The Living Dead

Yet even here the past lingered. It was the past that had brought me here, after all.

The nursing home was a sprawl of landscaped grounds and low-slung stucco buildings, faintly Spanish in design. I found Gran in a garden overlooking the Pacific, and I paused, studying her, before she noticed me in the doorway. She held a paperback in her lap, but she had left off reading to stare out across the water. A salt-laden breeze lifted her gray hair in wisps, and for a moment, looking at her, her eyes clear in her distinctly boned face, I could find my way back to the woman I had known as a boy.

But the years intervened, the way they always do. In the end, I couldn't help noticing her wasted body, or the glittering geometry of the wheelchair that enclosed her. Her injured leg jutted before her.

I must have sighed, for she looked up, adjusting the angle of the chair. 'Robert!'

'Gran.'

I sat by her, on a concrete bench. The morning overcast was breaking, and the sun struck sparks from the wave-tops.

'I'd have thought you were too busy to visit,' she said, 'now that your man has won the election.'

'I'm not so busy these days. I don't work for him anymore.'

'What do you mean—'

'I mean I quit my job.'

'Why?' she said.

'I spent some time in Pittsburgh. I've been looking into things.'

'Looking into things? Whatever on Earth is there to look into, Robert?' She smoothed the afghan covering her thighs, her fingers trembling.

I laid my hand across them, but she pulled away. 'Gran, we need to talk.'

'Talk?' She laughed, a bark of forced gaiety. 'We talk every day.'

'Look at me,' I said, and after a long moment, she did. I could see the fear in her eyes, then. I wondered how long it had been there, and why I'd never noticed it before. 'We need to talk about the past.'

'The past is dead, Robert.'

Now it was my turn to laugh. 'Nothing's dead, Gran. Turn on the television sometime. Nothing stays dead anymore. Nothing.'

'I don't want to talk about that.'

'Then what do you want to talk about?' I waved an arm at the building behind us, the ammonia-scented corridors and the endless numbered rooms inhabited by faded old people, already ghosts of the dead they would become. 'You want to talk about Cora in 203 and the way her son never visits her or Jerry in 147 whose emphysema has been giving him trouble or all the—'

'All the what?' she snapped, suddenly fierce.

'All the fucking minutia we always talk about!'

'I won't have you speak to me like that! I raised you, I made you what you are today!'

'I know,' I said. And then, more quietly, I said it again. 'I know.'

Her hands twisted in her lap. 'The doctors told me you'd forget, it happens that way sometimes with trauma. You were so young. It seemed best somehow to just . . . let it go.'

'But you lied.'

'I didn't choose any of this,' she said. 'After it happened, your parents sent you out to me. Just for a little while, they said. They needed time to think things through.'

She fell silent, squinting at the surf foaming on the rocks below. The sun bore down upon us, a heartbreaking disk of white in the faraway sky.

'I never thought they'd do what they did,' she said, 'and then it was too late. After that . . . how could I tell you?' She clenched my hand. 'You seemed okay, Robert. You seemed like you were fine.'

I stood, pulling away. 'How could you know?'

'Robert—'

I turned at the door. She'd wheeled the chair around to face me. Her leg thrust toward me in its cast, like the prow of a ship. She was in tears. 'Why, Robert? Why couldn't you just leave everything alone?'

'I don't know,' I said, but even then I was thinking of Lewis, that habit he has of probing at his face where the acne left it pitted—as if someday he'll find his flesh smooth and handsome once again, and it's through his hands he'll know it. I guess that's it, you know: we've all been wounded, every one of us.

And we just can't keep our hands off the scars.

I drifted for the next day or two, living out of hotel rooms and haunting the places I'd known growing up. They'd changed like everything changes, the world always hurrying us along, but I didn't know what else to do, where else to go. I couldn't leave Long Beach, not till I made things up with Gran, but something held me back.

I felt ill at ease, restless. And then, as I fished through my wallet in a bar one afternoon, I saw a tiny slip of paper eddy to the floor. I knew what it was, of course, but I picked it up anyway. My fingers shook as I opened it up and stared at the message written there, Call me sometime, with the address and phone number printed neatly below.

I made it to Laguna Beach in fifty minutes. The address was a mile or so east of the water, a manicured duplex on a corner lot. She had moved no doubt—five years had passed—and if she hadn't moved she had married at the very least. But I left my car at the curb and walked up the sidewalk all the same. I could hear the bell through an open window, footsteps approaching, soft music lilting from the back of the house. Then the door opened and she was there, wiping her hands on a towel.

'Gwen,' I said.

She didn't smile, but she didn't close the door either.

It was a start.

The house was small, but light, with wide windows in the kitchen overlooking a lush back lawn. A breeze slipped past the screens, infusing the kitchen with the scent of fresh-cut grass and the faraway smell of ocean.

'This isn't a bad time, is it?' I asked.

'Well, it's unexpected to say the least,' she told me, lifting one eyebrow doubtfully, and in the gesture I caught a glimpse of the girl I'd known at Northwestern, rueful and wry and always faintly amused.

As she made coffee, I studied her, still freckled and faintly gamine, but not unchanged. Her eyes had a wary light in them, and fresh lines caged her thin upper lip. When she sat across from me at the table, toying with her coffee cup, I noticed a faint pale circle around her finger where a ring might have been.

Maybe I looked older too, for Gwen glanced up at me from beneath a fringe of streaky blonde bangs, her mouth arcing in a crooked smile. 'You look younger on television,' she said, and it was enough to get us started.

Gwen knew a fair bit of my story—my role in Burton's presidential campaign had bought me that much notoriety at least—and hers had a familiar ring to it. Law school at UCLA, five or six years billing hours in one of the big LA firms before the cutthroat culture got to her and she threw it over for a job with the ACLU, trading long days and a handsome wage for still longer ones and almost no wage at all. Her marriage had come apart around the same time. 'Not out of any real animosity,' she said. 'More like a mutual lack of interest.'

'And now? Are you seeing anyone?'

The question came out with a weight I hadn't intended.

She hesitated. 'No one special.' She lifted the eyebrow once again. 'A habit I picked up as a litigator. Risk aversion.'

By this time, the sky beyond the windows had softened into twilight and our coffee had grown cold. As shadows lengthened in the little kitchen, I caught Gwen glancing at the clock.

She had plans.

I stood. 'I should go.'

'Right.'

She took my hand at the door, a simple handshake, that's all, but I felt something pass between us, an old connection close with a kind of electric spark. Maybe it wasn't there at all, maybe I only wanted to feel it—Gwen certainly seemed willing to let me walk out of her life once again—but a kind of desperation seized me.