Audio: Camille Bordas reads.
It wasn’t his job to explain it over and over, to sit the families down and say, “The husband/the brother/the son you knew is no more, it’s only machines breathing for him now, and you wouldn’t be letting him go, because he’s already gone.” He was the surgeon, not the organ-donation person, not the social worker, not a friend. His job was to say it once. Once was often enough—families would unplug a loved one within a few hours. But certain people required extra attention. TV shows he’d heard of (TV shows his own wife watched) had led some to believe that desperate cases were never that desperate, that all you had to do, really, was to keep asking the surgeon, and the surgeon, because you kept him focussed and engaged in the case, would suddenly light up, go to the lab for half a day, find a solution to reverse your loved one’s vegetative state, and hug you warmly at the end of it all.
“But he just looks so peaceful,” the wife of one of his patients told him that night. She’d been delaying the unplugging for a few days.
“He’s gone,” Paul said.
“How can you be so sure?”
He listed again the signs of brain death.
“But we all know the stories about people waking from comas after years,” the wife said. “Or communicating with blinks. What if he just needs a few more days to figure out how to blink?”
“He’s not in a coma. He’s not in a vegetative state,” Paul said. “He is brain-dead.”
The wife said again that her husband looked peaceful. “Like he’s dreaming,” she said. How cruel would it be to just unplug him in the middle of a dream?
“And what if he is dreaming?” Paul said, instead of repeating the brain-dead part. “How many of our dreams are pleasant, would you say? How many do you wish would go on forever?”
The wife thought about it. She hadn’t had a dream about flying in a very long time.
“Aren’t most of your dreams horrifying?” Paul insisted.
He was talking about himself now, of course, the dreadful dreams he had, and the boring ones, the ones about packing endlessly for a trip he never finished packing in time to take, the ones about looking through every single drawer he’d ever seen in his life for his tax return. The boring dreams that he woke up exhausted from, as if he’d gone through a day instead of having recovered from one.
“What if your husband is stuck in a bad one?” Paul asked. “What if you could free him from that?”
The wife started crying—not for attention, not to get Paul to change his tone. She was very tired. She hadn’t gone home since her husband’s accident. Her fourth-grade students had come to see her, to give her the “We miss you” drawings they’d made, but she hadn’t gone to meet them in the waiting area, so they’d left their art at reception. She hadn’t showered or slept or combed her hair in days, and hadn’t wanted to scare them.
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“I guess Clark spoke of bad dreams,” she said, trying to look at her husband and giving up instantly, to cry harder. “He never liked sleeping very much, either. He thought it was a waste of time.”
They let Clark go later that night. The wife asked Paul to attend, and instead of pleading a prior commitment, as was his habit, he sat next to her the whole time. He would even have taken her hand, had she expressed the need. Twenty-six minutes after they unplugged Clark, his heart stopped for good, and, once Paul had recorded the time of death, he checked on one more patient (that one would make it), sent out a recommendation letter for one of his interns (something he’d kept putting off), drove home, smoked a last cigarette, and hanged himself.
Anna didn’t make much of Paul’s empty side of the bed—she was used to waking up alone.
Danielle was already up and watching the Discovery Channel, pretending to know more about sharks than the voice-over was willing to divulge, improvising facts as she went along, to make the ocean more interesting.
“After they shit them out, sharks actually keep the bones of all the humans they eat, and they use them to build houses with,” she told her mother, as she came down the stairs.
“I don’t want to learn anything before breakfast, honey. We’ve been over this.”
Danielle joined Anna at the kitchen table and asked her to eat her breakfast quickly, for she had a lot to tell her about Egypt.
“Your presentation is going to be great,” Anna said. “You shouldn’t even think about rehearsing it now. The most important part, on the day of, is to relax.”
