If You Lived Here (9 page)

The building hasn’t changed much since Paolo bought it. Traditionally, wakes and viewings took place in the living rooms of the families of the deceased, so it made sense to keep the spacious entry hall, grand staircase, and elegant receiving rooms. A few years ago, Martin and I changed the color scheme from reds and golds to more muted blues and mauves, but we considered it an update, not a redesign. We kept the chandeliers, the mahogany furniture, Paolo’s portrait over the mantel. I appreciate Paolo, who looks solemn but also faintly confused. The idea that he might have struggled in this profession gives me confidence because it took me a while to feel comfortable here myself.

I step into the front receiving room, which resembles a living room, only more professional, like the waiting area in a bank. We keep the tables empty except for boxes of Kleenex and small stacks of business cards announcing the services of grief counselors and therapists. Mr. Sloane sits in an armchair by the window. In his blue nylon sweat suit, he seems quite virile for a man in his sixties, except that he’s hunched over, staring into the space between his legs like someone leaning over the railing of a bridge, contemplating a jump.

“Mr. Sloane,” I say. “I have to apologize to you. I’m so sorry.” I hold out my hand.

I seem to have startled him and it takes him a moment to reconnect with his surroundings. “No problem,” he says. His handshake is firm enough, but automatic.

I take the chair next to his. “How are you doing?” I ask. In our line of work, this is not an idle question.

Mr. Sloane pats his hands forcefully against his legs. “Mrs. Marino, I’ve made a decision about Sylvia and I need your help.”

“I’ll help you in any way that I can.” I hold my hands in my lap and wait for him to continue. His wife, knowing she had only a few months to live, dictated a fairly detailed set of instructions, including seating arrangements for the funeral and the directive that the organist should play “Be Thou My Vision” just before the service.

Mr. Sloane leans back in the armchair, sighs, smooths a few displaced strands of hair against his head. “You’re going to think I’m crazy,” he chuckles.

“I doubt that.” I’ve seen it all.

He glances over at me, gauging my possible reaction, then says, “I’ve decided to bury Sylvia on her stomach.”

I nod. Well, it’s a new one.

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“I don’t suppose so. I’ll need to talk with Bennet, who did service on her. He’s probably already positioned her on her back.” I stand up and glance at my watch. I know very well what time it is, but I want to under-line the fact that we have only a few hours until the viewing.

Mr. Sloane looks surprised to see me move so quickly. “No, no. Sit down, Mrs. Marino. We don’t have to do it for the viewing. I’m not insane.” He pulls my chair a bit closer to his, then motions for me to sit back down. I sit, but on the edge of the chair, folding the pink message slips between my fingers.

Mr. Sloane leans back and repositions his leg, a dusty Nike resting on his knee. There’s a stain of sweat around his white undershirt. I think he may have jogged here.

“Do you have kids, Mrs. Marino?” “Well, no.”

His eyes narrow. “That’s funny. I thought you had kids. My youngest son went to school with a Marino.”

“Martin has two boys from a previous marriage. Abe and Theo.” Mr. Sloane nods. “That’s right. Theo Marino.”

“Right,” I say.

He rubs the tips of his fingers against his stubble-shadowed face. “The thing is, Mrs. Marino, we had three kids. You’ll meet them this evening. And you know what was the hardest thing about pregnancy for Sylvia? Sleeping on her side. She simply couldn’t do it. I don’t know how she made it through those last months, tossing and turning like she did. Miserable. Once the babies were born, she didn’t care how much sleep she got, as long as she could sleep on her stomach. I felt so guilty each time I got her pregnant, putting her through that. Poor thing. Can you believe it?”

I shake my head.

Mr. Sloane sets his feet on the ground, leans back in his chair, stares out the window. “Then she got cancer last year. She was a saint. With bone cancer, they say it’s like experiencing the agony of childbirth, but for months and months. The doctors gave her painkillers, but she refused them, said they knocked her out.” He stops and stares at me. “That’s heroic, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely.”

He nods. “Sylvia didn’t complain about anything,” he continues, then turns to me and raises a finger. “Except one thing. Guess what?”

“Sleeping?”

He smiles. “Right. In the hospital they made her sleep on her back. Last week, she finally agreed to the painkillers. She knew it was the end. She said, ‘Richard, I’m ready.’ That was how she said good-bye: ‘I’m ready.’ ” He leans over again, looking down at the floor. His voice grows softer. “She kept talking, though. That was the surprise. She said, ‘My stomach. My stomach.’ And she moved around this way and that.” He shakes his shoulders, a patient imprisoned in bed.

