Close to Hugh (55 page)

He must have faded out. How long?

How long it has been, this year of knowing she was dying, she would die. She’s been dying since he was four. No length of time was long enough.

Everything in the world is empty. Mimi is no longer filling it.

However, there are things to do. So.

Hugh gets up. Her hand, which he lifts, is dead—no sleep can mimic that lack of volition. There is no confusion. No pain, no sorrow, nobody in that body now. He leans over the bed and puts his cheek against hers. Cool, empty.

Still, for a long time she lived in this shell. He kisses it, and runs his hand over the silver hair, pretending she is not gone.

8. HUGH CAN’T TELL

The streets are empty. Strange, on a, what is it …? Sunday morning. So that makes sense.

Hugh walks without intent, automaton, limbs moving/eyes taking in data, unsubjective. Gerald walking along, Gerald too—don’t talk to him right now. Hugh steps into FairGrounds, passes the crowd at the counter, walks along the side wall and out the back door, into the garden beside the gallery. In the back door.

Upstairs, Gareth and Léon will be still asleep, not even eight yet. Can’t talk to them either. You should make them breakfast.

You could sit in the framing room, no Ruth on a Sunday morning. (Can’t tell her, that will be too hard.) But it’s cold in there, as cold as.

Into the gallery, down to the
Dark Gates
. Mighton. How does he channel, how can he paint like this? Huge block of blue-blackness rages up the wall, pulls the eye from form to form, takes Hugh in so that he wants to grip the edge and walk inside the frame, be among the dead who are waiting there.
They stood beseeching on the riverbank/yearning to be the first to be carried across/stretching their hands out toward the farther shore
.

A knock on the window.

Gerald, his face close to the glass.

Open the door, of course. You could tell Gerald. Now you are in his club.

They are silent.

The computer clock bings. Nine a.m., too early to open.

“Opening early?” Gerald asks.

Hugh shakes his head. Then stops. His head feels pretty bad.

“I’ll come this evening, the wine and cheese,” Gerald says.

RSVPing. You ought to cancel that. Hugh nods. He puts out a hand and touches the frame. He wants to tell, he has to tell. “My mother—Mimi,” he says.

Gerald nods too.

“I can’t, I can’t,” Hugh says.

Gerald touches the frame on the other side. His hand on the grain of the wood. “I dream every night that they aren’t dead, that they weren’t. I gave up too soon, I shouldn’t have called 911, they were just sleeping and I was too stupid to see it.”

Yes, that the dead would have waked had he not been so fast to call it death. That he was mistaken, that empty hand not empty.

“The other dream I have is that I’m dead, inside the house. While they’re going to sleep out in the garage.”

Hugh stands and listens. You can do that.

“I imagine what it was like, what she said. If she told him what she was going to do.”

You can answer that. “No. She wouldn’t have scared Toby.”

“I know. She struggled, I could see. I mean, I knew. I know, she was having a hard time, she said—”

Oh no.

“Not that she would … She said she wasn’t a good mother. She said sorry.”

Mimi saying sorry, sorry.

Gerald says, “I can’t listen to anybody tell me anything anymore. In case it’s the thing I ought to be listening to, the thing I ought to fix.”

“I don’t know how you could have fixed that. I don’t think you could have.”

“No, maybe. You couldn’t fix your mom, I guess.”

No.

Gerald lets go of the frame. He puts a hand out to the picture, not pointing at any one thing. “So, I’ll come back this evening,” he says. Almost as definite as a promise.

Now you have to do that wine and cheese after all.

Hugh follows him out onto the front porch and stands in the damp cool air. Pulls out his phone. He can’t see the screen properly, but he texts. As he hits send, the moving truck drives past the gallery. In the passenger seat, Ruth waves, catching sight of him.

Right, get that place cleaned out. That’s what he’s got to do.

Hugh steps off the porch and walks, limbs moving just as always, as if nothing has happened, over to Mimi’s apartment.

(L)

Key in lock, scraping, wakes her.

Where? White light, open air, and far away, a ceiling.

A luxury, not knowing where you are. Maybe it’s finally the alien abduction. More noise, keys. Ivy’s place. On the couch Jason sits up, looking around at the door.

Savaya’s arm is heavy on her other arm, she pulls it out, asleep and tingling. Fuck, she slept like a dead thing. It’s—what time is it? Phone—it’s nine. Shit, she never called her mom. Seven texts waiting, oh freaking frick.

