I see you everywhere (35 page)

The last time I saw her, in Washington, she made fun of my wig.

“You know, that thing makes you look like one of the Supremes. A lilywhite Supreme. Or Doris Day. Like any minute you’ll break into song—

like, ‘Que Sera, Sera.’ ”

I laughed. “You try it on for size. I don’t mean the wig.”

“Oh, we all get it sooner or later, long as we’re not struck down by a falling rock or a sniper. It’s the world we’ve made, no mystery there. But if it were me, I’d shave my head.”

“And what, flaunt it? Remind everyone of their biggest fear?”

“If cancer is your biggest fear, you’re doing all right,” said Clem. Long ago, I realized that idealism had turned my sister into a crank. But her company made me happy—and I still had glimpses of her inviolate tenderness, deep inside her shell. And honestly, I was relieved when she made fun of how silly I looked, because I did look silly. Like most women in my predicament, I’d tried on dozens of wigs looking for my old familiar self in the mirror—couldn’t I hang on to
her
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that the only thing to do was treat this cover-up like a masquerade or a disguise. I chose two: a long auburn pageboy, very Glenda Jackson, and the one I wore that day, a canary bubble that swooped along my jawbone. My friends told me I looked camp or chic or risqué; I looked nothing of the kind, but it was their job to say so. Not Clem’s. Clem picked her own job: calling classmates from grad school who’d gone into medical research. She asked them for the more complicated truths about my drugs, and then she told me, not a single word minced. Risk of leukemia, atrophied muscle and memory, sandblasted liver, neuropathy, menopause early and mean. No having babies. For that, for telling me what I was up against as bluntly my doctors would never have done, I felt grateful. I order the Home on the Range BBQ Platter and eat every bite: pulled pork, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and coleslaw. I eat every shred of iceberg lettuce, every sawdust wedge of tomato in the salad. I rip a roll in two and drag it through the gravy left on my plate, the bottled dressing in my bowl. I can tell my hunger makes them uneasy. When your only sister kills herself, you are not supposed to eat like John Wayne at the hoedown. I can’t help it. I eat not just to console myself but to do something I can do well when my mind has shut down or would like to. (“Everyone has a mindless thing they excel at,” Clem once said. “Yours is eating, mine is sex.” I gave her a dirty look and said, “How do you know mine isn’t sex as well?” “Because you react like that,” she said. “Because you’re clearly jealous. But listen, eating’s nothing to sneeze at.”) The place we’re having dinner would be called a coffee shop in New York; in Dubois, it’s a family restaurant. So the menu declares, as if this claim makes it extra-appealing: all those babies in booster chairs, screeching just for the joy of it. The food is fine—I have coconut custard pie for dessert, with a scoop of chocolate ice cream—but I could have wished for less light. The four people who brought me here share the rancid raw-oyster complexion of people who haven’t washed or slept or laughed for days. Besides Buzz, there is Sheldon, a veterinarian; Vern, a Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 237
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tall storky man with cratered skin; and Dave, Clem’s field assistant, a summer intern from Bozeman. Buzz told me Dave is the one who found Clem. Now that I’ve met him, I have no idea how to ask how my sister died. He’s just a kid, wide-eyed and baffled. I’m sure my parents know how she killed herself—they spoke with the police—but never in a million years would I ask them. Sheldon talks the most. He tells me a story about how, back in the spring, they performed surgery on a captive cub to correct a heart defect. Clem did the byzantine paperwork to get the procedure approved (permission, absurdly, to save the life of an animal protected by the Endangered Species Act). They found a cardiac surgeon who, just for the novelty and the publicity, talked Sheldon through the operation. They had all kinds of machinery and special expertise. The risks were significant, that was a given. The bear died on the table.

“It was supposed to be a big story in
National Geographic.
But without a happy ending . . .” Sheldon stops when he becomes aware that Buzz and Vern are frowning at him. I want to tell him to go on, just to have time fill up with talk. It doesn’t matter that I heard this whole story from Clem just before I saw her in Washington. She called me the day after the surgery. She sounded miserable, wiped out, defeated. But she never mentioned it again, so neither did I.

