This Isn't Going to End Well, page 9
She had at least five doctors at any given time. She saw them weekly, sometimes daily, and then there were the operations and the trips to the emergency room, which happened more and more frequently. William had been there for these trips, slept with her in the hospital room, never left her side. He made sure she had everything she would need.
But after William died, I was her plus-one. Most of the time she traveled by ambulance, so I’d meet her at the hospital. On one of our visits, in 2008—I can’t remember what we were in there for that time—she was sure she was going to die.
“It just feels like it this time,” she said.
“Let’s wait and see what a doctor says.”
“They don’t know anything,” she said, and laughed. “I mean, they know some things, but not about dying. And they’re getting so young. They all look fourteen years old!”
I thought so, too.
“Well, you’re not going to die,” I told her.
“Just in case,” she said, “hand me my purse.”
Her purse was a giant cloth bag in which she kept her diabetes supplies and wrist braces and sippy cup of Glenfiddich and her wallet and the lollipops in case her blood sugar was low, the book she was reading and eight or nine other things, among them a notebook and a pen. While we waited on the doctor she wrote out her will, in a frantic, barely legible scrawl.
It was six pages long, a holographic will. Among many other things, this is where she told me what to do with her ashes, how she wanted to mix them with William’s ashes, and then take them to the land they used to live on and scatter them around the creek.
She did not die that trip, or the next trip, or the next. It wasn’t until 2011, when she went into the hospital to have an abdominal obstruction removed. Her body was just too weak to withstand the procedure.
The last ten years of Holly’s life weren’t without their joys. She was a wonderful aunt to her nieces and nephews. She traveled a little. She even created a new, alternate family with Raquel and Miguel, a married couple who began by working for her and eventually moved in, along with their two children, and stayed with her until she died.
But nothing was truly good for her again, and that was because of William. As I saw it, he’d done this to her. His decision was the source of all her sorrow. Now they were both dead and their ashes were on a shelf in my bookcase, separate, in limbo, behind a pane of cracked glass.
How long did my ash-duty stay undone? A long time—months. It wasn’t as if I was thinking about it all the time, though; it only seems like that now. But since I passed them every time I went into my office I could never completely forget the task ahead of me. I always knew they were there, waiting, as if I could hear their dead fingers tapping at the glass.
In the end, I sent Holly’s ashes to my sister Rangeley and she had them buried next to my father’s grave on the Eastern Shore in Maryland.
But William? William I kept upstairs, in the cabinet. He was like a character in a myth, one of those stories about a man who’s been sentenced by the gods to an afterlife alone in a wooden box, kept from the woman he loves for all eternity.
But the gods weren’t doing this: I was.
14 Discovery
2011
After Holly died we went through all her things, every drawer, every box, every treasure. It was the kind of sad day we laughed through, joking, what she would have done were she here. Relief, for her and for us. I don’t think it’s possible to live deep inside a grief for too long without actually going crazy. I think that was what had happened to Holly.
The last six months of her life she’d been living in the basement of a house she’d just bought. Raquel and Miguel and their two children lived on the main floor.
For someone who was known as being a great collector and creator of very odd and wonderful things (she had encrusted even her headboard and pill boxes herself, with beads, sea glass, and broken teacups), there wasn’t a lot that any of us wanted in the end. Barrie took the life-size fiberglass rhinoceros, and Rangeley some photographs and three elephants Holly had adorned with feathers, beads, and decoupage. There was a small painting of a chimpanzee in a nightgown smoking a cigarette I’d always coveted—I remembered being with her and William when they bought it. Laura and I took that and some cement cherubs and a disrobing goddess for our lawn.
But it was as if her life instilled objects with their value; the moment she died, so much of it felt like trash. That coffee mug with the chipped handle she’d bought at the roadside diner that summer; the faux-ostrich feather scarf; the edition of Catcher in the Rye she’d read and reread so many times that the pages were falling out, some of them in fact already missing, the tape on its spine yellowed because they’d been taping it up for years, for decades. The lines she loved, they loved, marked and highlighted, the page corners turned back. This was not just a book: it was a relic.
It was in the big green trash bag now, full of everything else that once meant so much to her. No one wanted it anymore.
We went through the day like this, reminiscing and destroying things.
While everyone else was busy going through Holly’s art supplies and her miniature scissor collection (she had close to fifty), I explored the small closet beneath the stairwell. In the very back, tucked into the shadows with the spiders and the camel crickets, were two boxes.
I lugged them out into the light. They were full of journals and photo albums. The journals were dated with a black sharpie on their spines: July 1992–January 1993; year after year like that. The photo albums were bulging with Polaroids.
“Look,” I said.
This was what we said whenever we came across something odd or interesting or valuable or sad or ridiculous. Look. They stopped what they were doing. Rangeley came over and removed one of the photo albums. It chronicled a trip out West that Holly and William had taken in the eighties, each photo annotated, along with sight-seeing pamphlets and coasters from bars. Holly and William. So young, so beautiful. We oohed and aahed. Barrie opened the photo album documenting the construction of their home.
