"It
was a really fine ceremony. Really fine. Lots of flowers, big fluffy white
ones, like these tiny silky clouds, the inside of the church was all covered
with them. And you know me, I don't really do the church thing any more...kind
of lost my last bit of faith a long time ago...but walking back in there
after so long and remembering the stained glass shining on the marble floors,
the pews full up -- Jesus, Alexa, they were more full than you could've
imagined. People were watching from outside, had to stand up for the ceremony.
I turned around once and saw all these faces I never knew, never met. Made
me wonder if I'll get such a turnout when it's my show. Anyway, where was
I...oh, yeah. Fucking attention span sucks these days, just goes off on
a whole other track and I'm left at the station. The church...man, if you
don't believe in God a church like this one makes you believe, you know
what I mean? I'd forgotten all the colors, the robes, and the altar boys...
you remember, I was one myself... Course it's hard to look at the altar
boys and not want to warn them about the wandering hands of the priest...but
this just wasn't the time for that kind of stuff. Even I felt, well, reverential.
Anyhow, people as far as the eye could see, packing up this church, then
back to the house after for the party, a real big do, a complete Irish
wake. I had no idea he had those kinds of relatives, but there's two times
people like that come out of the woodwork, when you win the lottery and
when you keel, and so there they were. Food spread out in the backyard,
cause it was a real nice sunny day, everybody walking around, talking quiet,
but talking. Lots of people came up and shook my hand, told me stuff like
I was the next of kin, funny that, and as I wandered around, everybody
had some story to tell, everybody had their own remembrance and they were
sharing them all around. Wish I'd had a tape recorder, that's something
I'd like to have collected, to play later, to make it easier, but who walks
around at a wake taping all the stories about somebody? Almost makes me
feel like you're not supposed to, you know, someone isn't supposed to keep
those stories, they get told when you die so they can go away with you,
float to heaven, whatever bullshit you want to imagine them doing. That's
what it felt like to me, though, I stood over by the tree in the middle
of the yard and watched them talking, everyone talking about just one person,
and I almost could imagine all those stories collecting above their heads
and being blown with the next good breeze up and over the river, to wherever
he's gone."
Mike
paused and rested his hand on the grass, running his fingers lightly over
the fresh shoots. "Course, no doubt you know all this already." He laughed
to himself. "I have no idea why I think you even need to hear this, surely
he's told it all to you himself. You know, I'm almost jealous, I'm almost
ready to tell him I'm going to knock that smug look off his face yet again,
because he got to see you again first, before I get there. Maybe that's
what they call divine justice." He laughed again. "Justice. Divine justice.
Yeah, if anybody'd understand the meaning of that, it'd be old Ben Stone."
Mike
stopped again and stared at the headstone, lifting his hand and running
his forefinger over the engraved words like he did every time he visited,
tracing out Alexa's name and the numbers beneath it, trying to imagine
it was not cold marble under his touch but his wife's face, or arm, or
breast, never achieving the lost sensation but hoping nonetheless. Why
he spoke to her Mike had never fully fathomed. When asked he would say
he was a fundamentalist athiest -- though in public, naturally, he was
Catholic. He hadn't lied about his faith disappearing long ago; he had
no sense for a greater being. But he did fervrently believe in a hereafter,
he did believe there was a place where everyone went afterwards, where
everything that once meant a great deal was smoothed over and purified.
He did and always had believed that. So he talked to Alexa, believing she
heard him. Usually, around this time of the visit, after he'd told her
all that had gone on in the past month and re-read the engraving like a
blind main reading Braille, Mike would feel the empty sore place in his
chest open up again and he would cry a little.
