That Night (20 page)

In those days while I waited for the real estate agents to come and lead strangers like judges through our house, empty now of all but the furniture that was to be forever left behind, I found myself recalling again my mother’s potions and formulas and earth-bound acrobatics and what they had come to; what Leela’s efforts had brought her, and Mrs. Rossi’s, what the efforts, the very lives of any of our mothers had finally come to when they looked casually over the heads of their children in the middle of a busy day and saw that even the love that had formed them would not necessarily keep them alive, and yet still I could not quiet the drone of regret that had begun to follow me in those days, the persistent, illogical belief that still, something might have saved us. If there were children, we had said, my husband and I. The very child we had not managed to keep alive. I could not quiet the thud of this old longing not merely to stop time and bring the dead back to life but to discover forever what part of love remains.

As he was about to follow the real estate agent out to the yard, I asked him, “Do you know why she moved away?” There was a coy hint of gossip in my voice that I hadn’t intended, a caution, I suppose, against seeming to remember her with too much seriousness.

“The owners?” the real estate agent asked, but Rick turned to me, his hands in his pockets. I suppose I wanted to see him blush, to see tears come into his eyes. Or better yet I wanted him to ask, “No, why?” so I could step into their little drama for the first time, finally deliver the note I’d planned to write. I could imagine putting my hand on the bare bit of wrist that showed above his pocket, under his leather sleeve, behind the ugly, uneven scarf. I could imagine telling him, “There was a child,” as if it would prove something. A child as marvelous as any one of us. “Sheryl, I mean,” I said.

His hands were in the tight, shallow pockets of his jacket. He didn’t move them as he shrugged. “Oh yeah,” he said, and what sadness was in his voice was not private, or even personal, but only an acknowledgment of what he knew we all had once shared. “I remember,” he said, and nothing more.

When they had made a quick circuit of our yard, the real estate woman climbed the steps to tell me he was interested. “But you’d have to come way down in your price,” she said.

I told her I would speak to my parents. When they’d first put the house on the market, my father had been shocked and amazed to discover what it was now worth, and for days and weeks after, he spoke only of what he had paid for the house and what it had come to be valued at, as if they were two halves of an equation that defined the extent of his success. I suppose he was prophetic in this: he died in his sleep, in the coral-colored bedroom I had not yet seen, just two months after the transfer of ownership.

She shook her head. She was an attractive woman with a small, hard mouth, a housewife returned to the marketplace now that her children were gone. She had the impatient air of someone trying to make up for lost time. “Wait on that,” she told me. “The wife’s not enthused and I’ve got some people coming by tomorrow who might be better for you. More cash on hand.” She checked her clipboard for their name and I looked beyond her to the driveway, where Rick and his wife were leaning against her car. Their children had all gathered to the window at their elbows, were putting their mouths and their noses and the tips of their fingers to the narrow opening in the glass. Through the windshield’s yellow reflection I could see someone else was sitting with them, a small, slight old woman with short cropped hair. She seemed to absorb the blows of the children’s elbows and feet as if she were lifeless.

The real estate woman named the couple she would be bringing by tomorrow—the couple who would, indeed, prove to be our buyers—and then turned to see what was happening in the back of her car. She waved her hand in the air. “Let’s watch the upholstery, dears,” she called, and then, to me, “Let me get them out of here.”

There was a general opening of the doors as she approached, and the biggest child and her mother got into the front seat beside her. Rick slipped into the back, lifting a smaller one onto his lap. As they pulled out of the drive, he glanced at her house once more. Then his wife twisted in her seat to say something and I saw him press the child’s head against his chest as he leaned forward to hear her.

When Billy Rossi died, the front doors all up and down our street remained closed. It was late winter, warm enough to go outside, but the only person I saw on the sidewalk all that long weekend was a reporter for the local paper, who climbed Mr. Carpenter’s steps, spoke briefly to him through the door and then, like a contented trick-or-treater, proceeded to Sheryl’s old house, where the no longer new owners added, “You couldn’t have asked for a nicer kid,” to the short potpourri article that appeared the next morning.

