Last Rites (32 page)

“Truman,” she started again, “please let me go. We can talk. I know you’re upset about Lucy. We all are.”

“Don’t fucking lie!” Truman said a little louder, but still not loud enough to get Will’s attention, Rachel thought. He slammed her hand into the table as he said this and tightened his grip on her shoulder. “You feel nothing for her! Nothing! You people don’t know how to feel anything but hate and fear!”

Rachel had never heard cursing from Truman before, and thought it was a pretty sure sign this wasn’t going to end well. She expected a tearing, searing pain in her arm at any moment, then the hot, wet blood everywhere, covering everything in defeat and despair. Then she’d scream, Will would come running in and shoot Truman in the head, then a couple days of agony, and then—well, whatever came after that. Stupid oblivion or ravenous madness or just the sad boredom she’d seen in Truman. Whichever it was going to be, it filled her with a frantic longing to live, to whimper and sob and beg for her life.

But Rachel also had that nearly unavoidable reaction a person has when someone else gets angry, especially if that anger is at least partly misplaced: her own wrath and indignation rose in response. “I couldn’t fucking help it!” she said in a hoarse voice—and although she was sniffling as the words came out, they sounded more infuriated than pleading. “She scared me. She scared me all the time—I can’t help that. But I still feel bad for what happened to her. Don’t fucking tell me I don’t. You can kill me now if you’re that mad at me, Truman, but don’t tell me how I feel, or think you know everything.”

They again paused, with Rachel’s fast, shallow breathing the only sound in the room. Truman’s grip relaxed somewhat, but he did not let go of her. “All right,” he said more quietly. “She was much faster than me, you know.”

“I know, Truman. But why are you telling me this? Why did you grab me?”

“To show you. She could’ve killed you anytime. And she wanted to. All the time. Every day.”

“Yes, I know. That’s why I was always scared of her.”

“No, you still don’t understand.” He let go of her arm finally. “I’m not explaining it right.”

Rachel slowly pulled her arm back, rubbing her wrist. Now that the danger was past, she was more sick and disgusted with herself, and more in awe of Truman’s restraint, even in the midst of his maddening grief. She thought how people always want to apologize without it costing them anything, and how she’d come down here with the same false, cheap assumption. Then for a moment it looked like her fuck-up might cost her something—and that made her feel shocked and scared? How could she even think of killing poor Truman, when he’d done nothing but lash out against her callousness and unfairness?

Part of her wanted to get as far from Truman as possible at that moment, but the better, less rational, more insistent part prevailed. “Scoot down,” she said.

“What? Oh.” Truman moved down the bench.

Rachel sat beside him—close, with her shoulder touching his. She remembered vividly when her dad had died—it was before all this craziness, when death was just loss and emptiness and pain, when it was confusing for those reasons, and without any of the mess they had now. She remembered how you didn’t—you couldn’t—really talk about it, but you just needed someone close, a body touching yours, and that was enough, even though it wasn’t really enough and you still hurt so much inside you thought you’d die yourself. But words would’ve just made it worse, putting your empty head more at odds with your overfull heart and tearing you apart even more inside. So they sat there for what seemed a long time without speaking.

“Do you want to try to explain it to me some more?” Rachel finally asked. “I know I’m not good at stuff like that, but I’ll try to understand.”

Truman took a deep breath. “Thank you for trying. I was saying how badly she wanted to hurt you. Not wanted, like it was something she chose or found pleasurable. It was more of a need, a longing. She’d tell me that on so many nights, how it gnawed at her inside. And we’d talk about it, and every morning she’d tell me how she wasn’t going to hurt you. She’d decided not to and she wouldn’t, no matter what. Don’t you see how hard it was for her?”

Rachel leaned more of her weight against him. “I—I guess I sort of wondered if that’s what was going on in her head. I didn’t know for sure. And then I’d see her and mostly I’d feel frightened. I’m sorry.”

