Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (11 page)

Thinking of the photo, thinking of her, I wished I could have been lovelier in the picture, with a longer neck, in black-and-white, my hand and chin tilted in an artful way. There were women like that. Still, I thought, this was a beginning. Like an anonymous package, a missing-person poster, a message in a bottle. I wanted to be found. And maybe she did too. This flyer, it might be the sign she’d been waiting for.
Here I am,
I thought.
I’m so sorry. Find me,
I thought.
Please.

Our child, Joseph’s and mine, was a girl. The nurse told me when I woke up. They’d already whisked her away. I imagined her as an adult, shiny dark hair getting in her eyes, wiping the counter around her sons’ cereal bowls with a kitchen towel as they looked at her adoringly, clamoring for more more more. And now, I wondered if she’d felt it—her father’s death. I wondered if she’d suddenly felt less secured to the world—one side of her body lighter, dizzier, refusing to stay put. I wondered where she was when it happened, if she’d been aware of the tiniest zing.
I’m still here,
I wanted to tell her suddenly.
I won’t leave you again. Not ever.

I felt like a fraud. I was more sorry than I deserved to be.

I looked around. The voice on the phone made me feel as though someone had barged in here, opened the curtains, exposed something uncouth. The coffee table, I noticed, was strewn with unopened newspapers and supermarket savings packs. There were empty ripped-open envelopes. Every day, I’d gone through the mail with him. On the way back from the study, I’d drop the envelopes here. There must have been forty of them now. I gathered them up, threw them out.

I had never been this way. I had never lived like this. I had always replaced soap before it grew a film. Everything in the closet faced north.

I found myself in the study, standing by Joseph’s desk. I picked up one of his pens, a heavy thing with a complicated ink system. I remembered this one. I’d bought it for him years ago. The first thing he did with it was write me a note:
To the most beautiful woman I know. I’m hungry in case you are wondering.

I opened the middle drawer and found a lone pill bottle. They really were everywhere. I wondered if I’d put this one here in one of my pathetic, failed attempts to clean up. I’d put a vase in the refrigerator, a VCR warranty in my sock drawer. There was so much stuff. Our possessions grew and grew. Then, one day, they stopped. I wondered if I’d ever buy anything again that presumed life would march on—a plane ticket, a magazine subscription, something decorative for our home.

I dropped a folder, some receipts, and unhinged paper clips onto the desk. There were gum wrappers, used tissues, ancient credit card statements, chandelier bulbs, and blank postcards from Delray Beach. I was making a mess
. I’m sorry, Joseph,
I thought.
I didn’t mean to ruin your things.

There was a recipe for coconut cake, a kitchen timer that jingled when I shook it; there was a movie stub from years ago. I kept going through the things, piling them on his desk, imagining building a giant shape that might resemble my Joseph.
What if you could sculpt the person you loved the most,
I wondered.
What would it be made of?

Toward the bottom of the stack, I found an oak leaf, big and fingerlike, lovingly pressed between two pieces of wax paper. It looked fresh, brand-new. I hadn’t done it. I’d read about this in a craft magazine. It was something Martha Stewart did, not us—ironing leaves for decoration. I found another. A red maple leaf. Then an itty-bitty brown one. I did the ironing around here. When, in all our years, had Joseph ever ironed?

I put them aside, feeling as though I’d intruded on a private moment. Perhaps he’d been planning to give these to me with a very special card. Thousands of things, I thought, were only halfway realized. His juice box had liquid left inside. His clothes remained unwashed in the guest-room bathtub. The Bellow story was dog-eared midway through.

I kept going through his things.

It was while I was cutting up some unused credit cards that I saw the note written on a piece of fabric. It was torn, but not enough. It was there. Right there, on top of the stack on the desk. I’d put it there, not noticing. Front and center. It wasn’t even ashamed of itself. And it was nothing fancy, just a scrap of old thin cloth, as though it were a tag that had been itchy and yanked out. White with purple letters, like veins on old skin. It was in a woman’s handwriting.

Meet me at the Bow Bridge at sunrise.

