a terrible shock.’
‘Without her history and a full report . . .’ the other one says and turns up his hands.
‘It was most likely an embolism.’
‘Could we get the check when you have a chance?’
They knock back their espressos while I print it out, put down two twenties, and bolt out of the dining room.
My mother’s friend Janet was with her at the clinic on the island. She wasn’t struggling, Janet told me. She wasn’t in pain. She was dozing. Sort of in and out. Then she sat up, said she had to make a phone call, lay back down again, and was dead. It was very peaceful, Janet told me. Such a pretty day.
I tried, in phone calls with Janet, to get more detail than pretty day and peaceful. I wanted everything, my mother’s exact words and the smell of the clinic and the color of the walls. Were children kicking a ball outside? Was she holding Janet’s hand? Who did she sit up to call? Was there any noise at all when her heart stopped? Why did it stop? I wanted to hear my mother tell it. She loved a story. She loved a mystery. She could make any little incident intriguing. In her version, the doctor would have a wandering eye and three chickens in the back named after Tolstoy characters. Janet would have a heat rash on her neck. I wanted her and no one else to tell me the story of how she died.
Her suitcase arrived at Caleb and Phil’s house three days after the funeral. Caleb and I opened it together. We lifted out her yellow rain slicker, her two cotton nightgowns, her one-piece bathing suit with the pink-and-white checks. We pressed our noses to every item, and every item smelled of her. We found gifts in a paper bag, a pair of beaded earrings and a man’s T-shirt. We knew they were for us. When the suitcase was empty I slid my hand into the interior elasticized pouches, certain there would be something in writing, a note or a sentence of goodbye, of premonition, in case of. There was nothing but two safety pins and a thin barrette.
The rest of the week goes badly. My writing flounders. Every sentence feels flat, every detail fake. I go for long runs along the river, to Watertown, to Newton, ten miles, twelve miles, which help, but after a few hours the bees start crawling again. I scroll the 206 pages I have on the computer and skim the new pages I have in my notebook since Red Barn. I can’t find one moment, one sentence, that’s any good. Even the scenes I’ve clung to when all else seems lost—those first pages I wrote in Pennsylvania and the chapter I wrote in Albuquerque that poured out of me like a visitation—have dimmed. It all looks like a long stream of words, like someone with a disease that involves delusions has written them. I am wasting my life. I am wasting my life. It pounds like a heartbeat. For three days straight it rains, and the potting shed starts to smell like compost. I arrive at Iris soaked through and barely dry off before I have to ride back home. I try to fold my white shirt carefully into my knapsack but it wrinkles, and Marcus scolds me for it. Each way I pass the Sunoco station on Memorial Drive, the ugly marigolds in their concrete bed, and hot tears mix with the rain. The date at the end of the week with Silas, for which I have swapped a lucrative Friday night for a Monday lunch, fills me with dread. But when I am not paying attention, I remember his voice on the phone and his chipped tooth, and a ripple of something that might be anticipation passes through.
Harry and I have two doubles together, Tuesday and Thursday. I’m not an efficient waitress when Harry is working — we get lost in conversation and cajole the sous chefs into making us BLTs or crab cakes and smoke cigarettes with Alejandro out on the fire escape and are never around when Marcus is looking for us—but I am a cheerier waitress. Harry’s charm rubs off on me. My service is worse, but my tips are always better.
‘He’s not panna cotta, is he?’ he says on Thursday lunch over vichyssoise and iced coffees in the wait station while Marcus interviews someone in the office.
Harry asked me to dinner after