I would like, she continued quietly, still without looking at me although I now sat beside her, to visit the place where he died before we go. She did not say the place where he was killed or the place where he was murdered, she said the place where he died. Already the specificity of his death was being sanded down, a gloss was being put on it, not killed and not murdered but died. I don’t expect it will help, she continued, but I would like to do that. And then I never want to come back to this place again.
Mark nodded, it was obviously something they had discussed, he even reached across the table and took her hand. The desire to stand in the place where her son had been killed, a place like any other place, death making its claim along a meaningless stretch of road. She would convert that meaningless landscape into something else, it was an act of memorial, she wanted things to become what they were not. The emptiness of death is too hard to sustain, in the end we barely manage to do it for a day, an hour, after the death event itself.
There was something self-serving not only in Isabella’s grief, but in all grief, which in the end concerns itself not with the dead, but with those who are left behind. An act of consignment occurs: the dead became fixed, their internal lives were no longer the fathomless and unsolvable mystery they might once have been, on some level their secrets no longer of interest.
It was easier to mourn a known quantity than an unknown one. For the sake of convenience we believed in the totality of our knowledge, we even protected that illusion. At a certain point, if we were to encounter a diary with the record of the dead one’s innermost thoughts we would refrain, most of us would not open the book but would return it to its resting place undisturbed, even the sight of it would be horrifying. In this way, I thought, we make ghosts of the dead.
I don’t know the place, I said at last.
Mark has arranged a car, Isabella said. She turned to him and pressed his hand, matters between them had evidently improved. We can go in the afternoon, after lunch. Our last lunch in this dreadful restaurant, I must say that I won’t miss it. And although I had myself expressed a similar thought, I instantly resented her for it, after all her son had chosen the hotel, it was one of the last things he did. She looked at Mark again and then leaned forward. Now she pressed her hand onto mine and said, Of course, you will be taken care of. Everything goes to you.
I don’t think I understood—or one part of me understood, everybody understands the phrase taken care of, as well as everything goes to you, everything is everything. But another part remained confused, she had changed tack so suddenly, or perhaps my mind was simply being stubborn, refusing comprehension. What did she mean by everything? There was the apartment, of which Christopher had said, when we began talking of a separation and almost in passing, You should have the flat, if it comes to that.
But I had not taken it up with him, although I had already known it would come to that—I did not even know what he meant by have, whether he meant that I should stay there while he found another place to live, which was in fact what happened, only I too moved out not long after, leaving the place empty. Or whether he meant that I should take ownership of the apartment—which was what Isabella was talking about, that was what she meant by taken care of and everything goes to you, she was not talking about personal effects, mementos or memories, she was talking about money.
I withdrew my hand from Isabella’s. When we married, Christopher had insisted that we both make wills, a morbid and I thought unusual step to take, although I knew it was common, many of our friends had made similar arrangements after their weddings. Weddings always made your mind go to eventualities and these documents acted as safeguards against those eventualities, unless of course they actually made them come true, the prenuptial agreement that led almost seamlessly to the divorce, the will that led—as it had in this case—to the death, shockingly early and unforeseen.
Had Isabella and Mark already consulted Christopher’s will? Was this what he had wanted, everything goes to you, or had Christopher—the day he moved out, or earlier even—made an appointment with his lawyer, Circumstances have changed, I would like to amend my will, no longer the same terms or beneficiary. Or perhaps the thought had occurred to him but he had not acted upon it, the matter was hardly urgent—after all, who would he leave the money to? We had no children, he had no siblings, his parents were themselves wealthy.
But if he had changed the will, perhaps the lawyer—Christopher had used the family lawyer, we both had, a reassuring man—had already told Mark and Isabella, Mark would have called him the moment he’d heard news of Christopher’s death, he would have called him a second time for advice about the investigation, at which point that lawyer might have said, Christopher called me a month ago, two months ago, he wanted to change his will. The marriage had dissolved, or was on the brink of dissolution. Supposing Isabella and Mark had known the entire time, how would I explain myself to them?