Talking to the Dead Read online

  My body was somnolent, but my restive mind barked out orders to keep moving, stay awake, stay watchful. I paced on rubbery legs, longing for unconsciousness. My mind, luminously awake, sewed blindfolds of anger and forged a strong rope of despair. Bound and helpless, I spoke: “Kevin?” Only the ticking of a clock responded. I picked up a cushion from the sofa and hugged it like a lost love. “Kevin, are you there?” I waited for an eternity. I closed my eyes and concentrated on trying to hear his voice. I listened until my head hurt. The silence whistled to me.

  As the night advanced, my thoughts began to wander. I thought of Kevin, took inventory of him, touched him with my mind. His eyes, brown and sharp, taking in every detail around him. His hands, holding a pencil, flipping on a light switch, caressing my skin. His legs, thin but strong. My annual joke, spoken at the first sign of summer, when Kevin would tromp down the stairs wearing shorts for the first time in months: “Are those your legs, or are you riding a chicken?” His laugh, short bursts likes a gun firing. His scent: clean, earthy, masculine.

  I thought of sleep—so close, yet so unattainable. I thought of turning on the TV. It would be a good distraction. The news maybe. I could find out what had happened in the world since Kevin died. See who else was persisting in the face of loss, pain, grief, and confusion. But the idea crushed me. I couldn’t bear to share the planet’s burden today. I thought of food—I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I thought of cereal bowls and Kevin talking to me about cereal bowls. I closed my eyes, reliving the moment. I knew his voice. I’d spent years mapping its cadence. It was the voice that said “I do,” told me the Visa bill was overdue, and groaned my name in the middle of the night. I shivered in my warm living room. An ache, like a fist, sat in my belly. “Kevin?” Nothing.

  Tears of frustration rolled fat and useless down my cheeks. What was I expecting? I hadn’t anticipated hearing his voice in the first place. I hadn’t asked God, or the universe, or my sainted aunt for this gift. Maybe he wouldn’t speak again. Maybe it hadn’t happened at all. A small voice whispered, “It did.” I lowered myself to the floor and put the pillow behind my head. My eyes closed. Sleep came, not on a gentle breeze, but like a clout from the end of a club. I fell into its darkness thinking: I understand nothing.

  “You’ve gone and done it now,” Kevin whispers in my ear. “You’re stuck with me.” He whirls me around the edges of the dance floor, doing his best imitation of a waltz. My white gown fans out behind me as we spin. I giggle, actually giggle, so unlike me, so removed from serious Kate, this giddy woman spinning in the arms of Kevin Davis. “Kate Davis,” I say, rolling the name around my tongue. His hand is on the small of my back, pressing me close and all I want to do is run away with this man and make love to him until we are both exhausted and stupid. The thought sends volts of electricity flying through my body. Then I spot my mother, gesturing wildly at me, waving me in. She mouths words I can’t make out. Then she holds up her hands in front of her face, pretending she’s holding a camera, her index finger clicking wildly on the imaginary button. We’re wanted for photographs.

  I flick my wrist at her, but that only gets her more worked up. She begins to alternate between taking pretend pictures and waving me over in giant movements, as if she were a dockworker and I the Queen Mary.

  “Mom wants us for a picture,” I tell Kevin. Without missing a beat, he turns us toward where my parents are standing and cha-chas us over to them.

  Mom grabs my wrist, nearly yanking my shoulder out of its socket. “Great-Uncle Jonah is leaving.” She says this loudly, as if making a general announcement to the room, then she leans in and whispers, “Can’t stay up one minute past nine for anything. Not since the hernia operation. Grumpy old coot.” She throws her arms up, “Uncle Jonah, I’ve found them. Stand there and I’ll take your picture. No, there, against the wall. Just back up a few feet. Against the wall. Just move—oh never mind, that’s fine.”

  Kevin and I stand on either side of my great-uncle Jonah and smile. Dad holds up the camera, ready to click. Great-Uncle Jonah looks down at his feet.

  Mom waves her hands over her head. “Woo hoo! Look up here, Jonah. Woo hoo.”

