“This is not your fault,” I say. “And there’s no such thing as karma.”
“You don’t know that.”
But I do. Because if karma existed, I would be the one with cancer, not Anna. I take a deep breath, knowing what I have to do. All the years, I’ve kept my promise to Jonas. But Anna has to know this isn’t her fault. “Do you remember how Leo kept ranting around the apartment screaming why? Breaking things and yelling at Mum?”
Anna nods.
“He blamed himself for Conrad. But it had nothing to do with him. It was my fault.” I take a deep breath. “That day on the boat, when Conrad died—”
“I don’t want to be dead, Elle,” Anna says, interrupting. “I don’t want to be nothing anymore . . . no more trees, no more you—just a pile of flesh rotting away. Remember Mum? And the worms?” She’s half laughing, half crying.
“You won’t,” I say. “I won’t let you.”
“Poor Conrad,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “I wasn’t even sad.”
28
1998. May, New York.
The top of my mother’s kitchen table was once an old barn door, its sharp edges softened by decades of family dinners. There is still a keyhole where a lock once fit, and woodworm boreholes like pinpricks, filled with years of food grime turned the consistency of earwax. When I was little I loved to root around in each hole with a fork, making tiny piles that seeded the tabletop like termite droppings. I sit here now, poking at the table with the tip of a ballpoint pen. Peter should have been here by now. It’s Mum’s birthday and we’re taking her out for dinner. Our reservation is at eight. I pick up the kitchen phone and call the time. “At the tone, the time will be . . . seven . . . twenty-five . . . and fifty seconds. . . . At the tone, the time will be . . . seven . . . twenty-six . . . exactly.” The new kitten walks into the kitchen. Marmalade back, white paws, yellow eyes. He looks up at me, wanting attention. I put him on the table and he starts eating the termite crumbs. Somewhere in the apartment I hear a crash. I push back my chair and go down the hall.
Mum is on a stepladder, alphabetizing the bookshelves.
“Oh good,” she says. “You can help me with the poetry section.” She pulls a stack of books off the shelf and hands them to me.
“Peter’s running late.” I sit down on the floor and start sorting books. “Does Primo Levi go in poetry?”
“I can never decide. Put him in philosophy for now.”
I pick up The Collected Poems of Dwight Burke from the top of a pile and open it. On the front page is a handwritten dedication, scrawled in faded blue fountain pen: For Henry’s girls, who are sweeter than pachysandra, with hope that your lives will be filled with poetry and spice. Love, Dwight.
“This is mine.”
Mum glances down from the ladder. “I believe it’s yours and Anna’s.”
“You’re right. I’ll send it to her.”
“I’d keep it here. It’s probably worth a fortune by now—a signed first edition of Burke. Jeremy will just want her to sell it.”
On the back cover of the book is a faded black-and-white photo of Dwight Burke in a seersucker jacket and polka-dot bow tie. His face has the same kindly expression I remember from my childhood, a pleasant WASPiness.
“He was a nice man,” I say.
“Such a tragedy,” Mum says.
“He wore penny loafers with nickels in them. I should write to Nancy.”
“Your father always thought he was a homosexual.”
For years after Dwight Burke drowned, there were rumors he had killed himself—that Carter Ashe, the man he had gone to return the book to that spring day when my father and I went to collect his boxes, was Burke’s lover. That Burke, a devout Catholic, was overcome with shame and guilt. My father insisted the rumors weren’t true. Burke’s clothes had been found in a careful pile on the banks of the Hudson, perfectly folded—everything but the boxer shorts he was wearing when they pulled him out of the water. “If he were planning to drown himself,” my father had said, “why keep on his boxers? Dwight would have wanted to go out of the world the same way he came in. He was a poet. He loved symmetry.”
“Author or subject?” Mum says. She’s holding a book about Gandhi. She has moved on to biography.
“Subject. No one really cares who wrote it.” I open the book of poetry in my hand. The poems are alive, odd, buzzing with insects and tender grasses. As I skim through, a verse catches my eye.