We were silent in the taxi on the way to the hospital and we only glanced at each other once, when Ann took my hand and I moved close to her so she could rest her head on my shoulder.
13
The Butterfields were filing into town one at a time, first Keith and then Hugh’s older brother Robert, who’d flown in with one of his nine children, a middle son named after Hugh. They gathered at Ann’s; there was nowhere else to go and even Ingrid, her sister, and a few of Ingrid’s friends went to Ann’s.
I stayed away, utterly isolated in my hotel room. I remember that room better than myself on that day. When I conjure it up in memory, I see an empty room, a ladder of sunlight rising and falling on one wall, a pigeon lighting on a window sill and peering in through the glass, a dead fly resting in the convex glass shade covering the overhead light, a fraying light cord oozing brown fuzz, the rattle of room-service trays in the halls, voices, hundreds of voices and none of them mine. If I concentrate with all my might, I can just barely picture myself in that room: on the bed, my hands behind my head, my feet crossed, fully clothed. I see myself at the window, looking down at the street. I see myself in tears. Yet even these memories are dim and somehow unreal. All I truly know is that I stayed in my hotel, waiting for someone to call me, and, for the most part, I had ceased to exist.
I also remember writing and I think I was writing a letter to Jade. But I never found any evidence of any writing at all. I picture myself tearing some hotel stationery into shreds and watching it drift into the tin wastepaper basket, but that feels more like logic than memory. An anesthetized patient will awaken and remember being wheeled to the operating room, the overhead lights flashing by, the masked attendants, the squeak of rubber gloves. But it’s difficult to say if these images are retrieved from the unconscious or if they are invented, drawn from our sense of what the world without us must be like.
I never think of the life I’ll miss after I’m dead, or all that I missed before I was born. It’s the time I’m as good as dead during this, my one and only life, that makes me tear at my hair. It seems to me that if I carefully gathered all of the time I was entirely alive I would have amassed perhaps two years of life so far…
At four o’clock Ann called.
“You belong here,” she said. “As much as anyone. You belong with us.”
I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my hand over my eyes.
“Do you…” I stopped. “How do the others feel about me being…? I want to be with you.”
“David, I don’t know how the laws of karma work. But for some reason you were here when I needed someone. When I needed you. And today that seems bigger than anything else, the past. And everyone here agrees. I wasn’t sure you hadn’t gone back to Chicago. But really I knew you’d still be here. I can’t figure it out now but this is right and really, David, you should be here.”
“I want to.”
“Then come. Now. Right away.”
“It really is all right?”
“Yes. It’s a lot more than all right. It’s…essential. We’re getting righteously drunk. We’re gathering our forces and I need you here. If you’re worried about Keith, well, he knows I need you here, too. Also, by the way, Ingrid knows.”
“Ingrid knows what?”
“All about you.”
“What do you mean?”
“She knows you’re you and why we did that act in front of her last night. And as a citizen of Jupiter, she couldn’t care less. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about that. Look, David, I’m not giving you a choice about this. I don’t want you sitting in that hotel room all alone while this is happening. When the sun sets you won’t even turn on the lights. There’s no choice. Just come over right now.”
“I will. I want to.”
“I know you do. OK. Oh, one thing. If you pass an open deli, pick up some mixers—tonic, club soda, you know. We have to make highballs. If we keep drinking everything straight, we’re going to be dry way before Monday morning.”
Ann hung up and I held on to the phone.
When Sam Butterfield opened the door to me, I was sobbing. I didn’t want it to be that way and I’d been fighting off my tears from the time I left the hotel. It was a stupid thing that broke my defenses: when I rang the buzzer in the lobby, no one asked who it was through the intercom. It was as if it hardly mattered who was there because it would never be Hugh. The locked glass door was buzzed open and I burst into tears. I didn’t ring for the elevator. There was a bench in the lobby and I sat down, shaking my head and saying “Stop it” to myself, but it seemed I would have to be one of those mystics who can stop a bleeding wound through the powers of the mind to wrest the control of my tears from the spacious, anarchic part of myself that ruled them now. Suddenly, the elevator appeared. I staggered in and rode up to the seventh floor. I was still crying when I knocked on Ann’s door.
“Hello, David,” Sammy said. “It’s nice of you to come.”
His voice was deep, much deeper than mine. His egg-sized Adam’s apple quavered at the center of his long tanned throat: at seventeen he was already over six feet tall and though I was just an inch shorter than him, I felt him looming over me. His light brown hair was parted in the middle and gathered in back in a small Thomas Jefferson pony tail. His blue eyes looked at me through a red mist. He extended his hand and I took it. I bowed my head, ashamed to be crying and helpless to stop.
“I’m sorry, it’s a terrible thing,” I said, but I doubt it was clear. I thought I should turn around and compose myself. I felt like a huge emotional pig to be inflicting my sorrow and confusion on them. I’d been summoned to be strong and my tears were a violation of trust.
“We expected you,” Sammy was saying. “Jade’s not here yet. Mom just hooked up with her a couple hours ago.”
There was a measure of relief in learning that the moment I’d been waiting for had been moved forward a notch or two. With any luck I would have control over myself by the time Jade arrived. But the real deliverance from the ruination of my feelings was Sammy’s telling me. I knew there was no particular reason for him to let me know that Jade wasn’t there yet, no purpose except to ease the pressure on me. Sammy was comforting me, really, and I swallowed hard and tried to be worthy of it.
I looked at him and said, “I’ve missed you, Sammy, but I would have rather gone through my whole life without ever seeing you again than have to see you on a day like this.” I waited for him to say something but he just gazed mildly into my eyes and suddenly I realized I hadn’t actually said anything: my thoughts were loud and out of control, but I hadn’t even moved my lips.
When I reached the front room, Keith was sitting on the arm of the sofa holding that framed square of pink and blue quilt. His hair had darkened to a deep, opaque brown and his once frail body had a kind of obstinacy to it now. He drummed his squarish fingertips on the raw wooden frame; his sandals sank into the sofa cushion; his feet were creased and powerful-looking, and his toenails were grown out long.
“This is mine, OK?” he was saying, in his high, reasonable voice.
“Not now, Keith,” Ann said.
“But I’m the one who wants it. I’m the only one.” He stared hard at the piece of quilt. He knew I was in the room but he gave no indication.
“Hello, David,” Ann said. “Thank—”
But what she was saying was lost to me; I was listening to Keith.
“You don’t hang something like this up on your wall,” Keith was saying. “This isn’t a picture, you know. It’s not something to add
“That quilt comes from
Keith kept his eyes fixed on the quilt and he was shaking his head. “That’s not it and you know it. That’s like
