She placed her hand over the center of her chest, stepping to the middle of the bridge and starting to cry. When the first tear rolled down her cheek, she swiped it away.
“It’s small now, but I can feel it right here, moving, growing stronger. I know you don’t believe me, but you can touch it. You’ll see that it’s real. I swear it’s changing and the temperature there is different. It’s burning now like a firecracker, crawling around under my skin. I want you to touch it. If you don’t feel it, then I’ll forget the whole thing.”
Emily stepped closer, moving at half speed but exact, like Katie when she was intent on infallible motion. I knew no suitable words of protest. They would have sounded sillier than her own request, which now felt as rational and urgent as anything. She untied the back of her blouse that hung loose from a thin strap around her neck. When she turned around the wind took it by the tails, exposing her lean shadowy back and pale blue bra. I unhooked it and slipped it off her shoulders. “Tell me if you can feel it,” she said. “It’s moving around now.”
The wind whipped her hair against my face. I imagined the sickness she’d described—a misshapen bulb, black and feverish. I let my hand slide up from her stomach onto her breasts, one at a time. Her skin was warm. Emily wasn’t especially endowed but her breasts were bold, surprisingly vast in their nakedness. I searched them first with my index and middle fingers, pressing the sides as though checking their pulse. Emily gazed at the streaming lights below, wanting dis passion, just the facts, which I knew was impossible. One of her tears fell onto my forearm and I lost the meaning of what I was doing, what I was searching for. It was embarrassing to examine her like a doctor. When she started to step away I pulled her against me and began to feel her the way I wanted to feel her, the way I did when I imagined us communicating solely through sex, spending days in bed without saying a word. I pushed my hands flat over her breasts and gripped them until I felt them in my possession. I rolled them to the sides of her chest and then pushed them back together. I tried to understand. Her breathing was heavy now, her rosy cheeks blazing. It was all soft, healthy flesh.
“Do you feel it?” she whispered.
I didn’t answer. I stroked her nipples that grew stiff and eager until they were the ripe nipples of Emily Schell in her prime. I kissed her neck. I imagined that embryonic formation under her skin, spidery and destructive. Emily reached back to redo her bra. I wrapped my arms around her waist and held her whole body, kissing her shoulders before tying the back of her blouse like a shoelace. My eyes tilted down to the space between her knees, to the links in the fence and the zooming lights below.
When Emily faced me again her cheeks were still red, even though her expression had changed from sympathy to sadness and guilt, embarrassment and regret, every draining emotion wrapped into one. (Since we’d begun dating I’d done everything I could to deny Katie’s crush, which in that moment proved itself as undeniable as a raging elephant. Perhaps it was always there, even during our first kiss, but after her death Katie’s crush was full-blown and doubly perverse.) In the long stare that followed I understood that I was no longer Emily’s boyfriend, that the most important reason for her visit was to say goodbye. We walked back the way we came. When we reached her car she stood there dangling the keys and staring down the street.
“You know, Katie never let you read her graphic novella because she never drew it. The last few months her hands were so shaky she couldn’t draw a thing. She’d only gotten three or four pages into it.”
I nodded, acting like I suspected as much. “I still have a copy of
Jackknife Janitor
. I can get it for you if you want.”
“You can keep it. She gave it to you.”
Emily unlocked the door, taking her time, clearly waiting for a final word. “I think you should keep her comic,” I said. “It was her best one. Why don’t we meet up tomorrow, maybe go for a drive out to the bridges of Madison County. I could bring it to you then.”
“I don’t know, George.”
“Otherwise, when will I see you next?”
Emily shrugged. “I’ll call when I can,” she said, stepping into the front seat and driving off without another word.
“See you later,” I answered, as her taillights disappeared around the bend. I went upstairs to my room. When I couldn’t sleep that night I wandered the neighborhood and the next neighborhood over, for the first time regretting Katie’s drowning in a way that had nothing to do with Katie. (The recognition of this selfishness was another blow of its own.) Eventually I found myself in some stranger’s backyard. I woke an old mutt in his doghouse to pet him. Then I went home to smoke my dad’s cigarettes and cry on the porch with the crickets.
