Elaine Dewey received the augury of her death at noon, during her lunch hour, when she went to see Dr. Mangel, as he asked. Yes, the results had come in -- the biopsy showed definitely the eruption of cancer. She had time left, of course, therapy could start immediately, remission was possible, etcetera. She carried the news back to work like a pocketful of string too short to be saved. She left the office at five.
She walked the few city blocks home as always. She passed the time-scummed window of the local Woolworths, the yellowed posters for tulip sundaes blearing out at her. She strolled pensively past the second-read bookstore, the pawn shop, the Salvation Army, the arcade den, the local grocer who groused when she didn't have exact change. In the foyer of her apartment building (modeled on what the builder thought was the open-air style of Venice) she slipped her passkey into the lock, pausing for a moment, as was customary, to notice the missing mosaic tiles in the cherubim overhead. Their eyes were gone. The door slunk quietly closed behind her as she checked the mailbox. No letters.
The boys had already been in. Lakelets of milk blended with the topography of cookie crumbs on the counter. She cleaned them up, silently, her arm as efficient as a wiper blade. Basil would not be home for a while. Briefly she imagined him battling the traffic up from Boston, tie askew, left hand resting on the outside mirror, knight errant astride Route 95. Then the picture faded.
The window in the living room framed a small courtyard. Rectangular flagstones circled a struggling birch tree. Miners had gotten in the leaves of the first tree they'd put there. She remembered the famine of that tree, how the leaves bleached to a urine yellow, then curled like baby's fists and flocked to the ground. Basil had spread Diazanon according to the instructions, but finally had to uproot the shivered lance of the tree. Then, this past year, Basil came home with an orphan tree riding in the back seat, the burlap bulb riddled with roots. It survived the winter, but already she could see, or thought she could see, a halo of yellow around each leaf. In the veins, she thought, the miners are now at work.
Basil got home late. He'd paid attention to the air traffic control report on the radio and found himself scurrying through Chelsea at 35. The boys had already eaten. One was reading in his room, the other destroying spaceships. She scooped the warmed-over steak and rice out of the oven and extracted a still-fresh salad from the refrigerator. She watched his hands as he ate and complained, as he always did, of the horrors of commuting, the abrasion of his job (VP at a cable company -- he'd wanted a job in journalism), how the general quality of life sucked. She knew that by the bottom of the salad he'd be bellowing at Seth for playing the video games and destroying his mind. So she poured him some Scotch, an extraordinary thing since he rarely imbibed beyond wine during the week, and watched the brown liquid swirl behind his eyes. The blip-blip from the living room subsided.
He paid his respects to the two boys, tousling Seth's hair in a way that she knew Seth hated but endured, mock-boxing with Benjamin, his big hands swallowing Ben's tiny fists. He didn't kiss either of them, instead wished them goodnight from the door. She waited in the bedroom while he read the paper, listening to him fold it and fold it again until he'd bracketed the article he wanted to read. Then the squeal of the recliner, the snap of the light switch, the carpeted shuffle down the hallway, the clothes laid neatly on hangers, shirt, socks, underwear in the hamper. The picture of his slightly pudgy body, the skin always a yellowish tan, hair dark and whorled on his chest, burned in afterimage as he turned off the light and slipped into bed. The deep sigh he took, the way he angled his head on the pillow, told her that if she didn't speak soon he'd be asleep.
"Honey," she murmured, swing her leg over his thighs, her arm ribbanded across his chest and arms, "I need you to listen to something." After she'd told him, he removed herself and waited. Freed for the moment he was as supine as a hyphen in a sentence, a long pause between thoughts. For the first time that day a constriction torqued her throat like the closing of a fist and a yellowish haze hovered across her eyes as they burned with tears. Slowly (so slowly, she thought, and tried not to read reluctance into the rotation of his body) Basil turned on his side and cupped her in his arms, cradling her in the quoin of his armpit. She brushed his cheek with her hand. She wanted him to talk and fracture the silence around them that sounded all too prophetic, but to reject his gesture seemed obscene and churlish. Yet she felt that some treaty had just been settled between them, autographed moment's later by Basil's even breathing. She imagined she heard, before she too fell reluctantly asleep, a sound akin to the rapid crackle of melting ice that echoed in every room of the house. Then silence and sleep.
