All Adults Here(27)

“I’m in love,” Astrid said.

Mary nodded, smiling.

“With a woman.”

Mary nodded again. There were only a dozen men in the building at any moment, Astrid guessed, most of them on staff. Maybe all Mary’s friends had gone lez in their widow queendom. Most women over the age of forty were misandrists when you got right down to it. They wanted their husbands around for manual labor, but what else? And of course, once husbands started dying off, it was all women anyway, and who cared who slept with whom, who cuddled close or shared a precoffee kiss? Nobody. Astrid felt emboldened and kept talking.

“My daughter’s having a baby with a ghost,” Astrid said. “Not an actual ghost, but with a negative space, with no person.”

Mary nodded. “Mm-hmm,” she said.

How long had it been since Mary Budge had held a baby? Human lives were so long, it was hard to stretch a net wide enough to hold all of a person’s experiences. What did Mary remember? Did she remember her wedding? Being a teenager? Did she remember Barbara losing a tooth for the first time, and how she’d tucked a crisp $2 bill under her pillow, fresh from the bank?

“Your daughter and I didn’t always get along,” Astrid said. “But we knew each other for a very long time.” Astrid hadn’t thought about what she was going to say, but now that she was talking, she knew what she wanted Mary to know, or at least what she wanted Mary to hear. “I didn’t always like her, but she was a good person. You did a beautiful job.” There was nothing else that mattered, was there? Whatever other accomplishments she’d ever had, Astrid had foisted three human beings on the planet. Had they made it better? Had she? Barbara had tried, in her nosy, nudgey, self-righteous way. Was this what getting old meant, realizing that the people she had always judged for being too much had been in the right, and she had always done too little?

“Barb, yes,” Mary said. Her eyelids looked heavy, as if she might fall asleep. There was a light knock at the door, and then a nurse came in with a tray of pills.

“Mary, I see you’ve got a visitor,” the nurse said, kindly. She patted Astrid on the shoulder. “Mary usually naps around now, I wouldn’t take it personally.”

“I’ll go,” Astrid said. She stood up and touched Mary on the hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “For Barbara.”

The nurse held Astrid’s elbow and walked her to the door. Her grip was firm. “We’re not sure how much Mary understands about her daughter,” she said.

“I see,” Astrid said. How stupid—of course, she should have checked. She should have thought about what Mary knew, if she would be upset or confused. The nurse was still holding Astrid’s elbow, which felt both generous and serious; this was a woman who was used to holding people who were shaky on their feet, used to helping people who wouldn’t or couldn’t ask. Astrid half wanted her legs to give out, to fall in order to be saved, but she stayed upright. “I left her some things,” she said.

“Mary says thank you,” the nurse said, and opened the door for Astrid to leave.

Freezing cold air blew from the air-conditioning vents in the hallway ceiling. A woman in a wheelchair sat outside a room down the hall, and Astrid waved. The old ladies all looked alike, like babies all look alike through a glass window, lined up in bassinet after bassinet. If Barbara Baker were still alive, and she turned the corner to go visit her mother, and Astrid had been standing right there, what would she have done? The truth was that Astrid thought about Barbara all the time—it wasn’t just her death, not at all. Barbara’s death was the splash in the water, but for the last twenty years, Astrid had been watching her bounce on the diving board.

People talked about coming out like it was one thing that happened, like it had to do with who you wanted to have sex with, full stop, the end. But there were other things, too, that one needed to say. Fear controlled so many things. Astrid put out her hand and rested it against the cool wall, a ballast.



* * *



—

    Elliot had been fourteen, and small for his age. He was in the ninth grade, on the basketball team, getting good grades, and popular enough, as far as Astrid could tell. No trouble. Not like Nicky, who fell asleep at the wheel of her car coming home drunk from a party and nearly killed himself. Even Porter had had her troubles, of the dramatic teenage girl variety, but Elliot was on the honor roll, the class treasurer. So Astrid had been surprised when Barbara Baker called her.

Barbara was a crossing guard then, not at the corner by the elementary school, but two blocks over, in a mostly dead zone beside the river and the train tracks. It wasn’t a busy spot, and why they put her down there, Astrid had never understood. But Barbara was calling to say that she had seen Elliot and his friend Jack—a beautiful boy with sandy hair, a soccer player, the son of academics who threw dinner parties and listened to Miles Davis on vinyl—playing on the rocks by the river. It’s so dangerous, you know, down there, that’s what Barbara had said. It looks still, but the current is strong. She was thinking of their safety. When Barbara was halfway to where the boys were, they hadn’t seen her yet. The river was noisy that day, and so were the trains, and they were teenage boys who thought they were alone in the world. Barbara was young then, god—if Elliot was fourteen, she must have been in her forties, like Astrid was, and there was no reason on earth two teenage boys would notice a woman like that. They wouldn’t, and they didn’t. So she got closer, finally close enough to tell them to quit horsing around, and then she saw. They were kissing.