The next Saturday the weather was mild and bright. Susan went out on the side porch and tipped the rainwater out of the seat of one of the plastic chairs and wiped it dry with a dish towel. She took her coffee and a stack of papers to correct and sat out in the sun. I dug up a couple of trowels from the mess in the garage and tossed them in the foot well on the passenger side of the station wagon. The wagon was the last my grandfather had bought before he died. It was rusted and decrepit but I had a great loyalty to it, an unabashed sentimentality about having ridden around in it with my grandparents before I had become a husband and a father. It was white and had a broken deck for cassette tapes and electric windows that worked only half the time and less than that in cold weather. The tires were bald and the chassis shook so violently when the car idled that it sounded as if the entire exhaust system were about to drop out of the bottom of the car. I felt like a bad parent every time I drove Kate around, but I also had a sincere if wholly unfounded faith that the car was charmed and that Kate would never come to any harm in it.
I said to Susan, “Kate and I are going to go get flowers and plant them at the cemetery.”
“Okay, babe. Say hi to everyone for me,” she said.
“Funny,” I said.
Kate and I bought a tray of six red geranium plants at the garden center, then drove to the cemetery and yanked up the old plants from the previous year. Kate took the job seriously, telling me to make sure that we lined up the rows of holes for the new plants and spaced them evenly in front of the stone so that they would look neat. She pulled one of the plants from its pot and held it in front of her nose. She sniffed at the flowers, then at the root bundle and soil.
“Smell nice?” I asked.
“Kind of,” she said. “I like the way the dirt smells better than the flowers, I think.”
“It’s the leaves that smell so strong. Cool how the roots stay in the shape of the pot, huh?” I said. “That makes it easy; you can just stick the whole thing right into the hole you made.”
When we had planted all the flowers, I said, “We have to water them now. See up the hill there, the spigot — that pipe with the faucet like the one for the garden hose at home? There’s a plastic milk jug by it. Do you want to go fill it up with water and bring it back down so we can water the flowers? Think you can?”
“Yeah, I can do it,” Kate said. She started to march up the hill, zigzagging in between the headstones. She sang a song to herself that I didn’t recognize. As she made her way up the hill, her singing became fainter and I could hear only intermittent notes carried back down on the breeze. The farther up the hill she went, the more the headstones in between us obscured her. I had a sudden impulse to follow her. The way the headstones looked — almost like walls made of alternating granite and marble and slate shingles — it seemed as if she might lose her way among them, as if they were arranged in narrow rows without exits or with dead ends, as if she were walking through a maze suddenly.
“You see it, sweetie?” I called up. She turned around toward me. “You see it?” I called up again, louder. She took a step back toward me. I waved her back.
“Never mind; never mind; you’re fine,” I yelled. She turned back toward the spigot. She bent forward and disappeared behind a row of three white stones and stood back up with the plastic milk jug in her hand. When the jug was full, she hauled it down the hill, bending and stepping sideways to keep her balance.
“That was a bit more of an adventure than I thought,” I said. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, but I’m soaked,” she said. She set the jug next to the headstone, dropped onto the apron of grass in front of the plot, and lay on her back.
I sat down next to her and we were quiet, looking up at the maple trees and their new, luminous shawls of foliage, and at the blue sky and the clouds, which were gray with white piping and silhouettes of gold light. Kate tipped her head back far enough to see the headstone behind her. She whispered letters to herself, translating them from upside down, and half-spelled the names on the stone. She stopped reading and looked at the sky again and shivered. Her arms were covered in goose bumps.
“Chilly?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s warmer standing up.”
“You’re right. Let’s get up and water the flowers and go get you changed. Our work here is done.” I pushed myself up, then gave Kate a hand and hoisted her to her feet. She poured the water into the soil around the plants and it rose and broke over the edge of the grass and streamed down away from the plot, beading through the turf and shining like chrome.
I WOKE UP ON a Wednesday afternoon in October, nearly two months after Kate had died and Susan had left, with what sounded like the reverberations of some catastrophic, cosmic organ chord clapping off the walls and rattling the windows and dopplering in the blood of my ears. It took me a full two minutes to remember where I was and who I was and what the circumstances of my life were. Two minutes does not sound long unless you cannot figure out where you are; then it is a terrifying undertow out of which you desperately try to paddle and inside which you cannot figure out what direction is up, and no matter where you try to put your feet, they do not touch the sandy bottom of the upright world, and for all you know you might be upside down, as much as you feel that the surface of the water must be just above your head. When I coordinated my senses, my panic gave way to misery. The living room was littered with empty whiskey bottles and dirty drinking glasses with dirty spoons and forks in them and piles of old newspapers and magazines, books and maps, and dirty clothes. Cigarette butts were piled in pyramids in two glass ashtrays and scattered across the coffee table and stubbed out in the glasses and in the bottles and on plates and even in the potting soil around the houseplants. I groaned and pounded the couch in frustration. Its cushions were filthy from my having slept on them for weeks, and stained and slick from having spilled beer and whiskey when I passed out.
I wobbled to the kitchen. The old stove, spattered with food, with its rusty burner grates and greasy, dented blue teakettle and greasy hood that had dust gunked up on top of it, seemed a concise sign of my devastation. I yanked the kettle off the stovetop, opened a kitchen window, leaned out, and dropped it into the weed-shot flower bed below, but carefully, as if I were placing it there to great purpose, so as not to appear erratic to anyone who happened to be standing in the rank backyard. The cabinets were all shellacked in grease and dust, too, and had stains running down the doors. What seemed like every dish and glass and mug and cup and utensil was dirty and piled up in the sink and on the surrounding counters.
I decided to clean the house. Unless I took a shower and ran a load of laundry, with half a cup of bleach in it, and shaved and combed my hair and dressed myself in a real pair of my old pants and a real, button-up shirt and clean socks and a nice pair of shoes, and mopped the floors and scrubbed the cabinets, and washed the dishes and opened the windows and scoured the counters, the engines of ruin could never be reversed. So I spent the day cleaning. Every task took twice as long as usual, because I had to do it all one-handed, holding my broken hand up or dangling it off to the side like a wounded animal. Although I’d broken it seven weeks earlier, my hand still ached most of the time.
Darkness had fallen by the time the job was done. The house was not so much cleaned as ravaged. It still smelled of garbage and old cooking, as well as, now, of bleach and disinfectant. I was drenched and exhausted. The spotless, purified sensation I’d spent the day trying to achieve, had anticipated, had hoped for more and more frantically, scrubbing caked grunge from drawer handles with a toothbrush, swabbing buckets of oil soap over the floors, which always looked dirty anyway, even after they had been scrupulously mopped, that sanctification I so much desired, the feeling of having scoured and cleaned and purged the self-pity and druggy grit caking my brain and clogging my heart, taunted me from just beyond reach, like a cloying, shiny mirror image of myself prim and sober and at ease, sitting with perfect posture in spotless, pressed clothes, my hair freshly cut and combed down, clean-shaven, in an armchair upholstered with immaculate, ivory fabric, a portrait of my smiling, beloved Kate on a table next to the chair, a glass of freshly brewed iced tea glowing in the sunlight streaming into the room from the windows, an anthology of inspirational verse in my lap, my forefinger keeping place at a poem in which a pastor consoles a father who has lost his only child, which has quieted my heart and brought me at peace with my daughter having been ground up beneath the wheels of a car.