None of this Ever Really Happened (4 page)

Now I'm going to try again telling you about the funeral. I've
tried before, but without success. It came out sounding like
bad situation comedy what with the mistaken identity, incorrect
assumptions, and people finishing each other's sentences.
Cheap laughs, but it really wasn't like that at all.

I had to go, of course, although I didn't mention it to
Lydia; it had turned out that she had little patience with my
interest in Lisa Kim.

Outside the door were two knots of friends: the old suburban,
high-school friends in their casually expensive, saggy,
baggy just-so clothes and the urban theater friends in their
tighter, blacker, angrier clothes. All friends, I noticed, were
smoking. Inside I signed the book and looked at the picture
boards. My gosh, she'd been pretty. Even as a little kid, she
had one of those magical smiles that makes you want to trust
or love or confide or buy. By the time she was fourteen or fifteen,
she knew about the smile; you could tell. She had high
cheekbones, black, black hair and eyes, skin you wanted to
touch with the tip of your finger. And she was the star of every
single photograph from the earliest on. Her images were
alive, energetic, almost bursting into three dimensions. No
doubt in my mind that if she had been a troubled soul, it
had been of the Dylan Thomas rather than the Sylvia Plath
variety.

"Peter?" Someone had taken my elbow, and I realized
when I turned it must be one of her sisters.

"Yes?"

"Oh, I thought you might be. I'm Maud, Lisa's sister."

"Yes, I know. How in the world . . . ?"

"You do? Sophie, this is Peter." And Sophie took my one
hand in both of hers.

"Oh, Peter."

"Wait a minute," I said.

"Tanya, this is Peter Carey," she said

"No, no," I said, but Tanya, who was nineteen or twenty,
had already given me a quick, shy hug. "Peter
Ferry,
" I said.

"Ferry? I thought it was Carey."

"I thought it was Cleary," Tanya said. "I thought Lisa said
'Cleary.' " She shrugged.

"Oh, well," said Sophie.

Now you may wonder why I didn't stop them right there
and clarify things. Two reasons. First, I didn't know who Peter
Carey or Cleary was, or if he was at all. Second, had I told
them who I wasn't, I would have had to tell them who I
was,
with all the last-person-to-see-her-alive stuff, scenes of the
accident, mea culpas. I didn't want that. It was clear that they
were just barely hanging together to begin with. Still, I tried.

"I need to explain something."

"You need to explain nothing." Maud took me by the
hand and walked with me. "No one could ever blame you
for breaking up with her, believe me; we all know how difficult
she could be. But we could also all see how good you
were for her."

"No, no."

"We
could
see that. And we're very happy you came.
Mother, it's Peter."

"Oh." I was lost. It was too late. I smiled and nodded and
begged off when they asked me to sit with the family, sat in
the back row and sneaked off as soon as the service began. If
the real Peter Carey or Cleary showed up, they'd figure out
their mistake. If he didn't, no harm done. I badly wanted to
be finished with Lisa Kim; I really did. I wanted to say goodbye,
close the box, put it in the ground, and walk away, but
it wasn't going to be that easy. I was beginning to realize that
I shared with this utter stranger an intimacy more intense
than sex or confession or even betrayal. I was beginning to
feel that it was more intense than any I'd known before.

John Thompson, the chair of my department, was looking
through the window of my classroom door. He beckoned to
me. "Just a minute," I said to the kids and stepped out into
the hall.

"Sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, but there's a detective in my
office to see you."

"A detective? Oh, the accident."

"Go take care of it. I'll sit in for you."

Lieutenant Carl Grassi was sitting at John's desk talking
on his phone as if the place belonged to him, and he motioned
me to sit down. He asked me to tell him about the
accident. "I'm sure it's in the officer's report," I said.

"Just one more time," he said. I watched him as I talked.
He was a bored, slightly hostile man who made no attempt
whatsoever at civility. He affected a smirk as if it might have
made him seem intelligent or worldly. "Couple more things,"
he said when I finished. "Where were you that day from noon
until the time of the crash?"

"Me? Where was I? Well, I was here."

"Anyone see you?"

"Well, I taught until 3:15. My students saw me. Why are
you asking me this?"

