We Are Not Ourselves(190)
“Hello, Mr. Huggins,” she said as she neared him. He had stopped moving forward and was standing with both hands on the walker. He lifted a hand and pointed at her in apparent remonstration. He was saying something but too quietly for her to hear, so she leaned in closer.
“No more,” she heard him say, gently as a baby. “No more.”
She studied his face to see if he meant what she thought he meant. She couldn’t hear him without putting her ear almost directly up to his mouth, but she could read his lips. He was saying, “No more,” over and over, and he was shaking his head.
It occurred to her that she could elect to take this as a sign if she wanted to. No one was hanging on her decision; it was only her left with her life. Mr. Huggins was right; she couldn’t keep coming here forever. She had needed someone to give her permission to stop.
She kissed his hairy cheek. “Thank you,” she said. “Good night. Good-bye.” She passed through the barrier and out the door, where she stopped to turn and look. The last image she had of the place was Mr. Huggins’s gray-white back, like a glimpse of a surfacing whale, as he stepped in front of the lamp in his slow turn into the room that he had shared with Ed and that now was his alone. She wondered if he missed Ed too. She hoped he didn’t even remember him.
? ? ?
Everyone told her to sell the house, find someplace smaller, cheaper, sock away the difference. But she didn’t need the money. The life insurance payout allowed her to pay back the home equity loan she’d taken out to cover Connell’s tuition and the nursing home bills. It even let her put the new roof on that she needed. She had little in savings, but she had the house, and she had Ed’s pension and her salary as long as she worked. There was no more nursing home to pay. She wasn’t paying Sergei anymore. Connell was almost done with school.
Besides, where would she go if she sold? Back to Jackson Heights? Nothing was left for her there. When she bought the house, she had planned to die in it. Her plan hadn’t changed.
Cindy Coakley said, imploringly, “The ghost of your former life is here.”
Not my former life, Eileen thought. My former future life. That’s the ghost that’s here. The ghost of the life I almost had. As long as I don’t leave this place, that former future doesn’t have to die.
And then she thought, We move around too much in this country.
95
Heading into his final quarter of school, which began three weeks after his father died, Connell had only one course left to take in his major. He also needed to finish one science requirement, and he was taking a theater elective, the plays of Tennessee Williams. He had planned to write a thesis on Bellow’s influence on Amis, but he couldn’t get his act together to do so, and he’d stopped caring about graduating with special honors in the department. General honors in the college would do.
Shortly after the start of the quarter, he started dating a girl named Danielle and going to the Tiki or Jimmy’s with her and their friends. He played pool and foosball and Addams Family pinball and had long conversations deep into the night fueled by caffeine, and he had a lot of sex with Danielle. There were people crashing on his couch nearly every night, friends of his or of his roommates, and it felt like a single endless party. He started skipping classes. He still made it to the Blue Gargoyle tutoring center three times a week to meet Delores, the fifth-grader he’d been helping with her reading since September. He started staying in Danielle’s apartment while Danielle was at class. He would be there waiting when she got back, and because she always seemed happy to see him, he didn’t let himself wonder whether he was wasting his time. He worked on his role in Williams’s one-act, Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, a lonely play about a man who comes home to his quietly suffering girlfriend and narrates to her the story of his night spent wandering the streets, which felt quite a bit like his life, except for the part about coming home to his girlfriend, as it was always she who came home to him. His other classes fell to the side. There was a paper he didn’t do in the medieval literature class, and then there was a project he didn’t do in the science class, and then the halfway mark came and went and he knew he was going to fail, but he couldn’t stop himself from failing, and he couldn’t drop any classes because he was only taking three. He knew he was in a whirlpool, and he could feel himself going under, but he couldn’t grab anything firm. His mother wasn’t going to be able to come out for the graduation, because she’d gotten a recent promotion and couldn’t take time off, so he didn’t have to do a lot of explaining about why he wasn’t walking with the others, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing to let her think he had graduated. Danielle was still in her third year. She told him she’d had fun with him and left for a summer in Florence to study Renaissance art. He sold what he could, shipped his books, and got on an Amtrak train in honor of his father, because they had talked of riding the rails across America together. The Lake Shore Limited left at night, passing through Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before it entered upstate New York. When the sun came up, he saw small cities, former hubs, gorgeous Hudson views. He read a little, didn’t sleep, didn’t talk to anyone. Mostly he looked out the window and thought of his father, who would have found it fascinating, the history of manufacturing in America written on abandoned factories, rusty buildings, heaps of scrap. Somewhere after Poughkeepsie he started crying, and he cried on and off for an hour and half until they pulled into Penn Station. He hadn’t taken this trip intending to mourn his father, but it occurred to him that that was what he was finally doing, that when he’d boarded in Chicago he’d undertaken a twenty-hour vigil of silence for him. It took seeing the haunted glory of upstate New York, and being unable to talk to him about it, for him to understand what it meant that his father was gone.