Shaking out the Dead (26 page)

He forgot his feet and took the book back to his mattress and sat with it on his lap. He opened the cover and turned the pages slowly. He knew Tatum's Rachael story, but he'd never seen the book. The old pictures were interesting, but the narratives beside them did not impress him much. A pen marked the page where Tatum belonged, and there was a blank space where her picture should have been. He touched the space with his fingers. He picked up the pen that was tucked into the seam of the book. Where Tatum's picture should have been, he started to sketch. It was an irresistible impulse, and he didn't pause to question it.

He sketched out her torso. He drew the scar. A place cut open. A place sealed closed. He drew a breast, a simple curve of specificity. Paris stayed with the moment. Then he hogged the space beyond that allotted to Tatum, his drawing reaching down, claiming much of Rachael's space below it and encompassing her baby picture. At first, the motion of his hands, the focus, and the appearance of lines, curves, and shading served to ease a tension that stretched across his shoulders and neck. It was an overdue exhale, moving out measuredly. But as the birds outside above the window wells worked themselves into a frenzy, an anxiety beset him, causing him to adjust and readjust his shoulders as he worked, as though he couldn't get them to sit quite right on his body. He felt pressure as he worked on Tatum's eyes. A pressure to act. To escape. His feet steamed.

The arrival of the day cast a green glow throughout the basement. Paris closed the book's cover. He flopped backward on his mattress, fully clothed. He had done it again. Violated her space. Yet, as he lay there, he seemed to grow lighter, as though he were not guilty at all and was, in fact, absolved.



Facts are products of evidence, and evidence exists only in the past. So facts are products of the past. Making decisions based on them, and using them to predict the future, is to look into an old-news crystal ball. When a choice is made based on the facts, and then made again and again, a layered reality is created. Fact stacked on fact. Past stacked on past.

There is fact, and there is hope. Choices are rooted in one or the other. Tatum knew this. She'd chosen different paths at different times. She'd hung in there out of hope. She'd split, knowing the facts. Sometimes, she just four-wheeled it, left both paths, and tossed pills down her throat. Maybe it didn't really matter which path she chose? So far, they had all led to the same place.

Outside her kitchen window, a black-capped chickadee sang its two-note song. Tatum lifted her head in the direction of the sound. She hadn't slept. Hadn't even been to bed. She paced the kitchen in her stocking feet, carrying the slip of paper with Lee's phone number on it. She needed to call him to get insurance information for the hospital. But for Rachael's sake, she knew she needed to ask for more. The world to which she had brought Rachael could crumble beneath her. Paris might not be there next time to stop the blood and tears. And Tatum knew that her own shame, if not Geneva's exasperation, would dig an ever-widening gulf between the two doors across the hall from each other. Rachael could well end up collateral damage. She needed insurance in more ways than one.

Tatum fingered the piece of paper. The phone number was for Lee's answering service. He was in New Jersey currently, setting up a satellite office for his company. Something to do with pharmaceuticals. He was two hours ahead, and she thought she might catch him before he went to work. She would get nowhere with a lecture, she knew, or anything with even a whiff of criticism. He had to be seduced, flattered. She fanned herself with the phone number, considering what to say. She looked into her living room and noted the wilting plants, signs of her neglect, reminding her of the to-do list that never got done. Track down old work contacts. Schedule a mammogram. Why did uphill tend to be a battle while downhill tended to snowball? Momentum and the laws of physics had a way of taking sides.

She picked up the phone and dialed Lee's number. She left her message.

“There's been a little accident. Everything is fine. Two little stitches is all. I just need some insurance information for the hospital.” Tatum hesitated. “Lee,” she said, “try to see yourself through Rachael's eyes. You're important to her. Why don't you give her a call and check up on her? I think it would help. Okay. Thanks.”

It was the best, and least, she could do. A sorry commentary that the two were one and the same.

