Chapter 2
WILLIAM
When at first his great-aunt Eleanor didn’t respond to his knocks, William wasn’t concerned.
She always took her time. At Christmas, she loosened the Scotch tape of her presents with her thumbnail to save the paper, buffed her blood-red oxfords before walking out the door, her body calibrated to its own steady internal clock.
She had been a school secretary for forty-five years, and William always imagined her as this old engine, pumping and whirring behind a desk—a piece of machinery the staff wished they could replace, but how could they, when ultimately she still functioned as she always had?
Because of all of this, William did not worry. He did not worry until he pressed his ear against the door and heard the murmur of men’s voices.
Eleanor, always more of a mother to him than his actual mother, had given him a key two years ago when the pipes froze in his basement unit and he needed a place to sleep, so he was able to unlock the door.
He dropped his fraying duffel in the hallway.
In the kitchen, there was an envelope with his sister Shay’s name scribbled at its center, pinned beneath the cream-colored rotary phone.
An abandoned mug of tea sat on the Formica counter, the bag still steeping, so that the water was as saturated as saffron.
“Hello?” a strange voice called out from the living room, accelerating the tick of William’s heart.
“Aunt Eleanor?” he said, and that’s when he saw her.
There was a moment of relief, brief as the start of a breath, when he thought she’d simply fallen asleep in her wingback chair.
Next to her was a bald man in a knit polo he vaguely recognized as her landlord, and her neighbor Lewis, who was, for some reason, holding Eleanor’s hand, and that’s when William noticed the color of her skin.
The stiffness of her neck, the tendons still as tree roots.
“William,” Lewis said. His cheeks were wet with tears. The landlord looked away, as if embarrassed.
Lewis began to talk, but all William could hear was the hand of the grandfather clock.
Everything in the cramped apartment was older than his twenty-one years.
The hard, upholstered sofa; the lace curtains that were brittle as ice in a Chicago winter; the Victor Credenza, which still cradled the T.
Rex album he brought her last week, always puppy-eager to share what he loved.
Now the room felt not just old but lifeless.
Even the painting near her chair, a Rubens reproduction that had always embarrassed him—the naked goddess with her round, luminous breasts—looked drained of color.
“I found her half an hour ago,” Lewis continued, still holding Eleanor’s hand. “I stopped in to wish her a safe trip.”
“The coroner should be here soon,” the landlord said.
“The coroner,” William repeated, as if he did not understand the word.
He had never seen a dead body. Sometimes he worried after men he saw lying across seats on the L, but now he knew that was foolish.
There was a clarity to death. Life is uncertain; death is certain.
They had told him this, at the Buddhist temple on Ashland he’d visited the other week, but he hadn’t really understood.
He sat down on the carpet like a kindergartner. His throat strained, and he wished Lewis would not look at him. Lewis often stared at him when he visited, asking questions with the set of his mouth, though William had no answers. He was not single for the reason Lewis was single.
“It was probably a stroke, something quick,” Lewis said. “I’m sure she didn’t feel any pain.”
William tried blinking his tears back. There was a telephone in the kitchen, but he did not know who to call.
His family was already on the island for the wedding, most having flown the prior evening.
Ferrying Aunt Eleanor to the airport was the one task his mother had given him.
All they thought him capable of, William the baby, William the dishwasher, and perhaps they were right.
He couldn’t afford to miss even more shifts at the restaurant, and Eleanor hadn’t seen the point in extending the trip any longer than she had to, not liking to be away from home.
She hated to travel, and he’d loved that about Eleanor: her lack of curiosity, the certainty of her world.
He brought his thumbnail to his mouth, but it was already bitten down to the quick.
“Do you want to call someone? Bridget, I mean, your mother?” Lewis had gone into the kitchen without William realizing it and handed him a glass of water.
Of course he did not know the number for the hotel.
He had not even written down the address, assuming Eleanor would remember.
All he had was a plane ticket. He thought of his mother, most likely smoking a cigarette and avoiding her siblings.
And of Shay, though she’d become difficult to picture.
A bride in a catalogue or one of those women in the newspaper, eyes like a live wire.
He hadn’t spoken to her in nearly a year, not since the rupture of her engagement party last October.
“No one’s in Chicago,” he said.
The clock chimed, and he startled. Both men were watching him.
Lewis said something about how Eleanor’s will was in the filing cabinet, that she’d left very clear instructions and designated him to help carry them out.
He would call the church, help however he could.
Eleanor remained still, the side of her head kissing one of the chair wings, her hands resting flat against her pleated skirt.
William felt a muscle strain near his heart, just like when his father had passed.
Eleanor was the only remaining relative from that side of the family.
He could not look at her any longer, his skin suddenly hot, even with the torrent of cold air from the window unit, so he fixated on the carpet’s familiar fibers, trying not to unravel.
Loss hardened some, but William was always thin-skinned, and grief had made it even thinner.
And though Aunt Eleanor was in her late seventies, she was never supposed to die.
She was hardy, sharp, unchanged since he was a boy—and for this to happen on Shay’s wedding weekend.
The shadow it would cast. If Shay had been there, she would have known what to do, but he didn’t even remember the hotel’s name, and his flight was leaving in two hours, and what if he had not had a key?
What if he had not had a key?
He would still be in the fluorescent light of the hallway.
He might not have even heard the men’s voices, and he would have assumed that Aunt Eleanor had gone out, changed her mind.
That would not have been out of character.
She never felt like she had to explain herself to anyone.
For that version of William, she would still be alive.
She could still be alive.
“I should go. I need—I need to go.” He stood up.
“Go?” Lewis asked.
“I’ll call you, from the island, after I talk to my family. I just—it’s Shay’s wedding, and I have to get there.”
“All right. I understand,” Lewis said, though from his tone, William was not sure that he did. “You have my number?”
William shook his head, and Lewis found a piece of paper and a pen.
William slipped it into his pocket and thanked him, though the words were almost indecipherable.
The tears had come, a steady stream over his lips, and Lewis patted his shoulder.
The landlord looked uncomfortable again.
Men often seemed uncomfortable around William, and he around them.
He picked up his duffel and, almost without thought, the envelope on the counter, and quietly closed the door behind him.