The Queen of Hearts(75)
“Zadie,” called Nick. He held something out to her. To my dismay, she looked back over her shoulder, her eyes widening at the flat object in his hand. She reached for it.
The physicists have a term: “gravitational time delay.” It’s derived from Einstein’s theory of general relativity, referring to the fact that speeding objects seem to slow down as they near the gravitational pull of a massive physical object—thus effectively producing the slowing of time. With dim amazement, I observed with my own eyes as time slowed to a crawl, hobbled by the enormity of the betrayal Zadie was about to discover. I spun helplessly in a suspended animation of my own creation, as Zadie’s hand inched ever closer to Nick’s.
She took the photograph from him. She looked at it.
She began to cry.
Chapter Thirty-two
A COLLECTION OF MARBLE ANGELS
Late Autumn, 1999: Louisville, Kentucky
Zadie
Graham’s funeral took place on a day so sunny I sweated through my one good black dress. As I scanned the crowd filing in to the hushed marble interior of the Cathedral of the Assumption, the wash of grim solemnity on every face struck me. It looked as if body snatchers had replaced my friends with black-clad cheerless automatons.
Conspicuously missing was Emma. A couple days after Graham’s death, she’d managed to contact his father, Dr. O’Kane. He had retired from his active medical practice at this point, but he kept busy working as some sort of consultant to the orthopedic device companies that manufactured his widget. In addition to that, he and his current wife ran a foundation supporting reactionary political causes; because of this he owned a private jet from which he was evidently deplaning as they spoke.
I could faintly hear Dr. O’Kane’s side of the conversation. Emma and I were huddled together in a cubicle at the back corner of the residents’ lounge where there were telephones for dictating encased in little glass partitions. Though sound was rendered tinny and distant by the gap between me and the telephone and by the machine hum of the plane in the background, it was still possible to hear the barely controlled annoyance in Dr. O’Kane’s voice as Emma held out the receiver. “You say you met him at the hospital? Are you a nurse?” he inquired, after Emma had finished her plea for him to contribute to Graham’s memorial service.
“I’m a classmate of Graham’s. We’ve been friends for years and dating for—”
“Classmate.” Dr. O’Kane sighed with faint scorn. “Well, listen, Emily—”
“Emma.”
“Emma, then. Do you have any idea what a tremendous embarrassment it is to have to speak to the bishop about planning a funeral mass for someone who died in this manner?”
“Would it be all right if I read something?”
Another disdainful sigh. “I know you mean well. And it is touching he had anyone willing to stand up for him. But I think it would be best if you left this to the family.”
“I am also going to contact his mother,” Emma said in a small voice.
A sharp, almost barking laugh: “Graham’s mother made the decision to leave us close to ten years ago. I doubt very much she’ll be attending since she’s had no contact with him, and she certainly will not be making any decisions regarding the arrangements. Marilyn and I will handle that. Now, if you don’t mind—”
The line buzzed with an angry dial tone. Emma replaced the receiver in its cradle with an incongruous gentleness.
“Whoa. No wonder Graham was . . .” I trailed off, unable to complete the sentence both inoffensively and accurately. “Sad,” I finished lamely. “What a jackass.”
“Was it something I said?”
I looked up. Nick peered around the partition at me. In open defiance of Dr. Markham’s sartorial policy, he wore a white coat over scrubs and again had dissolute stubble blurring his face, but his expression was unfiltered: alert, amused, slightly sardonic.
“If there is simultaneous crying and cursing in here, it’s a given that you’re going to be in the vicinity,” he said. “I don’t know how I survived the boredom before.” He started to say something else, then stopped abruptly as he caught sight of Emma.
Emma’s face was unreadable. “I need to freshen up,” she said. “I’ll take my theatrics elsewhere.”
“Well . . . bye,” I called to her retreating back. She did not look up.
So Emma did not attend Graham’s funeral. After the conversation with Dr. O’Kane, she refused to go, mumbling to me that she would rather mourn him in private.
It wasn’t a bad service. As Dr. O’Kane had promised, it seemed impersonal; but despite that, it was lovely. The ceremony conjured a mournful grace, an ancient sense of the sweeping and adversarial nature of death: Do not rejoice over me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will arise; though I sit in darkness, the LORD is my light.
The light in the church filtered in through windows so high and celestial that the rays of sun, shot through with lazily dancing golden dust motes, seemed to be tendrils reaching from heaven, an impression reinforced by the majestic blue starry-night ceiling. Everything was luminous marble and lustrous gilt; all the opulence was as un-Graham-like as it was possible to be, but a place of such somber, magnificent glory somehow seemed right for grieving my friend. The beautiful unearthly voices of the choir washed over me with almost palpable grace, soaring and swooping and hanging in the air above the congregation as if they were the very soul for whom they mourned, finally twisting up with the shafts of light from the upper windows until they vanished into the eternal sky. For moments afterward, I observed the mourners sitting perfectly still, seemingly not even breathing, a collection of marble angels watching one of their own depart.