Shaking out the Dead (30 page)

“So that's the father?” Geneva said in a soft and measured tone.

Paris nodded.

“It's bad news?” she said.

Paris nodded again.



Geneva remembered Tatum standing in her living room asking if Geneva thought Rachael would be better off with Lee and whether she should call him. Yet, clearly, this situation was not of her own making. Tatum cocked the pistol, Geneva thought, and was now upset someone else was pulling the trigger.

“How do you feel?” Paris said.

Geneva looked off to the side from behind her dark glasses. She liked the way the question sounded in Paris's mouth. He meant it. He wanted to know. He had no assumptions. Geneva tried to be as honest as protocol allowed.

“I'm on a new planet,” she said. “I suppose we all are. It must change a little, at least, every time someone dies.”

The small group of guests retired to the porch and front yard. The giant lilac bushes surrounding the bed-and-breakfast had survived the hailstorm better than most and infused the gathering with a sticky, heady sweetness. Geneva sat on a settee on the porch beside Helene. Helene's hand rested on Geneva's knee. Geneva occasionally touched the blue, bad tattoo of a phoenix on the sun-spotted skin of the back of Helene's hand. A few people from the
Messenger
had come, and they expressed their condolences and then huddled together at the wine table. Two residents from the nursing home were parked in the sun in their wheel chairs, aides standing idly behind them. Geneva's neighbor, Ron, approached the settee. He told Geneva that if she needed anything, he was right next door. Vincent stood at his mother's shoulder, looking out at the lawn.



At the bottom of the porch steps, Tatum and Paris joined Lee and Rachael. An old-fashioned sleigh sat on the front lawn of the bed-and-breakfast with a solemn white wreath set up in the driver's seat.

“Can I climb on that?” Rachael asked Tatum, then blushed, and redirected her eyes to Lee.

Lee looked to Tatum and then quickly away.

“Looks like it,” he said, and off she went.

Lee turned to follow. He watched her run, mount the runner on the sleigh, and then hoist herself into the seat. He had to admit, he wasn't sure if she had changed or whether he had never looked closely before. She looked different to him. No longer a subset of Margaret, but his, alone, she seemed, at once, both older and younger than he remembered.

“Lee.”

He turned. Tatum had come up behind him.

“Lee,” she said, and the reasoned arguments concocted during the service stuck in her throat and all she could say is, “what are you doing?”

Lee furrowed his brow.

“What are you going to do with a little kid?”

“Rachael?”

“That's the one.”

Lee knew this might happen. He had considered it as he sat between flights. Tatum might judge him just as she had when he had asked her to take Rachael before. She didn't understand then, and she didn't understand now. He had decided he wouldn't negotiate. He didn't have to. His job was to do the right thing, not convince Tatum of its rightness.

“Thank you for all you've done,” Lee said. “But you know as well as I do that she should be home now.”

“As opposed to four days after her mother died.”

“I did what was best for Rachael then,” Lee said patiently, “and I'm going to do what's best for her now.”

Tatum looked past Lee to Rachael, who stood on the sleigh beside the wreath of flowers, looking in their direction.

“I'm not sure you know the difference between what's best for you and what's best for her,” Tatum said.

Lee stared at her coldly, then turned away.

“Just wait until school is out,” Tatum said, changing her tone, pleading, “or after summer vacation. This isn't the sort of thing you do on impulse,” Tatum said to his back.

Lee turned around slowly. His voice was exasperated.

“Why are you doing this?” he said, turning out his hands. “I haven't seen my daughter in six months.” He said it like it was Tatum's fault. “This is our reunion. Our time. Why are you ruining it?”

“I . . . ” Tatum said. “I'm not trying to ruin it.”

“Well, you are,” he said.

Paris came up behind Tatum and stopped short. He could feel the tension.

“I have no idea,” Lee said, “how you could think she's better off with you than with me.”



Tatum felt her face flush. She's better off with
us
, she wanted to say. With me, Geneva, and Paris. But she couldn't make promises on others' behalves, and she couldn't promise that she wouldn't drive them away. She might have already driven Geneva away. Words stuck in her throat.

Lee turned away from them and walked toward the sleigh. Tatum followed. Paris followed Tatum.

At the sleigh, Lee reached up and brought Rachael to the ground. Tatum could feel it coming. He was going to say something right now. Almost as though a bus were careening toward Rachael, Tatum wanted to rush in and shove her out of the path.

“I bet you're ready to come back home,” Lee said.

Somehow, it was visible, the heat reaching up from inside Rachael's belly, turning her cheeks scarlet. Her eyes shot to Tatum. Rachael looked as she had at the water's edge. Busted. Found out. Would she start swinging? Tatum could see she would not. It would stay inside, a push-pull, a mix of desire and fear.



Lee felt the same push-pull as Rachael did. Desire and fear. But for him, the push-pull was soothing, the sensation of his feet touching the ground, but not sinking into it. There was no floating up, and there was no dragging down. Afraid to hold on and afraid to let go, Rachael's grip was one that offered a perfect equilibrium.

“Maybe we should all go,” Tatum said, impulsively, and with false brightness.

Rachael looked to her father. Lee stared coldly at Tatum. He misunderstood her motives. He thought it was a power play, that she was trying to make him the bad guy in front of Rachael by forcing him to say no.

“Maybe that'll work up the road,” Lee said.



Paris heard Tatum's blurted words. He had been invisible, listening to it all. But now, he had gone deaf. He stopped hearing the conversation and felt frozen to the spot, which was strange, because he was already moving down the front walk of the bed-and-breakfast, down the street. He wanted out of the khaki pants and the white shirt with the creases from the package. He wanted a white T-shirt and jeans. He wanted work boots, the diner's counter, and a poured cup of coffee to be enough. Paris wanted the sky at dusk and the sky before dawn and not this straight above light. Tatum was willing to leave, leave him and head off to the Midwest with Lee and Rachael. Paris knew that grief might consume Tatum in a way that she would become lost to him should Lee take Rachael away. He also knew that he might blow it with Tatum with his lies of omission and self-imposed curses. But he didn't know she would just walk away. He hated himself, and he hated all the lies. Not the ones of omission, but the ones he had told himself.

Hope had empty hands, empty as the hands of need, or longing. It was defined by the emptiness. That's what made it hope.



Away from the valley lights, the night was black and the sky packed with stars. Geneva's Saab crept up the road toward John's shack.

“Okay, that's close enough,” Geneva said. She pointed at the dark silhouette of the building. “There it is. Now, let's turn around.”

But Helene kept a light foot on the gas, rolling up the road. She pressed the brake as she pulled up beside the shack.

“Don't slow down,” Geneva said. “Drive.”

Helene gave the car some gas. Geneva watched the shack recede in the rearview mirror as they put distance between themselves and John's.

“It's a shack, all right,” Helene said.