Happy Family Part 15

Inside smells of stale smoke, must, and dirty diaper. Mail litters the floor. A faucet drips. The refrigerator door is open. Something inside is making the dirty-diaper smell. "h.e.l.lo?" Slashed limes rot on the counter along with empty bottles of gin, dead plants, and vases with desiccated flowers still with the sympathy cards on sticks. She swallows her disgust-this is not the time to be thinking about her daughter's piggery. Empty chairs and stillness. Has someone broken in? Is she going to find her daughter bleeding? "Cheri, I am here," she calls. She remembers that movie with the knife and the shower curtain. She rushes up the stairs. No harm can come. Not to Cheri. Please, not to her.

The bedroom door is ajar. In the slate light, she can make out a lump on the bed. Has she taken too many sleeping pills, wanting to join Michael? Why didn't Cici think of this and come sooner? The telltale lump. She recalls all the years of pulling back the covers above exactly such a lump, saying, "Wake up, sleepy-toes." She will never forgive herself if she came too late. She puts her hand on her daughter's back.

Cheri wakes with a start. She rolls over and sits up quickly when she sees Cici standing over her. "What the f.u.c.k?" Cheri says, pus.h.i.+ng away her mother's arms and murmurs of grat.i.tude. "What are you doing here?"

"Are you sick? Is this why you are not answering the phone?"

"I'm fine."

"I thought something had happened to you. You scare everybody."

"Sorry I scared you. You came, you saw...now go away." Cheri flops back down on her back and pulls the blanket over her head. Cici opens the shade and, in the light, can now survey the full extent of the chaos: paper cups half filled with water and cigarette b.u.t.ts, cans of half-eaten food, files, books, clothes belching out of the closet.

"Close the f.u.c.king shade! I'm fine, now turn around and go home."

"Fine?" Cici picks up liquor bottles that have overflowed from the garbage can. "This is no fine. You are a drunk. It is one in the afternoon."

"Says the person who pops champagne for breakfast."

"I am not the one living like this, leaving her door open for the world to walk in. I am not a drunk."

"First of all, I am not drunk. You can give me a Breathalyzer. I'm not on drugs. I'll even p.i.s.s in a cup, if you can find a clean one. Second, you can't just barge in here and tell me what to do. I'm not a kid. I'm asking you nicely to get out of here."

"Are you sick?"

"Not going to keep saying it nicely."

"Please do not tell me you are pregnant and drinking like this."

"I am not pregnant, Cici. I am not sick." Cheri rolls over. "I'm going back to sleep now so shhhh."

"Okay, okay. You sleep."

"No longer listening."

"I will sit and wait for you to wake up."

All Cici wants to do is get a giant can of disinfectant and some rubber gloves and start to pick up the garbage that surrounds Cheri's bed. She can't even find a place to perch in the bedroom. There's clutter upon clutter. When she finds a chair, it's beneath clothes. She's got to throw everything on the floor, which she cannot bear to do, so she sits with it all in a ball on her lap. This is the wreckage of her daughter's life. She feels a pain that emanates from beneath her ribs where she draws breath. A specific pain that comes from knowing that her love-no matter how unconditional and strong-cannot solve everything for her child. "Put the seash.e.l.l to your ear, cara, and wherever you are, you will hear my voice." All those years moving from house to house along the seash.o.r.e, Cici never doubted her mother's words. She wishes she had the power to reach Cheri.

"I can feel you staring. You're like a dog."

"You said not to talk. I need to close my eyes as well?"

"Oh, f.u.c.k it. I'm up now," Cheri says, tossing back the covers. She rests her forehead in the palm of one hand. "Can you pa.s.s me the lighter, it's on the table." Cici goes to the bedside table, moves a filled ashtray on top of papers and bills, rifles through them. "Oh, for G.o.d's sake, Cici."

"What you doing with this?" Cici has found the package of razor blades underneath a bra on the table.

"Give me that." Cheri stands, reaches over to take the box. The sudden rise to vertical makes her see spots before her eyes. "If I was going to kill myself, that's the last way I'd do it."

