Among the Dead and Dreaming. Samuel Ligon
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senior year, so sick she could hardly drag herself out of bed. It all seemed a little showy to me, something about their obsessive, touchy behavior, their devotion to each other, that felt just a little uncouth. Tom and I had dated all kinds of people in college, discovering who we were and what we liked, but those two—attached at the hip from first semester on. And the jealousy! I was careful not to show disapproval, knowing I could push him deeper into her arms that way. I kept my own counsel, comforted myself knowing it wouldn’t last, couldn’t last, and when it was finally over between them, Mark came back to Chicago and started working in politics, but with good people and for real change. Those were happy years, before I got sick. He met a woman at work I thought he’d marry. Liz. She was bright and driven, a reader, a cook. She said she didn’t want children, but lots of women say that. When Mark left his job with the congressman, I didn’t understand why until I found out Cynthia was in New York. “What about Liz?” I asked. She was in Washington full time with the congressman then, while Mark ran the field office. Maybe the distance between them was too much. Maybe he didn’t like that she was his boss, though I hoped I’d raised him better than that. In the weeks before he left he’d visit the house and sit with me, read to me. He’d bring vanilla ice cream and I’d pretended to enjoy it, though nothing appealed to me anymore. Everything tasted like metal. I couldn’t beg him to stay away from her. It wouldn’t do any good. I didn’t believe in God, but I prayed He would help my son find the right woman to love.
Mark
I was forgetting her smell, the exact feel of her hands. The second I got home, I called her machine to study her voice. Maybe if she’d known she was going to be dead, she would have put more thought into her recorded greeting, singing or leaving instruction for the living: “Don’t ride on motorcycles,” she could have said, or, “Run up enormous credit card debt.” Until I’d moved from the city a few months before, my aunt’s place had been empty almost a year, and it still held phantom odors—old people smells mostly and decades of cigarettes. I imagined Cynthia at the table, pulling Nat Shermans from the pack and filling the kitchen with smoke.
“Now you’re buying them?” I would have said.
“Kyle left them.”
“His pants, too?”
“I’m not doing this,” she would have said, and I would have said, “Of course you’re not,” and we would have kept working that seam until we exhausted it.
I lit one of Kyle’s cigarettes and noticed a picture of my mother hung by the basement door. There were pictures of her all over the house. Sometime during the long months of her illness, a shrink had told me the sick and dying live in a world the healthy can’t inhabit or comprehend. We can hardly even visit. Or, if we do, we’re merely tourists who need to get away fast as a matter of self-preservation. I’d just moved to New York from Chicago when my mother died, and was back with Cynthia after all those years since college. For a little while, we were able to bring something soft out in each other, a tenderness I hadn’t known in years.
Then Kyle appeared, bringing our fighting and jealousy out of remission. We started arguing, like we’d argued through multiple break ups in college, the silences between our arguments growing and taking on weight. She talked about babies more as we drifted apart, an obsession I didn’t understand. Why would we have children now, when we seemed more unstable every day? And if it wasn’t babies, it was Kyle she talked about, until I couldn’t stand to hear any of it.
“What do you think of the name Isabelle?” she asked one night. “For a little girl?”
I didn’t think anything of the name Isabelle—because we weren’t going to have a little girl. Not then. Not ever. We were about done it felt like.
“Kyle wants me to pose for him,” she said, and I said, “Pose,” and she said, “Nude,” and I didn’t say anything.
“Are you moving to Long Island to get away from the city,” she said, “or to get away from me?”
“My aunt’s house is empty,” I said. “And Garden City’s not far.”
“You’re the only person I know,” she said, “who would move to the suburbs not to have children.”
But there were good times too—plenty of them—although, toward the end, if we weren’t fighting, everything felt fragile between us, like we were just waiting for the glue to take hold and wondering if it ever would.
I smoked another Nat Sherman at my aunt’s kitchen table. Cynthia was going to walk through the door any second and we’d argue about Kyle’s pants. We needed a catalyst, a last argument to determine if we were going to break up for good or start finding a way back to each other. It was just a matter of smoking and waiting. I hadn’t seen her in weeks, since before her family reunion up at Lake George. This night was no different than any other night she’d been gone. Unless I chose to believe she was gone for good. It was hotter than hell in my aunt’s kitchen. I lit another cigarette and waited.
7
Cynthia
Wanting her became a kind of sickness, as if I’d been infected with longing for this nameless, faceless entity who would grow in me and make herself known to me and, after she came out of me, keep growing into who she would become. I guarded against my selfishness, this wanting I felt to bring her to life, so deep in me it overwhelmed my fear of the cliché I seemed to be embracing, biological clock or whatever it was. None of that mattered. Months before I was pregnant, she existed in me, of me and separate from me too, teaching me how to transcend the enormous selfishness of this world, and then I wasn’t even aware of selfishness or my want, because I’d already transcended that and was living only for her. I was far past wondering if she’d fill some hole in my life. She’d already filled it, or if there wasn’t a hole, she’d already made my life so much larger—finally giving me this profound reason to live. I’d known love as a child and a sister, a lover and a friend. But this was different, deeper, so deep I could hardly believe Mark couldn’t feel her everywhere around us. She was there, somewhere, I don’t know how many months before I was pregnant, waiting for me, her demands on my attention the beginning of this enormous gift. All I wanted to do was find her.
Nikki
The minute Alina sees me at LaGuardia she bursts into tears. I take her in my arms and hold her, trying to ignore the men in business suits checking us out as she cries into my shoulder. At thirteen, Alina could pass for seventeen and we could be sisters, but that thought reminds me of my mother’s awful vanity and what the first mastectomy did to her, how it made her hate herself, as though her body—her beauty—was all she’d ever had. For the first time in days, I wonder when I’ll get the cancer that killed her, when Alina will, and then I forget all that and the men gliding by and everything else as I breathe her in, rubbing my hands over her head, through her hair, over the soft skin at the base of her neck, my beautiful, beautiful baby.
Mark
Cynthia’s parents were at the funeral home when I arrived, waiting in a room with velvety gold wallpaper and overstuffed chairs. I wasn’t prepared for how much they’d aged in the hours since I’d left the hospital. They looked like they’d been awake for weeks, starving. “We’re glad you’re here,” Denys said. “We know you want to be alone with her.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone with her, but a man with a silver pompadour escorted me to a reception room where Cynthia’s casket sat on a stand surrounded by blown up photographs—Cynthia eating birthday cake, Cynthia on a horse, Cynthia and me on her parents’ patio. Seeing her up there everywhere made her seem both closer and further away, all those images evoking her, but also emphasizing her absence.
I wondered if Pompadour had seen her naked, if he’d handled her body. Of course he had. So what? From the back of the room I looked at her casket, only the top section of which was open. I walked toward her, thinking I wouldn’t recognize her, but I did, and she looked . . . not good, but not as bad as I’d expected, either. Her face seemed deflated and inflated, as though bones had broken before everything collapsed and swelled, shades of purple and yellow