Shaking out the Dead (37 page)

“It's not what you think,” she said again. It's not
personal
. That was what she meant. It was what she wanted Rachael to know.



Rachael had slipped down the hall back into her room. She did not look toward the window to where the trees outside were lit by sun, the leaves transparent and gold-trimmed. She did not look in the mirror either, not at the face. Not at Rachael. Or Mallory. She sat on her bed and tugged at the hem of her shirt. She looked to the space between her dresser and the wall where she had tucked herself in the aftermath of her mother's death.

Rachael.

But then the doorbell had rung. Her Aunt Tatum had come for her.

Mallory.

Rachael closed her eyes and pretended. In her mind, she pressed herself to Paris's chest as Tatum drove in a panic to Geneva's. Paris's heat wrapped around her. There was nothing her Aunt Tatum could do.

But drive.



Geneva opened Tatum's back door and stepped outside. The midmorning sky above was gray. The air itself tasted gray. How could Tatum have done this, she thought, as she descended the steps? How could she do this to Rachael? Then Geneva stopped short, remembering again that it had not been suicide. Strange that she kept making the mistake.

From the patio, Geneva took in the tiered beds. Caretaking had not been the tenor of her summer. Not caretaking of the dianthus or foxglove. Not caretaking of Ralph or Tatum. Maybe that's why she kept thinking “suicide.” Maybe she just wanted to blame Tatum and thereby throw herself clear of blame.

Tatum. Ralph. Two people in four months that Geneva had withdrawn her attention from and
zap,
they'd disappeared. It would be arrogance to think one controlled such things, yet in a way, Geneva thought, it might be so. We keep ideas alive by thinking them. We keep relationships alive by showing up. Geneva had stopped showing up. She had let them go, and now they were gone. Such was the risk in opening one's hand.

Geneva stepped off the patio and walked along the untended flowerbeds. Ralph. Tatum. Dead. Still, Geneva knew it would've been wrong for her to do other than what she had. Her love for each of them had eroded, pushed apart from itself like rock split by ice. Something else, something not-love, had seeped in. Resentment. Annoyance. It would have been wrong to hold them in her world with her heart unopened to them. So she had turned away. Not just in body, she had released them, too, from the hold her mind had upon them. Once she could hold them in a better place in her mind, she assumed her feet would follow, and she would come to behold them in her life once more.

But alas, there are no guarantees as to who will be there when you reach your newfound place, whether that place lies inside or outside your mind. Such are the risks, she thought, of following one's heart. The heart points. The mind intends. The body moves. Heart. Mind. Body. Understanding their relationship to each other can be quite useful. The trick, however, is being able to tell one from the other.

Black leaves matted in the birdbath. Heart. Mind. Body. Three. A sacred triad. A sacred number. Not the number tragedies came in. That was a bum rap. Maybe the real meaning of the idea, Geneva thought, was that tragedy came in
three —
in the third dimension. Perhaps as we evolve as a species, she thought, and perceive in four dimensions, as opposed to three, we will understand tragedy differently. Perhaps from the fourth dimension, tragedy isn't tragedy at all.

Geneva felt the urge to smoke some weed and engage in some recreational contemplation of the number three. But she knew she would not. There was another impulse building inside of her, an intention that she preferred to experience from the neurochemistry of “straight.” The intention involved Rachael. Geneva's heart had pointed.

She had known it standing in Tatum's apartment with the cop. Even if Rachael were happy where she was, secure with her father, Geneva felt she had to make the offer: live with me. There is always a place to go, she wanted Rachael to know. A number to call. There is no one source of anything. No one and final source of love.

Geneva's heart felt like a reservoir with slowly rising water, and yet, she questioned her intention. Did it matter that not a day had passed since burying Ralph and she was already considering taking on another creature in need and bringing new ghosts into her ken? Was this impulse to take in Rachael a healthy one? Was she backing away from what she claimed to want, John and intimacy and being truly known? She didn't know whether it was her mind or her heart that she didn't trust. Interest was different from love. So was obligation.

She put a palm to the sky to catch a stray flake of ash. She thought of Rachael. With interest. She thought of her and felt the nerve-ending pangs of responsibility. She felt the inner reservoir and the water she knew would overflow its banks.

She was a communist when it came to love, she realized. From each according to her ability, to each according to need.

Geneva knew what she had to do. For whatever answer Lee or Rachael might have, she had to make the offer. She blinked her eyes against the smoke and particulate and felt a pang in her stomach. She thought of John and what they might have had together, just the two of them. A world with few reasons outside of themselves. But could she really lose something she barely had, or be haunted by a life never experienced?

The pang started to reach upward toward her heart. She felt an oncoming tangle of feeling. But a sudden rustling in the hedge snapped her out of herself. Voodoo burst through the bushes and raced across the yard to the patio where he leapt onto a plastic chair. Geneva walked over to where he waited.

“You've got an opinion?” Geneva said.

Voodoo stretched his neck to meet her hand. Geneva stroked him from head to rear. He looked up to her with narrowed eyes.

A cat can teach you more than a ghost,
he seemed to say.

A slow smile spread Geneva's lips.

On her patio on this smoky morning, there were no hungry might-have-beens. No black hole drawing her in. No sacrifice being made. She was moving of her own volition, and it was without obligation. Duty. Need. What had she been thinking? She was not assigning her love according to need. She loved. She stood in the state of it, and she was not alone. She loved Rachael because Rachael was there in its field. She loved John too. He was there. She knew it. She could feel it.

The answer was not Don't Look Back. It wasn't Look Forward, either.

