“She is new here,” Mrs. G said. “Where do you see her?”
She was speaking normally. Almost casually. But her voice had lost something, Raymond thought. It had lost its energy. Its unique brand of aliveness. It felt almost as though Mrs. G’s voice had lost Mrs. G, and was now existing on its own, without her.
“She just stuck her head out from under the couch. But then she took one look at me and went right back under again.”
“She was wild for part of her life. Not all of it, I don’t think. She does not behave like a cat who has never known people. But still she is quite wary. I’m not surprised that she would hide when a new person is at hand.”
“I don’t think I have to tell you that Luis adored you,” Isabel said, turning the conversation suddenly back around. Out of small-talk territory. “Because I know he was not a man who would make a secret of a thing like that.”
“The feeling was definitely mutual,” Mrs. G said in return. A tiny glimpse of her old self peeked out through those words.
Raymond heard himself let out a sigh of relief. Even though he would never in a million years have welcomed this outcome, he felt deeply relieved that Mrs. G had been right. That Luis really had loved her.
“He told me you were the only person he’d ever met who didn’t have one prejudiced bone in your entire body,” Isabel said. “Not even one hair on your head with a slight bias—that’s what he said. For the first couple of years he kept looking for some of that when he was with you. Some little bit of judgment. He figured, yeah, of course, you were better than most. Better than ninety-nine percent of the people he met. But he figured he’d find some little scrap of something in there somewhere, because he mostly always did with people. But not you. He just stopped looking after a while. He said if there was one thing he could say about you, one big thing that defined you, it’s that you value every human life the same. He said if you were a story, your title would be something like ‘Every Life Has Value.’ He really admired that about you. And it confused him a little, too. He kept wondering how a person gets put together that way, but he never found out. He could never figure out the roots of that.”
“I don’t think every life has exactly the same value,” Mrs. G said. “I think Rosa Parks’s life had more value than Adolf Hitler’s. But I think that’s a different kind of a subject than what you meant.”
“I think so, too. I’ll bring the kids around to meet you. But maybe when things settle down a little more.”
“I would love that,” Mrs. G replied. But she was gone from her voice again.
“I always meant to,” Isabel added.
Her voice sounded heavy with that special brand of guilt Raymond had heard so much of in the past few days. How many people had told him lately of things they had always imagined themselves doing, but then life had intervened and the things had gone undone? And with that weighty tone of regret.
“I always meant to bring them and come around. Luis and I talked about it all the time. We wanted you to meet the whole family. I have no words for why it didn’t happen. No explanation. We were busy with the two kids. Then I got pregnant again. But that’s no excuse. There’s no real reason why we didn’t. We just made the mistake of putting it off. We thought we would lose nothing by putting it off. We thought we had plenty of time. I guess that was our key mistake, right? We thought there would always be more time. Why do we do that? I mean, not just Luis and me. Everybody. Why does everybody do that? Think we’ll always have more time?”
“Well, I don’t do that,” Mrs. G said. “But that’s a different story. When I was a young girl I had an experience that taught me not to take time for granted. And now that I’m ninety-two, I know it even better.”
“But we were taking for granted that we would always have more time with a ninety-two-year-old woman. It was a whole wrong way of looking at the world. Like death wasn’t real and would never really catch up.”
“Oh, it’s all too real,” Mrs. G said. “That I can tell you.”
“I know that now. I know it all too well. Now that it’s caught up.”
A pause.
Then Mrs. G spoke up suddenly.
“Well. I hate even to say it, because I am so very grateful that you came. But I am just so tired. I feel I have not one ounce of energy left for anything, not even to hold myself upright at the table. And I very much hope it will not sound rude, but if you will assure me that I will see you again, I think I had best put myself to bed. I know it seems very early to you. Seven o’clock or so, I’m guessing. But I am just so tired.”
“Of course,” Isabel said. “No, that’s fine. I’ll write down my address and phone number for Raymond.”
But Mrs. G was already walking away. Shuffling off toward her bedroom, waving over her shoulder.
Raymond and Isabel sat a moment. They looked into each other’s face. Then Raymond quickly looked away.
“Is she all right?” Isabel asked.
“I don’t know. I never saw her do that before—run out of energy to sit in a chair. Then again, I don’t usually visit in the evening, after dinner. Still, I think the news hit her hard. I’ll get you a pen and paper.”
But then Raymond was unsure where to find such a thing in Mrs. G’s apartment.
“I think I have something in my purse,” she said.
She dug around in there for a moment. It was a full purse, a hard place to find anything as far as Raymond could tell. In the middle of trying, she displaced an item and knocked it onto the rug. A sunglasses case, from the look of it. She reached down for it, then froze. Raymond wondered if they were both thinking the same thing. He figured they were.
Who would have imagined that dropping an item out of your purse could be the first act in a cascade of events that could get somebody killed?