"Sit down. You are very pale," Cici says, touching her arm. "You will fall."

"I'm always pale. Please, just get off me."

"You need help."

"I'm fine, I can stand on my own." Cheri turns away from Cici but has to steady herself against the wall.

"You need help. I am here to help."

"What do you know about what I need? You live in your own little bubble completely removed from reality, never worked a day in your life. What's your daily drama? The shoes you ordered are too tight or the pug's s.h.i.+ts are too loose-now it's, 'Oooh, Cheri's sleeping in the afternoon, and she's in her T-s.h.i.+rt and ratty old underwear,' and yup, I stink. Welcome to the den of iniquity, Mother! Go complain about it to Cookie or your friends who are only your friends because you employ them, but don't you dare show up here and judge me-"

"Do not talk to me about judging. I am sick of how you look at me, always with the hard eyes. Saying I am a stupid woman who sees nothing, hears nothing. How dare you! I have lived a life. You think I have had no suffering? There are many things you do not know about me. My life is not so full of cherries. I know what it is to lose. I lost my family. I lost my husband-"

"The great man that Sol was, yeah, I know. Spare me." Cheri turns her back to Cici, who grabs Cheri by the arm and wheels her around, a primordial anger rising.

"You think you are the only one with the right to anger? Plenty of things I have spared you." Cici allows the words to spill out. "Your father, he was not perfect to you, but he cheated on me. He had another woman. You think this does not cause me pain? Some things are so painful we must look away to go on. But when we turn back, we can be surprised. In the end, I was able to forgive. You think I am such a weak woman. Well, I am stronger than you think." Cici is puffed up like a lizard; she has stunned Cheri into silence.

Cheri sits on the bed. After a moment, she quietly speaks. "When did you know?"

"You were in college...it was over long ago," Cici says, wanting to suck her words back in.

"So you knew. And...you didn't do anything." Cheri is looking at her with hard eyes, and it makes her angry all over again.

"Nothing is so simple between men and women. Was it so simple with you and Michael? You had not seemed so happy together. In a marriage, who is happy always? In the end I let happiness back in and if that makes me the fool, then I am the fool," Cici says, talking to her daughter like she should have spoken to her when she was a teenager. "I do not care if you like it or no like it. I am here to help you. I am going to run a shower. You will get in it and get clean. Then we have a coffee. That is where we start." Cheri stands stiffly, but her eyes are softer. "You hear me," Cici says. It is not a question.

Cheri hears the water running. She's surprised she can make it to the bathroom without pa.s.sing out. Her head feels like aliens are drilling a hole in it. The bathroom is steamy and humid. She wipes off a corner of the mirror with her fist. Her left breast is hanging out of the side of her tank top. She can't believe Cici knew. Then again, of course she can; it's all part of her f.u.c.ked-up-family bulls.h.i.+t. She thinks about saying, Thanks for telling me what I already knew. But Cheri doesn't know exactly how much Cici knows about Sol's other life. Does she know about the house in Rye? About his son? She's not about to open that can of worms. As if her own life isn't caving in, now she needs this? "f.u.c.k," she says, stripping off her clothes. She steps into the shower and lets the hot water sluice down her back. Barely able to stand, she puts one hand on the tile wall. All she wants is to crawl back in her hole and be left alone. She thinks she still has some of her Sudafed-pain-pill powder. Just like in her twenties, she's too in control to go over the edge and become a full-blown addict.

When she's clean and wrapped in a towel back in her room, Cheri a.s.sesses what's left of her depleted stash. She decides that she'll do just one snort now and chase it with a swig of cough syrup. Her hand is shaking and she doesn't want to waste any of her product; she struggles to tip a small amount of powder from one of Michael's empty pill bottles onto the back of her hand. The last time she was like this, she cold-turkeyed her way back through sheer grit. The thought of doing that now makes her feel sick. And then there's Cici banging around downstairs, doing her infernal cleaning.

