you asked my mother if those we’ve lost are still among us, she’d be as matter-of-factly sure of it as she is about the price of coffee. Once I said, “Well, if that’s true, why doesn’t everyone have the experience?”
“The dead don’t come if they’re not welcome,” she said. “Not everyone wants to experience such a thing. Not everyone can handle it. Also they don’t come if your reasons are suspect. And believe me, they know.”
The morning after Dennis arrived, I was standing at the bathroom mirror and Penny came.
Good for you.
“Do you like him?” I asked my own image, and in my own eyes I saw her swirling around and around, her head back, something she called her happy dance. Then she stopped and leaned in very close to me, and I could see the gold flecks in her brown eyes, I could see them again.
Still. What good is it to believe in any kind of afterlife in the absence of hard evidence?
Oh, come on. Hard evidence is overrated.
I look up and smile, as though she might be standing there before me.
The best things in life have no hard evidence to support them. Hope. Faith. Love.
“I suppose that’s true.”
What are you doing out here all alone?
“I’m trying to figure things out. Help me.”
I think you’re doing fine on your own.
I hear the screen door bang shut and here comes Dennis, moving toward me in the darkness.
He says nothing, just sits next to me.
After a while, I say, “What do you make of death?”
He shrugs. “I think people see death as the hunter, but it’s just the ticket taker, the timekeeper. It’s the sound of a record playing in the background.”
I nod. Then I say, “Maybe it’s also there to remind us to do what we ought to.”
“And what should you do, Cece?”
“Be here. Give more.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know. What do you think? What else should I do?”
“Be with me? Finally?”
I feel myself starting to cry and I put my hands over my face. He puts his arm around me and rocks me side to side, slowly, gently.
I think about the fortune Cosmina gave me, so long ago, which I have never forgotten: Your task will be to learn in what direction to look for life’s greatest riches. I take my hands away from my face and look into his.
Fate is a part of our lives. Another part is choice. But the biggest part is the mystery, the great unknowable, about which we feel so many things, including joy.
IT’S BEEN A LITTLE OVER A YEAR SINCE I GOT THE POSTCARD from Dennis that inspired the road trip. Dennis and I are living in a coach house behind a big old house near Lake of the Isles, and it’s full only of the things we really love and use.
A lot of people worry about how a new relationship between older people can work when those people are so set in their ways, as they say. At least for now, I can report that it works beautifully: the only fight we’ve had of any note occurred during a vacation we took right after we moved in together, and like most spectacular fights, it was about something stupid, I can’t even remember what. We’d gone to Rockport, Massachusetts, which is an artists’ colony; I thought we’d both like it there. And we did, we had a wonderful time, except for the day we so bitterly argued. I think we were both just scared about having moved in together, thinking, What in the hell have I done?
We went our separate ways that day. I walked for miles along the ocean, and as the sun was beginning to set, I went back into town to eat some dinner. I went into a small restaurant on Bearskin Neck with a wooden sign proclaiming that the very best clam chowder in the world was served there. When I walked in the door, I saw Dennis sitting alone at a table, bent over his dinner. He didn’t see me until I was upon him, until I tapped his shoulder. When he looked up, I said nothing. He gestured to the chair opposite him, and I sat down. “I’ll give you a bite, and you can decide for yourself,” he said, holding out a spoonful of the chowder.
“I’ve already decided,” I said, and he gave me one of his famous penetrating gazes and said, “Yeah. Me, too. I decided a long time ago.”
This morning, in a chatty reverie, I