Where the God of Love Hangs Out

BY-AND-BY

Every death is violent.

The iris, the rainbow of the eye, closes down. The pupil spreads out like black water. It seems natural, if you are there, to push the lid down, to ease the pleated shade over the ball, down to the lower lashes. The light is out, close the door.

Mrs. Warburg called me at midnight. I heard the click of her lighter and the tiny crackle of burning tobacco. Her ring bumped against the receiver.

“Are you comfortable, darling?”

I was pretty comfortable. I was lying on her daughter’s bed, with my feet on Anne’s yellow quilt, wearing Anne’s bathrobe.

“Do you feel like talking tonight?”

Mrs. Warburg was the only person I felt like talking to. My boyfriend was away. My mother was away. My father was dead. I worked in a felafel joint on Charles Street where only my boss spoke English.

I heard Mrs. Warburg swallow. “You have a drink, too. This’ll be our little party.”

Mrs. Warburg and I had an interstate, telephonic rum-and-Coke party twice a week the summer Anne was missing. Mrs. Warburg told me about their problems with the house; they had some roof mold and a crack in the foundation, and Mr. Warburg was not handy.

“Roof mold,” she said. “When you get married, you move into a nice prewar six in the city and you let some other girl worry about roof mold. You go out dancing.”

I know people say, and you see it in movies, cascades of hair tumble out of the coffin, long, curved nails growing over the clasped hands. It’s not true. When you’re dead, you’re dead, and although some cells take longer to die than others, after a few hours everything is gone. The brain cells die fast, and blood pools in the soft, pressed places: the scapula, the lower back, the calves. If the body is not covered up, it produces a smell called cadaverine, and flies pick up the scent from a mile away. First, just one fly, then the rest. They lay fly eggs, and ants come, drawn to the eggs, and sometimes wasps, and always maggots. Beetles and moths, the household kind that eat your sweaters, finish the body; they undress the flesh from the bone. They are the cleanup crew.

Mrs. Warburg and I only talked about Anne in passing and only about Anne in the past. Anne’s tenth birthday had had a Hawaiian theme. They made a hot-dog luau in the backyard and served raspberry punch; they played pin-the-lei-on-the-donkey and had grass skirts for all the girls. “Anne might have been a little old for that, even then. She was a sophisticate from birth,” Mrs. Warburg said. I was not a sophisticate from birth. I was an idiot from birth, and that is why when the police first came to look for Anne, I said a lot of things that sounded like lies.

Mrs. Warburg loved to entertain; she said Anne was her mother’s daughter. We did like to have parties, and Mrs. Warburg made me tell her what kind of hors d’oeuvres we served. She said she was glad we had pigs-in-blankets because that’s what she’d served when she was just starting out, although she’d actually made hers. And did one of us actually make the marinara sauce, at least, and was Anne actually eating pork sausage, and she knew it must be me who made pineapple upside-down cake because that was not in her daughter’s repertoire, and she hoped we used wineglasses but she had the strong suspicion we poured wine out of the box into paper cups, which was true. I told her Anne had spray-painted some of our thirdhand furniture bright gold and when we lit the candles and turned out the lights, our apartment looked extremely glamorous.

“Oh, we love glamorous,” Mrs. Warburg said.

In the Adirondacks, the Glens Falls trail and the old mining roads sometimes overlap. Miles of trail around Speculator and Johnsburg are as smooth and neatly edged as garden paths. These are the old Fish Hill Mining Company roads, and they will take you firmly and smoothly from the center of Hamilton County to the center of the woods and up the mountainside. Eugene Trask took Anne and her boyfriend, Teddy Ross, when they were loading up Teddy’s van in the Glens Falls parking lot. He stabbed Teddy twice in the chest with his hunting knife, and tied him to a tree and stabbed him again, and left him and his backpack right there, next to the wooden sign about NO DRINKING, NO HUNTING. He took Anne with him, in Teddy’s car. They found Teddy’s body three days later and his parents buried him two days after that, back in Virginia.