"Just answer the questions, okay? How about after that?"

He wanted to know if anyone had seen me after school
and if I'd made any stops on the way home. When I said I'd
bought a bottle of wine at Sunset Foods, he wanted to know
if I had a receipt. I dug around in my wallet until I found it.
The time on it was 6:17 p.m. Grassi took it with him.

On my lunch hour, I called Officer Lotts. "Sounds like
they've got an open investigation of some kind," he said.

"Do you mean they suspect me of something?"

"Probably not. Probably just talking to everyone who saw
her last. Process of elimination. Or maybe because you went
to the funeral. If there's foul play, they watch the funerals."

"What kind of foul play?"

"I have no idea."

"Jesus," I said. "This bothers me; this scares me."

"Forget it," he said. "You're covered. If you hear from him
again, call me; I'll find out what I can, but you don't have
anything to worry about."

In the first Lisa Kim dream I had, we were sitting in the garden
at La Choza. It was late October, but the sun was warm
on our backs, bright on our faces. It was too high in the sky
for the time of the evening; we wore big sweaters. We were all
lovely. The women had white teeth and wisps of hair across
their faces. We laughed and laughed. The air was golden. We
were all friends, although I hadn't seen some of these people
in years, didn't know a couple very well, didn't know one at
all. Still, I felt closer to them, more comfortable with them
than with my real friends, with myself. Perhaps we were
stoned. Things moved slowly. Things tasted wonderful.
We were passing big platters of kamoosh: fried tortilla
chips spread with beans, then melted yellow cheese, then guacamole.

We were eating Steak Oaxaca: flour tortillas covered
with chunks of carne asada, onions and cilantro, then melted
white cheese. We were drinking beer from cans so icy they
were hard to hold. We were holding them high in the air.

Someone toasted Carlos Zambrano, who had just pitched
a no-hit, no-run perfect game striking out all twenty-seven
Red Sox he had faced to win the World Series. I think we'd
just come from Wrigley Field. It must have been a Sunday.

We toasted Ernie Banks for hitting a home run onto a
rooftop across Waveland Avenue.

We toasted Bill Madlock for going four for four on the
last day of the season to win the batting title.

We toasted Rick Reuschel for being so fat and graceful.

We toasted John Kenneth Galbraith for being so tall
and old.

We toasted Dag Hammarskjold for giving his life for
world peace.

We toasted Homer Simpson and Julia Child and Dave
Van Ronk and Susan Sontag and Snoop Doggy Dogg. Then
Lisa Kim appeared at the other end of the picnic table like
a happy Banquo. She raised a champagne flute. She smiled
that smile, her eyes locked on mine, and she shook her
head a little bit as if to say, "I can't believe it." What she
actually said was, "Here's to you, mister, and we both know
for what."

On Saturday morning I bought a clothbound artist's sketchbook
at Good's Art Supplies and took it down the street to
Café Express, a coffeehouse full of secondhand couches and
kitchen tables near our apartment in Evanston. I got a big
ceramic mug of coffee and started writing. It was the first
time in a long time that I'd written much of anything that
wasn't of some utilitarian or commercial value, and I didn't
quite know how to begin. I decided to make a list, a catalog
I guess, of something that had been on my mind a lot: my
near occasions of death. The first time I know I might have
died was when I was two or three and I had a temperature
of 104. My parents put me in a bathtub of cold water and ice
cubes, and I screamed bloody murder. The first such event I
remember was three or four years later, when I slipped off a
jetty in Lake Michigan into a riptide and someone—I don't
know who—just caught me by the back of my T-shirt. Then
there was the cold spring weekend my family went to our
summer home before the water was turned on or the phone
activated. We built a huge banked fire in the living room and
slept on mattresses around it. It turned out that the firebrick
in the fireplace was old and bad and the heat had caused a
smoldering fire in the wall behind. We all woke together
in the middle of the night to a room filled with smoke. My
brother and I rolled down our hill in pitch black to seek help
while my parents kept the fire at bay with water, soda, milk,
and then sand until the volunteer firefighters from Covert
five miles away arrived.

