Cape Disappointment (17 page)

There were preliminary comments by the other senator from Washington state, from the governor, who had cut short her honeymoon to attend, and from Kalpesh Gupta. They were all short, emotional, and to the point. Gupta's comments were particularly poignant and his
thoughtfulness surprised me. The reverence surrounding Jane Sheffield was almost palpable. Each time a new speaker took the platform, the room grew hushed. Deborah and I were seated on bleachers, packed in alongside hundreds of others, squashed so tightly our thighs were warm from the contact.

The low point might have been the confused and jarring, mostly political speech by Sheffield's distraught and sometimes foulmouthed twenty-seven-year-old son, who had been slated for the fatal flight but had missed it.

It was clear from the thickening tones in his voice that he was sobbing as he spoke. For a while all was well, but then he began making political comments against the Republican Party, a couple of former presidents, and some of the right-wing radio and television pundits who he claimed had been spewing venom onto his mother's corpse. To say the least, it was ill advised, and as he got more and more wound up, we could see his father trying to decide whether to escort him off the stage. In the end, his father and one of the Sheffield aides gently removed him while the bagpipe band began playing a version of the “Skye Boat Song.”

By the time we got to my house, the national radio newscasters were already jumping on the Sheffield people. It was deemed a shame that family members and Sheffield campaign organizers had thought it appropriate to talk trash against the opposing party at a funeral. The talking heads accused the Democratic Party of bad form. Kalpesh Gupta was cited as the sparkplug in a “dying” campaign, who had turned the funeral into a public pyre upon which had been thrown the last vestiges of good taste. All the right-wing noisemakers took up the gauntlet, and by late evening pundits were reporting things that hadn't even happened. It was said that the audience had cheered when Sheffield's son told the crowd he wished Maddox and his staff had gone down in the plane instead of his mother, though Sheffield's son had said nothing of the sort, and that the audience had been aghast throughout his remarks. It pissed me off the way Maddox's side refused to cut any slack for the young man, who was so clearly overcome with grief.

“Thomas?” Deborah had said as we drove up to my house. “How are you doing? How are you really doing?”

“Pretty shitty.”

“Is there anyone here to help out?”

“My sister was here, but I sent her away.”

“How long was she there?”

“Half an hour. I need to be alone.”

“There are a million little things that have to be done at a time like this. I've been through similar situations before. I know your head is in no shape to be handling the guff people are going to be asking you to handle. Are the funeral arrangements completed?”

“I think her family is taking care of that.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“A day or two. I'm not hungry.”

“I'm not leaving until I'm sure everything's okay.”

AFTER WATCHING THREE
talking heads reviewing the Senate career of Jane Sheffield for fifteen minutes, I channel-surfed until I found an old Alan Delon movie. Deborah couldn't take it and went out to the kitchen to listen to more Sheffield news on NPR. I could hear her clearing dirty dishes off the table, chairs, and presumably the floor, but I wasn't going to apologize for the mess. Feeling ashamed meant you could feel, and feeling wasn't in my repertoire just yet.

Our single-story house had been built in 1929 and added on to several times. The basement apartment Kathy had once rented now housed an engineering student from the U whom Kathy had branded the “mole” because of his proclivity for working all night on school projects and sleeping most of the day. I'd run into him only once since Kathy's death, by accident when he came out to get the mail off the front porch. Neither of us said anything. He'd been harboring a not-so-secret crush on Kathy since the day he moved in.

It was a simple house and needed work. The gutter out back by the crab apple tree leaked. The garage door needed to be rehung. It wasn't a shabby house, not exactly, nor was it a match for Horace's spick-and-span showplace next door. My humble home had a tiny backyard next to a detached garage, a long driveway that ran between my house and Horace's, and, because it was situated close to the sidewalk, no front lawn to speak of. The living room collected a fair amount of traffic
noise from the street. I didn't groom and curry what lawn we had, and you probably couldn't eat off the floor the way you could at Horace's place; but I had a nice collection of roses, and in the summer I grew tomatoes outside beneath the kitchen window, where the afternoon sun beat against the house.

Most of my neighbors had left notes of condolence or come over to talk to me since the accident. Horace hadn't shown his face, but his wife had delivered inedible casseroles every two days, which I would have fed to the dog if he hadn't run away during my delirium at the Coast Guard station. So far I hadn't found the pluck to go looking for Spider. Originally we'd found him on the street, so I knew he could take care of himself if he had to.

When I wandered into the kitchen, my eyes quickly scanned the room for familiar items of Kathy's I'd been staring at all week, but they were missing: a pair of earrings on the windowsill over the sink; her handwritten recipe card for ginger coin cookies, which she'd left on the counter, hoping to find time to make them; the saucer still holding the tea bag she'd used just before we left for the ocean. It was all put away.

As much as I resented the meddling, I was too stupefied with grief and indecision to say anything about it. I resented the hell out of Deborah, but she meant well, and God knows, I'd been needing somebody to come and do this.

Deborah noticed me looking around and said, “I know it doesn't seem like it and it probably will be heresy coming from me, because I know Kathy didn't like me, but you'll love again, Thomas, and it'll be almost as wonderful as what you had. I'm not telling you to drop everything and go searching for another wife. I'm just saying I know it seems like the end of the world, but I felt the same way when my brother died.”

