his home, near enough to an Edenic belt of woods to remain relaxed, and gracefully craning their necks and peering at him out of shining obsidian eyes—something put him in a mood of loss. Al probed with a hand and rested a palm against the cool stone wall, waiting for his eyesight to adjust. Soon the blindness left him and the dim evening light bloomed through colored glass. Speckled in filtered greens and purples, he made his way across the narthex to the rear of the sanctuary. He lighted four candles: one for a church friend who recently succumbed to influenza, one for Granddad Madison, one for his father. And one for Valerie, sweet Valerie. He sat in a wickered chair near the candles. He pictured and prayed for each loved one, but it was Valerie, far and away it was Valerie, he missed more than any other. He missed her so much his ribs ached. He missed her so much his teeth hurt.
Of his grandparents, Granddad Madison, gone now for a dozen years, had affected Al the most. He was a short, barrel-chested man with eyeglasses and one bright streak of silver at the front of his thick hair. He worked twelve hours a day at the drugstore he and Grandma operated, and still had energy to burn. A few years after he and Grandma bought a home, Granddad decided they needed a basement. He hand-dug it right under the standing house. Over time he experimented with a series of hobbies, from woodworking to toy train tableaux to guitar playing. He nurtured a flower garden and grew miniature cacti traveling salesmen delivered at the store. And every night from dark to one or two in the morning, he read.
Among Albert’s favorite childhood memories were overnights at Grandma and Granddad Madison’s house. After Grandma had gone to bed, Granddad and Albert rested in two leather chairs, reading their respective books. Albert occupied Grandma’s special chair, but only after she had evacuated it for the day. (No one except Granddad ever sat in his chair, even if Granddad wasn’t anywhere near the house.) Al and Granddad Madison drank bottled soda and munched on salty peanuts. At intervals Granddad asked where Al was in some story Granddad had recommended and plucked from his shelves. When Al provided details, Granddad smiled and gazed out the blank night window, as if he were recalling some lost friend or distant golden event of his youth. Then, often, the old man would exclaim, “Oh, I want to read that again!” Dropping his current book into his lap like a neglected pet, he took Albert’s book, flexed the spine and pressed his fingers down the gutter with delectation, leaned forward, and began reading aloud. He read intensely if not boomingly (Grandma was asleep in the next room), speeding his pace as the plot surged, slowing with savor over sumptuous descriptions, chortling in delight as he repeated especially admired lines. During these impromptu readings he occasionally stopped abruptly, even at mid-sentence. He raised a knee, gouged one elbow deep into the armrest of his chair, tipped to one side like a sailboat struck by a sudden gale, and let loose a ripe, long fart. Then, as if he hadn’t even paused, he resumed his recitation.
Al remembered Granddad Madison to God. He next shifted attention to his father, buried now for four years. His dad had died in his mid-sixties when he succumbed to a respiratory virus. Ray Simmel had been legendary, at least within the family, for his toughness. He delivered mail, which meant riding horseback fifteen miles a day, four days a week. Albert had heard of a motto from the Old American postal service, about getting the mail through in rain, sleet, or snow. But what his father truly dreaded was lightning. On at least half a dozen occasions bolts had crashed close enough to, as Ray put it, “singe the hair on my balls.” He described the preliminary iron odor and taste on his tongue, the prickly sensation across his back and legs. Then within moments a monumental spear of light, wider than a tree trunk and white as ivory in the noon sun, would split the sky and stab into the ground. The strike deafened. It stunned all the senses. Usually Ray had found shelter in an abandoned building or under a freeway overpass, but once a storm closed too rapidly for him to dismount and stake his horse. The lightning strike temporarily blinded the terrified animal, which ran into the side of a house and broke its neck. Ray staggered home, soaked and bruised, and was back on his route two days later.
Given so much that Ray Simmel had survived, it was all the more bitterly ironic that one January he took a cold, and could not shake it. He hacked vile, bilious sputum for weeks, then went feverish and descended into a coma. It was the first time in Albert’s entire life that his father was bedridden. With the quarrels over his son’s relationship with Valerie, Ray and Al had not been friendly for years. By the time Ray lay unconscious and incommunicative for three days, Al felt the anxiety rise on him like floodwater. He found himself sitting sentinel beside what surely would become a deathbed. He gave his father up as lost to the world, and wished he had spoken affectionate words while Ray could still hear them. Late the next afternoon, he took the hand of the husk that had been his father, squeezed it, and declared, “I love you, Dad.” Immediately, firmly, the hand squeezed back. Startled, Al jerked his hand from his father’s grip. It was as though he had been grabbed by a ghost, embraced through the veil of mortality. So it was that Albert added one more regret to the long chronicle of his sorrowful war with Ray Simmel: the regret that when his father had tried, one last time, to make peace and heal the breach, Albert had responded as if bitten by a rattlesnake. In hours the elder Simmel really was dead. Two days later he rested in his grave. Recalling the moment after all these years, Al muttered, “Lord, have mercy.” Was that a prayer or a cry in the dark? he wondered. Was there a difference?
He turned his thoughts to Valerie. Her hazel eyes and shoulder-length hair flashed in his mind. That was all he could stand. He rose from the wickered chair and proceeded upstairs.
≤
Situated just off the kitchen of Al’s second-story apartment was the spacious living room. Behind it ran a long hallway, leading to three bedrooms. There were bay windows across the front of the living room. The recessed windows looked directly out into the leafy canopies of trees. The elevation, with its tunneling length, made the apartment feel like a cave in the sky. Al burrowed into the rearmost, master bedroom. Before long he slept.
He dreamed. He was at a house in the mountains. A huge wooden deck jutted off one side of the house. Before the deck was an enormous, absolutely still lake. In the odd way of dreams, he somehow knew that lake was as deep as it was beautiful. The place was busy with relatives, bustling with Albert’s uncles and aunts and cousins and nephews and nieces. The door of the house giving onto the deck was left wide open. From the door issued a grandmother with a cherry pie on one hand and a pumpkin pie on another. Mother trailed with a thick, fudge-frosted chocolate cake. Children sensed the arrival of desserts and dashed across the lawn toward tables on the deck. Grownups clustered in conversational pods continued their talk and laughter, but followed the food with their eyes.
Then Granddad Madison, who had already been dead for years, appeared at the reunion. He was not frightening. No one was shocked at the ghost, but no one spoke to him or remarked on his company. The comfortable babble of the living, of folk who knew one another at their worst as well as their best and had nothing to hide, carried on uninterrupted. Granddad strolled among the family, assuming the slightly sheepish smile of a man arrived late at an appointment.
And there, there at the edge of the deck, stood Dad. Like Granddad, he too had died. He too was unthreatening. He too was mute. Unable to resist, Albert approached and greeted him. But Dad could not, he did not, speak. Even his eyes did not answer. His absence ached harder, his unbridgeable distance was rendered more keenly real, by this strange presence without presence. He was a cipher, written in body English intact but baffling, legible but defying interpretation.
Then Al heard a voice. It called to him, once, then twice, rising in volume. It sounded like Valerie’s voice, the lovely music of Valerie’s voice. He turned and there she stood, just out of the water at the edge of the lake. She wore a summer dress with her freckled shoulders naked. She raised a tanned arm and curled her fingers in beckoning. “Albert,” she said. “Albert. Come here.”
Al started from his sleep. He sat up, gasping. For the first time in this familiar, recurrent dream, the dead had spoken.
2
In successive
