For Love (38 page)

Now several of the girls in white move toward the chancel from various places around the room. They gather in a group of five directly below the pulpit. Lottie can hear one of them hum a note;
together, audibly, they fill their lungs. And then they begin to sing, a cappella, a sweet, slow version of ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.’ Even Lottie feels her throat clog as their
voices mourn, ‘Bring back, bring back, O bring back my bonnie to me.’ They stop a moment after the last chorus; and then launch into ‘Yesterday.’ These seem odd choices to
Lottie, though there’s a painful poignancy to them. She looks on her program. It says, under the song titles, that Jessica sang with this group in high school. They’re called the Minute
Maids.

When they’re finished, two of the girls mount the stairs to the chancel, while the rest disperse. Behind the pulpit, one sits down and drops from Lottie’s sight line. The other steps
forward and sets a paper down on top of the immense Bible in front of her. Her eyes sweep the congregation – she looks frightened – and she begins.

She has a soft, little-girl voice, whispery as Jackie Kennedy’s. She talks about how she and Jessica used to go into Harvard Square by train together in high school, how Jessica would
always pretend to be someone other than herself. She’d change her voice, she’d sometimes actually fake an accent. She’d walk differently. She’d be loud and boisterous, or
painfully shy. The girl’s voice trembles, and she bends her head; she seems to be smoothing the paper. Then she looks up again, her lips tight and determined as she begins to speak once more.
She says she wasn’t able to do anything of the kind, that she was always the straight man, setting things up for Jessica. But once she asked Jessica how it was possible for her. ‘And
she told me that it wasn’t as if she was acting at all. What she said was, “They’re all me, really.” ’

The girl pauses. She looks over their heads. ‘When I heard that Jessica had died, I thought about that, about how she didn’t even get to be who she was going to be, but even so,
there was so much to her. And I wanted to say today, “Jessica, we’ll miss all of you.” ’

She steps back a little, and then the other girl stands up and slings a guitar around her neck. She tunes it for a moment, and over the notes, you can hear people blowing their noses, the pews
creaking. Lottie glances over at Ryan. He looks miserable.

The girls sing ‘Amazing Grace,’ their two voices in a tight, yearning harmony that comes as close as anything audible to heartbreak.

Then the minister stands in the pulpit again and leads them in the Twenty-third Psalm. He says a long rambling prayer, talking about Jessica, naming the members of her family – there are
four or five siblings, apparently. He looks down at the front rows on Lottie’s side of the aisle as he speaks. Lottie wonders which of those heads looking back at him is Dorothea
Laver’s; whether she’s let herself weep or cry out her anguish yet. Lottie thinks about her voice on the telephone again, tries to understand what it must feel like to be her. For a
fraction of a second, she tries to imagine the void and hurt of somehow losing Ryan. And then stops herself. It is unimaginable.

She looks at him again, at the reddened patches on his cheek and jawline, the set of his face. He is frowning, trying to understand something too. His face is earnest, attentive. And private.
Whatever he is thinking is his own. He is, of course, lost to her, but in the way he should be. In the way Lottie still has not worked out her acceptance of, she realizes.

They have another hymn. Then several other people speak in turn – a teacher, a friend from college, who talks about Jessica’s struggle to figure out what she wanted to do with
herself.

Ryan sits, riveted, and Lottie wonders what he’s getting out of this, whether he’s getting anything. For a moment – she can’t stop herself – she thinks again of the
way they looked in bed together. Then she thinks of what she told him about her father’s funeral – how unknown he’d still been to Lottie after everything was said. Cameron had
cried, she remembers now, and that had horrified and fascinated her. Cameron never cried, not even when their mother hit him. Sometimes, yes, tears came up and glittered on the lower rims of his
eyes; but then his face would redden violently and – Lottie thought of it this way at the time – it was as if his eyes
swallowed back
the tears.

But he had cried when their father died, even though their father had been gone from home for four years then, and Lottie had understood finally that Cameron had loved their father, in spite of
his being a criminal. She had envied Cam, she remembers. Partly because at that age she would have liked the drama of being the one weeping; but also for the feeling that made him weep, which
Lottie, who remembered so little of her father, couldn’t share.