In the morning she constructed breakfast as she always did. The boys got into a wrangle about the plastic power ring at the bottom of the cereal box. Basil perfunctorily told them to be quiet, but she, in a moment she later did not regret but only marveled at, calmly took the ring and ground it under her heel. An acid silence ate their voices. The boys, casting only the briefest glances between them, took the dishes to the sink and with a stubbornness that made her throat constrict again they fussily cleaned all the breakfast plates and glasses. Then, backs still stiff, only their eyes a little unhinged, they gathered their books and broke for school. Basil read the lees of his coffee.
"When will we tell them?" he asked the bottom of his cup.
She looked more closely at the peremptory balding spot at the top of his head, the creeping tonsure that reminded her of his stories about his sojourn in the seminary and the anguish he'd drunk when his call turned out to be no more than a jackal's whisper. "I don't see it as a matter of 'we'," she replied, only slightly surprised as the hint of stone in her voice. When their eyes met she the space between them rattle like a huge screen sifting out grit and fossils.
"Of course 'we' have to tell them. It's a family problem."
She didn't answer at first, then said, "You're right. I'm sorry, I'm not very -- "
He rose swiftly out of his chair and cradled her. "Do you want me to stay home today?" She collapsed into his gesture, more than anything needing to feel the yield of his flesh, the starkness of his ribs -- yet the damnable voice in her head, the voice that had sprouted last night out of his breathing and solidity, his "thereness," crackled its witchy static: "He hates the driving. Why does he have to ask? Remember that last night he fell -- " She choked it off, smelled the sterile manliness of his after-shave, astringent and halting. She pulled her head away, looked squarely at the knot of his tie, the wedge of Adam's apple above it.
"No, you go to work today. I'll be fine." She smiled for his benefit, surveyed his eyebrows, his cheeks, his lips, his forehead.
She followed him out to the driveway and watched him as he encased himself in the car. He turned on the radio, set the car in reverse, and receded, his goodbye wave hardly visible against the glare off the window. In another second he was gone. The summit branches of the birch tree barely stuck over the stockade fence, the almond-shaped leaves waving like green eyes in the breeze.
She spent the rest of the morning furiously cleaning the apartment. By noon, surrounded by a pot of steeped tea and lunch, her hair neat, wrapped in a yellow dress, she began to write, something she hadn't done since the gethsemane of convent school, where the stiffly-bordered starched miss the nuns wagged their fingers at oozed poetry into her diary in the hope that something like truth would distill out. At first she tried to rhyme but the hydraulic pressure of her thoughts tore the meter apart. Memories convened, and relics long forgotten surfaced in the lemon-green light of the afternoon. Only when she heard the ordinary sound of the front door open and close and the clomp of the boys' feet on the stairs did she notice anything. She continued to write even as the boys, as usual, burrowed into the icebox. She smiled at them, briefly, but maintained her silence. They said hello, briefly, hands busy with fruit. They decided to go to the park.
She'd thrown away all the paper by the time Basil arrived, wilted and weathered. Again he asked her when the boys should be told, again she defaulted, trying to save the cleanliness and peace that was slipping away. That night he held her again and for a time, in the silence and twilight, she reveled in his warmth the way she had when he, filled with lust and anguish, had given the seminary the slip and slipped her his seed. Only at the edge of sleep did she, for the first time, give weight to the hungry catalyst at work deep inside her, but the warmth, for the time being, buoyed her.
The next morning found her on the porch of the parish rectory, staring into the sallow face of the housekeeper. "Father Manley does not see anyone without an appointment," she intoned. Elaine politely asked if an exception might be made since she, Elaine, was dying of cancer and might need some spiritual advice. The housekeeper hesitated, not knowing if Elaine was chiding her or not, but then asked Elaine to wait. She disappeared, then re-appeared to ask her to come in.