“She didn’t want to be on her back,” I say.

He nods. “Even when she didn’t know anything else, she knew that.”

Mr. Sloane turns to me, his eyes expectant.

“Then we’ll have to bury her on her stomach,” I tell him.

He smiles, his face flushes, then he drops his head and his hands go up to his face. I reach over to the table between us and slide the box of Kleenex closer to him. I don’t like to leave a person crying, so I just sit there, gazing at Mr. Sloane’s profile. I’m thinking that I have to tell Bennet to turn the body over. I’m thinking about how much this man loved his wife. And I’m thinking about what I’d do, if I had the choice to have children but die at sixty, or to live a long and healthy life, but never have a child. It’s silly to even think this way. Martin would say I’m crazy. But I know what I’d choose.

After Mr. Sloane leaves, I run up the stairs to my office. The computer still hums, but the screen’s gone blank and a loose ring of cream has settled on the surface of my coffee. On my desk sit two binders, one from York that I use to order register books, urns, and prayer cards. The other gives details on a line of metal caskets we’re considering from Messenger. The cremation business has taken off and I’m behind on my urn inventory. The vendors have been e-mailing daily for a decision, so I open the York binder and begin to consider it. I need two new mod-els of urns for pets, an urn for veterans, one for children, and a couple embossed with sprays of flowers, which widowers invariably choose for their wives.

I can’t seem to focus on any of it, so I’m relieved by the distraction of Rita buzzing. “Shelley? It’s a lady with an accent, says her name is Mai.”

I pick up the phone. “Mai?” Did I forget my wallet? “Hey,” she says. “Seems like you like to cook.” “Well, yeah.”

I hear the
ching-ching-ching
of a cash register. “Cash or credit?” she asks. Then, “How about you help me cook sometime, I teach you make Vietnamese food for your kid.”

For
my
kid? No one has ever called him
my
kid. The adoption agency calls him my “referral.” My mother and sister call him “the Vietnamese

baby.” Martin doesn’t call him anything. So,
my kid
? These words, com-ing from a woman I hardly know, feel like my first confirmation that I could really be his mother.

“Sure,” I say. A wave of happiness rushes through me, as powerful and unreliable as a chemical high. “When?” I want to sustain it.

“Tomorrow too soon? Fridays I make dish called
bún thang
. Noodle with all kind meat and vegetable. Real lot of work. You free?”

“What time?” My calendar sits on my desk, but I don’t check it. “Gotta start by seven in the morning. Maybe too early for you.” “No. Seven
A
.
M
. It’s okay.”

After we hang up, I open the calendar, already plotting how to get out of any appointments on Friday morning. But I’m lucky. I’m free. Then, before I forget completely, I make a note to pick up my niece. And then I phone down to Bennet to tell him to turn the body over.

At twenty to five, I’m pulling on my jacket for the Sloane viewing when someone knocks. “Shelley?” Martin opens the door tentatively, poking his head in. In the old days—last week—he would have walked right in.

“Hey,” I say. I button my jacket and, somewhat self-consciously, shake up my hair, which has gone limp in the heat. Our marriage is contracting. We learn less about each other every day. The brief joy I felt in my conversation with Mai has faded, predictably, to the tense uncertainty that colors my life these days. I walk over and pull the door open for him.

Martin stands there, chin lowered, eyes gazing toward mine. The expression on his face is cool, but not unfriendly. “Mr. Sloane said you got him through a bad spell this afternoon.”

I wave it off. “I just listened.” Still, I’m pleased to be an ace funeral director again. Martin smiles at me. Despite all that’s passed, I never for-get that he is, essentially, a generous man. On the day I found out that my sister, Lindi, was pregnant with her third child, Martin found me in the garden, trying to shove eight dozen bulbs into a tulip bed the size of a bathtub.

“Hey,” he said. Lindi had called to tell him that I knew.

I stabbed at the dirt with my trowel. “I am so sick of feeling sorry for myself.”

Martin took my hand, gardening glove and all, and pulled me up, then held me. “It’s okay,” he whispered, smoothing down my hair.

“It is not okay.” I stepped away from him. Would I always feel so des-olate? “It is not okay!” I screamed. “At least admit it.”

Martin winced. His hands dropped to his side and his gaze settled on me with the desperate expression of a person watching a loved one drown-ing. Then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he said the one thing I’d least expected. “Shelley.” He sighed. “Let’s just adopt.”

