Come Sunday: A Novel (25 page)

Living without Cleo is a lifetime of Lents back to back. So ashes seemed fitting. Then. But I was unprepared for them being
her
ashes. What came home, in the little heart-shaped koa box, was not the holy dust of burnt palm fronds and wood chips, but gravel. Bits of Cleo’s ground-up bones, coarse as pebbles, seared white. Not ashes that inspired acts of attrition, but ones that reminded me of all I had given up. Little more than a saltshakerful. People don’t tell you these things when you are about to burn your child.

It is all too much: to think of Cleo’s hair burning, to remember my father’s combustible tendencies in the weeks that followed our house fire. And now he is dead, buried alongside my mother in their unvisited graves. And Cleo has no grave.

Greg comes to me from the other side of the fire when he sees me pull on my hair and bend over, the scream just a silent rage. He cannot help me stand upright, so we crumple on the hard cement in an awkward embrace. “They stay dead,” I cry out. “They stay dead!”

In the distance, we hear the fire truck’s siren.

Ten minutes till touchdown and still I can’t think of 14 across:
Pope’s lovers
(
6, 7
). I guess that rules out NUNS. Whoever picked up the airline’s magazine before me has scribbled in LARK in 5 down, giving me L as the second letter, but still I am drawing a blank. It is the word that runs away with me:
lovers
. “Lovers” means passion, passion transgression, transgression a price. Not a good note with which to start a vacation, so instead I close the magazine, tuck it in my backpack, and imagine Cicely’s face awaiting our arrival. Cicely, a woman who comes without a price tag.

No matter how hard I tried, even on my best days, I was never able to match Cicely’s enthusiasm for life. Leaping from Yuletide to Easter to Thanksgiving as though each Hallmark holiday were a stepping-stone (with tasteful decorations to match), my brother’s wife has avoided gloom with enviable good nature. Which is not to say that Cicely’s life of privilege, bequeathed to her by her parents and then doubly assured by her husband, has numbed her to the plight of others less fortunate. Cicely, who visited South Africa but once after she married Rhiaan, had reportedly cried for days after seeing the puddles of street kids outside the stores, high from glue, burn-scarred hands cupped for coins. She became so passionate about these orphans that she started a campaign half a world away that had sent thousands of dollars in aid.

It was easy to see why Rhiaan was in love with her, then and still,
after seventeen years of marriage. Rhiaan, a celebrated South African poet in exile, had drawn large audiences in the seventies, mostly female. Groupies, Cicely called them, as if Rhiaan were the lead singer in a rock band, as if she had not been one of the good-looking girls vying for his attention. It had been her good looks that won him over. Her good looks, and her good, bright heart. First he, and then the rest of us, got caught up in the gravitational pull that was Cicely’s overflowing enthusiasm. An unlikely match, some said—this poet of dark thoughts of a dark land and the luminous child of Marin County’s wealthiest couple. Looking at them confirmed it: Rhiaan, shorter than his wife by several inches, freckled and bespectacled, burnt-orange hair; Cicely, with the improbable assemblage of parts that made her both lean and endowed, topped with a cascade of now dove-gray hair that fell well beyond her shoulders.

Rhiaan had loved Cicely from the get-go with a lack of caution we had never seen as children growing up. If anyone in our home had once loved, it must have been guarded, private, as though suitable for a lavatory. Punishable even. And Cicely, who read the old poems and still cried, returned the favor by birthing twins who are each a perfect braid of their mother’s wholeheartedness and their father’s sagacity. Claude and Francine, required as teenagers to treat Cicely’s devotion to them as a public humiliation to be endured, privately adore their mother.

Rhiaan meets us at the baggage claim looking tired because he had to drive the sixty miles of slippery blacktop to get to Reno’s airport and then had to mark time for another hour for the conditions to clear enough for our plane to land.

“Hello, sis,” he says, hugging me hard, his jowls giving way to dimples. “Hope you’re ready for snow.” I put on the pink down-filled parka Cecily has sent along with him; my denim jacket, the warmest thing in my closet, is no match for the brittle air.