She walked through the foyer and into the living room, where she was neatly and definitely abandoned by the housekeeper. In the center of her glowed a light calm, but in the extremities she felt the brushing cold she'd always felt in the presence of the priests who had visited the school for confession and conversion. She remembered them as corpulent men with white hair and rouge skin up to the roots, exhaling musty smells of cigarettes and sweat as they walked among the girls at study hours or blessed them in the final absolution of confession. They were her first view of men, and their raven presence, in their soutanes and pillory collars, clashed violently with the clandestine physical information the girls passed among themselves like wafers. What, really, hid behind their zippers? She realized that that had been, in one form or another, the abiding question of her life.
She had imagined those priests existing in rooms of mahogany and late sunlight, but the living room she sat in now was crowded with the usual furniture and achingly beige, tediously neat, in the morning light. She did not, of course, know why she was here, lapsed Catholic and all. Priest-napper, she supposed she was -- nun-killer, too, for all the ignoring she did of her call. A collection of Robert Frost's poetry lay open on the coffee table.
She had just begun to read the exposed page when she heard the officious shuffle of wing-tip shoes on synthetic carpet. She raised her eyes to see the doorway fill with a slim black plumbline cross-teed by the usual white lifesaver collar. He strode confidently to her and, as she rose to greet him, he motioned for her to sit and shook her hand at the same moment that she sunk back into the cushions. Almost as if she'd pulled him down he landed on the couch, his left leg cocked under him in what she thought he must think is a casual unanxious gesture. She almost wanted to laugh at him: the giants of her youth had been whittled down to males.
"I don't believe we've met, Ms. -- "
"Dewey. Elaine Dewey."
"Dewey. No, the name doesn't cross my mind. Are you on our files?"
"Perhaps on the register of the dead." The neatness of the room annoyed her. She concentrated on the enlaced hairs between his eyebrows.
"The register of the, ah, dead? I'm afraid that I don't -- "
"Just a joke, Father. I haven't been to confession or church in years."
"What brings you back?"
"I'm going to die and I want to know if you people have learned anything." She squelched laughter. Far back in her head, now feeling airy and unmoored, the voice sat in caustic silence, ready to spear this man. She tried to dredge up some minimum courtesy to shield him.
"Perhaps you'd better start at the beginning."
"It's very simple. I'm going to die of cancer and I want to know if there is anything in this religion I've given up that can give me a reason why I shouldn't go out and kill my husband and children, and then do myself in."
He sat perplexed for a moment, his eyebrows raveled in one long hirsute bar of thought, then rose and started pacing. She noted that his face, screwed in concentration, looked stamped with a cross, the black of his eyebrows pierced by the thin line of his nose.
"How do you know you're going to die?"
"My doctor told me two days ago. The biopsy was positive."
He fell silent again, sitting in a chair across the room. Ah, the voice said, the quarantine has already begun.
"Were you brought up Catholic?"
"I went to the convent school. We learned French. We learned not to touch ourselves."
"You had the catechism?"
"Yes."
"Do you remember it?"
"Not willingly. Why?"
"You were taught to accept God's actions, that His plan was beyond our knowledge."
"I wouldn't accept that line of reasoning from my mechanic."
Oddly, in the tight seriousness of the room, he chuckled. "All right. Appeal to childhood faith number one fails."
"What's number two?"
"A much harder version, Mrs. Dewey. Simply believing in God's love and wisdom, believing He cares for you and would not have you die for nothing."
A bleak vision of dry desert at noon cut through her mind, and emptiness tore like an explosion through her guts. "I can't afford that," she whispered. "I'm married to a man who wants to act as if life is simply a piece of garbled communication that will be straightened out if he waits long enough. I have two children who are entirely innocent of who I am and who I can only hope will feel a little remorse when I can't clean up after them anymore." The voice in her head rose to laugh out its venom, but she knocked it back, still wanting to shield this man she didn't know at all. "I can't have the luxury of a simple faith. I'm stuck in the middle of a tribe of human beings and ready in an instant to hate them. Do you have an antidote for that?"