>sorry sorry sorry I fell asleep—I’m ok

L texts as quick as her fingers will move. All this time the murmuring at the door, and now knocking—she looks up: not knocking but banging against the chain, like somebody has lost his temper. Because it always (let us face facts, ladies), it always is the gents who lose the tempers.

Good chain. The door won’t open, the guy keeps bang-banging it like he’s going to tear the chain right off, but he can’t. Is this a home invasion? Two voices, out there.

Ivy comes out of her bedroom half-dressed, dressed enough for students, anyway. Pants pulled on, still doing them up, holding a short Japanese robe around her. She heads for the door. “What, what, what?” she’s saying, still mostly asleep, and then she shouts, “Stop it!” She gets to the door and slams it shut. Angry herself, it looks like.

L slips off the futon and runs on bare feet to huddle beside Jason on the couch. Like front row spectators at the fights, they watch Ivy wrestle with the lock and take off the chain.

Two men. A man and a—a boy or something. Not quite. L looks away. She hates this about herself, this retreating from odd people, people with something wrong with them. The two of them come in, both talking. The wormly one blinks, murmurs, repeats, “Hi, Ivy, nice to see you here hi Ivy nice to see you …” The louder, less damaged one says, “Where the hell have you been, and what’s with the chain? Have you gone paranoid too?”

“Hi, Jamie,” Ivy says, giving him a wave of her hand—he flinches backward even though she doesn’t go to hug him. Then she turns to the
other guy. “I see you got most of Jamie’s things out already, that’s good. I was going to give you a call to say I’ll need the keys back, but this is—perfect, you can give them to me now.”

The belligerent one rocks on his feet, forward, like he’s going to punch her.

L pinches Jason’s leg, feeling everything go tense. They’ll have to intervene. She thinks they could take him—except, unless the other guy went batshit. This is very awkward.

But the loud guy pulls back, reins in the rage. He must want something from Ivy. “You can’t—The work’s done, so there’s no reason he can’t come back now, right, Jamie? It was just the noise and all the strangers he couldn’t take. We’ve got his equipment in the car, he wouldn’t bring it up unless they were gone.”

“They’re gone now, Alex,” the weird guy says. “They’re gone, Ivy. They’re gone.”

Uncomfortable.

Ivy just stands there, somehow pretty strong in her undone pants and her now-tied robe. “No,” she says. They all listen to that for a minute. “It won’t work anymore,” she says. “He’s got to get some help, you’re going to have to take care of this.” She turns and puts her hand out, not quite touching the limp guy. “I’m sorry, Jamie, but you really do have to go stay with your brother for a while, and see about finding a doctor.”

The guy, Jamie, stares off into the distance, not at Ivy. “I know, you’re right.” Such a sad, apologetic voice that L almost cries. “I’ve really got to get this under—under something. Control, or something.” He shakes his head, ashamed of himself, admitting it all, so sorry.

The brother’s not taking it, though. “Listen, I brought a cheque. I know it was partially Jamie, the you-know, the water, so we talked it over and we’ll pay half.” He digs in his coat pocket and holds out a yellow cheque.

Ivy doesn’t take it, and that sets him off again, raging: “No way he’s moving out!”

“He’s already moved,” Ivy says.

“No fucking way! He’s been here long enough, he has tenant’s rights, you can’t shove him out. My place is too small, you
know
that.” He’s saying ordinary words but the anger behind the words makes them come out in tufts, in flares. All threat, all of it. His shoulders are bunched. He can’t stop his hands making fists, even though he keeps relaxing them.

Ivy stands where she is. She doesn’t make room for them to come farther inside.

As his brother shouts on and on, Jamie sags against the door like he’s melting through it. He turns side-on to the door, tries to edge it open without his brother seeing—but the brother grabs his arm and says,
“Fuck
, Jamie, stay put.”

“I can’t do any more, Alex,” Ivy says. “It’s not helping.”

Jamie stretches his arm out, a thin wrist reaching out of his grey jacket. “Here,” he says in a dying-away voice. “Here, Ivy, thank you very much for all this time. You have been a kind and gracious landlady and I know I’ve outstayed my welcome.”

His delicate ET fingers hold out a Pokemon key ring. He drops it into Ivy’s hand.

