The Last Romantics(70)

Since learning of Joe’s death, Caroline had been able to do this: disappear into pockets of concentration like a gopher dropping down into its comfortable hole. She had coasted through the last few days, distracted from the reality of a Joe-less world with the sudden adrenaline of crisis planning: contacting family, contacting friends, the funeral, the memorial service. Plus the nagging specifics of her regular life: meal preparation and helping the kids with their homework and loading the dishwasher and folding the sheets. Caroline found that she could pretend, in the shadowy corners of her consciousness, that Joe was in a work meeting and could not be disturbed or had embarked on a lengthy, impressive business trip.

Caroline picked up another catalog, and a photo fell out, an old-fashioned Polaroid of Joe, his arm around a pretty young woman with dark hair pulled back from her face, a mole high on the right side of her cheek. They were sitting at a bar, the glint of bottles to their left flaring white from the camera’s flash. Joe and the woman were smiling, skin a little flushed, eyes bright.

Oh, Caroline thought. Joe looks happy.

*

Dragging a black garbage bag, I walked along the shadowy hall toward the bedroom. Inside, Joe had tacked towels over the ceiling light and windows. Sunlight edged in, but the room was dank, murky, as though it existed within an algae-filled pool. There was a king-size bed, unmade, a grayish white duvet swirled up in the middle. The floor was littered with clothes, shoes, socks, a long snaking belt. Inside the closet hung a few dark suits.

We hadn’t talked about Joe’s clothes. Furniture, all the household effects would be donated, apart from the few specific items that various family members had requested. Joe’s bicycle would go to Nathan. Renee wanted the vintage Casablanca poster she had given him years ago for Christmas. Caroline wanted Joe’s old guitar, for Louis, she had said, who’d been talking about taking it up. Noni wanted Joe’s baseball glove, the first one from Coach Marty.

“Are you sure he kept it?” Renee had asked her gently, the day before we left for Miami.

“He’s got it. I know he does,” Noni replied. Now in grief our mother was sure and stubborn. We no longer worried about a return of the Pause; at least there was that. “If you can’t find the glove, then you’re not looking in the right place.”

Only I didn’t know what I wanted. I couldn’t remember what Joe had, which of his possessions would mean something to me. I wanted everything of his, and yet I could not bear to take a thing.

“What are we doing with his clothes?” I yelled over my shoulder, though weakly. Neither of my sisters answered. I pulled at the towel on the window until it came down with a flurry of dust, and raised a hand to my eyes with the sudden influx of light.

A tall chest of drawers was pushed inside the closet. All those drawers, and I both did and did not want to see what was inside. I had no right to uncover Joe’s secret self, and yet I felt an obligation to protect him from embarrassment; anything bad, anything Joe wouldn’t want Noni to see, porn or drugs, I would take it away and destroy it. Flush it down the toilet, stuff it into my bag, and drop it into the sea. I felt a sudden, urgent nausea to think of what Caroline and Renee would find in my bedroom were I to die unexpectedly, unprepared.

But I found only boxer shorts and socks, white T-shirts still wrapped in plastic, belts, jeans, shorts—so many shorts, plaid, canvas, and khaki. And then, deep in the last drawer, my hand closed around a small box. I brought it out into the bedroom’s new, tentative light. It was a pale blue, the color of a perfect sky. Across the top, in black letters, were etched the words tiffany & co. The box looked brand-new, the edges sharp, the surface unmarked.

I sat on Joe’s bed holding the box in my hands. It seemed almost to emit light, to glow deeply, bluely from within. I opened the top. Inside was another box, this one covered in a deep navy velvet. Carefully I lifted the hinged lid, and there, nestled in a crack of velvet, was the most beautiful ring I had ever seen. A diamond, large and round, smaller than Sandrine’s, but somehow more brilliant, positioned on a band set with smaller diamonds. The whole thing took the light from the room and flung it back at me magnified a hundred times, a thousand. The ring seemed on fire, and I threw it down onto the bed.

*

After a spell I returned to the living room.

“What were you doing back there?” Renee asked.

“Cleaning. Joe’s bedroom.” I held the box loosely in my hand and considered for the briefest, rashest moment just tucking it into the pocket of my jeans, taking it home with me to New York. But that, I knew, would be cruel.

“Look what I found,” I said, and held out the box on an opened palm.

“Tiffany blue,” Caroline remarked as she walked in from the kitchen. “What’s inside?”

“A diamond ring. An engagement ring.”

Renee dropped her half-full garbage bag. “Sandrine’s?”

“No,” I said. “This one’s brand-new.”

“Are you sure?” asked Renee.

“Yes. I’m sure. Sandrine kept hers. Remember? And look at it. Look at the box.” I held it up but did not move toward Renee. She stepped forward and plucked it from my palm. She lifted the lid and whistled.

The three of us remained still, eyes trained on the ring. All silently asking ourselves the same question.

“Is it . . . ?” Caroline breathed. “The woman who was with him?” The detectives had told us about Luna Hernandez, the woman who’d left him alone that last night.