He walked across the room and sat next to her on the couch. "No, I don't. I'm supposed to give spiritual advice. I aim for the castles in the sky." She liked him immensely for that remark. "Mrs. Dewey, all you can do is examine what your life has been and see if, given the usual imperfections, you've done the best you can to love and be honest. If you're satisfied with your inventory, then you don't need me. If you're not, I've got a grab-bag of confession and absolution that might bind the wounds. In either case, Mrs. Dewey, it seems to me you aren't too concerned about the afterlife. In some way you are going to have to realize and accept your own absence and do it in terms of your earthly life, not some hypothetical summer camp for angels. And" -- and here he paused, a small smile playing on his lips -- "you seem pretty determined to make yourself pay for that information right down to the bottom of the cup." He paused again, playing with the pages of the book of poems, finally letting the leaves close in a gasp. "I'm sorry I can't be of any help."
She knew it was no use to stay, but she stayed anyway over lemon tea ferried in by the dour housekeeper. When she finally left she felt both relieved and abandoned. That night she told the children. Benjamin cried, but Seth, little man that he was trying to be, embraced her knees in silence.
Elaine finally went back to work, having decided to play female troubles instead of cancer as her trump excuse, got the appropriate chewing out, and returned to her desk. The first morning back she worked on filing accounts payable, took herself out to lunch, and in the afternoon filed accounts received. Dr. Mangel had called during her absence and left information about therapy, but she threw the messages away, caring at this point only to be dissolved in peace. The days passed. Basil did not so much avoid the subject as simply classify it in the realm of sex talk and income tax calculations, as problems to be pondered rather than aired. The children adjusted better, and even though she couldn't answer their direct questions, she was comforted by their brief and single-frequency attention. To them, the fact of her disease was in the same arcana as having a grandfather who can whistle "The Messiah" with tissue paper and comb. She knew Basil was handling it in his own way, reading the literature (his term) on it, talking in weighty tones to Dr. Mangel, spreading his concern like pollen, and she loved him for the effort. But she hated the fact that he was too reserved and too much a stranger to her feelings to come right out and share the misery. He still worshipped from afar, an unbreakable habit of his.
She found herself frequenting supermarket newsstands to read the latest dispatched on immortality in the pulp papers. She dredged the indexes in Moody's and Kübler-Ross's books for hints. She even started eating foods she hated (onions, olives, anchovies) so that she could savor, even in their repulsiveness, their sharp pulsing annoyance. At night, when Basil slumbered, she tried to hear the sound of her own demise. She imagined the cancer as some video omnivore swallowing energy pods as it raced along her veins. Her ears became abnormally sharp until she imagined she could hear the molecular deceleration of the bricks in the apartment house, the unlinking atoms of the wooden floors, the architectural groaning of her skeleton. Smells would invade her, flushing keen memories from her brain's thickets. She believed, or wanted to believe, that these honed senses were pure imagination, not a fact of science. But she couldn't push away the feeling that she was preparing herself, like a space probe falling into the sun furiously pumping out data before it dissolved into a single insignificance.
Given her choice of reading material, her discovery of the Church of the Divine Facet was only a matter of time. After she'd read the information they'd sent her, she booked a flight for a weekend retreat, mailed in the $50 registration fee, and broke the news to Basil.
"This guy's crazy," he said after reading the literature, "and you're crazy if you go."
"I don't care. I deserve it."
"C'mon, Elaine, you know the boys and I can't -- " The stony look on her face, laced, as even he could see, with a desperation so tight it made his body jump, shut off his words. The silence crept around them like a nesting fog. "Well," he said, and justified the pamphlets against his knee. They weighed like dead birds in his hands. "I'm sorry."
