Dust of Eden (8 page)

Of course, that could be good.
 
Because if he had forgotten Danielle Kramer, maybe she would have a chance with him now. (
Why don't I paint myself younger?
) Or, was this just an ancient hurt to her pride too absurd to rectify?

She wanted to be humble, and that was the paradox. Because it was pride that demanded she be humble. The potential to look like a mad egoist out for tyranny and revenge was obvious. Ariel the leper in charge of things. Pay her lip service, pay her tribute – an altar here, a statue there. But that wasn't what she wanted. What she wanted was to be worth something. Molly said they were grateful, but they weren't.
…as easy for you as Jesus Christ.
They were afraid.
Fear thy God.
She didn't want their fear. Only fundamentalists and fanatics used fear and took it on themselves to act as proxies for God. You could create the illusion of love, but you would never really have it if you forced it out of fear.

"Do you remember me, Kraft?"

He stared back blankly.

"I'm Ariel. We used to be friends."

"I don't remember you."

"Who
do
you remember?" She looked hard into his eyes. "If you could have anyone you ever knew here right now, Kraft, who would it be? Tell me. Don't be afraid. I can bring people back. Tell me who you want."

His eyes remained rigid and impenetrable to her. He could be thinking she was insane, she thought, or he could be hating her.

"Who do you want, Kraft? Your mother? Your brother? Give me a name, and if it's someone I have a photo of, I'll paint them back." She had lots of photos of Danielle buried with the others in a wicker basket upstairs. "Remember how I used to take pictures, Kraft? All of our gang. I always took the pictures. That's why I'm not in very many of them. You always asked
me
to take the pictures."

She plucked a thread from the sleeve of his shirt, brushed his shoulder.

"Just say the name of anyone you want, and I'll deliver him—or her—to you, Kraft. Now or never."

He wet his lips. "I can't remember anyone."

She really should paint herself younger.

But if she did, what would happen to her body? Would she still be there, dead, like Amber slumped in her wheelchair?
 
Now, that would get everyone's attention. Dropping like a fly, a little terror in the parlor.
Fear thy God
. . . .

She wished she had gone to Amber's funeral, seen the body. But how could she when she had to take care of the nine-year-old reincarnation of the forty-four-year-old corpse? "I'm too upset," she had told her son-in-law and grandson. There was no love lost between them anyway, and they hadn't tried to persuade her to attend, and except for Christmas cards there had been no further communication. She had considered taking nine-year-old Amber to her own funeral—who would recognize her?—but she had feared that Amber might become hysterical. Later, when she actually took the child to her own grave site, it became apparent that the fear was unfounded.

"Is that me?" Amber had asked, staring down at the cold stone.

"No."'

"Yes, it is."

"That was who you'll become, if you're foolish again."

The rosebud mouth tightened and the stare locked. "What was I like?"

"You were partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair."

"But what was I like? Didn't I have a life?"

"You sat. You waited to die. You couldn't climb things anymore and you were unhappy."

The thought that if she did paint herself younger she would have to bury herself, struck Ariel as absurdly comic at first. But as she pictured the details of dragging her own body out of the house and into the woods, she became terrified and disgusted. What would her cold flesh feel like? Would her clothes become torn in the dragging, her hair raked wildly in every direction? Without a coffin, the hole would have to be deep to keep animals from unearthing her. Would she be able to arrange the body in the grave? And most of all, would she be able to forget raining clods of dirt down over her own face and form?

"Paint me again," her husband, Thomas, pleaded that very night. "Paint me with legs."

"I'd have to get rid of the body you have now."

"I'll bury myself if you paint me with legs."

"What was it like to be dead?" she asked urgently. "Are the bodies still in the graves?"

"Paint me whole and I'll tell you."

"No, thank you. I've already lived that life."

"You're insane."

"Careful, careful."

D
enny Bryce rehearsed it all evening and in the dawn. The delivery. The four words. And each repetition sounded more like a lie. Finally he said it to his father: "Let's go see Mom."

The old man sat in his chair—the recliner throne about to be abdicated—and his eyelids pulsed without opening. "She's in the kitchen."

"No, Dad. She died, remember? You were at her funeral."

The eyes opened, the head came up. Martin Bryce gasped as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Beth dead. The terrible reprising of shock, tension knotting at the bridge of his nose, his lips spreading in a grimace to contain the pain. "I forgot," he said apologetically, and Denny stroked his silver hair.

"It's okay, Dad. It's okay. I meant her grave. Let's go visit her grave."

He felt lower than a scavenger, as despicable as a bully. His faithful, hardworking, dependable, trusting father.
Throw him out, Denny. Take away his house, the only thing he has left, the citadel of his memories. Let me see you do that.

"While we're out, I'll show you some things. . . . Okay? Okay, Dad?"

Nod.

He isn't listening. Tell him, but don't tell him. Soothe your guilty conscience. He doesn't understand. But you can pretend he did.

He had never lied to his father in these latter years. Never manipulated him. Not since high school. He had told him straight up what the medical prognoses were for his mother, for the old man himself. He had told him the truth about his sister, Tiffany, when she had committed suicide seven years earlier. Wretched Tiffany, who at age forty-seven had finally tired of fighting drugs and depression. He could have said it was an accident or a medical thing—God knows she had enough wrong with her—but he hadn't. Why let his parents doubt? He had told them. Told them everything on his almost daily visits. Investments, mortgage, insurance, repairs, scams, health—everything. More than they understood or needed to know; but they listened in order to hear him taking care of them, like he always did, mowing the lawn, shoveling the drive, plunging the toilet, changing the screens, raking the leaves. Acts of love to which his parents were happy spectators as well as recipients. How grateful they were, and it was sometimes hurtful to see that—as if they were surprised that he should give back to them. So, above all, they trusted him.