Geneva bent down and kissed Voodoo's head.

“You're a genius,” she said, though he already knew.

Geneva headed for her back steps. She had her last sentence. Her final column. She made it halfway up the stairs when a man's voice startled her. She turned around. He was standing outside of Tatum's back door. Vincent.

Geneva sighed and came back down her stairs. Vincent had come through Tatum's apartment. He wore his confusion and pointed with his thumb over his shoulder.

“What's going on?” he said.

“She's gone,” Geneva said. “She's dead.”

Vincent's mouth opened. He dropped backward slightly and leaned against the duplex.

“She was killed,” Geneva said. She looked up at him from the bottom of Tatum's steps. “Shot. At the Deluxe.”

“I just saw her last night,” Vincent said. “I was on my way out. I was supposed to meet her back in my room,” he said. “At my room,” he said. “I was worried.”

“Yeah?” Geneva said.

“She was working with me on my book.” Vincent looked off to the side. “The Deluxe, huh.”

“It wasn't personal,” Geneva said, and Vincent looked back her way. “The shooting,” she said. “It wasn't personal. She was shot by accident. Either the gun just went off or the bullet was meant for someone else. Maybe Paris.”

“That guy.”

“That guy.”

Vincent looked down, seeming to do calculations. Geneva suspected, but wasn't sure, that his reunion with Tatum might have had to do with more than his book.

“What can I do?” he said, looking back up.

“Nothing.”

Then Geneva looked at him long. She climbed the stairs and put a hand on each side of his face. She could still see in him the ten-year-old boy she once had known. His brown eyes darted back and forth, slightly restless, looking into hers. Geneva kissed him. Affectionately. Maternally. Love, she thought.
Stand there and see who shows up.
For her, Vincent always did. Every time.

“How 'bout keeping your distance from this,” she said, letting her hands slide to his shoulders. “Leave the service to others. Let Paris and Rachael do this without you. Unless,” she hesitated, “unless, there was more going on, and uh, you need to be there.”

“I'm staying at the Red Roof Inn,” Vincent said, “if you need me.”

“In town long?”

“Hard to say.”

Geneva wondered if she should offer him the apartment. But it was too soon, and Rachael was coming.

Vincent pushed himself off the wall. Geneva hooked her arm in his, and they walked back into Tatum's apartment together.

“You deal with a lot of spirits,” Geneva said as they moved down the hall.

“Not really,” Vincent said. “There are people who do, but I just deal with the dead.”

“Well, let me ask you anyway,” she said. “Who do you think has more to teach you, a cat or a ghost?”

“Depends on the ghost,” Vincent said. “Depends on the cat. Why do you ask?” He turned to face her as they reached the front door.

“A theory,” Geneva said. “My last column.”

“You're retiring?”

Geneva nodded. Then she noticed Vincent squinting over her shoulder. She turned, following his gaze. Vincent stepped past her to the coffee table and picked up a stack of papers.

“My manuscript,” he said.

Geneva was surprised she had not noticed it. She was glad Paris hadn't either. They both had been drawn past it to the kitchen counter and the cut-out paper dolls.

“Maybe you could take a look at it sometime,” Vincent said.

“In a few weeks,” Geneva said. She put a hand on his back as they entered the foyer.

“I'm really sorry,” Vincent said at the front door.

“We all are.”

“Call my mom,” Vincent said, his way of trying to look after her.

“I do,” Geneva said. “I will.”

Vincent left, heading down the walk. Geneva watched him from the stoop. He was barely taller than Paris, but leaner. Tidier. Tighter. Geneva considered Vincent's distinctions. He did not deal with spirits. He didn't deal with the dying either. Vincent dealt with the dead, that moment in between the two that should be only a moment and yet so often managed to drag forward into time.

“Vincent,” Geneva called to him.

He turned.

“The reason a cat can teach you more than a ghost,” she said, “is because the cat's here. The ghost's not.”



Vincent walked to his Chevy Trailer King. He had sucked in his lips and nodded in response to Geneva. He thought she was trying to tell him something, to let Tatum go. He climbed into the cab and turned the key. Geneva needn't worry, he thought. There was nothing he was holding on to. Nothing to let go of. It had not escaped him that Tatum had left his motel room, left him, to go to Paris. But it didn't change the fact that for him, death always opened a new pocket of space. He felt it every time he was called. He never discussed it with anyone, his awareness of the new space.

Death didn't bother Vincent because he didn't take it in. Instead, he stepped into it. He filled the empty space. It seemed to be what people wanted.



Geneva watched Vincent walk to his car. She considered that if Rachael came to live with her, Vincent would be in and out of Rachael's life because he was in and out of Geneva's. In Rachael's world, Geneva thought, men leave, but they come back. Women never leave, and yet they seem to disappear.

But not her.

“Twenty more years,” she instructed the powers that be. That would get Rachael to almost thirty.

Vincent pulled away from the curb. Geneva turned back toward the duplex, wondering what to do about Tatum's apartment. Should she leave it for Rachael to see as it was? Only the largest items remained, and the plants, a footprint of the life that had passed through. Geneva walked to the kitchen counter and peeked into the box on its surface. Some clothes and hair do-dads. Rachael's things. Geneva picked up the green leather book also lying there to pack it with the rest but hesitated. She had been concerned about how the ripped up apartment would look to Rachael. What about the ripped out page?

Geneva opened the Book and withdrew it. She placed the two items, the book and the page, on the counter one under each hand. Why had Tatum ripped it out? Did it have something to do with going to see Paris? Was the picture somehow her suicide note?