Justin Kramon (36 page)

“He’s been out of it because of the drugs,” Poplan said to Finny. Her voice sounded weak, thinner than Finny had ever heard it. “Thank you for coming. He was asking about you before.”

“How are you doing?” Finny asked Poplan.

“Exhausted,” Poplan said. “This is a lot to take.”

Finny reached over and gave Poplan’s hand a squeeze, and they both smiled sadly at each other.

“Do you need anything?” Finny asked.

“Just your company,” Poplan said. “How was your trip?”

Finny told her about her brother being cut off by the old woman with the glasses and the floppy hat, and Poplan laughed. They talked on about small things for a while, as Mr. Henckel napped. The light from the windows was fading, yet neither of them got up to turn on a switch. Mr. Henckel’s eyelids seemed held shut by the most tenuous pressure, and Finny felt as if the smallest movement might cause them to snap open like window shades. He was sweating now, his forehead wrinkling then falling slack. He seemed to be working over something in his sleep.

“Is he in pain?” Finny said.

“Not for long,” Poplan said. “Linda should be back soon.”

At around seven Linda showed up, a large dark-skinned black woman with a pink scar over her left eye. She was dressed in hospital scrubs, her hair in braids. She asked Poplan how Mr. Henckel was doing. Poplan introduced Finny, and when Finny extended her hand, Linda gave her a hug. She told Finny about what she was doing for Mr. Henckel—mostly controlling his pain—and said she’d be happy to answer any questions Finny had. But Finny didn’t have any. She decided to go for a walk while Linda adjusted Mr. Henckel’s medicine and cleaned him up for the night.

Finny walked to the old vineyard. She took the familiar path, down the hill, across the road, past the bird pond that was too dark to see at this hour. She hadn’t been back across this route since the summer when Earl left that first time, and now, as she walked between the vines that wrapped the wire trellis, she was struck by how small it all looked. She was a head taller than the green walls, and she could see all the way across the valley from where she stood. The countryside was quiet, the sky enormous, a gray-black ocean above. Lights were coming on in the farmhouses, like candles in a dark room. There is so much space in the world, Finny thought, hearing her own breath, looking across the wide valley, feeling a rush of loneliness like a cool breeze. She thought of that night years ago when she’d woken to the sound of pebbles tapping her window, Earl’s awful news, their sad goodbye. And the way that afterward she was left by herself to bear it, as you finally are with all bad news, while the world spins in its well-worn circles.

She was getting cold. Night was dropping its curtain over the valley, and Finny worried she would have trouble finding her way back, it had been so long. So she started off toward the little brown house. She tugged her thin black sweater more tightly around her, the one she’d been wearing yesterday when she got to Judith’s. It felt like so long ago.

Back at the house, Earl had arrived. He was sitting in the chair where Finny had sat, next to the IV drip. He got up and gave Finny a hug, thanked her for making the trip. He had a beard now, clipped short, and though he looked older, he was well-groomed and handsome in his way. His body had filled out in the years since Finny had last seen him, the youthful muscularity settling into a comfortable fleshiness—not fat, but solid. He seemed to stand straighter now in his checked sweater and faded khaki pants. He had the look of a tenured professor or a lawyer on his day off.

“It’s so good to see you,” he told Finny. “If only it wasn’t such a miserable occasion.”

“I know,” Finny said. “It’s a sad reunion.”

They both sat down next to Poplan. Linda was in the kitchen, reading the Bible and humming to herself. Later she would go to sleep in Earl’s bed, which Mr. Henckel had kept for him ever since he’d moved away. Poplan, Earl, and Finny stayed up through the night with Mr. Henckel as he slept in the living room. They’d switched on lamps, which provided only a dim light for the bedside. But it was enough. They could see Mr. Henckel with the sheet pulled up to his chin, looking small and scared as a child. Finny wanted to comfort him, to ease his sleep. They took turns holding the hand that wasn’t hooked up to the IV, and when he woke briefly, they whispered comforting things to him, about how much they loved him, how wonderful their memories of him were.

