“What time is it?” I asked.
“Can you tell us what happened?” she said slowly.
I opened my eyes. “I don’t know,” I said. “Anne was taking me home, and we went off the road.”
I pictured Anne’s car in the ravine, the snow covering it up, the wet eyes of the dead stag’s head mounted on her wall. But these images came as flashes, flat images, like something I’d invented.
“You weren’t found anywhere near our house,” Del said. “You weren’t anywhere near Anne’s.”
“I know she’s dead,” I said.
Alice sobbed and covered her mouth. I’d given her another reason to hate me.
Del made a shushing sound and smoothed my stiff hair back from my forehead like our mother used to do when we were sick. I closed my eyes and I held Del’s hand and felt the shape of her fingers, the texture of her skin, grateful to be delivered back into the world of the living.
32
I have never had a confidant to whom I could describe the feeling of being in touch with the dead. It’s an intimacy that I would have trouble explaining, one that lingers long after I’ve seen them, after whatever message they relay, though most of the time I am given no message at all. If one of them is standing innocuously outside the post office, or lingering after everyone has left a room, I can try avoidance, but the effects of having seen them cannot be ignored. I experience a sweetness, a warmth like a flush of embarrassed surprise. The encounter’s unpleasant if you’re the type of person who would rather be alone, who generally keeps far away from others, who allows only a few to get close.
Anne’s farewell event was a week after the accident. The authorities had found her car late that evening and hauled it out of the ravine. Her body was transported and taken care of per explicit instructions she’d left with a sister none of the Milton girls knew she had. The sister, Tara, was notified by the authorities after Anne’s doctor reported her listed as “next of kin” on Anne’s medical records. Tara came to Milton from Saratoga Springs—a foreigner placed in our midst. The Milton girls grieved more for Anne than I’d seen them do for Mary Rae—though Mary Rae’s prolonged disappearance before her body was found might have had something to do with that. Anne’s death, though it had been imminent, was sudden, and the cause was unexpected. Since Anne had planned to return as a bird, no grave site had been purchased. There was no service. Instead, we were invited to meet at Anne’s house.
The girls sat in the living room passing a box of tissues. Joseph, Randy, and their friends stood outside by their cars with cigarettes and beers, and few of them ventured into the house. Del assigned herself the job of chef, preparing small sandwiches and crudités, and Lucie and Alice played hostess, serving on Anne’s sterling trays. Geoff was too sad to do much more than sit on the couch beneath the stag heads with his bourbon. Every so often he would sigh and say, “Oh dear, Annie, Annie,” and put his face in his hands. Someone would pat his back and refresh his drink. The living room filled with the smoke from the Milton girls’ clove cigarettes. Lucie kept pushing the cigarette box’s button, and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” played so often that someone had to ask her to stop. Alice put the cigarette box on a high shelf.
Del had talked me into going to Anne’s. I’d suggested that my lurid injury might make the others upset. And I didn’t want to go back there, to the beef Wellington I expected was rotting on the stove top, to the cold glass doors. Del had come to my apartment door almost cautiously. “You have to go,” she said.
“Why?” I said. “So no one thinks I killed her?”
Del blanched. “Who would think that?” She twisted a wooden toggle button on Mary Rae’s hand-me-down duffle coat. “You were the last to see her and the girls will want to know what she said.”