Heat and Light (37 page)

           
I understand that you are lonely. Widowhood at a young age is a heavy cross to bear.

She needs it.

           
But that is no excuse to steal the poor man's ewe lamb.

Would a man who worked on a drill rig write such a thing? Would
anybody
? And yet, somebody had.

Herc was nothing at all like Wes. Even before his illness, her husband had been a slender man. In his arms she had wished herself smaller. With Herc she felt delicate, exquisite, herself perfected. His strength delighted her. He lifted and turned her effortlessly, all sweetness and grace.

She is always canceling on Shelby. What on earth can she say this time?
I can't make it after all.
I'm feeling under the weather.
The
th
sound is problematic. Would Shelby notice if she slurred her words?

She never intended to go in the first place.

The birthday lingerie she'd worn only once.

She takes the second bottle from the refrigerator. She doesn't need the letter. She remembers every word.

It was the last line that enraged her. The last line made her strike the match.

           
Your husband, if he were alive, would tell you the exactsame thing.

DEAD WESLEY IS WATCHING.

How is such a thing possible? The question does not plague him. It's the main advantage of being dead, the only one, really. The dead are—at the very least, at the very last—unplagued.

He watches Jessie pour a glass of wine. She's drinking too much.

In the months after his mother died, the boy Wesley Peacock had a powerful sense of being watched. In the classroom, the dreaded school bus, he felt Bernadette's presence. The feeling faded over time, though it did not disappear entirely. Even as a grown man, on rare occasions—his wedding day, for example—he sensed her gaze. Early in his marriage, he worried that she could see him making love to his wife. Jessie had laughed at him, but he knows, now, that he was correct.

On a bright day when he was very small, his mother took him walking in the snow.

He doesn't completely understand the interface. The Bubble Boy is confined to his house, as he once wished to be. He can see Jessie and anyone else who enters—see them, as you might naturally suspect, from above.

Watching her make love to another man was not painful, though he's still able to feel pain. It's one of the surprises of the afterlife, one of many. The afterlife, frankly, is not as advertised. Wesley hasn't met God or anyone resembling Him. Though he would dearly love to, he hasn't seen his mother or father or any other of the dead.

Only once, since dying, has he felt pain: the night Jessie discussed him across the dinner table.
By the end he had file cabinets full of papers. Medical studies and so on. But nobody believed him.

Did you?
the man asked.

I believe he believed it,
Jessie said.

She had never believed him. And yet even in death Wesley is convinced. Even in death he knows he was right.

Through all his research, his despairing and febrile months of study, he had never grasped the full mystery. Uranium-235, enriched to 4 percent: he added up the digits and got fourteen, a number that meant nothing. His mind was by then a blunt instrument. He blamed hermeneutics, homeschooling, the dulling effect of Lumox, the hot grief of leaving her.

The reaction itself was impossible to visualize. What did an electron even look like? Wesley's drug-addled brain saw jelly beans, candy hearts, the small sweet treasures that are childhood's currency, its only wealth. Tiny hearts colliding and dividing, orange, yellow, cherry-pink, split down the middle into matching halves, a mad burst of heat and light.

The splitting of the hearts.

Alive, he had no head for abstraction. Now, of course, he has no head at all. Bodiless, headless, heartless. The dead are pure vision. Their only occupation, the only power left them, is to see.

The terrible gift of clear vision. If you'd had it when you were alive, you'd have done everything differently. If you'd had it when you were alive, it would have killed you.

Hearts splitting like cells dividing, the child he and Jessie might have had, if only he'd known. But Wesley was just a boy, would never be anything but a boy. It was unimaginable that he could be anybody's father, and so he hadn't imagined it.

His mother took him walking in the snow.

It's too late, now, for Jessie to have a baby. The years when it might have happened, so few really, she'd wasted loving him. Nursing, burying, and mourning him. Too late, too late.

A hard snow in radiant sunlight. The brightness hurt his eyes. The brightness was strange and misbegotten, a glorious confusion in the heavens.

