Enon (2 page)

“Please, sit,” he said, waving his hand at a burgundy-colored leather sofa. Susan and I sat.

“We have taken care of everything. I just need to ask you about an urn, and if you could bring us something loose-fitting and comfortable for Kate to wear, pajamas or something similar, for the cremation.”

Susan said, “She liked to sleep in a T-shirt and cotton pajama pants—I don’t know what you call them. Ha, they’re those things the kids wear to bed but to school, too, if you let them.”

“Yes, yes, I know all about those. Lounge pants.” I didn’t know whether Rick was married or if he had children. There was a gold wedding band on his left ring finger. If he had children, they’d be my age. So, I reasoned, if he knew about kids wearing pajama bottoms and fleece slippers to school, it would be because he had grandchildren Kate’s age or even older. I nodded. I had no idea what to say. Susan continued.

“And the slippers, too. Fleece-lined, open-back things. She tried to wear those to school, too.” Kate’s favorite clothes to sleep in had been a white pair of pajama pants with different flowers and their Latin names written under them in black, and a thin, soft T-shirt silk-screened with the word
SUPERGIRL
on it, both of which I knew must be on the floor next to her bed, because she’d been wearing them the night before she died, when she’d come downstairs to use the bathroom between three and four in the morning while I was watching a late Red Sox game. She’d have changed out of the pants and shirt and into her bathing suit and denim cutoffs and bright green, short-sleeved polo shirt, the clothes in which she’d died, it occurred to me, and in which she must still be dressed, unless the morticians had removed them.

“Can she wear the slippers, too? Can we get her slippers?” Susan asked. “We’ll go get the clothes right now.”

“Yes, of course, Susan. That’s fine. And we can talk about the urn when you come back.”

“Great. That’ll be great. Perfect.”

Susan and Ricky stood up, and I followed. They shook hands and I put my hand out to Rick and took two steps in his direction. He stepped toward me and put his left hand lightly on my shoulder for a moment and shook my hand.

“Very good, Charlie. Just let me know whatever we can do.”

“Thanks, Rick. I’m sorry, I can’t really talk. I really don’t know what to say—”

“It’s okay, Charlie. That’s fine.”

When we arrived back at the house, Susan went to the basement to get the clean laundry from the dryer. She said she’d washed Kate’s underwear.

“Will you go and get her T-shirt and pajama pants?” she asked.

I went up to Kate’s room. There were some flowers for pressing on her desk, chicory and a magenta-colored zinnia and an orange tiger lily, and some seashells she must have picked up at the beach. I opened the middle drawer of her bureau. I looked at her small, colorful, neatly folded T-shirts and my knees gave out. I almost dropped to the floor. I squeezed the edge of the drawer and closed my eyes for a moment and took a couple of deliberate, deep breaths and opened my eyes again and took a top and a bottom from each pile, without looking at them more than to confirm that neither had cartoon characters or some other inappropriate
design on it. What could be inappropriate, though? I thought. What’s appropriate? Who at the funeral parlor’s going to undress and dress her? Rick? Some guy in a rubber smock and gloves? There might well be health codes or laws about what clothes people can be cremated in. Ricky might have been humoring us and he won’t even put Kate’s slippers on, just throw them out. Who, I thought, is going to trundle my daughter into the fire? Then my legs really did give out and I sat down on the rug in the middle of Kate’s room. I sat with my legs under me and the clothes I’d chosen for her in my lap. My body shook and I could not hold myself up. I lay down on my side until Susan found me, fifteen minutes later.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I can’t do anything,” I said.

“We need to, Charlie,” she said. She came into the room and knelt next to me. She’d been crying. She combed her fingers through my hair. “We have to do all this stuff.”

“I don’t think I can, Sue. I want to, but I can’t even get myself to move.”

