Authors: Katherine Leiner
“Phillipe,” I say into the phone. Aha, he must be calling about his wedding. Of course, that’s it. He’s getting married in eleven days. Marc is his best man.
“Alyese,” he says flatly in his French accent, pronouncing my name as he always does: wrong. Then there is a beat, a pause, just long enough for me to slow my breath, to begin to pull myself up tall, every muscle on alert.
“Phillipe? What is it?” The fear that’s always just a swallow away suddenly rises in the back of my throat.
“Aly-ese,” he says again, and I can hear the tears.
“Hannah?” I breathe out. “Phillipe, where’s Hannah?” My hand
grabs the shilling that hangs around my neck. I hold it, my life depending on it once again, as if Hannah’s life depends on it now.
“Phillipe?” I push the back door open, step out onto the small wood deck, the sun above the tallest blue spruce. I look at the river, my heart beating so loud in my ears I can’t hear anything else. From the inside out I’m pulled down, my breath sucked out. “Phillipe are you there? Tell me, Phillipe. For God’s sake, tell me now!” My words echo inside of me.
“She’s here. She’s with me. She’s safe.” For one instant I am relieved, but then he says, “It’s Marc.” Phillipe is crying hard now, sobbing. I cannot speak, so I wait for him to say something more.
“He’s gone,” Phillipe whispers.
I imagine Marc at the market, in the studio or on a plane to Brazil.
I close my eyes. I know this cold darkness, struggling for air and light. It covers me. I cannot breathe.
And then come all of the details: How Marc collapsed against the door of Hannah’s room, awakening her. How Hannah came out and saw him on the floor, dragging himself down the hall.
“Daddy, get up!” she pleaded. “Stop kidding around, please. This is not funny, Daddy!” she’d told Phillipe.
“ ‘I think I’m having a heart attack, Hannah. Would you mind calling 911?’ He said it quietly. He said it so politely, Hannah told me.”
And then, after Hannah called, she grabbed Marc up in her arms like they told her to do. “Daddy!” she’d shouted, and then she’d laid him back on the floor and began to push against him like crazy, like what she’d seen on TV, in what she hoped was the right rhythm.
I can see Hannah telling exactly what happened, every detail of it, for she is my orderly child—not messy, living in shades of gray like her mother.
“She tried everything, Aly-ese. Our little Hannah tried absolutely everything,” Phillipe sobs.
And then the paramedics arrived and began to go at him with their machines and plugs.
“He was thirty-eight years old, for Christ’s sake, and he’d never had so much as a bad cold,” Phillipe says then.
“Phillipe, I need to speak to Hannah.”
I want to rewind to the moment just after my run, before I opened Elizabeth’s door, before I took my shoes off. Edit that instant. Stand at the door another moment, and this time not open it. Give me another chance and I won’t open it, and none of this will ever happen. … My thumb and forefinger feel as if they have fallen asleep rubbing the shilling hanging from my neck. But I keep rubbing it, looking at the clouds, begging someone or something to give me strength. I have been here before, at this edge of myself.
“Mommy. Don’t say anything, Mommy. Please don’t say anything.” I understand immediately. It is not my comfort Hannah needs. She needs her own strength. “Mommy.” It is her midnight voice, the one that crawls into bed with us during the dead dark of her night.
“Okay, sweetie,” I say, taking in another breath and trying hard to get control, to stop shaking, gather myself up.
“When are you coming home?” I picture her small frame, pulled up tall as she can, her rosy cheeks, and her long blond fringe nearly covering her blue, blue eyes.
“Soon. As soon as I can.”
“What about Dafydd? Will he come too?”
“Of course, we’ll both be there before dark.” As if it’s not as dark as she has ever known.
My mind is stumbling around trying to order things, to be calm while I am fighting for my own breath. “Darling, call Elodie.” Elodie, one of my oldest friends, is also Hannah’s godmother.
“I already did, Mommy.” Her voice is so quiet. “She’s coming to pick me up now.” She sounds like she is twenty. I wonder if she is in shock. Oh my God, what a ridiculous thought. “I’m meeting her in front.”
In front of what? “Where are you, Hannah?” I don’t even know where she is. Jesus. My eight-year-old daughter has just watched her father collapse and I don’t even know where she is.