Husbands can surprise you, even after many years. And you can surprise yourself, too, by the depth of your love for them. Now, without thinking, I slide my hand around his neck and pull him inside my office, pushing against him until his body shuts the door, reminding him that I’m his wife. We haven’t touched for days. He smells of Dial and sweat. He holds me, tight. And then, suddenly awkward with each other, we let go. He walks to the window and looks down at the cars filling our lot for the viewing. I pull a lipstick and compact out of my desk and check my makeup. I think we’re both embarrassed, but I feel warmth between us, too.

“I want to ask you for something,” I say. He turns around to look at me. “What?”

Actually, I could ask for many things right now. Attention. Kindness. Camaraderie. And, how long has it been since we made love? But I will only ask for this. “Tonight,” I say, “can you look at the baby’s pictures?”

I’m surprised to see how long it takes for him to connect “baby’s pictures” with
that
baby and, once he does, his body sags. He lifts his hands to his face and rubs hard, like someone trying to warm himself. Then, he sighs. “How about after dinner? Would that be okay?”

I nod, probably too enthusiastically. We are two people, each on our own deserted island. But, for the first time in so many days, we are signaling to each other. “Tonight’s great,” I tell him.

He grins, but his eyes look pitiful. Then, giving me this casual wave, as if we’ve just been discussing vacation plans or something, he disappears out the door.

I walk to the window. Down in the parking lot, cars have begun to pull in for the viewing. Rita stands at the bottom of the stairs, greeting the mourners. After a moment, Martin appears beside her, then reaches out to shake somebody’s hand.

After dinner, we clear the remains of our sautéed bamboo shoots and prepare to talk at the kitchen table. I try to be hopeful. This table offers happy memories of our life together. We found it in an antiques store near Asheville a few months after we got married. It’s a yellow Formica, with a scrabbly white design running across the top and four dented yel-low chairs. At the same store, Martin discovered a 1962 edition of
The Joy of Cooking
and on the drive home we decided to bake every cake in the book. It took us a year, but we baked the lot of them. Forty-seven cakes. Sunshine cake. Tutti-frutti cake. Burnt sugar cake. Fig spice cake. When I look at this table, I think, So many cakes! That’s part of the reason I’ve put on fifteen pounds since my wedding. When you’re first in love, you don’t care. After that? Well, there are moments when cake offers consola-tions a husband cannot.

Martin has brewed a pot of tea and poured us each a mug. I push the pot and the mugs to the edge of the table, away from my fat folder of documents. I don’t want a drop of anything touching my pictures of my boy. Martin’s agreement to look at the referral signifies some openness, however slight. He runs a finger across the top of the folder and this simple willingness to touch it gives me hope that he could one day become enthusiastic. “When did it arrive?” he asks. He’s just making conversation, but I’m reluctant to let him know how long I’ve waited to

show him.

“A few days ago.” Nine. What’s the difference, really?

I page through the documents: immunization forms, medical forms, documentation of abandonment. I have both the photocopies of the Vietnamese originals and translations of each page into English. The baby’s pictures sit in a small manila envelope. Someone wrote “Photograph: Nguyen Hai Au” in block letters on the outside. I touch my finger to the

script, hold it up for Martin to see. “That’s his name,” I tell him. Whoever abandoned the baby tucked a slip of paper into his clothes with the name “Hai Au” on it. “Nguyen,” according to Carolyn Burns, is so common in that country that it’s just a Vietnamese way of saying “John Doe.”

Martin raises his eyebrows, nods with interest, as if I’ve just shown him some impressive calligraphic rendering in the latest issue of
Discover
.

I add, “I don’t know how to pronounce it yet.”

“Let’s see the pictures.” He gestures with his chin toward the envelope. It’s harder than I expected to pull out the photographs and hand them over. There are only two, one of him as an infant and one, taken a year later, when he is pulling himself up the side of a crib. I’ve only looked at them maybe three or four times myself, anxious to keep the experience fresh, afraid that, as with the photos of Sonya, too much viewing might jinx things. Martin takes the first photo by the corner, sets his fingers to his glasses, as if that will help him see it. I can’t read the expression on his face. I cried the first time I saw it. That’s too much to hope for now, so I just watch him. Martin gazes at my little one lying on the mat. The baby’s arms spread slightly away from his body. His head rests against a small blue pillow. He looks dazed, but interested. He’s only a few weeks old, so close, still, to the womb, but cut off from it twice already—once during birth and once when she, whoever she was, let him go. Even after so few glimpses, I’ve come to know the fluff of his hair, the curve of his chin, his eyes, dark as blueberries, staring out at me. I would like to be the air