The word “relax” made Danielle tense. Lately, everybody seemed to want her to make it a part of her life. Her piano teacher had spent her most recent lesson pressing down on Danielle’s shoulders as she played, urging her to loosen up, drop her shoulders, think of them as goo, or cotton, or rubber (the teacher couldn’t make up his mind), telling her that she’d never play beautifully if she kept her shoulders so stiff, and even though Danielle wanted to play beautifully there had been nothing she could do. If anything, an hour of pressing down on her shoulders had turned them to stone. She’d pretended to be sick so that she could skip the following lesson.
“I want to wear my sweatshirt with the pyramids on it,” Danielle said. “For my presentation.”
“Your sweatshirt has Mayan pyramids on it.”
“That’s part of my lecture,” Danielle said. “To talk about the differences. Don’t you think I can tell the difference?”
Danielle was nine years old.
Anna almost suggested that, if Danielle knew so much about places like Egypt and the Gulf of Mexico, she could probably locate the laundry room and retrieve her pyramid sweatshirt from the dryer herself, but something she would later think of as higher-order maternal instinct locked the words at the base of her throat and made her stick out her tongue at her daughter instead. Danielle told her how childish that was.
Danielle never went into the laundry room, which must have factored into Paul’s decision to hang himself there. Anna, when she saw him, didn’t scream. She didn’t believe what she saw, and yet made an instant decision to keep it from her daughter, send her off to school, deal with the situation after that. A cold plan, she realized as she devised it. She was not yet losing her mind. The seconds she was in would repeat themselves forever, haunt her at odd moments, flash through her head in the checkout line, when the girl asked if she wanted the PayDay with her or in the bag, and maybe Anna knew this already, that she’d never be done with the seconds, and so there was no actual need to be fully in them as they slid into the past.
She took Danielle’s sweatshirt out of the dryer, shut the door behind her, and walked back into the kitchen, her heart beating in her ears, her hands cold and clumsy around the embroidered drawings of Chichen Itza. She tried to fold the sweatshirt on the kitchen table, gave up, draped it over a chair instead. She ran hot water on her hands and forearms as if it could stop the wave of cold she felt going through her body—the hands seemed to be the point of entry. Paul’s body was going to be refrigerated, she thought, and Danielle would have to know about that part, eventually—she’d ask questions—but not the suicide, she thought, no, she would never have to find out about that. Anna wanted to go back to the laundry room, make sure she’d seen what she’d seen, but she knew what she’d seen, she even knew that Paul hadn’t pissed or shit himself—there had been no smell, no stain on his pants, no puddle under him. He must’ve prepared for that possibility, emptied his bladder and bowels before hanging himself. Emptied his bladder, Anna said to herself. Why am I thinking these words? She went back to the sweatshirt, tried folding it again.
“Hey, don’t fold that, I want to wear it!” Danielle said, and Anna sent her up to her bedroom to get dressed. Before it was time to leave for school, she asked Danielle to make sure to empty her bladder, and Danielle thought it was funny, because Anna usually said “one last piss for the road,” and Danielle made up a song about emptying her bladder while she did so, purple panties at her knees, a song that was also about water in all its different states.
It was getting cold outside, coats had been taken out of storage, time had to be spent sliding them on in the hallway, dangerously close to the laundry-room door.
“Did I tell you why the Egyptians built all the pyramids on the same bank of the Nile?”
There was no reason for Danielle to open the laundry-room door, but Anna still wondered what she should do if such a thing happened. Should she pretend she was seeing the scene for the first time?
“Come over here, sweetheart, we’re late. Busy day today.”
They didn’t think to turn the TV off, or the lights, and the house stayed like that for the fifteen minutes it took Anna to drive Danielle to school and come back, the Discovery Channel lining up facts about marine life in one room, her dead husband hanging in another.
She would never know this—the paramedics wouldn’t tell her—but Paul, in addition to emptying his bladder before kicking the chair, had put on an adult diaper he’d taken from the supply closet at the hospital, to be on the safe side.