Because
he spoke to her aloud, and because of his displays of emotion, Mike visited
her alone, insisting on at least a half hour of solitude while whoever
had driven him this time to the cemetery sat in the car and waited. He
looked off in the distance, past the other graves, and felt a warm breeze
brush his face. They'll just have to stew a little longer, he thought,
and removed his hand from the stone. But while the cavity in his chest
was opening, and he felt the bleak emptiness yawn before him like a gaping
mouth, this time Mike did not cry. He wanted to; he was accustomed to it,
the fact of it no longer embarrassed him, even if it had been fourteen
years since she had died. Not crying today brought along with it a sense
of peace and comfort, not that he had been wept dry but more like it wasn't
necessary any more. And at first he did not understand why he felt this
way. Last month he had not felt this way; last month he had visited as
he always did, taking his turn for a half hour, going first, waiting to
be called back to the car.
After
his half hour Mike had become accustomed to Ben venturing out to get him.
The former DA would shuffle out slowly, taking his time getting from the
car -- his knee hadn't been working right since that accident two or three
years ago, so his walking was almost painfully slow, but he made it seem
like a leisurely stroll, rather than an old man's stiff insistence on self-mobilization.
Ben would come out, set up his portable folding stool, then he would sit
down and rest a hand on Mike's shoulder. Self-conscious always, Mike would
quickly kiss his fingers and press them to the marble, then scramble up
and head over to the car. Sometimes, when he thought of it, he would gaze
out of the car window and watch Ben, sitting on his stool, leaning forward,
chin and hands on his walking stick, and watch how Ben never moved, never
spoke, just stared. He seemed to always know when thirty minutes had gone
by, because he would stand again on his own and pull out the flower he
had brought, slip it in the half-buried vase near her grave, and start
his slow shuffle to the car again.
Once
a year or so he and Ben would have visitors with them; Benjy or Caitlin
or both of them would come along, and the children would take their turns,
but they always felt the weight of time and never stayed very long. It
felt long to them, but in fact their visits rarely took longer than fifteen
minutes or so. It wasn't their fault. She had now been gone longer than
she had been there with them. Mike accepted that the burden of keeping
Alexa informed was left up to him and Ben, and he didn't fault them for
their abbreviated visits.
Mike
tried to work his way back over the past fifteen years or so, to when his
life had been much different than it was today, to when he was brushing
up against fifty and the gray in his hair was merely token, not all-encompassing.
To when Alexa had gotten sick that second time, and they had gone to New
Mexico. To a time when he hated Ben Stone, because if you went back to
that point, Mike Logan was a very different person than he was today.
He
closed his eyes, and remembered.
In
those days of fifteen years ago, Mike was not a man who shared anything
he loved. But circumstances had decreed differently, Mike's son Benjy had
discovered for himself the truth of his parentage, and from that day forward
Mike knew things would never be the same. He got over his initial jealousy
and sense of betrayal, mainly because he had no other choice, and what
helped was Alexa's newfound health. After that trip to New Mexico Mike
could hardly carry a grudge for anyone, even Ben Stone, and he found himself
almost entirely content with life in general. Such a small thing, health,
until it wasn't there any more; Mike felt grateful for every day she had
it back. He could afford to be magnanimous in the face of Ben's knowledge,
and eventually they worked out a schedule wherein Benjy spent some weekends
at the DA's home while other weekends Ben spent with them in Staten Island,
and over that first summer of new health Benjy spent a solid month and
a half alone with Ben. This had gone on successfully through the year after
Alexa's recovery, and for a while they were, indeed, one goddamn big happy
family. They had, improbably enough, even spent Christmas together.
It
was during this time that Mike realized, to his consternation and, in a
perverse way, disappointment, that Ben Stone was not fearsome. He was,
Mike found, just a person, not essentially different from himself. And
after that revelation, another surprise. It had come as a shock to Mike
to discover it was not a great burden to share part of his life, part of
his son, and some of Alexa's attentiveness with Stone. By letting go of
the fear that he would lose everything if he gave some away, Mike found
his stomach hurt him a lot less, and his headaches were nonexistent. By
letting the feeling of threat from Ben dissipate, Mike actually came to
where he could be in the same room with him and strike up a meaningful
conversation. And when he had gotten to the point that they could talk,
like two normal people who have never had a gripe in the world against
one another, Mike had even come to appreciate having Ben around. They still
sniped occasionally; no matter what they had in common their differences
were far greater, but the fights were less and less about the past, and
they were not nearly so hurtful. Mike consciously kept a lid on his temper,
knowing the change in the status quo had made Alexa happier than she had
been in a long time, and perhaps, in the end, that was what kept her going
as long as she had.
