Funerals for Horses (7 page)

Simon stopped at the door and I slammed into his back, accidentally pushing him forward to knock once with his forehead. He stepped back in a stupor, as though he’d planned nothing so radical as knocking, but it was too late.

A woman opened the door, a woman with gray hair done up in a deliberate style, her dress starched and white, an apron flecked with roses. She smiled at Simon, exposing a row of large, perfect teeth, each one seeming to perform its role with grace. I had to wonder why, with those teeth going for her, her smile wasn’t beautiful, like Mrs. Hurley’s, and why I knew I’d never play a game designed to make Grandma Sterling smile.

“Yes, may I help you children?”

Simon spoke up. “Mrs. Sterling?”

“Yes, young man. How may I help you?”

“I’m Simon. This is Ella.”

“Simon who, dear?”

“Simon Ginsberg.”

A cloud passed across her metallic blue eyes, like the cloud I blamed for blocking the sun, turning Grandma Sterling’s face a little grayer.

“Yes, I see.” She looked past Simon to our car, as if expecting a busload of Ginsbergs. Then she conceded that we had best come inside.

We followed her to the parlor, her steps a smooth glide that tossed her skirt about her calves. I walked behind Simon, clutching the back of his shirt, wishing to be invisible. The hall seemed miles long, like a forced march down death row. My vision darkened at the periphery, until I could only identify those objects directly in front of me. A knickknack shelf with pearly blue and white porcelain figures dancing a minuet. A grandfather clock with a swinging pendulum and great, brass-chained weights.

I wanted to ask god to absorb me into the floorboards, to make me disappear, but I owned no god as yet, being too young to merit his attentions. I knew that, if seen, I could only be seen as not fitting here. I was not a child who lived in a house with a grandfather clock. I was a child who had to wash her hands before she could touch one. I was not a child who would be trusted to dust the fine bric-a-brac, but the one who would break something special.

Grandma Sterling sat in a frail wicker chair and Simon and I perched lightly on the edge of a love seat, my hip bumping against his. I thought if I touched as little of the furniture as possible she might admire my futile efforts not to defile her environment.

DeeDee spoke first. She said, oh, man, did I warn you. She laughed at us.

“You look a lot like your mother, Simon.”

Grandma Sterling’s voice echoed down to me, like a voice that breaks through a veil of sleep. My stranger-grandmother was drifting farther away. Or I was.

She asked Simon what brought us, and if we traveled alone, and how we found the trip. She focused only on Simon, her smile store-bought, her voice crisp, a voice reserved for asking questions of strangers when the answers don’t matter. She never looked at me or called me by name. I began to think I might really be invisible, and the more sure I became, the more light flowed into my peripheral vision.

Simon stood and tugged at my sleeve. I didn’t dare ask what I had missed. I followed him bumping-close into the kitchen, a sprawling white room with bay windows and hanging plants, by far the brightest room in the house, yet the light appeared black to me. I can’t explain it any better than that.

Grandma Sterling set three blue willow china bowls on the table in front of Simon, then a quart of handpacked vanilla ice cream and a scoop, and slipped away to boil water for tea.

“Simon, is it dark in here to you?”

Simon gave me a funny look and pressed a hand to my forehead. I told him I felt fine and sat with my chin on the table, watching him scoop ice cream. It was packed hard, and he applied more and more pressure until the scoop slipped and a curl of ice cream skidded loose, flew into the air and landed on Grandma Sterling’s kitchen linoleum.

For the first time in my life, it seemed poor Simon was in over his head. He stared at the blob on the floor, his eyes frozen wide in terror. I looked around to see Grandma Sterling filling a kettle, her back to us, and did the only right, logical thing. I grabbed the scoop out of Simon’s hand and bumped him out of the way.

I wondered if he’d ask me later why I did it. I had plenty of time to wonder. Time slowed to a crawl as Grandma Sterling blew lightly on the burner and adjusted the flame.

I knew that, when she turned around and saw what had happened, she couldn’t possibly think less of me than she already did. But Simon had a chance. I could tell by the way she looked at him—like he was there. Like she had pictured her grandson looking something like him, blond and fair-skinned and handsome. Why ruin Simon’s chance?

