The Distinguished Guest (32 page)

Of course, the logical time to scatter the ashes would have been the day of the memorial reception (no service, as Lily’s will had dictated), but Clary had the idea that
Rebecca might somehow show up, or make her presence known, and so they waited. During the three days they were gathered in Chicago, Alan often watched her, his sister—big-boned like him,
blond too, her hair carefully frosted and shaped—watched her eyes nervously surveying a room, watched her jump eagerly whenever the telephone rang. Even at the memorial reception as she
greeted the straggling arrivals, her glance swung several times around the room, as though Rebecca might be hidden among the elderly people gathered to remember Lily. Now, standing in his yard, he
suddenly remembers Rebecca clearly, how she looked: the one of them with dark hair, like Lily’s. Perhaps, like Lily too, he thinks, she went white early. Perhaps then Clary wasn’t so
foolish to look; Rebecca could have been moving among the other white-haired guests.

He stops again now, to think of Rebecca, as he hasn’t in years. He remembers the way, periodically, she and Clary would descend to rescue him from all they saw as
wrong
in his life,
how for a while he would be swept into their world, never understanding it or their impulses. He remembers a game of Monopoly played with them one night when he was about eleven or twelve. He was
in his pajamas, they in their underwear. And it was such innocent underwear, really, as he thinks of it now. Nothing lacy or gauzy, the underpants waist-high, the bras big as halters, everything a
nurselike white cotton. Nonetheless he had been in a state of anxious struggle with his arousal, aware of the few curling strands of pubic hair he could glimpse at their crotches from time to time,
conscious of the shifting shapes of their breasts as they reached forward to roll the dice or move their pieces around the board.

Clary explained their theory later to him: their behavior was to be an antidote to Lily’s coldness. Their relaxation would help to make him more comfortable, easier, about women and
sexuality. He laughs out loud now in his sunstruck yard, thinking how very wrong they were, how comical the scene was.

They scattered the ashes on the last day in Chicago, he and Clary, while Gaby and the boys were packing up for the return trip. It was windy, too windy a day for such a chore, but
they had no choice, and so they made their way out to the rocky edge of the point, a thumb of green projecting into the lake at 55th Street. The water slapped at the rocks, the wind pushed against
them. Clary insisted on a prayer to mark the moment. While her lips moved, Alan looked at her hands, aged, veined, holding the plastic bag of ashes. He looked at the powder within, dotted with the
stonelike bits of bone. He could faintly hear the drift of Clary’s voice murmuring the Lord’s Prayer with its familiar rhythms, and he was grateful to her. He felt a sense of some
necessary ceremony being enacted.

When she was done, they stood for a moment, buffeted and rocking slightly. Then Alan threw the first handful out. And felt it blow back onto him, into his eyes, his hair, his opened mouth. He
blinked. He swallowed. He ran his tongue over his lips.

He turned to her. “This won’t work,” he said.

In the end, they had to come around to the 57th Street side of the point to get out of the wind, and Alan crouched on a rock and more or less turned the plastic bag out. Lily’s ashes
poured forth, some sinking, some floating away, white on the lake’s dark surface. Within a few seconds, though, they all disappeared in the lively water.

Clary was tearful at that moment, but she recovered herself quickly. On their way back across the grass, she sighed and said, “God, I hate to say it, but Mother died in the absolute nick
of time for me.”

“What do you mean?” Alan asked.

“Money, dear boy.” She held her hands up, rubbing her fingers against her thumbs. “Filthy lucre.”

Alan, in spite of his own confusion about Lily, was startled by Clary’s finality, her coldness: Lily seemed
done
for her.

An hour or so later, settled in the plane on his way home, he saw Clary’s odd gesture again in his mind’s eye and recognized abruptly what it had reminded him of—the repetitive
motion of Lily’s hands when she was at her most tired. He looked at his own hands then. There was a dark crescent curving under each fingernail of the right hand. He started to trace under
one with his left forefinger, scraping it clean, and then he realized what he was scraping at—Lily’s ashes. He turned his hands quickly then, palms up in his lap, as if supplicant.

