Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (30 page)

Indeed I suddenly felt hot, quite ready to explode in firework fashion. A dangerous spark was traveling upward through my body, burning a path through my heart as it went. I feared that when the spark reached my head it would go off. And yet I felt this to be a wrong reaction. I felt desperate to stop the fireworks of my own grief. I felt there could be no one sadder in the world than the mother of a dead child. If it had been my Maria I could not have sat before a stranger and served them tea. Violet did not need my blinding display of grief coloring her sober parlor, singeing her red and white tablecloth and clean walls with its sorry sparks. She deserved, at the very least, my silence.

“Violet,” I said softly. I could say no more than that. I touched the soft wrist of her sweater with my fingertips, from which she very discreetly recoiled. She began, as the two of them so often had at the library counter, to look swiftly from object to object, her birdlike gaze never alighting upon any one scone or spoon or saucer for more than a half-second. The rest of her was still but her eyes were trembling.

“Violet,” I said again. She looked at me then as if she had suddenly remembered my presence but then she returned to looking at the many pieces of the service and at the remains of our tea.

I didn’t dare move. I didn’t dare speak. I felt held there at the table by the strength of her sadness.

It would have wrecked him to see her in such a state. How he had adored her. But I could not bring myself to say this. At first I too looked down at the service. I tried to stay with her there but in the end I could not and I allowed my eyes to stray from the table to a dark hallway in the distance. I spent the long minutes wondering where it led.

“Would you like to see his room?” she asked.

“No!” I answered, perhaps too vehemently. “I mean, only if you’d like me to.” I was desperate to do something for her though I did not want to see his room in her presence. I feared it would cause the launching of the fireworks.

“No, I just thought you might like to.”

“Thank you. You’re very kind, but I don’t think I could.” My God, what had he told her? For all my fantasies of late night mother-son chats, I was mortified by the very real possibility that he had confessed to her.

“Thank you for coming,” she said and began very slowly—as if the announcement of her sadness had made her limbs heavier and difficult to move—to rise.

I joined her, relieved to be released from the table.

“It’s you I have to thank,” I said. “I don’t know how you managed,” I glanced at the remains of our tea. “It was lovely, really lovely, thank you.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I’m trying to keep busy.”

“Yes, of course, that makes sense.” I too would soon find this necessary.

“And anyway, I wanted to thank you, May.” The sound of my name’s diminutive issuing from her nearly killed me.

“Thank me?” I asked. “Why, whatever for?”

“Well, I don’t know how to put this, but…” She pressed her hands together and held them in front of her mouth. “If it weren’t for you, my son would have died without…” The torch she had been bravely holding out to me flickered out.

Oh, mistress of discretion, oh, purple heart, oh, Violet.

I rather despised myself for what I said next. “I’d better be going,” I lied. “I have asthma and I feel an attack coming on.” No doubt I seemed like someone who would have asthma though inexplicably I did not.

“Will you be okay on your bike?” I despised myself too for winning her concern when she herself must have needed it so badly.

“Yes! Exercise nearly always improves my condition.” It was ludicrous but I simply had to get out and could think of no better excuse. I nearly ran out of the house and through the orchard to retrieve my bicycle. Dwarfed by the enormous doorway, she waved and watched me go.

I whipped rather dangerously around to wave back at her as I pedaled off in a sad fury. It’s a wonder I didn’t slam into a tree or go down in a ditch, so agitated I was on that terrible ride back to the apartment. It was only when I was at last alone with the news Violet had given me that I was able to selfishly consider its implications.

I had never been so relieved to arrive at the apartment. Everything looked the same as I’d left it. The bathroom was filthy, Var was in his room, the kitchen counter was covered in dishes, the floor covered in toys,
For Esmé––With Love and Squalor
was on the dresser, his letter still underneath a loose floorboard at the bottom of the closet. In the apartment, the young man hadn’t yet died. The AC—whose roar I usually resented for its power to obliterate thought—and I had never been more compatible. While I had craved solitude in the presence of Violet’s grief, once alone I craved distraction.