Danielle’s fist remained in her coat pocket, clenched around the lighter, until her mother had not only dropped her off at school but turned the corner toward home, out of sight. Her father had left the lighter on the kitchen counter. He wasn’t supposed to smoke anymore, and Danielle, the first to get up that morning, and the first to see the lighter and the ashtray by the sink, had thought she’d do him a solid—empty the ashtray outside, secure and hide the lighter, give it back to her father while no one was watching, the next time she saw him (at dinner that night, she hoped: she couldn’t wait to let him know that, while he wasn’t suspecting it, she’d been his ally all day). She loved keeping people’s secrets. She assumed that the more she kept the faster she’d grow up. The problem was that she’d mainly kept fellow-children’s secrets so far, and she couldn’t imagine that those truly counted. Still. They might’ve been a test on the road to keeping bigger secrets, actual secrets. (Her neighbor Susie seemed to believe that any thought she had was a secret—she’d sworn Danielle to secrecy in advance of confessing such things as hating blueberries or Julia, her twin.) Danielle must have passed the test, because this was grownup stuff, this was important, her father not having really quit smoking, her father lying to her mother. Looking down from her bedroom window a few nights earlier, to investigate an owl sound she thought she’d heard, Danielle had seen her father smoke a cigarette a floor below, elbows on the kitchen sill, upper body leaning out of the window frame. He’d seen her seeing him, had trusted her not to say anything. He hadn’t even mentioned the possibility of buying her silence, just asked for it with the simplest gesture of a hand. She would slip him the lighter later that evening, when her mother wasn’t looking. Maybe she wouldn’t even say a word, just wink at him. But maybe a wink was too childish.
In the meantime, she planned to use the lighter. Either set something on fire or just show it off at school. She toyed with it all through first period, flicking it the second the teacher turned to the board, trying to melt different things (her eraser, a pen); when the teacher mentioned that something smelled like burnt plastic, no one told on Danielle, even though they’d been observing her experiments, even though some of them were scared of Danielle, unsure what she was capable of.
At recess, she explained the physics of the lighter to her boyfriend—the flint, the spark wheel.
“It’s so small,” Cesar said, weighing the lighter in his palm. “It looks like a kidney bean.”
“It’s actually called a split-pea lighter,” Danielle said. She knew that it didn’t make much sense to have a boyfriend at her age, but Cesar had asked politely, and people were usually intimidated by her, so she’d drawn the conclusion that at least he was brave. She took the lighter back.
“My father’s into miniatures,” she explained. “He has a lot of very small things.” She realized that this might make her father sound weird, or immature. “He’s a brain surgeon,” she added.
“I know,” Cesar said.
Danielle said that they should maybe set the school on fire, and Cesar said no, that they would go to prison if they did.
“Children don’t go to prison,” Danielle said. “Grownups think that everything stupid or horrible we do we either didn’t mean to do or happened accidentally. We can do anything.”
As they were making plans to set the school on fire, Mr. Schull, the recess monitor, came up behind Danielle.
“Are you guys playing with matches?” he said. “Give them to me immediately.”
Danielle knew that if she put the lighter back in her coat pocket Mr. Schull would see, so she stuck it into her mouth instead, tucked it between her gums and the inside of her cheek. Cesar took a step back from Danielle and showed his palms to Mr. Schull.
“Danielle, let me see your hands.”
She still had her back to him. If she turned around, he’d probably see the bump in her cheek and ask her to open her mouth. She moved the lighter right below her palate. Mr. Schull grabbed her shoulder and made her face him. “You’re awfully quiet, Danielle,” he said. “I’ve come to expect elaborate pleas from you.”
“We weren’t doing anything wrong,” Cesar said. “She was just melting the plastic on her windbreaker cord.”
Danielle knew that Mr. Schull’s attention would be trained on Cesar for only another second or two. There was no time to think. She swallowed the lighter.
“What did you just do?” Mr. Schull asked. “Open your mouth.”
She opened wide. The lighter had gone beyond the uvula, no problem, but she still felt it at the base of her throat, struggling to get past the point where her collarbones dipped. She thought that Mr. Schull would be able to see it if he looked into her mouth at the right angle. He didn’t. He let go of her face.
“What did she just swallow?” he asked Cesar.