“She was better than you thought. Better than you deserved.” Rachel heard the bitterness in those final words, though it didn’t make her anxious that Truman might attack again. No, he’d gotten to that point where a person can express his resentment and hurt, even to the person who’s wronged him, without it boiling over into rage. He presented it now to Rachel, not to intimidate or blame her, but to ask her help in healing it.

“I’m sorry, Truman. I don’t know what else to say. She’s gone and I can’t trade places with her and I can’t make it up to her.”

Truman finally turned toward her and they looked in one another’s eyes. His were brown and always looked a little sad, though now their anguish gave them the kind of vitality and urgency that Rachel had never seen in another dead person’s eye—with the possible exception of Lucy’s ethereal blue orb. But that had been different, Rachel thought as she stared at Truman’s soulful gaze: Lucy’s eye had looked so alive because it seemed so disconnected from her broken, animal body. Truman’s eyes right now seemed alive because they knew and felt so intensely the pain of his beloved’s death and his own grief.

“No,” he said. “You can’t make it up to her, and you needn’t be sorry. She died for you, and it doesn’t matter if I think you deserve it—she thought you did. Now do you understand why she did it?”

Rachel blinked twice. Truman’s words seemed right at the edge of making sense, like a riddle she had to answer without him coming out and saying what it meant, for that would ruin everything. And the revelation he was trying to convey to her called for surrender more than reason, so Rachel bowed her head slightly, looking down. “I didn’t know she felt that way,” she whispered. “I didn’t know she could.”

“She could. She did. She loved you, in her way. She didn’t say it, but she showed it. And now you have to live with that. It’s hard.”

Rachel felt Truman’s fingers in her hair, just lightly brushing it—barely touching it, really. She looked back up.

“I’m sorry I frightened you before,” he said. “That was wrong of me. I did it deliberately, too, knowing it was wrong. She would never have done something as mean and bad as that. She was better than all of us. That’s what I was trying to explain before.”

Rachel nodded. “Yes. Thank you for showing me.”

“I hope you’ll tell everyone you meet about her.”

“What? Well, yes—but you can too. You were closer to her.”

“Yes, but you people don’t listen to people like me very much. So I leave it to you.”

“All right. I’ll tell people everywhere about her.”

Truman turned and rose from the table. “Rachel,” he said, “I think we’re going out into more open water. Could you ask Will to look for an island? I’d like to bury her there, away from other people.”

Rachel stood. “Of course, Truman, if that’s what you want.”

“Thank you.”

Truman slowly shuffled around, picking up books, looking at them, and arranging them into two piles on the table. Rachel watched him a moment before going up on deck. Will was at the wheel, but she ignored him, going instead to the tightly-wrapped bundle off to the side. Rachel knelt down on the deck, next to where the poor woman’s head must be, under the sheets. Rachel put her hands on the fabric, letting them settle around the contours of her nose, brow, and cheeks. She closed her eyes and pictured Lucy’s savage beauty and all the powerful mystery behind it.

“You okay, Rach?” she heard Will ask.

“Yeah,” she replied. “Just kind of thinking about her. Wondering about stuff. Feeling sad and grateful and happy all at the same time.” Rachel didn’t think Will would quite understand what she and Truman had talked about—and she was definitely never going to tell him about the arm-grabbing, no matter what—but her description now was accurate, as far as it went. She’d never get over how sleeping with someone meant there were so many things you didn’t have to explain, things you could just take for granted, even as that intimacy precluded so many other topics of conversation. Just some more funny stuff to consider, but it gave her a hint of a smile as she sat there holding the face of the one who had saved them.

“Oh.” Pause. “How’s Truman?”

“He’s fine. He wants you to find an island to bury her on.”

“That’s good. I was worried about what to do with her. You know—a dead body, one that’s all the way dead. You can’t just let it sit around forever.”

Rachel inhaled deeply. There was no odor, just the freshest, clearest air she could imagine. “She won’t smell, don’t worry.”

“Well, if you say so. I still can’t believe how fast she was, how she saved us from those jerks.”

