interconnected jumble of metal, and for a moment I could feel the room begin to be enough for her, the foreign territory enough to soothe her. It was the feeling of being unreachable.
If it had not been for Len’s hand stretching out and grazing her fingers with the tips of his own, I might have kept her to myself there. The room could have remained simply a brief vacation from her life as Mrs. Salmon.
But he did touch her, and she did turn. Still, she could not really look at him. He accepted this absence on her part.
I swirled as I watched it and held on to the bench in the gazebo, gulping air. She could never know, I thought, that while she was clutching Len’s hair and he was reaching his hand around to the small of her back, bringing her in closer, that the man who had murdered me was escorting two officers out his front door.
I felt the kisses as they came down my mother’s neck and onto her chest, like the small, light feet of mice, and like the flower petals falling that they were. Ruinous and marvelous all at once. They were whispers calling her away from me and from her family and from her grief. She followed with her body.
While Len took her hand and brought her away from the wall into the tangle of pipes where the noise overhead added its chorus, Mr. Harvey began to pack his belongings; my brother met a small girl playing Hula-Hoop in the circle; my sister and Samuel lay beside each other on her bed, fully dressed and nervous; my grandmother downed three shots in the empty dining room. My father watched the phone.
My mother grabbed at Len’s coat and shirt greedily, and he helped her. He watched as she tugged at her own clothes, pulling her sweater over her head, then her mother-jumper, and her turtleneck, until she was left in her underpants and camisole. He stared at her.
Samuel kissed the back of my sister’s neck. She smelled of soap and Bactine, and he wanted, even then, never to leave her.
Len was about to say something; I could see my mother notice his lips just as they parted. She shut her eyes and commanded the world to shut up – screaming the words inside her skull. She opened her eyes again and looked at him. He was silent, his mouth set. She took her cotton camisole over the top of her head and stepped out of her underwear. My mother had my body as it would never become. But she had her own moonlit skin, her ocean eyes. She was hollow and lost and abandoned up.
Mr. Harvey left his house for the final time while my mother was granted her most temporal wish. To find a doorway out of her ruined heart, in merciful adultery.
Sixteen
A year to the day after my death, Dr. Singh called to say he would not be home for dinner. But Ruana would do her exercises no matter what. If, as she stretched out on the rug in the one warm spot that the house seemed to hold in the winter, she could not help but turn over and over again her husband’s absences in her mind, she would let them consume her until her body pled for her to let him go and to focus – as she leaned forward, her arms outstretched toward her toes now – and move, to shut her brain off and forget everything but the slight and pleasant yearning of muscles stretching and her own body bending.
Reaching almost to the floor, the window in the dining room was interrupted only by the metal baseboard for the heat, which Ruana liked to keep turned off because the noises it made disturbed her. Outside, she could see the cherry tree, its leaves and flowers all gone. The empty bird feeder swung slightly on its branch.
She stretched until she was quite warm and she’d forgotten herself, and the home she stood in fell away from her. Her age. Her son. But still, creeping in on her was the figure of her husband. She had a premonition. She did not believe it was a woman, or even a student who worshiped him, that made him late more and more often. She knew what it was because it was something she too had had and had severed herself from after having been injured long ago. It was ambition.
She heard sounds now. Holiday barking two streets over and the Gilberts’ dog answering him and Ray moving around upstairs. Blessedly, in another moment, Jethro Tull erupted again, shutting out all else.
Except for the occasional cigarette, which she smoked as secretly as she could so as not to give Ray license, she had kept herself in good health. Many of the women in the neighborhood commented on how well she kept herself and some had asked her if she would mind showing them how, though she had always taken these entreaties merely as their way of making conversation with their lone foreign-born neighbor. But as she sat in Sukhasana and her breath slowed to a deep rhythm, she could not fully release and let go. The niggling idea of what she would do as Ray grew older and her husband worked increasingly long hours crept up the inside of her foot and along her calf to the back of her knee and began to climb into her lap.
The doorbell rang.
Ruana was happy for the escape, and though she was someone to whom order was also a sort of meditation, she hopped up, wrapped a shawl that was hanging on the back of a chair around her waist, and, with Ray’s music barreling down the stairs, walked to the door. She thought only for a moment that it might be a neighbor. A complaining neighbor – the music – and she, dressed in a red leotard and shawl.