And then she thinks of Evelyn again, of her death, a year ago now. Her service had been held in a big church in Hyde Park, and Lottie could easily have gone: no one would have known who she was
except for the only couple who saw Lottie and Jack together socially, Jack’s closest friends. But it had never occurred to her. Instead she stayed at home and tried to keep busy that
afternoon. She’d done load after load of wash, filling the apartment with the smell of soap and bleach. She and Jack hadn’t yet discussed what Evelyn’s death would mean to
them.

Now she finds herself looking again at Ryan and wishing earnestly that she had done what he is doing. That she had gone – come late, left early, sat in back – and listened to them
talk about Evelyn. Jack had told her that the children had all taken part in it, that Charley, who had been fourteen when Evelyn had her first stroke, had talked about her eloquently; that Matthew
had read scriptures. Jack had asked Megan to read one of Evelyn’s favorite poems. Friends had spoken too, Lottie remembered his saying. He had not. Lottie had asked him what poem Megan read,
and she looked it up later. It was by Elizabeth Bishop; it was about a moose that stops a bus on a highway in the night. She had liked it too – she found it funny and austere – and it
made her think she understood something about Evelyn that she hadn’t known before.

Now, oddly, tears for that service she hadn’t gone to, for the lost opportunity to know more, perhaps, of who Evelyn might have been, come to her eyes. She fumbles in her purse for a
Kleenex and finds an old one, wadded and shredding, which she unfolds a corner of to blow her nose.

Ryan grips her arm momentarily in sympathy, assuming, Lottie supposes, that she’s weeping for Jessica. Let him, she thinks. Soon enough he’ll learn that you can mourn for any loss at
any funeral; that there comes to be a general sense of sorrow and loss in life which can be released by the ceremony even of someone you didn’t know.

To her surprise, though, Lottie can’t stop crying – she weeps through the rest of the service, like any of the young women in white around her – and it occurs to her just as
they’re hearing the benediction that she’s also weeping for herself, for what she finally lost when Evelyn died.

At the time, she had wept for Jack, for them all, but felt for herself only a kind of hungry happiness. For her, it was over at last. Evelyn’s long dying, yes, but also her own standing
always outside, looking in. What she’s feeling now, though, as the minister speaks of corruptible bodies being changed, is her own sense of loss; is how much she loved having Evelyn there,
how much she loved the yearning that resulted. She had accused Jack of needing Evelyn, but it seems to her that what she understands at this moment is that she needed Evelyn too, that she misses
the potency that Evelyn’s existence, her life, gave to her own love for Jack, and his for her. ‘Wouldn’t you love to have it back?’ Lottie had asked him, talking about their
secret, dark love together. And now Evelyn’s death has beckoned them both into the light. What Lottie has a confused sense of as she weeps is what she needs to leave behind a part of her own
life, a part that loves the dark, that always chooses what’s temporary, what’s thrillingly marginal – the hotel, the car, the secret meeting – and try instead to try to
build something permanent out of the quotidian, out of daily life. Out of everything that’s most fragile and mortal and corruptible.

On the way out, she feels a touch on her shoulder. Elizabeth. There’s no one she’d less like to talk to, but Elizabeth stays close behind her as they slowly shuffle toward the doors,
flung open now on the church steps and the sunlit town green beyond.

On the steps, Elizabeth embraces Lottie abruptly, she thanks her for what she’s done. Lottie raises a dismissive hand, shakes her head, but Elizabeth insists. Then she tells Lottie
they’re leaving, as soon as they get back from the reception in the parish hall. ‘Everyone’s packed and ready, so we can just put stuff in the car and take off. Mother will return
it to the leasing company for us, and that will be that. What I did on my summer vacation.’ She smiles, wryly.

Little Emily presses against her, whining, and buries her face in her mother’s side. Elizabeth encircles her with one hand, puts the other hand out and grips Lottie’s arm. ‘So
this is goodbye, Charlotte. But I hope, maybe . . .’ She looks hard at Lottie, perhaps noticing now that she’s been crying. ‘Well, Chicago and Minneapolis aren’t so far
apart. That’s what I’ll count on,’ she says firmly, cheerfully.

Lottie turns away to where Ryan is waiting for her at the bottom of the steps. Then forces heself to look back. ‘That’s not going to happen, Elizabeth,’ she says quietly.
‘The Chicago–Minneapolis thing. I hope everything works out for you, but I don’t want to hear about it either way, all right?’

