Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,162

Service. That grief wouldn’t be needed now, no, not anymore.

—

She stands by the window, the dark down. A chatter in the room. She is reminded of white birds, flapping. The cocktail glass she holds feels fragile. If she holds it too tight, she thinks, it might shatter.

She has come to stay, to be with Claire for a day or two. To sleep in the spare room. To accompany her dying, the same way she accompanied Gloria’s dying six years ago. The slow car journey back to Missouri. The smile on Gloria’s face. Her sister, Janice, in the front seat, driving. Playing games with the rearview mirror. Both of them pushing Gloria in a wheelchair along the banks of the river. Up a lazy river where the robin’s song wakes a brand-new morning as we roll along. It was a celebration, that day. They had dug their feet down into happiness and weren’t prepared to let go. They threw sticks into an eddy and watched them circle. Put a blanket down, ate Wonder Bread sandwiches. Later in the afternoon, her sister began crying, like a change in the weather, for no reason except the popping of a wine cork. Jaslyn handed her a wadded tissue. Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Gloria left with a smile on her face. They closed her eyes with the glare of the sun still on them, rolled the wheelchair up the hill, stayed a little while looking out over the land until the insects of evening gathered.

They buried her two days later in a plot near the back of her old house. She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried. A quiet ceremony, just the girls and a preacher. They put Gloria in the ground with one of her father’s old hand-painted signs and a sewing tin she’d kept from her own mother. If there was any good way to go, it was a good way to go.

Yes, she thinks, she would like to stay and be with Claire also, spend a few moments, find some silence, let the moments crawl. She has even brought her pajamas, her toothbrush, her comb. But it is clear to her now that she is not welcome.

She had forgotten that there might be others too, that a life is lived in many ways—so many unopened envelopes.

—May I see her?

—I don’t think she should be disturbed.

—I’ll just pop my head around the door.

—It’s a little late. She’s sleeping. Would you like another drink …?

His voice rises high on the question, unfinished, as if searching for her name. But he knows her name. Idiot. A crass, lumbering fool. He wants to own the grief and throw a party for it.

—Jaslyn, she says and smiles thinly.

—Another drink, Jaslyn?

—Thank you, no, she says, I have a room at the Regis.

—The Regis, awesome.

It’s the fanciest hotel she can think of, the most expensive place. She has no idea even where it is, just somewhere nearby, but the name changes Tom’s face—he smiles and shows his very white teeth.

She wraps a napkin around the bottom of her drink, places it down on the glass coffee table.

—Well, I should say good night. It’s been a pleasure.

—Please, I’ll show you down.

—It’s okay, really.

—No, no, I insist.

He touches her elbow and she cringes. She resists the urge to ask him if he has ever been president of a frat house.

—Really, she says at the elevator, I can let myself out.

He leans forward to kiss her cheek. She allows him her shoulder and she gives a slight nudge against his chin.

—Good-bye, she says with a singsong finality.

Downstairs, Melvyn hails her a cab and soon she is alone again, as if none of the evening has happened at all. She checks in her pocket for the card from Pino. Turns it over in her fingers. It’s as if she can feel the phone already ringing itself out in his pocket.

—

The only room at the St. Regis costs four hundred and twenty-five dollars for the night. She thinks about trying to find another hotel, even thinks about a phone call to Pino, but then slides her credit card across the counter.