“I’ll go get Maria!” I called out as I ran down the stairs just a few minutes after I’d run in. Fetching Maria was something I could do.

As I fled the apartment, I slammed the door with such force that one of the panes of glass cracked and had to be mended later that evening with tape. The tape was an atrocious shade of blue, not unlike the tape the painters had used to seal off the gray house. With its jagged traverse of the broken pane, it looked like the only river on a blank map. But at the time I kept hustling. I left the glass in pieces on the ground.

I couldn’t get to the nursery fast enough. I arrived early and didn’t care. I shadowed Maria on the playground. I had endless amounts of patience for her antics; my appetite for diversion was insatiable. I lifted her up to the top of the monkey bars then stood ready to catch her at least fifteen times. I did the same for Sophia and Charlotte. I twirled them on the tire swing, I petted and fed the rabbit, I caught the chickens and put them in their house, I climbed under the play structure and wove bracelets out of reeds, I dug a hole in the sandbox and filled it with rocks, I chased all the remaining children around the perimeter of the yard. I exhausted myself acting like a five-year-old, letting Maria’s chatter fill my brain until bedtime, until at last we both succumbed to that corpse-like stillness of sleep. My only comfort as I felt myself slipping away was the thought of working at the library next morning, the promise of that trusty encyclopedia of diversions not far off.

* * *

It seemed imperative that I tell Siobhan before she heard the news elsewhere. I didn’t think I could withstand her broaching the subject at a time of her choosing, perhaps when I least expected it and was in no position to cope. I had my opportunity during the lunch hour, while the summer patrons were out getting their green salads and sandwiches.

“Do you remember that young man?” Reluctantly I said his name in full to avoid identifying him in any way connected to myself. I stood at the window watching the crowd cross the street. Behind me the computer, beeping each time she scanned a book, sounded like a heart monitor.

“Of course I remember him. How could I forget?”

Fumbling for the words I should use to pronounce his fate, the words that would hurt my ears the least to hear, I felt a sharp needle of pain at the thought of never again feeling his voice drag its dark chain against me. I turned away from the window and stood next to Siobhan at the counter.

“He passed away,” I managed, recalling with some relief the words my father had often employed—
dead
being too final, the heavy thud of a noun too grim,
passed on
implying too great a distance, a place beyond me, the word
away
being beautifully, stubbornly indeterminate, a word that could mean anywhere, the verb
passed
tolerable, it at least implied an action and therefore a life.

“What?!” she said shrilly.

“I won’t repeat the words,” I said.

“You can’t be serious! But how? He was so young!”

“Outdoor accident.”

“What?”

“Diving, a large rock.”

I sat down and began researching request cards. I wanted to help someone, to meet a need. Siobhan sat down next to me and took a portion of the cards. We worked in silence for several minutes. It was a relief to be granted those minutes.

“Imagine if you had,” she said.

“I did.”

“You didn’t.”

I wrote the two words down on the back of a card for emphasis and slid it next to the card she was working on.

“Oh, May.” Her sigh was that of a mother whose child has failed an exam. “I was afraid of that.” She wrote on the card and passed it back to me.
At least no regrets.

I recycled the card and stood at the window again. The parking lot was peculiarly empty. Our patrons were picnicking in a field or had brought their provisions to the beach. They would spend their afternoon eating asparagus sandwiches with wild blueberries, gazing raptly at the sea. The confession I had sought so keenly was now of no interest to me. Siobhan, of course, was not to blame. Though the patrons too would soon exhaust me, in her company I prayed for their return. What I craved were exchanges with strangers, the light stamping of books. Anyone but someone who knew me; anyone but someone who knew.

“We’re going to have to delete his record,” Siobhan said gently, though I knew for a fact this was not entirely true. Four years prior a library staff member had passed away and her record remained untouched. The director had made it clear we were not to delete it and so our colleague’s name remained in the system, at once a false indicator of her continued existence and a true token of her persistent presence among us.

