Michael Tolliver Lives (25 page)

Mrs. Langston,
I thought.
Mrs. Langston and her fucking hedges.

“I’ll speak to him,” I said.

Brian and Shawna joined us. We didn’t hug—somehow it wasn’t the right thing.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I told them.

Brian nodded. “You too.”

“Are we allowed to go in?” Ben asked.

“Sure,” said Shawna. “It just got kinda crowded in there.”

I nodded a greeting to Selina ( Jake’s other flatmate, the investment counselor, a Korean-Canadian) as Ben and I entered the room. Selina returned the nod. I’d met her maybe three times at the most, but her total devotion to Anna was painfully apparent.

Anna was lying flat on the bed with her eyes closed, robbed of her usual color by a hospital gown and a respirator. I know you’re supposed to talk to people in comas, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. It wasn’t like Anna at all. There was nothing to connect with but the wheezing of the machinery and the grim drizzle of the rain against the window.

Don’t blame the rain,
I told myself.
Without it you wouldn’t even be here.

Back in the corridor, I had a few moments alone with Jake.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“A few hours. I dunno.”

“You looked exhausted. Why don’t you go home?”

“I can’t, boss.”

“Yes, you can. We’ve got cell phones. I can take it from here.”

“What am I gonna do at home?” (That pretty much answered my question about Connor.)

“The three of you should go,” I told him. “Selina and Marguerite both look beat…and we’re gonna have to do this in shifts. Get some rest and come relieve me later.”

“But, what if—?”

“You’ve done everything right, Jake.” I laid my arm across his shoulders. I knew he wouldn’t start crying again. He was being a man about it.

“I was responsible for her,” he said quietly.

“No, you weren’t. She was. And that’s the way she wanted it…
wants
it. There was no way in the world to know this would happen.”

He seemed to get that I meant this.

“Ben and I were ready for a red-eye,” I added, “so now we’re just doing it somewhere else. Besides, somebody’s gotta check on Notch.”

This hadn’t occurred to him. “Fuck,” he said softly.

“There…you see?” I cajoled him with a look. “C’mon, sport. I just blew off my mother’s death. Help me make it mean something.”

He put his hand on my knee and shook it. “I’ll check with the gals. Marguerite’s got a class in the morning. She could use the sleep.” He rose to his feet in full bear-cub mode.

“How were Mrs. Langston and her hedges?” I asked.

“A bitch,” he replied.

I chuckled. “Same as it ever was.”

“Hey…it’s the job.”

I was touched by the pride in his voice. He reminded me of me in my early days at the nursery.

Jake added, as an afterthought, “I bet even ol’ Capability had to deal with some crabby old Lady Somebody-or-Other.”

I’d recently told Jake about Capability Brown, the eighteenth-century landscape designer who persuaded the British aristocracy to tear out their formal gardens in favor of clumps of trees and free-form lakes. Jake, to my professorial delight, had adopted him as a hero.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “He probably did.”

He gave me a little salute.

“I’ll call you,” I said. “If there’s any change at all.”

An hour later, nothing had changed. Brian and Ben went out to scout for food, leaving Shawna and me alone. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt—and without her usual makeup—so she looked eerily young. I could still see the girl on Heart’s Desire Beach.

“Do you think she
knew,
Mouse?”

“What?”

“That this was gonna happen. Giving me her purse and all.”

I told her what Anna had said to me at the top of the de Young tower, explaining that I’d taken it largely as a sign of her general preparedness. “But she’s very intuitive, as you know. She knew the very moment her mother died—in Nevada.”

“Really?”

“And Edgar Halcyon, too.”

“Her big romance, you mean?”

I nodded. “We were all at her Christmas party on Barbary Lane…and she was out in the courtyard at one point…and she sort of…felt him leave.”

“She told you this?”

“Yeah. Not until much later, but…yeah.”

“That sounds more psychic than intuitive.”

“She wouldn’t call it that. It’s more like…a connectedness. She doesn’t talk to the dead or anything like that. She just feels it when…life ends.”

I’d struck a more somber note than I’d intended, and a shadow fell across Shawna’s face. I made a clumsy effort at changing the subject.

“When’s your book coming out? Have you heard from your publishers?”

