Chapter Thirty-Six
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
On Wednesday morning, Joan had gone for a hike.
She set off the way she always did, with a small bottle of water and a zipped bag of nuts in her nylon tote (she refused to use a backpack), sneakers securely tied and her hair in a clip.
At some point on the walk, she sat down and lost consciousness.
The area was relatively isolated, and no one found her for several hours.
All this Nelson told Jamie and Lee when he met them at the Satisfaction Café. It was Nelson who’d been called by the police after park rangers found Joan’s body. His card was in her wallet, in the slot marked EMERGENCY CONTACT .
“She was in a remote area,” Nelson said. He was seated across from Lee and Jamie in the back office of the café with the door closed.
“Where was it?” Lee asked.
Nelson removed from his pocket the slip of paper on which he’d written the name of the preserve. “High Rock Park.” Jamie looked at Lee.
“The ranger remarked that it was near some unprotected cliffs, that they’d been intending to install signs to warn hikers.”
“Are they doing the signs now?”
“They were putting in a work order when I left. In the meantime, they said they’d cordon off the trail with tape.” Nelson found it curious that Joan’s children were so interested in the signs. “Had you been there before? Was she familiar with the place?”
“She was… fairly familiar,” Jamie said awkwardly. He and Lee looked at each other again.
That’s all right, Nelson thought. You don’t have to tell me anything.
Nelson was both touched and annoyed to be in this position.
He was older than Joan, after all; it seemed a little insensitive to have him deal with her death.
There was something almost unseemly about seeing a client not only through life but then past the end of it, although he supposed he didn’t have many more years of this. He too was creeping toward that edge.
Nelson was mostly retired now. He had become the sort of senior citizen he would have mocked in earlier years: a personal trainer came by the house twice a week, and he and Adam were planning a cruise on the Rhine.
Nelson was even working on his memoir, an activity he’d previously believed reserved for bores and the delusional.
When the police had called, he’d been writing a new chapter as he sat in his office.
He had just poured himself a cup of coffee.
“What do we do?” Lee asked.
“I suggest you go to your mother’s,” Nelson said. “Take care of anything there.”
By the time Nelson arrived home, he was feeling morose.
He wished he’d seen Joan more. He recalled the box of snacks she had sent him in Düsseldorf.
How special he had felt, entering his hotel, when the concierge called his name and said he had a package.
From your friend , Joan had written on the note.
At the door to his office, Nelson saw the full cup of coffee still on his desk, next to the legal pad with his scribbling.
Honestly, who on earth was going to read his memoir (if he ever finished)?
He didn’t have children; he doubted Adam would be interested in learning more about him, once he was gone.
And yet, nearly every day, Nelson still wrote.
He went to his desk. There was a line he’d added that morning: I’ve been thinking that relationships, like life, are
Like what. Like what ? He couldn’t recall.
Over the years Nelson had given and received countless nuggets of so-called wisdom; he had sat before billionaires and CEOs and fifth wives and third husbands.
There were strategies plotted and abandoned, plans promised and secretly changed.
There had been so much planning for certain events: divorce and marriage and death and children.
People were always surprised, though. It never turned out how they thought. People changed. People died.
For most of her life, Lee had been a messy person.
While Jamie straightened his room without reminder (a habit he continued into college, that was only exacerbated by his time in the navy), she was the sort who misplaced homework and dressed from a basket of unfolded laundry.
Lee also lost things. She lost money and jackets. She lost key chains and employee IDs.
The day Joan died, however, was the day Lee would become not only a neat person but one who kept track of her possessions. Going forward, she would be unable to tolerate clutter; it would bother her in a way it never had when Joan was alive.
After leaving the café, she and Jamie drove to the townhouse. “She’s been talking about that cliff for years,” Jamie said, turning onto the street. “It just seems strange that she would—would fall unconscious right there. Do you know what I mean?”
Yes. Lee knew what he meant.
The townhouse appeared unusually crowded, and Lee began to inventory its contents.
There were several Home Depot bags on the floor, filled with Joan’s latest purchases, batteries and powdered bleach and a watering can.
On the kitchen counter were her radio and several cassettes stacked in a metal tin which originally contained mooncakes.
In the pantry were a pack of Chinese seaweed crackers, six different bags of Kirkland-branded nuts, and Japanese curry blocks.
After sniffing dozens of jars of old spices to test their potency, Lee’s head began to hurt.
She swallowed an aspirin without water and massaged her temples as she went through the house.
It did not occur to Lee to sit and rest. If she stopped, she would have to face that Joan was gone.
Lee would have to imagine her body on the side of that cliff.
Joan didn’t believe in God. When you died, she had told Lee, it was like the lights going off.
