Shaking out the Dead (4 page)

“I love you,” Lee said to Rachael, then pressed his lips together and nodded.

Tatum watched his “I love you” hit Rachael like an egg hits a windshield. Splat. Drip. Only the insult reaches the intended victim behind the glass.

“Take care,” Tatum said to Lee, across the roof of the car. Kind, quick words. She hoped they excused her from anything more effusive. She swung into the driver's seat and looked sidelong at Rachael. Her expression was flat. Tatum wanted to say something that would let her know that she wasn't in on the bogus “I love you.” People should be arrested when they use an “I love you” to cover their crimes, Tatum thought. It devalues it for everybody else.

Tatum turned the key in the ignition and hit the wipers to clean the window. She fake-smiled at Lee, sliding past his Audi parked on the wide drive. He waved sadly, and Tatum thought his pants might burst into flames. Liar. She wondered if he was lying even to himself.

Driving through genteel suburbia, Tatum stole glances at Rachael's profile. Steel, it seemed, was building up behind her doll-like features, giving the impression of maturity. But it was not maturity. It was pain. Sad that one could be mistaken for the other. It made Tatum want to believe, for Rachael's sake, that it was possible that Lee truly did love her, given what love might mean to him.

But no, she decided, as they pulled onto the expressway and drove west. He couldn't love her. Love was not subjective. Love would be unmistakable.

The Celica kept pace with the fast cars zigzagging across lanes to make their exits. City trains rumbled on tracks parallel to the highway. Rachael and Tatum were silent as they left the city and set forth through the flat Midwest. Traffic loosened, and naked trees stood unashamed against the pale sky. Rachael's expression remained flat as the landscape. Tatum suspected, though, that down deep in her psyche where there are no words, molten, rocky notions of love oozed. What it is. What it isn't. Notions that over the years and decades would simmer, rising to the surface in adulthood, cool and hard, as a disdain for love and for the people who claim it as they strap you down and blast you out of their orbits.

Somewhere between Davenport and Des Moines, they stopped for lunch at the Happy Chef. Tatum and Rachael sat in a booth against large windows that looked out to the front bumper of the car. Tatum rested an elbow on the stainless steel ledge while Rachael reviewed the menu. Tatum tried to think up some conversation, a compelling question, too interesting or provoking to be ignored. A soft-fleshed girl with over-plucked brows delivered glasses of ice water and then took their orders. Rachael ordered cooperatively, competently. She handed the menu to the waitress and retreated back into silence. Tatum ordered coffee and then returned to searching the landscape beyond the window, a parking lot, alas, for something to point out or comment upon.

But it was Rachael who broke the silence.

“Where's Nebraska?” she said.

“Montana,” Tatum answered, knowing what Rachael meant. “We're going to Montana.”

Rachael looked out the window.

“My dad said I was going to Nebraska.”

Your dad's a big dumb ass, Tatum thought.

“No,” she said, “he meant Montana. I live in Montana.”

Rachael's concern was obvious, her tether to what was left of her family in doubt. There had been no doubt for Tatum as to whether she would take custody of Rachael, whether it was for a week, for months, or forever. But now here they were, and Tatum was like any new parent, substitute or not, with a new life brought into the rhythms of her own life, changing it, even steering it, from the start.

The waitress returned with the coffeepot and Rachael's soda. Tatum leaned back as the waitress filled her cup. Rachael did not acknowledge her soda, and when the waitress left, Tatum leaned across the table and touched Rachael's hand.

“Don't worry,” Tatum said. “He just used the wrong name. He knows where you'll be. He has my phone number.”

Rachael withdrew her hand slowly and wiped the slime of Tatum off on her sleeve.

Tatum knew Rachael's life was reshaping just as her own was, the reality of it sinking in for both at a Happy Chef in Iowa. It was a new world for both of them, but Tatum was aware that she was a volunteer, whereas Rachael, most decidedly, was not.

They were silent again until the waitress returned with Rachael's burger and fries. Rachael looked down at her food but didn't touch it.