Forgiveness
had been a medicine Mike had never considered.
He
opened his eyes again, pulling his knees to his chest, feeling the warm
breeze on his face again, almost like a caress. He knew Benjy and Caitlin,
waiting out in the car, were growing annoyed with him, but he just could
not care at the moment. For years he had been a detective; his inability
to cry out here on this day was a mystery he wanted to work through before
he joined them for the ride home.
She
lasted through the summer after New Mexico, and when the end came it was
quick and sudden, so sudden that no one really had time to prepare for
it. When he thought about it later, Mike remembered her asking him if her
coloring was all right twice in the week before it happened. At the time
he had not thought about the meaning of her questions; he had cursorily
squinted at her and said she looked fine. The day it was fine no longer
she asked him nothing. Details began coming back to him.
Benjy
had found her, really, first. He had been booting the soccer ball around
with some of his friends, and as usual Caitlin had been trying to be included.
Benjy had glanced up to wave at his mother, who seconds ago had been glimpsed
watching him from the second floor porch deck, but who now was no longer
there. As he told Mike later, he had cupped his hand over his eyes and
squinted into the glaring sunset, but she still was not there. Something
made him very frightened about that instant absence and he had picked up
the ball, handing it to Caitlin. "Guard this," he had told her, "and don't
come up on the deck until I say it's okay."
Caitlin,
who knew how to follow orders, nodded enthusiastically, and sat on the
soccer ball. Benjy's friends had stared after him, wondering what had come
over him as he dashed to the base of the steps leading to the deck. "Mom?"
he had called softly, and bounded up.
His
footsteps faded at the top of the staircase, where he stood rigid for a
moment, where he could see how she had fallen, one arm under her head,
hair tumbling from her loose bun, her body twisted awkwardly to one side.
He had laid his hand on her cheek once, quickly, and when she did not wake
up, screamed, "Dad!"
It
wasn't right that an eleven-going-on-twelve year old should find his mother
like that, splayed out on her own deck like a paper towel, and afterwards
Mike felt a marked change come over him in relation to Benjy after that,
a greater kinship that narrowed the gap he had felt between them for years.
That day, Mike had been in the half-basement, rooting around for the lawnmower
extension cord, and at the sound of Benjy calling him he stepped through
the sliding glass door and stared up through the bottom of the deck planks.
He hadn't been able to see much, but there was one knothole in the deck
he had been meaning to plug up, and through it streamed strands of dark
blonde hair. He knew immediately what was wrong.
By
the time he made it up the stairs, Benjy was huddled next to her, holding
her hand and rubbing it, pulling some of the hair out of her face. "Make
her get up, Dad, please," he had entreated his father, but Mike had not
been able to help. In the end, no one had been able to help Alexa from
her coma, and five days later she was gone. The twenty-eighth of September.
Twenty days after she had reached thirty-six.
The
last thing he had ever told her was that the lemonade she had just fixed
and he had tasted was a little too sweet. "You have a way of putting in
just too much sugar," he had told her, and rested his glass on the kitchen
table, then headed into the basement for the cord. The last thing he had
said to her was a criticism. Mike never forgot that, how he had just offhandedly
put her work aside and turned his back on her. It was just one of a thousand
encounters in a day, some special, some harsh, some completely neutral.
But it had been the last thing. And he could not forget it. These days,
he couldn't taste lemonade without thinking of her, and when they had carried
her in to the sofa from the porch that day his eye had caught a glimpse
of his lemonade glass, untouched from just a half hour ago, and he had
begun to cry.
The
sheer suddenness of her departure was something from which Mike knew he
would never fully recover; it had been like having all of his limbs removed
at once, for he felt like a useless stump of a person, and turned to the
one thing his relatives always had found served as a pacifier -- he drank.