Another time my dad got a headache working in the
basement on a Sunday afternoon in January. He suspected
a gas leak, but the two guys from the gas company found a
carbon-monoxide leak instead and shut our furnace down.
They said that we were lucky we didn't wait until Monday
morning to call. I remember my dad forked over a good
chunk of his life savings without a word of complaint to have
the furnace replaced that very night, which turned out to be
the coldest of the year. We lay in our beds beneath mounds of
blankets and comforters listening to the workmen clanking
in the basement beneath us. It was 3:00
A.M.
when they fired
up the new furnace, and the temperature in the house was
38 degrees. For a long time after that, I dated things from that
day; the day we didn't die.

In my teens and twenties, I had several close calls that
involved automobiles or alcohol—or both. Once my brother
was trying to get my dad's Chevy station wagon up to 100
mph on a long, straight county road in rural Michigan. There
was one blind spot on the whole stretch, and when we came
over the rise, a 2 1/2-ton farm truck was pulled across the
road. The driver saw us and started forward, we braked hard
and steered behind him, skidding right beneath his tailgate,
which was cocked at a 45-degree angle and which scraped
the hell out of the roof of the car.

Another time after playing softball and drinking beer, I was
driving someone else's car way too fast on an unfamiliar road
when I almost missed the same kind of curve Lisa Kim missed.
I braked and slid sideways through the gravel and off the road
into high grass. Had there been a ditch there, I would have rolled
into it; and had there been a tree, I would have hit it very hard.
Once, after helping friends move on a hot day, we were drinking
beer and eating pizza on the roof of their new apartment
building when we dared each other to walk the ledge around
the perimeter. I still don't know how we all made it.

There were two airplane flights, one out of Columbus that
hit a front like a stone wall on its initial ascent, and one into
Quito, Ecuador, on a foggy night surrounded by the Andes
when the pilot came in to land three times and roared off
three times before he finally touched down the fourth time,
and the flight attendants led the applause for what one of
them said was "a very, very difficult landing."

Then there was a bump that turned out to be a sebaceous
cyst, a heart murmur that disappeared, a lab test that was in
error, and a bandit wearing a Yankees cap and a blue bandana
over his face and holding a very small gun in his right hand
who stepped out from the bushes when I was riding horseback
in the hills of Jalisco in Mexico. He had me dismount, pull my
wallet out and lie facedown in the dusty road. As he leaned
to remove the Mexican currency from the wallet (he left the
American money), he put the gun against the back of my head.
And those are only the close encounters I'm aware of. Who
knows how many others I might have walked through or past
like Mr. Magoo, with things crashing all around me.

When I finally put my pen down, it was afternoon, and I
was exhausted. I had not expected to write so much or for so
long; incidents came back one after another. I did not know
how lucky I had been, nor how lucky any of us has to be to
stay alive on this planet for very long. I closed my journal and
went home.

The next day I made a second entry. This time I started
writing down everything I could remember about Lisa Kim's
accident. I guess, in a way, it was the beginning of this piece
you are reading now.

In college I would hurry across the campus just to look in my
mailbox, and the sight of one trim envelope through the little
window would make my heart skip a beat. Now if I'm busy,
I often don't open my box for two or three days at a time—
nothing but bills, catalogs, and credit-card come-ons usually,
seldom the kind of hand-addressed linen envelope I found
there on a day late in January. The return address stopped
me: Maud Kim Nho, Meadow Lane, Glenview. I stood right
there in the vestibule and opened it.

First there was a note on stationery that matched the envelope
written in a small, precise hand and green ink:

Dear Peter,

I am taking the liberty of writing you after
considerable thought and at the risk of reopening
wounds that are now, I hope, beginning to heal. I
found this letter folded in the back of a book on Lisa's
nightstand. I have been looking at it and reading it
over for a couple weeks now. I've almost destroyed it
several times, both because of its intimate nature and
because Lisa had not sent it, and I can't be sure that
she intended to, but I can't bring myself to do so. It
is so full of her, of her energy and wit and intensity,
and we have so little of her left. At the same time, it is
not mine, and I feel like an eavesdropper reading it.
It is yours, and so I found your address in the guest
registry from the funeral and am sending it to you
to do with as you wish. I hope you don't mind.