“I think,” Sheldon says now, “well, I think she identified with that bear. I think she felt she died
with
it somehow. I think she thought it had something to do with her karma. She wasn’t really the same after that.”

Vern rolls his eyes. “Clem wasn’t no Buddhist, Shel.” Vern is a botanist. Clem bought her jeep from him, and the two of them sometimes went dancing. Just platonic, she said, but Vern had a blues soul. I look at him now and know why it was platonic, no matter how charming and smart the guy was. He wasn’t good-looking enough. Clem was vain that way.

“Karma in the
generic
sense,” says Sheldon. I remember now how Clem told me, early on in the job, that Sheldon was a good vet but an arrogant SOB. All these people—people I imagined I would meet if I Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 238 238

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came out to visit Clem—are falling into place, fitting the portraits she drew in our phone conversations, portraits that made me laugh. (Where is the pencil-pushing boss with the comb-over and the macramé ties? Where is the tattooed woman who studies mountain lions but shrieks at the sight of a spider?)

“All I know,” says Dave, “is like, day before yesterday, she packed for a week in the field. She had me order this new set of hiking boots from that store she likes in Jackson. She said purple, no second choice, and asked for these special all-weather liners. Man, that is so, like—like it makes no sense, does it?”

“Yeah,” says Buzz. “Yeah, she was makin’ the usual plans. Like tomorrow’s game. She told me she got the dogs, even the Not Dogs for you, Sheldon.”

I didn’t ask them for explanations or theories. I guess they assume that reaching for reasons will make me feel better. I feel, instead, sort of lofty, as if I am floating above them (despite the leaden food in my gut). Three and a half higher degrees at this table and none of these eggheads knows what even the cheapest TV movies do: that suicide, when it succeeds, wears other well-laid plans. Sort of like a flashy wig. We take a narrow, twisting road through sparse pines and patchy fields. We cross four cattle guards, which rattle the car loudly, as if to keep us wide awake. This time, Buzz makes no talk, small or otherwise. I’m still thankful for his awkward presence, anything to keep me from being alone.

Clem rented a mobile home on a spread that used to be a cattle ranch but was turned into a fancy lodge. On the way in, there’s a kennel of sled dogs; in the winter, guests can ride around in style. Clem said they also keep the coyotes away. As we drive through, the dogs rush to their fence and bark, but no one comes out of the lodge. It’s still light, the sun heavy and large down near the horizon. Buzz turns off the motor; we sit with the ticking for a moment. He says, “Want me to stay out here?”

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“No. Unless you mind coming in.”

“Oh yeah, no, not at all,” he says.

I’ve never been in a mobile home. It feels like a train car, shipshape and economically furnished but plastered everywhere with posters of magnificently rugged places: Barrow, Patagonia, Big Sur, the Río Negro. Clem went to all these places, mostly for work, but it’s a shock to see her worldliness defining so narrow a space. Unconscious trompe l’oeil: as if she wished to trick herself out of a claustrophobia that, even in Wyoming, she couldn’t elude.

From a telephone conversation this afternoon, I know the police came out here, to look for notes. They found none. No one suspected foul play; this was just protocol. So I cannot chill myself with the thought that Clem was the last one here.

“I’m going to, um . . .” Buzz stands by the table in the tiny kitchen. On the table is a tiny television.

“Go ahead, please.” I’m relieved he has something to watch other than me.

At the opposite end is Clem’s bed; there, against the pillows, sits the stuffed polar bear she’s had since college. I try to remember his name. Damien? Beside the bed is a nightstand with a lamp. The lampshade is covered with a sheer green silk scarf that belongs to me, a souvenir of lost love that I thought I’d misplaced around the time of my wedding (and which should, by its lingering importance, have warned me to back out). I lift the scarf and hold it up to the last light from the window. There is a dark ring in the center where the lampshade gradually singed the delicate silk. “You little worm,” I whisper. I lay it back over the lamp and turn it on. My surroundings glow a sweet chartreuse.

I pull the one drawer out of the table, set it on the bed, sit down beside it. One by one, I remove the objects it holds:

An Indian enameled box jammed with earrings, the dangling organic kind that Clem loved, made of feathers, seashells, rough turquoise nuggets, leaves dipped in gold. A barrette, tarnished silver, shaped like a fish. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 240 240

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A strip of gold condoms in see-through plastic.

