Shaking out the Dead (23 page)

She would be free to think about something else.

Soft human sounds traveled on the air. Two employees in polyester pants and shapeless sweaters speed-walked by, arms pumping, the low, gravelly sound of workplace gossip passing back and forth between them. Geneva felt the over-the-shoulder glance as they passed and heard the shift in volume and tone.
That's her.
She didn't hear the words, but she didn't need to.

An unexpected sniffle snuck up on her. She blinked back a few tears. Tears because she had tried and her best wasn't good enough.

The sun is on my face
, she told herself, arguing with the tears.

She looked up into the screaming sky and tried to open herself to it. Be as wide. Be as true. But the dark question crept in her heart: did she not love Ralph, or did she not know how to love? Who was the problem, the subject or object?

Of all her damned questions, it was damnedest. Ralph had loved her, this she knew. But he had not been interested in her. This, she felt. As for her, perhaps it hadn't been Ralph whom she had been interested in all these years. Perhaps, what she was interested in was love.

A handful of barn swallows appeared in the sky before her, dipping into view, zigzagging on the hunt. They were the first of the season, and Geneva stopped to watch the aerial ballet. They swooped and rose with grace, never gliding, never at rest in the sky. They flew over her head, and she turned to watch them, about-facing back the way she'd come. The air around her collected the warmth of the sun. Ralph's sponge bath, no doubt, was over.

She brought her eyes back to the earth. The home sat before her on the landscape, heavy and solid, looking to her like a glamorous prison. She wanted to be released. Geneva headed back to the choices she had made, but she stopped when she reached the bottom of the steps to the building. They looked to her like Everest, a great effort to climb. Back to her chaperone. Back to her shame. Back to the world that had shrunk and defined her. Back.

Back at Ralph's room, Vernita was waiting outside, armed, as Alice had been, with a loaded clipboard.

Geneva hit the play button as she walked toward the bed. She flopped into the chair. She tried to shut her mind and hear only the song.
I see trees of green, red roses, too
. . . Ray Charles was singing. A blind man. And yet, she was not moved. “Moved” and mad can't share the same spot. Mad digs in too deep for movement, and Geneva was mad. Mad at Ralph. And mad at Alice for reminding her of it. What might she have done in this world had she not been wasting her creativity, turning her psyche into a pretzel, trying to love right, trying to make her love right?

She was mad at all of it, and she was mad at being mad on a day the earth was singing.

The sun had traveled and no longer hit the crystal. Ralph's lower lip protruded farther than his top one, ever so slightly, the mildest of pouts. Geneva thought of younger days when she would lay in the crook of his arm and run a moistened index finger over the swell of it. The memory made her push air through her nose. At the time, she was young and had no idea of the size of the gulf between what he wanted of her and what she had to give. And she had no idea of the nature of the burden of being with one who wanted not too much, but too little.

When the tape ended, Geneva stood. She would not be checking into the nearby Super 8. She was going home.

Geneva pushed hard on the gas pedal. The speedometer pressed forward. She vacillated between self-righteousness and self-doubt and found them equally crippling. A hunger for a life without Ralph, without all the questions about him, about them, about love, overcame her. She slapped the steering wheel with her hand. Her breath grew shallow, and the skin on her face seemed to tighten. She wanted it all done, processed, sewn up, and digested. Whoever she would be when it was all over, she wanted to be right now. She leaned over her steering wheel and let a good, solid scream rip. Her Saab tore down the highway. The flow, Geneva thought, could kiss her ass.

But the flow, alas, misunderstood. It thought she said, “Kick.”

The wail of a siren hit her ears, and cherries appeared in the rearview. Geneva cursed and hit the blinker. Pulling to the shoulder, she reached to the glove compartment for the proper I.D.'s. She watched the officer approach in her side-view mirror. Standard issue cop: leather jacket, long legs, and mirrored sunglasses. She rolled down the window. He took her license and registration.

“Do you know how fast you were going?” he said.

Geneva looked at her reflection in his sunglasses.

“Ninety?” she said frankly. “Ninety-five?”

“In a . . . ” he said.

Young authorities, Geneva thought, with their guns and their clipboards. She knew what he meant. She knew the right answer.
In a seventy-five zone. Sir.

“In a . . . ” he repeated.

Geneva looked up at the cop but saw only herself where his eyes should be, and without a shred of false innocence, she answered, “In a twenty-year-old Saab.”



Tatum had let Paris sleep for three hours, and then they went to pick up Rachael from school. They took the car as the day had become glorious and, after collecting her, drove to Spring Meadow Lake under a sky as blue as cornflowers and giant, white cruise ship clouds.