Eugene Trask killed another boy just a few days before he killed Teddy. Some kids from Schenectady were celebrating their high school graduation with an overnight camping trip, and when Eugene Trask came upon them, he tied them all to different trees, far enough apart so they couldn’t see one another, and then he killed the boy who’d made him mad. While he was stabbing him, the same way he stabbed Teddy, two sharp holes in his heart and then a slash across his chest, for emphasis, for something, the other kids slipped out of their ropes and ran. By the time they came back with people from town, Eugene Trask had circled around the woods and was running through streams, where the dogs could not catch his scent.

The heart is really two hearts and four parts: the right and the left, and the up and the down. The right heart pumps blood through the lungs, the left through the body. Even when there is nothing more for it to do, even when you have already lost ten ounces of blood, which is all an average-size person needs to lose to bring on heart failure, the left heart keeps pumping, bringing old news to nowhere. The right heart sits still as a cave, a thin scrim of blood barely covering its floor. The less air you have, the faster the whole heart beats. Still less and the bronchioles, hollow, spongy flutes of the lungs, whistle and squeeze dry until they lie flat and hard like plates on the table, and when there is no more air and no more blood to bring help from the farthest reaches of the body, the lungs crack and chip like old china.

Mrs. Warburg and I both went to psychics.

She said, “A psychic in East Cleveland. What’s that tell you?” which is why I kept talking to her even after Mr. Warburg said he didn’t think it was helping. Mrs. Warburg’s psychic lived in a rundown split-level ranch house with lime-green shag carpeting. Her psychic wore a white smock and white shoes like a nurse, and she got Mrs. Warburg confused with her three o’clock, who was coming for a reading on her pancreatic cancer. Mrs. Warburg’s psychic didn’t know where Anne was.

My psychic was on West Cedar Street, in a tiny apartment two blocks away from us on Beacon Hill. My boss’s wife had lost a diamond earring and this psychic found it, my boss said. He looked like a graduate student. He was barefoot. He saw me looking down, and flexed his feet.

“Helps me concentrate,” he said.

We sat down at a dinette table and he held my hands between his. He inhaled and closed his eyes. I couldn’t remember if I had the twenty dollars with me or not.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

We sat for three minutes, and I watched the hands on the grandfather clock behind him. My aunt had the same clock, with cherrywood flowers climbing up the maple box.

“It’s very dark,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s very dark where she is.”

I found the money and he pushed it back at me, and not just out of kindness, I didn’t think.

I told Mrs. Warburg my psychic didn’t know anything, either.

The police came on Saturday and again on Monday, but not the same ones. On Monday it was detectives from New York, and they did not treat me like the worried roommate. They reminded me that I told the Boston police I’d last seen Anne at two o’clock on Thursday, before she went to Teddy’s. They said someone else had told them Anne came back to our apartment at four o’clock, to get her sleeping bag. I said yes, I remembered — I was napping and she woke me up, because it was really my sleeping bag; I lent it to her for the trip. Yes, I did see her at four, not just at two.

Were you upset she was going on this trip with Ted? they said.

Teddy, I said. Why would I be upset?

They looked around our apartment, where I had to walk through Anne’s little bedroom to use the bathroom and she had to walk through my little bedroom to get to the front door, as if it were obvious why I’d be upset.

Maybe you didn’t like him, they said.

I liked him, I said.

Maybe he was cutting into your time with Annie.

Anne, I said, and they looked at each other as if it was significant that I had corrected them.

Anne, they said. So maybe Teddy got in the way of your friendship with Anne?

I rolled my eyes. No, I said. We double-dated sometimes. It was cool. They looked at their notes.

You have a boyfriend? they said. We’d like to talk to him, too.

Sure, I said. He’s in Maine with his family, but you can talk to him.

They shrugged a little. Maine, with parents, was not a promising lead.

They pressed me a little more about my latent lesbian feelings for Anne and my unexpressed and unrequited love for Teddy, and I said that I thought maybe I had forgotten to tell the Boston police that I had worked double shifts every day last week and that I didn’t own a car. They smiled and shrugged again.

If you think of anything, they said.

It’s very dark where she is, is what I thought.

