Untitled.FR11 (13 page)

Behind him the room sundered. He swiveled carefully, his spine finding the sill. A carousel of beds jangled by in silent calliope music. Swoops of hall light knifed in. On them, she rode in, clone upon clone. The light folded, thin blades thinner, gold batons twirling into toothpicks, then gone. She filled his vision. Sounds. Touch. Guide of her hands.

Marcus said something. He knew it came out nonsense, knew she made sense. What that sense was he couldn’t say. She enclosed him like an exoskeleton, made mad meaning out of the swirling room. Cover-hug, a warmth he hadn’t known he needed. Katt was her name, a sharp array of names held by a circus performer in sequins.

Katt.

Katt.

Katt.

He’d always craved many lovers. She was many lovers, all good, pure goodness. She touched his senses, gave him heaven here on this bed. It was enough to bless his eyes, to hear that voice soothing him, to feel her hands resdng on his face, touching his brow.

He wanted more, a universe of love from her forever.

When she left—knives of light retwirling, growing to planes, then knives, then nothing—he felt like nothing so much as a flurry of aches and emptiness.

The bedroom smelled sick to her. Sleeping beside him had become unbearable and she’d taken to the daybed in the guest room upstairs.

Four days had passed since Sherry’s first visit, once more dropping by on Thursday to deliver a casserole, speak with Conner downstairs in the rec room, and go. It seemed to Katt, however, like an eternity in hell. There he lay, her victim, emaciated, jittery with brain disease whenever he made the slightest move, or feint at one, and on top of that, shivering sporadically, violently from the pneumonia he’d contracted and could no longer fight off. He ate and drank when she brought mugs or small

portions to his lips, but it was impossible to tell if he did so with awareness. She spoke with him, soothed him, shutting out that she had herself been the cause of his steep decline, speaking from the love she felt for him still. Let others scoff—if all this ever came out—at the contradiction; logically, there was a disjointure between love and taking his life, but no such problem could she find emotionally. It was seamless, an inevitability, inside her. And so it had been from the outset, from that initial impulse in Lyra’s cabin.

Sitting here now beside him on the bed, observing the unceasing ripples of motion pass over him like stray winds on water, she recalled her first two years out of college, a time spent testing herself, testing her limits, free and on her own at last, learning about life firsthand without the confines of family or school. She’d moved to New York City, just to be there, to see what a huge city felt like, to know that the Statue of Liberty and the United Nations, even though she never visited either, were right nearby if she ever decided to take them in. One winter’s day, alone and newly split from a fiery boyfriend who’d dumped her on (to her) bewildering grounds, she’d cut a large patch from a lemon blouse and sewn it inside the right flap of a fur-lined winter coat. Went to a stuffed, funky bookstore she was fond of rummaging through. She’d practiced at home, a kneeling to scan the lower shelves, palming two paperbacks and smoothly slipping one of them inside the cobbled pouch she had made, then pretending casual interest in the other and putting it back. But when it came time to actually do it, to steal

a book, even though she knew they’d never see it, even though she knew she’d glide right past the sullen clerk who never looked up from his desk for anything but a purchase, she simply couldn’t. Stealing was not something she could manage.

But now here she sat, having brought her mate to this pass, not proud of it, not even idly proud— but not shamed by it either. She could have blamed his deceptions, could have called him a philanderer deserving of death, but that she knew would have been a lie. He didn’t deserve this in the least, and yet it felt right—as right as anything she had ever done. For all the suffering they’d endured, this short concentrated decline had a closure to it that needed to happen. He was pale, his skin blanched nearly from the color of almond rind to the white nutmeat inside. A sheen of sweat bathed his face, dark wet drops having fallen and blotched the pillowcase that cradled his head.

Conner was again ensconced in the rec room. He’d not disturb them. Since his talks with Sherry, he had started hanging around more, being there for his mother. He’d eased into her hugs. She could tell he was making a conscious effort to support her, and it was touching. Her agitation toward him, while still active, had lessened a little since she’d committed to the course she had to take.