Now he sees only Jessie, who remembers him.

This is all there is.

THE BUILDING LOOKS
INNOCUOUS
in the afternoon light. Squat and square, of municipal construction. It could be a warren of government offices, a junior high school. As instructed, Rena drives around to the side entrance and waits.

This morning President Obama granted the traditional Thanksgiving pardon to Cobbler and Gobbler, the official White House turkeys.

She turns off the radio. For four years she has, quite literally, dreamed of this moment. Not every night, but several times a month, her sleeping brain conjures some iteration of what is about to happen. Now, absurdly, she is filled with dread. She wishes Mack were with her, because sometimes you don't want lively conversation. Sometimes—now, for example—Mack's silent, solid presence is exactly what you need.

Lorne Trexler is never silent.
Occupational hazard,
he jokes. According to his ex-wife, he once told Rena, he gave lectures in his sleep.

She doesn't miss him, exactly. She misses the idea of him.

If they'd met when they were younger, in a different time and place. If she had never met Freddy Weems.

Freddy changed her in ways that are not reversible. (
I am a filthy little whore.
)
If she'd never met him, there would be no Calvin. She would never have fallen in love with Mack. Instead other things would have happened—what things, Rena will never know. Too much time has passed, too many choices with consequences that led to more consequences that led to more consequences, her path spiraling off in a direction no one could have predicted. Impossible, now, to rewind it; to picture those other lives she might have lived.

Silent Spring
sits unread on her bedside table. She under-stands, now, that Lorne was only trying to fix her, like the home ec teacher who decided, when Mack was in ninth grade, to take her shopping for a bra.
You're already a B cup. Congratulations!
Mack carries the memory like a tingling scar: the hot misery of
that shopping trip, the silent mortification. The teacher failing to grasp the most obvious fact, that Susan Mackey had never wanted breasts of any size.

Mack's memories are Rena's memories. They move her as though she lived them herself. It seems to her a working definition of love.

They live on the farm as though it were an island. Rena thinks, often, of Mack's mother—Pete's second wife, twenty years younger, the one frivolous decision he ever made in his life. She ran off with a man her own age, also married, for reasons Rena can easily imagine: the loneliness of farm life, Pete's meager company. At the end of the day, when Mack is tired, Rena sees him in the set of her shoulders, the aging lonely man who loved and was left, silent because he knew no other way to be. In the months after Pete's stroke, it was Rena who fed and dressed and bathed him. He could not thank her. By then his words had dried up, what few there'd been. How long had it been since anybody had touched him?

Sometimes, as she cut his hair or shaved his bristled chin, his eyes would tear.

The grinding effort of farm life, waking at dawn like a monk doing penance. To love Mack is to live this life forever, something Rena has always known. She's put her life into somebody else's farm, decades of labor, every dollar she's ever earned. If she left Mack she'd have nothing, but this isn't the reason she stays.

Last week, driving down the Dutch Road, Rena glimpsed a towheaded child in the Devlins' driveway, bouncing a tennis ball off what looked like a giant plastic cistern. A boy, Olivia's brother probably. A normal, healthy child playing outdoors.

Shelby came to the door in a pink bathrobe.

I was driving by and I thought of Olivia. How is she feeling?

Shelby seemed delighted to see her.
She had a good day yesterday. She's still sleeping, or we could go say hi.

I'm watching you, Rena wanted to say. I know what you're doing to that child.

(Except that she doesn't, not really. Except that it's still possible she is wrong.)

Now she glances at her watch. The warden's secretary told her to come at four. To save time she came straight from work, still dressed in her new uniform. At Saxon Manor, the entire nursing staff wears the same scrubs, a pale blue smock and pants, printed with tiny butterflies. The pattern seems, to Rena, a little juvenile. As though the clients were born-again children, consigned to a kindergarten for the very old.

Except for the scrubs, the new job suits her: no overnights, no weekends. Her new patients are adults with long lives behind them. Their infirmities are inevitable, wholly expected. She never has to see a sick kid again.