"What do other old people do who don't have a son like you?" his mother would say.

Nothing she had ever given him—and she had given him everything—could be as important as those words.

And now the great betrayal. Why couldn't he just sit down on the couch and tell the old man that the Twins were still leading their division? "They'll blow it," his father would say, and he would take his mother's role of optimism and remind him of the World Series victory in '91. Then they could just go on like that. Small talk forever.

"Guess we'd better get going, Dad. Do you have to go to the bathroom?"

Martin stood in the living room, breathless from having donned his sweater. It was summer, but he was always chilled. He shook his head, moved his lips as though he wanted to say something else.

"Do you want your hat?"

“No.”

"Okay, then."

What he really meant was, Say farewell to your life. Say good-bye to the house you're never going to see again. Walk away from every semblance of your life, the old familiar things, the artifacts, the sacred surfaces that Beth and Tiffany touched a million times and that will be profaned by the next garage-sale shopper, or the next owner of the house, or the sanitation engineer when he leaps out of his truck to make the heave. That was what he meant to say.

And through the opacity of his father's expression, there came just a glint for a moment. Not a doubt, really, but a question. Denny turned away and pulled the door open against the swollen jamb, trying in vain not to stir the clapper in the little bell his mother had hung there.

Then came the slow, unsteady journey onto the steps, his father groping for the grab post Denny had installed on the porch (four lag bolts—see how much I love you?), shuffling down the sidewalk, stopping for breath, opening the car doors, moving the seat back—a crude ballet of clutching hands, lowering, pivoting, ducking. The terminal sound of slamming doors. Then the key turning in the ignition.
Look, Dad! Look at the house. You won't see it again. Don't you want to see the house for the last time?

But he didn't know it was the last time, of course.

Denny's emotions were singing so loudly that even the old man must have heard, he thought. He was swallowing sand by the mouthful. His father, though a great pragmatist, nevertheless had his intuitive moments, and this could be one. The silence between them became expectancy, as if Denny should explain, but the merciless car made all the irreverent noises that cars do. You couldn't say delicate things with the bumpkin thud of gears in the background, or the hiss and oscillating whine as you rolled down the drive pumping the brakes. So they got under way, the center of his father's life receding behind them, and each ticking second was like another foot of safety rope.

He started out for the cemetery where his mother was interred, but it wasn't five minutes before his father asked aloud where they were going. And what was the point of following through with the awful misdirection if his father had forgotten? Just get to the place. Don't go to the graveyard in Little Canada. Get out of the suburbs, away from the Twin Cities. Take him to KNEAL. New Eden. Home . . . .

"I can't leave you alone anymore, Dad. You wander, you start fires. What's going to happen when I'm back at school full-time this fall?"

"You don't have to worry about me."

"Yes, I do."

"I can take care of myself."

"Dad . . . you can't. That's a fact—you can't. I don't want to hurt your self-esteem or mess with your independence, but you could get hurt or killed."

"What difference does it make?" Martin asked wearily. "Your mother was the only reason I was alive. She was the best thing that ever happened to me."

"I know. But you can't expect me to let go of you like that, Dad. When God calls you in . . . okay. I'll accept that. But you can't ask me to just ignore you. What kind of a son would I be if I did that? You care about me, don't you? You wouldn't want to leave me with a legacy of guilt."

It was the only thing that worked anymore. This suggestion that his father still had an obligation to him. They lapsed into silence until they were jouncing up the eroding asphalt drive to the old farmhouse, and then Martin asked: "What's this?"

"New Eden, Dad. It's a great place. We're gonna try it, okay?"

After that it was all like a Bunco game in which Denny was a shill, infusing his old man with words, will, illusions as they migrated somehow through the greetings and the rooms to the chamber that had been cleared for his father. It was large—once a small classroom, according to the woman named Molly—and now there was a miscellany of old furniture on the tile floor and an immense open spot for the bed Denny was to bring on another trip (the bed was central) and there were paintings that looked like originals on the walls.

"This is pretty nice, Dad, and you can go anywhere you want in the house. It's all yours. Along with the other residents, of course. It's what they call assisted living. You're on your own, except they take care of your food and medical and other necessities. And I can come see you every day."

His father shuffled, breathless, to the captain's chair by the windows and collapsed onto the pads tied to its spindles. He seemed to be listening from a long way off.

"I'll be bringing your other stuff, Dad. Your bed, your dresser, your nightstand. Photos and everything too. Anything you want moved, you just say so. I'm going to pick up the rental truck now. I've got a student to help me. Okay? I'll see you in a little while."

From the window ledge his father picked up a framed photo of a woman in batwing sleeves, as if he knew her.

"We'll take good care of him," Molly vowed with empathy, and Denny allowed himself to be drawn into the corridor.

The little woman with the glitter glasses and the perpetual smudge of lipstick on one of her eyeteeth began to shuffle past as they came out.

Denny made two trips in the rental truck, and on the final delivery he faced Ariel in the parlor.
Paavo
was there, as well as two women introduced as Helen
Hoverstein
and Marjorie
Korpela
. For the first time it struck Denny as odd that an old matron—older, it seemed, than the residents—should be in charge.