Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) (22 page)

“That might be correct,” Darleen said, gnawing on her hands again. “The dead are part of our community, just like those in prison.”

“Ever visit the prison gift shop?” Deke said. “Can’t be more than ten miles from here. They sell cutting boards, boot scrapers, consoles for entertainment centers. The ladies knit those toilet-seat covers, toaster covers. Nice things. Reasonable. They won’t let the ones on death row contribute anything, though. They want to sell products, not freak collector items. It’s like that tree used to be outside the First Congregational Church. That big old copper beech they cut down because they said it was a suicide magnet? Wouldn’t use the wood for nothing either, and that was good wood. Threw it in the landfill. Tree was implicated in only four deaths. Drew in two unhappy couples was all. Wouldn’t think they’d rip out a three-hundred-year-old tree for that, but down it went. And now they’ve got a little sapling there no bigger around than a baseball bat.”

Angela dismayed herself by laughing.

“That’s right,” Deke giggled. “If a young person gets it in his mind now passing that spot, he’s got to
wait.”

“I should have suspected you two would get along,” Darleen said sourly.

“You sick?” Deke asked Angela. “Is that why you don’t care so much? Some undiagnosed cancer?”

“She’s never been sick a day in her life,” Darleen said. “She has the constitution of a horse.”

“Horses are actually quite delicate,” Deke said. “Lots can go wrong with a horse, naturally, and then you can make additional things go wrong, should you wish, if it’s in your interests.”

“Deke worked a few summers in Saratoga,” Darleen said. She suddenly looked weary.

“A sick horse is a dead horse, pretty much,” Deke said. “I’m going to uncork that other bottle now.” From the kitchen, Angela heard him excoriating the rust on the gas jets, the lime buildup around the sink fixtures, the poorly applied adhesive plastic covering meant to suggest crazed Italian tiles. Goblet once again brimming, he did not resume his place at the table but walked over to the painting. “I can see why you felt you had to have this,” he said. “At first it appears to be realistically coherent and pleasantly decorative, but the viewer shortly becomes aware of a sense of melancholy, of disturbing presentiment.”

Angela wondered if it was possible to desire a drink any more than she did at this moment. It couldn’t be.

“You clearly got an affinity with unknowing, unprepared creatures,” Deke went on.

“Deke used to be an art critic,” Darleen said.

He waved one hand dismissively. “Just for the prison newsletter.”

“Yeah, Deke attended prison for two years,” Darleen said.

“I began my thesis there,” Deke said. “‘Others: Do They Exist?’ But I never completed it. I was a couple of hundred pages into it when I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t genuine breakthrough thinking.”

Angela rose to her feet suddenly and tried to embrace Darleen. The girl was all stubborn bone. Her clothes smelled musty, and a stinging chemical odor rose from her spiky hair. She pulled away easily from Angela’s grasp.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there,” Deke said.

Darleen laughed. “Daddy Bruce better get here quick. Wake you up.”

“I have to … I have to …”

They looked at her.

“It’s late and I have to go to work tomorrow,” she said, ashamed.

“You said you’d take the day off!” Darleen cried.

“Take the day off, it don’t fit when you put it on again,” Deke said. “Attention here, I’m taking the fishbowl and going out for more wine. Liquor store has one of those change machines. Those things are fun, you ever seen one work?”

“Don’t leave!” Angela and Darleen exclaimed together.

“At a dangerously low level,” he said, raising the bottle.

No one could argue that it was otherwise.

“Just stay a little while longer,” Darleen pleaded.

Deke pursed his lips and pressed his hands to his leather shirt. “I might commence to pace,” he said. He grimly poured out the last of the wine.

“There was a strange thing that happened last night,”
Angela began. “I was on a boat, the boat that goes to the islands. I wasn’t actually there, but the most remarkable coincidence—”

“A coincidence is something that’s going to happen and does,” Deke said. “You got a fondness for the word, I notice.”

“Oh, Mummy is so seldom precise,” Darleen said. “When I was small, she would tell me I had my father’s eyes. Then one day I finally said, ‘I do not have his eyes. He was not an organ donor to my knowledge. A little frigging precision in language would be welcome,’ I said.”

Deke looked at her impatiently, then stood as though yanked up by a rope. “You girls hold off on the Daddy Bruce business until I get back. That’s dangerous business. You don’t want to go too far with that without an impartial yet expert observer present.”

He left without further farewell bearing the fishbowl, the door shutting softly behind him.

Angela laughed. “I think we disappointed him.”

The room felt stifling. She opened a window, beyond which was a storm window, a so-called combination window, adaptable to the seasons. She fumbled with the aluminum catches and pushed it up. The cold clutched her, then darted past. She turned and looked at her daughter. “I love you,” she said.

“Mummy, Mummy,” Darleen sighed. Then, tolerantly, “The new headmaster has a white umbrella cockatoo that likes to be rocked like a baby.”

“Do tell me about it, please,” Angela said.

“Stupid bird,” Darleen said cheerfully.

Six years later, Angela was dying in the town’s hospital, in a room where many before her had passed. She had known none of them, but this room they had in common, and the old business engaged in there. Darleen had been summoned but would not arrive in time. Angela was fifty years old. She had not gotten out as early as she might have certainly, but now by chance she had firmly grasped death’s tether.

Passed that little sapling tree on the way here, Deke said. Still being permitted to grow in the churchyard. Too new yet to cast a shadow, but it had better mind its manners, no?

Angela wanted to laugh, even now. What a night that had been!

Most enjoyable evening, Deke agreed.

The first nurse said, “It sounded like, ‘Did you bring the hammer?’”

The other nurse said, “Sometimes their voices can be remarkably clear. You can really understand them. I had one say, ‘I don’t want to go back there.’ Just as clear as could be.”