“How did an ugly bastard like you wind up with my beautiful sister?” he asks, patting Greg hard on the shoulder. It is an old joke: Rhiaan openly envious of Greg’s height and easy good looks, far from an ugly bastard.

“The weather report said high twenties today,” Greg chats, warming his hands at the blast of hot air from the car’s heater.

“Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” Rhiaan replies.

“Not to mention mine,” adds Greg, snickering like a twelve-year-old.

“How’s the writing?” Greg asks. “Magazine publishers as fickle as book publishers?”

“Oh
ja
,” Rhiaan confirms, “and as tightfisted.” He mentions, without enthusiasm, that an anthology of his old poems is coming out in the summer, but even the publisher is less than optimistic, committing to a small print run. The lectures, he explains, are the bread and butter.

From the backseat, I tune out Greg’s chatter and watch the winter I have been waiting for drift by the car window. Stripped of color, the world finally feels a little more habitable. The clouds are heavy with gloom, casting their gray pallor on the snow-covered mountains, the meadows like gaps in a row of decaying teeth. There are no traces of summer, no promise of spring—just skeletal trees and their sepulchral shrouds, stark and comforting.

When the car slows I awake just in time to see that “bread and butter” is yet another renovation to their stylish bungalow and a second Lexus parked out front. Cicely opens the front door before Rhiaan has turned off the ignition, and waves. She looks thinner, but this is often my first thought when I see her after a long absence. Only on one occasion did Cicely speak of her high school bout of bulimia, admitting that even as she approaches fifty she still occasionally succumbs to her habit of old.

“I’m so sorry I didn’t make it to the funeral, Abbe,” she apologizes as we embrace, and I muffle a reply in her fragrant hair. “We should just give up going to France for vacations. Each time we go something dreadful happens.” Last year, if memory serves, their cat ran away. She grabs my hand and pulls me in. “Come, I’ve got something for you.”

Their home smells of cedarwood and roasting meat, and the familiar sounds of
kweto
music come from the stereo. The house is streaming with upper-class debris, and we have to step over a mound of East
Coast newspapers to enter the living room, where the fireplace blazes beneath Cicely’s perfectly decorated mantel. Out their picture window is a sprawling view of the lake and the steep mountains sliding into it on all sides. The lake looks bad-tempered today, dark, its surface bothered by the gusty north winds.

“Where are the twins?” I ask.

“Claude is spending the weekend with a friend, and Francine is only back from her class trip on Tuesday.”

Leaning against the chaise lounge is a package. “It’s for you, Abbe. I hope you like it.”

I pull the paper off and beneath, framed in koa, is a watercolor in summer hues of Cleo and me.

Cicely has painted us from a photograph taken at the Fourth of July beach barbecue. Worn out from the sun, Cleo had insisted I pick her up. Cicely has captured the faint glow of sunburn on the slopes of Cleo’s cheeks as her head rests on my shoulder, the afternoon sun dappled on her arms, which are slung like pendulums from my neck. Although only my back is visible to the viewer, the comfort of holding a sleepy child is unmistakable.

“Oh, Cicely,” I whisper.

Suddenly she looks panicked; has she done the wrong thing? Greg assures her quickly, “It’s beautiful, Cis. You got her exactly right.” He hugs her and then puts his arm around my shuddering shoulders.

I look and look at that sweet face gazing heavy-lidded to the horizon, my face turned into her hair. I can still smell her, the sweat, the smoke from the barbecue in her salt-stiff curls. Still feel the weight of her in my arms, her head heavy in the dip of my shoulder, the one last muscle in her arm to keep the bucket from falling from her grip.

“I wanted to finish it months ago, but with all the holidays, it has been slow going.”

“Thank you,” is all I can say, and summer then threatens to flood the room.