Rachael walked several paces in front of them on a path soft with spring melt. Tatum watched her move through the landscape, small and self-contained, not bursting from seams like the spring growth that surrounded them. It lacked empathy, Tatum thought, spring. Fall and winter were sympathetic. There for you. Dead leaves and abandoned nests said
me, too — you are not alone
. Spring, on the other hand, was a collective celebration. You could opt in, or you could opt out. But no one was stopping the party to try to convince you to come.

“Spring,” Tatum said. “You can't help but love it, but it just doesn't offer comfort the way fall and winter do. Ever notice that?”

The blue bunch wheatgrass was already greening. Cottonwoods lined the shore. Bulrushes and cattails clustered in pockets in the shallow water just ahead.

“It seems perfect,” Paris said.

They rounded a bend, catching up to Rachael, who had paused at the bridge to look out over the railing. As they flanked her, she switched to look over the other side.

“What's on your mind, Rach?” Tatum said, turning and leaning back to the railing.

Rachael didn't turn.

“Nothing,” she said.

“So you've reached enlightenment?” Tatum said. “Calmed the mind into a nirvana of silence?”

Rachael looked over her shoulder. “What?”

“It's a joke.”

Rachael made a face. She didn't get it and didn't seem in the mood to try.

Tatum turned back to Paris. She curled her hands over the wooden railing, and Paris covered one of her hands with his own. Tatum looked into his profile, at the sandy hair, the full lips. He was an easy fit in the natural world, at home among the tree trunks, reeds, and sky. He was like the surface of the water, too, penetrable yet indivisible. You could break the surface, but he remained intact, and it was you who found yourself surrounded.

Paris turned to face her. As their eyes met, a sense of dissolving overcame Tatum, dissolving into Paris as though she could experience him from the inside out. It felt half like merging, half like ceasing to exist. Both had a powerful attraction.

“What's in your mind?” Paris asked in a voice just above a whisper.

“Nirvana,” she said.

Paris pulled her toward him. He kissed her on the lips. She pulled away and looked down.

“What?” Paris said.

“Earlier,” Tatum said, “in the basement, I wasn't looking for anything. Remember that book I told you about? The book my family keeps with all the women named Rachael in it?”

“Yeah.”

“Lee sent it several months ago. It's in the basement. I was going to write in it. I was going to change it,” she said. “Write about Margaret. Make it a different kind of book.”

“But you didn't?”

“No. I couldn't. I was unable.”

He looked at her quizzically.

Tatum shrugged. “Writer's block, I guess.”

Paris reached toward her and plucked a dandelion seed from where it had landed in her hair.

“I'm sorry I faked with you,” Tatum said. She didn't want to say “lied.”

Paris went to touch her cheek, but she turned before his hand could reach her. She stepped past him, crooking her neck to see up the path.

“Where's Rachael?” she said.

Paris turned and looked over his shoulder.

“Rachael,” Tatum called.

Rachael had left the path, walking into the brush, under the giant willow, down the embankment, and toward the water.
Nirvana
. She whispered the word and liked the way it felt in her mouth. She thought it would make a pretty name, good for a turtle. Wearing the chucka boots her aunt had bought her, she climbed slowly down a small hump near the shoreline to where the ground was muddier.

Above, she heard the sound of Tatum's voice. She heard her mention the Book of Rachaels, a book where everybody in it was dead except Aunt Tatum and herself. The sound of her mother's name also distinguished itself from above. Her mother was in heaven, Rachael knew, but she could no longer imagine it. Heaven was a place she couldn't locate, not even in her mind. Heaven seemed farther than the moon, past the sky, which was never-ending. It was nowhere. Heaven was nowhere, and that's where her mother was. Nowhere. And yet, her cut-out shape, a hole in the fabric of the Universe, remained.

Rachael stepped out onto a thumb-shaped jutting that extended into the lake some thirteen feet. One foot then the other fell on progressively squishier ground. She thought of her mother but not in heaven. She thought of her in the bathroom behind the closed door. She imagined that the cancer made blood drip from her and wash down the drain when she cried in the shower, blood like the girls at school had talked about. Rachael reached the tip of the jutting and looked down at the smooth and algae-filled water at her feet. She wondered if Aunt Tatum bled in the shower too. Or if she did when she was sick. Rachael knew secret feelings were felt in bathrooms. When you came back out, no one was supposed to know.

She then squatted where the mud turned to water. She looked over her shoulder. Furtively, she stuck a finger down her pants. She withdrew it and examined it for blood.

“Rachael?”

Startled, she jumped up and turned, folding the finger back into her palm and tucking it behind her back. Her aunt stood in the arch of the willow.

“Whatcha doing?” Tatum said, side-stepping down the slope.