  Uncle Jonah stares down at the floor.

  Dad says, “Close enough.” As he pushes on the button, Great-Uncle Jonah bends down and picks up a penny off the floor. He holds it up and smiles as if it were a Spanish doubloon. “Looky what I got here.” He turns to me. “My lucky day. Where’s my coat?” He toddles off down the hall and my mother holds her hands up on either side of her head and pretends to tear her hair out. Events make her nuts. She wants everything to be perfect.

  Dad shakes his head at the camera. He looks up. “Hey, I need a dance with my girl.” He holds his elbow out and I take his arm. “Sorry, sport,” he says to Kevin. “She was mine first.”

  Kevin grins. “Yep. And she’s mine now, but I’ll let you borrow her.”

  Dad’s face sort of freezes, a grin on his face that doesn’t reach his eyes. He presses his arm close to his side, squeezing my hand between. He half leads, half drags me to the dance floor. The music is a fast rock song, but Dad pulls me into a waltz and we start making a box with our feet. “Happy?” he asks. He has to yell into my ear, the music is so loud.

  I stand on my tiptoes so my mouth can reach his ear. “Yes,” I holler. “This is what I want.”

  Dad looks past me, over my shoulder, and I turn to follow his gaze. Kevin is standing beside his best man, Blair Winters. They’re laughing; Blair holds a beer bottle and takes occasional small sips from it. This is strange because I know Blair doesn’t much care for the taste of beer. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen him drink one.

  There are five women surrounding Blair and Kevin, and they are laughing. One of them snakes a hand across Blair’s shoulder and whispers into his ear. He nods and takes another fast sip of beer, his eyes darting all over the room. Another girl stands close to Kevin; she laughs at something he says. They look like a beer commercial, two handsome men surrounded by a bevy of chicks.

  Blair’s darting eyes rest on Dad and me on the dance floor. I lift a hand off Dad’s shoulder and wave. Blair holds up his beer bottle and points a finger at me, his left hand tucked low into the pocket of his tuxedo pants. The corners of his mouth go up in a nearly-there smile, then he turns away. The woman standing by Kevin puts her hand on his arm as she laughs and laughs. In all the years I’ve known Kevin, I’ve never known him to say anything that singularly hilarious. I try to drag my dad closer to them, but he spins me around, so my back is to the scene, his lips pressed together until they are white slits.

  A moment later Kevin taps my father on the shoulder. “I need my wife back.” Dad hands me over to Kevin, his face unreadable.

  I write “Kate Davis” with a flourish, but it doesn’t match the name on my credit card and the hotel desk clerk, frumpy in her brown uniform and matching bellboy hat, frowns and tears up the paper. She shakes her head at me as if I were a naughty child caught picking my nose.

  Kevin takes out his credit card and hands it to the clerk. She smiles, thrilled to do business with a reliable man who doesn’t go around changing his name and creating unnecessary paperwork for underpaid hotel clerks forced to wear cutesy uniforms. Kevin smiles and winks at me as he signs the slip. He has a sort of “I’ll take care of ya, baby” swagger in his manner as if at any moment he will doff a fedora and say, “This way, toots!”

  I should be insulted. I should put my hands on my hips and remind him which century we live in and doesn’t he know I can take care of myself and who does he think he is? But his slow smile and hooded eyes tell me he knows exactly who he is, and, in spite of myself, I feel something very close to swooning. I may hate myself in the morning, but for now, I’m all Jell-O legs and heart palpitations.

  The desk clerk, seemingly as charmed as I am, falls all over herself, “Yes, Mr. Davis, thank you,
Mr. Davis, ring if you need anything, Mr. Davis.” Kevin puts his arm around me and says, “Got all I need right here.” And I beam like a seventeenth-century Cinderella.

  Kevin is handsome in a smooth-faced way. His wide-set brown eyes and clipped brown hair give him the look of a trustworthy son, but his tall, muscular frame and broad shoulders give him a movie star feeling. Everywhere we go, people smile at him.

