat more, Seth glances at me almost beseechingly, as if trying to apologize for my son. Until a few months ago, I’d never met a companion of Alec’s. He’s been unfailingly polite, and, like Paul lately, speaks to me as if I’m in imminent danger of falling apart. He seems terribly young, though he is only a few years younger than Alec. His mother sent the nicest card about Michael, which, having never met me, she certainly didn’t need to do, and I wrote her back, saying I hoped we would meet one day.

For so long I worried Alec would never find anyone, given the difficulties of that world, and how tightly wound he is. Perhaps if he’d had his father’s acceptance it would have calmed him. I’m just his mother. I can’t pick and choose among his qualities, which he has always known, and so my acceptance means less. But he and Seth have moved into a new apartment together now, and I think he is happier than he wants to admit.

He is so committed to his guilt. He needs Michael’s death to be his fault. It’s what keeps his brother alive for him—that connection. As though, as long as he still has a confession to make, Michael will be forced one day to return in order to hear it. Without that prospect, there is only an ending.

This is the thing I have discovered: Michael’s being gone doesn’t mean we stop trying to save him. The strain is less but it doesn’t vanish. It becomes part of our bewilderment, a kind of activity without motive, which provides its own strange continuity.

Penny and I listen as the four of them chat away about who’s coming this afternoon, about the music for the ceremony and their plans to go out with the friends who will still be in town tomorrow night. My wedding was more formal, of course. My mother composing and sending out the invitations, most of them to my parents’ friends. The formal dinner a week in advance for John’s parents to meet mine. Fittings with the dressmaker, a meeting with the minister, the rehearsal at the church. John was patient with all of it, and bristled less than I did at the strictures of the costumes and the production. But none of that is necessary today, and it would make no sense for Celia.

When the vans arrive, they all help unload things into the little backyard that I share with the condominium on the other side of the building. Luckily, the couple who live there don’t have much interest in gardening and were happy to hear that I did. There’s been only one growing season so far, but I have cleared a few things out and planted a bit. I wish it were bigger, especially today. I did offer to pay for something larger, but Celia said no, this was fine, just family and a few close friends, not a year of planning and expense. She did at least let me buy her dress, a knee-length, powder-blue silk with a white collar and cuffs, and a pair of shoes to match.

And the flowers—I was permitted to organize the flowers, which Penny helps me arrange on a table by the back fence and down along the four short rows of folding chairs. There should be more for me to do besides this, but it seems they have thought of everything.

Around noon Caleigh appears with rented speakers and a stereo, which she sets up on the little screened-in porch off the kitchen. She’s helped by Ben and Christine, with whom it’s been such a comfort to me to remain in touch this year. Caleigh wouldn’t let me pay for her ticket from Chicago, where she lives now, though I suppose there is no reason I should have, besides how glad I was when I heard Celia had invited her and that she would be coming. She looks much as she always has, elegant and slender, and as shy as ever. She said she would stay on with me for a few days, so we can go to the storage unit and sort through some of Michael’s records (she knows more about them than any of us). I’ve put aside whatever papers he had with her name on them, and a stack of their reparations pamphlets as well, for her to keep. She smiles her way nervously through introductions to the other guests as they gather in the yard.

In their one feint to tradition, Paul is kept from my bedroom while Celia puts on her dress and arranges her hair. I do what I can to help, buttoning her up from the back, fixing the clasp of her necklace, things I haven’t done for her since she was a child.

She is thirty-six, my daughter. By her age, I had given birth to all three of them. They were already running across the yard in Samoset. It’s not that I want that for her, or even that I want grandchildren, necessarily, though all my friends do have them by now. I simply want her to be happy.

“Do the earrings go?” she asks.

They are little pendants of blue glass suspended in silver wire, and I tell her they are perfect with her dress.

She looks not at me but at herself in the mirror.

“If your father were here, he’d know what to say. I’m sure I should be saying something to you—on a day like this. I should have said all sorts of things, over the years.”

She glances at me, then back to the glass. “There are probably things you could have said,” she allows.

Though she never wears makeup, today she’s decided to apply a pale lipstick, which she does slowly and exactly, before dabbing her lips with a tissue.

“You know what I used to hate?” she says. “The stockings at Christmas. I didn’t hate them. But they aggravated me. And the Advent calendar. All those little rituals, no matter how old we got. It seemed like you were avoiding reality, just being naive.”

“I’m sure I was, I—”

“Mom—listen: I don’t think that anymore. I see these women and their partners or husbands, people with kids. They’re falling apart—money, or mental health, or whatever it is—and they don’t know what to do. They’re desperate. You were trying to keep our world together. To keep things the same. I get that now.”