Part 13 (1/2)

She holds the sh.e.l.l in her hand as they enter Charleston, Ben pressing their car slowly into a downtown clotted with summer tourists. Their route takes them past the location of one of her worst professional memories: the night she played the Grand Canyon Suite Grand Canyon Suite as a Jaguar was raffled. But it also takes her through more pleasant memory terrain, including the theater where she played in the small orchestra for a theatrical event at another year's Spoleto festival. They'd had fun, the group seated behind thick black netting, visible only partially to the audience, only to the first few rows, playing music that was easy yet not uninteresting, music that was fun. Before and after, they'd sit outside in the warm breeze, listening to the stage performers speak Chinese, watching them warm up for their contortions, legs behind their heads, cigarettes hanging from their dry lips. as a Jaguar was raffled. But it also takes her through more pleasant memory terrain, including the theater where she played in the small orchestra for a theatrical event at another year's Spoleto festival. They'd had fun, the group seated behind thick black netting, visible only partially to the audience, only to the first few rows, playing music that was easy yet not uninteresting, music that was fun. Before and after, they'd sit outside in the warm breeze, listening to the stage performers speak Chinese, watching them warm up for their contortions, legs behind their heads, cigarettes hanging from their dry lips.

She unfolds her hand, uses one palm to press the sh.e.l.l into the flesh of the other until it hurts, and then examines the temporary imprint.

As much as she wishes they could stay at a hotel-guesses, even, that Ben's mother would prefer it-it is not possible to suggest. And Ben's sister now occupies the house she and Ben once lived in, the one intended to be a home for their child. Morbidly-she knows this-she wonders what happened to the mattress she stained with blood, the only physical evidence that her child existed.

She speaks kindly but minimally to her mother-in-law, who has put herself together with clothes and makeup but whose face reveals something broken inside. Sometimes, when she closes her mouth, her upper and lower lips don't quite line up, and she does not rearrange them. Her stare has gone sideways, too, but still she manages to look at Suzanne with disapproval.

Suzanne determines to fold herself into something small and quiet, to be helpful but not fully there. She keeps their belongings neatly stored in the guest bedroom, tidies the gardens outside when Ben's mother is inside and the kitchen when Ben's mother steps into the yard. Blameless Blameless, she thinks; she wants to be blameless.

The days after her mother's death were a span of too much food, of neighbors and friends and distant cousins she'd never heard of bearing ca.s.seroles and pies and m.u.f.fins and fruit salads-far more than one grieving person could eat, dishes that spoiled, leaving Suzanne later to thaw and eat the posthumous food her mother had cooked for the freezer. At Ben's house, it is different. Despite his mother's standing in local society, her members.h.i.+p in a church, her many clubs, there are few visitors. Flowers arrive in florists' delivery vans, filling both the house and the funeral home with expensive arrangements, but people do not arrive with them, and no one brings food except Ben's sister, who has stopped by a bakery. Suzanne cooks some simple dishes to have on hand and slips out to a sandwich shop for a platter in case people do show up.

Ben moves about his childhood home, seeking empty rooms and not eating at all.

At night Suzanne stares at the floral wallpaper, the matching bedspread, the beads hanging from the reading lamp. Ben stares at the ceiling.

”Are you okay?” she asks.

”What's okay?”

She turns to him. ”I have no idea. Stupid question.”

”I'm okay.” He turns off the lamp, and the room turns powdery with only the pale summer-night light that slides through a gap in the heavy brocade curtains.

The funeral is efficient. That's how Suzanne thinks of the short service at the Episcopal church-family and parental friends in the front few pews, Charlie's beach pals in the back. Suzanne touches the closed casket, which is s.h.i.+ny enough to return her own image, stained burgundy and perfected as if airbrushed.

She remembers the time she complained about the Grand Canyon Suite Grand Canyon Suite and the raffle. Ben's mother said musicians shouldn't gripe about efforts to enlarge their audience. ”You'll never make a living if no one comes. Maybe playing music people want to hear is a good thing.” Charlie smirked and said, ”And what about your church, Mother? Should the priest tell people what they want to hear, soften its stance on adultery to increase its audience?” Her face tightened as she told him it wasn't the same thing at all. ”To them it might be the same thing, a kind of infidelity,” Charlie answered, and Suzanne didn't even bother to mask her smile. and the raffle. Ben's mother said musicians shouldn't gripe about efforts to enlarge their audience. ”You'll never make a living if no one comes. Maybe playing music people want to hear is a good thing.” Charlie smirked and said, ”And what about your church, Mother? Should the priest tell people what they want to hear, soften its stance on adultery to increase its audience?” Her face tightened as she told him it wasn't the same thing at all. ”To them it might be the same thing, a kind of infidelity,” Charlie answered, and Suzanne didn't even bother to mask her smile.

Now she sees tears in her reflection and pulls back her hand from the casket's cool, hard surface, wis.h.i.+ng she had been as good a friend to Charlie as he had been to her, wis.h.i.+ng she had been more alert. Her sin, she thinks, is not adultery but self-absorption, of cutting herself apart from the people she is supposed to love, the people she does love. It's what Petra was trying to tell her.

The service is followed by a scattering of ashes from a small rented yacht.

”He would want to be in the ocean,” Suzanne whispers to Ben, holding his arm, trying to say and do the right thing.

Overhearing, Ben's sister says, ”He would want to be with our father. This is where our father is.”

”Of course.” Suzanne mutes her voice. ”That's part of what I meant.”

Ben's mother joins them at the prow on the way back to sh.o.r.e. With her regal stature, she reminds Suzanne, just a little, of Olivia. Or, more accurate: she reminds her of Olivia come unhinged. Though her lipstick is perfectly applied, the mouth underneath still sits crooked, makes her frightening.