When she turned, her face fell. She stood for a moment, hands on hips, as if the whole situation was simply too much for her. Then she moistened a linen towel and wiped up the mess. As she straightened up, a wisp of gray curl fell onto her forehead, and she brushed it back into place, seeming anxious to make everything perfect again.

“I guess we should have left that to your brother Simon.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

We ate our ice cream and drank our tea in the most deafening, wearing silence. It seemed to stretch forever, like the god mesa, only not beautiful in any way.

I glanced obsessively over at Simon, hoping he’d say it was time to go.

Grandma Sterling broke the silence. “Before you go, maybe you’d like to see the room where your mother grew up.”

We followed her up carpeted stairs to the second floor, where she opened the door to my mother’s bedroom and motioned us inside. She did not cross that threshold herself.

Then she disappeared, leaving us alone in a new world of retrospect. Simon breathed deeply when she left, as though he’d never breathed before.

“DeeDee thinks this is all pretty funny,” he said.

“Well, she did warn us. Hey, Simon, is it supposed to be so dark in here?”

Simon held my face and stared into my eyes as though he might see some obvious evidence of my breakdown in vision.

“You okay, Ella?”

“Yeah, but we can’t stay here, Simon. Not even if she said we could, and she won’t.”

“I know. Hey, look at this.” He rolled his neck around as if to stretch out kinks. “Have you ever seen anything so clean? There’s no dust in here. You think she dusts in here every day?”

I walked the walls of the room, staring at close range like an old blind woman. I saw a teenage girl’s shelf of books, a bed with a ruffled spread, a locked diary on the nightstand. On the dresser I peered at a snow globe with Heidi inside, and a picture of my mother at about Simon’s age, which I held in my hands.

“Wow, look at this, Simon. She was so beautiful.” I felt his comforting presence at my shoulder. “I never saw her look this pretty. Did you?” Her hair clung to her skull in tight ringlets, her dark lashes curled like a doll’s from her blue eyes. She wore a tight polka-dot dress.

“Yeah, a while ago, maybe. When you were little. She’d get all dolled up and Dad would take her dancing.”

Something moved inside me. I knew then why my father fell in love with her, which had always been hard to fathom, watching her vegetate on the couch in her old housedresses, and curlers that never seemed to turn into a hairdo.

And then, knowing why someone would love her, I worried that she might not be okay.

“Where do you think she is, Simon? Do you think she’s happy?” Simon wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer.

Just then Grandma Sterling appeared in the doorway, startling me, and the framed photo sailed out of my hands and landed on the braided rug. I rushed to redeem myself by picking it up, and kicked it out of my reach.

Grandma Sterling scooped it up and returned it to its rightful place on the dresser.

Simon grabbed hold of my wrist and pulled me downstairs and out the front door.

“Simon, dear,” she called out as we trotted down her front steps.

Simon whirled as if sensing a gun held to his back. “Thank you for the ice cream, Grandma Sterling, but we can’t stay”

“Before you go, dear...”

This is it, I thought. She’ll say some little nice thing, now that she knows we’re not staying long. Pleased to meet you. Come again. At least, tell my daughter I love her, which we could not have done.

“Did your mother die?”

Later I would learn to guard against hope, but this one last time I had let a flagging sense of trust in the rightness of things pull me in.

My brother Simon only said, “What?”

“Did your mother die that time?”

“Uh, no. No, ma’am, she didn’t.”

“Oh. I just wondered.”

Then the click of her door, no kinder than its owner.

“Why did she say that, Simon?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the cancer surgery. Or because Dad tried to call.”

“Oh, yeah.”

We sat in the car together, and Simon leaned on the steering wheel and cried.

“We could go to Mrs. Hurley’s,” I said.

“We hardly know her.”

“But she said if we were ever in Columbus we had to come see her. We can be in Columbus just as easy as Reading.”

“I think she meant like in a year or two.”

“But she didn’t say in a year or two. Don’t cry, Simon. I think Grandma Sterling liked you.”

Simon laughed bitterly, but not as loud as DeeDee.

Something propels me upward through a thick crust of unconsciousness, cracking the surface to allow a scrap of light to bleed through. A hand, behind my neck, a touch of warm metal at my lips, then cool water. I try to take it in, gurgle and cough, spill it down my chin and neck, but even there it is appreciated.

