died.
People intended to make you feel better when they said the body was not the person, you or themselves, at least, but those were the ones who believed in the fields of hereafter, those who believed in cherubim. Their words presumed an independent mind, moving, roaming freely. If that were true, who knew how it might be, Hal’s mind floating untethered in this sterile room. Only herself for company. His mind and its murderer, her own. Maybe his mind was touching hers, in those infinite molecules of the air.
She willed her hands to rise, her arms to lift up, as though to feel the last of him going.
The cut was small. The cut was hardly there.
She pulled the shirt down after a while. She stood and looked and looked at him, the line of his nose and forehead, the eyebrows. But he would not say anything, and there was only so much looking she could do.
Though technically it was winter it felt like a mild spring day on the cemetery grounds. The service would be held in a steepled chapel called the Little Church of the Flowers, a name both quaint and faintly reminiscent of pederasty. Susan sat waiting in the first pew with Casey beside her at the end.
The venue had to be expensive, she thought—T. was paying, saying the funeral would be his responsibility—because it was an imitation of a church from Europe, an imitation of an English village church slapped down in the sunny, falsely green lake of Los Angeles County. Hal would have shaken his head at the pretension of it, but herself she found it pleasant enough. She didn’t mind the fake quaintness. She was not a snob when it came to authenticity. Whatever works, was the way she saw it. Whereas Hal had a tendency to mock his fellow Americans. He looked down from a high place on his countrymen, as he called them.
In his way Hal was an idealist. Had been. He had lofty ideas, where she only had pragmatism. She wondered if that made him more European. Also he had believed in taxes. Yes: though he’d grown up right here, though he had visited Europe only once, and even then in a bus full of low-budget tourists who yearned for nothing more than to step out of the bus in Paris and find the nearest McDonald’s, there were European aspects to Hal.
Sunlight filled the place with an excessive whiteness that made her blink when she looked up. Mourners were filing through the doors in surprising number but she didn’t know most of them—her own friends, her friends from college days, were far away and most hadn’t even heard the news. These were probably IRS employees, their equally unknown families in tow. Some were large, she noticed. Hal had never said his office was mostly overweight people, yet so it appeared to be. She’d never made a habit of dropping into his office, nor had she attended many office functions. And when she told Casey she would speak she hadn’t considered these mourners or their expectations. For their benefit she would have liked to be eloquent, but in the end she would not be. Of that much she was certain.
An arm’s length away Casey sat in her chair, head bowed. She did not wish to be spoken to. A few feet past her T. stood by a side door talking to a small man in black, the man who would officiate, Susan suspected—clerical-looking, nodding as T. spoke to him in a low murmur.
He did not say much—either that or Susan forgot to listen—and then Casey had intended to speak but could not, became choked up and had to roll back to her position at the end of the pew. Watching her made Susan wince but she had to get over it, she was up next herself, and she would have noticed her own nervousness if she had not been lost in feeling for Casey and the whine and the buzz. She had heard it from the moment T. told them Hal was dead: her life was full of background noise, a dull and droning clamor behind the voices or a ringing, a dreadful ringing like tinnitus that only diminished when she drank or smoked. Then things quieted and drew into focus.
It was not that she regretted all of it, only that she regretted this specific instance—that Hal had found out, that because of her carelessness he had seen. From that she’d failed to