The telephone rings four or five times while Alan is working, but he doesn’t stop to answer it. He eats his lunch outside, sitting on the deck, and works until late in the
afternoon. It’s cool by then, he’s put his shirt back on. The fall shadows across the yard are long, even in the bright light. It isn’t until early evening, after he’s
showered and poured himself a glass of wine, that he pushes the message button on his machine and stands waiting, pen in hand, to record whatever comes.

The first voice is Peter Admundsen’s, with brusque condolences about Lily. Then he says, “Now that you’re back, I wondered if we could meet at the house to go over a few
details.” Alan groans aloud.

There’s a dinner invitation for him and Gaby for the end of the month from the Mercers. It will be the first time that they’ve seen them since before Lily came.

Then a call from Linnett Baird.

Her voice startles Alan, and he sets his wine glass down. “Hello, Gaby. Hello, Alan. I hope everything was . . . went . . . smoothly, at the memorial service. Alan, I wondered if I could
talk to you. I thought I might come down maybe Thursday or Friday if that would work for you. There’s a little bit of final fact-checking kind of stuff I’d like to do. Could you call me
back?” And she recites a number with a western Massachusetts area code.

Ettie has called too, with a list of items he left at home by mistake. Can they be mailed to him? Like, soon?

Alan goes through the calls in order, answering them. When he calls Linnett back, he gets her machine and tells her either day is fine, he’ll be working at home. He sets the phone down and
takes a sip of the wine. It’s almost dark outside. He has turned on several lights by now, and he’s suddenly conscious of his reflection in the windows, raising the glass, setting it
down. Why is he nervous? Why is he a little excited at the thought of seeing Linnett?

It’s nothing, he tells himself. The mild flirtation they had earlier, the fact of his solitude now. The connection with Lily. He was drawn to Linnett, certainly. Attracted by her. But not
finally interested in anything, he’s sure of that. And he reminds himself too of how angry he was at her the night before Lily died. Very angry.

Alan finishes the stairs the next day, and with reluctance cleans his tools and puts them carefully away again. It takes him several hours to apply stain to the new wood, and then the job is
done. He has a sense, as he rinses the brush and then his hands with paint thinner, of a return from a distant place—of his life, his complicated but pleasant, ordinary life, calling him
back. That night, before he goes to bed, he finds a carton and searches Ettie’s and Thomas’s room for the things Ettie asked for: a stack of photographs Alan flips through, most taken
in New York, young people Alan doesn’t know. A textbook Ettie was reading, underlined heavily for the first twenty pages or so and then pristine. His soccer shoes, a box of CDs, a green
sweater hanging on a hook in his closet. Alan looks around the room just before he turns the light off. Every year it seems less his sons’, more just an extra space. When they took down the
last batch of posters—sports figures, rock groups, a beautiful young pianist named Hélène Grimaud—they didn’t put any more up to replace them. There are framed
family photographs hanging on the walls now, and a sketch of the harbor done by a friend, but these are Gaby’s choices. Their lives, their choices, are being made elsewhere. They are gone, he
thinks, and there is so much he failed to say to them, failed to give them.

But doesn’t every parent feel this way? He thinks of Lily again, of how hard it must have been for her, being a parent,
incapacitated
as she was by her rigidity, her coldness.

And then is startled by this idea. Lily, incapacitated. Startled by the sympathy, by the forgiveness, the word implies. As he carries Ettie’s carton to the kitchen and begins to tape it
up, he thinks of how often his own feelings have startled him since Lily’s death.

Linnett comes on Friday, mid-afternoon. Alan is rearranging trays of slides for his fall lectures. He’s in his study, at the back of the house, and the projector makes a
whirring sound, so he doesn’t hear her car pull in. The doorbell surprises him.

When he comes into the hall, he can see her standing in silhouette in front of the screen door. For a moment, he doesn’t recognize her. And then he realizes, walking toward the door, that
she isn’t carrying her crutches. Or they aren’t carrying her.

He is struck by how tall she is, how, somehow, larger than he remembered her. She’s wearing jeans and an undershirt top, with a big, unbuttoned red linen shirt like a jacket over that. Her
hair is in a ponytail at the nape of her neck, but silvery strands have pulled loose and they dance in the light breeze.

When the door opens, she snatches off her sunglasses and extends her hand. “Alan!” she says. And after a pause: “I was just so sorry, about Lily.”

