“What was he like?”
The woman’s face became slightly soft. “Oh Matt.” She shook her head a few times. “Matt. He was a sweet guy, I think. He made me sad.”
“In what way?”
“So eager about his painting. The first time I went there I was a little nervous, but when I saw the other paintings upstairs, I realized, No, he’s serious about this, and he was. I mean, he gave me a robe to put on, and I realized he wasn’t going to hurt me. He was going to paint me, and he did. He was a nice guy, he just was. Still is, for all I know.”
“And what about his mother?”
Ashley closed her eyes briefly, then said, “She screamed at me one time when she saw me coming down the stairs, and when that happened I thought, I’m never coming back here, but Matt said to me as he followed me to my car something like Oh, don’t let her bother you, that’s just who she is. Something like that. So I came back. It must have been the second time I was there that she did that, and it scared me. After that, I would just rush up the stairs, and sometimes before Matt got upstairs I would hear them hollering at each other. Really hollering.”
“What kinds of things would he say to her?”
Ashley got up and put the baby into its crib. The baby waved her arms and Ashley made clucking noises over her, and the baby stopped waving her arms.
“She’s a really good baby,” Bob said, and Ashley smiled. “Isn’t she? She’s a dream baby.” Ashley came and sat back down and spoke quietly, indicating with a finger to her lips that they needed to be quiet so that the baby could take its nap. “What was the question?” she asked, almost in a whisper.
“What kinds of things would Matt say to his mother?” Bob tried to whisper back.
“Oh.” Ashley looked surprised and said, “Gosh, I can’t even remember. Hold on. Well, his mother screamed things, like calling me a cunt and saying, You have that cunt upstairs waiting for you, and Matt would scream back, Shut up! She’s a model! That sort of thing.” Ashley shook her head slightly, pushed her glasses back up her nose with a finger, and said, “Frankly?” And she ducked her head and whispered even more quietly to Bob, “I wouldn’t blame him if he killed her.”
Bob stood up from the table and thanked her for her time.
“Sure,” she said.
—
As he drove to the center of Shirley Falls, Bob thought of how his sister and Olive Kitteridge had said the same thing: They didn’t blame Matt if he had killed his mother. Once in town, Bob went to the county superior court and filed a motion challenging the seizure of Matt’s computer as a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights.
By the time he arrived home he was exhausted. Margaret talked and talked about her day—who was in the hospital, who was not—and he finally said, “Don’t you want to hear about my day?”
And she said, “Well, of course I do, Bob.”
So he told her, but he told her with little affect to his voice, he was that tired, and she did not ask him many questions, and that caused a dreariness to rest in him. She just said, “Are you sure you want to be taking this case?” And for some reason that made him almost angry. He stayed quiet after that. But he thought—oh, it was a terrible thought to have about your wife—about Lucy telling him so long ago about narcissists. Margaret did not seem interested in his day. And then he thought about living with a ghost in the marriage, because although he knew he would not tell Lucy about the case, he very much wanted to, but it was all privileged stuff, between his client and himself. He could have told Margaret because she was his wife. But Margaret did not seem to care, and he did not feel like telling her anyway.
5
At three o’clock that morning Bob was woken by a phone call from Jim. “She’s gone,” Jim said.
*
Jim had been sitting beside Helen’s hospital bed in the living room when he heard her take her last breath. Jim was not aware that he was waiting for any breath at all, but then her breathing stopped. It just stopped. And he was absolutely stunned. He kept staring at her, and her eyes were partly closed, and she did not take another breath. Where was she? She was right there, but she was gone. He could not believe it.
It was by coincidence that the nurse was in the kitchen making herself a cup of tea when this happened, and so later Jim figured he had been with his wife for about eight minutes alone before the nurse came back into the room and said quietly, “Oh, there we are.”
Jim went upstairs to call Bob, who answered on the third ring, and Jim said, “She’s gone.” Bob said, “I’ll fly down in the morning.”
Jim then woke up his daughter Margot, who had been staying with them at the house with her husband and their two children, and Margot went downstairs and sat by her mother, and she wept and wept, and Jim held her; her husband was with them as well. They decided not to wake the others, it was not going to bring Helen back. The others were not staying at the house: Emily with her baby and her husband, and Larry with his wife. They were all staying at a hotel in Brooklyn Heights.
About an hour after Helen died, Margot said, “Dad, I can’t watch her anymore, it’s just killing me, but please, please, please don’t leave her here alone. I mean, even with the nurse.” And Jim said that he would sit with Helen, and he did so for the rest of the night, until it was morning.