“I’m at the hospital, Mommy. They say he died at the hospital. But I know he died at home, in the hall, near my room. I saw him. I was holding his hand. Before anyone came to help,” she whispers. “I was holding his hand, Mommy. And I couldn’t do the right thing to save him. I tried. I really tried. When they got there, they put machines and stuff on him. They weren’t going to let me go in the
ambulance, but there was no one to stay with me. I called Beti, but she wasn’t home. Neither was Phillipe. So I had to go. I sat next to him. I followed them. I held his hand. I kept holding his hand even though it was really cold till we got to the hospital. Till they took him away. I tried to go with him. I wanted to go with him. I didn’t want him to be alone.”
After a pause, she says more firmly, “There’s this nurse who came out of the emergency room after they took him in, and she wanted me to take a pill and said she was going to get a hospital therapist to talk to me. I told her I wasn’t going to swallow it and I didn’t want to talk to anyone but you. I’m not going to have to see him, right? The nurse can’t make me see him, right?”
“The psychiatrist?”
“No, Daddy,” Hannah says. I hear her deflate.
Oh shit. “No, no. No, Hannah. Not if you don’t want to. I’ll tell Phillipe. You stay with him till Elodie gets there—you understand? And when Elodie fetches you, you go home with her and stay with her, near her, within arm’s length, okay? Not more than an arm’s reach away until I arrive. That’s a direct order.”
From a distance this is all I can come up with, as close as I can get to folding her up in my arms.
“Okay, but, Mommy …”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“Where will they put Daddy? Never mind,” she says at once. “I don’t want to know.”
“They’ll keep him there, safe, until I arrive. I’ll handle it, Hannah. You don’t have to worry about it, sweetie.”
“Just hurry, Mommy.”
“I will.”
“And be careful, really careful, Mommy.”
“I promise. I love you, darling,” I whisper.
“I love you, Mommy.”
And the line goes dead.
I am suddenly very calm, making a list in my mind of what needs to be done first: I need a reservation to Los Angeles.
The travel agent says everything from Durango to Phoenix to L.A. is booked. “You can chance it. Go directly to the Durango airport, try to get someone to give up their seat. Usually, someone will,
but if no one does, you’re out of luck for today. The last flight leaves in half an hour.
“Your best bet is to drive to Albuquerque, fly from there. It’s a little less than a four-hour drive from Durango. There’s a plane that leaves in five hours. It has seats available. If you leave now, you can make it.”
Elizabeth brings me a cup of tea while I throw things into my suitcase. She’s under the mistaken impression that tea is what all the British drink in times of emergency. What happened to gin? Or better yet, Scotch? I smile and ask if I can have something a little stronger than tea. She puts her arms around me and I start to drain into her small, soft body. I gently push her away and shake my head. “I can’t fall apart now. I just can’t.” She nods. I look for my baseball cap. I remember where I have put my dusty sneakers.
“I’ll pack you some fruit and cheese for the ride,” Elizabeth says.
“And some Scotch.”
There have been some hard moments in my life, and I have faced them. I’ve had no other choice. I will make this call to Dafydd.
Dialing his number in New York, I imagine him there, in his office with a window, just twenty-two, hired straight out of college after a six-month internship in the legal department of Universal. He told us his bosses say he is smart and mature and learning the business well. He will go far and they want it to be with them. He called us last week to say he’d wrecked his knee playing soccer with a bunch of guys on a pickup team in Queens—and wondered if he should wait to have it fixed after Phillipe’s wedding.
While the phone continues to ring, I picture Dafydd sitting at his desk, the signed poster of Antonio Banderas above it, his papers lined up neatly in piles on the desk and all over the floor. I remember Marc marveling at how tidy Dafydd’s room was when he was a teenager.
“Should we worry?” Marc asked me once in Dafydd’s presence. And then, deadpan, he’d asked, “Didn’t Gary Gilmore always keep his room neat as a pin?” Dafydd got up from his desk and jumped Marc, throwing him to the floor, where they wrestled until Marc yelled uncle!
Six rings. Where is he? If that damn voice mail picks up, I’ll scream.
“Dafydd Davies’ office, Barbara here.”
“Hi, Barbara. Is Dafydd around?” I ask as calmly and casually as I can, feeling my breathing beginning to change.
“Mrs. Davies, how are you? Just a moment, please.”
Now I am hyperventilating, trying to get in a deep breath, but the air won’t go past my breasts. How do I do this? How do I tell a son … ?