Rachel leaned down, bringing her forehead closer to the shattered, covered shape before her. “I believe it,” she said, and then kept mouthing the first two words silently, over and over.

“Please, Truman, please come with us.”

Truman looked at Rachel’s tear-streaked face as she knelt next to him. She’d been pleading this way for some time, long after Will had given up and loaded the shovels back into the rowboat. She looked prettier than ever. Thinking of the years ahead, sitting on the island alone, Truman considered how feminine beauty might be the one thing he’d miss. Nothing else had much savor anymore for him. All the rest of human interaction or the natural world had faded to a grey, undifferentiated mass of boredom and pain when he’d held Lucy’s sweet, shattered head in his hands. But Lucy’s beauty, along with that of all the rest of her sex, remained as scintillating and varied as ever, in all its many forms.

Rachel’s attractiveness was so different from Lucy’s, or Ramona’s for that matter—cherubic, wet, overflowing with emotion and with all the strength and weakness of her mortality. It was probably quite different from his wife’s charms, if he could remember her. Truman felt so bad for having frightened Rachel. She didn’t deserve that. She was young and smart and only averagely selfish: someone like that deserved just a little self-reproach, not a nasty, violent threat from someone who was just as selfish and weak as she was. He’d make that one of the things he contemplated in his exile—his prideful, wicked torment of her.

“No, Rachel,” he said quietly. “I told you—I don’t think we should be around each other so much, living and dead people. It’s not right. Maybe for Lucy, she could, but she was stronger than me. She loved and hated you all so much more, and that sustained her somehow. Me—I just feel angry around living people, now that she’s gone. I blame them. They make me feel sick inside, to be frank.”

Rachel collapsed in deeper sobs that separated her words from one another and threatened to make her hyperventilate. Such frail things, these living humans: a little too much or too little air and they’d pass out.

“Why—won’t—you—forgive—me?” Rachel trailed off into an inarticulate wail that subsided into a moan.

Her head was down, so she couldn’t see Truman smiling at her as he ran his hand through her hair—not lightly this time, but luxuriating in the sensuous, thick curls as they snaked around his dry, stiff fingers. She didn’t flinch at all, didn’t show any sign of mistrust, even after how he’d acted before. He would make that another object of thought and analysis in the days to come—how fully and freely these people could forgive, even forget. It was another quality he knew he didn’t share, as much as he longed to.

“I forgive you, Rachel,” he whispered. “Don’t cry. And you hardly need my forgiveness. But I know how I feel. I know how she felt too. With her, everything came up from so deep inside, as though it started in her stomach. Her feelings had power and authority—over herself, over everyone. Mine don’t. They just come from my head, and that’s too weak and muddled to stand all the pain and passion that you people bring. But I want you to be happy. I do. She did. So be happy, Rachel, and don’t cry.”

She looked up, her face florid from the weeping. “Won’t there be storms? This island’s so tiny—you’ll be swept away. Aren’t there hurricanes around here, Will?”

Truman looked at Will. He was so charming too, in his way. He’d tried to reason with Truman before, but once he decided it was useless, he just stopped, unlike Rachel. No emotional appeal, no begging. Just rational discourse that came to a measured end when it was no longer useful. Truman wouldn’t need to consider Will and his way of thinking so much, because it was so close to his own, but he’d ponder his generous, simple soul, as well as the mystery that had brought them together, all those months ago.

“I think so,” Will said. “We’ve come pretty far south.”

Truman looked over his head at the branches of the tree above him. He had no idea what kind it was, but it had a tall, thick trunk, even though its branches didn’t spread out too far. “This tree looks old,” he said. “It didn’t get swept away. I’ll hold on to it if I have to. I’ll share its fate.”

“What will you do, just sitting here?” Rachel sniffed. Truman was glad she’d calmed down.

He patted the large duffle bag of books next to him. “I have my books. I haven’t really felt like reading them since she died, but I think one day I might.”