Bathing the Lion (27 page)

She heard a cough behind her and turned. An old woman stood nearby with a big black Newfoundland on a leash. Both of them were staring at Jane. The woman asked, “Who are you talking to, dear? Sounds like you’re having a lively chat with the wind. Don’t let me interrupt.” She finished with a loud self-satisfied “Ha!” and toddled off down the street behind the giant dog.

Jane turned back and looked for Josephine but the girl was gone. This didn’t bother her. Alone again, she would be able to think clearer about everything.

She started skating again, one leg in front of the other faster and faster, the sound of the spinning wheels and the gusty wind in the trees her only companions.

A few minutes later she was rolling down the hill toward Bill Edmonds’s house again. The last time she’d been there was in the dream and the house was on fire. Bill and Kaspar Benn stood outside watching it burn. But the house she saw now had neither burned nor was it in flames. Lights were turned on throughout the small building and gave off a warm yellow light. It looked very cozy inside on this crisp fall night.

Tiko the bartender had said it was September, but was it this September or last, or even three years ago? It had to be either this year or last because Jane’s bar was three years old and Felice had given her the wooden bench on the first anniversary of the place.

Having reached Bill’s house, she stopped at the driveway before moving up it as slowly as possible without losing her balance on the skates. She wanted to look in the windows to see who was there and what they were doing.

A familiar song by the group ABBA came drifting faintly out of the house. Both Jane and Felice liked ABBA and often played their music at home.

Above the song she heard a great woman’s laugh, which went on and on. It was the kind of happy uninhibited cackle you like to hear because it’s neither fake nor forced. The laugh of someone who isn’t afraid to let loose and
ha-ha
right up to the rafters.

Jane moved closer to the house and saw in one of the lit rooms the back of a green couch with a television on a table in front of it. Several seconds passed before she recognized the film
Mamma Mia!
playing on the screen. Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan were singing a duet together. Jane grinned because she and Felice loved to cuddle up on their couch and watch it, especially whenever either of them was feeling blue and needed cheering up. It was almost a given they would start singing the score about halfway through the movie.

Sitting on the green couch and facing away from her toward the TV were two men, or what she thought were men until one of them stood up and turned to say something to the other. Jane caught her breath when she saw the face: It was a woman with almost no hair on her head. She was wearing a plaid hunting jacket several sizes too large for her. It was wrapped tightly around her and held in place by her arms across her chest. The film froze on one frame. Obviously it was a videotape or DVD put on pause.

The woman’s face was appallingly thin. Her skin was stretched tight over her forehead and cheekbones. In grim contrast, there were ugly dark bags beneath her eyes. They broadcast to anyone who saw them, “Yes, I am gravely ill. You don’t want to know the details.” At once Jane thought of photos of starving children in Africa. The difference being those kids’ eyes always appeared to be locked in some kind of otherworldly, thousand-yard stare combining their imminent death with an almost saintly expression that said, I am still here but I am already gone.

In contrast, this woman’s eyes were powerfully alive, all here and
now
. She looked at whoever was on the couch with love, laughter, and flirt, but most palpably
delight
. It was almost unbearable for Jane Claudius to watch those eyes burning like a bright, bright flame on top of the very last bit of melted candle.

The woman dropped her arms to her sides and the heavy jacket fell open. She was wearing a yellow sweatshirt with
SIMMONS COLLEGE
across the front. But even though the bright shirt fell like a tent around her, Jane could tell at a glance she was skeletal and frail.

This was Lola Edmonds, Bill’s late wife. Watching her move out of the room in a sick person’s slow shuffle, Jane knew more and more about her with each step. Lola Dippolito Edmonds was self-absorbed, great company, highly sexual, happily directionless, and adored a husband who had disappointed her for years. As a young woman in Italy Lola had always believed her life would turn out to be prime time but it never did. She’d come to America as a college exchange student and fallen in love with the way the United States supersized everything. She thought,
this
is where I belong, center ring, and in many ways America was the perfect fit for the exuberant young woman. She did a number of things well but came up short of great in any of her pursuits. She could hold a room’s attention with funny or charming stories and anecdotes but inevitably they went on too long because she never knew when to stop. She was a terrific cook but only knew how to make six dishes. A competent albeit unimaginative painter, her college teachers had given her good grades more for her warmth,
grandezza
, and three-ring-circus personality rather than for her brains or talent.

She peaked at twenty-two and like so many good-verging-on-great athletes who never finish higher than fourth place in the big race, eventually slipped back in the pack. By thirty she knew she didn’t stand a chance of being a contender anymore for any kind of role in the spotlight. So she married a nice stingy man who loved her every day of their life together but never tried very hard to understand her.

The most heartbreaking thing Bill ever did for her was, soon after Lola was diagnosed with cancer, he came home one day with a book he’d ordered from the town bookstore entitled
Italian for Beginners
. In his fear and frustration about what to do, he thought by learning her native language it would strengthen their bond and enhance their ability to fight her new enemy together, which was already well on its way to eating her alive. But Bill had absolutely no talent for language. To watch him sit hour after hour, day after day at their kitchen table with his fat brown Italian book, taking notes and slowly mouthing the beautiful sonorous words from her homeland (
per sempre
) caused Lola to love her husband more than she ever had. Her impending death opened her already large heart until her love of Bill and her life became both exquisite and almost too much to bear. She had never been happier, ever. She had never been more afraid.

Lola was unaware of it but this was her one great, genuine talent in life—loving people. The image of her man with the Italian book in his meaty hands looking so damned serious made her smile when they lay in bed at night holding hands, knowing “forever” was no longer a word either of them owned in any language. In Lola’s increasing dependence on him, Bill learned how to be generous, thoughtful, and fully present in the limited days they had left together. Perhaps that was the greatest achievement of her life: without trying, she taught her husband to be a much better person. And then she died.

