“Oh,” said Jack.
“She saw her father die. You know that.”
He did not, but he couldn’t say so. “Yes,” he said. Then, “I will.”
“Will what?”
“Look after Sadie.”
“Not after Sadie,” said Linda. “Me. I don’t know that she could do it, worst comes to worst. Your parents have all those daughters, so I don’t feel too bad about asking. Will you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Don’t worry too much,” said Linda, though he was already worried and planned to worry for the foreseeable future. “I have every intention of dying in my sleep.”
Then there Sadie was, in a linen jumpsuit against the heat, billowing and flowered and wrong for her, beige and bright yellow—who would put an empire waist on a jumpsuit?—and they both loved her so dearly in it. She’d taken the afternoon to get a haircut, an old-fashioned bob when all the other hair of Greater Boston was pulled back into ponytails that day, or shorn into buzz cuts.
“Mom!” she said. “How are you?” She went to the opposite side of the bed.
“Furious, you want to know. I told Jack not to call you.”
“He didn’t. Arturo Vitale called me, that weirdo. What’s going on?”
“Tripped over a box and now they want to do surgery on my foot, if you can imagine such a stupid thing.”
“Well, I guess you should get surgery,” said Sadie. “Good grief.”
“They wanted to put some stitches in my scalp, but I said no.” Linda touched her hair. “Most things they offer in hospitals you don’t really have to do.”
The dog in Jack wanted to leap over the bed. He wanted to find somebody in the hospital to marry them—there must be a chaplain, people were always getting married this close to mortality, though Linda was fine: she would live through this and go back to her storybook apartment, or so they thought. Everything seemed fine then. Everything seemed absolutely ordinary, Sadie in her terrible jumpsuit with the empire waist, looking like an ottoman, Linda intact. He stayed where he was. He didn’t leap.
Later, as Sadie drove them home, he said, because there was no right question, “You saw your father die.”
“My mother told you that.”
“It’s not true?”
“No, it’s—I mean, it is true.”
“Oh, honey,” he said, because it was a moment for endearments though they never used endearments. Her new haircut matched her Weimar Republic eyebrows, the thin lines she’d plucked them into years ago, expecting that they’d grow back. Her lipstick was red. It suited her. It was only from the neck down that she looked clownish.
“Oh, honey,” she repeated. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. He had an aneurysm.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Not a freak accident.”
“I never said a freak accident.”
He was sure she had—
“A freak thing,” she said. “A freak thing.”
* * *
Her father was crinkle-faced with bad teeth; he wore short-sleeved polyester shirts with black neckties; she loved him. He liked to show her card tricks. He was showing her one when he died.
“Look,” he’d said. “There were once four thieves, and they decided to rob a department store.” Jack of Clubs, Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Spades, Jack of Hearts. “And they landed their helicopter on the roof of the building.” He put the jacks on the top of the deck of cards.
She was sitting in her bed, a little white Eastlake bed frame he’d found at a yard sale, such a long narrow shape they’d had to have a mattress made for it.
“The first thief went to the basement, fine china,” he said, pulling a card from the top and inserting it in near the bottom. “The second, to the ground floor, perfume.” Another card. “Third, lingerie. Fourth, jewelry. Then they heard the police outside, and they ran up—”
At this he riffled the cards but lost control of them. They flew into the air, then he himself folded up: he fell to his knees, as though surrendering to the imaginary playing card police force, he sat, he had a dopey expression on his face, he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, and his hands made funny giving-up gestures. She had laughed. Her father was very funny. Look at his hands, I give up, I give up.
That was the thing about her father’s death, what she never told anyone, that she had thought it was a joke. It was not the sort of secret that explained everything, or even anything, though she knew that was what Jack believed: a key for a lock. Something architecturally essential that couldn’t be disturbed without the help of professionals. A spell of the Snow White variety that might awaken her to a different life. Better? Worse? Probably not worth the risk. Maybe the beast preferred being a beast, the swan brothers the power of flight, the boy kidnapped by the Snow Queen the ability not to care about the feelings of others and also the luminous cold.
A knot on a vital net. An undiscovered organ. A tumor left alone for fear of rupture.
None of these. It was merely a thing that belonged to her.
There was a certain emotion that she’d felt, when she was looking at her father, thinking it was a joke, then understanding it wasn’t, but not knowing yet the right response, what this meant for the rest of her life. Not shame: she’d hate for anyone to think that. Not sorrow, though sorrow was nearby. It was an emotion she’d never felt before and never would again, close to a religious conversion: deep certainty over a mystery. She couldn’t bear another’s interpretation. Couldn’t imagine converting any of it into words. The memory—not of the facts of her father’s death but of this one moment—was hers, only hers, like one of those morbid Victorian lockets with a dead beloved’s woven hair. How strange, to use the dead matter of a person’s head to stand in for all of a dead person. How right, too.