“I think what you just did was an invasion of privacy,” Danielle said to Mr. Schull.
“I think it was just gum,” Cesar told him. “She always swallows her gum.”
The bell rang. Danielle was punished for chewing gum.
Punishment, at Peters Elementary, meant going to the school library during lunch break and reflecting on your behavior. Danielle had her habits at the library, a favorite spot. At this point, she knew where everything was, so she went straight for the wildlife section and picked out a book about sharks. She wanted to know if they built houses, like she’d told her mother they did. She was pretty sure they didn’t, but maybe they did something else that was impressive. She also wondered how she would explain to her father that she’d swallowed his lighter. She could feel it in her stomach now, or thought she could. She assumed that her father would have to cut her open in the bathroom to retrieve it, and that he would be mad at having to do more work at home. She wasn’t looking forward to dinner anymore.
At noon, the headmaster walked into the library, followed by Danielle’s aunt Esther.
“Danielle,” the headmaster said, squatting down to be at her level. “Your aunt came to pick you up. There’s been an accident. Your father is at the hospital.”
“My father is always at the hospital,” Danielle said, though she knew the headmaster hadn’t meant it that way.
“Something happened to him,” he said.
“Well, I can’t just leave,” Danielle said. “I have a presentation in the afternoon. A presentation on Egypt.”
“I think Miss Maisie will agree to reschedule.”
The night Paul died, Anna won twelve grand in the lottery. She found out only days later, after Paul was buried, on one of those evenings when she’d catch herself wishing for another funeral to plan. She didn’t want anyone else to die, of course, but picking a last tie, nice songs to play during the service—it had all kept her from thinking too hard about the meaning of life. Plus, no one (or so she thought) had ever died while planning a funeral. She assumed that funeral planning was akin to hitting a Pause button on any other shitty thing that could happen to you. But now that there was no script left to follow, now that the body was gone, meaning was all there was to ponder. She’d been happy with Paul. He’d managed to make her happy while having only a vague notion of the word himself. Was that noble or stupid? Had she taken too much from him? Would he have enjoyed life more had he not had her to please or pretend for? Why hadn’t he left a note? She knew why he hadn’t left a note. Paul hated repeating himself. The circularity of a depressive frame of mind, combined with the way he talked, a high-speed mumbling, had already forced him to repeat himself more than he could stand. Also: the repetitiveness of life itself.
Since the funeral, she’d been playing the radio real loud, to focus on other people’s thoughts, and it wasn’t until someone on “All Things Considered” mentioned something about the Caribbean that she was reminded of the lottery ticket in her purse. She’d never dreamed of the Caribbean herself, but she assumed that other lottery players had a uniform fantasy of a white yacht anchored there. She played the lottery every week, even though Paul made a good living and she had a job of her own (real estate). When he’d tell her it was a scam, a waste of money, she’d say, I need the possibility, however minor, of being surprised. She regretted ever having said those words to him.
Twelve thousand dollars. It was roughly what burying Paul had come to. She thought of buying Danielle something nice, like an aboveground pool or a dog, but then she knew it could never be that nice, that it would always be associated with this time in Danielle’s life, her father’s “heart attack.” She slid the winning ticket under a Chicago magnet on the fridge. Chicago—the city she was from, not the band. Someone on the radio was talking about the way birds fucked. Danielle came into the kitchen with blood dripping from her chin.
When they opened Danielle up, they retrieved not only the miniature lighter but three Lego pieces, a marble, and a key-chain flashlight. The Legos were dull and discolored by her stomach fluids, but the lighter retained most of its shine. The flashlight still worked. The surgeon asked Anna if she wanted to keep the items, as he called them, and she said yes, she thought Danielle might like to have them when she woke up. She assumed that Danielle had swallowed the lighter after learning that Paul had died, as a way to express her grief. Anna didn’t give the Legos and the marble and the flashlight much thought. She asked the surgeon if she should worry about the fact that her daughter swallowed things.
