Louisa Meets Bear (33 page)

Ilana read aloud from one of her guidebooks. She'd not seen the Santa Maria della Concezione on her first trip, but both of her guidebooks listed it under their recommendations for children. “For several hundred years, the church's order of monks decorated the crypt with bones.” She looked up at the girls. “It sounds like a Halloween art show.”

“That's disgusting,” Janey said.

“I'd love to go, Mother,” Sarah said, tipping her chin into the air.

*   *   *

A bald monk with a big belly sat at the entrance to the crypt selling postcards. He wagged his finger at the camera hanging around Sarah's neck.

Entering the first chapel, both girls gasped and Ilana had to control herself not to do the same. Hundreds of skulls were piled one atop the other, a backdrop for three skeletons dressed in hooded robes. On the ceiling, femur bones and hip sockets and vertebrae had been fashioned into a crown and cross.

Janey squeezed Ilana's hand and Sarah sidled close to her sister as they walked deeper into the crypt. In another of the chapels, a canopy of pelvises and a rosette of shoulder blades presided over more robed skeletons. At the end of the corridor, the wired bones of a Barberini princess who'd died as a child hung from the ceiling surrounded by other skeletons, some hanging, some impressed on the stone walls. Janey buried her face in Ilana's arm.

Back outside, the girls were silent. They walked past the shops of the Via Veneto without a single request to go inside to look at anything.

Ilana felt horrid. She'd expected the crypts to be cartoonish, not genuinely creepy. For years after her mother's death, the words of a camp song—
the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
—had made an endless loop through her head. She would wonder if water had seeped into her mother's coffin and rotted the flesh, if the bones were still in place.

When they reached the hotel, she led the girls to a couch in the lobby. It seemed better to talk to them here, not in front of Bill. She patted the cushions on her two sides.

“So, let's talk about what we saw. What did you think?”

Janey shuddered. “It was scary. I didn't like that princess at the end.”

Sarah had refound her Austenish air, the occasion ripe with the opportunity to assert her superiority over her sister and impress her mother. “She was beautiful. Now everyone who comes to that place will know about her. When I die, I want to be kept that way.”

“You are so gross.”

Ilana took a hand from each girl to hold in her own. “There was an inscription at the end in Latin. It's translated in one of the guidebooks:
What you are, we used to be. What we are, you will be
. What do you think they meant?”

Janey looked confused, torn, Ilana was sure, between her wish to have her mother explain and not wanting to admit her incomprehension to her sister.

“It's obvious,” Sarah said. “The bones were once people. Someday we'll be just bones.”

“I knew that.”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

“Hush.” Ilana lifted her daughters' hands to her lips. “Hush, my darlings.”

Upstairs, they found Bill on the balcony of their suite, reading the
Herald Tribune
and drinking a bottle of water. He was still in his running clothes, his mood boosted by the endorphins released from the exercise and, Ilana imagined, the long sleep he'd had before. The girls went out to show him their purchases. He put Janey on his knee and told Sarah she was going to knock everyone at her school off the planet in that jacket. He smiled at Ilana. That night, he ran his fingers down her spine, the tiny bones that had adorned the crypt like strands of sea cockles, and cupped the points of her hips.

*   *   *

When Ilana returned to the office, her plants were dry and droopy and it appeared that César had not been there. She watered the plants and quickly ran the vacuum before her first patient arrived. It was a hard day, all of her patients having saved their crises and anger at her absence for her return.

The week was so busy that Ilana forgot to call César to inquire what had happened. The following Monday, though, it was obvious that he'd been in, cleaning, in fact, more thoroughly than usual: the pictures askew from having been dusted, the windows washed from the inside. In September and October, César missed two more Saturdays, each absence followed by an intensive cleaning as it had the first time. With each missed Saturday, Ilana intended to telephone César to inquire what was the problem, but each time she felt a hesitation, and then, after the office had been cleaned again, it seemed superfluous.