That nearly does it, you can see Ivy’s will crumpling. She’s going to say stay, L thinks.

But the burly brother wrecks it. He looks like the kind of guy who wrecks things all the time. “Fucking
cunt,”
he says. Meanest voice in the world, dripping with bile and blame and everything always being somebody else’s fault. “You fucking, fucking cunt. You’d abandon this poor kid now?”

“Not a kid,” Jamie says. “Thirty-four.” He’s turned his back now, staring into the corner of the wall, as if he got there by accident, a Roomba that can’t make its wheels reverse.

“Listen, this isn’t going to happen. You don’t have a choice anymore. I’m going to the landlord/tenant ombudsman—we’ll get our rights. Jamie’s rights. He’s got tenure in this apartment, there’s no way you can kick him fucking
out
, you will be so sorry about this—”

The trembling brother is tugging on his sleeve now, tugging and begging. “Sorry about this,” he says in the vague direction of Ivy, and she says back to him, “I’m so sorry about this, Jamie—you know I’ve always, you know I—” And he says, “I know, I know, I—”

Between those two soft people the hard man ranting in the middle just gets eased out, borne backwards and out into the hall until Ivy can shut the door.

Then there’s a quiet little space.

Ivy turns. Her eyes are tragically large and miserable. Jason and L don’t comment, don’t cheer or high-five like they probably ought to do.

After a minute Ivy says, “Perfect. So I guess we’d better get going. Can you get Savaya up?” She walks back to her bedroom and closes the door, like no big deal.

A beep makes L grab for her phone: a text from her mom:

> you at Jason’s? if so we have to talk about this

Agh.

> no, I’m with Savaya, we fell asleep—I’m ok, home by noon?

So there she is, lying to her mom, and no real reason for it even. She honestly does not believe her mom would mind. That was so weird, watching Ivy deal with the guy and poor weird Jamie, tangles untangling. Knowing what they don’t know, that Ivy is going to be with Hugh now—and she and Jason too, because they suddenly—oh, look at that! Look at the head-splitting smile on his face, because he is seeing her, her, her. Look at that, they suddenly love each other.

There is a beep again, her mom:

> Gareth wants to do a studio visit this afternoon. To see your install. I’m cleaning the kitchen.

She shows it to Jason. He nods, he signs OMG.

Then Ivy’s door opens. Staring down at her phone, she says, “Oh no—we have to hurry—Hugh’s mother died last night.”

Because don’t be fooled, there is no good in the world. In this whole life, you will only lose everything you love, one thing at a time, and no matter what good thing might happen it will never be enough to make up for death.

9. I’M LOOKING THROUGH HUGH

All the way to Peterborough the scene replays in Ivy’s mind. Jamie, impossible to kick out; Alex, impossible to just kick. She drives, listening to the girls murmuring in the back, thinking about disentanglement. What is the obligation to our fellow crazies? At some point, do we have to cut them loose? It seems to her, driving along, that normal rules of fair dealing don’t necessarily apply: Jamie hasn’t kept house—isn’t capable of it—hasn’t paid rent for eighteen months, but she does not tally that. This cutting-loose is not from grievance but from understanding, after way too long, that she isn’t doing him any good.

It’s time to let go of that apartment, even though it now looks so nice and seems like a safe haven again. You have to be with the ones you are meant to be with, during this short blink of a life, not fritter away years with the wrong people, not helping them anyway.

But it does not seem very likely that Alex or Ray will actually get Jamie help.

Think about something else. There’d be room in Hugh’s van for her good oak table. (But is there room for it at Hugh’s?) Her bike, her books. (Can she step into his life? Is he too sad to love anyone? What about money, work, the need to be in the city?)

In the back seat L and Savaya keep up a low-voiced colloquy. Savaya is subdued, hasn’t said a word to Ivy yet, presumably too embarrassed. Jason, beside Ivy, seems pretty cheerful. He drums on his knees from time to time, darting, dancing complicated rhythms. As they enter Peterborough he turns for a quick consult with the girls and then directs Ivy to Savaya’s place, to drop her off.

Savaya gets out of the Saab, newborn-colt legs folding and unfolding, runs up the walk and through her front door, the screen slam-slamming.

“Wouldn’t want to be her this morning,” Jason says.

L leans forward from the back seat. “Yeah, her dad is all loosey-goosey except then suddenly he’s not.”