She hung up the phone. There was still an hour, maybe two, before Rachael woke. Tatum went to her own bedroom and lay down on top of the bedspread. She closed her eyes. Hope and fact. She felt she was stuck between the two. But she was not stuck. Nothing stands still. She just couldn't detect her own deeper currents, her trajectory, toward hope. She was advancing toward it, but she was walking backward, mistaking what was before her eyes for the ground beneath the backward stepping heel, choosing the lift and press of her step based on terrains already traversed.

Exhaustion pressed her to the mattress. Her body seemed to sink. As she drifted off, she became aware of a presence. Not one newly arrived but one just noticed. Margaret. Not a ghost, Tatum knew, but a phantom. A phantom limb. Not really there and yet part of her.

Tatum rolled to her side and opened her eyes. A slip of something on the other pillow caught her attention. She reached out and picked it up. She rolled to her back and squinted. Right there in her hand, it was Vincent.



Lee couldn't tell you his story because he couldn't see it. That is why he moved from face to face looking for it. The approval. The need. He required both. The need was necessary because he knew the approval was based on an illusion. But all this occurred beneath the veil of the subconscious. Unaware that he was so afflicted, Lee existed at the whim of physics.

The physicists say that reality takes shape at the pleasure of perception. Look into a teeming field of particles and they organize within the parameters of the stencils the one looking projects.
There it is
, one thinks, for it is obvious and solid. But the looker turns, and it shimmers away. Attention, alone, sustains it. Sustained him. Outside eyes turned upon him and he'd freeze frame, lit up in accordance to their hopes and fears. Was what they saw him, in part, at the least? Or was it merely bits and pieces parsed out from a grand whole, broken mirror images of other people's minds?

Alive, Margaret had an omnipresent eye on Lee. An eye
in
him, thinking him into being. When Lee didn't like what the eye saw, he found Corrina. Then he made the eye look at what Corrina saw. But when Margaret died, the eye closed. The notion of her ghost, though disembodied as the eye, offered no comfort. Ghosts don't tell stories. Ghosts are stories. Then, Corrina left. There had been no breakup. No big talk. Lee remembered something Corrina had told him early in their affair. “Single men take up too much energy,” she had said. “I prefer to carry the light side of the load.”

He had been comforted by it at the time.

Now, Lee listened to the low roll of the Atlantic and mistakenly drowned the wrong thoughts in alcohol. The part of his mind he dulled with Bloody Marys was the one that had it all figured out. The dulled part could've told you – had it not been dulled — that if you want to save your marriage, you must first save yourself . Had it not been for Corrina, he knew, it might've been him instead of Margaret. Dead. In order to save himself, he had lied to Margaret. True. But Lee found that most women didn't want to deal with the truth. They wanted to deal with their feelings. They wanted you to deal with their feelings too. It didn't matter what messed-up, imaginary nonsense their feelings were based on, they wanted you to
acknowledge
them.

Acknowledge them. Hell, Lee felt he was drowning in them. If Corrina hadn't sat down on the stool beside him in a bar on Rush Street, Margaret's feelings would've filled his ears and nostrils and lungs and dragged him down to rot at the bottom of a dark sea.

But Corrina did take that barstool, her hips wrapped in leather, her hair in long sheets of braids. The group she entered with simmered and sparkled. They dressed hipper. They laughed louder. They were a cluster of electricity at the end of the bar with Corrina sitting on the only available barstool, the one next to Lee's. She pushed several strands of braids behind her shoulder and twisted on her stool toward her empty glass. Lee was looking at her. So she looked back.

She gave her brows the slightest of lifts.

“Let me guess,” she said, her voice the flavor of honey and cynicism, “your marriage sucks.” A sneaky half-smile crept across her face.

Lee shape-shifted where he sat in the light of her flashing eyes and the sneaky half-smile. The colossal failure that was his marriage was a wry joke, an urbane fact over which witticisms were exchanged. When the bartender refilled Corrina's snifter with brandy, Lee caught his eye and tapped his stack of bills. They postponed introductions for the thrill of mystery and were clever with each other, throwing down truths like gauntlets.