There were the relatives, who came and clucked their tongues, brought food
and offered support, then disappeared just as suddenly back to their other
ends of the world, and Mike had barely registered their noisy presence,
though he was grateful for the silence that was left when they departed.
Ben, on the other hand, came as soon as he heard and never left, but fell
quiet, as he was wont to do, and did not speak to anyone for over a week.
Ben at least functioned; by then he was no longer working, and came over
to make meals for the children and made sure the house didn't burn down,
he hugged them and tucked them in at night, he cleaned up Mike when the
new widower was unable to take care of himself, but he did not say a word.
Then,
one day Mike had been in the living room, numb as if his whole body had
fallen asleep while his mind remained conscious, occasionally sipping the
bourbon he had taken to, staring at a television that wasn't even switched
on, and he had heard something he had almost forgotten he knew: Ben's voice.
He was on the telephone, and through some superhuman act of will Mike had
forced himself to a standing position and wandered into the kitchen.
Ben
had turned, seeing Logan leaning against the wall, but had not acknowledged
his presence. He pressed the receiver against his ear, turned halfway,
and continued speaking. "Right. Saturday. I'm sorry to have to ask you
to do this, Claire, but I can't do it on my own. They're going to find
me ready for Bellevue if you don't lend a hand for a day."
After
he had hung up Mike had watched him accusatorily, wondering what the man
was up to, resenting that he had just told Claire things weren't working
so well out here, but Mike had refused to ask what was up. Ben had come
over to him, pulling the bourbon glass from his hand and said, "I quit.
I can't do nursemaid for three children. I'm taking the kids and going
back to my house. It's smaller, I know, but I have to get out of here,
and I think they do, too. Claire's going to help me pack some suitcases
for them, and you are welcome to come with us. But I'm not coming back
here again. I can't. Just...think about it."
Mike
had thought about it. And on Saturday he let them go without a word. By
Sunday, after a horrid drunken night in the house in Staten all by himself,
Mike, who had lived as a bachelor until he was nearly forty and once chased
murderers and arrested killers, could not stand to be alone with his fears
any more. He left everything as it was and threw his clothes in trash bags,
piling them in his car and drove to Ben's.
Except
to sell off the furniture and move what they could, none of the Logans
ever went back to the gingerbread house.
"You
remember," Mike started talking aloud to her again without really hearing
his own voice, "how I told you about that. I had to come on out here and
apologize for just going to pieces and not being able to keep your house.
It was a pretty house, it was prettier because you'd picked it but...it
always reminds me of you being sick. Like Ben told me that one time, in
Staten we only can remember you dying. At his place, everywhere, there
are signs of you living. Took me a long time to really understand that,
mostly cause I never was there for that time when you lived there, but
I think I know what he meant. But that was when I started coming out here
regular, after I had to that first time to tell you we weren't living there
any more. Like you needed a forwarding address." Mike almost laughed, then
didn't. In his mind he was remembering that first trip to the gravesite
after the funeral, before the headstone was even in place, nobody else
around but himself. He had sat in the car for an hour before he got up
the gumption to walk to her site, then sat in the damp grass next to it
and patted the sod softly, like the way he had stroked her stomach when
she had been pregnant. After a few minutes of the terrible silence he had
begun to talk to her, and from there on out whenever he visited he continued
the one-sided conversation. At first he had come every other month, then
as he got older every month.
And
that was as frequent as Mike liked it.
He
came because he missed her, he came because his grief was a physical thing,
attached to his back, weighing him down. He spoke because he could not
stand the silence, and never had. But he spoke for another reason, too.
There was a picture he had in his mind that had come to him in New Mexico,
a panicky feeling that if he had not married her she might have found someone
who did not care as much as he did. There was always the chance she could
have been left to face her disease alone, to die alone. And that terrified
Mike, to think that he almost let her go once. Now that she had gone without
him, he had a nagging sensation that wherever she was she was at least
safe, and no longer in pain. But she was alone again. He could not follow,
not yet. And that tore at him. He was stuck in purgatory, forced there
because of his children...he could not leave them. So he came to Ben's
house, and moved in.