Twenty-four
While I see little value in reporting the ordinary sorrow of the proceeding weeks, I feel it my duty to reveal a few idiosyncratic features of my process. As anyone who has experienced the death of a friend or distant family member knows, inevitably you must endure questions aimed at ferreting out the depth of your relationship to the deceased. For me these questions were complicated by my more dear relationship to Emily than Katie, and my own share of responsibility in her cause of death. I mostly blame my own guilt at having left Katie in the canoe for my queer reaction to those bold many who broached the subject of her drowning at such venues as Dunkin’ Donuts, Ace Hardware, the Urbandale public library, or the flowery parking lots of any number of shopping villages in West Des Moines. Despite the population boom and the city borders sprawling out like floodwaters, these inquiring souls proved difficult to evade, inspiring me to such extremes as to dive behind walls of decorative hedges, or to turn the car stereo up so loud while waiting for the light to change that I couldn’t hear the voice of the busybody shouting my name from the lane next to me. These unavoidables included fellow classmates, parishioners, neighbors, my parents’ friends, their work associates, etc., most of whom knew of my relationship to Emily, but were hardly familiar with my connection to her younger sister. What shocked me most was that a good number of them, likely due to Katie’s schooling outside the Catholic system, weren’t aware Emily even had a sister until she died. Given the cloak of deceit memory tends to pass over such periods, it’s astounding I can so precisely recount these dialogues, a few examples of which I have listed, anonymously, in no particular order:
Q: I’m so terribly sorry. Did you know her well?
A: Like she was my own sister. My older sister, really. She was a genius, you know. An incredible, patriotic genius.
Q: I heard she was kind of a loner. But she must’ve opened up to you, right?
A: She was just starting to open up. She asked me to be her confirmation sponsor, but then she mostly skipped the classes. I guess she was more spiritual, you know?
Q: You’ve only been in Des Moines, what, a year and a half? I know about you and Emily, but how well could you have known her sister?
A: I knew a lot
about
her, but she was healthy so rarely that whenever I saw her, it was like starting all over again. Not many people really
knew
her.
Q: I’m worried about you. Should I be worried about you?
A: The way it was written in the papers, you’d have thought we were three peas in a pod. No need to cry for me. I only met her a few times. We weren’t even fishing together that day.
(After relating these details, I’ve now decided to completely bypass my initial bout of anguish when I was certain I’d lost
both
Schell girls and would have settled for just hearing Emily’s voice and knowing she was still alive. But before doing so, I’d like to share a short anecdote—no doubt of dubious meaning—simply to provide a context for judging the depth of my low point, that relative place often referred to by alcoholics when they describe “hitting bottom.”)
A few weeks after the funeral I answered an ad to replace inventory tags for a lighting fixture wholesaler. Iowa Lighting Solutions was only a twenty-minute walk through the woods and across the back nine of the Urbandale golf course, which was patronized by a number of golfers who harbored few qualms about teeing off the moment I sprinted across the sixteenth fairway. (It was once explained to me by such a golfer that he was perfectly entitled to kill me because I was trespassing and he had a summer pass.) The work was tedious and mostly involved replacing inventory tags on thousands of fixtures covering the ceiling space above ten aisles of decorative lampposts, track lighting, flood lighting, cutesy night-lights, sockets, bulbs, every accessory of luminescence imaginable. Only a few days into the job my boss, Mr. Jaffe, hired a volunteer assistant from the Catholic Charity House to help me replace the tags. Strangely enough, while this assistant was Chinese and mentally retarded, he looked like Mr. Jaffe’s twin, particularly in concern to the odd-mannered fat stores around his waist. Both of them had the habit of constantly adjusting their glasses, which when they stood together made them appear like windmills in perpetual motion. Whenever Hu was around, Mr. Jaffe acted like the most kindly, upbeat boss you ever met, apparently to prove to all his employees that he had a soft spot for the mentally challenged and wasn’t simply exploiting the situation for free labor. “Hu’s got a good back,” he was always saying. “He’s just a regular guy who wants to put in a regular day’s work.”