The first nurse did not like this one. She was new and ambitious, quite often imprudent. “Are you sure?” she demanded.

I
T WAS THE PARENTS
!
When would the parents stop coming? They’d been coming for months, since Christmas, since
before
Christmas, since the burning of the Devil festivities on the seventh. June’s mother and her second husband had arrived, missing Howard’s parents by only a few days, for they had come down specifically for his twenty-second birthday. Caroline’s father had come down for Valentine’s Day with his new wife and their fairly new infant to show her to Caroline, as though she cared. Abby’s parents were still in town, having arrived for Semana Santa—Holy Week, which was now just past—and James’s parents would be showing up any day now from Roatón, off Honduras, where they had been diving. And each set of parents had a new child with them. There was Emily and Morgan and Parker and Bailey and Henry, not one of them over the age of six. It was a phenomenon.

The parents were generous when they visited. June’s mother’s new husband chartered a plane and flew them all to
Tikal. They climbed Pyramid IV and watched the sunrise, even baby Morgan in her tiny safari ensemble. And even though June’s mother’s new husband had rented rooms for them at the Jungle Lodge, one night they’d slept out among the ruins in hammocks. Everyone knew this was the desired, anecdotal thing to do, sleeping out among the ruins beneath the bats during a full moon, which it happened to be that night. Then they flew back to Antigua for the parade of the heads, for this is what they had really come for, to see the huge papier-mâché heads, the
gigantes
and
cabezudos
, running and weaving down the streets beneath the fireworks and whistling rockets. June’s mother and her new husband had expensive cameras and they took pictures of everything, they were delighted with everything.

When Howard’s parents came, the father, a prominent throat specialist, rented horses for everyone and they had ridden to one of the lakes for a picnic. Even baby Bailey made the trip, wrapped in his mother’s arms with one tiny hand clinging to the pommel. The whole group of them, eight in all, trotting like a cavalry through the poor little towns on these big-assed horses, leaving behind piles of green-flecked dung. Where had they gotten such healthy horses? It was embarrassing.
Buenos días!
Howard’s parents said to anything that moved. It was amazing they hadn’t been stoned.

Caroline’s father appeared with darling Emily, a redhead, and his lively new redheaded wife, who wore a ring in her navel and was only two years older than Caroline. There had actually been something of an incident when everyone had been invited for lunch in the garden of the Hotel Antigua. There were some hummingbirds in the hibiscus bush near them, green and purple ones, the size of mice. One veered toward
Emily in her high chair, no doubt encouraged by the feathery brilliance of her hair, and her attentive mother smacked it sharply with a guidebook she was holding. The bird spun to the ground in a buzzing heap.

They all shrank back from it a little.

“Gee, Penny,” Caroline said.

“It was coming right at the baby,” Penny said. “It almost struck her.”

“Hummers can be exceptionally aggressive,” Howard said, smirking.

“Maybe it’s just stunned,” June said. “Maybe if we put it under a bush.”

James took a linen napkin from the table and placed it over the bird, which was still whirring like a windup toy. Darling Emily bounced in the high chair and clapped her hands. She wore a sweet little dress embroidered with ducks. James walked a ways beyond the table and was about to lay the hummingbird down.

“Farther,” June said. “A farther bush.”

He came back with the napkin and put it on the table.

“James,” Abby said, “is that blood?”

He picked it up again and refolded it.

“Maybe we should have eaten it,” Howard said. “You know, so as not to waste it. We should find its nest and eat that too. The Chinese eat nests.”

Penny frowned at him. “I
am
sorry,” she said. She dabbed at the plate of fruit she had been feeding Emily. “What is this, guava? Or papaya? One of them upsets her tummy.”

Another pitcher of margaritas appeared from somewhere. It was a very well-run place. Gardeners swept the walks quietly with palm fronds tied to sticks. One of the swimming pools
had the heads of a hundred ivory-colored roses floating in the deep end.

“You’re great kids,” Caroline’s father said. “Really, you’re terrific kids.” Clearly, his spirits had taken more of a beating from the hummingbird incident than his wife’s. “You’re fine kids. Caroline, you have fine friends,” he said.

All the visiting parents liked to pretend that the young people were charming. It was funny seeing this, all of them pretending this in their own way. The children were exhausted by the parents’ vigor, they felt wearied by their presence. They were repelled by the parents’ dedicated interest in them, they were astonished. Will we ever be
this
blind, do you think? they’d say. No, they agreed, they could not imagine themselves being this blind …

They were all starting off in their twenties. Each had come separately to this colonial town in the bowl-shaped valley beneath the three volcanoes and found one another here. Each of them remembered their first solitary days in town and then the speed with which they became involved in a life with the others, their friends. And they still wondered how this had been accomplished, and how much of it they had each been responsible for. They felt that here their lives were now beginning.

At the same time, they felt it was possible that their actual lives were still waiting for them, and that it involved different people. This was something they found themselves thinking about more and more, usually with unhappiness, as the parents kept coming.

Holy Week and its enormous, numbing spectacle was over for another year. The great obligation was over. The great
anda
borne by the penitents had been stored. The dyed sawdust and fresh flowers that had covered the streets in elaborate designs before being mangled by the penitents’ feet had been swept away. Everyone loved Good Friday—betrayal and trial and cruelty still having the power to captivate—but Easter was a letdown. The promise of Easter was the same old promise. The town was hot and quiet, and everyone was still a little drunk.

Abby and June were having breakfast at one of the cafes that faced the park. The fountain was not operative this morning. Usually water plashed from the stone nipples of a trio of heroically sculpted women, but today they stood inactive, though still with their mysteriously withdrawn expressions as they held their lovely breasts. Workmen in boots rooted around in the water beneath them.