We, the neighborhood people, the mothers and fathers and teenage children (there were plenty of us by then), didn’t speak together until we met at the funeral parlor, where the carpet and the draperies, the formality of the boy’s full name—William Benedict Rossi—on the directory at the entrance and our own Sunday clothes made us all awkward at first, unable to think of anything to say. The coffin was closed, flag-draped. The picture of Billy in his uniform had been taken from the top of the Rossi’s television set and propped against the wall.

Mrs. Rossi’s black jersey dress would be costume in another year. It had padded shoulders and a wide cinch belt with a rhinestone buckle.

She’d had her hair done and wore too much perfume, almost as if she had confused anniversary dinners with this other standard of our social lives. The thick lenses of her black harlequin glasses flashed under the light, but she was not crying. She seemed instead to be dried out, scooped hollow by her grief. I don’t think any of us spoke a full sentence to her, or even a complete phrase, but she seemed to forgive us for it. She seemed, in fact, not to expect very much from any of us.

Diane stood beside her in a dark miniskirt and granny glasses, looking sullen and politically well versed, keeping us all from saying whatever inane expression came to mind. Mr. Rossi, as I remember, spent most of the wake on the front porch of the funeral home, talking with his own father, a sprightly old immigrant with dyed hair.

Later, we sat with our fathers in what had somehow been designated as the neighborhood’s two rows of folding chairs, while our mothers, who were better at this sort of thing, made a tour of the floral arrangements that lined the walls. They proceeded singly, standing before each arrangement as you might stand before a painting in a gallery, and then, briefly, as if to confirm what they already knew, checking the card. I saw them pause especially before one arrangement, even hesitate so that there was a snag in their progress, a chance for one to motion toward the card and for another, frowning, to lean forward and then whisper, her mouth and eyebrows showing surprise, What do you know?

They returned to us quietly, demurely, although there was something nearly breathless in their manner as they placed themselves in their seats and, almost simultaneously, leaned together. Apparently, they said, Sheryl’s mother still had friends or in-laws in town, someone who must have told her about Billy, maybe sent her the article.

We all turned to look at the arrangement Sheryl’s mother had sent and then I saw the men cast down their eyes, as if anticipating some compliment.

“Do you remember that night?” my mother was the first one to ask it.

“Wasn’t that some night?”

The men moved to the edge of their seats as they spoke, and the women turned to one another to nod and shake their heads. Georgie Evers sat just in front of me, and I tapped him on the shoulder and whispered, “Remember how you cried?” I saw the overflow of fleshy neck that capped his shirt collar turn bright red. (Not long after this, and no doubt because of it, he asked me to undress for him. Life, he said, was very short.) Mr. Evers raised his arm to demonstrate a grip he’d used that night. My father lifted his leg and pointed to a spot on his shin. Wasn’t that some night, we whispered. Wasn’t that some excitement?

“You know, I’ve seen him around,” Mr. Evers said, and his wife added, “Remember how he screamed?”

“Where?” I asked, but she answered, “Out on the front lawn, that night,” placing herself, as she had begun to do, between her handsome husband and whoever was young. “I think he was on LSD or something.”

“Not then,” my father said. “There wasn’t LSD then.”

“Then they just had beer,” my mother said. “And maybe pot.”

Mrs. Rossi joined us before I could ask Mr. Evers again, and we fell back into our embarrassed, inarticulate consolations. Finally, my mother mentioned the flowers.

Mrs. Rossi looked toward them. “Yeah, wasn’t that nice?” Her voice was thin and careful. “She called me up, too. Last night.” She sat down next to me and I had to lean back so the others could hear. “You know what she told me?” she whispered.

The women bent forward, eagerly, I think.