  Our porter is also wearing a bellboy hat that, in combination with his huge ears and mildly bucktoothed smile, makes him look like a performing monkey. He wheels our luggage to the elevator and pushes the Up button. I snuggle Kevin’s arm and sigh. I’m with Kevin in paradise. Okay, it’s not paradise; it’s Niagara Falls, the tackiest place on earth—home of heart-shaped beds, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum, and more neon signs than should ever be assembled in one place—but for me, it’s perfect.

  In our room Monkey Boy stands by the door and clears his throat. Kevin hands him money, but I can’t see how much because Kevin’s back blocks my view. I throw myself on the bed, which is disappointingly firm, and I hear the door close. Kevin stands at the bottom of the bed and smiles down at me. He jumps onto the bed and scoops me up into his arms and kisses me until I forget my name, Davis or no Davis.

  He pulls away, coming up for breath, but instead of loosening clothing or, at the very least, kicking off his shoes, he gazes out the patio doors at a cloudless sky. “This place is fantastic.” He pulls me up so I can look out too. It really is something, but watching through the all-weather windows is much like seeing it on TV with the volume off. Kevin lets out a sigh. “Let’s travel the world together, Kate. You and me.”

  I fiddle with the buttons on his shirt. I don’t answer because I know he’s just dreaming, just excited to be here, miles from home, cozying up to waterfalls. He’s talking the talk of a romantic, but he doesn’t mean it. We both know our plans. The ones we made together huddled in the backseat of his not-so-classic, two-door Monte Carlo, motor running, and risking asphyxiation for the chance to be alone for just an hour or so. We both want the same things from life: to live in Greenfield, to have four children, and own a house large enough for all of us to be comfortable. He rolls me onto my back and makes a low growling sound in the back of his throat and now none of it matters anyway. Not the dreams, not the house, not the children, not the cloudless sky.

  4

  The back door opened and closed. The sun poured into the living room. I didn’t move from my position, lying on the floor. It didn’t matter much who was entering my house. I recognized my mother’s sensible brown shoes as she walked into the room and stopped a few feet from where I lay.

  “Napping?” she said.

  “Uh, yeah, sort of. What time is it?” I asked, pushing myself up into a sitting position. Her arms were filled with books.

  “Three fifteen,” my mother said.

  “Oh man.”

  “I brought you some books,” she said. “I’m not saying you have to read them. I just thought they might be, uh, useful. Helpful.” She bent and placed the stack on the floor beside me. I picked up the top one. Finding Your Way after Your Spouse Dies.

  Your way to what? I thought.

  I eyed the rest of the stack with apathetic suspicion.

  She gestured to them. “Just a thought. No pressure.” She straightened and her eyes swept over the room. I followed her gaze. Pillows from the sofa and a cotton blanket lay limp and crumpled on the floor. A pair of jeans and Kevin’s blue dress shirt mingled with the socks I had taken off last night. A bowl of congealed yogurt sat beside a half-eaten apple on the coffee table. The debris of despondence. I realized, too, the house smelled musty. The smell that hits you when you come home after being away for a week. It must have been obvious to her that I had been camped out on my living room floor since the funeral, more than a week ago. I offered no explanation.

  My mother pressed her lips into a thin white line. I fingered a copy of Getting to the Other Side of Grief and felt a chasm open between me and my mother. Like we were castaways on separate islands, waving to each other from our beaches but unable to swim the distance to connect. I wondered what she was thinking. What she knew that she couldn’t tell me, that I’d have to find out on my own. I raked a hand through my greasy hair.

  I suddenly envied my mother. Sure, she’d lost her husband, but she’d had the luxury of time with him. Forty-three years. Kevin and I had five years. She’d raised her children with her husband by her side. My arms were empty, my womb unattended. Self-pity writhed in my chest, pushing upward until it burned my eyes. I pushed the stack of books away with my big toe.

  “Do you need anything?” she said.

  Everything. “No. Nothing.”

  She nudged the books toward me with her brown suede mules. “If you decide to look at them, start with these two.” She bent over and grabbed Experiencing Grief and The Heart of Grief. “They’re library books.”