This year, instead of feeling that the months were racing out of control, the winter holidays and all of their busyness only a blink after summer, what she felt was that the skeletons were taunting her:
What we are, you will be
.

*   *   *

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, Sarah came down with a 102-degree fever and a raging sore throat. “Of all mornings,” Ilana said to Bill with a sigh. “After I've been out of the office since last Wednesday. My first patient has been holding on by a thread for five days, counting the hours until she could see me.”

Bill was shaving. “I can't get into it. I have three guys coming in from L.A. to meet about a six-hundred-mil transaction. You'll have to deal.”

Ilana rescheduled her first two patients and took Sarah to the pediatrician. Afterward, Sarah threw up on the curb outside the doctor's office. Ilana sent Nona out to pick up the antibiotic at the pharmacy and helped Sarah back into her pajamas. “Brush your teeth, honey,” she instructed through the bathroom door. Sarah stumbled out of the bathroom and lay on her bed. Her mouth smelled foul.

“Did you brush your teeth?”

“I couldn't.” Sarah turned on her side. Ilana got Sarah's toothbrush and filled a cup with water. She brushed her daughter's teeth and had her spit in the cup. She smoothed Sarah's hair back from her forehead, cooling now from the Motrin she'd taken earlier. Sarah shut her eyes.

“When Nona gets back, I have to go into the office. I'll be home by six. Nona's going to give you your medicine and she can make you something to eat if you feel like it.”

Sarah nodded. She was already more asleep than not.

*   *   *

Ilana unlocked the suite door. She had twenty minutes before her first session. As always, she went into the waiting room to turn on the lights before going into her office. From the empty trash can and tidy piles of magazines, she could tell that César had been in.

There was an unpleasant smell, though, in the suite, like something rotting. Ilana deposited a yogurt in the refrigerator of the tiny kitchen. She stuck her head in the fridge, wondering if the smell might be coming from inside. Could an animal, a mouse, or, God forbid, a rat, have gotten in and died hidden behind something?

A feeling of dread came over her. She clutched her keys as she walked back toward her office. The smell was definitely coming from that direction.

Her office door was ajar. She pushed it open. The smell washed so strongly over her that her hand flew to pinch her nose. She gagged. Then she screamed.

César was lying on her office floor. His eyes were rolled back and he was curled on his side. Blood had come out of his mouth and had dried in a rivulet across his chin. The smell was feces.

She shut the door. Unable to stand, she sank to the floor. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her back, resting now against the wall. She dug inside her bag and found her cell phone to call the police.

*   *   *

Not wanting to traumatize her patient, an accountant who traveled uptown every Monday to discuss the panic he felt when a woman touched him, Ilana went down to the lobby to intercept him. As the elevator doors opened, she saw him crossing the lobby. She motioned for him to step aside with her. Someone had grown ill in her office, she explained, careful not to brush his arm. She would call him in the evening to find a time for later in the week.

After her patient left, Ilana told James, the weekday doorman, what had happened. His usually skittering eyes opened wide. “I've never seen anyone dead.”

She could hear the sputtering siren of the squad car pulling in front of the building.

“You won't see anything.” She touched his shoulder. Her hand was shaking. “The police will cover the body.”

Two officers entered the lobby, an older one with a thumb looped under his holster, a younger one with a clipboard tucked in his armpit and a staticky radio on his belt. James breathed in so his chest filled out, torn between his desire to be part of the story—the doorman working when the body was removed—and his terror of the corpse itself.

Ilana led the officers up to her office. She unlocked the suite with the still-shiny key, remaining in the doorway while they bent over to examine the body.

“He worked for you?” the older one asked.

“He cleaned my office, once a week, on Saturdays.”

“Yup. Looks like he's been dead about forty-eight. You can call it in,” he said to the younger man. “Nasty-smelling, that's for sure.”

He stood up. “We need to wait for someone from the medical examiner's office. They'll do their report and then we can cart this out of here. Can we go into that other room?”

