Shaking out the Dead (8 page)

“You never knew Vincent, did you?”

“No.”

“He entered my mind,” Geneva said. “Maybe he's thinking about me.”

“Do you like him?” Paris asked.

“Like him?” Geneva said. She looked into Paris's face. His eyes were slightly squinted, almost a wince. She suspected he would prefer she did not like Vincent much.

“He interests me,” she said, showing mercy. “Is that the same thing?”

“I'll have to think about that,” Paris said.

“Well,” Geneva said, “do get back to me.”

Paris nodded. He looked into the bottom of his mug. “Thank you,” he said and got up to leave.

Geneva lifted her chin, a silent goodbye and you're welcome. Her mind had leeched onto the question she had posed to Paris. Was being interested in someone the same thing as liking him, loving him even, if you're interested enough?

“Good night,” Paris said from the door, though it was still-dark morning.



Paris closed the door to Geneva's and faced Tatum's. He had the key. He was glad Geneva was home. It made it easier to stay out. He stared at Tatum's door for only a few seconds before it reminded him of the blank canvas in his closet and he left.

Paris walked with his hands jammed into the pockets of his canvas coat. He had no shadow as he watched the edge of the sidewalk where it met the small patch of grass of the boulevard. Trees tangled above his head until he spilled out of the residential streets and glanced up at the morning moon.



Rachael heard Tatum say her mother's name.
Margaret
. Aunt Tatum spoke it from a hunkered down place outside the bathroom door in the motel room. Rachael knew the place well. A place where she, too, used to sit. Outside the bathroom door, she'd listen to her mother make bad noises in the shower. Rachael always knew when the noises were coming. She knew because her mother would turn on the TV in the kitchen and walk away. She would suggest a video for Rachael to watch and snap it into the VCR in the family room. She would turn on the radio in the bedroom. Rachael refused, though, to be swallowed by the contrived din of the house. Safer to listen. Better to eavesdrop on the secret. For whatever danger it held, she wouldn't be alone.

“She gave me this look,” she heard her Aunt Tatum say into the phone.

Rachael knew the look. She could see her mother's face, a double helix of love and anxiety, a look followed by a hug, too tight. A hug Rachael didn't want.

That was before motel rooms with loud heaters and thin blankets and eating sandwiches off of their wrappers. It was back in the afternoons when autumn-colored leaves hung proudly, seemingly unaware of their fate. They rustled outside the window of her mother's bedroom, where she had retreated, rolled to her side, and forgot about breakfast, laundry, and getting Rachael ready for school.

So Rachael skipped breakfast. She stayed home and collected the leaves as they fell. She brought to her mother the reds and yellows with their edges curling inward like fingertips. She held them by their stems and twirled them in pirouettes while she stood beside the bed. These leaves were the bravest, she told her mother, those unafraid to go first and lead the way.

The weeks slipped by, and Rachael learned to climb cupboards and eat pretzels for breakfast. More leaves fell. They fell in small showers riding together on shared breezes. One evening, when her father got home, he came to the bedroom where Rachael was sitting in the pocket between her mother's arm and torso while they looked at old pictures of great aunts also named Rachael. Her father brought a woman into the bedroom, gray-haired but not too old. The woman told Rachael to call her Miss Geri. Rachael looked to her mother to know whether or not to like her. At first, her mother ignored the woman's presence, not rudely, but as though she couldn't see her at all. Before too long, though, Rachael could sense a silent gratitude, a relief in her mother, and so she ate Miss Geri's food and let her dress her for school.

Miss Geri left late at night, and when she did, Rachael snuck into her mother's bed. In mornings over breakfast, Miss Geri would admonish her playfully, telling her that her mother needed rest.

“Are you afraid to sleep by yourself?” she asked.

Rachael shrugged.

“I promise you,” Miss Geri said, “there are no monsters in your closets, and if there were, I'd clean them out.” She raised her arm, holding her sponge aloft, demonstrating that she possessed the proper weaponry for the job.

Rachael gave her a half-smile to be polite. She knew the monsters weren't in her closet, and she also knew that they couldn't be fought because they never attack. They watch. They owned you, and it was enough.