Finny said she’d never forget her piano lessons, that he was the kindest teacher she’d ever had. She said she’d always be grateful for the way he’d welcomed her into his home. He mumbled something back about the coffeepot being warm for her. Earl talked about what a loving father Mr. Henckel had been, how close he’d always felt to him, how lucky he was to have been taken care of so well. He said he knew he was always loved, and he had such great respect for what his father had made of a difficult situation. Poplan simply said that her years with Mr. Henckel were the best and most meaningful of her life. She kissed him on his damp forehead and then wiped it with his handkerchief, the way Mr. Henckel used to after his confessions. They told him all the things they’d never found the right moment or taken the time to say. It was like a bedtime story for Mr. Henckel, as his eyelids began to close. Or like a suitcase they were packing for the journey ahead of him.

Toward morning he woke up. He seemed more lively and alert than he had during the night, though when he spoke, his speech was slurred. “Goff,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Poplan said. “What?”

“Goff. Ee.”

Earl understood. He went to the kitchen and prepared the coffee, setting the silver pot on the silver tray and then bringing it to the bedside. He poured the coffee into the china cups, and they each clinked their cup against Mr. Henckel’s one last time. Mr. Henckel drank his thirstily. Finny distributed the milk and the sugar, stirring it with the little silver spoon, and they all enjoyed a brief coffee party together, like the old days, until Mr. Henckel lost his strength and spilled coffee on himself. Poplan was worried he’d been burnt, but he assured her he was fine, that coffee could never harm him.

“And one more. Thing,” Mr. Henckel said, between heavy breaths, as if he’d just run up a flight of stairs. Finny could tell he was still dazed from the morphine, by the way his eyes wandered the room, yet the coffee seemed to have given him strength for this request.

“What is it?” Poplan asked him in her new, softer voice. “Can I get you something, sweetheart?”

Mr. Henckel shook his head slowly. He looked at Earl. “I wanna tell you,” he said to his son, his tongue still sluggish. He swallowed to moisten his throat. “That I always thought. You and Finny were good for each other.”

And with that, he fell asleep, for what would turn out to be the last time. In the final hours Poplan lay in bed with him, and held him as he slept.

Chapter
34
Finny and Earl Have a Chance to Catch Up

Fortunately, Linda was there to take care of everything. She liked Poplan, and was happy to help. Poplan wasn’t up to all the practical chores she normally would have taken charge of. Linda made the calls, arranged for the paperwork and talked to the funeral home. It ended up that she called Finny’s old friends, the Haberdashers, and through the receiver Finny could hear when Mr. Haberdasher let loose a giant sneeze and his wife in her pickled voice yelled, “Holy Christ, you blew my head off!” Linda took the phone away from her ear for a second, then got back on and in a polite, assured way explained that Mr. Henckel was to be cremated.

Since Mr. Henckel’s family had disowned him, and he hadn’t talked to any of them for years, and his only friends were the kids he taught, they decided it was best not to have a formal service. They took the ashes back to the little brown house, and Finny played a few bars of a piece she remembered from her piano lessons. Earl read a page he’d written about his father’s life, including Mr. Henckel’s performing days and his time as a teacher. Poplan talked about how rich their life had been together, how she loved nothing more than to see him play the piano, how fulfilling their charity work had been. Poplan had informed Mr. Henckel’s students about his death, and over the course of the afternoon, a number of them stopped by to pay their respects.

And then, because they wanted to lend some sense of finality to their ceremony, they decided to pour the ashes out of the bag, into the silver coffeepot. Earl did it, since he had the steadiest hands, and they listened to the sand raining on the bottom of the pot. Then Poplan said she would keep the pot on the piano, for as long as she stayed in the house. She didn’t plan to be going anywhere soon. She would keep up the after-school program, and maybe go back to working at a school as well. Earl was going to stay with her for a few days, until she was ready to be on her own. Having Mr. Henckel’s remains in the house with her, she said, would help her feel less lonely.

Earl offered to drive Finny to the airport in Mr. Henckel’s car, a brown station wagon, though not the same one he had driven when Finny was a child. Finny had taken two days off work and couldn’t afford to leave her kids with a sub any longer since it was the end of the school year. So she said goodbye to Poplan and that she hoped Poplan would come visit her in Boston when she felt up to it. They hugged, and Poplan thanked Finny for coming all this way to be with them.

“I’d always known you’d turn out to be a special person,” Poplan said.