She fronted him, even though every muscle in her head wanted to pull away, and scavenged his face as if it were the first face she'd seen after a coma. The children were asleep. He stood, the papers sliding off his lap to his feet, and reached across the intervening space to touch her hair. She suffered the caress as she should would suffer the rake of dry branches on a walk in the forest. Then he left, shoulders sloped in his own edition of sorrow, the shuffle of his feet on the carpet dopplering down the hallway.
Then a raspy silence. Outside she heard the wind pick up, the arid grating of dirt and garbage that sounded so much like water swirling just outside the indifferent windows. The flood has begun, she thought. She turned the light off. The birch tree, bartered in half by shadow and streetlight, semaphored back and forth. She peered down at it, forehead against the glass, as if waiting for a dead phone to ring. Then quickly she turned away and ran out the rear door down to the courtyard, grabbing the flashlight always stationed at the top of the stairs. Her hair flared in strands of dark fire. She flicked the beam across the tree and wherever she saw a leaf dried and curled she delicately picked it off and put it in her pocket. When she was done she placed them all at the foot of the tree and watched as the wind devoured them. Satisfied, she went back inside.
She held Basil as they slept, feeling distant but obligated. Seth cried out in the middle of the night and she cooed him back to sleep. Benjamin, thumb plugged in mouth, was earnestly in dreams. All the darkness filtered her and for a moment, suspended and rootless, she distilled peace for herself.
The taxi left her off in the foothills of a mountainous Victorian house, which was surrounded by a lawnful of people talking and gesturing loudly. Traversing the front porch, she entered a large hall. Around the fringes of the cavern were tables piled high with stalagmites of books, manned by bored and obliging people. She threaded her way to the registration desk, picked up her packet and namecard, her name encased in the figure of a candle burning at both ends, and then, without any Virgil, plunged into the crowd.
She circled the book tables piled high by the industry of Death. One table had a series of books, in a recipe style, on how to eliminate oneself gracefully. Other books proclaimed the superiority of Death to life, the self-healing quality of the Big Sleep. (She thought, an old sarcasm bubbling up momentarily, it strange that everyone here engaged to explore the virtues of Death were happily gin-and-tonic'd and vertical.)
As she thumbed through a book explaining the shape of the life to come, a vision of the trinity of males in her life swam upward. Seth had been five at the time, Benjamin three, she and Basil feeling ancient and tired. They had gone camping and a glaze of stifling weather descended on them, making them all irritable. Seth, perhaps to prove his independence, perhaps to keep his sanity, walked to the end of the dock, where he was told never to go, and jumped in. He couldn't swim, have never been in water above his neck. Basil, packing the car, had caught a glimpse of his fragile body before it neatly disappeared. The rescue was easy (Basil could touch bottom) and with a few moments of vigorous back-slapping and coughing Seth lay limp but sparklingly alive on the weathered boards. It was Basil who'd saved him, she recalled. It was something he would know how to do, being the sort of man who would take a first-aid course just in case something like this happened, while everyone else would trust to blind luck.
Afterwards, that night, when the weather broke and they sat around the comparative safety of a hotel pool, while Seth burrowed into her lap and Benjamin curled into Basil's, they whispered quietly about nothing at all, simply glad for the chance to sit in the quickening twilight holding their sons. For an instant, as she put the book down and stared at its art nouveau cover, she felt as if she were the lead horse on a team, tethered and straightened, except that the reins were composed of something like water mixed with laughter.
She heard a brash cough behind her. "Have you read that book?" a voice asked. She turned to face a not unhandsome man who stood in that nervous casualness common to strangers at a party. "No," she answered, telling herself not to look at the nametag.
"Name's John, John Teck. Been here long?"
"At least thirty years," she replied dryly. He was occasionally staring at her nametag and her left breast tingled with embarrassment.
"Thirty years? Not bad! I'll have to remember that one. No, I mean 'here' here."
"Just this morning."
"I guess the big man is going to speak to us this morning."