She rolled her eyes. “The ass monkeys want me to change the ending.”

“Oh?”

“Can you believe that? I ended with a chapter on paraplegic sex…and they thought that was—get this—too downbeat.”

I told her, tactfully, I could sort of see their point.

“C’mon, Mouse…it’s totally hopeful in a book about sex. It means we all get a shot at getting laid. It’s about as upbeat as you can get.”

Her eyes were so dark and soulful without the distraction of makeup. Like Natalie Wood’s eyes (or Natalie Port-man’s, if you must). I suddenly felt so blessed to have known her all these years. She was leaving me, too, I realized, and that would sting a little.

“So,” I told her, smiling, “tell the ass monkeys how you feel about it.”

“I have. Believe me.”

“What is it they say? The only difference between comedy and tragedy is where you end the story?”

“Who always says that?”

“I dunno. Somebody.” My heart grew leaden again. I sighed and gazed down the empty hallway toward the elevator. “Where will they find food this time of night?”

“Safeway, I think.”

“Ah.” I smiled at her rather pathetically. “You won’t have that problem in New York.”

“No…I guess not.”

A long silence.

“Should I be leaving?” she asked.

I took her hand. “It’s your dream, babycakes.”

“Yeah…but…I can write anywhere, and…Dad’s just…coming apart at the seams.”

“That’s not your problem. It’s not even about you.”

She blinked at me for a moment, apparently understanding, then turned her gaze back toward Anna’s room. Even from here you could hear the sighing of the respirator.

“This sucks so bad,” she said.

The guys brought us pizza—lukewarm and oily and curiously satisfying. The four of us consumed it tribally in a nook next to the nurses’ station.

Then Brian asked me: “Is this déjà vu for you?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “A little.”

“Why?” asked Ben.

“This is where Michael was laid up back in…’77, was it?”

“It was one floor up, actually, but the view was the same.”

Shawna wiped her mouth, remembering the story. “The thing with the snooty-sounding name.”

“Guillain-Barré,” I said, smiling. I had come down with this esoteric syndrome literally overnight and had recovered in a matter of months. In between I was almost totally paralyzed. Jon—my lover, the gynecologist—was working at St. Sebastian’s at the time and would stop by on his rounds, bringing his Norse god face into my limited line of vision. Five years later AIDS would turn the tables. Jon died here in 1982, blind and terrified.

I knew not to go there now.

Ben’s face lit up. “Then this was where you came out!” (It’s amazing, really, how well Ben remembers my stories. I’m not nearly as good about remembering his.)

“What do you mean?” asked Shawna.

“He wrote his parents from here,” said Brian. “Told ’em he was gay.”

Shawna turned to me. “But you were paralyzed.”

“I dictated it.”

Brian laughed. We all did, in fact. But back then I’d thought I was going to die in this place. I thought the paralysis would reach my lungs and that would be it; there’d be no other chance to say who I was. I remember the butterfly kite that Anna hung on the wall across from my bed. And I remember the people around the bed the day I wrote the letter—Anna and Mona and Brian and Mary Ann—my “logical” family at 28 Barbary Lane.

“It was a fucking
long
letter, too,” I said, grinning. “Thank God Mary Ann knew shorthand.”

Her name hung in the air like an unanswered question.

Shawna avoided eye contact with her father by staring down at the pizza box. Ben shot a glance at me, then gazed into the distance. Brian cleared his throat and stood up.

“Too many sodas,” he said, heading off to the bathroom.

Once he was out of earshot, Shawna murmured, “Shit,” beneath her breath.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” said Ben.

Brian was gone for at least ten minutes. When he returned his face looked ravaged from crying. Standing, he addressed the three of us as a body.

“Sorry, guys.”

“No problem,” said Ben.

“We have to call her,” said Brian. “We can’t let this happen without her.”

26

Remembered Perfume

Y
ou try it sometime. You try finding a fifty-five-year-old housewife from Darien, Connecticut, whom you haven’t talked to for years. That place is a hotbed of cautious white people. It’s where they shot
The Stepford Wives,
you know. Both versions of it.