”Such a terrible, terrible accident,” she says. ”I know he would have found the right kind of woman if this hadn't happened. Then he would have been all right. He still could have done so much in life. He would have had children and a business, everything a man's supposed to have.”

Suzanne is still not certain of the surrounding details-she has not wanted to pressure Ben-but she knows that Charlie took his head off with a shotgun and that his mother has not cried in front of anyone.

Ben walks away from them and stands alone at the back of the boat, looking out to the sea that holds the remains of the only other men in his family. Suzanne faces the curvature of the sh.o.r.eline, the wind off the ocean buffeting her back, her hair las.h.i.+ng her face in irritating strands. The sounds of wind and wave and fluttering sail meld into a single wail, its tone at first cello-like and then giving way to a plaintive ba.s.soon and finally the sound of sea from a sh.e.l.l. In that moment, Suzanne hears the very sound of grief.

Twenty-three.

Charlie's letter arrives two days after Ben and Suzanne return home. The sense of strangeness is immediate because the envelope is addressed to Suzanne and because Charlie never sent letters. He'd call occasionally and talk to whomever answered. Sometimes he would forward an email with a surfing joke-once even a viola joke that not even Petra knew-but he never mailed paper.

Suzanne sits on the porch stairs. She waves at the neighbor across the street, who tends her yard guarded by her dogs, and watches a couple of cars pa.s.s. She hears them slow briefly at the stop sign at the end of the street, then turn onto the 206. Finally she opens the envelope, conscious that it is one of the last things that Charlie may have handled: folding the sheet, licking the seal and the stamp, writing her name and address in blue ballpoint.

The letter begins with a sweet salutation, followed by an apology for pain inflicted on her and on Ben. It is a suicide note, because it was written by a suicide, but it lacks the explanation for the act that such letters are supposed to provide. ”I'm going to blow off my head so there can be no revision of the cause of death. I am sending you this so that my mother cannot destroy it and make everyone pretend it was not suicide, which is what she did when my father killed himself. She denied us his last words. Now you have mine. I have lived. I have loved salt.w.a.ter. Warm or cold, sunny or overcast or raining, I love surfing. In the ocean I feel at home. On land I do not. Soon I will be in the ocean forever.”

Suzanne inhales and exhales to slow her speeding heartbeat. She hears light footsteps coming from the kitchen and folds the letter, flipping the envelope to make it anonymous.

”What are you looking at?” Adele signs.

For maybe the first time Suzanne feels compa.s.sion for Ben's mother, a woman who tried to protect her children from an ugly truth. ”More junk mail,” she signs, forcing a smile with the lie. ”Will you help me make dinner if your mom doesn't need you? I missed you while we were gone. Meet me in the kitchen. I'll be right there.”

In her room Suzanne hides Charlie's letter in her box of secrets, setting it on top, next to the sh.e.l.l he gave her at Folly Beach. She feels shame because she is both hiding the letter and making sure it's the first thing Ben will see should he open the box. She winces at what this tells her about herself, wonders how she became a person she does not even like.

The kitchen is noticeably bright with the lengthening days of midsummer. Dust motes are visible in the streams of light that slink through the blinds over the sink. Suzanne soaks in the warmth, trying to fix the simple pleasure in her mind.

Under her direction, Adele washes and spins the lettuce, peels the shrimp, measures and mixes the dressing ingredients. Because Adele cannot easily sign while she cooks, their work is mostly wordless.

Once Adele pauses to say, ”Next summer I'll be able to hear.”

Suzanne smiles at her, and the worry must be evident on her face because Adele adds, ”Not really hear, I understand, but I like to say that.”

Suzanne returns to slicing the red onion, then looks at Adele straight on. ”Are you scared?”

Adele shrugs, makes the signs for yes yes and and no no. She opens a can of mandarin oranges and drains the syrup into the sink. Due to the cut of her tank top, her wing-like shoulder blades are visible, and Suzanne can think only of a bird-delicate but strong enough to survive-though she knows it is wrong to reduce Adele to anything other than who she is.

”That seems right,” she says. ”It's normal to be scared before an operation, but you're right there's nothing to be afraid of. It's something you have to go through once to get where you want to be.”

An hour later they are eating the supper with Ben and Petra. Petra opens a bottle of white wine and grows chatty with her second gla.s.s.

”Okay, okay,” she said. ”A violist was crying and screaming at the oboe player sitting behind him. I'm making it a him him, Suzanne, just for you. Okay, so this violist was crying and screaming at the oboe player. Finally the conductor asked him why he was so upset, and the violist said, 'The oboist reached over and turned one of my pegs, and now my viola is out of tune.' The conductor nods and asks him doesn't he think he's overreacting, and the violist screams, 'I am not overreacting! He won't tell me which peg he turned!'”

Suzanne smiles and nods her recognition; of course she has heard it before.

”Absolutely hilarious,” Ben says softly, staring stonily at Petra.

”Here's one,” Suzanne says. ”A viola player is finally tired of being so unappreciated, and she's tired of all the stupid viola jokes, so she decides it's time for a change and walks into a shop and says, 'I'd like to buy a violin.' And the shopkeeper says, 'You must be a violist.' So the viola player says, 'How can you tell?'”

”Because it's an ice-cream shop!” Petra exclaims.

Adele looks around to gauge everyone's reactions, to see if she is supposed to laugh now. Her expectant face collapses when she sees Ben push away his plate and stand. ”Excuse me.”

A minute later Suzanne hears the front door fall shut. She continues to eat, encouraging Adele to do the same.

”What's with him?” Petra asks.