Cheri walks into the kitchen wearing the same tank top and underwear, her hair still wet. There are two full garbage bags lined up next to the front door. Cici is pouring espresso into two cups Cheri has never seen. Did Cici bring her own cups along with her d.a.m.ned espresso pot? Cheri was fortified enough to get down the stairs, but the smell of the cleaning products Cici was using mingling with coffee makes her want to retch.

"Sit and have an espresso," Cici says, bringing the cups over to the table that's now cleared. There's a box of biscotti on the table; Cici's taken a few out and put them on a plate. "I can put more sugar in if you want."

"This is your idea of help? Flying halfway across the country to make espresso and compare my marriage to your f.u.c.ked-up marriage? Playing who is the biggest martyr?"

"That is not what I try to do, Cheri. The point I make is that I suffered too. I have felt as you are feeling now-"

"So let's stop everything and immortalize your grief about Sol," Cheri says, grabbing the box of biscotti and shoving it in Cici's bag.

"That is not what I am saying; you twist my words," Cici protests. Cheri fixates on the counter, where a pile of Cici's things has already acc.u.mulated. She starts scooping up whatever she thinks might have come from Cici.

"What are you doing? Stop." Cici is by her side, trying to take the coffee grinder out of her hand. Cheri turns around to avoid her and slams her leg into a trash can.

"f.u.c.k!" Cheri's s.h.i.+n throbs; she's gnas.h.i.+ng her teeth, and her mother is looking at her like she's the one who's bats.h.i.+t crazy. "d.a.m.n it, don't go moving things," she says, trying to push the trash can with her hip. It's full and heavier than she thinks. Or she's weaker.

"You cannot keep up like this. You hurt yourself. Let me have that," Cici says, taking the coffee grinder from Cheri's hand.

"I'm fine."

"No, you are not fine," Cici says forcefully. "Nothing is fine. You are in the depression; this is normal when someone dies. But it is not normal to shut yourself away from everybody for so long, to be hurting yourself, wearing the same clothes for days, drinking yourself sick."

"You really want to compare normal?" Cheri stares at Cici, who claps her hands together and waves them up and down in an effort to stop herself from saying the first thing that occurs to her.

"You want me to bite; I do not want to bite. Cara mia, when someone you love dies, nothing feels the same. A part of your heart is gone and never comes back."

"I'm afraid it's more complicated than that."

"Everything is always more complicated. And also always more the same," Cici says.

Cheri turns away and when she turns back Cici has put the coffee grinder and other things in her tote. "I don't know what you want me to say. I can't explain it myself," Cheri says. How could she describe to Cici that her pain was about more than Michael's death? That she'd lost him in the marriage and then, just as she saw him again, she lost him and everything else she cared about permanently. "I can't feel anything, and when I do, it's all too much."

"I have been in the shoes you are in," Cici says, sitting down at the table. "I shut myself away like you do. I could not get out of the bed. I had no reason to move forward. I wanted to hurt myself..." There's not a trace of the puffed-up lizard left in Cici. She looks all too human.

"You lost a husband too, I know..."

"I am not talking about Solomon." Cici takes a deep breath and pauses. "I lost a baby." The plainness and weight of the statement levels Cheri.

"You had a child?" Cheri asks, sitting down.

"I was pregnant before you." Cici's voice sounds distant. "There was an emergency. The doctors had to make an operation so I would not die and they got the baby out. But he was so small and so sick. He lived only a few hours. I could not have children after that."

"You had a hysterectomy? You could have told me," Cheri says, remembering the trip to Italy when she found out that she was adopted. n.o.body told her anything in her family, but when she did hear something, it was dropped on her out of the blue. "Why didn't you say anything?" Cheri asks.

"Maybe I should have told you. But it caused too much pain to look back. Your father and I never spoke of it. But losing a child is something you can never forget." Cheri thinks of Karen, the funeral and the baby in the tiny coffin. For the first time, she thinks of her mother as a young woman, bereaved, emptied. Had there been a funeral for Cici's baby? Cheri's head is spinning and she doesn't feel at all well. Her mother is looking at her with concern.