Mary Ann had given me her number on 9/11, but it hadn’t worked since the invasion of Iraq. Shawna had a more recent number, but, typically, she’d mislaid it. My only option was to sweet-talk the nurse (he didn’t require much) into letting me use his computer.

I tried Googling Mary Ann’s husband to no avail. There was plenty of stuff about his former business—and even a mention of his wife—but no phone numbers, of course.

Then I remembered Mary Ann’s stepson, the Explorer Scout whose troop ran Darien’s ambulance service. Their website provided a phone number, so I called and got a recording: a croaky-voiced kid telling you to call 911 and not the Explorer post if this is “an actual emergency.” I just wanted the Explorer post, so I left a message: “If anyone in the post knows Robbie Caruthers, please tell him to tell his stepmom that Anna Madrigal is…very ill. This is extremely important. Thank you very much. The number she should call is…”

The pizza made us sleepy, so we slept intermittently, slumped against one another outside Anna’s room. In the pearly-gray hour before dawn I took my cell phone to another wing of the hospital and called Irwin at home in Orlando.

“Hey, bro,” he said.

“Hope I’m not too early.”

“Nah. Lenore’s up and fixin’ biscuits. You on the ground?”

“No…well, yeah, but…I’m still in San Francisco…”…
three…two…one…

“…I won’t be coming back, Irwin. My friend Anna has had a heart attack, and…I have to be with her. I’m sorry.”

A long silence, and then: “Mama’s got two days at the most, Mikey.”

“I know that, Irwin.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do, Irwin. Anna is family to me.”

“More than your mama?”

I took a breath and said it: “If I have to choose…yes.”

Irwin sighed audibly. “Your old landlady, right? The one with the—”

“Can she talk on the phone?”

“Who? Mama?”

“Yes.”

“No way.”

“Then I need you to help me, Irwin. I need you to tell Mama that I love her and I wish I could be there and…whatever she needs to hear…and I want you to tell her, if you haven’t already, that I’m glad she blabbed about Papa. Tell her: ‘Good for you, Mama.’ Tell her I’m proud of her. Tell her I’m glad she came out.”

“Okay. That’s awful long but—”

“How is Sumter doing around all this?”

“He’s holdin’ up. He’s a tough little soldier underneath.”

“I know,” I said, bristling at his implication. “He’s also a sweet gay kid who needs your support.”

“That’s not funny, Mikey.”

“I’m not trying—”

“How could you possibly know that, anyway?”

“How could you possibly
not
know it?”

Silence.

“No boot camps, Irwin. And no more snide remarks. That’s all I’m saying. Let him be who he is. Don’t deal with this the way Papa did.”

The invocation of our father brought even more silence, but I think I got through to him. I was holding the cards now; Irwin had no choice but to listen.

“Will you at least come for the funeral?” he asked.

“Depends on how soon it happens, I guess.”

“It won’t look right if you don’t.”

“I don’t care how it looks.”

“Right.”

“I’ll try to be there, though. I really will.”

I could picture myself at a funeral ceremony—two, three, maybe four days hence—but it wasn’t being held at a memorial park in Orlando. I was climbing the wooden stairway at the entrance to Barbary Lane, holding tight to Anna’s favorite vase (the Chinese ginger jar she kept on her dresser). There were at least a half-dozen people with me, so we would have to make it simple and quick. The house had been severely remodeled and was a single-family dwelling these days—a young developer and his PR woman wife, both chums of Governor Schwarzenegger. I knew they wouldn’t cotton to the notion of a foreign substance being sprinkled in their garden.

“I hope we’ll see you,” said Irwin.

“I hope so, too,” I replied.

Shortly after ten that morning, Jake and Selina showed up to relieve the watch. Brian and Shawna headed off in their separate directions, and Ben and I went home. Anna’s condition had remained unchanged, and I was grateful, frankly, to get the smell of the hospital out of my head. I was beginning to feel a familiar tightening in my chest—a function of my meds, probably, or anxiety, or a combination of the two. It happens sometimes, I don’t know why. I was ready to breathe some clean morning air and take a shower and stretch out on the bed for a few hours. Ben was, too.

It felt odd hauling our luggage back into the house. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since we’d packed those bags. After showering, we unpacked just enough to brush our teeth, then crawled under clean sheets together.