Anyway, since Hu’s medication caused symptoms of vertigo, Mr. Jaffe decided to have him prepare the tags, leaving me with the sole responsibility of climbing a thirty-foot ladder to attach them to the fixtures. I didn’t complain. It was still better than a happy-go-lucky job at the mall where my increasing frustrations would be placed on broad display. For the most part things went smoothly with Hu, until late that first afternoon when I noticed from the top of the ladder that he’d prepped a whole row of stickers upside down. I had no intention of putting up tags with upside-down stickers, especially since Mr. Jaffe loved to embarrass employees by making repeated public announcements of their mistakes. The day was nearly over. After pointing out the problem, I asked Hu if he wanted me to print a new row of stickers or put off correcting the issue until the morning. In what felt like a complete personality swap, Hu not only denied that he’d done anything wrong, but kept staring at the upside-down tags as though I’d just switched them with the proper tags he’d produced. The conversation ended with Hu giving me a look like I’d stolen something from him. Then he stormed off, bumping into several customers on his way to the bathroom where he slammed the door, shat on the floor, then picked up the shit and threw it at the ceiling, mirror, and walls. Then he smeared the shit. When this surreptitious work was complete, he washed his hands and face, then marched out the back door—he forgot to clock out—and hopped the bus back to the Charity House. My day ended with Mr. Jaffe handing me a collection of sponges and disinfectants. He insisted I undo the accident as penance for my lack of sensitivity in dealing with the mentally challenged. I’ll skip ahead by saying that cleaning the mess was an unpleasant experience, but that in the face of the moment’s larger and less easily resolved problems, I found myself in the unique position of tolerating this unpleasantness. At the very least the story won a few laughs from Smitty, which, when I told it to him, made me feel like a normal guy for a few minutes.
The next morning I returned to work trying to pretend that nothing had happened, even if all the other employees found the situation hilarious, especially the warehouse workers. One of them kept putting on a Jackie Chan accent and asking me,
“Hu flung poo?”
I tried to ignore him and focus on the routine of hanging tags. Inevitably my thoughts turned to Emily and who she was talking with and what she was telling them and whether or not she still loved me. I imagined meeting her randomly in Lions Park, checking for cancer again and not finding it, kissing her ballerina lips, pressing against her fiery cheeks, mixing our tears and holding each other up. I thought about Katie, Mr. and Mrs. Schell, my parents, my friendships, life jackets, police, news reports, etc., and over time grew used to the sensation that instead of climbing up and down a ladder at Iowa Lighting Solutions I was actually at home in bed, hiding under the covers and functioning by remote control. Hu and I more or less got along over the next few weeks, even if I’d occasionally catch a dirty stare when I’d sigh too loud after noticing one of his stickers covering the string that I needed for hanging the tags on the fixtures. These hurtful looks reminded me of an abused son who, if he takes one more lick, might just go for the ax. I avoided criticizing Hu in any way, but knew it was only a matter of time before Mr. Jaffe brought me another mop and pail.
It finally happened on a Friday afternoon when Hu decided to print the stickers without asking how the program worked. In doing so he erased a block of about five hundred prenumbered tags, which meant that someone would have to go back and type in each inventory number, then look up the corresponding model number in one of the thousand-page manufacturing catalogs stacked in the office. I explained the predicament to Mr. Jaffe, who told me that I shouldn’t have let Hu use the computer. “You’re the computer expert,” he said. “What’s he doing doing your job?”
Knowing I couldn’t completely skirt the issue, I bought two Cokes and invited Hu to join me in the break area out back. I tried to act more sad than angry, like I’d just been scolded by Mr. Jaffe and felt lousy about it. “What made you use the computer without asking my help?” I said. “I never use the computer,” he said, crossing his arms and shaking his head from as far as it would stretch one way to as far as it would stretch the other. “
I
do the stickers,” he went on. “
You
do the computer.” When I pressed Hu a second time, he took to his feet and starting huffing his way inside. Of course I had a good idea where he was heading, but I kept a few paces behind him, waiting until I was sure of his intentions before blocking his way or wrestling him into submission, if that’s what it came to. Hu surprised me by slamming the service door and turning the bolt. I didn’t hesitate. I jumped off the loading dock and sprinted for the front entrance, knowing it was no quick jaunt around the warehouse, but figuring Hu had better be damned fast if he planned on beating me. (I won’t deny an initial joy in the challenge, the feeling of sudden resuscitation—adrenaline surging into my heart, blood rushing to the extremities, a momentary reprieve from my stress and directionless pain.)