Ben's
house had become a sanctuary for all of them, for all three children, as
Ben had put it. When Mike had finally weaned himself from the bourbon --
Ben wouldn't allow any in his house, so the weaning process had been closer
to cold turkey -- and come to his senses, he began to feel more secure
and settled than he had felt in years, since way back in Rochester. There
were still dark and heavy days, when he would feel only half full, slow
and uncomprehending, thinking of how she really wasn't coming back, how
he was never going to see her again, his kids would grow up without her,
and how his life really was over, but those days were fewer and further
between each time, and the memory did not burn him as badly every time
it returned.
He
had noticed that Ben's practice of coping was withdrawal. Ben went on long
walks out in the backyard and down to the reservoir, at least one trip
a day, and after a while Mike began to include himself. In the beginning,
though, it was not so much a matter of joining him as walking several yards
behind, following the same path but not actually joining Ben in his thoughts
or steps. Though Mike's anger was essentially gone, he felt in another
way that he and Ben had gone back to ground zero, and they were back to
being complete strangers, tabula rasa, with nothing to join them. Mike
and he had begun to wonder if Ben was merely waiting for them to find their
own place and let him have his peace and quiet again.
A
few weeks after Mike started following Ben out to the reservoir, the former
DA had paused in his gait and turned, then continued walking backwards
slowly. "Mike," he had said, "stop being my shadow. Walk with me." And
they had continued strolling through the woods, hands thrust deep in their
pockets, contemplating as before but doing it side by side.
A
mile or so after that first invitation, Mike had spoken hesitantly. "I
was thinking," he had said, "how it was probably time I got us out of your
hair and back to a place of our own, you know, now that we're signing papers
to hand over the Staten place next week. Should be able to take that cash
and get us an okay house on our own. If you don't invest it I hear you
get taxed up the wazoo." He squinted up into the late afternoon sun. "Backyard,
though. I still want a big backyard. If we're lucky we can get one with
a tree so Benjy can have his tire swing here and there."
After
a long silence, Ben's voice came out queerly. "Why?"
"Why
what?"
"Why
bother having two tire swings?"
"I
dunno...I guess..." Mike had faded out, and finally caught on, his face
tensing in confusion. And then it had cleared. This elliptical way of speaking
had gone over Mike's head in the past, but seeing Stone so regularly over
the past year he had finally begun to translate. Ben didn't want his peace
and quiet; Ben was hoping the three of them might stay on a more permanent
basis. "Aren't you going to be kind of cramped if we stay here?"
"I
like cramped," Ben had said.
The
following weekend they had begun to clear out the basement, throwing out
old broken things and selling the rest in a yard sale, repacking boxes
and stacking them nearer the washer and dryer, until they had a large open
space for Mike and his furniture. The basement, which Ben cared nothing
about, became Mike's apartment, while Melissa's old room was taken by Benjy
and the piano room reconverted to fit Caitlin. She loved the large bay
window and covered the French doors with cloth, effecting her own private
space. The piano came out of hiding and they made space for it in the living
room, and Benjy and Caitlin began taking lessons. Occasionally they would
work at transcribing their mother's music for piano, and when they sat
down to play her songs, whatever Mike was doing around the house he would
pause and listen, remembering hearing all of those songs so many times
before, and each time they played his heart clutched a little less and
he smiled a little wider. Amongst the four of them they felt more powerful,
more able to weather the loss of Alexa, and the house had felt, if not
quite like a family, like a very exclusive brother and sisterhood. For
a long time they interacted as minimally as possible with the outside world,
and at first Mike had worried about their solitude, then came to depend
on it. He and Ben had talked, on one of their long strolls, about using
some of Mike's house money to get a larger place, but the thought of no
longer having the one they did came as an anathema, and the money stayed
safe in the bank.
And
so the remainder of the Logan family came to reside at Ben's house.