"The big man?"
"Reverend Jerry Baulm. It's on your schedule." He took her elbow and guided her along the fringes of the crowd. "Personally," this in a conspiratorial whisper, "the man's a fraud. This whole thing is a fraud."
"What 'whole thing'?" She found herself answering in an equally low whisper.
"This guy makes his money off suckers who think they're gonna get a break from death that they didn't get from life." He finished his gin and tonic and she suddenly found herself guided toward a table marshaled with a sparkling regiment of full glasses. He offered her one. She took it. She'd never drunk before noon.
"I didn't understand your comment about suckers."
"Look, say you've got cancer, okay? All of a sudden everything you thought was okay in life goes to flinders. Husband is lost. He doesn't know how to handle you, probably because he's forgotten a lot and taken a lot for granted. If you got kids they think you're some kind of oddity, like an Uncle Sam bank that shoots pennies into an eagle's mouth. They don't understand and you can't dump a lot of the garbage you feel onto them. Now, what would you do?"
"I don't know," she said, her voice muted.
"One day you hear about, or read about, the Church of the Divine Facet. They promise you an answer. All you got are questions, you're fresh out of answers. Sounds good. You figure that since this life is suddenly worth diddley, you might as well get ready for the next. You take the Reverend's advice, give him his money, and, pfft!, in six months you're gone and he's shelling out free drinks to people like me, and is enjoying the hell out of 'this' life while selling the benefits of something he knows nothing about. The way I figure it," he said around the last of the of the gin and tonic going down his throat, "if life after life, with the 'afterlife entities' (no one's just 'dead' anymore), is so great, why ain't he made the ferry trip himself? Because he's got a good racket on this side."
"What are you doing here then?"
He laughed. "Well, I guess you say I'm a vulture. I'm with that book company over there, the one where I met you. I don't particularly like what's happening, but" -- he shrugged his shoulders and laughed again -- "a man on this side has to eat."
"So you sell people books they don't need -- "
"People 'buy' books they don't need. If I had my choice I'd sit under a tree, play the pennywhistle, and drink gin. But as long as people are going to keep looking for their answers in people like the Reverend instead of in things they know about and that know them, I'm going to live off their foolishness."
A carillon, located probably in one of the turrets, pealed out, and the huge crowd moved toward the lecture hall. "Many are culled -- "
"Why are you telling me all this?"
He moved toward the hall, again taking her elbow. "These death conferences are some of the best places to pick up women. You can't believe how the nearness to death sharpens certain hungers." He glanced down at her, his eyes, though slightly hawking, open and genial. "Are you interested?"
"In many things, but not you. Not this time at least." She paused at the entrance, met his gaze. "Don't you ever think about your own death?"
"All the time. Can't help it in this business."
"Why aren't you afraid?"
His laugh again. "Compared to life, death's nothing. I stick with what I know. Like I said, gin, a tree, pennywhistle."
"And a woman."
"And a woman."
The force of the crowd pushed them through the door. She saw him carried away. She lodged herself in a small eddy at the back of the lecture hall and from there watched the wave of people smooth down into a sheet of heads, punctuated by small swells and undertows of conversation. Then, like some light-quick electric current, the anticipatory silence. Then, the Reverend.
Beturbanned and dressed in white, he came out and stood quietly, periscoping the hall. Everyone waited. She let her eye rove around the dentil molding of the room until she saw, stuck in a corner and strung deftly from block to block, a spider's web, the largest she'd ever seen. She could just make out suspended in the center of the web several egg cases, about the size of marbles. She checked the other corners of the room and in most if not all of them hung webs.
"Death in life," he began, "does not exist. There is no such thing as death. If you let the 'I' go, cauterize the ego, then you will cultivate an openness and passivity that will carry you beyond the fight for happiness and contentment in this world. The closer you are to your own death, the closer you are to the continuation of your life." She heard John Teck's voice full of its specificity and concrete humor in her ears. She tried to see where he was anchored in the hall. Then, for an instant, she suddenly felt as if there were weathered boards of a weathered dock under her feet, the invitation of water in front of her, and an imminent thrill of rebellion in her guts. She closed her eyes, then opened them on the man who looked to her like an underdone mushroom.
