The Quick & the Dead (33 page)

“It’s around here somewhere,” J.C. whispered.

“That’s what I’m saying,” the medic said. “I’m sure it is. We’ll just get you stabilized, then we’ll start looking.”

“Couldn’t have flown far,” J.C. said, his eyes rolling whitely.

The driver started canvassing the yard in a desultory manner, having no patience at all with victims of illegal fireworks. None. Damn thing shouldn’t be so hard to find in this yard, which was very cruddily maintained.

“This your husband, Karen?” the medic asked Emily’s mother.

“No, no. Just a friend.” She smiled at the medic, then thought to reassure J.C. “We’re going to start looking for it right now, J.C.”

“Should I get a jar, Mom?” Emily said.

Her mother didn’t answer. She and the medic were heading off to the ambulance with J.C. strapped to a gurney. The driver was standing meditatively at one of the corners where the fence met itself, then thought better of it. “You got a rest room I could use?” he asked Emily. She nodded and pointed toward the house. Alone, she struck out across the dilapidated terrain. She didn’t know what the thing looked like, exactly. She guessed it had rings and was petaled sort of and squashed on top. She’d pieced this conception together from a number of sources. She would recognize it by its being there.

She saw the marble. There was the perfume bottle. Then she saw it, curled and winking on the dust by the lizard’s hole. A pretty lizard lived in there, with a big purple fan at its throat. That had to be it, Emily surmised, though it couldn’t be the whole thing. It didn’t look like it was the whole of anything. Some ants were already investigating it in the way they investigated everything, by crawling all over it. She stuck out her foot and nudged it a little. It looked pretty unexemplary. She nudged it around, then tipped it into the hole and tapped it in. It seemed a little spongy and didn’t want to go all the way in, so she ground it in.

Later that night, Emily sat at the foot of her mother’s bed, eating from a can of pumpkin pie filling that Ruth the Neighbor, beside herself with excitement, had brought over.

“He was a good man. He was attracted to me. Sometimes we had fun together. Oh, I know it wasn’t your fault, honey, I know. Knowing that is
the only thing that’s keeping me sane right now. The only thing that’s keeping everything in perspective.”

“It is?” Emily said.

“A bomb,” her mother said. “I can’t believe, a bomb.” She was rubbing cold cream into her cheeks. Emily supposed that because of the seriousness of the exceptional event just past she wasn’t using her Facial Flex, a bizarre device that she customarily placed in her mouth for five minutes just before retiring, to combat muscle sag. Emily could tell that her mother wanted more than anything to use it, but out of respect to J.C. and his first night in the hospital she wasn’t.

“Do you want me to go away for a while?”

“What a thoughtful suggestion. Maybe. Not far.”

“Mom!”

“Then don’t say things you don’t mean, Emily! I can’t even think with you tormenting me like this. I thought you meant going to bed, to sleep. If you can sleep tonight, more power to you.”

Both of them were silent, mother and daughter, neither of them thinking much about J.C. but instead of how stimulating and surprising life was. To Emily it felt a little like Christmas Eve.

“A bomb,” her mother marveled. “The world has entered our lives.” She screwed the lid back hard onto the cold cream. “I know you never thought he hung the moon, honey, but I have needs.”

Though Emily wished that she herself had needs, all she could manage was colleagues, which, being as she didn’t even want them, didn’t come close to resembling needs.

“I’m just afraid that after this, people are going to think we’re kind of unwholesome,” her mother said. “This must not be made the centerpiece of our lives. I don’t want you to think of yourself as being bad or peculiar.”

“You mean strange?”

“We mustn’t be discouraged, Emily. Did you get a chance to talk to that nice medic today? He’s terribly nice. I met him in that class I took. He came in and gave a little slide show on the dangers of not knowing what to do in an emergency. Maybe when things settle down a bit, we’ll all go to the movies together.”

“I don’t like the cinema, Mom, you know I don’t.”

“Well, then, he and I will just have to go by ourselves, won’t we?” her mother said.

Emily finished the pie filling. Her mother continued to speak about the medic, who preferred to be referenced by his last name rather than his first. She said she liked this trait in a man.

