Paris Was the Place (46 page)

Each of his breaths is hard now and comes slowly. Part of me knows what’s happening, and part of me is too removed. It’s been such a sharp decline. Oh God, he’s leaving. Our childhood’s a lie now. The camping trips a lie. Because if it ends here in a hospital bed on Avenue Victor Hugo, then that’s terrible. That’s awful. I stand next to Betty in the dark and hold Luke’s hand and I’m completely with him. Twinned to him. Then I’m separated from him and there’s no way to articulate it. It’s more than sadness. It’s the emptiness that I’ve been terrified of. I feel completely dry. The EKG machine plays one long, extended high note. I look over at the nurse—the stranger I’ve come to trust—and I say, “Tell me. Tell me, Betty.”

“You loved him. I could tell that the minute I met you. That you two were good for one another. I saw how you took care of him.” She gently places Luke’s arms down at his sides and stands for a minute with her head bent in prayer. Then she turns off each of the
machines and walks toward the kitchen and leaves me alone with my brother.

It’s happened so quickly and quietly that my father hasn’t even woken up. I stand and don’t say a word. It’s too soon. I want more time. I have things to say, if I could just be given more time, please. Betty will come back from the phone, and Dad and Macon and Gaird will wake up. “Can you hear me?” I whisper close to Luke’s ear. “I’m saying good-bye now. I’m saying it, and I know you can hear me.” He’s still warm—still with us partly. His face has gone slack and peaceful. His jaw is finally relaxed.

I climb up onto the bed and lie with my weight on my right hip so I don’t press down on his body. My lips touch the skin on his left ear. “This is the part we didn’t talk about, so you’ve got to help me out. Tell me you’re okay.” I can’t stop the tears. “I’m missing you and you’ve only just left and you didn’t tell me what to do when this part came.” I close my eyes and push my face into his shoulder. “Don’t leave without telling me.” I cry out a little more loudly. I try to swallow the sobs by clenching my teeth, which makes my chest heave. The whole bed shakes. The grief is raw, and it comes for me.

When I open my eyes, my father takes my arm and pulls me up slowly. I sit on the edge of the bed and kiss the top of Luke’s hand where the veins run. I kiss it. Then I kiss it again. Dad pulls me so I’m standing in his arms and I make a moaning sound. No words, just the sound.

Macon runs into the living room and gets me to lie down on the rug near Luke’s bed. The moaning stops just as quickly as it began. Gaird walks in next, half-asleep, and cries out, and doesn’t stop crying.

T
HE PARAMEDICS DON
’
T
come back until after dawn. They wear purple latex gloves this time and move around the living room, packing things up. Then they wheel Luke away on a stretcher. I watch from the living room window while they put my brother in the ambulance. Two vans pull away from the curb. One carries my dead brother, and
the other carries the EKG machine, the metal IV pole, three cardboard boxes of unused saline, and the hospital bed.

Luke shouldn’t be alone on the way to the morgue. So I get my bag. “I’m going with him.”

“No, you’re not,” Macon says.

“No, I’m going to follow the ambulance, because he shouldn’t be in there alone. What were we thinking, letting him go by himself like that?”

“You’ve said good-bye, Willie. Please don’t do this.” He takes my arm.

“How do you know I’ve said good-bye? I haven’t even begun to say good-bye, and please take your hand off me!” I’m yelling now. “My brother’s alone with strangers driving to a morgue I don’t even have the address for, and I’m following him there!”

“You don’t need to go to that place!” Macon’s yelling now, too. “It’s not what you do now! Goddamnit! Just stop! What you do now is let me make you something to eat. Then you lie down on the couch and you rest.”

“Then what? And then what?” I can’t stop myself. It’s the part after this that terrifies me.

“Then I will still be right here.”

By now the vans are gone. I go and stare at the street for a minute. “Okay. You’ve made me miss them. Okay,” I whisper. “You win. But I still want to go out. I haven’t been outside in days.”

“I’ll come with.”

“I’m just getting flowers. I’ll just have a quick walk alone. Please.”