S
USAN
’
S PARENTS AND HER
sisters were gigantic Finns from Minnesota. Sue herself was tall, but not as tall as her parents and siblings. Her dad was six foot five and her mom was five foot eleven. Both of her sisters were nearly six feet tall. Sue was the shortest in the family, at five nine (“Five nine and
three-quarters
, Charles,” she’d remind me), and that was still two inches taller than me. Her family skied and biked and hiked together and looked people straight in the eye and were in intimidatingly good physical and moral health. They
were always affectionate toward me but I was certain they were disappointed that their daughter had taken up with me. I felt like I must look puny and sound as if I did nothing but mumble to them. My deeply ingrained habit of proceeding by irony was lost on them, and when I was with them I deliberately had to make an effort to be straightforward. Luckily for me, Susan was just enough unlike them to want to keep a loving but firm distance. When we visited Minnesota or they came east, they mobbed her and tried to get her to go off on some alpine excursion or other. Or so it seemed. Her sisters, both of whom looked like Olympic athletes, would get on either side of her and take her by the elbows as if they were going to whisk her away to a ski lodge. “Sue,” they’d say, “you look pale; you need to get some oxygen in your blood.” Susan’s father, a tree of a man, with a white mustache and a white halo of hair running from ear to ear and a perennially sunburned and freckled bald-topped head, used to look around at my stacks of books and maps and say, “The scholar. Charles Crosby, you need some exercise, too. You’ll get water in your lungs.” He’d give me a pat on the back with his huge hand that felt like being belted with a wooden oar.

When Kate died, Susan’s family stayed for three nights at a hotel off the highway two towns over. They came to the house the day before the funeral. Susan and her mother and sisters sat on the couch and went through the shoe boxes of family pictures we had and chose the ones she liked best so they could make a display for the funeral. Susan sat in the middle and her mother and sisters pulled stacks of photos from the boxes and shuffled through them and showed them to her.

“Look at this one, Susie. She’s so cute in this canoe.”

“What about this one, hon? Which birthday is this?”

“Look at the face she’s making here. Jesus, she looked just like you.”

Susan’s mother remained composed. It seemed she felt she had to, because she was parenting her daughter again, in a way that she had not done in a long time. Perhaps she had never had to help Susan through a tragedy. Susan had never told me about any deaths in her family. Her sisters wept and talked while they went through the photographs. They wiped their eyes with tissues and rubbed off the tears that dropped onto the photos. Susan’s father paced back and forth in front of the bay window in a discreet but vaguely military manner, as if awaiting orders.

“We should have two boards for pictures,” he said at one point. “No? One for either side of the urn?” Susan’s mother and sisters stopped riffling the pictures and looked at him.

“Yes. Yes, I think that’s right.”

“I’d better go get them, then. I saw an office supply store off the highway.”

Susan’s family debated about what sort of display board they should buy and with what to stick the pictures onto the board. While they weighed the advantages and disadvantages of cork and thumbtacks, they stole looks at Susan and had a wordless conversation about her over and above the discussion about picture arrangements. My impulse was to rescue her. Had it been my own family, I’d have felt overwhelmed. I’d have felt the need for quiet and solitude. The practical trivia of double-sided tape and making sure the photos could be mounted and taken down without damage was meaningless
static. I suddenly had the urge to scream, to make all the prattle stop. It all seemed like a flimsy curtain of noise yanked in front of the silent void of Kate’s absence.

“Sue,” I said. Her family stopped talking. I tried to sound soothing, calm. “Sue, do you want to take a little break, go upstairs and lie down for a little?” Both of Susan’s sisters put their arms around her and leaned their heads against hers.

“Yeah, Susie. You need a break?” her younger sister asked.

Sue wrapped an arm around one sister and put her cheek against the side of the other’s face.

“No,” she said. She took a deep breath. “No. This is good.” She looked at me. “I’m okay, Charlie. Thanks. I’m good. Come help us. You took so many of these. Help us figure out what we should put up.”

Susan’s father said, “Okay, then. I think I’ve got what we need. I’m going. Want to come, Charles?”

“No,” I said. “No. I think I need to lie down a little myself. Thanks. I just need to go upstairs and lie down a bit.”

I
BROKE MY HAND
five days after Kate’s funeral, three days after Susan’s family flew back to Minnesota. I woke up that Sunday morning on the living room couch after having spent most of the night sitting in the dark, exhausted and unable to sleep. It was one in the afternoon. I experienced again the impossible grief of remembering that my daughter was dead after the little sleep I had managed had cleared my mind of the fact. Each time that happened, I felt more worn away, less able to suffer the weight. I was curled up in an old afghan and turned toward the back of the couch.

“You need to get up, Charlie,” Sue said. I couldn’t see her, but I could tell from her voice that she was in the doorway leading to the kitchen. “It’s one o’clock. I’ve been trying to be quiet all day, but I need to do things. I need your help.”

