“How do you know all this?”
“How do I know anything? I told you that time-wise, things are much closer than you’d think, and not necessarily all moving in the same direction. Jeffrey, actually, I’ve met. This is his twentieth family.”
“He gets reborn?”
“I’m not sure I’d call it that. He keeps coming around when he’s called. He’s a border collie, like I said.”
“Is he going to protect the girl, like you protect Neave?”
“Better, I hope.”
“But it’s going to work, right? I help you reach Neave. You protect her from him.”
“That’s the plan,” Boppit said, nodding. “That’s why we’re here.”
“He’s bearing down on her, isn’t he? She’s in his head.”
Boppit nodded. “Yes.”
“Neave’s so vulnerable. People think she’s capable, but in a little box in the back of her mind the girl still believes in nobility and salvation and magic animal helpers. You know that book she reread every year? The one with the pirate? She actually thinks that that book is the truth: good triumphing over evil, love triumphing over everything.”
“But that is the truth, Lilly.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Dog.”
“Ridiculous? Aren’t you right now sort of talking to a kind of magical animal?”
He had a point.
NEAVE
Our Mother Dies
Our father died quick and our mother died slow. It was the reverse of the way my parents did most things, but I guess the way you make meat loaf or change a tire isn’t the sum of you. Dad was writing a letter to a local congregation suggesting that perhaps their (unmarried) minister had socialist leanings when he just tipped over and hit the linoleum. Mom claimed she knew from the sound that he was dead before the body hit the floor. Aneurism. I read some of the letter he was working on. It said even a minister needed to be a man among men.
“Man among men my ass,” Lilly had said when I reported this. Lilly wasn’t somebody who got reverent around death just because it was death, and she and Daddy had never really liked each other. “Every day he’d tell you that war was what turned boys into men. I think Daddy spent his war loading toilet paper and hamburger onto troop ships.”
I didn’t believe her. I went to my mother.
“Well, he ended the war that way. But he didn’t start it like that. He was on one of those big landing ships. It was attacked and sunk. Some other boat picked up survivors. He ended the war in Newport News. We didn’t talk about it, really.”
I let myself imagine my father floating on a debris-choked ocean surface, maybe underneath planes still strafing the water, maybe with oil slicks burning around him.
“You weren’t curious about what he did in the war?”
“A wife doesn’t prod.”
“But…”
“You are a prodder, Neave. You have a give-no-ground temperament and it scares me. A girl who wants men to be interested in her can’t be aggressive. A person only gets to be more of what they are as they get old. You need to remember that. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to consider your own nature. I don’t want you to die alone. But the way you are…”
I figured she was right, of course, but I didn’t have a handle on what I could do about it. It was just how I’d been made. And my mother was, truly, now alone. Jane had begun her married life and decamped to a snug Cape Cod in Swampscott with Todd. Snyder was making enough money to have moved into the studio where he ran his business and stored his books and prints, though he was still coming home for dinner at least three times a week.
Eleven months after my father died my mother got a cold, which became bronchitis, then pneumonia. She struggled to keep the house running without asking anyone to help. When Lilly and Jane and I visited and found the dishes unwashed, the refrigerator empty, and the trash piling up, we were frightened. Snyder was no help. A kitchen full of dirty dishes and leftovers looked perfectly normal to him. My mother and her concerns were a kind of mystery to him, and though he made some feeble efforts to cook or clean, she rejected them. Boys were not supposed to do that kind of work, she’d say. At first she even rejected Lilly’s and my help, but we could see her drifting—staying in bed all day, and then not knowing what day it was. Then she stopped refusing help.
“Neave,” she said to me one early evening when I was standing at her sink. “Put that sponge down. Come talk to me a minute. Please.”
Her voice was so thready it gave me an ice-water-in-the-chest feeling. I dropped the sponge and my hand went to my breastbone. She was having a little trouble breathing. “I’ll boil some water and we’ll do that thing with the towel over your head for steam,” I said. “To loosen your chest.”
“Sit.”
I did.
“Your brother, Neave, looks like a grown man but he isn’t. All he knows about is comic books, which is not enough. How will he ever find a wife? He has what he calls his own business. But I’ve talked to him when he comes here for dinner, and the fact is he doesn’t really know about the world. He can’t say what he owes or who owes him. He has no business sense.”
“He’ll learn.”
“Not on his own he won’t. You and Lilly have business sense. Now you and the girls got him going on this comic-book-business idea, but you’re not done with him yet. He needs more help. And he doesn’t have anybody but you. Except for when I’m feeding him, the man lives on burnt toast and cold cereal. Tell me you’ll show him.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. You have a cold.”
“I have pneumonia and I am an old woman. And there’s something else. Neave, your father didn’t pay any taxes for the last ten years of his life.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means the house will have to be sold to pay taxes. I was hoping Snyder would have a kind of net, some money to fall back on, but he won’t. You and Lilly have each other and your little cosmetics business seems to be working. Jane has her Todd. Snyder has no one.”
She’d started with cool detachment, but that unraveled as she went on and now, to my dismay, she started to cry.
“You’re just feeling emotional because you’ve got this bad cold. You’ll be fine.” I said these words but looking at her sunken eyes, her papery face, and sandbag slump, I knew the thought of her dying was in my head. I’d just been thinking it behind my own back, but it was why I was here sitting by her side right now, letting her talk about what I needed to do for Snyder.
“Just tell me you’ll help him.”