Sunday morning, I decided to have a look in the garage. The whole house was flooded with sunshine, and brightness glinted off the shriveled islands of snow under the trees. On a day so full of light, I felt I was ready to tackle the place where my parents had died.
Only in the garage, the sunlight hit the grimy, cobwebby windows and turned to dull milk. Although the Caddy was gone, towed away by the cops, the plaster ceiling was black from exhaust. I drew a breath and reeled back out, gagging at a stink of exhaust and rank meat. I am now reasonably sure that odor was mostly in my mind, but so what? Imaginary or not, it made me feel I was going to be sick every time I inhaled.
I forced myself back in there with a rag tied over my mouth and ran the automatic garage-door opener. The motor thrummed, but the door rose only a quarter of an inch before making a banging noise and refusing to rise any further. It was bolted shut. I struggled with the bolts, but it seemed to me they had impossibly rusted in place, and I couldn’t force them free. I turned in a circle, looking for something I could hammer against the bolts to free them up, and that’s when I saw one of my father’s blue, flat-soled boat shoes. Perhaps it had dropped off his foot when the EMTs pulled him out from behind the driver’s seat. I picked it up, and a spider crawled out onto the back of my hand. I shouted and threw it, shook the spider off my knuckles, and got the fuck out of there. That was enough for me.
After that I stopped working on the house. I had found the old Sega in the living-room closet. I hooked it up and played NBA Jam, sometimes for five, six hours straight. I played Sonic the Hedgehog 2 until I made it to the end. I played in the dark while headaches intensified to migraines. Then I played some more. When I was fed up with gaming, I watched whatever was on TV: reality shows, cable news, I wasn’t picky. I felt like I was recovering from a stomach bug—only I never actually recovered.
I’d always been a reader, but I lacked the mental energy to force my way through a book. Everything looked too long. Every page had too many words on it. In that whole stretch, I read just a single novel, Laurie Colwin’s Another Marvelous Thing, and then only because it was so short it could be read in one sitting, and only because she didn’t clutter up the page with a whole mess of words. It was about a young woman, just married, just pregnant, who falls in love with and has an affair with a much, much older man for reasons she hardly understands herself. You hear about a woman sleeping around on her husband, you’re automatically inclined to be judgmental. But everyone in the book was kind, everyone wanted the best for one another. In the end it seemed to me it was really about one generation saying good-bye to another, and I had an ugly cry about it on the couch. It made me glad to think my mother had carried such a happy, romantic heart in her.
I had meant to read it and slip it into the returns pile at the library, but I wound up just putting it back in the shoe box with my mother’s unpaid parking tickets. By the time I was done reading it, that book felt like it belonged to me.
I only ever left the house to drive the Bookmobile, and I went through my routes automatically, hardly seeing the people who entered the book car to find something to read. The next time I met someone who was dead—the next time a Late Return paid me a visit—I barely saw her face until she began to weep.
She’d entered after a small parade of children and their mothers had worked their way through the car in a noisy, milling line. I was in Quince, a country hamlet south of Kingsward, parked in the lot between an elementary school and a baseball field. The field was churned to frozen mud and smelled like thawing dog shit. The day was like my mood: hazy, buried under a low mass of icy cloud. At some point I became aware there was a single woman in