“Promise?” He looks at me. “Promise I can trust you.”

“It’s fine.” I stare back at him. I walk to the flower market on Rue St. Didier and ask for calla lilies. I go back to the apartment and cut the stems under the faucet and place them in a glass vase on the mantel. I call Luelle at the academy and explain that Luke’s dead and that I won’t be coming in to teach next week or the week after or maybe ever. I’m scarily efficient. I call Sara next. She answers right away.

“Luke’s gone.” I don’t cry. My voice is flat. “He’s gone. He died in
his sleep. I’m so glad you got to say good-bye. I’m so glad you came yesterday.”

“Oh, Willie, he was such a good brother. Such a good friend. Oh Jesus, I’m so damn pissed off at this disease. Is Macon there?”

“He is. He’s right in the kitchen, cooking.”

“Do you want me to come over? Lily and I could come over right now and be with you.”

“I’m okay. I’ll call you soon. I just wanted you to know. I couldn’t live with the idea that Luke was dead and you didn’t know.”

I put the phone down. I’m not okay. But the whole time I’m floating somewhere above my body, and none of it’s real. Macon has scheduled the cremation for Friday. At any moment Dad might sneak a call to the Paris morgue and change the instructions, so I guard the phones. I’m in the sadness entirely. Then I’m observing it from somewhere above and it’s crazy-making. To be in it is better than to be observing it, I decide. My mind can’t slow down. Can’t help circling and circling. I know this feeling of losing Luke—really losing him—is just settling in now deep in my bones and in my bloodstream and in the web of veins around my heart and that it will get worse before it ever gets better and I observe this cliché and see it for what it is—a sickening thing. Worse before it gets better. I’m observing again. Better to be feeling. But I can’t control my mind like that. It’s much stronger than me today. Playing tricks.

Dad comes out of the den before lunchtime, looking like he’s been crying. “Do you want lunch, Dad? You should really eat something. Macon’s making chicken soup. It’s important that you eat. Why don’t you have something with us?”

“I’m fine. I had toast. I’m not hungry. I think I’ll go to church. Then on to the airport. I have a flight home tonight.”

“That soon? You’re leaving? I thought we’d have more time.” I mean this but I’m also the tiniest bit relieved. Or maybe even more relieved than that. Maybe I’m glad he’s going, because Dad requires an effort. Too much. I’m not capable. And I wish I could reach him. I wish we could prop each other up, but that’s not our history. Maybe
we’re too much alike in ways I never knew before. Maybe we each need to be alone.

“There’s nothing left for me to do here right now. I’d like to go home. I want to be in the house. I want to be around your mother’s things.”

I stand up from the couch and hug him. It’s a long hug, and he’s crying quietly—an old man crying in the hall by his dead son’s front door. Then I cry, too. He says, “Say good-bye to Macon and Gaird for me. I’ve never done good-byes. I’ll call you when I land.”

“You never call, Dad,” I laugh. “I’ll call you. How about that? I’ll call you and see how you’re doing.”

“That would be fine. That would be good.”

Then he leaves, and I go back to the couch and I don’t get up the rest of the day, except to pee. I don’t want to eat, either. I’m not hungry, no matter how many times Macon tries to serve the soup. Down on the street, a mother uses her arm to herd her two daughters into the back of a waiting car. My mother could have made Luke better. She would have known things to say to him. She would have known what to do, and he would have lived longer.

Gaird comes home. He’s been with Andreas and Tommy all day. Then he takes a nap in his bedroom. When he wakes up, he walks into the living room and embraces me on the couch. He says his friend Clarisse—the one with the stiletto heels at Andreas’s party—is cooking dinner for all of them. I nod from the couch and say, “That’s good. That’s nice.” But inside I’m thinking,
How could you leave us? Leave the apartment? How could you be with anyone else but Luke and me and Dad?
And still another part of me is thinking of how much I don’t want Gaird to stay. And how relieved I am that he’s going. I don’t want to talk to him. I just want this unspoken thing. This shared grief. Then he’s gone and I’m alone and it’s better.