“When did your brother die?” I asked.

“When I was seventeen he went away to college and got mixed up in one of those stupid fraternity stunts that went wrong. I'm not saying I don't miss him still, because I do, as I'm sure you'll always have a special place in your heart for Kathy, but you have to realize there is a future waiting for you out there. There
is
a life waiting. And you know what? Kathy would be the first to tell you that. So do your grieving, but at some point start pulling out of this funk.”

It was solid advice, but I resented the fact that it was coming from a woman Kathy had viewed more or less as a potential rival. It didn't help that Deborah worked in the wrong camp and that Kathy felt the upcoming election was as vital as anything she'd ever taken part in. Nor did it help that I believed everyone in the Maddox camp was jubilant over recent events, that they were all secretly gloating because Sheffield and her top aides were permanently out of the picture.

I even resented the fact that she was sitting in Kathy's favorite chair without knowing it, just as earlier she'd managed to find Kathy's favorite spot on the couch. Hell, there wasn't anything about this woman I didn't resent. I tried not to wolf down the meal she had made for us, but that didn't last more than a few bites, because I was starving, and then when I went to the sink to drink a glass of water and fill a second glass, I realized my stomach hurt from the sudden influx of food and liquid.

“I might have fixed something other than scrambled eggs and toast, but there isn't much in the house,” Deborah said. “I
can
cook other things.”

“I need to go shopping.”

“Would you like me to go for you?”

“No, thanks.”

I needed to send Deborah packing, but I couldn't drum up the energy and I apparently craved human companionship, because after we finished eating I let her blather on and on about the week's political news. “I know you realize how important this election is, not just here in this state but nationally. The Washington Senate race has been named as one of the two most important races in the country. Our party is two seats away from taking the majority from the Democrats, and if we can do that, we can get some things done for this country.”

“I don't care about this. You might as well be talking about the Tibetan high school basketball championships.”

“We've got a whole raft of television and radio pundits working the point that it's outrageous that the governor will appoint Sheffield's husband if she wins the election. We're hoping the public pressure will force the governor to change her mind. Anyway, some of the talking heads are refusing to discuss much of anything besides the fact that the polls haven't changed since the accident. Sheffield's still in the lead.

What they don't take into account is the sympathy factor. I mean, if Maddox had gone down in a plane crash, he'd be ahead in the polls, don't you think?”

“Actually, I don't.”

“We're thinking after this service for Sheffield maybe the sympathy factor will taper off. At least we're hoping it will. You know what we found out this morning?
60 Minutes
will be taping a piece on the election. In addition, money is coming in from all over. It would just be such a shame to lose by a nose and then have the governor appoint the husband. Thomas. I'm running on and on, and what I should be saying is, I thought you and Kathy were just the sweetest couple. I always thought you had the relationship I was looking for and have never been able to pull together. You were devoted to each other but also independent in your own right. You were both just a treat to be around. It's a tragedy. I'll be sick about it for a long time.”

“Thanks, Deborah. And thanks for coming. But I think I should be alone now.”

“Yes. Of course you need time by yourself.” Instead of leaving, she tipped forward in her chair, crossed her legs at the ankles, and said, “The president called yesterday. Did I tell you? He said the whole nation was watching our race and it was vital we not let up.”

“Funny he should call you guys, seeing as the other camp lost their candidate and six staff members.”

“Of course he's talked to the Sheffield people, too. Just a week earlier Maddox and all of us were in a small plane together. It could have been us. It was terrible, but we still have a job to do and we're going to do it the best we know how. That's what
they
would have done if we'd been in that plane.”

“Sure.”

“Look, kiddo. Would you like me to come around later in the week and spend a day going through Kathy's things? I could sort them and help you decide which should go to the Goodwill and which—”

“Can you leave now?”

“Sure.” But instead of grabbing her coat, she began clearing the table, one last favor for the widower. Widower. Jesus. I was a widower.

“Just leave!” I yelled, whereupon she picked up her coat, slipped into her shoes, and stepped out the back door.

SNAKE HAD PICKED THE LOCK
on the front door, let himself into my house, and was now ensconced in an easy chair with his cowboy boots propped on the coffee table. He'd come to comfort me, but he wouldn't do it by pouring me vodka and looking me in the eye, partially because neither of us drank— he was a reformed alcoholic, while I'd never touched a drop in my life— and partially because looking me in the eye with words of consolation was not his style. Parking his boots on our coffee table
was
his style. He'd asked to stay the night, handing out the excuse that Emerald City Pest Control was bug-bombing his apartment house again.

Groundhog Day
had been my security blanket for most of the day, but now we were watching Michael Mann's
Last of the Mohicans.
We'd been at it awhile, and I was finding this new flick a distraction from watching Bill Murray stumble through one suicide after another. I'd been housebound most of the week, still feeling as if I was living somebody else's life and doing it in a borrowed body. Until now, catastrophes were events I investigated for other people, not incidents I lived through myself. Late this afternoon, despite the fact that I had attended two more funerals after throwing Deborah Driscoll out of the house, I was beginning to sense the first vague stirring of normalcy since the accident. I'd actually walked to the store and returned with a bag of groceries, though afterward I left a container of ice cream on the counter until it melted.