A box of matches from our mother’s favorite French restaurant in Providence.

A paperback book,
Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare.
A tiny delicate skull, jaw and teeth intact.

A pair of ebony chopsticks with abalone inlay.

A card for a dentist appointment in Jackson three weeks ago. A photograph of Clem, grinning and tanned, seated in tall grass next to a knocked-out radio-collared grizzly bear, one hand buried in its fur. A large copper bracelet, clearly a man’s.

There is more, but my vision is no longer clear. I pocket the condoms (I think of our parents, tomorrow, going through all these same motions, all the detective work of grief ) and take the skull over to Buzz. He examines it and smiles. “Prairie dog. Yeah. Nice specimen.”

I return it to the drawer and slide the drawer into the table. I look again at Clem’s bed. Darius; the polar bear’s name is Darius. I pick him up and hold him close.

Now it’s dark. I ask Buzz to drive me back. I close my eyes and wait to feel us cross the cattleguards. This time, I welcome the way they jar me through and through.

“I know, I know. I’ll win the pity sweepstakes now, for sure.” This is me, wearing the brave wry face I always wear for Ray. I wore it even through my so-called treatment. (Oncologists: do us all a favor and find another word; as one of my radiationmates put it, “Ain’t no treat to none of it, hon.”) This is my fault, not Ray’s, and it’s part of why we finally knew we had to call it quits. The way I felt I had to be; the way he couldn’t be. But we’ve been apart for only a month, so he’s still the one I needed to speak with, desperately, after I heard the unbearable news. I didn’t think twice. I left messages for him in three places, even with his agent. Ray travels a lot, and sometimes he’s simply impossible to reach. Now I tell him everything. How my shell-shocked mother was the messenger, how I heard my father (a gentle man) throwing and breaking things in the back-Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 241
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ground. Everything, everything: crying in Denver, arriving in the middle of such outrageous beauty, my guilt at recognizing this beauty, the huge greasy dinner I’ve eaten, the heartburn from eating it. The people my sister worked with. The contents of that drawer.

“These are not the belongings of someone who’d kill herself !” I shout into the phone.

“What would those belongings be?” says Ray, the first thing he’s said in some time. He’s in L.A.: like me, in a hotel room.

“Dull belongings, I don’t know, just . . . not photographs of yourself with a bear! Not
gold
condoms.”

“Not gold.” He says this quietly, just to repeat it, the way a therapist would. “Well, all that glitters . . .”

“Her life, you mean. Gee, duh. Thanks, Ray.” Now I begin to cry.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that . . . you always thought she knew so much.”

“So what? So she didn’t know anything after all? Is that what you mean?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Sorry.” I stroke Darius, who lies on the hotel bed beside me. Ray moved out after my chemo ended. Part of the reason had to be that we were apologizing way too much—that is, we were saying too many things requiring apology. We had been together for almost three years. For much of that time, I’d been pestering him about children; he didn’t want children. Funny how we broke up once I could no longer physically have them. We had been through too much strife. I think we’re both sad, but our lives are more peaceful now. When we talk, we remind each other that we made the right decision.

“I’d be glad to come up there and help you. The shoot’s been delayed a week, so I could fly up tomorrow,” he says.

“My parents will be here.”

“Gee, duh,” says Ray, and I have to laugh.

“Thanks, but I don’t think it’s a great idea.”

“No, you’re right. It would raise too many questions.” Before we say good-bye, he gives me the number of the hotel where he’s staying. We made an odd, even talked-about couple. When they found out that Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 242 242

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Ray was a stuntman, the line among my friends was that dutiful Louisa had left Mr. Chips for Mr. T. Brains for brawn. Only that’s not how it was. Still, I let the misperception stand. I felt it gave my life more color. That was before the cancer.

I sit on the bed, wondering how I can possibly sleep. My sheets have been folded down, and three Hershey’s kisses perch on one of the pillows. When I stand, I discover that I’m sitting on the fourth, now soft and misshapen. Carrying Darius with me, I open the minifridge and see that the tiny Smirnoff I drank has been replaced with two. I like this hotel after all.