"Our study of Death this weekend," he droned on, "is a study of sources, sources of wisdom that are available to the duped living. You will be channeled to entities that will grace you with knowledge. You will incorporated into yourself the epiphenal experiences of those who have been close to the borders and returned." She could not stop John Teck's voice from forming the descant to Baulm's dirge and again her feet gripped inside her shoes what she thought were the water-smoothed ends of dock lumber. Slowly Teck's voice ascended until, like a moth, it flitted brightly among so many stone pillars.
She could feel the anesthesia in Baulm's voice, could sense the palpable carnage of acceptance he wreaked in the room. She found herself consciously sending messages along her nerves to determine how much of her was still loyal and unconvinced. All of her so far. She decided to leave, consider the $50 as a sacrifice at the altar of common sense. As she scuttled along the back wall she raised her eyes to the egg cases. With a shock almost as gratifying as it was frightening, she saw the web quivering with frantically new bodies, the egg cases riven. They scampered away on the web's cables, like strings of black raindrops, and then disappeared into the woodwork. Baulm's voice fell harmlessly off her back as she left the hall.
Outside she paused at one of the fountains to wash her face. The incubating heat of the sun pierced the scrim of her dress and runnels of sweat outlined, like a dim negative, her back and sides. She walked the mile back to the hotel. At the hotel, the man at the desk handed her a note from Dr. Mangel and abruptly she was drawn back into the confines of her body. The perspiration chilled in the air-conditioned lobby. Up in her room, the bed freshly made, the blinds drawn against the sun, she sat by the phone and read the note again in the dim light: "Call. Urgent. What the hell are you doing with that pimp?" When Marlene the receptionist answered and told her to wait, she listened calmly to the dim static in the dead phone. Finally Dr. Mangel's voice filled the earpiece.
"Elaine. There's something you've got to know. You're a damnably difficult woman to get ahold of, you know that. When Basil told me where you were, I just about -- "
"What is the news you have to tell me?" Her voice was even.
"The Church of the Divine Facet? Well, I can't blame you. But the news I've got for you is good."
A small animal of anxiety began to burrow in her guts. "I'm not sure I can handle good news."
"You'll handle this. There's no way to apologize for this, so I'll tell it straight. You've got the wrong information. A mix-up in the lab, compounded by a computer error -- we just got word in today."
"Yes," she answered.
"I can't tell you what was bothering you when you visited me, but I can tell you it wasn't a malignant cancer." He paused. "You there?"
"All of me."
"I told Basil."
"Of course."
"Elaine, I'm not one to interfere in business that's not mine, but Basil -- "
"Dr. Mangel, please."
"All right, just get home. I'll have Marlene make an appointment for you next Monday." The phone went mute for a second, then filled with his "Come home".
After she cradled the receiver she couldn't recall how she replied. The animal had drilled her heart and its offspring scampered along her veins and nerves. From out of nowhere came reprieve, a glitch, and suddenly she was whole and empty and lousy with doubt and wonder and time again. She'd had no chance to decide if she wanted life again, but there it was, the vexation and qualms and plausibilities being distributed among her muscles and brain without a thought as to her consent.
She wasn't sure how long she sat in the leavening twilight of the room, but a sharp rap on the door brought her quickly to. She rose to open it. In the hallway stood a porter and in the porter's hands was a large flowerpot with a small thin resilient birch tree lancing upwards. "This came for you a few minutes ago." He stared at her as if she were the oddest person in the world to be receiving a birch tree rather than flowers, but five dollars smoothed out his face.
A card was stuck in the soil. She pulled it out, pulled open the blinds to see it better. "Swinger of birches, come home" it read.
She read it again. Put it back in its holder. Stared out the window. Waited.