The sight of Viola’s name in the database plucked a chilly string in me as much because I had loved my former supervisor as because she happened to share a name with my father’s reader who, during a certain period of my childhood, would startle my mother and me with telephone calls at home. So the name Viola had held for me the music of three deaths, and now, in a roundabout way, a fourth.

“But,” I began, then thought better of it, striving to leave the impression that although the young man and I
had
, we were not close. “Yes, of course,” I said, acknowledging obliquely that it would never do for a library database to be cluttered by obsolete records. Such a state of affairs would have been nothing less than a librarian’s nightmare.

“Do you want me to do it or…”

“Yes!” I could never accept such a murderous task. Once, when looking up a patron I had met the phrase
PATRON IS DECEASED
;
 
I did not feel prepared to meet those three words again.

I kept the fact of the young man’s first account, established safely under his father’s name, to myself. He would be my Viola but no one would know. I could, when I felt the need, view the three items on his record and pretend he was not only very much alive, but also very young. It would be as if his second record, the one I had entered myself in what was to be the last year of his life, had never existed, as if our first encounter (and therefore those to follow) had never occurred. It was a comfort to me when I had little else, the idea that he was on-island somewhere, aged six or seven, being driven by his mother to school, to soccer, to P.I.P., just another child with a library card who had not been in lately, simply too busy being a child to stop in.

* * *

It was the library’s busiest summer on record. Checking out books to patrons while trying to smile, answering the phone in as cheerful a voice as I could manage, I thought I would faint from grief and exhaustion. I could not sleep. News of the young man’s death reached the public. Patrons marveled at how unlucky the young man had been, they were bent on illustrating how lucky we, who had not leapt to our deaths, were to be alive. I did not feel lucky but of course I did not express this. I became garrulous as one who wants to speak but has nothing permissible to say. I mirrored their marvelous expressions like a circus monkey so that by the end of each day my facial muscles were as sore as my feet.

At the apartment I was safe from any mention of him. No staff member to inquire sympathetically about whether or not the young man I had pointed out to them was the same young man who had died. No unsuspecting patron to select me at random as the staff member who would become audience for remarks about the injustice of being killed while on holiday or the tragedy of dying young, expressions of horror in the face of Mother Nature’s many hidden perils or the brutally irreversible blows of fate. I wanted none of it, none of the fears and marvels that had turned him into a figure of terror or regret. I loathed their invitations to join them in their figure making.

In the apartment, no one knew he had lived or had stopped living. It was back to the frozen sea. I stood dumbly shivering upon it, hardly believing that the last several months had been real, the woman at the waterfall me, the woman in the gray house me. Though I must have, I don’t remember cooking or cleaning or caring for Maria. I only remember standing upon the black ice empty-handed, yes, axeless, no way to break it, the summer heat strangely useless in this regard. I stood until I could stand no longer.

Each day, when I went into the bedroom, I saw that the donated calendar was still on June. The room seemed empty without him although he had never been in it. I did not bother to shower or clean my glasses or wash my face or even eat. I had no appetite. I only put on fresh clothes to avoid suspicion. I feared scrutiny of any kind and wanted only to be left alone to grieve. I had counted on summer’s onslaught to distract me from missing the young man but I had not counted on him being Missing. Given this sad miscalculation, said torrent of distractions did not console me. Indeed, I was inconsolable. In none of the novels I had read did the young lover die. I had no instruction manual. Buoyed as I had been by love, when love was removed, I collapsed.

* * *

During my illness, which had few symptoms but despair, fatigue, and a high fever, Var and Maria were often absent; it was August after all. They belonged to another sparkling yet faraway world: the busy, moving, healthy world of post offices and grocery stores, summer camps and swim lessons, barbecues and visitors. I lay prone, motionless, dreaming, an island of sorrow surrounded by a sea of happiness. I was not at all easy to rouse, having fallen down roughly and reeled into a pit of sadness. Fate’s logic had defeated me. I, in my filmy glasses and dirty white flannelette, could not comprehend how it was that he, of the
Treasure Island
vision and the raspberry Tootsie Pops, had beaten me to the grave.