The Beginner's Guide to Living (20 page)

“I'm sorry you were worried. I needed…”

Adam grunts, his jaw set. “God, Will, not everything's about you.”

“You're right, it's not. It's about all of us and how much this fucking hurts.” Dad flinches. “And what are you so angry about, anyway? You've been a shit ever since you arrived.”

“That's not true.”

“It is,” says Dad, his eyes tired. “More or less.”

Adam glares at me and seems taller than me even though he's not.

“What?” I ask.

For a moment his face opens before shutting down again. Dad's the first one to speak. “Adam, Will asked you a question.”

“Forget it,” he says, rushing past me, nearly knocking Dad over on his way through. I call after him but he's already gone.

“What was that all about?” I ask Dad, but as I do, I remember things, a thousand small details, an inventory of looks and words.

“He always was a bit jealous of you, the way you were with your mom.”

“That's not my fault.”

“It's nothing to do with whose fault any of this is. Was it you who took her camera?” Dad's eyes are more focused than they've been for ages.

“I didn't think you'd noticed.”

“You've been in our room a couple of times from what I've seen. But it's okay, I don't mind. I think it's good that you find ways of dealing with all this. God knows, it's the hardest thing I've ever had to do. So, have you taken any photos?”

“Yeah, I have, actually.”

“Can I see them?”

“Now?”

“Yes, please.” Dad sits at the table and tucks in his shirt. The hair is still thick and dark on the top of his head except for a single streak of gray that I never noticed before tonight.

“I'll go and get them.”

There's no sign of Adam. From under my bed, I draw out my wooden box, remove the envelopes full of photos I had developed, all twelve rolls of them, plus one extra. The last images Mom ever took.

Adam's waiting for me in the hall, pinching at his bottom lip. “When you were born, I felt I lost her, lost something. Does that sound weird?”

“No, not at all.”

“I think all of this kind of reminded me of that.”

I want to touch him, but for now words are good. “You okay?”

“Sure.”

For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, I feel I can ask him anything, and he won't mind. “What do you miss most about her?”

Adam runs his fingers through his hair. “The way she could always let you know that she loved you.”

“Yeah.”

“I'm sorry, Will.”

His hand goes to my shoulder and he pulls me in, his arms tight around my chest as I feel my body relax. His too. When he releases me, his jaw looks even more like Mom's in the half-light of the hall.

*   *   *

Memory.

Two days before she died. I'm watching TV in the living room on my own. The woman on the show is giving birth but it's not going well—it looks like she might lose the baby, monitors beeping, tubes like tentacles, blood everywhere. I feel a hand on my shoulder. It's Mom. People tangoing in and out of emergency, the dread in the woman's eyes, a scream. The baby held up to the woman's face, a kiss, a simple act of love. My mother's hand.

*   *   *

Dad smiles and I spread the photos out till they cover the whole surface of the table. I curl the strap around the camera and place it beside them. Dad sifts through them, holds up the one of my mother's dress to take a closer look. “You know, she wanted to go to the Himalayas and take pictures. That was before she got pregnant. We never went.”

Adam pulls out the photo of the word
DEATH
written into concrete. It was partly hidden under a picture of a wing. “They're good. What are they for?”

“They're a record.”

“Of what?”

Dad rests his finger on a photo of a dead bird. “A life. At least the part since your mom died.” He looks up at me. “I didn't think you were coming back. God, I was so worried. You hear about it, boys doing themselves in.”

“I would never…” I begin, but I think of the piece of green glass, and the rest of my words dissolve into doubt. In front of me, my brother and my father, the photos, a mosaic of grief. There are so many things I could quote that might make Dad feel better. Some of them might even be close to the truth. All those things that I've thought, read, experienced, since she died. But how do you roll all that up in a sentence, how do you make it count?

“I miss her,” he says.

For a moment it's as if she's there with us, that we're intact again, but when Dad stacks the photos, we return to a triangle of men.

“You should put these in an album, Will.”

“Yeah, I might. Not sure what I want to do with them. I'm not quite finished yet.”

“She would've wanted you to have the camera. Which reminds me, there's something I want to show you both. I'll be right back.”

When he has gone, Adam points to the only envelope I didn't open. “What are those?”

“They were in the camera when Mom died.”

He flips through the images—Dad leaning against a tree, a white feather, us at the mountains, me with long hair. He holds the last one up. “This was when I found you standing too close to the edge of the cliff. I remember your face. How strange,” he says, his voice steady. “She was there and she didn't say anything. She'd always been so protective, but there she let you…”

I take another look at the photo, my face shaped by vertigo, an expression so familiar in the mirror since she died.

“You know, I thought I could protect you,” he says, “protect you from what happened. But I couldn't even protect myself.”

Dad walks in. He's holding a piece of white paper which he gives to Adam.

“What's this?”

“It's a poem I found in her things. Going by the date, she wrote it soon after you were born.”

Adam unfolds the page and reads:

half moon—

my son laughs

and I am whole again

Dad sleeps in clean sheets. Tonight he changed them for the first time since Mom died. Adam dreams of childhood days at the beach. The house is thick with grief, but there are doors and windows. My bed feels good after sleeping on the ground.

THE DIVINITY OF LOVE

M
EMORY.