When only the stubbornest of leaves remained, holding on to their place in the sky by fragile fingers — seeming, now, the brave ones — Rachael woke up knowing her mother was gone. Rachael sat with the covers wrapped at her waist and stared at the drape of the sheet over her mother's shoulder, waist, and hip. Her hair was messy in back and Rachael thought that she should brush it before Miss Geri arrived. She leaned over her mother's body and directed her voice into her ear. She spoke as though into a dark house she wasn't sure was empty. “Mommy? Mommy?” She shook at her shoulder, but she knew. She also knew that her mother hadn't become a ghost and floated up and away. She was still in there but past a big door, maybe two, hiding down deep.

That's dead too.

When her father came in, Rachael moved back from her mother fast and said, “Now she's dead.”

Her father stared at the draped sheet. Then he gathered Rachael off the bed and crushed her to his chest. She felt flat as a shield against him as he squeezed her too tight. She stared over his shoulder into the long hallway that led to the stairway down to the foyer. Her stomach growled for breakfast, and her father's cologne was making her slightly nauseous. His big hand held the back of her head and scrunched her hair.

She struggled from his arms and ran to the master bathroom to get her mother's hairbrush. But once inside, Rachael remembered it was on the nightstand. She turned to leave, but her eye caught a movement in the mirror. She blinked at her reflection, and it blinked back. Still, she didn't trust it. It wasn't her, not who she wanted to be but someone coming for her, to get her, to be her. Her mother hadn't been alone when she cried. A sneaky child was in there with her, and her father too, a ghostly version, whom her mother beat with words like fists, words muffled but not drowned by the shower's drum and patter.

A sudden ringing startled Rachael, and she broke away from the reflection. She ran from the bathroom, past her father, who lifted the phone from its cradle, and down the hall. In her bedroom, she hunkered into the space between the side of her dresser and the wall and let the three sides hold her.

There she sat, alone, hearing no pounding shower, no radio, or television. She covered her ears, but the noise was inside. She tried to be deaf to both worlds, the one inside and out, which created a world without her, one in which she did not exist. When the noise was gone, she felt the static hum around her and pretended she was it. A vibrating nothing.

Then, she realized a thing that had never occurred to her before. All the sounds, all the furniture, the hallways and walls, they existed without her, went on in her absence.

Another ring, but the doorbell now. It was a sound disconnected from meaning, asking nothing of a self that didn't exist. Rachael stayed in her corner and let it ring again. She heard without listening, blended as she was into the invisible fabric of space. Then she heard the clank of the knocker that nobody ever used. The unfamiliarity of the sound focused her attention, called her back into being. Rachael rose from her corner. It made no sense, but she thought, maybe it's Mom
.
She left her room and crept down the stairs. She approached the front door apprehensively. Even though she wasn't allowed to, she opened it.

“Hey Rachael,” Tatum said, stepping in.

Tatum's hair was dark like Rachael's. She wore browns and tans like an explorer, and a black wool ski cap on her head. Rachael knew who she was.

“She's dead,” Rachael said.

Tatum looked up the staircase. She took the edge of the door away from Rachael and closed it. She placed her backpack on the floor and led Rachael by the shoulder to the steps and sat down on the second to bottom one. She turned Rachael to face her. She took her hands.

Rachael pulled her hands away.

“I'm sorry,” Tatum said, dropping her own hands into her lap but still studying Rachael's face.

Somehow, Tatum's sudden presence did not surprise Rachael. She knew that her mother didn't like her. And she knew, without knowing why or how, that the girl in the mirror was like her.

The sound of a car engine on the long driveway caught both of their attention. Neither moved as they heard someone approach, turn a key in the lock, and enter. It was Miss Geri. She looked down at them, and her face shifted. She knew without asking. Geri frowned sympathetically and touched Rachael's head. Tatum stood and introduced herself.

“I'm Margaret's sister,” she said, extending her hand. “Tatum.” She paused then, still holding Miss Geri's hand. “I drove all night,” she said.

Miss Geri pulled Tatum to her and hugged her even though they had just met. Rachael watched her aunt's eyes shut tight over Miss Geri's shoulder. The hug bothered Rachael, and she was about to tell them to stop when they let go anyway. Geri started up the stairs, and Tatum followed. On the third step, Tatum looked back over her shoulder at Rachael.

