It is Peter’s office. They need him to fly to Memphis in the morning for a story. Flight details. Hotel information. Local telephone numbers.
I look around for a pen and something to write on. All I can find is a takeout menu and a flyer for a local production of The Silver Cord. Nearby, thumbtacked to a wooden shelf above the phone, is my mother’s list of important phone numbers. It has been there since I was a child, by now covered in scribbles and corrections, names of local plumbers and electricians, the Park Ranger station; numbers crossed out in ballpoint pen, rewritten in pencil; a peace sign Anna once drew in green Magic Marker. In the middle of the list, written in faded blue ink, Conrad’s mother’s phone number in Memphis is still visible. The handwriting is Leo’s.
* * *
—
“Wasn’t your stepfather from Memphis?” Peter says, throwing a few things into a carry-on bag. “Socks.”
“He was.” I pull open a lower drawer and take out four pairs of socks.
“Have you ever been?”
“Once. For Conrad’s funeral.”
“Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“How old was Conrad when he died?”
“Jack’s age,” I say. “Do you need undershirts?”
“Christ. How do you ever get over something like that?” Peter throws a few last things into the bag—a pack of gum, a comb, the book from his bedside table—and zips it.
I sit down on the edge of the bed. “You don’t.”
Down the path, I hear Finn and Maddy arguing. “No shouting on the pond,” my mother yells from the porch.
“I can’t believe you’re abandoning me with that crazy woman.” I chip at the red nail polish on my big toe. My heels look like they are made of rhino horn. “I need a pedicure.”
“Come with me. We can have a romantic getaway.”
“In Memphis?”
“Anywhere we can have sex without your mother hearing us.”
“Much as I love you, Memphis is the last place on earth I ever want to see again.”
Peter sits down beside me on the bed. “I’m serious. It’ll be cathartic. I’ll take you out for barbecue spaghetti.”
I stare out the cabin door, mind searching for a simple excuse. The pond is golden, glassy, tipping toward evening. Here and there a few small turtle heads have popped up like thumbs, basking in the last of the sun. I wonder whether Peter is right—whether there could ever be such a thing as catharsis.
“Come,” he says again. “You’ll be rescuing me from four depressing days on my own in the murder capital of America. We can have loud sex. You can get a pedicure.”
“I doubt Mum’s willing to watch the kids,” I say. But even as I sidestep, I hear my mother’s voice in my head, the pep talk she would always give me and Anna when we were afraid of anything—the dark, a bad grade in social studies, the idea that, one day, she would die and rot: “We are not a family of cowards, girls. We face our fears head on.”
“Let me ask her,” Peter says. “You know if I ask, she’ll say yes.”
“True.”
“And you can visit Conrad’s grave.”
30
Three Days Ago. July 29, Memphis.
The cemetery is prettier than I remember—an arboretum of mature flowering trees and shaded slopes giving way to wide lawns dotted with the gray teeth of the dead. Carved angels cling to the edges of tombstones. It takes me half an hour to find Conrad’s grave. I make my way through row after row of Chinese headstones and crumbling Confederate graves. Groups of tourists wander the cemetery listening to an audio tour of Dead People Greatest Hits. I watch them move like lemmings between the tombstones.
His marker is small, strewn with spongy fallen petals—pale pinks browning to rot. A flowering dogwood towers above, shading and littering his plot. Nearby is a large granite obelisk with a nice low ledge to sit on, the ground around it carpeted with thick green grass. Someone has recently left a bouquet of fresh flowers. I move the flowers to one side and sit down on the cool stone seat. Anna hated grassy graves. “They’re grassier because there are more worms in the soil. Think about it.” Instead, I think about the picnic lunches Anna and I had as children, when we would visit our grandparents. Sitting on the cool marble tombstone of the suicide grave, playing with our paper dolls. Mine were awkward, bulbous stick figures with rounded feet and simple faces. Anna’s were always magazine-perfect—girls with Susan Dey hair, boys with brown shags. An endless wardrobe of miniature clothes—hip-huggers and purple clogs, French sailor sweaters, bandana bikinis, Fair Isles, kilts with teensy safety pins. Our secret one-dimensional world—the world we pretended was ours as we sat on a sad man’s grave eating ham sandwiches on buttered white bread, looking out across the old cemetery to our grandparents’ house on the hill, the fields of cows and cud beyond.