All the Lasting Things (26 page)

Between the smoke and the sleeplessness, a wrap of suffocatingly tight sheets wrapped around Max’s mind. He could simply give over to the weight that pulled on him and curl back in a senseless cocoon onto the thick green lawn. But then, like a stroke of lightning, an urgent flash lit him up from the inside. His eyes snapped open. A light, brighter than the flames that lashed the upstairs windows, rent the cloth binding his limbs and made him jump to his feet. He wasn’t exactly thinking of Claudia or the book, but the afterburn of both set him running for the house.

The assembled men, lungs already whistling from their labor, weren’t quick enough to catch him, but one of the more spry women managed to snag his foot, which sent him crashing hard into the porch steps. He knocked his shin but hopped past the shocking pain of it and vaulted, in three Olympic strides, up to the study. The room was hotter than he’d left it, and the smoke came faster now, like filthy water flowing over a breached dam. Max stripped off his shirt and tied it tightly, bandit style, around his mouth and nose before dropping to the floor. Crawling forward with great care, he avoided the hills of burning books and groveled toward the desk.

At first, he didn’t believe it: the safe had burned down. The history of Henry and Jane forever lost. But he felt farther along the bookcase, his sense of spatial positioning thrown off by a good three feet, until his panicked hands came to the hot metal box. His fingers jumped as if they’d found a live coal. He cursed, but again pushed past the pain. A sense of invincibility danced in a flash across his storm-riddled mind, a tonic, an opiate: nothing could hurt him, nothing could stop him. Holding his breath, he snatched off the shirt and used it to pry open the door.

The book was there, curled by the heat but unharmed, and he moved as if extracting it were a child’s game, the steady hand needed to snatch it from its narrow opening without touching the hot surrounding walls, like a kid tweezing the patient’s funny bone without inciting the cruel electrical
bzzzzzt
in Operation. With the shedding nest of pages in his grip, with every piston firing, he saw an exit route running like a white seam across the room’s deadly black felt, as easy to follow as a runway, out of the smoke, out of danger, a mattress of soft, fragrant grass waiting for him on the other side.

Hugging the shaggy beast of his grandfather’s book to his chest, he flew forward like a sprinter hearing the starting gun. The white trail led out of the room. His eyes didn’t need to be open to see it—the trail, the green, the sky—but his body was a crucial foot off from where he thought it was, and his sneaker caught hard on the base of Henry’s chair. Max snapped forward. His head, with all his momentum behind it, smashed into the corner of the desk. The pages scattered like birds through the room. The heat kited them up and away. They drifted down, falling into flames, feeding them or buckling into brittle shapes of ash.

Max groaned. He lifted his hand to his head, his hair already slick with blood. His eyes fluttered and closed. The smoke drifted above him but sent its tendrils down, knitting the billowing cloud to the fledging fires that thickened it. He coughed himself still then listened. The wood of the shelves popped and snapped. Paper scraps fizzing through the air like comets. The breath of the fire crawling closer to his ear. The closing approach of the sirens. The curtains, the books, the rugs, the walls. Everything falling beneath a roll of orange waves. Everything being swept away with a music all its own.

15.

B
enji sat on a crowded lawn in a circle of fifteen students more than half his age. He’d lost track of how he’d gotten there—everything he did happened in a blear—but it wasn’t longing for the programmatic cheer of new student orientation. He felt, as he had every day of the past month, as if a giant hand had picked him up and set him down, morning to night, moving him like a pawn in a game he had no wish to play.

Of course there was no hand. He wasn’t caught in a dissociative fugue. He woke and dressed and ate and ran and shat and showered and slept, but he did it all without any sense of self-propulsion, driven to drama club, to the Cineplex, to Sperry’s for a night with Cat, by the self-preserving sense that it was simply better to do these things than not. He didn’t have to hide his grief, but if he didn’t display proper evidence of coping with it, if he didn’t demonstrate that he understood the word
accident
and had no cause to blame himself (but who else in the world could he possibly blame?) his mother and Cat would come for him. They’d interject themselves. They would, as if he were a man sinking into the sea, start throwing him lifelines, and their lifelines weighed as much as chains. The last thing Benji wanted was rescue.

The students finished up their lunches and settled into sharing, according to rules laid down with demented enthusiasm by a junior advisor, the details of their lives. Tammy, said advisor, exuded a blond, bland kind of commonplace beauty: her vacant smile would later make her a natural for real estate sales or fund-raising and development. She produced a big cellophane bag of M&M’s and instructed the girl next to her to take a handful.

“Let’s see. You took . . . five. Five? You can do better than that.” Tammy demonstrated what constituted a proper handful and dumped them into her victim’s waiting hand. “Count them. How many do you have? Sixteen? Now we’re talking! Now you tell us sixteen things about yourself.”