Rachael's cheeks flushed scarlet, and she took a step backward, her foot landing squarely in the water.

“No,” she cried out, lifting the soggy boot and keeping the guilty finger hidden.

“What's going on?” Tatum asked. “What do you have? Did you find something?” She extended a hand to help Rachael out of the muck.

Rachael took a second step back, her other boot now soaked too.

Tatum's hand then dropped to her side. She blinked.

“Rachael,” she said, “what's behind your back? Is it Vincent's picture? Do you have Vincent's picture?”

Rachael's little mouth opened. Then Tatum extended her hand again to help. But Rachael twisted to avoid it, jerked herself too hard, and lost balance. She went down sideways, her head slapping against a granite slab jutting up from the cold, shallow water. Tatum lunged forward, stepped into the water, and jerked Rachael up by the arm.

“Omigod,” Tatum said, pulling her to dry ground and kneeling before her. She tried to separate the wet hair from a cut.

Rachael weakly shoved at Tatum's hand. She reached for the spot of impact and felt a wave of confused grogginess. It didn't register yet as pain, but the cold shook her.

“Stop,” Tatum said, pushing away her hand. “Let me see.”

“No,” Rachael said, and she pushed away Tatum's hands long enough to bring her own fingers to her temple. As she touched it, she noticed Tatum's fingers, the blood on them. She looked down at her own fingers, and her face went white.

“I know. I know,” Tatum said, reaching for her wrists. “It's okay. It's okay.”

Rachael pulled away.

“C'mon,” Tatum said firmly, taking hold of a wrist.

“No,” Rachael said, struggling loose but losing balance in the process.

Tatum grabbed her arm, keeping her upright.

“Let go,” Rachael hollered. “I want my mom.”

“She's not here,” Tatum said. “I am.”

Rachael screamed in Tatum's face, a primate's threat, and then she lashed out, her fingernails dragging across Tatum's cheeks.

Tatum let go of her and put her hand to the side of her own face. Rachael looked as shocked as Tatum, and then she was suddenly lifted up and over Tatum's head. It was Paris. He held Rachael, her back to his chest. At first, she writhed and kicked with her heels at his knees and thighs. Then came the tears. He hiked her up once, flipping her chest to face his own.

“C'mon,” he said as he headed back up the embankment and toward the car, walking at a brisk pace. Tatum trotted behind him.

“Paris, stop it,” Tatum said.

But he kept walking.

“Paris,” Tatum hollered.

But Paris didn't stop.

“We have to go to the hospital,” he said.



At the car, Tatum fumbled with the keys. She climbed behind the wheel, and Paris got into the back with Rachael. Tatum peeled out of the gravel lot. She stole glances in the rearview mirror as she drove. Rachael was whimpering now, but her tears weren't the tears of protest like those near the water when Paris had first carried her off. Paris pressed his hand to Rachael's temple. He held her whole body tightly, Tatum could tell. The thigh Rachael sat upon and the chest against which she rested were firm, yet soft, like the earth beneath the grass. Rachael was not trying to wrestle away.

“Don't let her fall asleep,” Tatum said, though it didn't seem likely.

The knee beneath Rachael jiggled. Rough fingertips touched her cheek. Tatum was outside the circle.

Tatum wanted to blame Vincent. But she was the one who had brought him up, who had gone looking for him again. She didn't understand why she saw him by the water in the guilty blush of Rachael's cheeks and the hidden hand behind her back. Tears fought to the surface, rimmed Tatum's eyes, and plopped onto her lap. Her mouth twisted, and she sniffed, and her vision blurred. She looked into the rearview and met Paris's eyes, then she looked away in shame. She sniffled and wiped her nose with her hand.

She was relieved to reach the hospital's lot.

“Go,” she said. She needed them gone.

“It's okay,” Paris said to Tatum, touching her shoulder. He carried Rachael from the car and through the sliding doors without looking back.

In the car, Tatum wiped at her cheeks with the heel of her hand. She struggled to get ahold of herself. She was tired of herself. Very tired of herself. But there was no one else to be.



Rachael received two stitches, but it was Tatum who looked the worst for wear. She didn't make it into the hospital until all was said and done. She dealt with the front desk, providing the information she could and promising to bring in insurance information later. Back at the duplex, Rachael slept. Her cheeks were white against the pale green pillowcase. Low, southern light came through the drapes. Paris and Tatum stood beside the bed.

“Thank you,” Tatum said softly.

“I'm sorry,” Paris said.

Tatum's brow drew together.

“For what?”

“I've never known you to cry,” he said. “I wanted to be there.”

Tatum sighed.

“I'm the one who screwed up,” she said. “Not you. Don't be sorry.”