I picked up the one that happened to be full of photos of naked people. I looked at a couple of pages, and then closed it, but somehow in that time I was able to see Holly and William. And there were others, too, bodies of their friends, faces I didn’t want to see because I was sure I knew them, or had met them, and surely if anything was not my business this was that. I winced as the scenes became more and more Roman (in some of the pictures the women were actually dressed in togas). It wasn’t because I objected to their Dionysian past times; I was a big fan of whatever made them happy. But I wasn’t a voyeur, an onlooker to somebody else’s life. At least, that’s not how I wanted to think of myself. It would turn out, of course, that is exactly what I was. Just not so much of the orgies.
One happy thought: if these pictures were any proof, they had a great sex life. In this way as in so many others, they’d used their bodies until they were all used up.
The rest of the boxes were full of the journals, dozens of them.
“What do you think we should do with these?” I said.
There was something about finding them that felt momentous, and a little dark, like finding a book of spells. As if by reading them we might accidentally summon William’s sad spirit.
“I think we should throw them away,” Laura said. She’s a social worker. Her job is to think of other people, dead or alive. “They’re not ours to look at.”
“It does seem . . . invasive,” Rangeley said. “And I don’t know if I’m really interested in reading someone else’s diaries. I don’t even like to read my own.”
We laughed.
Still, I picked up one journal, thumbed past sketches and drawings and lists and diagrams of dreams and hand-drawn geologic schemata and stopped at a random page. October 27, 1995—six years before he would kill himself. And there it was: “I understand now how people can just reach a point, despite feeling generally good and secure and in love etc. and blow their brains out. It used to build up like snow on a flat roof. Suicide was collapsing under that weight. This is more pure—everything I think I am and love and loves me and etc. is just a bad bad joke—pow!”
I closed it.
“Yeah,” I said. “Not sure we want to go there.”
“What did it say?”
“Just that . . . he was thinking about killing himself.”
“Oh, just that?” Rangeley almost laughed.
“Not our business,” Barrie said. “Really. It’s morbid. We don’t have permission.”
“He’s dead,” I said. “How are we going to get permission?”
“Exactly.”
So it was unanimous. Just because Holly and William were both dead now, that didn’t give us the right to peer so deeply into their private lives. And didn’t we know enough already? Enough. This was a purge, after all.
It was a hectic day. So much to deal with. Some friends came over to help and left with a memento or two. I took bag after bag of trash to the truck; Laura and I gathered Holly’s art supplies to donate to a school.
I took the journals outside, just to get them out of the way. I should have put them in the truck—it was almost time for a dump run—but I didn’t. Without saying anything about it to anybody—even to myself, if that’s possible—I put the journals in the trunk of my car. I didn’t think about why I was doing this, did not examine too closely what my motivation might be, which is just like me, expert compartmentalizer that I am. But they were books—books by a writer, a famous writer, my brother-in-law. They were one-of-a-kind, handwritten, illustrated, works of art themselves.
But Laura was right: I didn’t have permission. I did think of Kafka, of course, and his friend and lawyer, Max Brod. Brod promised Kafka that he would burn Kafka’s manuscripts after he died—but didn’t. As much of a betrayal as that was, weren’t we happy now, happy that his friend betrayed him? I wasn’t comparing William to Kafka when I thought this. I was thinking about the cost-benefit analysis of posthumous treachery.
I took them home without a word to anybody, even Laura. I slipped the journals in the glass-doored cabinet where we kept our rotating collection of ashes. But I didn’t look at them again, not for a long, long time.
I think you know where this is going.
Months passed. Holly’s house was emptied and sold. The estate, such as it was, was settled. The visions I had of Holly’s last seconds alive had faded a little bit, because it was all so fresh. She wasn’t taking up an inch of space in the world anymore. Time passed so quickly and before I knew it, months had gone by and thinking of her became more historical than emotional, which was more upsetting: the death of someone you love cuts the deepest wound, but you fear the day it heals.
The difference, though, was that as Holly’s death became more distant, and the grief lingered like smoke, a new emotion surfaced, one that was equally, if not more, intense: a searing, almost elemental, hatred of William. It came on so suddenly, as if the spell I had been under all of my life had been lifted. Maybe it was the distillation of hate—or maybe it was just the absence of kindness. The source of it was obvious, born from what he’d done—and left undone. And that of all the terrible diseases Holly had, William had given her the worst of them all: to live the last ten years of her life without him. He’d broken her heart and mind. He’d broken her life.
I reviewed, in a kind of morbid emotional montage, all the operations she’d endured, the late nights in the ER, her last weeks in the ICU—without him. But also what it must have felt like to wake up every morning for thousands of mornings without him in bed beside her, every morning having to remember that the reason he was not here was because he chose not to be. That he did not die on a river, or a mountain, or skiing, or riding his bike headlong into a tree, or even falling out of a tree. He did it himself. And for thousands of mornings, she had to wake up and wonder if the reason he did it was because of her and the disease that was killing her all on its own.