“You coming?” she said.

Rachael shook her head no.

Tatum stared at her for another second as though waiting for a change of mind.

“All right,” she said and continued up the steps.



In the Cloud 9 motel, Rachael cracked her eyes drowsily. Over the other bed, she could see the top of Tatum's head leaned back against the wall. Tatum sat on the floor near the bathroom. In her half-sleep, Rachael knew what Tatum was doing. She was eavesdropping, listening to secrets.

Rachael's lids fell, and the world was dark. Tatum and Miss Geri ascended the stairs and disappeared on the landing. Rachael stood in her pajamas near the front door on the cool, marble floor. She about-faced and met her own reflection from the top of her head down as far as her shoulders in the entryway mirror. She was pretty. It was fact. She had been a fairy for Halloween, her dress a gauzy and sequined sea foam.

Rachael placed a small palm to the glass. Her stomach rumbled, but it was part of the past, just an echo. She pressed the tip of her nose to the nose beyond the mirror's cool surface. She looked into her own green eyes. Her feet were cold on the marble floor. The chill from the mirror comforted her. Cold like winter water, icy, but not ice.



Geneva drove her Saab north past the Scratchgravel Hills, gripping the steering wheel a bit too tight. Earlier that morning, her mood had been foul, her thoughts like an IV dripping resentment into her bloodstream. Jet-lagged, she would have preferred to putter at home. But Ralph had to be her first priority. She hadn't seen him for two weeks. Too long, she was sure, by good society's standards.

Such a difference it is to be driven by responsibility as opposed to desire. She would advise against it, if asked. She knew responsibility could crowd out desire like weeds in the flowerbed. After too many years, you go to the garden to pull. Duty calls. You forget that flowers once grew there. You kneel without question and labor.

But no. She would not think these thoughts. They were not conducive to carrying out gladly the task of the day. Love shrinks on the witness stand. Questioning it did a marriage no good.

The blue of the sky was hot and bright as Geneva took the curves through the canyon, through the cliff walls rising in mudstone layers of red and green. She knew well that she had not been born with the stuff that greases the skids for married life. Acceptance. Amnesia. Marriage required a duck's back. Geneva was born with a porcupine's topography, a back like a pine-covered hillside. Nothing rolled down it, nothing shrugged off. Experience tangled. Words jammed. She'd find the emotional debris, pick it up, dissect it, and smear it on a slide, view it under the power of magnification, all grotesquely large. Making studies of feelings is big business — therapy, talk shows — but Geneva learned the hard way that the scientific mind applied to love instead of test tubes leads not to high fives and by-George-I-think-we've-got-its. Picking through their love in a petri dish, to Ralph, had seemed a lot like looking for problems. And problems are, well, problematic, negative indicators, cause for alarm. And Ralph's alarm led to his anxiety, which led, for Geneva, to frustration. A stray musing or theory on their relationship, she found, inevitably morphed into conflict. There were two speeds: agreement and argument. What she had been seeking was exploration.

It took her years to realize that her mental tinkering was not a quality that had attracted Ralph, as she had believed. Because it was one of her most defining characteristics, it was hard for her to imagine anyone loving her without loving
it
.

But so it was.

For the sake of peace, then, she learned to work quietly in her mental lab.

The roads were clear and the miles added up quickly. Canyon Creek reflected the sky on its way to the Missouri. As she drove, Geneva worked to cast past choices in a more positive light. Was it so bad a lesson to learn to keep the peace? Peace is sought everywhere, marched for by throngs, and she had established it simply by keeping her thoughts to herself. It would be different, of course, had she died in her silence. But she had not. She simply lived in seclusion, mentally speaking, for which there is something to be said. Folks climb mountains to reach monasteries because they're good places to be if you've got a lot to think about. You don't make it in one if you don't.

So you see, I wasn't a doormat
, she said silently to some other point of view that lived inside of her. Then she hit the gas pedal hard, hoping to leave her thoughts behind, choking on her dust.