Ilana nodded. She followed the two men into her waiting room, perching on the chair across from them. The younger one rested the clipboard on his knees. She gave him César's name and phone number, then felt embarrassed when she had to say that she did not know César's address.

“Any relatives?”

“There might be a sister here in New York, but the rest, I think, are in Colombia.”

“Medical problems you were aware of?”

“No. Well, he had a history of depression. That was, let me see, about eighteen years ago.”

“Need to write that down?” the younger one asked the older one.

“Everything the doctor says goes in the report.”

“History of suicidal behaviors?”

“No. Not that I know of.”

Ilana canceled the rest of her morning patients. Half an hour later, a woman arrived from the medical examiner's office. She put on a mask, squeezing her thick fingers, one by one, into disposable gloves. She looked in César's mouth and listened to his chest with a stethoscope. She pulled off his socks and shoes and examined his feet. Then she nodded at the officers. “Okay, guys, we can get him out of here. I'll radio down to the driver to send us up a stretcher and a bag.”

Working together, the two policemen maneuvered a plastic bag under César and zipped it shut. “Don't want anything falling out,” the older one said, crinkling his nose. They lifted César's body onto the stretcher and covered it with an army blanket.

After they left, Ilana went to the supply closet to get a bottle of disinfectant. For a strange moment, the thought crossed her mind that she should call César to help her clean up. To her relief, no feces or blood had touched the rug, but, nonetheless, she sprayed Mr. Clean on the area where César had been, letting it soak in while she went back to the closet for a cloth. A shopping bag stuffed with rags cut from what appeared to be César's old T-shirts hung from a hook. She dumped the bag onto the floor, looking for the largest one.

At the bottom was the envelope she'd given César with his name written on the outside in her green felt-tip pen. Surrounding his name, César had written her name—
Ilana Ilana Ilana Ilana
—over and over in the same ink.

She held the envelope the way she imagined César having once done. He must have taken it to her desk, then sat in her chair and used the pen she'd just put back. She imagined him inhaling the envelope, brushing the pen across his lips. Writing her name over and over until the envelope was covered, she saw now, front and back, and then hiding it at the bottom of the bag.

The fifty dollars was still inside.

*   *   *

Not until she was in college had she learned that it is Jewish custom to wait to place a headstone over the grave until after the one-year anniversary of a death. She called her favorite aunt, the one with the plump arms, to inquire.

“Your other aunts and I, we bought a headstone. A beautiful granite headstone. We didn't ask your father for a penny toward it, but still he would not come for the unveiling. He was polite, but he basically flat-out refused. She's dead, he told me. We all die, every leaf, every tree, every bug, every bird, mongrel dog, human being dies and rots. There is nothing about dying to make a fuss over, that's what your father said.”

Her aunt tsk-tsked. “We thought about asking to bring you to the cemetery,” she said, “but we were afraid of your father, afraid he would make a scene and make it harder for you.”

Ilana had found the name of the cemetery in the copy of the obituary she'd pasted into her childhood diary, brought to her dorm room with her few other favorite childhood possessions—a gold locket her mother had given her, a lithograph of a Mother Goose ditty, a framed photograph of her mother and her reading together in a hammock. She'd taken a bus from her college to the town nearest to the cemetery, and then a taxi she could ill afford. At the cemetery office, a woman looked up her mother's name in a set of file cabinets and marked an
X
on a map.

It was a ten-minute trudge through fields of Cohens, Blausteins, Goldbergs, Kapinskis, some of the headstones crumbling and untended, others massive mausoleums of marble, before she found her mother's headstone, bare save for her name and the dates of her birth and death.

She'd not gone back.

*   *   *

In the evening, after the children were settled in their beds, Sarah with another dose of Motrin, Janey with permission to read to herself for ten minutes, a Detective Forbes came to the apartment. Ilana led him into the living room, away from Bill watching TV in the family room.