*
For Bob, who had not been in New York for more than two years, there was a sense of unreality as he landed in LaGuardia Airport. The airport had been reconstructed and become huge, and this disoriented Bob. He made his way—it took a very long time—to the taxi area to take a cab to Park Slope. The cabdriver had a gray beard and wore a twisted scarf on his head, and he asked Bob, through the glass partition, “How are you?” And Bob told him that his sister-in-law had just died, and the man said, “Oh, I am sorry to hear that,” and he shook his head many times, and Bob wondered about all the stories this man had heard. “I’m just going to spend a couple of days with my brother, I’ll come back for the funeral in two weeks,” Bob said, and the man nodded and repeated how very sorry he was.
But in the not-yet-dusk—it was five o’clock on the first day of April—New York looked different and yet the same, it was the oddest feeling. Bob’s cabdriver dropped him off at Jim’s house in Park Slope: It was a brownstone on a block of mostly brownstones, the buildings looked serious to Bob in a way that he had not remembered. There were daffodils blooming in front of many of them. “Thanks a lot,” Bob said, tipping the man thirty percent, which is what Bob tipped every cabdriver he ever had.
As he walked toward Jim’s house a forsythia bush, its yellow blossoms partly out, reached toward him and he had to push it partly back to get by.
—
All the Thanksgivings here, all the Christmases that Bob had been to in this house—
—
But the moment Bob walked through the grated door below the stoop, he felt the huge and gaping lack of Helen. She was gone, and he grasped the sense of this as Jim closed the door behind him.
Even the hospital bed was gone; they had taken it that morning, Jim told him, after they had taken her body. “They zipped her up in a bag,” Jim said. Bob stood dazed in the living room. The white painted horsehair wallpaper sparkled against the dark wooden frames of the room, it was a beautiful house, he had forgotten this in a way. His nieces and his nephew seemed so glad to see him that it bewildered Bob. Emily said, “Uncle Bob! Uncle Bob!” And she came over quickly to give him a huge hug, as did her sister, Margot; Margot’s older son, who was skinny with pimples, also gave him a hug. Even Larry hugged Bob, as his wife, Ariel, stood politely next to him. Margot and Emily had both had a baby during the pandemic, and one of these children, Margot’s, was now walking, a little boy who kept putting his wet fingers into his wet mouth and beaming at Bob, just beaming at him. The other baby, Emily’s girl, was much younger, and when Emily said “Oh, here, Uncle Bob, hold your grandniece!,” Bob took the swaddled child in his arms, and within seconds her placid face became wrinkled, and she screamed and screamed until Emily took her back, and she still kept screaming. Bob felt very bad about this, even though Emily kept saying “Don’t worry, Uncle Bob.” He noticed that Jim took the baby then, and the baby stopped screaming, and the way Jim held her, bouncing her in the tiniest way as he walked back and forth, Bob thought: He is so comfortable with that child.
Neighbors had brought in food, it was sitting on tabletops throughout the living room, and every so often one of the kids would scoop up a handful of nuts or slice a piece of cheese and pop it into their mouth. It was the oddest thing, almost like a celebration. But Helen was not there. Jim sat on the end of the couch holding Emily’s baby, and the girls told Bob where they were living now—Margot in Philadelphia, Emily in Providence—and they got Bob all caught up, and their husbands seemed to be kind, grown-up men who took part in all the conversations. Larry and Ariel lived in Manhattan, on the Upper East Side, and Larry did something from home that Bob could not quite understand, something with computers; Ariel worked in cosmetics for a large retailer.
With great sadness, Bob did not know what to do. Every so often one of the girls—Margot or Emily—would start to cry, and then stop, and there was laughter as well. But Bob felt really out of place. This is how central Helen had been to this family, he realized. He would not have felt out of place had she been there. But she was gone. And the house itself seemed to know this: There was a sense of darkness in the home, even though all the lights were on.
—
Later, in Jim’s study upstairs, Bob sat alone with Jim. It was nine o’clock in the evening, and except for Larry and Ariel the kids had all gone out for a walk through the neighborhood; they had said they would be back soon. So Bob sat with Jim, who looked remarkably like himself, only very tired, and Jim said, swiveling around in his chair, “Bob.” Bob said, “Jimmy.”
“I’m just so weirded out,” Jim said, and Bob said, Of course he was.