NIGHT ARRIVES EARLY in the afternoon, the saggy-bellied clouds swaying low over the lakeside cabins. Greg has slept through dinner and I watch as Cicely draws a quilt over him, tucking it around his broad back. Rhiaan has gone to bed early too, with a headache Cicely says plagues him a lot of the time.

“It’s not a tumor,” she says, on the bright side, and hands me a glass of wine as we sit at the kitchen counter. “He had a scan done and everything is normal. Physically there’s nothing wrong with him, so now the neurologist is recommending a psychiatrist.”

“Is he depressed?” I ask, wondering if the Hebrews were right—that the sins of the parents are visited on their children. Does the inevitability of that fate catch up with us the minute we are distracted from our struggle against it?

“Oh, you know your brother. He’s a poet. He’d be the first one to tell you that misery is an art form.” The concern is etched around her smile. Suddenly she starts to cry, and it is so surprising to see her anything but glass-half-full jolly it takes me a moment before I embrace her.

“Have you talked to him?” I ask.

“Sure. We talk, or at least I talk. He makes me feel like I overdramatize everything, but the last time we spoke about his work he said he felt ‘redundant.’ Now you tell me how I am supposed to take a statement like that?”

“Is it writer’s block, you think? Have you read anything of his lately?”

“There have been a couple of poems, but that was a while back. I thought they were good, but it doesn’t seem to matter what I think, and now, to be honest, I’m just too afraid to ask. Maybe you could get him to show you something. Maybe you could talk to him about writing, and about seeing a professional.”

“Rhiaan is not likely to see a shrink, Cis, you know that. It’s just not how we were raised—stiff upper lip, and all that,” I reply. And just for an instant Cicely can’t keep the contempt from her face. Contempt for the broken children from their broken family in their broken backwater
country messing up the otherwise sunny landscape of her preordained bounty.

“Maybe that’s part of the problem,” she says.

“Maybe you’re right.”

She looks wrung out, and pats at her cheeks with a leftover napkin before returning to the tasks of domesticity. “What about you and Greg?” she asks. “How are you two handling the trials?” Cicely does not need an acute skill of observation to notice how I shrug Greg off like a shawl on a humid evening.

“Not good,” I say. She nods, and waits for more. “Greg might tell you otherwise. He’s buried himself in the church, and I avoid it. I suppose he feels this weekend is our last hope.”

“A little bit of hope never killed anyone,” she answers, identifying her ally.

THE WORLD IS PLUMP with snow when I get up and the flakes drift down, as though they have all day. The pine trees have cotton-ball branches, and from the eaves dangle icicles. The only sign of activity outside is the smoke drifting up from the chimneys. Inside, Greg and Cicely are sitting on the floor by the window, piecing together a puzzle the size of the coffee table. Thick in conversation, Cicely sees me before I have a chance to eavesdrop.

“Hello, Abbe, how did you sleep?” She hurries to the kitchen and pours from her cat-shaped teapot a mug of fresh tea.

“Okay.” What I don’t tell her is that I have spent half the night hearing her words over and over in my head—
A little bit of hope never killed anyone
. It is hope that will pull Rhiaan and Cicely from the quicksand, as it always does. But what did hope ever do for my mother, or for Cleo? What can it possibly do for me and Greg? “Where’s Rhiaan?” I ask.

“Out in the shed. He’s converted it into an office, but it’s more like his cave. You must take a look.”

I put on the parka and Cicely’s boots and walk along the cleared footpath to the shed.

“Brought you some tea,” I announce as I step into the warmth. There is a small potbellied stove in the corner and a rolltop desk that looks as though it comes from Bob Cratchit’s office. On top of it is the Olivetti typewriter. Pinewood-lined walls are shelved with books and framed photographs: Rhiaan with Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, Rhiaan shaking hands with Desmond Tutu, Rhiaan sitting with a group of African children outside a rondavel in the middle of the sticks. The small black-and-white photo in the pewter frame gives me pause: Rhiaan as a boy standing on top of a ridge next to our father.