Earlier that morning, when infested with such thoughts, Geneva had taken measures to jar her mind into better thinking, measures not currently available as she hugged the mountain curves. Those who consume drugs, legal or otherwise, are seeking relief. Some want to feel better. Some don't want to feel at all. Then there were those like Geneva, those who were seeking to melt the ice in their minds, having found themselves frozen into one of its frosty corners. It wasn't about feeling better but coming to new conclusions. Optional conclusions. Geneva believed there was a danger in allowing any one opinion to be left alone to run amok in her mind.

So she had retrieved an empty water glass from the kitchen and headed to the bedroom. She grabbed her toiletry bag, still packed, off the pillow and had rummaged, finding her sewing kit readily. She dug out her tiny travel scissors and a sewing needle. Then she reached to the floor for the underpants she had worn home from the airport. She pulled the thick sanitary napkin from the crotch, and she cut into it. She pulled out two sticky chunks of hashish bundled in plastic wrap.

Here in her bedroom, it now seemed a bold move. Were she instead in prison, her assessment would no doubt be different. At the time, though, it seemed neither bold nor stupid. Had it seemed either, she wouldn't have done it. It had felt nothing more than practical. She still had a few ancient buds from Vincent, but Vincent didn't come around much anymore since he and Tatum had split up, not even to see Geneva. He had been her only connection. Packing her Kotex in her hotel room in Amsterdam, Geneva hadn't felt any risk of anyone being interested in the contents of her underpants.

Geneva nicked off a small chunk from the smaller of the two hunks of hash. She stabbed it onto the end of her sewing needle. She pulled a pack of matches from the nightstand's drawer and lit the speared morsel. When it started to smoke, she placed it on her nightstand, covering it with the inverted glass.

“Eva's medicine,” Geneva had said, as the glass filled with smoke. That's what Vincent's mother used to call pot. Geneva crouched on the floor beside her nightstand and slid the glass to the edge letting the lip hang just over the side. She sucked the blue curling ribbons of smoke from beneath the glass and slid it back to fill again. Sitting on the bed holding the smoke in her lungs, her thoughts of Vincent turned to thoughts of Tatum. She thought of Tatum's sister getting cut down in the prime of life while Ralph lingered. She exhaled slowly. She remembered a conversation she had with Tatum following Tatum's mastectomy. Tatum had been sitting on the closed lid of the toilet seat while Geneva emptied the plastic drains that caught the blood and fluid from the wound that was once a breast. Tatum hadn't told Geneva that she and Vincent had split up, but it was obvious that he wasn't around.

“What's become of our boy, Vincent?” she had asked Tatum.

Tatum was drugged up pretty good, but not too impaired.

“I bugged him. He left,” she said. “Plain and simple.”

“Bugged him how?”

“It was a naturally occurring phenomenon,” she said. “I don't blame him. I could've shut up more. Reached out more.”

“Maybe the talking was the reaching,” Geneva said.

Tatum crossed her hands over her collarbone and looked toward the ceiling as Geneva reattached the drains.

“Can a person shut up and still be who they are?” Tatum had asked her. “I mean, if you shut up because you think you're bugging someone, are you being a good person for shutting up, or are you not you anymore?”

Geneva considered her own silence in her marriage as she secured the drains. It had not been a practice she had undertaken unconsciously. She had considered it at length. Had chosen it as a higher path. If talking leads to pain and frustration, is it not a kindness, to oneself at least, to shut one's pie hole?

“All shutting up is not created equal,” she finally said. “Women waste a lot of creative energy talking. Maybe we'd be wiser to pursue the intimacy of the apes.”

“Would that be the enlightened relationship?” Tatum asked. “Grooming each other and listening to the wind?”

Geneva offered Tatum a steady arm, and Tatum rose slowly from the toilet.

“For me,” Geneva told her, “the enlightened relationship would run along the lines of a Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday kind of bond. But with steamy sex. Friends. Comrades. Equals. Hot sex.”

Geneva recalled the conversation as she blew past an ancient pickup truck doing its damnedest to go fifty. The peaks of the Sawtooth Range rose ragged against the western sky. Hot sex. It was the last thing she needed to be thinking about then, and it was the last thing she needed to be thinking about now. She had exacerbated the feeling that morning. Buzzed and turned on by notions of sex between equals, she had gone to the living room, flipping through the playlists in her mind. Marvin Gaye? Al Green? Roberta Flack?