Macon finally doesn’t ask me about the soup; he just brings two bowls into the living room, and we eat on the couch. “We shouldn’t sleep here,” he says. “I think it would be better if we went home. It’s been a long time since you were in your own bed.”

I nod. When I finish the soup, I stand and get my coat from Luke’s bedroom. “Let’s go home. I want my mother.”

Macon turns out the lights. “I know you do.” He takes my arm, and we walk down the hall.

“You didn’t know my mother, did you?” We’re out on the sidewalk, Luke’s sidewalk, and I’m confused. It’s such a warm September night. The air is soft and sensual, even, and bitter with all this sadness.

“We can take a taxi.” He leans into the street to hail a cab.

“I remember now. You never met my mother. She died first.”

My mother took to her bed when she missed my dad. I’ve always thought that’s what you do when you’re sad. So I go to bed for most of September. I grieve for Luke every day. Sometimes I’m still so surprised he’s gone missing that I want to get up and look for him on the street or over at his apartment. Where is he? It’s almost been my undoing—this need to find him. My grief is private. It’s not something I can fully describe to Macon, and in a way that makes it scarier. It’s a leveler. My brother’s dead, and I’m not.

I like to be in bed because I’m lower to the ground and somehow this makes me feel closer to Luke. I keep the fan on and read on top of the sheets. Sometimes I try to smoke in Luke’s honor, even though I hate the taste of cigarettes. Macon wants me to go to my office at the academy and teach and work on the Sarojini, but nothing has made me get up yet. The academy was my old life, where I read small notes from Luelle on bits of scrap paper that told me my brother was dying.

Will I drive Macon away for good? Sara calls every day and asks me if I’m angry. She thinks anger will help. She wants me to punch something. A pillow or a wall. I can get angry at politicians who’ve slowed down the research and doctors who may be in over their heads. But my anger doesn’t last, because I’m really just sad. A long sadness has moved in, and it doesn’t surprise me except how pervasive it is. His
dying is this physical, visceral thing to me now. A long O of sadness. I used to think about getting sick when he was sick, but now I seem to be really sick. Feverish. Sweaty. I have the dream that we’re climbing the rock face together again, except this time it’s Luke who’s falling. He can’t hold on. And I’m not asleep dreaming the dream. I’m wide awake.

Did I say “I love you” enough to my brother? That’s what makes me crazy—all the looking back. Where is he now? I want to know much more about his dying. Some days I honestly think he will appear, and I let the rest of the world go. I don’t feel indebted to anyone, and on these days I retain only the thinnest connection to Macon and Sara. I can’t reattach the different parts of my life. My mother. My father. My brother.

Then it’s October. Macon cooks eggplant in the kitchen for dinner one night. He’s made so much food for us this fall it’s like we run a small restaurant. “Willie,” he says, bringing the plates to the table, “I went to the center on Rue de Metz today.” I’m on the couch reading
Anna Karenina
. I stop when I hear him say the word “Metz.” He says, “I think it might be time for you to go around there again. I think you should call Sophie.”

“You didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to beg to Sophie.”

“I didn’t do anything. It’s my job to go there. She asked where you were. I told her about Luke.”

“Sophie isn’t talking to me. Besides, people mourn for entire years. They wear black and they don’t leave the house. Luke hasn’t even been dead a month. I thought it would be better after he died.”

“It will get better.”

“Sometimes it feels like I’m completely alone. Where is Pablo? It would be so nice to talk to him. We could all go to the playground in the Tuileries. We could go look at cheetahs at the zoo. Let’s do that tomorrow—let’s go back there.”

“Pablo is in school.” Macon takes my hand. “You could get dressed tomorrow. That might feel good. That might be a start. To get out of bed and get dressed.”

I
T TAKES
two more weeks. Maybe I go a little crazy. I fixate on things. I have cycles of repetitive thinking. It’s almost like when the words used to appear. My mind plays tricks. I can’t get Gita out of my head. I see her fully. I miss her like family. She’s walking toward me sometimes in my head while I try to sleep.