I felt like I was going to pass out. I was weak. I was
weak.
I sat down slowly in the desk chair, not wanting to rush this. It felt like this shouldn’t be rushed. I picked up the note, delicately, feeling it in my hands. I wondered if something like this should have been heavier, with the heft of a hamantashen, at the very least. I looked at the words and then I didn’t. I put it back where it came from. And then I picked it up again. I mashed it in my fist. Go. Vanish. I decided I wouldn’t look at it again. It wasn’t meant for me. I tossed it into the garbage can. I took it out of the garbage can. I uncrumpled it. Flattened it onto the desk. The letters leaned to the right, poised as if with their hands on their hips.

I sniffed it.

I turned it over. There was a tiny grease stain. From our counter? From fish?

I folded it. It went willingly, like a ballerina being lifted at her waist. Tiny square.

From the Bow Bridge in Central Park, Joseph and I watched the ducks. Sometimes we’d sit in a gazebo nearby and feed them old bread. I didn’t like when they came too close. They had ferocious little beaks. Joseph liked to stomp near them and cause them to fly toward my head. I’d scolded him. I’d told him to find someone else to harass. I was always saying things like that.

I’d read that a man was murdered in our gazebo.

Joseph was always up at sunrise, his favorite time of day. He’d go for a walk and return to make our coffee before his shower. Sometimes, he’d walk with Dottie. She was an insomniac and a hypochondriac. He’d tell her it was good for her lungs. She would have drunk parrot urine if she thought it would diminish her frown lines.

For a moment, I thought:
Maybe I wrote this note.
It could have been me. I could have been a walker. I could have liked the mornings. But then, could I have? I liked the afternoons. Sunset, not sunrise. Cooling down, not warming up. I hated walking first thing. It made the system reel. I tried to imagine us. Me, groggy. Him, tugging me along. The air—it never happened. I would have remembered. Perhaps it was Dottie, then. But of course it wasn’t. Dottie didn’t have the patience to write something down. She just barged in, never knocked, never made polite requests.

And then it hit me: our daughter. I recalled what I’d said to Joseph just after he’d passed, about finding her. I wanted to know where he’d been when I said that—for how long hearing continues to work and when it shuts off. This note, I thought, what if it was from her? What if they had met, after all these years? I always knew that he couldn’t let go, but maybe he found a way so that he didn’t have to.

It wasn’t easy. I will say that. After we gave up the baby, we hated each other a little. I couldn’t stand his disappointment in me. I’d wanted to be enough. When I wasn’t, I shunned any possible replacement. It’s horrible, I know. Still, it’s been a very long time. And he, heart of gold, had wanted only something of his own, something to love. I deprived him of that. I know I did. And yet, we moved on. It required silence and shame. It required opening our restaurant just to be something other than non-parents, to watch each other in a different context. They never left us, those feelings, but they dimmed. We grew around the hole. I’d like to think it made us stronger, but I suppose it’s impossible to know a thing like that.

Pain in my chest. I wheezed.

I sniffed the note again. There was lead in my stomach. A whole new world had just broken into my house. Then the jealousy surged. Why had he been so secretive? Why had he kept her from me? You
gave her up, Victoria,
I told myself. Our relationship after that—Joseph’s and mine—was a delicate hora around that crater. That’s the funny thing about loss. Sometimes it’s the absence of something that makes everything else appear around it. It’s like turning off the lights in order to see.

And yet, I believed we’d moved on. Not always together, but along, past, in whatever way we could. That he’d met her, known her, and for years perhaps, was a betrayal I couldn’t begin to comprehend. He had kept her from me, and he’d kept some of himself from me too.

I looked at the leaves. “Did she press these?” I said out loud, waving them in the air. “Why didn’t you share them? Her?”

And then I couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t think. Maybe Dottie had a point—all these reminders were too much. I marched into the kitchen, began collecting used dishes. There were paperweights crouching in a corner next to a tall stack of red manila folders. There was a tissue box impaled and balancing on a little copper giraffe. Our lemon tree was totally dead now. Its smell had been our nostalgia. Baghdad. Now the leaves were brown and shriveled on the floor. I hadn’t even noticed.

Moments before, I’d thought: This was Joseph’s world, his memory. It all bore such weight. Everything and its dust needed to stay just so. To clean it would be to remove him. Now I reached for his sock. I knotted it for effect and hurled it across the room. “How could you,” I heard myself whisper.