"Enough talk of sad things. Sit. I make you something to eat."

Although Cheri wasn't hungry, she ate a few bites of the risotto that Cici miraculously threw together from the seemingly empty pantry. She drank water and napped, and when she woke up, Cici came into her bedroom and said, "I am going to help you pack up Michael's clothes. It is not good to sit with them there for so long. You are ready?"

Is she ready? To let the memories in, the images she'd kept at bay by sinking into the mound of overarching despair? Cici opens Michael's closet, takes something off a hanger, and approaches Cheri with it. Is she ready to feel the softness of Michael's favorite s.h.i.+rt, the one that made his eyes the color of blueberries in summer? He had this s.h.i.+rt when they first met and there was a time she would wear it when he was away, feeling protected and attached. Cheri has never been particularly sentimental, but she knows she's not ready to let that s.h.i.+rt go. Cici is sitting on a corner of the bed, looking at her expectantly.

And suddenly, moments that were commonplace float up in Cheri's mind. How he'd throw off his boots and then later ask, "Have you seen my other boot?" The boots with the caulking splatter from when he decided to put up shelves and made such big holes in the wall that they had to call the handyman to redo it. How he would run his hands over his face when he was tired. The day she caught him listening to mariachi music and actually liking it. She sits, clutching the s.h.i.+rt to her chest, until she feels her mother's hands on her shoulders. Instead of withdrawing, she allows herself to lean back. "We will keep this one for you," Cici says, gently taking the s.h.i.+rt. Cheri gets up and moves like a cl.u.s.ter fly, pausing in front of his closet, then circling to his chest of drawers, not knowing where to start. His clothing is stained with food and accidents that smell of indignity. She is looking at the remains of his last days and thinks she should have taken care of them better. The struggle to feed and be fed, worn on his sleeves. She can hear her mother exclaiming, "Che schifo!" Where to start?

Without uttering another word, Cici swoops in and picks up Michael's things from wherever they met their inglorious end weeks ago. Cici sorts and folds, making neat piles of clothes to be donated or thrown out. "We decide this one later," Cici says when Cheri gets stuck, which is more often than she would have thought. Is she ready? There is much more letting go to do, she knows, and not just of objects.

After all of Michael's clothes have been sorted, Cheri and Cici sit in silence on the edge of the bed. Cici puts her hand on top of Cheri's. They sit like this for a few minutes, until Cici says, "I will stay in a hotel. But you must promise me that you will not hurt yourself. No razor blades. No pills."

"I promise," Cheri says.

"I want you to remember that G.o.d is always here for you. I know you do not believe as I do, that you think I am simple...but this is what helps me. I know your father and my baby are in heaven. And so is Michael." Cheri quells her impulse to say, Do you actually believe in this? Cici continues. "Going to church, talking to Father Joseph-this helped me with my loss, with all my problems. When you make the confession, you put all your sin and sorrow at the feet of G.o.d. His forgiveness and love are so big, it makes your troubles feel smaller."

As soon as her mother leaves, Cheri regrets not asking her to stay. She wanted to be alone because she's jonesing and there's the last bit of chopped-up Sudafed-pain-pill powder to consume. But as soon as she cuts her last lines and inhales, she knows it's an empty gesture, like s.e.x with someone you once loved but now can't stand. She wanders through the house. It feels too big. Like she's lost weight and it hangs off her. Who knows, maybe Cici and the millions of believers out there are right. Maybe Michael and Sol have reconciled in the Great Beyond. They're at the seaside chasing waves with Cici's baby boy and numerous vestal virgins, laughing. Maybe she'll just pop the last pain pill and take a bath.

The world might collapse, but as long as there is running water, Cheri will survive. She adjusts the water temperature. The yellow washcloth draped over the side of the tub smells of her mother's tea-rose perfume. She feels a deep longing; for what, she's unsure. The kind of painful sweetness that makes her want to call and wake her mother up and say, I'm sorry, come back, please come back. But it's one o'clock in the morning. First thing tomorrow, she promises herself, I'll get up and do things differently. Start small: Put on pants. Work my way up to being kind.