Elizabeth stares and raises her hand, but before she can say anything, Lottie turns away into the crowd moving raggedly down the steps.

She lets Ryan drive back. She sits on her side of the car, watching the pretty New England scenery float by. Through the woods, she can see the regular rhythm of tract housing. Then the trees
open out on to an office park. She’s thinking of Jack. Of Evelyn. She rouses herself: this is selfish, she thinks. She looks over at Ryan, at his sober face. The sore-looking patches from
shaving make him look young to Lottie. Young, and more vulnerable than he usually does.

‘Well, what do you think you learned?’ she asks him abruptly. ‘Anything?’

He shrugs. ‘No. Well, I don’t know. Maybe. Mostly that a lot of other people cared a lot more about her than I did. It made me think, though.’

‘About what?’ she asks.

‘Oh, it’s pretty egocentric, I guess, but really about what anyone could say about me.’ He looks over at Lottie. ‘If I died.’ He grins ruefully. ‘Not
much,’ he says.

‘Well. Honey, come on. You’re just starting to be who you are.’

He’s looking back at the road, still smiling slightly. Then he says, ‘I guess I’m just having a kind of pre-life crisis, then.’

Lottie laughs, delighted.

‘What about you?’ he asks after a while.

‘What? What about me?’

‘You were crying. You seemed affected.’

‘I wept for general mortality,’ she says. ‘No. Well, yes and no. I was being egocentric too, really. I wept for myself. The bell was tolling for me.’

‘Really? Do you think about that? About dying?’ He looks over. ‘I mean, I know you did when you were sick. But. Well, I just wonder.’

‘I haven’t so much, I guess. I did then, a lot, of course. Cold-sweat thoughts, sometimes. And I worried terribly about you, about how you’d do. But since then I’ve led
the kind of life where you don’t have to, much.’

‘And what kind of life might that be?’

‘Well, unattached, primarily, I guess.’

‘But you’re attached now.’

Lottie is speechless for a beat or two. Then she says, ‘I seem to be, yes.’

‘You are,’ he announces firmly; and she wonders what he’s noticed, what he’s guessed at. He smiles at her. ‘So maybe you’re in a pre-life crisis
too.’

‘Ah, pre-life, pre-death.’ She makes her voice tough. ‘It’s all the same kettle of fish. Ball of wax.’

‘Tub of chicken,’ he offers.

She laughs and looks out the window again.

‘This reminds me,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Oh, I was just thinking of this course I took, this biochemistry course? Freshman year, it was required. And there was this section called Sex and Death. The point being that where you
have parthenogenesis, you know, before you have sex, animals don’t ever die. They just go on splitting forever. They’re immortal. But once you get two different sexes coming together to
make a third creature – to make life – there’s also death.’

‘Well, there you have it.’

‘I suppose.’ They’re coming to the parkway now, slowing down for the light. ‘Still,’ he says as he downshifts, ‘there are always accidents. Deaths in both
worlds that have no connection to that issue. I mean, paramecia must get squashed sometimes, or devoured, or what have you. And then in our universe too. I mean, Jessica – her death
wasn’t connected to sex at all.’

‘Mmm,’ Lottie says.

They begin to move through the network of streets toward her mother’s neighborhood. The air feels dry, Lottie realizes. Dry and hot. ‘Are you going to work at all today?’ she
asks him.

‘I haven’t decided. I have so little to do, it’s like I could finish in a couple of hours anytime. Maybe I’ll call the weather guy and see if it’s supposed to rain
again soon.’ They stop at a light. Suddenly he turns to Lottie, grinning. ‘Remember when you used to telephone the weather guy, Mom? And play that game?’

‘Yes,’ Lottie says. She’s grateful to him for calling it up. She would dial the service while Ryan watched, and then repeat the odd detail – ‘Sixty degrees
tomorrow, yes, partly sunny’ – and laugh, more and more hysterically at each additional element. She would begin by faking the laughter, of course, but Ryan would inevitably start
really laughing, and then she would laugh genuinely too; until by the end of the forecast, they’d be in tears over the final repeated details. After she hung up, he’d say, ‘Do it
again, Mom,’ and that in itself would set them both off once more.