Just as Tatum had poked Rachael back in her bedroom, she reached across the table now and stole a french fry from Rachael's plate. Tatum pointed with the fry.

“It's a good thing we're going to Montana and not Nebraska,” she said.

Rachael's eyes followed her french fry to Tatum's mouth.

“Nebraska's a bad deal,” she said, munching Rachael's fry. She took a tiny, plastic cup of half & half from the bowl on the table. “Do you know about coffee?” Tatum asked, tearing open the cup and pouring it into her mug.

Rachael said nothing.

“A cup of coffee can pin down a moment in time like a photo on a fridge.”

Rachael took the straw from her soda and laid it carefully on her plate, creating a cootie-resistant barrier between the hamburger and contaminated fries.

Tatum tossed the plastic cup aside, picked up her spoon, and stirred.

“In Nebraska . . . ” she started.

Rachael stared at her plate. Tatum waited.

“In Nebraska . . . ” Tatum said, again.

Tatum kept her voice patient and pleasant. She kept saying “In Nebraska . . . ” until Rachael looked up, clearly annoyed.

“In Nebraska,” Tatum said, she paused this time for dramatic effect, “I tried to kill myself.”

Rachael's face did not change.

“How come you're not dead?” she said. She took the top of the bun off her burger and ate the pickle below.

Tatum thought Rachael starting in on her food was a good sign, so she went on.

“I took a bunch of pills,” Tatum said. “I thought they would make me go to sleep and die but instead I just barfed like crazy all night and ended up alive.”

Rachael twisted her mouth like she wasn't buying it.

“It's true,” Tatum said. “I still remember how cold the bathroom floor was. I lay there all night, throwing up every ten minutes or so. I tried a couple of times to make it to the bed to grab a blanket, but walking made me have to throw up even worse, and I couldn't make it to the bed in time to grab a blanket before I was back with my face in the toilet.”

Rachael's brows lifted slightly. The idea of Tatum's face in a toilet seemed to please her.

Tatum sipped from her mug and looked out at the parking lot. She recalled the cool bathroom linoleum and porcelain bowl, the sweating and the not knowing whether she had failed or whether this was what dying was. Her stomach had rung itself out over hours, twisting, it seemed, like a towel, the pressure throwing everything upward, vomiting the vapors of bile when there was nothing else left.

By 4:00 a.m., Tatum had pegged herself for spared. Exhausted. Dehydrated. But not dead. She managed to crawl out of the bathroom and find her way to the bed. She sat on the floor, leaning against the drab, olive-colored spread. Her skin felt stretched tight over her bones. Her own wrists looked to her bird-frail. She had no fat, no fuel. No source from which to draw. Pared down to organs, bones, and a layer of muscle as thin as a sheet, she could feel her heart, a clear vessel that was perfectly empty. It felt transparent. Made of glass. She had struggled up from the floor.

Tatum then left her motel room to find coffee. All she could find, though, was a drop-and-fill vending machine in the hall near the lobby. It was a wonder, she had thought, dropping dimes through the slot, that in a world of lattes, cappuccinos, and breves that such a machine still existed. It was like finding a rack or shackle on a prison wall. A thing we'd decided as a society was no longer humane.

She pressed the rectangular button that no longer lit up. The cup dropped, and the florescent lights in the ceiling hummed. The machine choked and then released a pathetic drizzle of caffeine. For a moment, Tatum wondered if she had succeeded, that she was dead and didn't know it, and that this was hell's lobby.

“Nebraska.” Tatum sighed the word aloud in the booth of the Happy Chef.

“If I were dead,” Rachael said, “I'd be with my mom.”

Tatum looked at Rachael. Her head was cocked in what seemed feigned innocence. Something in Rachael's inflection and expression made Tatum think Rachael was testing waters, being purposely provocative to discover what sort of reaction was available.

“No,” Tatum said. “Not if you killed yourself. If you kill yourself, you don't get to see anyone you knew when you were alive.”

