Whistler

CHAPTER 5

Two months later, my mother found Lucas dead in the backyard. He liked to circle their property every morning while my mother drank coffee in bed. That morning she’d gone back to sleep for a while. She wasn’t entirely sure how long he’d been out there.

“Still, that’s a nice death,” Eddie said when I called to tell him.

I’d thought the same thing, the result of spending one’s adulthood with a hospital administrator who went straight to the obituaries every morning and reported the deaths of the day every evening when he came home from work.

Lucas had enjoyed above-average health throughout his life, along with a below-average outlook.

I had to think he didn’t suffer, or didn’t suffer much, but no one did autopsies on ninety-year-old men who died in the garden, and so there was no way to know which part of him had failed.

Not that it mattered. Lucas had been telling my mother for some time (at top volume) that he had no intention of leaving their house.

She could move to a condo if she wanted, but he was staying put.

Every night he pulled himself up the long staircase to their bedroom to prove that he still could, while my mother climbed the stairs behind him, her hands hovering inches from his back as if she could catch him.

“I’ll send her a note,” Eddie said. He had already sent her a note, thanking her for the return of the red leather dictionary some forty-five years later. He was touched that she’d held on to it, and she was touched to have heard from him.

Leda canceled her patients and I canceled my classes.

We would take the train to Boston and then the commuter rail to Winchester, where our extremely competent half-brothers would carry out the details of their father’s death.

We, the useless stepdaughters, would demonstrate our support by showing up.

Leda had never been close to Buddy, though he could have dialed her number as easily as mine when he got sick.

He tended to call us in order of age: me first, then her.

If I hadn’t picked up, she would have been next, and had she gotten the call, she would have gone to Gloucester.

She was in graduate school at Fordham at the time, rounding on psych patients in a locked ward, but she would have made it work.

He only needed one of us, either of us. No one needed both of us.

I had an easier time with Buddy when we were children by virtue of being older.

I could still remember him living in our house.

I could remember some of the good old days and Leda could not, but that didn’t matter, it could have gone either way, and in this case, it went my way.

That’s how I thought of it. Leda visited Buddy a few times in the year before I took him to California (my unfortunate euphemism for his death), but I was the one who got to know him.

Similarly, it could have been Leda that Eddie ran into that day at the Met.

That would have made more sense since Leda looked more like our mother, and she only lived on the other side of the park.

But it was me that he found, or it was my husband, forever curious and aware of his surroundings, who had noticed Eddie there.

But our mother’s third husband was a different story.

Lucas thought of Leda as a daughter, whereas Lucas and I thought of one another not much at all.

Being a little younger meant that Leda could be folded into another family configuration, while I, slightly older, had already reached my limit.

I would lock myself in the bathroom and stare in the mirror at the scar running up the side of my face.

In those days I still dreamed of getting Eddie back.

Leda and I made our way through the crowds of Penn Station.

Where was everyone going? We did not opt for the quiet car.

We found two seats together and stashed our small bags.

The plan was to come back on the last train, not to sleep in Massachusetts if at all possible.

There wasn’t going to be a funeral. Maybe there would be a memorial service at some later date, but maybe not.

Our mother hadn’t decided. She had kept a modest account for Lucas to use for his investments, and last year he’d sunk everything he had into a company that was developing a new kind of casket made of hemp and mushrooms that promised to consume the body and then itself, all in forty-five days.

“Your entire corporeal self, gone!” he had told us at the Thanksgiving table. “Poof!”

He was in love with the idea and needled my mother to give him more money to up his investment, which she refused to do. Then he died. Now he was to be eaten by mushrooms, as per his wish.

Leda tipped her head back when the train pulled away, closed her eyes. “The problem with having too many parents is having to watch them all die,” she said. “It’s nice that Buddy never married again.”

Of course Buddy had married again, but only for a couple of years when we were in high school, years in which we rarely saw him anyway.

We were grateful to have not been invited to the wedding.

There were no additional children, and in the end she went back to Arizona, which meant that we were free to disavow her entirely.

“How do you think it was we weren’t destroyed?” I asked her, because now that I was thinking about our childhood more, I wondered.

“Compared to most people?” she said. “Oh, honey, you have no idea what people do to their children. Our childhood was fine.”

This news surprised me. “Was it?”

“We were loved, not passionately but enough, and we were largely ignored, which allowed for our healthy separation from the primary family. Necessity made us resourceful and brave. We were left to solve our own problems and so we did. The children you should worry about are the ones who are the singular light of their parents’ lives, the ones who hit thirty and are still calling their mom five times a day. ”

My mind went to my students, so many of whom had parents who might as well have carried them to school on golden plinths.

These parents would call for a teacher’s head if a spot in a desired class did not open, if a grade was not raised, if the girl did not get to sing in the play or was left on the bench through lacrosse season. “Too much love?”

“Not too much love, more like too much crippling dependency on the part of the parent, which masquerades as love.”

“I never thought about that,” I said, and truly, I had not, though it had been right there in front of me all these years.

“Our parents,” Leda said, “did not depend on us for their sense of identity. They had their lives and we had ours. Bless them.”

Leda and I talked plenty on that train ride, but my mind kept drifting back to the unfamiliar concept that perhaps our mother had done us a favor.

We had been given a ringside seat at the edge of her life, and there we balanced.

Maybe that was fine. Buddy was harder to factor into the equation because he was so consistently absent, but whenever we were on the boat, he expected us to dig our own life jackets out of the well and put them on.