Emily assumed that John Crimmins was in the past and was glad of it. Would she be required to send him a get-well card? Her mother looked tired and unhappy and confused but then she reached for the Facial Flex, which was in what she called her jewel box on the bedside table. There were no jewels within, but Emily knew that the device with its tiny rubber bands was special, slowing time’s progress on a personal level, her mother having told her as much in a more carefree moment. Her mother slipped the thing into her mouth, arranged her jaws, and sighed.

T
he portion of the dresser that Annabel had made into a little memory square looked bereft now that the paper napkin had left it. That napkin had lent the scene some sincerity. Alice couldn’t imagine where that violent sneeze had come from.

She was all right now. For a while she had saved, quite inappropriately, those stupid cigarette butts of Sherwin’s. But when they started looking like everyone else’s stupid cigarette butts, she threw them away. She couldn’t have distinguished them from someone else’s if her life depended upon it. Love was funny, the way it came and went. She gnawed her knuckles and looked at the orphaned items on Annabel’s blueberry-colored bureau, which now, because of her, seemed unable to transcend their nature. The sad thing was that Annabel had really tried with this, the tackiest notion in the room. Everything else was so tasteful, so perfect, the result of serious, practically pathological consumer coding. This assemblage had perhaps been Annabel’s first tentative clumsy baby step toward appreciating something larger—in this case, reductively, death, but with some work maybe something grander, like real life—and Alice had inadvertently, spontaneously messed it up.

Annabel returned and went directly to the bureau. Without a glance at its unevocative surface she pulled open a drawer and took out a beige cashmere sweater. She removed the one she was wearing, the gray one. Rather, it was shale. She didn’t have gray. She didn’t have beige either. God,
beige
. What were they thinking of back then? Ecru. It was ecru. Changing sweaters always soothed Annabel.

“Daddy thinks Mommy visits him in his room,” she said. “He thinks she’s in there now.”

Alice was relieved she was still speaking to her. “Why doesn’t your mother come in here?” she said. “Did you ask her to?”

“She won’t see me. I mean, I guess she sees me, but she won’t let me see her. I don’t think Mommy ever liked me. She was in love with Daddy.”

“You weren’t one of those awful children who were always asking, ‘Who do you love more? Me or Daddy? Me or Mommy?’ were you?”

“Maybe,” Annabel said. “Maybe I was.” Though she had never truly dared. It would have been too horrible to know, and alarming either way.

“Well, you’re paying for it now.”

“You are incapable of empathy with another human being, aren’t you, Alice? You must lack a gene. You’re just kind of abnormal. You’re like a fifth child or something.”

Alice was not offended.

“Your desert is so creepy,” Annabel went on. “I don’t even like the clouds out here. I think they’re creepy too.… This would never happen back home.”

“The desert has a tradition of very fine clouds,” Alice said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why is she here and not here? It’s not right. Have you noticed how much weight Daddy’s lost? It’s like he’s being
drained
.”

“Why can’t your mother just stay around if she wants? What’s so awful about that?”

“This is not Latin America,” Annabel said coolly.

“What does Latin America have to do with it?”

“In Latin America these things happen, but not here. Didn’t you ever have to read any of their novels in school? It’s because their culture is oppressed or suppressed or something.”

This sweater was coral. And this one was dusk. She had never thought dusk especially flattering, at least with her coloring.

“This is an interesting thing that’s happening to you,” Alice suggested.

“It’s not happening to me at all. It’s happening to my mother.”

“How does she look?” Alice asked.

“You are so morbid.”

“What does your father say? What does she do? Does she say anything? Can you remember what your mother’s voice sounds like?”

“Her voice?”

“The last thing you forget is a person’s voice. The next-to-last thing is the sound of their footsteps. Their tread.”

“Tread? Nobody treads.”

“The next-to-the-next last thing is …”

“You are not an expert on this, Alice. No one ever died for you. I don’t mean died
for
you, of course, that would be preposterous. I mean died in your personal experience. You didn’t even know your mother. You’re not even entitled to discuss these matters with me, if you want to know the truth. The thing is, if my mother insists on staying here I’ll never have my own destiny. What happens to me will still be part of my mother’s destiny. That’s not natural.” Annabel stopped fluffing and stacking her sweaters and paused dramatically in thought, Alice assumed that’s what it was, then began determinedly to pick apart the memory square. “Do you want this lipstick?” she asked.