“Says who?” Rachael said.

“Says the rules.”

Then they regarded each other, frankly and stubbornly.

“So, you wouldn't have seen anyone you knew if you died that night,” Rachael said.

“I didn't want to see anyone,” Tatum said.



Geneva never left Amsterdam. After mornings spent in her hotel room reading and looking out over white roofs and clotheslines, she'd take the short walk to a bar called Blues. She spent the hours there smoking hash and drinking in the musk of the young, unbathed boy with tight, dark curls — twenty maybe — who tended bar. Lean, he moved with the grace of a girl and the ease of a child, gliding among the tables, gears all well oiled. An incense of hand-rolled cigarettes lightly dusted his new man smell, pleasantly corrupting it. He walked, rag slung over his shoulder, back and forth from the front of the bar to the rear, retrieving dirty glasses from behind pool tables and from oiled mahogany ledges. Geneva imagined a dog sniffing the spot where the young man's foot peeled off the cracked and dirty tiles.

The sun blared over Dam Square, but Geneva parked herself in the bar where it was dark and music videos of American blues artists played in the same loop every afternoon. If she sat there long enough, she could hear Dr. John and Etta James sing “I'd Rather Go Blind” twice. So much for Frankfurt. So much for Versailles. This had been her fifth trip abroad in two years, and now she knew that she was done. At heart, Geneva was not a tourist. She didn't need more vacations. She needed more life.

For the past two weeks, Geneva had been eyeing her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. At sixty-two years old, she knew time was not on her side. She could pass for fifty on a good day, she thought, but nonetheless, she knew her good days were numbered, just as she had known at twenty-six that her smooth skin and gravity-defying features were on loan. While still in her youth and prime, she had chosen to let go of her looks before they left on their own. It's not that she ceased the grooming and upkeep on what God gave her. She was just careful not to count on it.

She intended to be ready for the next stage, too, the next round of loss. When she became an elderly woman — white-haired, shrunken — she knew she would lose more status, more attention, more “can I help you's?” from store clerks. One doesn't become a ghost overnight. It is a gradual path to a gray blur. Not a potential sex partner. Not a danger. Not likely wearing an enviable pair of boots. People's eyes move on to find something more interesting. There was no one to blame. Geneva thought it might even be biological. We notice what we need to notice — opportunities, threats.

The flight back to Montana was uneventful, just as one wishes a flight to be. Geneva looked through the fogged window of her taxi at the familiar stoplights and intersections. They were unchanged by her absence and, she thought, might say the same of her. But what can we tell from the surface, she thought? Some minds cover more ground on a trip from the sofa to the john than others do on a trip around the world.

She pulled her earphones down around her neck.

“It's the next right,” she said to the cabby. “Second duplex on the left.”

She repositioned the earphones. Five years ago, she would have never worn earphones in a cab. But now, rudeness and prudence be damned. Geneva remembered how she had shunned the Walkman when it first came out. The walkers, joggers, and cyclists tooling around cut off from a key physical sense struck her as engaged in ill-advised displays of bravado. There are reasons why we don't leave our houses blindfolded or fight with one hand tied behind our backs. Why risk being deaf to the hollered “watch out” and the blaring horn of the brakeless bus careening toward the storefront window?

But Geneva had submitted, been sold, and now, like others, had closed the loop between her mind and her ears. And in that orbit, in the cab, she listened to “Fixing a Hole” by the Beatles. She hoped the song would end just as she arrived at her door. She wanted the soundtrack to her trip to end poetically, cleanly, in a fading track.

It was hard to believe that it was twenty years ago when she'd first heard the song she listened to now. She and her husband, Ralph, had lived in Tucson. She had picked up
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band
while record shopping for
Whipped Cream
by Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass. She had heard the Beatles' pop hits on the radio and on impulse bought their new release. Halfway through the second song — “With a Little Help from My Friends” — she had hauled a kitchen chair into the living room and, for the first time in her life, listened to music. It wasn't background. She wasn't dancing. She sank from the chair to the floor. Lennon's voice was a tuning fork. Inside of her, something vibrated.