And now “It’s time,” she said. She eased back folds of blanket and bedclothes. His hands tried to grab after them but she brushed his attempts aside. He wore no top, his hairy chest matted with moisture above where his ribs fell prominently outlined in gaunt flesh. She placed her palms to either side, slick on the scumbles of sweat that coated him. She closed her eyes and felt deep inside his blocked lungs, the alveoli walls swollen or destroyed, an ingress of plasma and blood cells inside the air sacs. A slow pass all about revealed where the healthy ones were, and one by one she burst the walls, let blood through, an idle making of wine, invisible invasive footstomp through her husband’s chest cavity, making solid and useless more and more of his lungs until, beneath her hands, all wrack of motion lost its tension and arced up and ceased, death thick on the air at his last caught gasp of breath. Then came surcease, relaxation, his life lifting free.

Katt opened her eyes. A thrill coursed through her, so slight it seemed like static uncertainly felt. Moving one hand down from his chest to recapture the fallen fold of sheet and blanket, Katt rested the other lightly above his stopped heart, feeling the fire go out. His head was angled back, his neck seeming suddenly too thick and bold where his chin abruptly rose and his mouth fell open.

She covered him. Thought to pull the cover over his head, felt foolish about it, then felt it was ritualistic and right.

She’d have to tell Conner.

Then there’d be a phone call or two to make.

She yawned deeply, drawing away from the bed to suck in air. She felt spent, tired, emotionally drained. She would need, somewhere in here, to lie down and take a nap if she could. There was no great sorrow, nor any triumph, but only a vacancy and the dull throb of a distant wound. She supposed that more emotion, perhaps a punishment, was waiting in the wings. But for now, nothing but a feeling of finality occurred to her.

And it felt precisely right.

Sherry had picked up a bag of cookies and muffins at Jon’s Natural Bread on Laurel near The Rainbow. So clear and sunny a day it was, that she decided to leave her car on Howes and walk through campus to Katt’s house. Only a handful of students passed her down the tall march of oak trees and along the walkways near Lory Student Center and the library. She’d begun a few days ago in morbidity but now, getting to know Conner and giving his mom some badly needed companionship, a gentle love for them both infused her, woke her anew to the beauty of the campus she walked through. The Coed Killer, she couldn’t help it, occurred to her at the passage of every lone male—but the thought was always fleeting in this sunshine and soon she crossed Prospect and walked the remaining four blocks, glad to be alive on this glorious morning.

Conner was sitting on the single step in front, beds of petunias and carnations to his right. Impassively, he watched her approach, a gawky handwave substituting for a voiced greeting.

“Hello yourself," Sherry said. “Where’s your mom?”

“Upstairs with my father, I think.”

- “Want a cookie?” She held the bag out.

“Sure.” He took a fat one, poked with raisins. “Is this one of those healthy kinds?”

She laughed. “Afraid so.”

“Always looking out for my welfare, eh?” Conner had a wicked sense of humor.

“That’s my way, I guess.” And indeed it was. She’d told a few BBS contacts with her home phone number to, in so many words, fuck off this morning. They suddenly—all the stunted weirdos on the BBSs—seemed to be diminished, puerile, sexually obsessed out of all proportion. It was intriguing that such folks existed and mildly interesting that computers had brought them together, but she felt no connection to them any longer. She suddenly wanted roots in real relationship, and she thought she knew where they lay. She sat next to Conner. More serious: “So how are you doing?”

He tore off an arc of cookie, held it out. “Here.” “Thanks.” It was thick and sweet with molasses, the oven aromas still lifting from the dough.

“I’m okay, I guess.” She let his pause linger. “My mom, she, well it’s kinda hard to tell with her. I think she’s pretty torqued.” He stared at the sidewalk. “Umm, like yesterday? She was sitting in the living room, this was last night, all the lights out and just her fat peach candle lit and flickering on the coffee table and I think she was talking to it. I went by, I mean I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and I said are you okay and she said yes and brought me in for a hug. Then I went upstairs to my room, but I think she was sitting there a long time.”

“It’s normal what she’s going through,” Sherry said quiedy. An image of crazy Brad came to her, gold-rimmed glasses, a pouch of magic pebbles about his neck. “I was a romantic when I was younger. I had a few dates in high school with nobody special. But I knew that somewhere in the world, the perfect guy waited for me.”

“And did you find him?” Lovely Conner. Already the skepticism was there that’d anchor him later in life.