“Mom!” his voice comes on the line, excited. It cuts straight through my heart. “Where are you? I thought you were yogaing?”
I will ruin his day. I will ruin his life.
“I have awful news.” I close my eyes and suck in as much air as I can.
“How awful?” Dafydd asks. I can hear his fear. I want to be able to say this right so it hurts him as little as possible.
“Really, really awful.”
“Tell me fast,” he says.
I use Dafydd’s nickname for Marc when I begin to explain. “Marco’s had a massive heart attack and he’s … he’s … he died.”
The sound of his sorrow drags on forever like a mournful foghorn, like the soul-sad cry of a lone coyote, a sound he grew up listening to in our canyon, nightly.
I wait, closing my eyes, hand clenched around the phone, wishing I could hold him. Knowing that wouldn’t be enough.
“Where’s Hannah?”
“She was with him when it happened. Marco collapsed in front of her bedroom door. Now she’s with Phillipe.”
“I have to get some air, Momma. Can you call me back in five minutes and tell me what I need to do?”
Elizabeth lets me borrow her truck. Her brother, Ned, will return it next week when he comes in from Texas. He is a professor and teaches two classes in foreign policy at the University of New Mexico once a month. It seems everyone in Elizabeth’s family is a teacher or a professor. Elizabeth teaches math at Fort Lewis, the UC campus in Durango. Her mother teaches at the high school, and her sister teaches kindergarten at one of the elementary schools in town. Before her father died, I think he taught, too. Ned will drive the truck up from Albuquerque and fly home from Durango.
Elizabeth helps me lift my suitcase and we put it in the back. She hugs me quickly and asks for the tenth time, “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?” I shake my head.
I get in the car and roar out of the driveway, looking at the clock and beginning to pace myself. One hundred twenty-five miles to Albuquerque. I’ll have to push it. Once I get out on Route 550, where there are long straight aways, I’ll be all right.
I find the green bottle of single malt Elizabeth has put under the front seat. I pour a little into the tea to sip as I drive. Then I try to figure out the earpiece and how to use the cellular phone. First I call Dan Wolfe, our friend and doctor of twenty years. He tells me what he thinks happened.
“Fribulation,” he says. “No pain, probably no fear. The brain has a way of shutting itself off when we’re in that kind of physical emergency. It was fast. According to the paramedic report, he was already in cardiac arrest when they arrived at the house.”
Hannah is right. He died at home in the hall in front of her. Lord. Somehow I have managed not to think about Hannah having to deal with Marc as he was dying. Now I let myself imagine the scene, hearing him fall, watching him pull himself down the hall, trying to help himself and at the same time trying to protect her from what he must have known was happening. I can feel the tears coming, and when they do, I cannot stop them. I pull off the road.
“There’s going to have to be an autopsy because he died at home. It’s a state law.”
Autopsy? No. No. I picture Quincy cutting into Marc. The bright light over Marc’s body, his barrel chest, bare and elevated—soft white skin, so little hair. He always wanted more. “Does it bother you that I have so little hair?” he once asked while we were making love. I wonder about his lungs, his kidneys, and liver. Will an autopsy tear him to bits? I sip the Scotch and remember
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,
how important it is to keep the body quiet, disturbing it as little as possible after death. I wonder how many people have already violated Marc’s body. Is he in some deep freeze, his soul, frozen air, floating above it?
“No one is to touch his body until I get there. Will you see to that, Dan? Promise me,” I plead.
On the highway again, it starts to rain, coming down on the
windshield in sheets like someone squirting a rubber hose full-force. This is what the newspaper must mean when it says the monsoon season has finally hit the southwest. I race through Bloomfield.
By the time I hit Cuba, New Mexico, lightning is breaking the sky, cracking it wide open, the rain now falling, fierce.
I stop for gas. As the rain beats down on the tin roof above me, I shiver. My hands are stiff, they are so cold. I catch sight of myself in the pump. Marc loved my hair, “rumpled after love,” my “buffalo brown” eyes, “swan neck,” bony shoulders, long-waisted back—his favorites. My uneven lips, bigger lower and disappearing top lip. Sultry. That’s how he thought of me. Now all of me is slumped ragged, swollen eyes, a wrecked mess. I look as homeless as I feel. I start to cry, whimpering at first and then a full-out keen, falling hard against the pump.