The police talked to me and they talked to Rose Trask, Eugene’s sister, too. She said Eugene was a worthless piece of shit. She said he owed her money and if they found him she’d like it back, please. She hid Eugene’s hunting knife at the bottom of her root cellar, under the onions, and she hid Eugene in her big old-fashioned chimney until they left. Later, they made her go up in the helicopter to help them find him, and they made her call out his name over their loudspeaker: “Eugene, I love you. Eugene, it will be okay.” While they circled the park, which is three times the size of Yellowstone, she told the police that Eugene had worked on their uncle’s farm from the time he was seven, because he was big for his age, and that he knew his way around the woods because their father threw him out of the house naked, in the middle of the night, whenever he wet his bed, which he did all his life.

Mrs. Warburg said she had wanted to be a dancer and she made Anne take jazz and tap and modern all through school but what Anne really loved was talking. Debate Club, Rhetoric, Student Court, Model U.N., anything that gave you plenty of opportunity for arguing and persuading, she liked. I said I knew that because I had had to live with Anne for four years and she had argued and persuaded me out of cheap shoes and generic toilet paper and my mother’s winter coat. She’d bought us matching kimonos in China town. I told Mrs. Warburg that it was entirely due to Anne that I was able to walk through the world like a normal person.

Mrs. Warburg said, “Let me get another drink.”

I lay back on Anne’s bed and sipped my beer. Mrs. Warburg and I had agreed that since I didn’t always remember to get rum for our get-togethers, I would make do with beer. Anne actually liked beer, Mrs. Warburg said. Mr. Warburg liked Scotch. Mrs. Warburg went right down the middle, she felt, with the rum and Coke.

“Should we have gone to Teddy’s funeral?” she said.

I didn’t think so. Mrs. Warburg had never met Teddy, and I certainly didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to sit with his family, or sit far behind them, hoping that since Teddy was dead, Anne was alive, or that if Anne had to be dead, she’d be lying in a white casket, with bushels of white carnations around her, and Teddy would be lying someplace dark and terrible and unseen.

“I think Anne might have escaped,” Mrs. Warburg said. “I really do. I think she might have gotten out of those awful mountains and she might have found a rowboat or something — she’s wonderful on water, you should see her on Lake Erie, but it could be because of the trauma she doesn’t—”

Mr. Warburg got on the line.

“It’s three o’clock in the morning,” he said. “Mrs. Warburg needs to sleep. So do you, I’m sure.”

Eugene Trask and Anne traveled for four days. He said, at his trial, that she was a wonderful conversationalist. He said that talking to her was a pleasure and that they had had some very lively discussions, which he felt she had enjoyed. At the end of the fourth day, he unbuckled his belt so he could rape her again, in a quiet pine grove near Lake Pleasant, and while he was distracted with his shirttail and zipper, she made a grab for his hunting knife. He hit her on the head with the butt of his rifle, and when she got up, he hit her again. Then he stabbed her twice, just like Teddy, two to the heart. He didn’t want to shoot her, he said. He put her bleeding body in the back of an orange Buick he’d stolen in Speculator, and he drove to an abandoned mine. He threw her down the thirty-foot shaft, dumped the Buick in Mineville, and walked through the woods to his sister’s place. They had hamburgers and mashed potatoes and sat on Rose’s back step and watched a pair of red-tailed hawks circling the spruce. Rose washed out his shirt and pants and ironed them dry, and he left early the next morning, with two meat-loaf sandwiches in his jacket pocket.

They caught Eugene Trask when one of his stolen cars broke down. They shot him in the leg. He said he didn’t remember anything since he’d skipped his last arraignment two months ago. He said he was subject to fits of amnesia. He had fancy criminal lawyers who took his case because the hunt for Eugene Trask had turned out to be the biggest manhunt in the tristate area since the Lindbergh baby. There were reporters everywhere, Mrs. Warburg said. Eugene’s lawyers, Mr. Feldman and Mr. Barone, told Eugene that if he lied to them they would not be able to defend him adequately, so he drew them maps of where they could find Anne’s body, and also two other girls who had been missing for six months. Mr. Feldman and Mr. Barone felt that they could not reveal this information to the police or to the Warburgs or to the other families because it would violate lawyer-client privilege. After the trial, after Eugene was transferred to the Fishkill correctional facility, two kids were playing in an old mine near Speculator, looking for garnets and gold and arrowheads, and they found Anne’s body.