Lilacs.

Cici likes air travel. She finds it soothing to be in the capsule of neither here nor there. But first cla.s.s isn't what it used to be. She's had to tap her champagne gla.s.s twice to get the stewardess's eye and decides to switch to vodka and orange juice. For the first time since Cheri was a small child, Cici feels like she was actually able to help her. She would like to have stayed longer but she knew she'd done as much as Cheri would allow. It doesn't get easier. She thought that maybe with age she wouldn't feel the referred pain that comes from seeing your child suffer. She was wrong. If she could, she would take Cheri's burden away, breathe in her loss and expel it like smoke. But she can't do that for Cheri any more than Sol could do it for her when she lost the baby. You were once my salvation, she could have whispered to Cheri, you gave me a reason to live and now you must find the same for yourself.

Why does she think of the right thing to say only after the fact? She felt she had said both too much and too little to Cheri. A child does not want to know the intimate things that go on between her parents. How could she tell Cheri that she was also to blame for the woman with the emerald ring? That after her baby died, she became numb to pleasure she knew Solomon wanted to give her but she could not receive. Or give to him. She turned her face away, pretended for so long that one day the mask she was wearing had become her face. She had put so much of her love and energy into being a mother, wanting to do better than her mama. She had only one child; there was plenty of room in her heart. But she had not left enough room for Solomon. She knows this now. But then, she was so young. She understood so little.

She could not tell Cheri about Solomon's confession. She would like to erase that memory and focus only on the fact that they found happiness again. Solomon had shown her that he was still the man she had fallen in love with. He'd awakened something in her that she had given up hope of ever feeling again. But she found herself able to speak of only the small things to her daughter. For such big things, she could never find the words. You did nothing. It might have taken Cici years, but she did do something. If I could forgive Solomon, so can you, was what she meant to say. "G.o.d forgives us so we can forgive each other," Father Joseph told her and Solomon when they sat across from him in his office at the church. "Are you prepared to do that, my children?"

She was not prepared when Solomon confessed. He had been on a phone call at work when his eyes suddenly went dark. She had raced to the hospital. He was sixty-six years old. His veins were bad; the phlebitis could give him a stroke and kill him. He was getting special attention, surrounded by doctors who said he was lucky-it was only a miniature stroke. A TMI, she was sure, but she was saying it wrong because Cheri corrected her. They did not want to worry Cheri; she had told her afterward, when most of his eyesight came back. She had seen him struggling with his gout, his swollen legs, but he was always so strong. "Doctors make the worst patients," he'd told Cici when she worried about his health. Now the man with all the answers, the proud doctor she'd married, was like a little boy in his hospital gown. She slept on a chair by his bed and would wake up in the middle of the night and find his hand searching for hers. She got in next to him; his arms looped around her waist and his head rested on her neck.

The next morning, his sight had come back in one eye and the doctors said he could go home. "I have to tell you something," he said as they were packing to leave. "It's over with her. It has been for a long time, but I needed you to know." Cici could not have said when, exactly, but she'd sensed Sol's attention was slowly returning to her.

"I made a mistake," he continued. "I'm not proud of it or of how I handled it. I never loved her the way I love you. But it wasn't just the two of us." For a moment, Cici could not breathe. He and the Emerald Woman had a son. And that boy was going to be a man; he was soon to be in college. "It wasn't planned," he said, and she'd snorted. She did not want to hear any more. Was it worse or better that he'd stayed with the woman because they'd had a child? She could not give him his own child. Was this why he'd sought out someone else? As much as she tried to block them, these thoughts crept in with cat's paws later. But for now, she needed Sol to stop talking. She held up her hand.

"If you don't want me to come home, now or ever, then I will have to accept that. But I needed you to know the whole story." How could her husband have a child that was not hers? In all her years of thinking about the Emerald Woman, she had somehow never imagined such a thing. Men wandered, had affairs. Not children. Because he had confessed, was she supposed to forgive? Was that what his eyes were pleading? She had to ask herself: Could she imagine a life without Solomon? "We are going home," she said.

