Alan was next to her now. “Look, Sis, I don’t mean to go all Sleepy Hollow on you or anything, but you need to understand that...I’m sick. Just like Dad and Grampa and every other man in the Quinlan line going back for...I don’t know how long.” Her face was throbbing and it hurt too much to move. “Wh-what’s wrong?” “Colon cancer. It runs in the men in the family.” “Have you seen a doctor?” “No need to.”
“Then h-how do you know?”
“The man I killed last night came here and told me.”
Marian felt her shoulders tense.
“It’ll all make sense soon,” he said, and kissed her cheek. For some reason Marian then remembered that both Grandma, Grampa, Mom, and Dad had all died in this house, and all were buried in the Quinlan area of Cedar Hill Cemetery, along with their direct and distant ancestors.
Alan looked at the blood on his fingertips—whether it was his blood, Marian’s, or some of that from the bottle, there was no way to tell. He turned toward one of the upper cupboards and began drawing faces on them. “I know,” he said, “that there’s nothing we can do about the dying, you’re right there. But there is something we can do about the part that comes after the dying, I found that out last night.” He finished the first face— it looked a lot like Grampa’s— then started another. “I suspected for a long while that there might be ways to do it, I even tried a few— but I imagine Laura or Boots told you all about that.”
Marian offered no response. There was no need.
“Okay,” he said. “The first thing you’ve got to ask yourself is this: what kind of tapestry, quilt, whatever, are you supposed to offer up to the Divine Art Critic when you reach the great Gates? Answer: a beautiful one. Because if it’s not beautiful, that means it’s not finished.” He stopped drawing Mom’s face and leaned toward Marian. “But what happens if— regardless of how much you try to make it otherwise— your tapestry doesn’t turn out to be so beautiful? What happens when you offer it up after death and the big Somebody shakes Its omnipotent head. ‘But it’s the best I can do!’ you cry. ‘I really tried, but I just didn’t have all that much nice stuff to work with!’ What happens then? Easy; you and your tapestry are thrown out to wander around all-blessed Night.” “I love you, Alan, but you’re not making sense.” “Stay with me, Sis, you always were the best listener in this house.” Marian stared. “Please let me go, Alan.”
He wasn’t listening. “Families talk about ‘the ties that bind’ a lot, you ever notice that? You know how that phrase originated? From Story-Quilt makers. I kid you not. See, there’s a method of quilting called ‘tessellation,’ which means ‘to form into or adorn with mosaic, a careful juxtaposition of elements into a final, coherent pattern.’ Since the quilt-makers had to employ endless tessellations in order to join the various patches together in order to form the story of their family, the threads they used were referred to as the ‘ties that bind.’ Don’t say I never taught you anything.
“Well, care to guess what those ‘ties’ are in our family, Sis? Love? Loyalty? Personal integrity? Think about. What is it, above all else, that ties you to your family?”
Marian looked down at her legs; they were shaking. She looked at the bloody faces on the cupboards; they were drying. She looked in her brother’s eyes; they told her nothing.
“I don’t know,” she finally said.
“Guilt,” replied Alan. “Guilt is what ties us all together, whether we admit it or not. Oh, sure, it’s easy to dismiss that idea. ‘I do it because I love you.’ ‘I do it because she’s been so good to me.’ ‘ I don’t care how sick or senile he is, I’m going to see him because I love him.’”
Alan laughed; it was breaking glass. “What a fucking bill of goods! You don’t do it because you love someone, you do it because your conscience won’t leave you alone if you don’t. It’s not so much that you love that senile, oatmeal-drooling caricature of a human being in the nursing home bed, you do it so you can clear your conscience. ‘Well, at least I came to see him. At least I did that.’ It’s all such shit. I’m not saying that love doesn’t have a small part in there, it’s just that we tend to ennoble our actions by saying they’re done out of love, when in reality they’re done because we’re scared to death of never being able to forgive ourselves if we don’t at least make the gesture!”
“God, Alan, that’s a horrible way to think.” Marian was so terrified she was on the verge tears, and the last thing she wanted to do now was give into it.
“Is it?” replied her brother. “Think about it. It’s what drove Grampa to us, isn’t it? His last-ditch attempt to clear the slate, to beautify his tapestry. There’s so much that gets buried under the weight of compiling years, so many memories that can find a dark, dusty little corner to hide in, so much unresolved guilt that builds up unnoticed that we can never be sure if we have really made our tapestries whole, beautiful, acceptable, cha-cha-cha. What if Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grampa, all of them, what if when they got to wherever it is we go they pulled out their tapestries and— voila!— right smack in the middle of it was all this shit they’d forgotten about, all these disfiguring little unremembered guilts that crept into to the artwork, huh? Easy—they get banished to ever-blessed Night. But what if there was a way to fix those tapestries? What if there was a way to remove the ugliness from them? They’d have to be accepted then, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t they?” He was almost right in her face now, and Marian, for the first time she could remember, was very much in fear of her brother.
“G-Given what you’ve s-s-said,” she whispered, “I s-s-suppose they would almost h-have to be. Yes.”
Alan’s body suddenly released all its tension. His eyes grew less intense, his shaking stopped, and he smiled his crooked grin. “Good,” he said, taking her hand. His touch was almost too gentle, and Marian noticed with a numb horror that the moist blood squishing between the flesh of their hands was not...was not at all that unpleasant. She closed her eyes and swallowed. “Marian?” “Yes?” “I’m going to tell you how we can do it. I’m going to tell you how we can make their tapestries beautiful once again.” “...all right.”
He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She stared at the faces he’d sketched on the wall, wondering why none of them were dripping because his blood was so fresh.
“Last night, around six or six-thirty— I wasn’t paying that much attention— I was sitting in the front room, just...just sitting, I guess. I kept thinking about all that had gone wrong between Laura and me, and try as I did I couldn’t find the reason for us breaking up like we did.
“You have to understand that the nights were terrible for me, have been for the last eight months since she left, and I...I can’t stand sleeping alone. The fact that everything in our house had her smell on it didn’t help matters any. The chairs, the curtains, our bed— God, especially our bed! She took everything with her when she left, except her smell. It’s the sweetest smell I ever knew. Everything about her was the sweetest I’d ever known.
“Anyhoo, I started going through the closet one day and I found her old black robe and a bra and panty set she’d left behind. They were covered with her scent. It was incredible. I’d hold them next to me and lie on the bed and just...just breathe it in.
“It was so overpowering that I could almost feel her there with me. So I tried laying all the things out like she’d be wearing them if she were still there, and I’d lay there and close my eyes and smell here, so near, so full and ready, and I could sense her body, every part of her body, there in the bed next to me. So one night I didn’t open my eyes, I let her scent carry me as far as it could, and when I reached out to touch her I could feel her skin, and it was so warm, so near, so ready...it was like we’d never been apart. I made love to her that night like I’d never done it before.