Valley of Ashes (32 page)

I tried to leave Mimi alone, telling myself that I needed to concentrate on being a mother instead of investigating anything, that I’d already caused enough trouble, and that, furthermore, I should wait to see if there was anything safe and matronly I could help out with once Dean had returned home.

I busied myself with taking the girls on outings: to Pearl Street to play in the sand pit with the big rocks in it, for generic sunny walks around our neighborhood in the red wagon, and even, God help me, to the annoying Mom-and-Toddler group up at the community center.

The discussion topic that week was either Rolfing or Transcendental Meditation. I wasn’t exactly paying attention.

And, okay, I spent a lot of hours staring at my map of Boulder with all the pins stuck in it. A lot. Trying to see if there was something,
anything
to be gleaned from it.

Plus which I told myself I
wasn’t
actively scrutinizing every white male person between the ages of roughly twenty and forty who looked like he might be lacking in self-esteem and/or communication skills and/or could possibly have a bit of a drinking problem whom I happened to pass on the sidewalk, whenever I left the house.

Which would be a big fat lie, of course, but “scrutinizing” seemed like a relatively harmless activity so what the hell.

McNally very kindly had the
New Times
’s accounting department cut me a check for my first two articles and another to reimburse me for the actual meals, so I was okay for money again. I even dragged the girls over to Mustard’s Last Stand for Chicago-style hot dogs one night, and wrote a totally lame review of the place.

I mean, “Chicago-style” my Manhattan-born-and-bred ass. Give me an infinitely superior sidewalk-cart Nathan’s with sauerkraut any day.

So, okay, I was bored out of my mind. Except when I started thinking about Cary, and then I just cried.

Dean wasn’t home yet. McNally was out of reach. Mimi couldn’t talk to me about anything that actually mattered.

And my best friend in this town was dead.

C
ary’s family didn’t have a memorial service for him, it was a funeral. With a closed casket.

But it was beautiful. In a small old chapel with lovely stained glass, a dark beamed ceiling, and smooth white plaster that made the walls seem soft as comfort.

The altar was surrounded by white lilies—dozens and dozens—and they perfumed everything. Sweet and poignant and just fucking heartrending, all at once.

There was a large framed color photograph of Cary on a gold easel beside the dark-wood casket. Strange-looking… cheesy blue background, maybe a little airbrushed? It was like a high-school yearbook picture, only of a grown-up.

I kept trying to figure out who’d taken it and why—he was wearing a jacket and tie, but his hair was really different. Blow-dried, maybe. And his smile radiated discomfort.

I wanted an image that seemed more like
him
… standing on our front porch drinking coffee with his bike helmet under his arm, maybe, or helping Dean flip burgers on the Weber. Just…
laughing
, for God’s sake.

I couldn’t look and I couldn’t
not
look.

Dean cleared his throat. We were on the aisle in the fourth pew, left of the altar.

He’d gotten in late the night before and promptly fallen asleep on our sofa with his briefcase balanced upright in his lap, pummeled comatose by jet lag and twelve hours of coach-seat tall-guy torture.

Parrish had woken up twice with night terrors, and I’d let him sleep.

Now he and I looked as though Satan-worshipping elves had spent the entire night working us over with veal mallets—especially around the eyes.

The kneelers were the kind I remembered from the church Mom took us to sporadically when we were kids.

Thanksgiving and Easter, mostly, because she liked the hymns: “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing,” and that
a-a-a-a-a-lei-loo-oo-jah
one.

At least that’s the way I still spelled it in my head—despite being pretty sure even Episcopalians would’ve hesitated to commit to that many hyphens in a single word, whether or not it was phonetically accurate. Which my version totally was.

Okay, so my mind was bouncing all over the place—before my dear late friend’s funeral had even
started
—which made me feel like a deeply shitty person.

I’d had a lot of practice with that feeling lately.

I looked down at the kneelers, again. Little oval cushions, maybe ten inches high, upholstered in velvet that had probably debuted in a deep, rich shade of burgundy: the old Hearty Gallo, lugged down to beach bonfires by the seamed loop set into each bottle’s neck—weight of the entire gallon depending from your single, overtaxed finger.

Okay, the velvet was probably meant to echo the color of communion wine. I just missed the Gallo, and that beach at night. All the grown-ups arrayed around the fire, sipping from paper cups.

Focus, Madeline.

I pulled my kneeler out, slid forward off the wooden pew’s satiny edge. Sank down to my knees.

Assume the position: hands clasped on the railing, eyes shut.

It was uncomfortable immediately despite the kneeler, which I suppose was the point.

Penance
.

I did the Lord’s Prayer, not out loud.

Tried to remember the Nicene Creed from communion class.

One God, the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible.

Um…

God of God, light of light, very God of very God…

I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

And really, why the hell not?

But that was all of it I could remember.

I could have reached for
The Book of Common Prayer
, but felt like that would be cheating.

I pushed myself up until my ass was level with the pew. Slid backward onto it.

The woman seated directly in front of us whispered loudly to her companion that Cary’s best high school friend had flown in from Boston.

“He’s going to play something,” she said, and I heard her program crinkle.

I examined my own but couldn’t see whom she was referring to.

An organist took his seat and began playing Bach.

Not our age, not Cary’s friend.

Dean nudged me gently with his elbow.

I looked at him, wondering why, then saw Setsuko standing in the aisle beside us.

I scootched over.