Now I lose another couple of days.

When I get one back again, it’s fairly useless to me. I’m lying on a couch in a modest cabin, in a long, clean white shirt, with a sheet thrown over me. A noisy swamp cooler works against odds to keep the air livable. The room is decorated in bones. Cattle, coyote, rabbit, god only knows what. Feathers. Native American pottery.

My feet lie propped and bandaged. They feel too heavy. I don’t move them, so I won’t have to know what I’ve done.

My first visitor is about three years old, a towhead, with a baby bottle of something amber, juice maybe, dangling from his mouth. He runs up to the couch surrounded by hound dogs whose whole bodies wag with the action of their tails.

I hear a sucking sound as he pulls the bottle free, and a squeak of air rushing into the flattened nipple.

He seems startled to see me look back.

“Are you dead?” he asks.

“Apparently not.”

“Mom said you might be dead.”

“Looks like it got better.”

“Right,” he says, and runs away, the dogs running with him.

I decide on a little nap; or rather, it decides on me.

When I wake up, a woman sits on the edge of the couch with me. Kathy, so she says. Her golden-brown hair is gathered up onto her head, with just the right amount falling away again. She is younger than me. She hands me a cup that I assume contains water, but it’s warm chicken broth. I drink it all at once and feel better.

“Thank you. How did I get here?”

“You walked. Rick found you in the front yard. You were delirious with fever. You probably don’t remember.”

I don’t, but it doesn’t seem necessary to say I don’t. I’m sure the blankness on my face says it all. She is a stranger to me, yet I’m an old friend of the family by now. I’ve been with them for days.

She sits with me for a while, which I like, though I can’t seem to say so, and tells me my fever was a hundred and four when I arrived. She and Rick wrapped me in wet sheets, and the doctor came and shot me full of antibiotics. He said my feet were so infected that in another three or four days he might not have been able to save them.

I try to thank her for finding me in time to save my feet. I can’t very well follow Simon without them. She says I found her. Whatever. I want to ask how Simon’s feet are holding up, and who will find Simon in time to save them, but I think she has enough trouble just saving me, so I ask where we are.

She says we’re on the edge of Death Valley, fifteen miles from the nearest town.

I say I have money, I’ll pay her back for the doctor, and she says we’ll work that out when I’m better, that I should get some sleep, and in the process of doing so, I lose another day or two.

Long before my feet are ready to bear me, I decide to test the water, and I hobble out back to sit with Rick, my host, on rickety lawn chairs in the cool desert night. As soon as I take my first step I know it’s a mistake, but I finish the job anyway.

“Mighta been too soon,” he says, pointing to the clean dressing soaking through with blood.

“Guess so,” I say.

He’s a bearded young man, twenty-five maybe, with thin brown hair cascading down the back of his collar, and an easy smile, which he gives away for free. We sit silent for a while, not so much out of awkwardness as respect. A yellow hunter’s moon hangs gigantic over a nearby mountain, washing the barrel cactus and prickly pears in a pearly, translucent light. Somewhere in the distance coyotes yip and bark in shrill voices, and the dogs’ hackles rise.

I roll up my sleeves two turns, which I normally would not do, because he and his wife have seen the scars anyway.

“You know,” Rick says, “you really can’t walk across Death Valley barefoot. Or just about any other way. Temperature can get up to one thirty-five by day. You wouldn’t make it, even starting out in good shape. You couldn’t carry that much water.”

“I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I can,” I say.

“You’re not bothering us any. Stay till you’re ready to move on. But let me drive you to Vegas. You can get a bus from there, hitchhike, whatever you need to do.”

“If you’ll let me buy the gas.”

“It’s not that far,” he says. He tells me a few old Death Valley ghost stories. Predictable ones, punctuated by yawns. Then he excuses himself and goes in for the night.

I don’t bother to tell him that I damaged my feet so badly walking out here, I wouldn’t dare walk in again. I’d rather spend the night out in real life, anyway. I gaze up at the man in the moon and wonder if Simon tried to walk across Death Valley. I wonder if anybody found Simon, put a hand behind his neck and poured water into his mouth. But the moon doesn’t say what it knows.