The second girl, an auburn giantess with an intriguing gap between her front teeth and unfortunate bangs, saluted the group. “Hi. My name is Vanessa Darby. I grew up in Glens Falls. I was captain of my varsity volleyball team. Go, Indians! My favorite color is magenta, though with this skin I’ve been told I shouldn’t wear it. Is that the sort of thing I’m supposed to say?”

Tammy gave a thumbs-up.

“My favorite food is pizza. I have no idea what I want to major in. Journalism, maybe. Or maybe premed. Is that sixteen?”

“Six,” shouted some sadistic stickler for rules.

After Vanessa had completed her struggling autobiography, she passed the bag of M&M’s like it burned, and round they went with the sugar-amped sharing. It might have been a balm to Benji’s mind to let Bob from Sleepy Hollow or Barb from Anaquassacook siphon some calm little current of thought where he could escape the waters that sooner or later spilled into that hospital waiting room, that bright linoleum box where he’d slept for two nights, where he and Cat and Claudia (who couldn’t bear to look him in the eye) and Evelyn and Nick and Arnav joined Jim and Amanda Davis (who also couldn’t bear to look at him—or any other Fisher, for that matter) on a diet of soggy sandwiches and vending machine coffee, hopeful, now that Henry had made it out of the woods, that Max would soon follow, leaning on the doctors’ cautious optimism, on their
We have to wait and see
, on their
We have some promising news
until the winds changed and, like that, he was gone—
subdural hematoma
were the words they used—and nothing, nothing, nothing could ever be done to make it right.

But Benji found he could no sooner float in the calmest, most inconsequential pools of Bob’s or Barbara’s lives than he could pretend that he belonged where he was sitting. He heard voices, needling, implacable voices that had been building in volume since the memorial service that the Davises refused to let him or his family attend, a chorus of voices that positively screamed now with the inanity of his present situation and told him to go. It was wrong. Everything he was doing was wrong. Fake. Nothing but more ruin crouching on the road ahead.

When an impressively muscled boy with three freckles under each eye like a cartoon drawing placed the candy sack in Benji’s lap, Benji took his handful with the enthusiasm of a machine, but found he couldn’t speak. His eyes had fallen onto his zippered lunch sack, an orange nylon bag stuffed still with his uneaten lunch, which lay on the grass before him, bright as a coiled snake. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.

Tammy, nearly preorgasmic with the biographical trove promised by his baker’s dozen of M&M’s, tried to get the ball rolling. “I love your T-shirt,” she said. “Where’d you get it?” It was black, adorned with a picture of Harold Gray’s loveable, empty-eyed Orphan Annie and the words “Tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow).” A gift from Brandon Wright and the rest of the
Macbeth
cast.

She wanted thirteen things? Benji could have come up with thirteen things. He could have told her about the great, good success of the drama club, what he’d gotten from it, yes, but also what he’d given up for it. He could have said that, two hours before his parents’ house burned down, he’d slipped into the side yard like a wounded animal and given Sam Palin a faint but final no. That Sam had said, “It’s your life, buddy,” as if he could see the end of it, and, “It’s all good,” as if it was anything but. Benji had chosen a path that afternoon. A life. The sort of life in which he’d build on the $600 he’d saved to buy Cat’s ring or don a rented tux for the premiere of Max’s opera. He chose this life, which changed on him in the blink of an eye, which left him falling without warning from the sky as life has a tendency to do.

Last year, on a desperate August night, he’d stood on the bridge and found no one separating him from the pitiless black gorge. Now he had Cat. He had his mother, his sister. He had the blessing that was Max, until that crucifying moment he no longer did. He’d spent the last year climbing up, out of that ravine, and this, in the end, is where the effort landed him. What role did he think he was playing? And where did he think it would lead? He was a fool strutting his disastrous time on the stage until, in the time it took to run a three-mile route he’d run a hundred times before, he destroyed everything.

Max was gone. Max was gone. And one day, no one knew when, no one knew how, the others would follow. He would lose Henry. He would lose Cat. He would be back where he started. Alone. All of these thoughts—was that thirteen, Tammy?—somehow fit into his little zippered pouch as snugly as a baggie full of carrots, a banana, a ham and cheese on rye. It was, at that moment, the saddest and most dangerous thing he’d ever seen. It was the rest of his life. If he let it, it would follow him through the years. It wasn’t Cat and children and a two-car garage. It wasn’t love or forgiveness or the possibility of being redeemed. It was 6,500 sandwiches before he stepped his way to a dusty death. It was 6,500 bags of baby carrots, 6,500 bananas. If he died today, he’d be worse than forgotten. It would be as if he’d never been born.