Lee went to Joan’s closet. Here was where she had spent hours as a kid; not the sort to actively entertain children, Joan had simply instructed Lee and Jamie to do as they wished inside without breaking anything.
Lee had tried on Joan’s clothes and jewelry until somehow she had managed to lose a pearl necklace, and then she hadn’t been allowed in anymore.
Or perhaps Lee had barred herself from entering.
Joan had a way of turning cold, nearly to the point of cruel, when she was disappointed; it prompted self-regulation, even in children.
Where did Joan store her jewelry? It seemed improper to ponder, but that was what Nelson had asked them to do—identify sentimental items. What Lee wanted were some favorites she’d seen Joan wear over the years: the gold panther ring, a Chanel cardigan Joan had splurged on and then worn only on special occasions, usually when she went to lunch with women she described as “rich ladies.”
Lee tried on a camel coat she had always admired, which was too small.
There was a gray silk dress Joan had purchased because she liked the material, but had never worn; this fit Lee perfectly, though when she saw her reflection, she could hear Joan’s voice telling her to take it, it fits you better—she shrugged it off and avoided mirrors after that.
With each minute Lee felt more and more pinpricks of a creeping hysteria; when she did finally break, she wanted her mother’s ring.
Surely something was wrong with her. Surely there was something grotesque about needing a physical item to hold on to.
But she did want something physical, because if it was only Lee and her thoughts back in her own apartment later that night she thought she might drown.
Lee could hear Jamie on the floor above. Perhaps he too was looking for something—there was a set of art supplies Joan kept in a metal toolbox, including steel calipers and a protractor, that he’d always admired and which had survived the fire as they’d been stored in the garage.
Lee searched the closet again. Along the back wall was a collection of shopping bags. Joan had once told Lee that such bags invited clutter. “It doesn’t matter how nice the store the bag came from is,” Joan said.
Lee flipped through the bags. Joan had nested them with a large orange bag inside of another orange bag inside of a yellow bag.
Lee reached into the last bag, which was navy.
Inside were two gray cashmere sweaters and then, underneath the sweaters, a red velvet envelope.
Lee opened the envelope and was relieved to find the panther ring.
Also tucked in the envelope was a white index card with Joan’s handwriting in clear block letters:
BE NICE TO EACH OTHER!
“Jamie?” Lee called.
They sat next to each other on the floor of the closet. Because Lee had tossed so many items on the ground, it was covered with empty boxes and coats and pants. Lee was playing with Joan’s ring, which she had put on. It was loose on her finger, and Lee flipped the panther around and around.
“Nelson called,” Jamie said. “The police asked him to pick up Mom’s bag. There was an empty pill bottle inside. Nelson said the label was for a pretty powerful barbiturate.”
“What’s a barbiturate?”
“A sleeping pill. A strong one.”
Lee kept spinning the ring. “Where did she get it?”
“I don’t know.” (In fact, it was the same bottle that had been prescribed by Dr. Marcus for Bill decades earlier.
In the years since, such pills had become nearly impossible to procure.
Joan had been worried they wouldn’t work, given their age, and so she had taken half a pill the week before.
An hour after swallowing, she felt simply incredible.)
“It smells like mothballs in here,” Jamie said.
“I told her not to use them. They’re supposed to be cancerous.”
“I guess she didn’t care about that.”
Lee fingered the carpet. “What’s with the note? We are nice to each other.”
“Maybe just a reminder.” Jamie recognized the index card from the stack Joan kept at the café to jot potential phrases for her poster board.
He thought of her deciding on those specific words— BE NICE —and sighed and looked at his hands.
His mother, who had only ever wanted him to have a stable job, who had so resented his time in the navy—what had she once called it?
A waste of a nice boy like him. But he wasn’t such a nice boy, he knew: Jamie was never as nice as he wanted to be.
He had followed rules, that was all, but they hadn’t brought him anywhere.
It wasn’t until he’d started working at the café that he’d felt any sort of peace.
He’d dropped little hints to her these past months.
Jamie had told Joan the other evening, after a particularly busy Friday, that he hadn’t known there were so many lonely people in the world.
“Loneliness!” Joan had exclaimed. “Jamie, you must be brave! Living by yourself is nothing to be scared of!” At the time, he’d assumed she’d heard about him and Sandy, but now he was unclear.
His mother had been steadfast and also impulsive.
She had been unhappy, and then happy, and unhappy and happy again.
She’d been both the best mother in the world and the person who knew most what he hated about himself and, at times, like many mothers, when frustrated or angry, had pressed her thumb to that tender place.
In the end, Jamie knew Joan would have known, when she’d taken those pills by the cliff, that he still needed her.