Cici wraps the cashmere throw that she brought around her, glad that n.o.body is in the seat next to her. Never once had she considered a life without Solomon. They had the glue of their marriage: beautiful homes to run, food she knew to buy and cook for him, the suits she picked out and packed and unpacked, the daily calls, his always knowing what to do, how to fix things. Her papa had died when Cici was so young, but she remembered the look on her mama's face the day it happened, a look that said the world would never be the same, would never feel like a safe place again. Solomon had kept Cici's world safe.

It is hard to remember the gradual way the shoot of forgiveness surfaced. She had not gone looking for it. To celebrate the fresh start, he had bought her a gift-lilacs, just like the ones he'd planted for her in Montclair. He knew to get tight cl.u.s.ters with the purple buds just awakening. Where had he found lilacs in winter? "Nothing is impossible," he had said, but not about the lilacs. A perfect spray sitting there on her white plate at the dinner table. Someday, when I'm awfully low, when the world is cold. Frank Sinatra crooning on the stereo. Croon. Solomon had taught her that word back when his touch made her s.h.i.+ver as if with fever. When her teeth were white and her knees unwrinkled and her heart tender. "You are my home," he said. "I only ever wanted you, us, as we were." He poured her some wine, an excellent vintage. "I only ever wanted to make you happy, Cici. The houses, the jewelry, these were things I could give you when you didn't seem to want everything else I had to give. More than anything, I wanted to know that you still wanted me. When you cut up my clothes, I thought that you'd scream and threaten to leave me. A declaration would have stopped me in my tracks."

A declaration-where were the words back then for all the emotions she had held in? "It was not my duty to tell you to stop," she said. She thought of her mother and sister. "Men slow down when they are older," Genny had said about her Ettore when he had his women, "they come home again." A declaration. Now, that evening, she'd found the words. She shouted and called him a liar and a motherf.u.c.ker, screamed that she should have taken a whack out on him when she could. When she was exhausted and about to call to Cookie because the dinner would be cold and she was probably drunk, watching TV, he stood up and took her in his arms: "We can't go back to where we began-we are both different people than we were twenty years ago. But I want to share who I am now with you. But you have to be willing to share yourself too." He touched her cheek with his hand. She could see the pa.s.sage of time, reflections of all the men she'd known or thought she'd known in his face. He talked about how he would retire and become a doctor again, work in a clinic for no money. He was going to help the people who most needed helping. "I am going to be a better man, just let me show you." And the way you look tonight. And then his hand was on her back like a knife, cutting the b.u.t.tons off her dress. His breath on her ear: "Forgive me. Please, forgive me."

"Are you all right, ma'am?" The stewardess is leaning over, handing Cici a tissue. Cici nods her head; she didn't even realize she was crying. She pats her eyes and then checks herself in her compact, fixes her makeup. There is still an hour left of the flight; she settles back to try to nap. "A woman is born with only so many b.u.t.terflies," her mother had said when Cici told her she was in love with Sol. "When your heart is broken by a man, when he hurts you, he steals one. Don't let your b.u.t.terflies go easily, Carlotta mio-one day you may be left with none." The last gift Solomon gave her was a gold necklace with a mother-of-pearl b.u.t.terfly, tiny diamonds around its wings. It had been too painful to wear that necklace after he died, but now she thinks she can. And one day, when she pa.s.ses it to Cheri, she might just find the courage to tell her a little bit more.

Ashes Are Heavier Than You Think.

Cheri hesitates outside the door to Michael's office. She's been back in there only once, to put the box of his ashes on his desk because she had no idea what to do with them. Michael, with all of his obsessing over her watching him go into the fire and detailed instructions for his memorial/premiere party-right down to the c.o.c.ktail recipes-was mute on the subject of his mortal remains. She'd told the lady at the funeral home no to putting Michael in a columbarium, an urn, having him made into a ring, or hanging him in a portrait; she'd just take him to go. But now she has to reenter HMS Bay, since Bertrand wants her to send him The Palmist files from Michael's computer. She's been putting off the task for long enough, and she certainly doesn't have the excuse of being too busy. She'd said no to Samuelson's invitation to take back her cla.s.ses "with modifications" and could no more listen to news about the Iraq museum's losses than she could revisit her book or write anything more than a grocery list.