I went to Joseph’s closet. I yanked things off the hangers. Blazers and coats and merino wool sweaters. I should have been sleeping. A smell of him leaped up, a smell I hadn’t smelled for months—garlic and the lavender water I’d ironed his shirts with. In the end, he had stopped smelling like himself.

I knocked his hats off the top shelf with the back of a broom. They scattered like bugs. I pulled his polo shirts out of their drawers. They crumbled onto the floor. I threw his underwear, one by one, into the crouching bag. His handkerchiefs. His undershirts. His khakis bowed into themselves.

I lifted up a pair of jeans, meaning to fold them. I should have folded everything. Brought it all to the Salvation Army. Oh well. I dropped the jeans back onto the floor. I picked up a silk shirt, laid it out on the bed. I saw the shape of it—the wide, bubbled shape of it. This would not do. The intimacy would not do.

Then I was gathering the clothes into a giant hill. I was falling over my feet. My shoulders were going stiff. I was an old, old lady. I put on my leather gloves. I felt criminal.

I set off in search of every half-full pill bottle. The diapers, slipper socks, lotions, ointments, heating pads, urinal, therapeutic pillows, bedpans, baby wipes, wash bucket and its thick orange sponge.

I was outraged. I was hysterical.

I went to the kitchen looking for garbage bags, but there were none. I went to the hall closet. So many odd things. It overwhelmed me. I wanted it all out. I moved the broom to get a better look and the top shelf fell down.

Boom.

Shit.

Immediately, Dottie banged with her heel. She lived above us but heard everything. It was counterintuitive, I often thought, unless she kept her ear to the floor constantly, which wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. These flimsy walls were the only things lamer, frailer than me. I thought,
Go away, please.
I rifled around in the closet. Not one single garbage bag in the entire place.

Then, here appeared Dottie. Next to me. She hadn’t knocked. She had a headful of pink curlers. She found me on my knees.

“Shit hellfire,” she said. “What on earth.” I looked up at her. Sometimes, I wondered if she was really from the South or if she just watched too much TV.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

For a second, I was about to tell her everything, about the note, the truth. But when I took a preparatory breath, I choked on some dust. And then I couldn’t. I couldn’t get the words out. It was my dignity, among other things, that Joseph had stolen when he’d decided to keep his relationship with our daughter from me.

So I pretended that I didn’t see her. I moved around her like she was an ornamental plant. She was used to it. She took the hint and vanished. I located some old supermarket plastic bags on top of the fridge. They were small but they were something. I stood on a dining-room chair, fully aware that I could break my neck. “Fine,” I said to no one in particular. “Break twice.”

In the bedroom, I found Dottie delicately folding some of Joseph’s sweaters. Her eyes were full of tears.

My first thought was that she was messing with my mess and interfering. I had already cleaned up after her—her endless piles of crap. But she was making everything smell like her lipstick again—like wet powder, a smell that made me cringe. I did not want to see her face and felt confident that Joseph would not have either. He wouldn’t have wanted her all over his things. I had the urge to tell her that this was not a petting zoo.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

I grabbed at the sweaters.

“You’re really going to do this tonight?” she asked, and let go. “Let’s have tea instead. Let’s watch a movie. Come, doll. Let’s sit.”

“I don’t want to sit,” I said.

“All right, then,” she said. “But you’re really going to throw all this out? It’s good stuff. Someone would want it, you know. I’ll help you,” she said.

It was quite comical: Dottie all of a sudden so philanthropic—an ambassador to the poor.
Joseph,
I wanted to say.
Let’s call a spade a spade. Has Dottie ever done a charitable thing in her life?

And then, I remembered what he’d done.
Forget it,
I said to him in my head.
I’m not talking to you.

I threw one of his shirts at her and she caught it. It hung from her hands by the sleeve, like a small child unwilling to walk. I wasn’t feeling well. I was queasy in the throat. I started another bag, stuffing in thing after thing after thing. The bags were thin, some of them already ripped. I began to sweat. Dottie wasn’t helping. I looked at her, about to give it to her good. But then I thought of what Joseph would say:
She’s alone, she has nothing; it wouldn’t kill us to humor her.
But this was extreme, even for Dottie. This needed more than just humoring.