“I wouldn’t have been anything without you and Mr. Henckel,” Finny said.

Then she and Earl got into the car and started off toward the airport.

Finny and Earl hadn’t said anything to each other about their lives for the entire three days they’d been together, since all their attention had been focused on Mr. Henckel, and now Finny experienced that old feeling of having too much to say to Earl, not knowing where to begin. Having spent such an intense couple of days with him, Finny didn’t even feel angry or disappointed with Earl now; she simply wanted to talk, to open herself up to someone she could trust, who knew her. It was Wednesday evening, and she was booked on the last flight from BWI to Boston. She would get in around ten o’clock.

Earl steered them onto the paved tongue of the expressway ramp. He was saying something about Air France and American Airlines, how the food was better on one but the other was more punctual, but Finny couldn’t still her mind for long enough to take it in. The car’s wheels thumped little heartbeats over the grooves in the road. The stadium lights above the highway were lit, charging the night sky with an electric brightness. As they merged onto the road, Finny saw that it was crowded with the red and yellow cat eyes of other cars. The sheer number of other people was a surprise to Finny, after seeing so few people in Mr. Henckel’s house, and Judith’s before that. But here were other families, other lives, other stories. For a second, Finny was overwhelmed by the multitude of destinations, of paths that crossed and recrossed, journeys beginning or coming to an end.

“I wish we had more time to catch up,” Earl said. His face had a raw, windburned look from all the crying he’d been doing the last couple days. “I know this just isn’t the right time.”

“I do, too,” Finny said. “I mean, I wish we had a few minutes to chat.”

“Are things going well?”

“Pretty well.” She felt as if she should say something to lighten the mood between them, there’d been so much heaviness the last couple days, so she told Earl, “The other day one of my kids said he knew the ‘three baddest words in the world.’”

“What are they?” Earl asked.

“Crap, ass, sass,”
Finny said, “according to Gabe. I’m not sure how
sass
got in there.”

Earl laughed. Finny could tell he was relieved to hear something funny. “Sass is not always a bad thing,” he said, glancing at Finny. “It really could go either way.”

“So do you think your mom will want to hear about your dad?” Finny asked Earl.

“Um,” he said, and swallowed. “My mom passed away, Finny.”

“I—” Finny began, but couldn’t finish the thought. “I’m sorry, Earl. What happened?”

“She took pills,” Earl said. “Last winter. It was all really sad. But it was a long time coming. She never really got her head above water. In the end, even having me there didn’t make a difference. There was nothing I could do.”

Why didn’t you tell me?
Finny almost asked Earl. But then she recalled sitting with her brother in the hospital cafeteria, after her mother died, and deciding not to share her own news with Earl. She couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t the kind of thing you called someone up to report when you hadn’t seen the person in years.

So Finny said, “My mom died, too. Last summer. Heart disease.”

“I’m really sorry,” Earl said, glancing over at Finny again. She noticed his eyes had a way of creasing in the corners. She could tell he was sad for her. Earl never had to fake his sympathy. If anything, he felt too much.

“We’re a pretty cheerful crowd,” Finny said.

Earl let out a long breath. Again he seemed much older to Finny. “You know, I keep telling myself it’s part of life,” he said. “But that doesn’t really help. It doesn’t make it any easier.” He shook his head. He seemed to be grieving over more than just his own losses.

“You never think about this part when you’re younger,” Finny said. “It’s natural to ignore it. You’re too caught up in the fun. But it’s like you can’t have one without the other.”

“Beginnings and endings,” Earl said.

But Finny felt they’d gone far enough down this road. “Anyway,” she said, “are you planning to keep your mother’s place, or did you decide to move?” She wanted to steer them away from these gloomy subjects.

“I’m going to move,” Earl said. “The only reason I stayed was that I was finishing up some writing and editing. I actually have a book coming out.”

“Wow. That’s terrific news, Earl.” She really was excited for him, knowing how hard he’d worked for it. “Did your dad know?”

Earl nodded, pressed his lips together. “He got to read the stories this year. He said some nice things.” Earl’s voice was flat as he reported this news about his life. Finny could tell he was depressed, and as always, her heart leapt toward him. She had to restrain herself from reaching out to touch him.