She had surveyed her albums, eyes slowing at the
S
's and
T
's. She zeroed in on the band Traffic. She owned two of their albums, the same two anyone who had Traffic albums would have,
Mr. Fantasy
and
Low Spark
. She pulled
Low Spark
from the shelf and let it glide from its sleeve. She placed it on the turntable and skipped to the title track.

The needle hit the groove and from the friction between the two came the sound of piano and sax, coming on, moving in as though approaching from a distance. Geneva had stepped backward away from the turntable. A puttering of bongos, seeming to mind their own business, did their thing, a self-involved rhythm, while the chords of a piano minded the beat. Geneva dropped her robe over the arm of a chair and stood in the middle of the room where the effect from the stereo was best appreciated. There, she raised her arms forward slowly, leading with the backs of her wrists. She let them rise to Frankenstein level and held them there, suspended, shoulders relaxing before she released her arms slowly back to her sides. Reaching up then, out from her hips, she stretched her arms overhead toward the ceiling and then dipped into a hip. The sound was still all sax and chords and bongos as Geneva alternated arms and alternated hips, reaching with one as she dipped with the other. She eased into harmony, into sync, if not with the universe, if not with the voices in her head, then at least with this song. She rolled her shoulders up and back as the vocals broke through.

The stretching, and the hash, did its work on her. She felt her blood in her veins. Body and spirit reintegrated. The combination amounted, for Geneva, to sexuality. Her sense of it.

A mixed blessing, it was, to have that pot stirred.

And now on the road, just remembering her morning, she was horny again. Always a potential side effect of feeling good. Both a gift and a burden.



Geneva arrived at Parkview with only an hour left for visiting. The staff knew her and nodded in greeting. Alone with Ralph in his room, Geneva didn't talk aloud to him the way she knew many family members did to their comatose or catatonic loved ones. But she did try to emanate. She thought at him. She believed it a more effective method of communication given the circumstances.

And she brought him music. She was convinced he liked the Beach Boys, and she put
Pet Sounds
on the CD player she had bought for his room.

Ralph didn't look good, she thought, standing over him as he slept. But do the addled ever? His skin was tragically pasty, his mouth slack. A smother party waiting to happen.
No more disappearing into Europe.
She sent Ralph the telepathic message. Then she fingered his hand, a useless thing. She felt a small storehouse of tears behind her eyes. Nothing that needed to fall, just a stash in the psychic attic.

She looked softly at Ralph in all his frailty. In a way, she supposed, she had always considered him frail, if not of body then of emotional wherewithal. But once she learned to keep her restless mind to herself, he had been endlessly kind. Entirely devoted. She was Geneva. His Gen. He loved her. It was simple.

But the problem with simplicity, for Geneva, was that it couldn't be understood. So she didn't feel his love and nor could she see with her own logic that it was so.

The Beach Boys harmonized. Geneva looked at the picture of her and Ralph on his nightstand. It was of the two of them sitting on a neighbor's deck. It was taken in 1974. In it, Geneva has a great tan — they were real back then and considered healthy. Ralph was wild about tan lines, white breasts and bottoms. Up until last year, the picture had sat on her nightstand at home.

She touched the edge of the frame. Dated as it was, it was still Geneva's favorite picture of them. The sky behind them was blue, and Geneva wore big hoop earrings and an orange scarf tied around her head. Her face is bold and ecstatic. Being a woman then, she thought, was such a blast. A collective, violent awakening.

Her eyes drifted from her own image to Ralph's. Everything looked too big on him. His hair. His ears. His shirt collar. You couldn't tell from the picture, she thought, that he was a good man. But, of course, he was. After all, Geneva had picked him, and she had always had an uncanny ability to weed through a room of men, right down to the one, or the ones, if there were any at all, that were the real deal. Character, or at least its humble beginnings. Potential. Which is not the same thing, however, as having what it takes to actualize potential. The two, one learns, are surprisingly unrelated — a fact she had learned too late.

Geneva looked away from the picture and laid her hand on Ralph's chest and thought about the promise she had made to him. Her word. To love him. I didn't promise to love a memory, she thought. I promised to love a man. Whoever he is. Whoever he might become.