I despised him for breaking my already broken sister, for abandoning her, my family, me. I wanted to believe in an afterlife I never had been able to believe in, hoping there was a place even now where he might be suffering, and would suffer forever.
But I knew where William was now. He was in the hallway outside of the room where I wrote, in the glass-doored cabinet upstairs.
So I went up there and I got him out.
Then I did a wicked thing.
This was on a night in August 2011. It was late, and even late as it was—past ten, at least—it was still humid, the air was thick and wet and the trees alive with cicadas. North Carolina in mid-August is so hot, and the air at times so still and moist it can feel like you’re walking through a swamp.
Laura was downstairs, reading in the family room. The way our house is designed, I can walk from my office into the living room downstairs and out the back door without being seen or heard. This is what I did, through the screened-in porch, using the light cast from the family room—where I could see Laura, on the couch, but she could not see me—and walked to the back of the side yard. It’s a place no one ever goes; we’ve never done anything with it. The soil is dead. Nothing grows there, other than a few weeds now and then; but even they seemed bereft.
It was overcast, no moon or stars. I could see Laura stop reading and turn on the television. Suddenly the yard was colored with that eerie TV blue. Why didn’t I have her join me? Why didn’t I tell her what I was about to do? Because I thought that if I told Laura what I was doing, she might ask me not to. I couldn’t risk that. If I told her, I thought I might change my mind, and I didn’t want to change my mind. Which told me that I would most likely regret what I was about to do.
I’ve never been good at naming feelings, of describing them, or (I fear) even having them. Would it even be possible to separate the feelings out, to see them clearly enough to name them at all? All I know is what I did: I opened the box he was in and began to empty out his ashes. I wandered toward the darker corner of the yard and tossed a handful of him back there as well. Occasionally the ashes would catch a ray of TV light and give them substance, like rain. I knew what I was doing: this was my pitiful revenge on the man I’d spent my life idolizing, who I thought I’d admired more than my father, admired more than anyone I’d ever known. I spread him out—knocking the last bit of him from the bottom of the box with the heel of my hand—until his cigarette-gray ashes were everywhere.
It rained later that night, washing him deeper into the earth as far down as the rain could take him. Had his ashes been seeds, a million Williams would have pushed through the soil and disappeared into the night. But they weren’t seeds, they were the opposite of seeds. Like the rest of my family—some who were in the sky now, and some who were in the sea, and one in a grave beside my father—he ended up exactly where I thought he belonged: nowhere. I had liberated him—and thought I had liberated me.
A few centuries ago, people who killed themselves were treated, post mortem, as criminals and vampires. They could be hung, staked through the heart, burned, dragged through the street, thrown into a public garbage heap, put in a barrel and floated down a river—all of this while perfectly dead. The self-murdering hand might be cut off and buried apart from the body, and a stone placed over the dead man’s face, to prevent the spirit from rising from the grave. In other words, you got killed twice.
Now I understood why.
William plans his life.
15 Journals I
2013
I shouldn’t look at them, I’d always thought that. Or I’d always told myself I thought that. I didn’t have the right. Reading them would be the worst transgression. It didn’t matter that he was dead, the argument went; they were still his. A private journal doesn’t suddenly become public just because the person who wrote it is dead, simply because he’s not here to object, to stake his claim. Even after the death of a patient, a psychiatrist is still bound by confidentiality. The same logic would seem to apply to journals. Reading them, I had thought, might be the worst thing I could ever do to him.
But after what I did to him that night I realized that, no, reading the journals would not be the worst thing I could do. I had just done the worst thing I could do. He was already dead, but—like they did it in the old days—I had killed him again.
I’m not sure now how much time passed. A year, maybe more. Side-eyeing them as I went into my office, I felt like the curious protagonist of a ghost story. As hard as I tried to rid myself of him, he kept coming back, again and again . . . The forgotten archives of a forgotten writer, cloaked in dust, accidentally rediscovered . . .
But I wanted to be done with William. I wanted to erase him from my life. And I was busy. I was teaching fiction at the University of North Carolina in 2011 and writing my fifth novel, The Kings and Queens of Roam. I finished it and started another. Laura and I were happy and, after enduring some of the fissures and distractions a long romance seems destined to endure, settled into our lives together with abandon—or what middle-aged abandon looks like: long walks, beach trips, and bingeing Fleabag in the light-filled home we had created together, shelves lined with books and miniature treasures, folk art, antique boxes.
So I was putting it off; I was pushing him away. Like William, like Holly, I had a million opportunities to get rid of them. I could have at least boxed them up and put them in the attic. But I didn’t.
I pretended to hash it out with Laura, to whom I had eventually revealed their existence.