“I mean, I know it’s not normal,” she said, “but how abnormal is it? Is it a cry for help? She’s very sad, I know this, but do you think she’s depressed?”
“Well, I’m not an expert on mental health,” the surgeon said, “but I’ve been retrieving foreign objects from people’s insides for the past twenty-eight years. More often than not, they seem oddly mentally stable. As far as I can tell, they just think it’s fun.”
Anna held on to that diagnosis for many years.
Danielle moved out young, but not to go to college. Anna considered selling the house, didn’t, retired early from a sparkless career, took up weaving and pottery, never remarried. Danielle moved back in with her after every breakup, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for weeks. When she broke up with Armand, her mother knew that she would stay longer, Armand having been not only her boyfriend and her roommate but her employer—she left him and her job, as a desk clerk at his hotel, in one fell swoop. Two months into her renewed cohabitation with her mother, Danielle still hadn’t found a new job, and, as far as Anna could tell, she wasn’t looking too hard. She’d taken to journaling, which worried Anna. Wasn’t keeping a diary for depressive people? Were all depressives suicidal? She thought about reading the diary while Danielle was out, but Danielle didn’t go out much, and, when she did, Anna would talk herself out of spying on her daughter’s interiority. It wasn’t as if being aware of Paul’s had ever helped much.
Danielle had thought of suicide a handful of times, of course—who hadn’t—but mainly as a distraction from the boredom of her hotel-lobby work. “If I killed myself right now, in this elevator, what would that do to the business?”—things like that. On many a slow afternoon, she’d wished she hadn’t been born, but that was different. That wasn’t a suicidal thought; it mostly sprung from laziness, or an unfulfillable desire to nap. She was wishing she hadn’t been born, one morning, when her mother came home from the store. She’d been on the couch reading about diluted Buddhism instead of looking for work.
“What are you reading?” her mother asked.
“I don’t know,” Danielle said, and half closed the book to look at its cover. “Something about finding inner peace and pure joy through Buddhism. It was right there on the coffee table.”
“Oh! That’s my book about inner peace!” Anna said.
“Makes sense.”
“What does?”
“Well, it’s not my book about inner peace, and you’re the only other person living here.”
“Ah,” Anna said. “Got you.” She was silent for a few seconds. “I thought you meant something else. Like it made total sense that I would read about inner peace because I’m such a bore.”
“I don’t think you’re a bore,” Danielle said. “And Buddhists are pretty good, I think. As far as spiritual people go.”
“I think so, too,” Anna said. “I’m glad we agree on something.”
Danielle asked her mother why she was reading about inner peace. Anna wasn’t actually reading about inner peace, she explained—not yet, at least. She’d found the book on the bus a few days earlier and had asked her fellow-riders if it belonged to anyone, but nobody had so much as vaguely looked in her direction to acknowledge that she’d spoken.
“People are just so rude,” she said.
Mother and daughter agreed on that, too, but Danielle didn’t say so. A conversation wasn’t really worth having when you agreed with the other person.
Rude people were a mystery to Danielle, because being polite was just about the easiest thing she could think of. All you had to do was to know when and when not to look at someone, and the distinction between the two circumstances seemed pretty easy to make. Politeness was a quality you could acquire quickly when you felt you were a little lacking in the positive-traits department, Danielle thought, and so whenever she encountered rude people she took it to mean that they believed they had enough virtues as it was, that they didn’t see a need to make the little extra effort.
“Is it interesting?” Anna asked her daughter, of the inner-peace book.
“You could’ve left it where it was.”
Danielle realized that she’d adopted an annoyed tone of voice, even though her mother, in that moment, didn’t particularly annoy her. She saw Anna getting ready to leave her alone, and understood that when her mother died, no matter how long from now that was, she’d remember this very second of having been dismissive toward her out of sheer habit, and feel horrible about it until she died in turn.
“It’s just that if I were an actual Buddhist,” Danielle said, stopping her mother on her way out of the room, “I would be pissed that people now seem to believe that the Buddha was primarily seeking happiness and not nonexistence.”
