Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [72]
I couldn’t think what to ask next. I had lost my bearings. Oh, it wasn’t that I doubted my memory; I was still sure of that. (Or almost sure.) But the picture! For now I saw that of course it was Mama. Obviously it was. And here I’d found so much in that little girl’s eyes, imagined such a connection between us!
“My feet, Charlotte.”
I slipped the picture back in my pocket, then, and went to the foot of her bed and lifted off the folded spread. I hung it over a chair. I returned to her, avoiding tubes and cords, careful not to jar her, and more gently than I’d ever done anything in my life, I laid my cheek against my mother’s.
She died a few days later, and was buried from Holy Basis Church with Saul officiating. Her coffin seemed oddly narrow. Maybe I’d made up her fatness, too.
The funeral was well attended because she was the preacher’s mother-in-law. None of the congregation thought much of me (I wouldn’t come to Sewing Circle, lacked the proper attitude, really was not worthy of Saul in any way), but they were very kind and said what they were supposed to. I answered in a voice that seemed to come from beside my right ear. This death had taken me by surprise; I’d lost someone more important than I’d expected to lose.
After the funeral, I went through a period of time when I was unusually careful of people. Everything they offered me, I tried to accept: Miss Feather’s tea, cup after cup; Dr. Sisk’s little winter bouquets; even Saul’s prayers, which he said in silence so I wouldn’t take offense but I knew, I felt them circling me. Sometimes when I was sitting up with Jiggs (for a while there, he had nightmares), Saul would wake and come search me out, and stand in the doorway in his shabby pajamas. “Are you all right?” he’d ask.
“I’m fine.”
“I thought something might be wrong.”
“Oh, no.”
“I woke and you weren’t there.”
“Are you all right?” I said.
“Yes, certainly.”
“Don’t catch cold.”
Then he’d wait for a minute, and run his fingers through his hair and finally turn and stagger back to bed.
I saw that all of us lived in a sort of web, criss-crossed by strings of love and need and worry. Linus cocked his head and searched our faces; Amos sent his music calling through the house. Selinda was floating free now in her early teens, but still kept touching down to make sure of us at unexpected moments. And Julian had a way of leaving his hand on people’s shoulders like something forgotten, meanwhile whistling and looking elsewhere.
“I won’t hurry you,” Amos said.
I looked at him.
“I know what you’re going through,” he told me.
For we never met in vacant rooms any more—or if he found me in one by accident and put his arms around me I only felt fond and distracted. I was saddened by his chambray shirt, with the elbow patches that I had sewn on in some long ago, light-hearted time. It appeared that we were all taking care of each other, in ways an outsider might not notice.
So I survived. Baked their cakes. Washed their clothes. Fed their dog. Stepped through my studio doorway one evening and fell into the smell of work, a deep, rich, comforting smell: chemicals and high-gloss paper and the gritty, ancient metal of my father’s camera. I turned on the lights and took the CLOSED sign from the door. Not ten minutes later, along came Bando from the filling station. He said he wanted a picture like Miss Feather’s: cape and silver pistol. Could I do it? Would the cape fit, was the pistol real?
“Certainly it’s real,” I told him. “You see it, you feel it: it’s real.”
“No, what I mean is …”
“Sit beside the lamp, please.”
As soon as he was gone I developed his pictures; I was so glad to be busy again. I came from the darkroom with a sheaf of wet prints and found Amos in the doorway. He was leaning there watching me. I said, “Amos!”
“You’re back at work,” he said.
“Yes, well, only Bando.”
I hung the prints. Bando’s face gazed down at me, clean and still, like something locked in amber. “Isn’t it funny?” I said. “In ordinary life he’s not nearly so fine. But my father would never approve of these;