She played it for Ralph when he got home. He said, “Pretty weird.”

Geneva thought they would divorce for sure. How could they go on when he didn't understand this thing, this thing she didn't understand either, but a thing that for her changed everything?

The following morning, she couldn't get dressed in her own closet. She didn't feel like, nor want to be, the person who had purchased this dress or that bag. Her can of hair spray struck her as ridiculous. The blush she had used every day since seventeen now seemed clownish. Absurd. She sat on the closed toilet lid holding a can of AquaNet and crying.

She stopped cruising cosmetic counters and attending white sales. She crawled through record bins like a roach, her fingertips divining rods. She read the backs of albums, the liner notes, bought bands she had never heard of based on intuition alone or a producer's name she recognized. There are parts of the psyche that are preconscious, floating in limbo, waiting to be charmed from their dark basket by the right string of notes, the right rhythms or chords. A self Geneva didn't know was coaxed to the surface. The Grateful Dead. Blind Faith. Canned Heat. One led to another, loaves and fishes stretching both forward and backward in time. Waylon Jennings. Louis Jordon. Professor Longhair. In '74, she picked up Lou Reed's
Rock
'
n
'
Roll Animal,
and it started all over, a new turn on that same spiral. Iggy Pop. The Modern Lovers.

She was changed, and Ralph didn't seem to mind, which Geneva thought was more than you could say for most husbands. Of course it also might have been that he hadn't noticed.

The cabby hit the wipers and Geneva scrunched her mouth to the side in private thought remembering how, despite her growing music collection, Ralph always chose the music if he was home or the radio station if they were in the car. His favorites were unmemorable songs that would never become Muzak because they were Muzak already. “Krab” for the ears. What really got under her skin, though, was that Ralph thought the music was
them
. Thought when he played it, he was putting on something
they
enjoyed.

But she saw Ralph's pleasure in believing it, and she didn't want, under any circumstances, to diminish Ralph's pleasure. It was not what she signed up for.

The taxi pulled to the curb. She read the meter from the back seat and added a two-dollar tip. She stepped onto the front walk. It was slippery from the sleet. The cab pulled away and “Fixing a Hole” faded out. Geneva snapped off the Walkman and pulled the earphones to her neck. The chill in the air felt more fall than winter, but her fingers felt cold wrapped around the handle of her bag. It was nearly midnight, and the neighbors' windows were dark, all except for Ron's, next door. His light was on, and she could see his bearded profile as he crossed his living room. Ron fought to keep local schools open and fought developers to maintain open space. He put flyers in people's doors offering workshops in recycling and organic gardening. His eyes were quick and intelligent. His belly, soft and paunchy.

Ron brought Geneva snap peas and rhubarb from his garden in the summer and, come winter, occasionally shoveled her walk. He was a retired, revolutionary librarian who claimed the Dewey decimal system should be abolished, that it served only to obstruct the public's access to knowledge. Geneva had asked him once, thinking she was being funny, if he had ever burned Mr. Dewey in effigy. Without missing a beat, Ron told her no but said that in younger, wilder librarian days, he and some librarian comrades had made a Melville Dewey piñata for Cinco de Mayo.

Geneva suspected that Tatum and herself next door in their duplex were a disappointment to Ron. They never showed up for city council meetings or school board elections. Still, he never gave up on them.

Ron's light blinked out and Geneva flinched, just then noticing on his lawn the three deer from the urban herd watching her with minimal interest and zero alarm. Some of them were second and third generation, knowing nothing but city life. They feared no man nor dog. Upon finding one's tulips headless and young trees stripped of bark, they were vermin. But staring back at you through the night and the wet shimmer of November, they were enchantment itself.