Her coworkers were stunned when she quit: Jo, Agnes, Steph Mulraney (back to work now, temporarily unpregnant), and even Dr. Stusick, who alone knew the reason. By the time Child Protective Services requested copies of Olivia's medical record, Rena Koval was no longer an employee of Miners' Hospital.

In the end she made the call anonymously. It was Mack who helped her decide, Mack who urged her to pick up the phone. A lifetime ago, when Rena was in danger, only Mack had come to her rescue. Now Mack's bravery makes Rena better.

This is the reason she stays.

At that moment the truck pulls in beside her and Mack steps out, still in her orange vest—as though, in thinking of her, Rena has conjured her from the air.

Rena gets out of the van. “You came.”

They stand shoulder to shoulder, not speaking, squinting into the sunlight. At last the side door swings open. Calvin is underdressed for the weather, in a cheap windbreaker and khaki pants. He carries a plastic bag.

Just for the holidays, they tell each other. Until he gets on his feet.

SHELBY BRUSHES OLIVIA'S
HAIR,
counting the strokes.

“Pastor Jess will be here any minute. She'll be glad to see you. She's been worried about you.” Her hands are shaking a little—nerves, probably. Except for Sunday services and a brief sighting at the Food Giant, she hasn't seen the pastor in months.

Olivia squirms. “Is Granny Rox coming? I want to show her my shoes.”

The child's fondness for her grandmother is, to Shelby, mystifying. Roxanne who forgets birthdays and ignores Christmas, who shows up irregularly, reeking of cigarettes and Jean Naté.
She smells beautiful,
Olivia once said.

“I don't think she can make it, sweetie.” Shelby parts Olivia's hair and begins braiding. Inviting Roxanne is never more than a formality. Any minute now the phone will ring, her mother canceling—assuming, of course, that she remembers to call. “She has to take care of Peanut.”

Olivia laughs delightedly. It's a reliable source of mirth, for a seven-year-old, that a grown man could have such a name. “Peanut can come, too.”

Shelby does not respond to this. She has never actually met Peanut, though she's seen him from a distance—reclined, always, in the passenger seat of his van, which Roxanne leaves idling while she runs into the liquor store. He's not the sort of man you want around children.

She says, “You can show your shoes to Pastor Jess.”

There's so much she wants to share with the pastor, months' worth of worry and frustration and, yes, trauma. If ever in her life Shelby needed counseling, it was after the surprise visit from Child Protective Services, the greatest shock of her life. For weeks it seemed that the world was caving in around her: the menacing letters on official stationery, the humiliating questions. Olivia was interviewed twice. What exactly the social worker asked her, Shelby isn't certain; she wasn't allowed in the room. Though Shelby begged her not to,
she insisted on interviewing Rich. He's going to leave me, Shelby thought; but incredibly, the opposite happened. For the first and only time in ten years of marriage, her husband came to her defense.

She's an excellent mother. She lives for those kids. What's the matter with you people?

He has a temper, no question. For once his anger was directed at someone else, and it was marvelous to watch.

Shelby's husband believed her—and so, in the end, did everyone else. In October she received a letter in the mail: the accusation against her had been ruled Unfounded. The interfering busybody who reported her (Dr. Stusick? the specialist in Pittsburgh?) was simply wrong.

Unfounded.
That was all: no apology, no official acknowledgment of the injustice she'd suffered, the insult and anguish and breathtaking shame. Rich went back to being Rich, bossy and critical. He worked overtime and went hunting on Sundays, determined to pretend that nothing had happened. To him, nothing had.

Then, last week at the Food Giant, Shelby spotted Pastor Jess pushing her cart down the frozen foods aisle. Even at a distance she looked terrible, her eyes deeply circled, her hair graying along the part, and Shelby recalled—vaguely, like some memory of a past life—that Pastor Jess had been wounded, too.

It was hard to keep track of other people's suffering.

The pastor looked surprised to see her. She took Shelby's hand in both her own.
I should have called you weeks ago. Forgive me, Shelby. You deserve better.