“Not mean,” he said. “Just saying.”
“We might not be long for this place either,” she said. “Corporate creative has really taken a shine to Stevie.”
“Corporate creative? A shine?”
“The less said, the better,” Emma said.
“I’m not saying anything,” William said. “So that should be best.”
“Hey,” Emma said. “Look.” Higher up on the tree’s trunk, William could see the edge of a honeycomb protruding from a hollow. “They usually use bigger spaces than that,” Emma said. “They smooth the bark near the entrance. Can you see?” She angled her head up. The wind freshened and gusted behind them. A spot appeared at the corner of the hive and bombed down at Emma. “Ouch!” she said. She hit at her own hip. “Damn it.” What looked like a bee’s corpse tumbled to the ground.
“It’s exactly like your dream,” William said.
“Yeah,” she said. She frowned. “That’s what I think about my life every day. Just like a dream.”
William wasn’t up for more conversation. He tugged on Blondie’s leash and headed for home, counting twenty steps before he turned and looked back. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, not exactly, but what he saw was a woman he had known for a few weeks, at most, staring up at a tree as sunlight dappled the grass beside her flatly.
SEVEN
He was deep into the invitation stage now. Fitch had said yes. Wallace had said yes. Tom had said no and laughed and asked if William minded if he set the phone down while he thought things through and then, without setting the phone down, said he couldn’t be sure because Jesse had reconsidered his offer, and then laughed again, with a hope that was also a fear that the hope was misplaced, and said that he couldn’t control the pace of that reconsideration and didn’t want to, because he wanted to fully deserve whatever came to him. “I’ll put you down as a maybe,” William said.
The phone rang back right after he hung up with Tom. “Hello?”
“Is this William?”
“It is,” he said, suddenly unsure.
“This is Bonnie Travis.” He couldn’t place the name at first, and then he remembered: the short, moon-faced woman who was married to Jim, Louisa’s ex-boyfriend. They lived in Seattle with a boy and a girl. She did something in sales. Bonnie.
“Hi,” he said. “How’s Jim?”
“That’s why I’m calling,” she said. “He’s dead.” Her voice, high and fluted, misshaped the word.
William caught his own reflection on the inside of the glass door that led out to the deck. It looked like a mirage. “What?” he said. It didn’t seem like enough. “How did…,” he said, and then stopped. Now it seemed like too much.
When Bonnie spoke again, her voice was frayed. “He’s been having a hard time. It started as money trouble and it spread. We haven’t been getting on.”
“We heard from him about a month ago, when you two were in town visiting. We were going to have a drink.”
“No,” she said. William let the line fill with silence. “He never even made that trip. He just wasn’t able.”
“But he said he was here. He said that you weren’t feeling well and that’s why he couldn’t come out to meet us.”
“He said lots of things, for lots of reasons.” She coughed a sob. “The funeral was small, just family.” It hadn’t occurred to William to think about the funeral until then. “I just thought you should know,” she said.
William was overcome by fatigue at first, but then he was overcome by the opposite. He walked down the hall to the bedroom, came back to the garage, ended up in the kitchen, uncertain what he was looking for. In the bathroom William looked at himself in the mirror. He saw a man who preferred illustration to photography, winter to summer, South America to Europe, basketball to baseball, who thought often of death, preferring to divert it into metaphor, and dreaded the days when he could not, who frequently experienced a violent hatred of the ways that people asserted their own importance, who wondered if he knew anything, especially the things that he once thought he knew completely. He flicked off the light and watched his reflection in the dark.
When Louisa came home, he greeted her at the door and said he had coffee in the kitchen for her and that she needed to come and sit. “There’s news,” he said.
“Are you expecting?” she said.
He laughed because he thought anything else, even a grave face, would be a kind of ambush. He let her get halfway through her cup of coffee. When he told her about Jim, her hand flew up to her mouth like a bird, and she began to breathe shallowly through her nose. Then she pulled her arms tight around her, each palm matched to its opposite shoulder; the muscles stood out in her forearms but they were not very strong muscles and the effect was one of failure. “When did we see him last?” she said. “He looked good, I thought.” She dragged an index finger through the wet corner of her eye. She looked like she would be wiping her eyes like that all night.
William wasn’t expecting a second call from Bonnie. “I feel like I owe you some more details,” she said. Her voice was thick and thin at once. “I found him.” She paused, though not long enough for William to say anything, which was a relief, and then she tipped forward into the rest of her explanation. “He was sleeping on the couch in the guest room. He was doing that more and more, at first because the kids snuck into our bed at night and woke him up, but then for no reason at all. On the night I’m talking about, they weren’t even there: they were at my parents’ house. But he never came to the bedroom, and I figured he was on the couch, like always. He was sensitive to noise and to light, so it was always like a cave in there, door shut tight, lights off. I came to get him in the morning and the door was open a crack and all the lights were on. There was a bottle of pills on the table next to him. I went to shake him, and the second my hand touched his arm I knew. It wasn’t just that I guessed. I felt it. The absence of it. I didn’t even try to revive him. I just called the police.”
A question stirred dimly within William, and he brought it into the light. “Did he leave a note?”
Bonnie made a harsh noise that sounded almost like a laugh. “Not just one,” she said. “Evidently this had been on his mind for a year or so. We were in debt and he wasn’t telling me. He was addicted to pills. He couldn’t sleep because he felt like everything was vanishing. He was worried that he had cancer. It’s hard to even tell what parts of what he said were true.” She drew a deep breath and this time when she spoke her voice was steely and tearless. “I have two kids,” she said. “A man with children shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”
“Terrible,” William said, meaning all of it. He kept most of the information from Louisa, except the fact that Jim had thought that he was sick, because that seemed like a plausible explanation for an impossible act.
The next morning, Louisa made coffee that she didn’t drink and started in on how Jim had looked the last time he had visited them. “He’d lost some weight,” she said. “Not too much, though. He said he’d been working out regularly, that he was cutting out red meat. Why would someone let vanity rule them, even a little, if they’re thinking of ending it all?”
“He probably wasn’t thinking about it yet,” William said. “Or he was putting on appearances. Or he was fighting to stay afloat.”
“He had an uncle who killed himself,” she said. “Jim always said he couldn’t imagine ever doing anything like that.”
“That was twenty years ago,” William said. “Why would what he said then matter now? The person he became might not even be connected to the person he was.”