“My wife wants to renegotiate our relationship,” Lee told her. “As far as I can tell, ‘renegotiating a relationship' means a woman telling a man how he needs to change.”

Corrina leaned in, as though she were about to confide.

“Here's what I know,” she said. “Men tend to think that when a woman tells him her feelings, she's accusing him of causing them.” She picked up her snifter and raised it to Lee. “Thanks,” she said.

The group she had arrived with was moving to a newly emptied table. Corrina waved good-bye to Lee and joined them.

Lee thought about her, and her friends, all the next week. He remembered being them, the best and brightest in a room. He had felt that way with Margaret once, as a couple. They ranked in a crowd. People were aware of them and not the other way around. Because he had felt it again with Corrina, that old simmering, he knew that it was not he who had been diminished by time. The problem was Margaret.

He hadn't gone looking for an affair. Nor had he leapt into one at the first hints of marital dissatisfaction. Lee told himself this, and it was true. But when he came upon it, the improved reflection, it drew him like a magnet. He took shape before it. Over the next week, he watched Margaret as she moved behind him in the bedroom mirror and as she made school lunches and loaded the dishwasher. He realized that even her expressions of pleasure had to squeeze their way through her mask of hurt and resentment. Margaret's face had become to him a constant accusation.

But then, approval from the needy is hard to come by, as their dissatisfaction is built into the neediness. It comes to be, in fact, that the needy's approval isn't worth much anyway as the value of approval lies in the source. Margaret had been discredited by her desperation, cultivated by Lee though it was, and now all he saw in her eyes was that he was not good enough.

Perhaps some cakes can be had and eaten too. But when it comes to wanting neediness and approval from the same person, both sides are out of luck.

Lee returned to the bar the next week, hoping to find Corrina, and himself. That was a year before Margaret got sick.

Living as the reflection in Margaret's eye had come to feel to Lee like a slow dying, which was why, looking back, he could see that he had been in a life-or-death situation. He chose life. The body ducks without thinking. The soul, he figured, does the same. It reflexively dodges bullets and reaches blindly for lifelines when drowning.

Corrina was that line, that life preserver floating on the surface. Lee told Corrina that if he hadn't met her, he thought it might have been him, and not Margaret, who would have gotten cancer. He thanked her for saving his life.

Corrina said that it was too bad Margaret couldn't find someone to save hers.

Lee's affair with Corrina did not make him feel like a louse. He felt like a good man who in order to be a good husband had to go re-find his goodness some place else. His affair with Corrina had not felt like the low and sneaky part of his life but the honest part. Lee didn't divorce Margaret. He never left. Technically, she did.



Now, from an Adirondack chair, Lee watched the Atlantic's crash and rumble, the tide moving in and out like breath. Bloody Marys kept the world slightly a blur but couldn't stop the dreams, dreams in which he would find himself floating just slightly off the ground, feet grabbing for the earth. The only escape was to waken. The dreams were with him in Florida right after Margaret's death. They were with him in Newark, and they were there for those two days in between — just two days that he had spent in his own home since parting paths with his daughter.

After the launch of the satellite office in Newark, Lee had been free to return home. But instead, he headed south to Cape May, where it was still off-season and quieter than he had anticipated. Since the dreams followed him anyway, they were not the reason for avoiding home. His two days in the house had been suffocating. Everything there, the furniture, the appliances, the very walls seemed to ask
where is she?
as though his connection to them was through Margaret and here they had been stuck with each other awkwardly, blown off by the intermediary each had depended upon. Lee didn't want to sell the house or give everything away. Nor did he want to be responsible for it. He didn't know how.

So it sat unoccupied. Almost.

Margaret was there. But she wasn't in her grave. A fact only Lee was aware of. She was in a box in their bedroom. Lee knew that Margaret wanted to be cremated, the logistics of decomposing too unseemly for her to stomach. But she didn't want to offend relatives and her Catholic heritage. She told him all this years ago before she was sick, before she was unhappy, back when such a conversation was innocent, macabre musings, a projecting of themselves into a harmless future too far away to worry about. But Margaret had not left Lee with instructions as to what to do with her next, after she was burned. Before leaving for Florida, he had placed her on the shelf beneath her nightstand, slid in between a Bible and a green leather book.