“Happiness is certainly overrated,” Anna said. She knew that that was the kind of thing you had to tell a depressive person so that she wouldn’t feel too alienated from the rest of the world.
“And nonexistence underrated,” Danielle said.
“I don’t think nonexistence can be rated,” Anna said. “By definition.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s under-,” Danielle said.
“Are you all right, honey? You were with Armand a long time, and I get that it’s hard, but you worry me a little these days.”
“I’m fine, Mom. Definitely not planning on slitting my wrists over Armand’s picture.”
“Who said anything about slitting wrists?”
“I was joking,” Danielle said. “Saying ‘nonexistence’ sounded nice, like, if I didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have to look for a stupid job right now, et cetera.”
“It doesn’t have to be a stupid job, honey. You’re still so very young, you still have time to find something you’re passionate about.”
Anna regretted using the word “passionate.” There was a lot of pressure in it. She saw Danielle wince. Danielle had been spending a lot of time thinking about lines of work lately, and how people ended up modelling their world view on whatever it was that they did for a living—how mathematicians thought everything was numbers, how writers thought everything was fiction. Even Armand had tried to convince her that checking strangers in and out of identical rooms mattered. “Life is a hotel lobby,” he’d say. She wondered whether garbagemen went around telling people that everything was waste, which would’ve been, to her mind, closer to the truth than anything else she’d heard.
Danielle had never wanted to be or do anything in particular. She’d always enjoyed learning about things, but the knowledge had never transformed into a calling. Always ahead of the learning curve, she’d ended up taking it full circle, had trapped herself in the circle, even, while her slower, not-as-curious classmates had used the curve as an on-ramp to all kinds of careers. Some of them, like Cesar’s wife, had even invented their own professions. She’d been one of the very first app designers, had come up with a pet-dating app that had made her and Cesar rich.
“Was Dad passionate about his job? I know you weren’t too happy with yours,” Danielle said. She didn’t talk about her father much, but she did ask questions, which Anna always tried to answer as honestly as possible, to make up for the big lie about his death.
“He liked his job, I think, for the most part. The nurses annoyed him, of course, and the patients. . . . He wasn’t crazy about dealing with the families. But he liked fixing people, I think. I don’t know.”
“Sometimes when you talk about him,” Danielle said, “it sounds like maybe he was a little bit of an asshole.”
“All I mean is he had doubts, like every sensible human being. No one is always satisfied a hundred per cent of the time.”
That was putting it diplomatically. Paul hadn’t been satisfied even twenty per cent of the time, not on his wedding day, not when he mended a broken person, not when his research got funded, not even when Danielle was born. Every day, even a good one, was an annoyance or a challenge on the way to eventual fulfillment, which he believed—or at least seemed to believe—he’d receive. The little moments of joy were not for him. He wanted all the joy, all at once, at the end of his life.
“Was he a polite man?” Danielle asked.
“Very,” Anna said. “Very polite.”
Danielle sneezed and her heart tightened, or so it felt. She pressed the heel of her hand hard and high on her chest, over her left breast, where she believed her heart to be.
“Are you all right, honey?”
“It’s nothing. I should probably just go see the cardio again, see if that mitral-valve-regurgitation thing has evolved.”
“He didn’t seem worried about it last time. Didn’t he just say that maybe it would become a problem in, like, twenty years? You probably just pulled a muscle sneezing.”
“Surely,” Danielle said.
She wasn’t a hypochondriac, but she did have her heart checked more often than she admitted to her mother—as far as she knew, a bad heart was what had killed her father. “Anyway,” she said, after whatever had tightened in her chest loosened a bit. “Jobs. Cesar offered to have me help him and his wife work on their pet-hotel project, with my experience and all.”
Anna felt guilty about the heart scares, of course—she’d instilled the fear—but it was better that her child worried about a nonexistent genetic condition than about the real one, was how she comforted herself. She knew that some people didn’t consider suicide a genetic condition, but she also knew that there had been five suicides in four generations of Hemingways. What kept her up at night was the question of whether there would’ve been as many had the first one remained a secret.