The dead body makes its own way. It stiffens and then it relaxes and then it softens. The flesh turns to a black thick cream. If I had put my arms around her to carry her up the gravel path and home, if I had reached out to steady her, my hand would have slid through her skin like a spoon through custard, and she would have fallen away from me, held in only by her clothes. If I had hidden in the timbered walls of the mine, waiting until Eugene Trask heard the reassuring one-two thump of the almost emptied body on the mine-car tracks, I might have seen her as I see her now. Her eyes open and blue, her cheeks pink underneath the streaks of clay and dust, and she is breathing, her chest is rising and falling, too fast and too shallow, like a bird in distress, but rising and falling.

We are all in the cave. Mrs. Warburg went back to her life, without me, after Anne’s funeral that winter (did those children find her covered with the first November snow?), and Mr. Warburg resurfaced eight years later, remarried to a woman who became friends with my aunt Rita in Beechwood. Aunt Rita said the new Mrs. Warburg was lovely. She said the first Mrs. Warburg had made herself into a complete invalid, round-the-clock help, but even so she died alone, Rita said, in their old house. She didn’t know from what. Eugene Trask was shot and killed trying to escape from Fishkill. Two bullets to the heart, one to the lungs. Mrs. Warburg sent me the clipping. Rose Trask married and had two children, Cheryl and Eugene. Rose and Cheryl and little Eugene drowned in 1986, boating on Lake Champlain. Mrs. Warburg sent me the clipping. My young father, still slim and handsome and a good dancer, collapsed on our roof trying to straighten our ancient TV antenna, and it must have been Eugene Trask pulling his feet out from under him, over the gutters and thirty feet down. Don’t let the sun catch you crying, my father used to say. Maybe your nervous system doesn’t get the message to swallow the morning toast and Eugene Trask strangles you and throws you to the floor while your wife and children watch. Maybe clusters of secret tumors bloom from skull to spine, opening their petals so Eugene Trask can beat you unconscious on the way to work. Everyone dies of heart failure, Eugene Trask said at his trial.

I don’t miss the dead less, I miss them more. I miss the tall pines around Lake Pleasant, I miss the brown-and-gray cobblestones on West Cedar Street, I miss the red-tailed hawks that fly so often in pairs. I miss the cheap red wine in a box and I miss the rum and Coke. I miss Anne’s wet gold hair drying as we sat on the fire escape. I miss the hot-dog luau and driving to dance lessons after breakfast at Bruegger’s Bagels. I miss the cold mornings on the farm, when the handle of the bucket bit into my small hands and my feet slid over the frozen dew. I miss the hot grease spattering around the felafel balls and the urgent clicking of Hebrew. I miss the new green leaves shaking in the June rain. I miss standing on my father’s shiny shoes as we danced to “The Tennessee Waltz” and my mother made me a paper fan so I could flirt like a Southern belle, tapping my nose with the fan. I miss every piece of my dead. Every piece is stacked high like cordwood within me, and my heart, both sides, and all four parts, is their reliquary.

When Your Life Looks Back

When your life looks back—

As it will, at itself, at you — what will it say?

Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool.

Flame curl, blue-consuming the log it flares from.

Bay leaf. Oak leaf. Cricket. One among many.

Your life will carry you as it did always,

With ten fingers and both palms,

With horizontal ribs and upright spine,

With its filling and emptying heart,

That wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled, in return.

You gave it. What else could do?

Immersed in air or in water.

Immersed in hunger or anger.

Curious even when bored.

Longing even when running away.

“What will happen next?”—

the question hinged in your knees, your ankles,

in the in-breaths even of weeping.

Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in.

Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face.

No back of the world existed,

No unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for.

This, your life had said, its only pronoun.

Here, your life had said, its only house.

Let, your life had said, its only order.

And did you have a choice in this? You did—

Sleeping and waking,

the horses around you, the mountains around you,

The buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts.

Those of your own kind around you—

A few times, you stood on your head.

A few times, you chose not to be frightened.

A few times, you held another beyond any measure.

A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure.

Mortal, your life will say,

As if tasting something delicious, as if in envy.

Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving.

— JANE HIRSHFIELD