had moved long since to New Zealand from where, every two or three years, she sent a postcard of craggy mountains and wild meadows, green ridges towering over a blue sea. The other two were more gone than that—one had succumbed to cancer in her forties, the last to manic depression and a group home in Northern California, not far from the ancient redwoods . . . faces blended and faded, their features more and more obscure.
That was the abstract cost of this, the cost beyond Hal’s death: his memory was compromised. What should be a full and vivid remembrance of him was fractured by her separate life and blame—her separate life infringing on the life they had, the history he deserved to own.
The queen-size bed that had stood here might well have been the origin of his dying. She closed her eyes and saw the bed again, its sheets and blankets in disarray. She’d been careless here once, just once, with Fantasy Baseball. She had no way of knowing, of course, that Hal would have a minor car accident and appear at the house in the middle of the day, when she was still washing off in the shower. She had brazened it out, pretended there was nothing to acknowledge, and Hal had seemed to go along—but then soon after that he’d known, too soon for pure coincidence.
She should have erred on the safe side and never brought Baseball here. It had not been her practice to bring men home. Pure laziness: Baseball’s apartment, where they usually went, was at Fairfax and Wilshire and she’d wanted to avoid the lunch-hour traffic. And she was not in the mood for the apartment’s frat-boy furnishings, free weights on a vinyl bench, neon Budweiser sign and running shoes tumbled in a pile near the door with dirty socks crumpled into them.
That it was Baseball, with his stolid lack of foreplay and solid grasp of box scores, kept multiplying the offense, but the fact remained that she was sorry for symptoms, sorry for side effects most of all. Not for all of it, only what slid off the rails. It could not be her fault and all of it was her fault. She was a murderer and a victim, she felt the strain of trying to find her footing on uneven ground. Then also she was changeable, prepared to be someone else. She had fluidity.
She said goodbye to Hal again. She had left him once in the casket, once at the funeral and now in the bedroom. She would leave him again, she suspected, hundreds of times in near-invisible gestures, like the blur of a moving limb in a photograph.
Downstairs she passed Casey’s doorway and saw T. stand up quickly from the level of the chair; he caught her eye and smiled. She wondered what was between those two these days. Before he went away there had been a close friendship that had ended; Casey had pushed him away, run from him even. Susan had suspected then that she had a crush on him. Casey liked to beat men to the punch, since the accident, reject them preemptively before she could be rejected. Understandable. Typically, though, she chose losers to take up with, insulating herself. That part wasn’t so good.
But now—the look on his face as he rose—when it came to Casey Susan was unsure of her own instincts.
He had better not be leading her daughter on, she thought, with an edge of anger. T. dated women who resembled models—not that they actually were models, only that the prerequisites for seeing him seemed to be poise and classical looks. The girlfriend who had died, whom Susan had met only a handful of times, had been a slim, light-skinned black woman with a surprising movie-star charisma, who turned heads wherever she went but was also self-effacing and modest. The combination was rare. And then this rare, humble beauty had suddenly died: her heart had stopped with no warning and she was gone, as though to prove the unfeasibility of her goodness.
Casey was a rumpled child by comparison, a tomboy, a brat and a squeaky wheel. Not to mention the paraplegia, an attribute unlikely to be on his wish list.
She was defenseless, more so than ever. Susan would speak to him if she had to.
They dropped Casey at her apartment and headed to the office, where Susan would be introduced to the work of dismantling the business. T. had hired some kind of lawyer who