For those two days at the house, Lee did not sense Margaret's ghost watching him. No one was watching him. His calls to Corrina went unreturned. He gravitated to the box of ashes. He sat on what was once Margaret's side of the bed and looked down at the box. But it failed to look back. It was silent and self-contained. He reached down and pulled the green leather book from the shelf. Margaret had told him about the Book but had left out the nitty-gritty details. As far as Lee was concerned, it was nothing more than a type of family tree.

He flipped through it. He noted the strange, self-congratulatory tone. Maybe, he thought, it was something that made sense to women. He paused over his daughter's entry. Her birth date caught his eye. It was two days away.

Lee did not think of his daughter much. It had not been his habit. She had been well cared for by Margaret. He had no cause for worry. He provided the cash, and the two lived within the comfortable wing of protection it cast. The world the two shared was satisfying and complete. He paid the tab. And now, Rachael was in his wife's sister's care. Doing the right thing sometimes means finding the right person to do it. He probably hadn't brought it about as well as he might have, but the outcome was what mattered. Rachael was cared for. She was safe.

Yet, there on the edge of the bed during those two days, the terrifying lightness snaked in through his feet, climbed his legs, and reached up into his chest and shoulders. It was the warning, the feeling that came in the dream right before the force field lifted him.

Lee couldn't explain why Margaret's death had surprised him, but it had. Even after the fact, he walked through the next days like he was playing a role, testing a circumstance, sampling it, to see if it was to his taste. That was how he had been feeling when Tatum said to him, “You should probably check on Rachael.” Tatum had been standing in his kitchen. They had been planning the funeral. She said the words, and then she picked up the phone to order Chinese food.

Checking on Rachael would not have occurred to him. But it was not because he didn't care. He had assumed, without even knowing he was assuming it, that Tatum had assumed such duties. The recognition that his daughter was uncared for unleashed adrenalin into his blood stream. It was the moment he realized that Margaret had made no arrangements for Rachael. It was the moment he realized that Tatum hadn't stepped up to the plate.

Fear. Embarrassment. Helplessness. They added up quickly. They were the anxiety. They were the adrenaline. But Lee had a different interpretation for his upset biochemistry. Lee interpreted the discomfort as insult. Insult was preferable to the insecurity that might overtake him on the way to his daughter's room. He climbed the stairs, indignant at what he considered Tatum's “order.” He pushed on the half-opened bedroom door. His eyes slipped through the room. He didn't see Rachael, and he moved to back out, when he heard a rustling. A shifting.

So he took another step, deeper into the room. He saw little socked feet sticking out from where Rachael crouched between the wall and the dresser. More steps, a floor's creak, and her face appeared, her eyes lifted to him, large green pools, pulling at him with wordless, shapeless need. She was a black hole, and the force she exerted dismembered him where he stood.

His skin went first. Then, the organs. He was ripped apart, robbed of even the organizing intelligence that said the heart goes here, the arms go there. Perception did not shape him. It reached at him with greedy hands. Lee floated like a junkyard of parts. He unraveled among pink ruffles, unicorns, and glitter. So he wasn't even there, not really, when he lowered himself to a knee and placed a hand on Rachael's arm.

“You'll be okay,” he said.

He didn't realize it, but in telling her “you'll be okay,” he had let her know that she was on her own.

It made the sucking stop, but the need remained. This, Lee did know. Still, he stood and turned.

And there she was. Tatum. She had slipped into the bedroom and leaned against the wall near the door. He flushed, as though she could read his thoughts and knew that he knew he had stopped the sucking but not the need. A moment that had passed for him with discomfort, though not self-reproach, reframed itself through the lens that was Tatum. She had sent him to his daughter to watch him fail. Hatred flickered in his chest, and it was its own explanation.