We applied our own sunscreen. He didn’t tell us to stay away from the lobsters.

He assumed we were smart enough to see the snapping claws and keep our hands in our pockets.

Leda and I were in the taxi from the station in Winchester when we discovered that we each thought the other had called ahead to say we were coming.

“When she called me yesterday, I told her we’d see her soon,” I said.

“It’s not the same thing,” Leda said.

But then the taxi pulled into the driveway of the stately foursquare on Everett Avenue and it was too late to do anything but get out and ring the bell.

“Do we ring the bell or go in?” I asked. Suddenly I had doubts about everything.

Leda leaned in front of me and pushed the button.

Miraculously, when the door opened, Christopher and Matthew were there together, lanky and large of tooth like their father, Christopher paler, Matthew better-looking. Our sort-of brothers, who I would forever think of as The Boys, who doubtlessly thought of Leda and me as The Girls.

“You came!” Matthew cried, and wrapped his arms around my neck as his brother reached for Leda. Then, having embraced the man in our arms, we switched our partners, dancing a sibling reel in the front entry hall.

“We failed to confirm our arrival,” I said.

Leda had her arm around Matthew’s waist. “I’m so sorry about your dad.”

It was never just the four of us, and soon this moment would end—spouses, children, neighbors, friends, our mother, all would come pouring from the other rooms any second.

But for now we were together, recounting every positive thing we could think of to say about Lucas Ekker.

Remember how much he loved the peppermint ice cream you could only get at Christmas?

Remember how he liked to stay up to watch reruns of M*A*S*H, and how, being lanky and tall himself, he identified powerfully with Alan Alda?

While we assembled our list, I kept looking at their faces, thinking of how their mother was our mother—that was the part that always amazed me.

Our lives had so little overlap, and yet she had given birth to all of us.

“She can get rid of this place now,” Matthew said, his eyes going up to the double-height ceiling above the stairwell. “She can get herself a fancy condo in town, spend the winters in Florida if she feels like it.”

“Not that we’re thinking about Dad’s death in terms of the real estate potential,” Christopher said. He had a job in tech, something to do with search engines. That’s all I knew.

“She spent her life taking care of him,” Matthew said. “Even before she married him, she was taking care of him.”

His brother agreed. “That’s why he married his publicist. The publicist is always going to take care of you.”

This conversation lasted maybe five minutes, seven at most, and it made the hours we had traveled to Winchester and the hours we would travel to get home worth it.

Christopher’s wife, Paula, came in and let out a little howl to see us there, and the howl drew forth their own two sons, ten and twelve, from the den where they had been splayed across the sofa playing video games.

They gave each of us the tentative hug of a young boy.

Christopher had picked them up early from school, the same school Leda and I had gone to, the same school Christopher and Matthew had gone to. When does that happen anymore?

Only Lyle was missing. “He never leaves work,” Matthew said.

“Let him hide from us for a minute,” Paula said. “He was here last night until nine o’clock.”

“Teeth take precedence over everything,” Matthew said.

“Where’s Mom?” Leda asked.

“Lying down,” Christopher said. “She’s been on the phone fighting with the mushroom casket people all morning. Apparently Dad’s modest stock purchase does not move him to the top of the wait list. Demand for mushroom caskets has exceeded inventory.”

“He really wanted to be eaten by mushrooms,” said Sean, the older of Christopher and Paula’s boys.

“Well,” Leda said, putting a therapeutic arm around his shoulder, “he won’t know the difference.”

I dropped my bag on the long Shaker bench in the hall and excused myself for a minute.

I went down the hall to the kitchen, through the mudroom, and down the stairs to the backyard, going across the patio and into the soft grass where Lucas had died.

How long had it been since he and I stood there together while he made his cranky pitch for more Positivity books in the classroom?

Lucas had gotten much more time on this earth than my father had.

Buddy, whose funeral mass so overflowed the church that people said there must not have been a boat on the Atlantic that day.

I stood in front of the lilac beds and thought about them both, Lucas Ekker and Buddy Zabriskie.

I was not inclined towards magical thinking, but I sent out something like a prayer to the two of them all the same.

Let me keep Eddie, I asked them. Not forever, of course, but if you could look out for my third father for a little while, I would be grateful.

A cold spring wind had picked up, and I had left my jacket on the bench in the hall.

The moment I had the thought, my mother was there, the jacket in her hand.

“You’re going to freeze,” she said, and held it up for me to thread my arms inside.

I must have been standing in front of the place where Lucas had fallen.

She no doubt thought I was there for a different reason.

I put my arm around her and I told her I was sorry, because I was sorry.

How awful that she had to find her husband that way.

“Thank you,” she said. “No one seems to feel bad that he’s dead.”

We weren’t looking at one another, which made it easier. “Well,” I said, “it’s hard not to think about all the other ways it could have gone.”

She nodded. “And it’s hard not to wonder if the four of you won’t say the same thing about me when I’m gone. Mom’s dead, check that off the list.”

What Leda had said on the train came back to me, that by going about the business of her own life, she had made us capable.

I made a quarter turn and took her in my arms. “You’re a whole other story,” I said to her, thinking it might even be true.

“If you ever die, the four of us will cry out a river for you to be carried away on.”

My mother smiled at the thought of that, then she rested her head against my shoulder. We stood there in the cold until Leda came and told us it was time to come inside.