“That’s wonderful!” Anna said. “Pets. Pets are wonderful. They’re a real emotional help.”
“What does that have to do with anything? Cesar and Steph just want to treat them like your regular American consumers, as far as I understand the plan.”
“Nonetheless, I think it would be wonderful for you to work around animals. You’ve always liked animals.”
Danielle wasn’t entirely sure of that. She’d never met one she’d built a relationship with, mostly knew them from books and TV. She was lying about the job opportunity anyway. Steph didn’t need help with her project. Cesar and she weren’t doing great, actually, last she’d heard.
She called Cesar that afternoon, while her mother was out, to prepare him to lie in case he ran into her.
“Sure,” Cesar said. “I’ll lie to the nicest woman on earth. Again.”
Cesar had broken up with Danielle at age ten. He’d told her that she was too sad for him, which she’d understood, and had even admired him for daring to say. He’d told her she wasn’t too sad, though, for them to remain friends. She’d thought that he was letting her down easy, but he’d meant it. They’d been close all through junior high and high school, had even stayed in touch during Cesar’s college years in Glasgow. He’d gone there to study literature but had become a carpenter somewhere along the way. That’s how he presented it: he’d become that, not decided to switch career tracks. One day he’d been a scholar with an interest in building, the next a carpenter with an interest in Victorian literature. He’d still graduated before moving back to the U.S., to open a woodworking business.
“You know who else I lied to about you recently?” Cesar said. “Fucking Armand! He called me on my birthday. Didn’t text me. Called.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him you were doing great.”
“I am doing great.”
Cesar had built floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in Armand’s lobby that Armand had filled with books bought in bulk and arranged according to color.
“Are you guys going to be friends now?” Danielle asked.
“I don’t see that in the cards for us, no.”
“Good. He would only just constantly break your balls about how negative you are, anyway, and how life is a glass half full or whatever. God knows he broke my balls about it.”
“Well, it’s true you’re not exactly a ray of sunshine,” Cesar said.
“And fuck you, too.”
“I just find it funny that you always go for the super-happy-go-lucky guys, when you’re about the darkest person I know.”
“You need balance in life,” Danielle said. “Also, am I that dark? Don’t I just see the world as it is?”
“You like feeling shitty,” Cesar said. “You go the extra mile.”
Danielle tested her theory on Cesar, about lines of work, how she believed that a person had to convince herself that the one path she’d chosen was the most meaningful, and how maybe that was why nobody ever got along. Cesar thought about it, but not for very long.
“Yeah,” he said, “I don’t think you’re right—that a mathematician sees everything through a math prism, or whatever. I read some literary criticism about that, actually. It talked about how farmers never thought in farming metaphors, for example, how only writers thought they did.”
“Armand spoke almost exclusively in hotel metaphors,” Danielle said.
“Speaking is different than thinking.”
“You mean you never think in carpentry metaphors?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like you never tell yourself, ‘Well that was a waste of wood,’ instead of a waste of time? Or ‘That guy only knows to cut along the grain,’ or whatever?”
“You just made these up?”
“ ‘You have to wait for the sawdust to settle’ . . . or something. . . . I don’t know. Didn’t Jesus rock the carpentry metaphors?”
“Maybe he rocks them in the book, I haven’t read the whole thing, but I’m telling you: if that’s the case, the writers made him do it. Jesus himself never thought in carpentry metaphors.”
Danielle had a fleeting thought about Egypt, not about pyramids but about something she’d read in the Egyptian Dream Book. Her father had told her about it eighteen years earlier, when she’d been gathering materials for her presentation—how Egyptian sleep temples were also healing temples, hospitals, sort of. They’d looked it up in the encyclopedia. The Dream Book was a long list of dreams that were believed to be either auspicious or bad omens, and they’d gotten a kick out of reading examples, one of which Danielle remembered: auspicious—if a man sees himself sawing wood in a dream, it is a sign that his enemies are dead. They’d laughed at the dream descriptions, she and her father, because the dreams were so specific, so unlike any dream they themselves had ever had or would ever have (dreams of measuring barley, dreams of slaying hippopotamuses, dreams of seeing yourself in a mirror) that they’d felt protected from the world, from both the good and the bad that could befall them.