I stared at the green velvet upholstery, which Kate and I had always agreed was the color of new ferns, and said, “Everything is shit because Kate’s gone.” Susan remained silent.

“Do you know what I mean, Sue?” I said. I turned myself over to see her. She was leaning against the door frame, hands at her sides. Her face was pale and swollen and her eyes were bright red and had black circles under them. She shook her head.

“Yes, Charlie,” she said. “I know what you mean, but I need you to help.” She walked through the room and out the other door, into the front hallway, and went upstairs. I sat up then and walked across the room after her. I meant to help her. I meant to follow her and explain how I meant to help her and to be stronger but that I didn’t have any choice, that it was like I’d been withered, sapped of spirit. Susan moved around in our bedroom upstairs, opening and closing drawers. I meant to call up to her. I meant to go upstairs and to ask what she needed me to do. Even better, I’d find something essential that needed doing that she hadn’t thought of and tell her I was going to do that.

That was when I broke my hand. Everything failed inside me. Something snapped in my stomach and I cried out and put my fist into the wall of the stairway landing. The old horsehair plaster pulverized and poured from the wall like hourglass sand but I struck a stud behind it and broke eight
bones. I vividly remember crying out, because that was something I’d always consciously stifled whenever I had hurt myself around Kate, so I wouldn’t upset her. I’d sighed and laughed out loud at my own foolishness in front of Kate when I’d pounded my thumb with a hammer, or had a pebble ricochet off a shin while mowing our lawn, or once had a two-by-four drop on my head when I was rebuilding the steps on the side porch and had to drive myself to the emergency room for stitches. “Your dad, the genius,” I’d said as I’d fetched the first aid kit and wrapped a handful of ice cubes in a facecloth. But the pain when I broke my hand was something else altogether. It obliterated my will and I remember gasping in awe at how much it hurt and how neatly I had felt the bones in my fingers and hand snapping. I dropped to my knees, holding the wrist of the broken hand with my good hand, suddenly wondering how in the world I could tell Susan what I’d just done. I had obviously knocked myself half senseless, because the punch had sounded like someone trying to go through the wall with a sledgehammer, and Susan had lunged out of the bedroom and to the top of the stairs, as if the punch had released the ratchet locking a coiled spring, the way an angry parent might pounce when she heard her kid knock over a lamp after she’d told her six times to knock off tossing the tennis ball in the living room. She held one of her crewneck shirts in front of her by the shoulder seams, and clutched it to herself as she looked down at me kneeling on the hall floor.

That image of Susan, at the top of the stairs in her bathrobe, her face ravaged and pale, holding the shirt—a fitted white T-shirt with a pattern of flowers and vines embroidered
in black around the neck and sleeves and a small yellow bird embroidered just above the left breast—seemed like a photograph from a movie or a play that you see in a magazine you’re leafing through while waiting to have your teeth cleaned or have blood taken, and you think to yourself, Oh, I remember
that
scene; that’s when it all comes apart; that’s when he puts his hand through the wall and she runs out of the bedroom and stands there at the top of the stairs, like she’s a parent about to yell at her kid, but she sees him down on his knees at the bottom of the stairs, gasping, and he’s gray in the face, in a cold sweat, and he’s holding a hand up and the fingers look all mangled, and you can tell just by the expression on her face—it’s so well done—that she’s acted from reflex, that she’s still conditioned, still habituated to parenting her daughter. But it’s true: her daughter is dead, still and always and even though her mind still makes these little loops back in time to before her daughter died if she lets go of the fact for even a moment, and every time it’s like hearing for the first time all over again,
Your daughter has been in an accident
, and that is the moment she realizes, It’s all over and I’m going back to my parents’ house, and I’m going to stay in my old bedroom, even though it has been my mother’s sewing room for nearly twenty years. And whether or not she really believes that that is what she will do, that spare corner room with no rug and no curtains or shades and a chair and a table with a sewing machine on it and a lamp bent down over the machine and a single framed piece of embroidery of a redheaded moppet wearing a sunbonnet with a basket of flowers hooked on her arm and a rabbit at her feet, which used to be her room when she was a girl, is the concrete picture her
mind makes of the certainty that she must go away, and that is the moment he realizes that that’s what she’s thinking.