With that, Benji stood. Dropping his M&M’s like empty seed husks into the grass, he left everything—lunch sack, orientation packet, campus map—where it lay and, ignoring Tammy’s surly protest, started the long walk back to parking lot D.

She sat on the edge of Henry’s bed and read the letter aloud. She’d been working on it since the day Max died, since the day she watched her opportunity to tell Claudia the truth come and go on that endless drive to the store. Evelyn might have unburdened herself then, though she couldn’t shake the notion that telling would do nothing but add to her load. And not only hers. Claudia, too, would bend with the weight; Evelyn’s bold and upright girl brought to the ground by a forty-year-old lie.

Excepting the reverend who married her, never had Evelyn admitted to anyone that she had opened the door one day and took into her arms another woman’s child. Never had she wanted to. Never had she seen the need. She and Henry had worried for a time that the secret they kept from Claudia would be exposed by nasty children or gossiping neighbors or the self-appointed scourges of a small upstate town. But the elderly neighbors who knew of Jane’s disappearance had, miraculously, moved on or gone demented or died before her daughter reached the age that may have tempted them to disclosure. And the young families who took their place had never seen the woman named Jane. They knew of no scandal, no secret, and so Claudia grew, as Henry and Evelyn intended, with a sense of belonging she had no cause to doubt.

Except, on some level, Evelyn knew, she did. As soon as Max appeared at her door, Evelyn couldn’t avoid seeing just how much her daughter did. Why else would Claudia keep such an enormous and essential predicament from her? Why else would she turn from her mother’s guidance? Her love? Why else would she leave buried the lie of her own child, year after year, decade after decade, until the child came crashing into their lives like an avalanche? Evelyn came to see Claudia’s secret as retribution for her own. For now that Henry’s mind had dissolved, and with it the oath he insisted they keep, the fault rested entirely on Evelyn’s shoulders. Thus, the letter.

What started as a rambling six-page admission of and apology for burying the bones of her daughter’s history—a truth Evelyn felt compelled to offer in a sort of tribute to Max—had swelled, in the weeks following his death, into an imprecation of her very own existence. It was her fault, she said, rejecting the comforting thought that Henry shared (and possibly deserved even more of) the blame. It was all her fault.

But who was her admission for? The further she read, the more she wondered who stood to benefit from what she had to say. Was it for Max, who was gone? Was it for Claudia, who had the rest of her life to live? By confessing her heart, Evelyn alone stood to feel lighter. Claudia had lost Max. Claudia had lost Henry. And now Evelyn stood ready to take away what was left. She read the letter through to the last words.
Love, your mother
. Your mother: what was left after that for Claudia to lose?

Evelyn gave no more thought to tearing up those pages than she would about pulling her hand away from a flame. She did it instinctively. She shredded the letter, bit by bit, her eyes spilling over at the sight of the awful confetti raining down into the trash. How could Max forgive her? Tired, she shifted her position on the bed until she was lying by Henry’s side, her head pressed to Henry’s head. He looked at her then, and she wondered who he thought he was looking at. If he realized he was looking at anyone at all. Maybe she was, in Henry’s mind, his wife. Maybe she was Jane. Maybe she was a girl he never thought to mention, a girl who lived in his mind eons before she walked into that apartment off the garage and met the boy with the suitcase full of books. But no. Evelyn wasn’t Jane. She wasn’t even Evelyn. She was nobody, just as Henry now was nobody. She curled next to him and drew his arm around her. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, as if readying for sleep. Now perhaps, at last, they could rest.

By the time Benji arrived, his mother was gone. He stood in the doorway, stunned by a smell that made his stomach lurch every time: floor cleanser and beige food and, somewhere deep underneath, the dark offense of human shit. He closed his eyes and opened them again, as if this brief respite might make the yellowish light oozing from blister-like sconces less terrible and the man in the bed, nearly unrecognizable to him under his thin white sheet, more like his father. He’d spent his lifetime wishing his father would disappear, and now that Henry had, Benji wanted little more than to get him back. He didn’t like coming here, so it surprised him to find that, lately, here was one of the only places he could stand to be.

Once Benji overcame his body’s reflexive response to the indignities of dying in a leased room with lemon-colored linoleum, he found himself sitting sentinel over his father, in the vicinity of a precious calm. He stepped forward and peered down from Henry’s side into a face washed clean of recognition. Gone, the disappointments. Gone, the wit. Gone, the sharp-toothed eminence. All the lasting things, it turned out, did not last. His father’s mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, like a fish mouthing clear, silent bubbles into the air. Benji pulled up a chair and sat. This was the vigil he never dreamed of keeping. And this was the last.