“Yes. A guy named Brad, two years older than me and living off-campus in an all-wood, sunlit loft. I saw him at a concert, placed an ad identifying him, and he called me. He was in the process of ditching another girlfriend and he took me in and loved me and said so. I went nutso over him. And I surrendered myself to him—because after all this was the perfect guy, and there was nothing worth rocking that particular boat for.”

“Sounds like you wimped out over him.”

“You got it. I emptied myself out and filled my life with Brad. So the upshot is I became boring and I suppose dishonest to him, and he dumped me like a shot after a few weeks of heaven. Let me tell you something. It took me a year to get over him, and in some ways, I’m still not over him even now. Your mom’s begun her grieving process early is all. She’s losing a dear man, and she’s feeling a void inside her as he goes.”

Conner glanced at her. He still held half his cookie in a pouched upturned hand, Saran Wrap bunched down around his palm. His eyes were opaque, unreadable.

“You sure you’re all right?” she said.

His glance passed lighdy over her face, almost as if he hadn’t heard the question. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know how I am. This stuff just keeps rolling in and I watch it roll in and change every-

thing all the time, and I don’t feel much like a kid anymore, ya know?”

“It’s hard, isn’t it?”

His words overlapped hers. “It’s almost like he died a week ago and what’s upstairs isn’t him. But it is, it’s him all right, so I don’t want to be there but I sometimes drift by anyway and open the door a crack and look in. My mind goes away when I do that. It’s just too much.”

“Yes, I see what you’re saying.” She could picture it as he spoke, the look on his face, the sorrow of his voice transporting her into that hallway, peering in at the thin shell of a man on the bed. Somewhere behind the house but hidden from view, a small squadron of Canadian geese moved honking by in the sky.

And then the front doorknob clicked and the door came open like a soft vacuum equalizing, and there stood Katt, a look on her face whose message was unmistakable.

The world shuddered down around him.

Conner would not allow himself to be touched all week long. Sherry came by a few times and sat with him, mostly talking about all the bad things in her life, more of that ugly-mother stuff and lots about the crazy husband she had once had. She wouldn’t let him see her brand or even feel it through her clothes. And all that time, he sat much of the time with his mouth shut, lots of thoughts flying past but not a one of them feeling like it was worth the energy to put into words.

His mom he had to push away. That didn’t feel so hot but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Whenever some well-meaning person, anyone, not even necessarily his mom, reached for him, it felt like torch-flame and he’d cry out and yank away from them—real brief, not some stupid scene but just enough that they knew not to try it again. Uncle Henry at the funeral, for example, his dad’s brother. God knows why he’d come. Some dumb family duty thing or other was Conner’s best guess. Flew in from Minneapolis, stayed at the Marriott. No one liked him but there he was at the funeral home and the cemetery and dropping by this or that gift at the house, expecting to be invited in, but Mom was too smart for that. At the funeral, early on, he’d sidled up to Conner to make somber small talk, trying to hug him, then flinching back at Conner’s reaction. At the ceremony around Dad’s grave, he stood way apart from the family, an odd shadow on his face, an averting, and it felt to Conner as if he wanted to check his watch all that time to see if it was time to catch his return flight.

But on the Saturday of the funeral, Dad’s department head and some of Mom’s work friends filling out the party, Conner’s numbness gradually lifted. It was like the final letting go of Novocain unpuffing your jaw, the tingle-fizz of flesh regaining sensation. The gravesite ceremony went on for days, a droning of words reduced to nonsense in his ears. All he could see was the spit-polished sheen of the coffin. All he could sense was the comforting presence of his mom on his left and Sherry on his right.

And the emotions coming out from under, the unmasking of his pain: He could feel that too.

There was the grief, of course. His mind floated back over a lifetime of doing things with his father, the homework help, hearing his low loving voice read bedtime stories to him and sometimes set aside the books and make one up right then, the humming in the car, letting him help set up a surprise party for Mom. But mixed in with the joy of those times was an unbearable ache, a he’s-gone, but how could he be gone? He’d been at their sides just an eyeblink before. It was unnatural, an unacceptable disappearance, and Conner understood that the clash of memory with he’s-gone and, worse, those-were-all-the-moments-ive 'll-ever-have, produced grief. Whatever lay in that coffin, a stretch of sky reflected in its metallic brown lid-curve, embodied nothing more than that. Not his father’s spirit nor even his body, though that was crudely there. Just grief, solid as blocks of bitter chocolate.