“You should be enjoying your life,” my grandmother said to me one night while I was helping her with her nightly cup of tea. Even drinking tea was difficult for her. She took little sips, like a bird. I had to hold her head up; she smelled like lemon and dust. I felt like crying, even though that was impossible for me. Crying wasn’t like riding a bicycle; give it up and you quickly forget how it’s done. Look in the mirror and make faces, cut up onions, watch sorrowful movies. None of that can bring back tears.
That night my grandmother’s sudden advice took me completely by surprise. I’d assumed that she of all people understood I’d been ruined long ago. I didn’t deserve to be happy. Didn’t my dear grandmother understand that? I had already passed the age my mother had been on that icy night when she drove off to meet her friends. Who was I to enjoy anything?
“You’re always so negative,” my grandmother said.
“You got all the positive genes.” Amazing, considering her condition, considering the condition of the world.
Toward the end of her illness, even my grandmother had to face sorrow. She cried in her sleep. I couldn’t stand to hear her suffering. I left the cat I’d adopted to keep watch over her, curled up on the hospital bed I’d rented, and I went to stand outside, where I could breathe in the brackish air. It was spring and there was pine pollen everywhere; things had turned a sulfury yellow. That night I wished that my whole life had been different and that I could start all over again, in Paris or London, in Italy, even across the river in New York City, where I’d gone to school. I was still young. I wished I could shed my skin, walk away, never look back. But starting a new life was not my expertise. Death was my talent; before I could stop myself, I wished my grand-mother’s pain would end. I wished that this world would no longer have a hold on her.
She died that night while I was sleeping on the couch. The cat was beside her, and when I heard Giselle mewling, I knew what had happened. My brother didn’t come up to New Jersey until several days after our grandmother’s passing; the funeral had to wait because it was exam week at Orlon University. Ned realized what was happening to me as soon as he walked in the house. I was like a bird that had been let out of its cage only to find it could go no farther than the windowsill. All those years of planning my escape from New Jersey, and now I couldn’t even leave the living room. I’d pretty much stopped eating, aside from cornflakes and milk, which was the only thing I could keep down. I hadn’t showered and I gave off a faint odor of mildew, the scent of the ruined and the lost. I had called in to the library to let them know I wouldn’t be coming back. The reference desk was too much for me. Everything was. Jack sent me a sympathy note on police stationery; he wrote that he missed me, more than he’d ever expected to, and was hopeful I would soon return to my desk. But that wasn’t about to happen. I could barely find a reason to get dressed, let alone field meaningless research questions or have sex with someone I didn’t care about in the backseat of his car. Sometimes I simply stayed in my bathrobe. I had lost the will to wash my face, to look in the mirror, to step outside, to breathe the air.
My brother and I hadn’t had a real conversation in years. Too busy, lives too far apart. But after the funeral he sat beside me on the couch. He was allergic to cats, just as I was, and his eyes had already begun to water because of Giselle.
“This is not going to do you any good,” Ned told me. “You can’t stay here.”
Logical still, as if it mattered. Logical then, as well. I thought of the morning of my mother’s death; before my grandmother had arrived, I’d wandered out in my pajamas and saw him in the kitchen. I think he might have been cleaning up. He was orderly even then. It’s too early, Ned had told me. Go back to bed. I did exactly that. Two days later we’d sat together, side by side on folding chairs at my mother’s funeral, held at the gravesite. A few of my mother’s friends were there, all in black dresses. Ned wore a black suit, borrowed probably. I’d never seen it before. I had a navy blue dress with a lace collar that I’d snipped off with the same shears I’d used to cut my hair. There was a plain pine coffin, closed. Still, I’d read enough fairy tales to know the dead were not necessarily gone. Our mother might have been asleep, under a spell, ready to rap on the coffin from within and beg, Let me out!
It could happen at any time. The sky was gray; there was ice on the ground. And then I saw that Ned was crying. He was quiet about it. He didn’t make a sound. I don’t think I’d ever seen him do that before, so I quickly looked away. And then the coffin looked different. Shut tight. Over and done.
At my grandmother’s service, Ned and I were the only mourners. Same kind of plain pine box, same graveyard. We had never gotten around to putting a marker on my mother’s grave, and I was glad of this. I didn’t want to know exactly where she’d been buried. Maybe she hadn’t been buried at all. Maybe I’d been wrong and she had indeed flung open the wooden box to run through the dark and the cold the moment we’d left the gravesite. I looked for footprints, though it had been more than twenty years. Only the scratch scratch of birds. And something else — the tracks of a fox.
Ned had not only handled my grandmother’s affairs, he’d already done the research needed to set my life in order as well. He had found me a job, at the public library in Orlon, and a cottage to rent only a few blocks from the university campus. We debated the merits of a move. Statistically, the odds weren’t on Ned’s side. Had money been involved, I would have bet my future consisted of twenty more years in my grandmother’s house, wearing my bathrobe. But my brother was a worthy opponent, methodical if nothing else, and a challenge never deterred him, even if that challenge was me.
While I was moping about and eating cornflakes, Ned packed up the house, called the real estate agent, had new tires put on my car. And so it was. I was leaving New Jersey. My colleagues wanted to give me a going-away party at the library, but without me, there was no one to organize it. I took the cat with me. I had no choice. Giselle jumped in the car and made herself comfortable on my brother’s jacket, ensuring that Ned would sneeze all the way down to Florida.
It was an unseasonably hot day when we left. The air was sulfur-colored, gray around the edges, and the humidity was at 98 percent.
“This will get you used to Florida.” Ned was oddly joyful.
There was sheet lightning ahead of us on the New Jersey Turnpike, the silent sort that is so vivid it can light up the whole sky. My brother was delighted by the weather; his department was currently involved in a lightning study and he was one of the project advisers.
“Without thunderstorms, the earth would lose its electrical charge in less than an hour,” Ned told me.
He kept notes on the storm as I drove. I was used to being alone, accustomed to talking to myself; without thinking, I made another wish aloud, despite how it burned. I wished lightning would strike me.
“Like hell you do,” my brother said. One of the tasks of the meteorology department at Orlon was to work with a team of physicians and biologists, addressing neurological injuries found in lightning-strike victims. “You have no idea of the damage that can be done. None whatsoever.”