Dean scootched over.

She took the aisle seat beside him.

Then the real thing started, and the three of us wept nonstop for more than an hour.

The priest talked. Friends. Family.

Then there was a bit of a lull.

A guy walked up to the altar, stepped onto the dais.

Ah, the friend.

Tall, around the same height Cary had been. Thinner, though, with paler hair.

He turned around, facing us but not looking at anyone, just gazing over our heads.

Someone handed him a black case. Old and battered, gray at the corners.

He squatted down, resting it on the floor, flipping three silver latches open, then raising its lid.

He stood up, light glancing off the length of gold he now held in both hands.

A trumpet.

There was utter quiet.

One cough from the back, echoing the way noise will in a high room with stone floors—fleeting and watery.

The guy took a deep breath, raising the instrument to his mouth.

I can’t tell you exactly what he played, over the next ten minutes.

It started as “Taps,” but then shifted upward—just after the note a singer would’ve raised his voice on, at the end of “from the sky…”—but leaving that right away for something light and silvery I’d never heard before.

Liquid.

Translucent.

And then part of Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” the beautiful one.

And then on into that sweet, sweet bit of Largo from Bach’s Piano Concerto Number Five, which I’d first heard as a kid in
Slaughterhouse-Five
when the Tralfamadorians come down shimmering out of the stars to take Billy Pilgrim and his dog Spot away.

So the version I had in my head was Glenn Gould, with someone else doing a little pizzicato in the background.

Cary’s friend just floated through the piano line of it… soft, breathtakingly sad… and then suddenly it wasn’t that Largo at
all
anymore.

I couldn’t put my finger on the new melody, though I knew I’d heard it… Sousa, maybe—though mournful—but then it was gone.

On to the next, again familiar.

This one he stayed with.

“
Oh
,” I said, not loudly, right when I knew.

Dean leaned so his lips brushed my ear. “What?”

I just shook my head.

I couldn’t talk anymore.

It wasn’t really profound, what he was playing. Simple—but he made the notes float, like you were hearing them from a very long way away.

Across a lake, maybe, near the end of the day.

A song I’d first heard the Ink Spots do, on a very old scratchy record of Mom’s that she’d managed to keep intact since boarding school in 1957—though, as she’d often told me, “it was old even then.”

A song that had always reached deep into my head, with its sadness and hope: “We’ll Meet Again.”

Jesus
.

I knew the words by heart, thinking through them as Cary’s friend sent the melody soaring through the chapel’s old rafters…

Won’t you please say hello to the folks that I know, tell ’em I won’t be long…

Fuck.

I couldn’t help it, I sobbed, biting the edge of my fist to try shutting myself up… which I failed at pretty much immediately.

Because wouldn’t it be the best possible thing, if it all really
did
turn out like that?

To think everyone really
is
waiting for you—for all of us—that each beloved person we have to lose has only gone on ahead to prepare the way, to let them all know you’re coming, too, soon enough:

All we’ve done forgiven, all our sadness explained, all happiness triumphant.

All of us released to float up. Light as air, clear as water, sweet as the notes of that trumpet.

Oh, how I wanted that.

For Cary, for me… everyone.

I saw Setsuko leaning forward, trying to catch my eye from behind Dean’s shoulder.

I looked over at her and she handed me Kleenex.

And then the melody slowed down, down, down…

“Taps” again, the ending of it.

Then he stopped, and it seemed absolutely still for a moment.

A void of sound, but not of feeling.

Not empty, just quiet.

But it wasn’t quiet, not really.

Everyone was crying. The whole place.

Dean sobbed beside me.

Setsuko was sniffling—demurely, of course.

Cary’s parents had collapsed into each other in the front row, his mother quivering, his father’s shoulders quaking in hard, long spasms of grief.

A man directly behind me just gave in and let go, the noise breaking out of him so deep he could have been some huge, ancient animal, lowing in pain.

The last of its kind.

Then the overhead lamps were dimmed, slowly, until there was nothing but candlelight, and the lilies’ perfume, and all of us crying out, our voices in unison literally sounding the very depths of what had been lost.

A hundred people.

No, more than that.

Family, old friends from across the country. Every last person Cary had worked with, here.

And that made me draw in my breath—so sharply it whistled backward through my teeth.

Here. The person who did this is right here…

I reached for Dean’s hand, gripped it hard enough that he turned to look at me.

I didn’t
want
to think about Bittler. Not now.

I wanted to think about Cary. To sink into the beauty of everything being done in his honor.

He deserved that from me.

But it was over.

Lights came up from behind the rows of pews: illumination to beckon us out, pass us onward and back into the world.

People stood, started moving slowly up the crowded aisle. Not a single person making the journey alone.

They passed in twos and threes… halting, leaning against one another.

Broken.

Dean and I were lying in bed later that night. Not doing anything, but not sleeping. On our backs.

We both had our knees up, touching lightly, rocking slowly back and forth in a tender rhythm.

It had taken me another two hours to stop crying after we got home.

Now I was spent.

Dean reached for my hand, tucked his fingers through mine.

“Bunny?”

“Mmm?”

“There’s something I want to ask you.”

I inhaled too fast again, the air whistling.

Nothing bad, please. I don’t have anything left.

“Okay,” I said, squinting my eyes shut, tight enough to hurt.

“I’ve been offered a job.”

I exhaled. Our knees rocked.

“A good one. A pretty decent promotion, actually.”