‘Oh, you were dying to come,’ she said, putting her hand over mine and squeezing. For a moment, I was afraid that she knew really, truly, why I was here.
Stella navigated me back to the old house on the gravelly road. I felt like I was falling into a billowing dream. The tire swing had fallen off its tether and was now lying on the ground beneath the tree. Next door was the Elkerson house. Down the street was Philip’s house, but it was too dark to really see it. A buzzing glow filled my stomach-surely he wasn’t still living there. I was terrified to find out-if he was, that would be disappointing, pathetic. But if he wasn’t, it would be equally disappointing, just for different reasons.
Stella opened the flimsy, rusting screen door. A strange smell wafted out-a mix of mildew and plug-in air fresheners. ‘Are you coming?’ she asked me.
I stood next to the handprint my father had put in the front walk’s cement. RICHARD, it said, in very straight, neat letters. I could have stopped the arc of what was happening. I could have called someone, a caretaker, a nurse, hospice. The little I knew of Stella, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be easy to cajole her into months of surgery and treatment-the doctors had said, for instance, that she might end up needing a colostomy bag. It wouldn’t even be easy to get her to admit there was anything wrong with her. I looked up at her in the door. Stella wore a shrunken neon-blue t-shirt underneath her hooked cardigan that said DIVA in sparkly rhinestones across the chest. She mentioned she was thinking of starting a website. I pictured a dark, noxious mass inside her, sitting on top of her bowel the way a kid perches on top of a carousel horse.
I stared at my bags. I had packed enough clothes. The dogs were at a kennel called the Doggie Day Spa, the only one my father said they could go to if I had to travel anywhere, because the ratio of dogs to daycare workers was four to one. Maybe being a caretaker was inscribed into the very fiber of me, meaning that if I looked at myself under a microscope, this was exactly what each of my individual cells would say. Why else was I always finding myself in these situations? Perhaps in Cobalt, I could succeed, where elsewhere I had failed. I wasn’t here because of fear or anger. I was here because of, well, scientific destiny.
In the year between then and now, Stella and I would get to know each other through our habits. I would take comfort in her banal routines: her morning hour and a half of primping, the copious amount of sugar in her tea. I would relish the more significant moments, too. We would walk along the creek bed, cutting through Philip’s old backyard-his family had moved after all, just a few years after my grandmother had died. We would stumble upon the bird graves Philip had shown me years ago. The headstones would be washed clean by rain, and the handwriting on the tiny slabs would be so hauntingly, painfully familiar. Neither Stella nor I would say anything, but we both, in our own ways, would know who’d buried most of the birds there, long before Philip was born.
I would learn that she couldn’t go to bed without watching the Lottery, even though neither of us played-she simply liked the way the ping-pong balls blew around to and fro. And that she loved her dogs desperately, and gave each dog a song. She was like my father in that way, in many ways. She would tell me many stories about her husband, Skip, sometimes full of confessions, but I would never confess anything back. In the year since I came, Stella would ask only once what my dad was up to, and I would answer, ‘Oh, he’s doing his thing.’ She wouldn’t delve further. There would be a lot of things I wouldn’t ask her-if she was angry this had happened to her. If she asked why. If she was afraid. The closest we would get to a conversation about heaven was the time I found out that Stella believed the afterlife was an episode of The Price Is Right. Those who lived fair lives would be able to come on down the aisle and play the pricing games with Bob Barker, those who were very good got to climb up on the stage and play Plinko and the shell game and Cliff Hangers and spin the big wheel, and those who were criminals or pedophiles or sold drugs to children got to sit in the audience, waiting for the rest of eternity for Rod Roddy to call their names. When I would ask her what she thought she’d get to do in The Price Is Right Afterlife, she would reply, ‘Oh, I might not be in the Showcase Showdown, but I’d definitely get to spin the wheel.’
Maybe I knew all this was coming, standing there in Stella’s gravel driveway, still fresh off the plane from New York. Maybe I convinced myself that she needed me instead of admitting what I couldn’t bear to think about back home. Whatever the case, I swallowed hard, lifted my bags, and threw them over my shoulder. Stella’s old dogs regarded me tiredly; none of them got up. ‘I’m coming,’ I said. Of course I was.
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