  Alone again, I pushed the pile of books as far as I could reach. The books Mom had read after Dad died. It looked as though she had surrounded herself with books. Fortified herself against her emptying future.

  Dad. I hadn’t thought of him since before the hospital called to tell me about Kevin. Dad was sixty when he died. He had just up and died. That is what Mom said, “How could he just up and die?” Like it was his fault. In a way it was.

  Dad’s death turned him into a newspaper headline: “Man drowns trying to save boy.” It was the kind of story that makes you give up reading. Right when you get to the part that tells you how both the seven-year-old boy and his would-be rescuer were swept downriver, fated to die in each other’s arms.

  He didn’t know the kid. He and my mother had been walking by the river. He had heard the calls for help, saw the hand reaching out of the water and the brown head of hair going under. He left my mom standing on the riverbank, gaping in fear and unbelief, and threw himself into the river. And died.

  Sitting on the laminate flooring in my living room, I shuddered at the suddenness of life. Regret and sorrow bodychecked each other in my mind. A part of me wanted to call Mom, tell her I would read the books, all of them, and any others she had. To ask her how she was doing. To tell her I remembered what she had lost. To step out of the container of grief surrounding me and … and what? What did I think I could do for her? For anyone?

  We’d been close once. We used to call each other for no reason, just to touch base. She would pop into the Wee Book Inn bookstore, where I’d worked until a few weeks before Kevin died. She’d browse the shelves and wait for my break so she could buy me coffee. But Dad’s death had put a wedge between us. In her grief she stopped calling, stopped coming by the store, and I hadn’t known what to do about it, what to say. Now I understood there was little that could be said to a woman whose only desire was to see once more the face of the man she married.

  I rolled onto my hands and knees and crawled to the bookcase that held my photo albums, gripped with the sudden need to see my father’s face. I selected an old one that was filled with pictures of my parents, many of them in black and white. I was searching for one particular picture, one with Dad, at Christmas, a long time ago. I turned to the page and studied the photo. He wasn’t looking at the camera, but off to one side at something or someone beyond the frame of the picture. His mouth was wide open in an exaggerated expression of celebration. He held his left arm up above his head, his right arm wrapped around his torso. His body was at an odd angle, his right foot high off the floor.

  He’d been dancing when the picture was taken. He looked alive. Invincible. My heart contracted. Like trying to give birth to pain—to get it out of my body somehow. The album slipped from my hands and I lay down on the floor exhausted.

  “Kate,” Kevin’s voice came from above me. “The day we told your dad we were getting married, his face turned purple. I thought he was going to have a st
roke.”

  I was sure I was dreaming. The scene flickered behind my eyelids.

  “But he hugged us and yelled, ‘Wonderful!’” There was a chuckle in his voice. “You wore that red dress,” he said.

  “Red,” I mumbled.

  “Go to sleep, Kate.”

  “I am asleep,” I told him.

  5

  “The church is going to hell in a handbasket,” Margaret Cunynghame said. She’d said the same thing about the democratic process, her great-uncle Murray, and the quality of produce at the Green Market.

  Kevin had been dead for over three weeks when Maggie, as she preferred to be called, phoned to inform me she was coming over “for a good visit.”

  The church she spoke of was Greenfield Community Church, of which she was a member “in good standing.” She’d been sitting in my living room occupying our orange wingback chair for the past half hour.

  “I have no idea,” Maggie said, “why on earth they want to paint pictures of Noah’s ark all over the hallways. Animals and that sort of thing. What’s that got to do with anything?” Her eyes were large with the question. Maggie spoke in a loud and careful manner one would use if addressing the UN. Every word evenly parceled out.

  I knew little about Noah’s ark or Greenfield Community Church, so I gave a small shrug in response. Maggie was, literally, a colorful woman. While you could not determine her age with any kind of precision (more than sixty, less than one hundred), she wore clothes that could rightly be described as “too young.” Today she swathed her ample figure in a flowing, sateen shirt as yellow and bright as optimism. She paired the shirt with fuchsia polyester pants. Beside her chair sat a broad-brimmed hat the color of mulch. She resembled a giant tropical flower.