Should he kiss her? Alan no longer knows the rules. Their hands grip firmly, but she doesn’t bend forward in any way, so he just tightens his grip slightly for a moment.
“Thanks,” he says. “It was . . . difficult.”

“And so unexpected,” she says.

They still stand on either side of the threshold. Now Alan steps back. “Well, come in,” he says.

She walks past him, a sure, long stride. She’s only a few inches shorter than he is, he sees this for the first time, and she carries herself with a masculine vigor that surprises him.
He’s thought of her injury, he realizes, as part of her.

“I’m really grateful you could see me,” she says.

“With the usual stipulations, of course,” he answers, trailing her.

She turns back and grins at him. “But of course.”

She’s standing in the living room. Alan has crossed to the kitchen. “Sit down,” he says. “Would you like something?”

“I’d take a beer if you’ve got one.”

“Coming up,” he says. He gets a beer out for her and pours himself a glass of seltzer. When he brings them over, she’s seated on the built-in couch in front of the windows,
turned sideways to look out at the yard.

“The hurricane really did a number here,” she says.

“Yes. Well, actually, there’s no real damage. And the trees will all come back. This is our winter light.” He gestures. “An early guest this year.”

“Mmm,” she says. “Thanks.” She takes the beer and sips it.

Alan sits down opposite her, in one of Lily’s chairs. “You’ve recovered completely,” he says.

“Oh!” She looks down at her leg. “Almost,” she says. “I’ve got a bunch of exercises I have to do. But I can’t jog yet, and I miss it. I’ve gained
about five pounds since the
ordeal
began.”

“It’s odd to see you, castless.”

“It was the only way you knew me, I guess.”

“Exactly.”

She looks over at him, framed in the ornate curve of carved wood around the back of the chair. “It’s odd to see you here without Lily.”

“Yes. Well. The only way you knew
me
, I guess.”

She smiles. “True.”

A little silence falls.

Then Linnett stirs herself. “The service was in Chicago?”

“Such as it was. I mean, there was no service. Per Lily’s orders. We had a kind of . . . ” His hand circles. “Reception.”

“Oh!” She nods. “Like a wake or something.”

“No, exactly
not
like a wake.” Alan laughs at the memory of the party, that gathering of the lame and halt in the rented space, the watery sound of the roomful of elderly
voices. “Like a ladies’ tea or something. And then Clary—my sister—and I scattered her ashes over the lake. In the lake.” He’s still smiling, remembering that
the hotel called the rental space a “function room,” that the boys delighted in that name.

Linnett, looking carefully at him, thinks his response is odd. Distant. “So that’s that,” she says, trying to move into what seems his mood.

“Well, there’s still a lot to do with the estate and so forth, but yes, that’s that.”

“What did she die of, exactly?” She planned earlier to lead to this question much more slowly, but that doesn’t seem necessary given what she reads as Alan’s present
frame of mind.

Alan is startled, but he shrugs, as though casually. “Old age. Parkinson’s disease.”

“No, but I mean, there has to be a cause. What was on her death certificate?”

“Heart, I think. I didn’t read it.” Surely this isn’t the sort of thing she wants to know.

“Heart? I didn’t know she had heart problems.”

“I didn’t read it. I think that’s what the doctor thought it might have been. In the short run.” He sets his glass down. “Look, you’re not writing about her
death, are you?”

“Well, yes. Obviously I need to include it. I mean, I can’t exactly ignore it, can I? I mean, in a way, it becomes, almost, the
point
of the story.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t do it at all, then.” He’s frowning. “The story. The article.”

“Oh, I have to do it, even to get the kill fee.”

“The kill fee?”

“Nice term, huh? Yeah, I mean, I have to turn something in to get paid for my time. And I put in a lot of time. If they take it, obviously, I get full price. If they don’t, I get
less, but something. That’s the kill fee. Naturally I’d like more. I live, just a little
bit
, hand to mouth. I could use it. And they want the death, obviously. It’s the
hottest part, now.”

“This . . . language is ludicrous.”

“It is the language, nonetheless. I didn’t invent it.” Linnett has realized by now that she made a mistake being as casual as she was about Lily. Whatever he feels, it
isn’t as simple as she assumed. But there’s something prissy too, old-maidy, she thinks, about his tone, that she resists sympathizing with. She decides to plunge ahead. “Did you
find her?” she asks.