Ruth stood on the stoop, holding a grocery sack.
“Hello,” Ruana said. “May I help you?”
“I’m here to see Ray.”
“Come in.”
All of this had to be half-shouted over the noise coming from upstairs. Ruth stepped into the front hall.
“Go on up,” Ruana shouted, pointing to the stairs.
I watched Ruana take in Ruth’s baggy overalls, her turdeneck, her parka.
Ruth had been standing in the grocery store with her mother when she saw the candles among the paper plates and plastic forks and spoons. At school that day she had been acutely aware of what day it was and even though what she had done so far – lain in bed reading
When she saw the candles she knew immediately that she would find her way over to Ray’s house and ask him to come with her. Because of their meetings at the shot-put circle, the kids at school had made them a couple despite all evidence to the contrary. Ruth could draw as many female nudes as she might wish and fashion scarves on her head and write papers on Janis Joplin and loudly protest the oppression of shaving her legs and armpits. In the eyes of her classmates at Fairfax, she remained a weird girl who had been found K-I-S-S-I-N-G a weird boy.
What no one understood – and they could not begin to tell anyone – was that it had been an experiment between them. Ray had kissed only me, and Ruth had never kissed anyone, so, united, they had agreed to kiss each other and see.
“I don’t feel anything,” Ruth had said afterward, as they lay in the maple leaves under a tree behind the teachers’ parking lot.
“I don’t either,” Ray admitted.
“Did you feel something when you kissed Susie?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“That I wanted more. That night I dreamed of kissing her again and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.”
“And sex?”
“I hadn’t really gotten that far yet,” Ray said. “Now I kiss you and it’s not the same.”
“We could keep trying,” Ruth said. “I’m game if you don’t tell anyone.”
“I thought you liked girls,” Ray said.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Ruth said. “You can pretend I’m Susie and I will too.”
“You are so entirely screwed up,” Ray said, smiling.
“Are you saying you don’t want to?” Ruth teased.
“Show me your drawings again.”
“I may be screwed up,” Ruth said, dragging out her sketchbook from her book bag – it was now full of nudes she’d copied out of
Ray was dancing around his bedroom when Ruth walked in. He wore his glasses, which at school he tried to do without because they were thick and his father had only sprung for the least expensive, hard-to-break frames. He had on a pair of jeans that were baggy and stained and a T-shirt that Ruth imagined, and I knew, had been slept in.
He stopped dancing as soon as he saw her standing at the doorway holding the grocery bag. His hands went up immediately and collected his glasses, and then, not knowing what to do with them, he waved them at her and said, “Hello.”
“Can you turn it down?” Ruth screamed.
“Sure!”
When the noise ceased her ears rang for a second, and in that second she saw something flicker across Ray’s eyes.
He now stood on the other side of the room, and in between them was his bed, where sheets were rumpled and balled and over which hung a drawing Ruth had done of me from memory.
“You hung it up,” Ruth said.
“I think it’s really good.”
“You and me and nobody else.”
“My mom thinks it’s good.”
“She’s intense, Ray,” Ruth said, putting down the bag. “No wonder you’re so freak-a-delic.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“Candles,” said Ruth. “I got them at the grocery store. It’s December sixth.”
“I know.”
“I thought we might go to the cornfield and light them. Say goodbye.”
“How many times can you say it?”
“It was an idea,” Ruth said. “I’ll go alone.”
“No,” Ray said. “I’ll go.”
Ruth sat down in her jacket and overalls and waited for him to change his shirt. She watched him with his back toward her, how thin he was but also how the muscles seemed to pop on his arms the way they were supposed to and the color of his skin, like his mother’s, so much more inviting than her own.
“We can kiss for a while if you want.”
And he turned, grinning. He had begun to like the experiments. He was not thinking of me anymore – though he couldn’t tell that to Ruth.
He liked the way she cursed and hated school. He liked how smart she was and how she tried to pretend that it didn’t matter to her that his father was a doctor (even though not a real doctor, as she pointed out) and her father scavenged old houses, or that the Singhs