Geneva headed up the walk, her steps deliberately slow. The scent of wood smoke, earthy and as comforting as the musk of a young man, snaked invisibly among the trees and houses, the smell speaking to the ancient in her genes. She surveyed the front yard as she stepped. The leaves had matted, and the ground fell sleepy under their brown blanket. Geneva sighed as she felt something inside of her unfurling. A tension she didn't know she was holding began to release. Airplanes, hotels, big cities — she never realized the way they tended to bunch her up in both body and spirit until she reached home. The neighborhood was quiet. Surely, there was traffic and distant train whistles and electrical hums, but the silence underneath it all ran deeper. The silence was what Geneva heard.

At the front door, she checked her mailbox, even though Tatum had been collecting the mail. Then she dug in the outside pocket of her bag for her keys, her fingers seeking their mundane familiarity. She turned the key in the lock and entered the hall between apartments and, by intuition, could tell that Tatum was not home.

She entered her own apartment, closing the door behind her.

Ralph
, she thought, as though encountering him, registering his presence. But Ralph had never lived in the duplex. Only Geneva's responsibility for him.

All was as she had left it. Her cluttered desk hadn't straightened itself. A wall of ancient albums on dusty shelves built with one-by-eights and concrete blocks had retained its sooty charm. Geneva dropped her one bag and looked at her blinking answering machine. Everything in the room called her home.

“Voodoo,” she called, wondering if the cat was in.

No response.

Geneva went to her answering machine and pulled off her Walkman and set it on the desk. She paused with her finger above the play button. Did she want to know? Did she want to answer the call of duty and administrative function that the blinking light seemed to imply? The thought of it was almost overwhelming. Geneva's mind could readily accommodate reflection on potential cosmic relationships among disparate disciplines, but filling out a form for a supermarket check card was enough to ruin an afternoon.

Get it over with, she thought, and went to hit the button when she noticed the note. It was from Tatum. She had gone to Illinois. Paris was looking after Voodoo. Tatum's sister, Margaret, was sick.

Geneva didn't know Margaret, not firsthand. But she did know that Margaret and her husband and daughter were all the family Tatum had and that cancer hunted Tatum's people with the fierceness of a vendetta. Tatum had told her that Margaret hated her, but claimed she didn't mind. “It's not her fault,” Tatum had said, “it's just a family thing.”

Geneva dropped the note in the wastepaper basket and turned to the pile of accumulated mail. Geneva sorted, tossing junk into the trash and opening the manila envelope from the
Mountain Messenger
. It was letters for her next column. She answered three letters per week and got paid twenty bucks per. It wasn't that she needed the sixty bucks. It was that she liked being tied to the community in some official capacity on her own terms. Her column was called Belinda's Discount Kissing Booth. It offered camp disguised as advice, or advice disguised as camp. Belinda's true identity was relatively secret.

She pulled a letter from the envelope.

“‘My abusers,'” Geneva said aloud, the expression striking her as strangely humorous. Why not call them ‘those jerks'?
And forgiveness? She tossed the letter across her desk.

“Can't help you,” she said. “I'm post forgiveness.”

Geneva had run her laps around the counseling, self-help, and new age track. She was well schooled in the importance of forgiveness to one's spiritual achievement. In her quest to do better on the forgiving front, she had once asked Tatum whether she forgave Margaret and Vincent for the pain they had caused her. Tatum told her that she didn't forgive either one of them because there was nothing to forgive.

“People are who they are,” Tatum had said. “They love who they love. A person can't control that. You shouldn't have to apologize for it.”

Geneva was not inspired. But still, she tried. She tried to forgive the rude store clerks, bad drivers, and the car salesman who sold her a lemon thirty years and two vehicles past. She tried to forgive her husband for being sick and forgive the loss of a decade as she cared for him, watched his spirit leave his body while some shred of a thing tenacious and meager hung on. What was left to be so stubborn, she wondered? Or was it more an issue of the spirit being somehow snagged, unable to disengage itself?

Five years ago, she had checked him into a nursing home. She tried to forgive herself for institutionalizing him, even though by then he'd been so-called dying for nearly seven years.