She cracks a window to relieve the stuffiness. A breeze blows in, riffling a movie poster on the wall that's come untacked on one side. The afternoon light looks dusty. The plain brown box of ashes is right where she left it, by Michael's computer next to a vase of deeply dead lilacs. As a parting gift, Cici had filled the house with "new life." Cici's fluffing up HMS Bay felt like a violation, but Cheri has to admit that it's thanks to her mother that putting on pants is now an almost daily occurrence. The air no longer smells of nag champa or sickbay or, she realizes sadly, Michael. Are you ready?

When she sees Michael's face come to life on the screen, it startles her. Like he'll come up behind her saying, "What the h.e.l.l are you doing on my computer? And by the way, did you read my journal?" She fast-forwards through The Palmist video files, catching bits of what he says. Images move in time-lapse; his eyes sink deeper into his face, he goes from sitting, to being propped up in a hospital bed, to lying down. His voice grows thin and raspy. "How do I live while dying?" The light is crepuscular; his face is partially shadowed. She lets it play: "The dirty little secret is that I had a fantasy that I'd find the answer out there. And I'd be healed. But whatever anyone said to me, it all boiled down to: believe. My rational mind wasn't having any of that. 'Fake it until you make it'...if I had a nickel for every time I said that. Then I remembered what I'd witnessed with this monk in Thailand. He was a meth addict dying a painful death on the streets, his face covered in sores. He had gangrene. I asked him how he had lost his way. He said that there was no way to lose, that everything-good and bad-was all experience. 'Nothing to do, nothing to change, everything is perfect as it is.' If we accept what is, then there's no conflict. No conflict, no suffering. No suffering and we are at peace. I could tell looking into his eyes that he knew this, not in his mind, but in his heart. Despite his miserable circ.u.mstances, this man had dignity. And, finally, I got it. It's not about the mind; it all comes from the heart." Cheri has no stomach for this. She powers down the computer, then yanks every last tentacle from the wall. Bertrand can have the whole d.a.m.n thing.

Her weekly talks with Marlene-she'd cut the Dr. c.r.a.p-is her only social life. She is sick of herself, of being in this house.

As she lifts Michael's computer onto the counter at the UPS Store, she thinks she is done with inertia. Peanuts and bubble wrap-h.e.l.l, yes. Insure it for the highest amount possible, and get it there as fast as possible. Why not say yes? She didn't have to stay in Chicago. She could start over, move to another state or out of the country because she had no ties and, for the moment, no job. Buy all the guns she wanted and go around the country to every three-gun compet.i.tion there was and call that her life. Yes to telling Samuelson take your handcuffed job and f.u.c.k it. She has money and doesn't need to be ashamed of it or hide it from anyone anymore. h.e.l.l, if she could figure out something she was inspired to research, she could fund her own trips, or even become a donor, greasing the wheels on any number of projects. She walks home feeling the late-summer sun on her face like a warm slap telling her to wake up and get on with her life.

"It's okay to feel relieved. Even excited at the prospect of new beginnings. That's understandable, even necessary," Marlene says. "You're familiar with the pink-cloud syndrome, I'm sure."

Cheri is distracted by the a.s.s prints on Marlene's faux-suede couch. Looks like there was a couple here before her. Shouldn't the good doctor rake the couch to clear it, like in a j.a.panese stone garden? "I'm sober and can conquer the world?" Cheri says. "And after the pink cloud comes the crash of reality. Not really into Big Bookspeak."

"I wasn't referring only to your being sober. Loss isn't a cold that lasts for a few days and is gone. But I want to return to Cici's visit first," Marlene says. "It sounds like she showed some real emotional honesty. It couldn't have been easy for her to tell you she'd lost a child before she adopted you."