A missing shoe. Mom's late for work, again. Dad's already left. “The cork ones,” she says, as if I know what that means, and runs out of the room. Before I can shake my head, she's back again, “You know which pair I mean?” “No idea,” I say, putting an apple in my bag. She doesn't find the shoe, has to change her trousers, wear boots instead. She dies that afternoon. I never eat that apple. Two weeks later I find a shoe under the couch. It has a piece of chewing gum stuck to the heel. The heel is made of cork.

*   *   *

I know where she is but I go down to the old part of the cemetery first and check out the names of the dead, where they come from—Sarona, Haifa—places I've never heard of, but now they rest here.

Mom's stone is in the new part. It's shiny black with rough-cut edges. Somebody's left flowers. Chrysanthemums. I don't know whether to sit or stand, the space is so open. Nobody else is around except for some men off in the distance, digging a new grave.

I squat on the concrete next to her headstone. It's been raining, so it's damp and the grass is growing back where her body was laid. She's down there, what's left of her; the coffin was varnished so it must be still intact. Her body. What happens to a body that's been buried for two months? I'd like to know. Some part of me is in love with the facts.

“Mom?”

No one can hear me, the gravediggers are too far away, and the only sounds are birds, the eternal hum of traffic, wind tearing at the trees. I remove a leaf that's got stuck to the stone in the rain and lean in. “Mom? I'm okay. You'd be proud of me, I've learned how to cook. And I've got a girlfriend. Her name's Taryn.” The concrete's cold under my ass. I shift. “Her period's late.”

Taryn didn't call back last night after I left a message. I wish I knew why. It begins to rain, so I pull the hood up on my jacket and draw the cord tight. “I've been using your camera. I knew you wouldn't mind. My photos are different from yours, but I think I know why. Anyway, it helps.”

A lady with greyhounds walks along the other side of the fence, which reminds me of an old joke about cemeteries, but I can't quite remember how it goes. Mom would, she loved sick jokes. I want to call her Anna. “Remember when I had a thing about calling you by your first name, and you said,
There are only two people in the world who can call me Mom
. But, now that you're dead…”

The word seems absurd. “Anna,” I say, sheltering in on myself, and it's like she's with me again, in the folds of my jacket, all sorts of Annas: the one from the photo with Dad, a vague smell I can remember, oranges, diving into surf. “I've been remembering things. There was something wrong with you, wasn't there? That's why you were going to the doctor's. You thought you were going to die, but not the way you did. Why didn't you tell us?”

The rain stops again suddenly and the sun comes out and starts evaporating the drops on the concrete. It has a bit of help from the wind.

“I've also been thinking about whether there might be a God,” I say, my breath warm inside my jacket. “You could give me some insights into that.”

I smile and remember a line from Wittgenstein—
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him
. If the dead could speak, would we understand them?

“Maybe it's because now I get what it might be like to feel a presence. Is it you, or something to do with being in love?”

The gravediggers are taking a break among the headstones; they must see plenty of people confessing to the dead. “On this show I watched, they said we're hardwired to believe in something that's not there.”

I raise my head out of my jacket. What I'm hoping for right now is a sign—a ray of light, some voice in my head. I have this desire in me for something beyond logic. I need to believe. Or maybe what I want is for a book with all the answers to land at my feet.
The Book of Everything
. Except, I don't. Not unless it's got a few blank pages in it where I can write all about this. My chapter. Life according to Will.

“I miss you,” I whisper, and for a moment the sun illuminates the stone, before the clouds close again.

The Book of Everything.

Part One: What it is to die.

Part Two: What it is to live.

The light drops and it starts to rain really hard. My jacket's waterproof but my jeans are getting soaked. I'm cold. Water trickles down my neck.

“Will?”

I follow the voice from the fresh grass to the dark, wet hems of jeans. Green jacket. Taryn's tall beneath an umbrella, large drips gathering on one of its spikes and falling onto my knee. I'm so glad to see her but I don't feel quite ready.

“Adam said you'd be here.” Taryn crouches beside me. She puts her hand on my drenched knee. “You okay, Will?”

“I'm fine. What about you?”

“I'm not pregnant.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I go to say
good
, but it feels like the wrong word. She rests the stem of the umbrella against her shoulder, sheltering both of us. I slide my arm around her, smell the incense and her damp hair. Her fingers weave a pattern on my knee. Circles. Small ones. A drop of water quivers on the scar above her lip. “Did you want to be pregnant?”

“No, not really.” She looks down at our hands as I thread my fingers through hers. “Though a part of me did. Something to do with love.”

She leans into my chest. I go to say her name out loud but instead I hold it in my head and try to make it fit the body pressing into mine. I have been inside her, tasted her bare skin. I know the sound of desire in her throat, the way she lets slip a small laugh when she's not quite sure. She has let me cross the threshold into her world. Part of me is hers.

She takes my hand and draws it around her, so tight I can feel my arm beginning to constrict her breath. The fact that I love her makes it possible to exist.

Taryn allows the umbrella to drift to the ground. “Anna,” she says, reading the inscription.

I go to tell her things about my mother, but I'm not sure where to begin. Taryn digs around in her pocket and pulls out a small gray stone. She places it on the top of the grave before passing another to me. I steady my hand and balance my stone on top of hers. I touch her cheek. “I might never have met you if she hadn't died.”

“Is that okay?”

“Of course it is. I'm sorry,” I hear myself saying. “I've done things…”