Alice shook her head.

“I don’t even think it’s Mommy’s hair in this brush. I’m remembering she used it to clean the backseat of the car. She hated the backseat and was always worrying about it, like who Daddy had given a ride to. He was always giving rides to all sorts of people, particularly in the rain. She used to spray the backseat with
poison
, practically. And photographs where somebody’s cut out, that looks so dumb, you know? I never realized before how stupid that looks.” Annabel dumped everything into a wicker wastebasket and placed a piece of stationery over it.

The room had its equilibrium back, its sterile calm.

“I have to find another way to grieve,” Annabel said.

“I think you’ve passed through the grieving process,” Alice said. “I think you’re in the clear.”

“Both of them are crazy, they always were.”

“Who?” Alice said cautiously. “Mommy and Daddy?”

“Mommy and Daddy, right. I have to take a nap now. Come back later, okay, much later? You can come back later.”

Alice walked a mile down to the intersection where the bus stop was. Annabel was one of those people who would say “We’ll get in touch soonest” when they never wanted to see you again. Alice expected to hear those words any day now. She didn’t know why she spent so much
time at Annabel’s house. The house meant something to her, she couldn’t get enough of it. It was already like some stupid memory of a happier time, a time that she could look back on as belonging to someone who was not quite Alice yet. She had felt a beat off all summer—just an hour off her real life, a year or two, maybe a few hundred miles. She wished she could be
outside
, in the world, but not of it. Still, being outside was very much like being at the bus-stop intersection where the desert and its flitting birds had been transformed into four identical Jiffy Lubes, one on each corner, none seeming more popular or desirable in terms of patrons than another.

The bus bench was empty, but someone had left a portion of newspaper behind.
VOLCANO BURIES 450 IN GUATEMALA
, a smallish headline announced discreetly. Alongside the article was a large advertisement for a toenail fungus cure. Didn’t people at the newspaper ever think of propriety and balance? Alice irritably stuffed the newspaper into a bulging trash receptacle.

She waited. After a moment or two she realized, realized fully, that she was waiting for the bus. This seemed to her the ugliest folly. She could always use Corvus’s truck to visit Annabel, or indeed to go anywhere, but she wanted it available for Corvus. She fervently wished that her friend would want to use the truck, but she was in one of her sleep marathons, rising only to go to Green Palms. She slept lightly with her eyes open, causing Alice to suspect she wasn’t sleeping at all but traveling somewhere terrible, following narrow, colored paths to multicolored lakes, all to the sound of jungles burning, waves crashing, mountains collapsing, horrible phenomena leaping out, frightful figures, masses of light—all Bardo bluff and all awful, with the added disadvantage that Corvus was alive while she was experiencing this, not only alive but just sixteen and a half years old. To experience Bardo normally, a person was supposed to be dead. Being dead would give a person some protection from this scary stuff, even though the whole point of the Bardo state, as Alice had struggled to understand it, was that it was just as illusory as life’s little activities and memories were. Maybe Corvus was just trying to speed things up so that when she did die at a respectable age—thirty, say—she would’ve done all her Bardo time and could just slip into that thing that had no beginning and no end, which Alice couldn’t grasp at all
and didn’t sound all that fabulous, either. She just wished she could keep Corvus from sleeping so much. When she got home she’d make her eat a Popsicle or something. A Popsicle at the very least.

A bus drew up to the curb, the door opened, and the driver called down, “You going to the Wildlife Museum?”

Alice shrank back. “I certainly am not!”

“It’s Appreciate the Variety of World Wildlife Day. They’re running special buses. The museum’s the only place this baby goes. If you want to go someplace else, you’ll have to wait another five minutes.”

“I’d like to blow that place up!”

The driver grinned, then took a small camera from his pocket and snapped her picture. “I’ve received over one thousand dollars by providing the police with tips just on what I overhear on my route.” He shut the door, waved, and passed through the light just as it changed from yellow to red.