“She told me to move out of my house. That was her advice. She said, Believe me, I’ve been through it. She said if we didn’t, we’d always expect to see Billy, in his bedroom or in the kitchen or something.

We’d always be hearing him coming home at night or walking up the stairs.” She looked at us through her small, thick lenses. She shrugged and laughed a little. “I don’t know where she expects us to go.”

“That’s silly,” Jake’s mother said.

(But when we got home that evening, we would all close our front doors, turn on the television before we’d even taken off our coats. We would speak to one another in loud, nearly gay voices, aware that we were thus far free of the kind of longing that would forever haunt the Rossi’s house, that persistent, unshakable longing for an irretrievable past.)

“Did she mention Sheryl?” Mrs. Carpenter asked.

Mrs. Rossi touched her beads and held them. We had already begun to look at her differently. That future our parents had set their lives for had come to her as it had once come to Sheryl’s mother and her completeness set her apart. “Yes,” she said. “She’s married. To someone from out there. She’s got two kids and a house and all.” There was a pause during which the other women, still sitting forward in their seats, seemed to be waiting to be told something more. It was clear that they had hoped or imagined something more for Sheryl: the door flying open and filling the dirty, bloody room with hot sunlight was not miracle enough if it brought her only a life like theirs, two kids and a house and all. Not now, when the poor consequence of that life was so much before them. When the news of whatever she had gained in the time between then and now made them think only of what might be lost.

Mrs. Rossi held out her hands, the large glassy diamond and silver band, a huge blood-red ruby. The gesture seemed to say, make of it what you will. “I guess everything turned out fine for her after all.”

Pam wanted to fill her arms. She thought of flowers and candy, a huge stuffed animal—a giant panda, for instance—or even a potted plant, but in the end merely bundled up her own three children and slid them, protesting, into the cold back seat of the car.

At her parents’ house, Sheryl’s mother was already waiting by the front door. She frowned when she saw the three children and said, “One of us will have to wait downstairs with them.” But Pam walked briskly past her into the hallway and called to her own mother. She bullied her grandmother into shoes and a coat. “We’re all going,” she announced as she turned the old woman around and tied a muffler at her throat. “I think it’s important to have a crowd.”

As they’d been doing since Sheryl’s return, the three women gave in, believing that Pam, being younger or smarter or just more full of energy than any of them would ever be again, knew best. The grandmother patted her hand and softly murmured something in Polish.

Pam shouted at her, “You’ll be warm enough?” The old woman nodded, Sighing deeply. Pam could smell her sharp breath and her aunt’s sweet perfume and another fragrance that told her they both had been crying. “You’ll be all right?” she asked the grandmother. The woman continued to nod. On the wall behind her was the photograph she’d had taken when she’d first arrived in America. When she’d arrived in Ohio six months ago, she had seen it as soon as she’d entered the house and, ignoring all the other portraits of her daughters and her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren, burst into tears. It took some time before the others could discover that the word she was crying meant refugee.

“She’ll be all right,” Sheryl’s mother said for her.

Out in the car, Pam told her, “This is the last of it, Ann.” (She had dropped the “Aunt” some time this fall, recognizing her own new authority.) “Tomorrow we can begin to believe it never happened.”

Sheryl’s mother nodded. She had rented a house in a nearby suburb, and Sheryl would begin school there after the winter break. Her house back east had been sold and the furniture was on its way. She had found a job in Columbus as a receptionist. Six years from now she would tell Mrs. Rossi, Leave or you’ll always hear him coming back, because in her sister’s house she no longer woke in the middle of the night believing he was back and beside her. In the basement family room where she and her mother slept, she woke only to confirm that the floodlight still shone brightly into the yard and that her ideas about what to do with her life had not left her. That she was getting better, getting on.

At the hospital, Pam asked her mother and grandmother to stay in the car with the children and then took Sheryl’s mother’s arm as they crossed the parking lot.