Chapter Twenty-Two
One frigid afternoon a month later, a woman stopped Becky coming out of the library, introduced herself as Jenny Shneider’s mother—apparently Jenny and Skip had been in the same class—and put her arms around Becky, as if they were friends.
She said she was so sorry about Skip. She cried against Becky’s coat for a moment, said she’d been wondering how Becky was getting on. Was there anything she needed?
My son, Becky thought.
Around that same time, Jean Carhart—who’d been to her parlor once, years ago—tapped her arm in line at the post office, expressed her condolences, and in a hushed voice asked Becky if she could check on her son William, because it had been almost two months since she’d gotten a letter from him.
Becky held up a finger as if to say, Hold that thought.
She bought her stamps and got out of there.
After that, for a long time, she stopped leaving the house if she could help it.
She stopped holding sessions too. For now.
Maybe forever. She canceled her long-running advertisement with its scalloped edges.
Some of her regulars no doubt had heard what happened and were staying away.
If people called for her, she said she’d retired and hung up.
The idea of strangers coming into her house wanting something, even a glass of water, was overwhelming.
Beyond that, the idea of doing what she did—for anyone—with Skip gone was unthinkable.
She couldn’t contact others, or even attempt to, with him out there.
It had taken her a week just to get up her nerve to close the parlor doors and sit down—alone, for the first time—to try to reach him, but she couldn’t stop crying enough to concentrate.
Cal hadn’t asked what she was doing in there, and wouldn’t, she knew.
They were giving each other space, when space from each other was the last thing they needed. They didn’t know any better.
She now found it shocking how much the living asked of spirits. The presumption of it. And to think, she’d contributed to it for years. She felt protective of the dead in a way she never had before. She felt closer to them than ever.
—
She and Cal cried differently. Cal tried to hold it in—fifty times a day, he tried—which, it turned out, was physically painful.
His entire body shook when he broke down, and he held off wiping his eyes because his eyelids were raw.
Becky’s face, by comparison, hardly moved when she cried.
She thought of her face as a wooden mask that leaked water.
She went about her day blotting tears. She learned she could do most anything while crying—eat, wash dishes, stare at the television, brush her teeth. Even read.
They both noticed that it hurt to blink.
They both stopped noticing when the other was crying.
Crying was like breathing. They asked themselves—but not each other—the worst questions, like how had the world benefited from their son’s death?
What speck of good had that contributed?
How could they just go on with their day-to-day lives when their child had been robbed of his? How could they exist, while he didn’t?
How did anyone do this?
—
Felix found out about Skip from Tom, who was sobbing over the phone so much that he could hardly get the words out, at first. Felix suggested he come home, see the Jenkinses; it might do them all some good.
But Tom wanted to wait. He was in his last semester before graduating and had a full course load on his plate.
Going home right now would upset him too much, wreck his studies.
He was barely keeping it together as it was, he said. Maybe after midterms.
When they hung up, Felix called the Jenkins house.
There was no answer. He called the next day, same thing.
On the third day, he drove over to their house and knocked on the front door.
He was knocking a second time, harder, when Becky answered.
In a worn sweatshirt with the high school mascot, the badger, on the front.
Skip’s. She collapsed against him. He was still in his coat and hat, holding her, when Cal came down the stairs.
The only time the two men had ever spoken face-to-face was at the lunch counter at Ferguson’s, thirteen years ago.
Felix was surprised that he still felt that interaction as solidly as the floor he was standing on.
But Cal looked pummeled, they both did. The shades were drawn, the air in the house gone stale.
The downstairs phone, Felix saw, was off the hook.
He spent several hours with them. Listening, talking.
The three of them said nothing at all for stretches.
Cal wandered in and out of the living room, went upstairs for a while.
Becky stayed in the recliner the whole time.
Nothing from the past came up. Why would it?
There was only one topic that mattered, and they couldn’t talk about that.
A predicament all too familiar to Felix.
He knew grief carved out a warren that could start to look more comfortable than the aboveground world.
The Jenkinses were one foot in the warren.
He checked their cabinets and their refrigerator to see if they had enough food—discreetly, while looking for sugar for his coffee.
Later that day, he called Bishop and caught him up on what was going on.
Bishop, whose mother had died from polio several years ago but whose father was still alive and developing late symptoms, had just put the old man to bed for the night.
He listened as Felix caught him up, then listened as Felix said he was tempted to go buy the Jenkinses some groceries but didn’t want to be presumptuous.
Bishop asked him what the presumption would be—that they need to eat?
So Felix brought them groceries. And he brought more a few days later, and a few days after that.
Bags of them he carried in through the back door; they’d shown him where the key lived, under the rock.
He brought food that was easy to fix, food that was already made, containers of takeout he slipped into their refrigerator.
Once he had access to the key, he sometimes came and went without seeing them, not wanting to disturb them if they were both upstairs.
He invited them out to a restaurant or two, but they declined, so he brought over a pizza and turned on their television—claiming his was on the fritz. The Beverly Hillbillies. Green Acres. The lightest fare he could find.
It made a difference to them, opening the fridge and finding eggs where there’d been none, hearing a voice that wasn’t theirs in the house, seeing him come through the back door now and then.
They wouldn’t have expired on Taft Street without him, but in the slipstream of Skip’s death, the Jenkinses had forgotten they were still alive, and Felix helped remind them, in increments.
—
There’d been no funeral. There was nothing to bury.
But Cal took some money out of the college fund Roman had left for Skip and bought the plot next to Everett’s, and a brass marker with a marble base, and two months after Skip died on a section of highway in South Vietnam, Cal and Becky stood in front of a section of grass in Ohio and tried to say goodbye to him. The ritual did not help.
Tom put off coming home till after his graduation in May.
His major had departed from engineering in his second year, and had bounced around a little, and finally landed in the vague field of communications, which to him meant radio.
Sound engineering, programming, being both behind and in front of the microphone, he was interested in all of it enough to want to find out more, and his plan was to spend the summer in Bonhomie while he delved into a job search in Hancock and the surrounding counties.
He also knew he had to see the Jenkinses, and he wanted to, but the thought of doing so made him anxious. It was all so fucking sad.
When he was home and finally went over to their house, they threw their arms around him as if they hadn’t seen him in years, when they’d just seen him at Christmas.
They wanted to show him the grave. Not actually a grave, they said, just a marker.
He drove them to the cemetery and followed them down a row of headstones and markers, some bearing little American flags.
There Skip was—or wasn’t. What were you supposed to say?
Nice marker? Tom asked them if they wanted to get some ice cream, and though neither of them did, they were so caught off guard that they shrugged and said yes.
It occurred to him that he’d never been alone with them before.
Not that he could hold it against them, but they were incredibly hard to talk to.
He said things, they nodded. He asked trivial questions to get them talking, they answered in as few words as possible.
No one mentioned the renewed threat of the draft, now that he was out of school.
No one wanted to jinx things. At the ice cream parlor, as Tom ate his rocky road cone, Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins sat on a concrete bench and shared a sundae without even seeming to know it had flavor.