Jane didn’t realize how deep a fugue state she’d fallen into as all of this information revealed itself and then the effect it had on her. Minutes might have passed; it easily could have been longer. She was standing at the window with head down and eyes closed, reviewing everything she’d experienced, when she heard the voice behind her.

“It’s beautiful, no?”

Turning, she saw Lola Edmonds standing nearby with arms across her chest again, hugging Bill’s heavy mackinaw coat to her body. Up close in this dim light coming from the window, she looked even sicker than from a distance.

“You
knew
I was out here?”

“Yes, that’s why I came. We dead are like mechanics—we can move wherever we want in time. Before when you saw me inside the house I was still alive but I died a week later. It’s why I can talk to you now. Do you see the color in there yet?”

“No,
what
color?”

Lola smiled and said excitedly, “It’s the best part of what’s in that room, Jane! Even when I am not inside with him, the color is still there because it’s so strong when Bill and I are together. Look closely and you should be able to see it. Try again.”

Despite having just been told what to do by a dead person, Jane was fascinated by what was happening and looked again into the Edmondses’ living room. Bill was still sitting on the couch with
Mamma Mia!
frozen on the television screen. Jane looked everywhere but noticed nothing more than what she had already seen. She shook her head. Lola said, look harder.

Eventually she saw it on the ceiling over the door Lola had used to leave. A kind of faint-colored wash across everything in that particular section of the room made it look like an old photograph exposed to the sun too long so the individual colors were fading into one.

“I think I see it—a sort of burnt sienna, right? What is it?”

“
Esatto
—that’s right—Italians call it
terra di Siena
. It was the first color used by the cavemen who painted on the walls. But do you know why they chose it first? You’re getting your mechanic’s eyes back so you begin now to see the colors of human emotion again. Burnt sienna is the most important one.

“Did you notice the little bit of orange still in there? Of course orange is the color of passion, the desire people have for each other when they fall crazy in love: Fireworks! Explosions! The hunger at the beginning of all great romance for sex and physical closeness.
Pow!
It’s delicious and torture too.
That
crazy first passion always goes away, no matter who you are. But when love is
real
, the orange fades into a quieter color, which is much more nuanced and beautiful.

“After I got sick, the little orange left in my relationship with Bill disappeared. For a while the only color we shared was the shiny black of me dying, the same color as the obsidian ball you have in your pocket.

“But black taught me a lot too. At the end, in those last days we had together before I died, we moved
through
the black to the most important color—burnt sienna. It is what you are seeing in our living room now, even when I am not in there, because it remains: the color of the greatest love humans can feel for each other. It comes only when all others have burned off or faded away and what remains is a hundred percent pure. Like the color of the earth in direct sun on a late fall afternoon. It is the color of the truest human passion.”

Jane was taken aback. “Burnt sienna actually
means
something?”

“Yes, it means immortality, or as immortal as human emotion can be. We only live a few years, so our forever is pretty short.” Lola grinned. Her voice sounded strong and healthy, not the voice of a dying woman. “
You
brought me out here, Jane. Maybe you don’t know how you did it yet, but your mechanic side told me you were here.”

“Why? Why would I?”

Lola rubbed the top of her almost bald head like someone who’s just gotten a short haircut and enjoys the bare feeling up there. “So I could tell you what to look for in our living room? And burnt sienna is one of the most important colors on the drawing of bottles you have. Obsidian is important too because it is the color of death, which you must teach yourself to move
through
to get to the burnt sienna.”

Instinctively Jane touched the pocket holding Kaspar’s two drawings and the black baseball. She took out the ball and showed it to Lola, who nodded as if she fully understood why Jane had it with her.

“What
are
those other colors on the drawing? Why specifically those?”

Lola took the ball. Hefting it in her hand she said, “The colors on the ink bottles are the most important sentiments of the whole human experience; it’s like a chart showing the letters of the alphabet. A detailed chart of what make us most human.”

“Is it supposed to help me fight this Somersault thing?”

Lola shook her head. “Maybe, I don’t know—you’d have to ask the person who gave it to you, but I would guess so. The colors on those bottles are for sure telling you important things about being human. Since you were a mechanic, maybe you can put the two together in some way.…

“Whether they will actually help fight against Chaos I don’t know; some things work better than others. But the problem is Chaos always returns sooner or later and just … destroys.

“I’m going back into the house now, Jane. Do you mind if I keep this ball? I am where it belongs. I want to be with my husband now.” Lola tightened the coat around her, lifted one hand in a small wave, and left. A few moments later she reappeared in the living room and sat down next to Bill. The image on the television unfroze and
Mamma Mia!
started playing again for the last time in Lola Edmonds’s life.

FIVE

All the lights were off inside Kaspar Benn’s house when Jane arrived ten minutes later. To her surprise, Kaspar’s lovely dog D Train and his blond pal Kos were sitting side by side on the steps leading up to the small front porch, looking like two old philosophers watching the world go by. She remembered the last time she’d seen these two: Kos had just gobbled up the
udesh
and no one knew what to do about it. If she were ever flipped again back to that moment in the future, what could she do to save him?

On seeing her approach now, the dogs rose together and ambled over to say hello. She knew Kos’s owners let the dog come and go as it pleased. She often saw the gentle fellow walking around town by himself. Although it was against state health regulations, Kaspar sometimes brought D Train into Jane’s bar where the pit bull sat quietly at his master’s feet, happy to shimmy his body hello to anyone who greeted him.