It surprised her sometimes how much she remembered from the few days before her father died, as if maybe her brain had known to pay extra attention. It was all the more eerie that everything that had happened in the weeks after was a blur. She knew she’d gone back to school after the funeral, and that she’d gone to the hospital at some point, for the lighter removal, but she had no recollection of these things. She remembered taking the time to borrow the book about sharks that she’d been browsing when the headmaster interrupted her with the news, but she couldn’t recall actually reading it. She’d never returned the book. It was still right there, on her old bedroom shelf.
“Do you remember if I ever gave a presentation on Egypt at school?” she asked Cesar.
She could picture herself researching mummification, and looking up the word “desiccated,” but not standing in front of a room to share her findings.
Cesar said that she had, but maintained that they hadn’t started dating yet, at that time—that the presentation on Egypt was one of the little things that had made him fall for her.
After she hung up with Cesar, she lay in bed and read about sharks. Sharks didn’t build homes, of course. They had to be in constant motion to keep breathing through their gills. Some of them never slept. It was possible for a shark to drown. She thought she would’ve remembered that fact, had she read the book before.
Danielle knew that her mother was lying about her father’s death. She’d never heard of a young person dying peacefully in his sleep, the way her mother said it had happened. Anna insisted the heart attack hadn’t woken him, but that didn’t make any sense to Danielle, who could be woken up by the smell of toast. He had woken and he had suffered. She was convinced of that.
She heard Anna come back and open all the windows on the first floor. Anna was obsessed with air circulation, but also worried about burglary, so she opened and closed windows several times a day. She liked doors to be open, too. In a few minutes, she would knock on Danielle’s bedroom door and share with her some random information about the outside world. This was only ever an excuse to check on her and to “forget” to close the door on her way out. The “forgetting” used to drive Danielle crazy. As a teen-ager, she’d often slam her door in response, but that only had the effect of bringing Anna’s head back between the door and the door frame to ask, “Did you say something, honey?”—after which Danielle would yell at her to close the door once and for all, and Anna would ask why she needed the door to be closed so badly. Danielle never had a satisfying answer to that. She was never doing anything private or embarrassing. Always reading, doing homework, thinking in bed. She sometimes thought now that maybe, if her door had been closed all those years, she would’ve had a more exciting life. Or developed a more interesting personality, at least. Operating as if she could be walked in on at any moment had made her dull. Probably. She thought of the phrase “That ship has sailed” as she heard Anna open the kitchen window downstairs, and wondered if any sailor had ever thought it. The kitchen was right below her bedroom. Many years before, she’d looked out her window and seen her father smoking down there, elbows on the sill. She’d called to him, and he’d looked left and right to see where it had come from. She’d had to say “Up here!” for him to look up. He’d seemed surprised to see his daughter there, in her bedroom, surprised that the interior layout of their house should have direct consequences on the outside world, on whose window looked out on what. He’d looked at her and crossed his lips with his index finger, and Danielle had nodded and pretended to zip her own lips, to assure her father that his secret was safe with her. She thought about this gesture often, how he might have just been asking her to shut up and go to bed, not to keep a secret.
She closed her eyes now, hoping to fall asleep before her mother came up to let her know what was for dinner, or what she’d learned in weaving class. She listened to her heart—not to her metaphorical heart but to the actual murmur, the leaky valve through which blood regurgitated backward at a volume that wasn’t yet cause for concern.
When Anna walked in, Danielle was either sleeping or pretending to. Anna stood on the threshold for a minute, giving her eyes time to get used to the darkness of the room, to discern different gray masses, the bookshelves, the desk, the hamper, to make sure that her daughter’s chest was still rising and falling under the blankets at regular intervals. ♦
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