“I didn’t know her.”
“You know what I mean, you knewofher. But the answer is no. That was a whole other circumstance. Mary wasn’t dead.”
I pulled out the bag of cherries I’d brought from home thismorning. There should always be some small surprise. “But all the people who visited her were dead. Maybe they were stuck.”
Eddie took a handful of cherries, and I handed him a paper cup for the pits and stems. “I think she was about to die,” he said. “She was in the space between life and death when you can see the people who died before you. I guess that’s a kind of bardo, too. I should ask. I remember when my mother was dying and she said her sister kept coming to see her. My mother said her sister would sit on the edge of my mother’s bed and pat her ankle. ‘Everybody’s waiting for you, Rosalie,’ she’d say.”
“Well then, maybe it’s the same thing. Everyone needs someone to tell them they’re dead.”
“I guess that’s right,” Eddie said.
“So Mary Carter’s people got there too early. Or maybe she was about to die, but then the horse came back for her.”
“I told you that story when you werenine,” Eddie said.
“I’m still working through the details.”
Eddie sighed. “I know. I think about it, too.”
A late start invariably resulted in a late end. When finally the bags had emptied and the nurse removed the line and taped a cotton ball into the crook of Eddie’s arm, we went out through the waiting room to find that even the receptionist had gone. At the elevator bank, Eddie held my arm with one hand and his cane in the other. I kept his bag with his legal pad andThe Tibetan Book of the Deadover my shoulder.
“Put me in a taxi,” he said, then yawned. “You’re not going all the way downtown and then coming back up to get the train.”
I pulled him into me. “That’s the way this day ends, on the curb out front. Goodbye, Eddie! Good luck getting home.”
A woman in the elevator looked at the two of us. “She’s notletting you go,” she said to Eddie.
“Not a chance,” I said.
“I’m going to be fine,” he said.
“If I had my way, you’d come home with me,” I said. “And if you didn’t want to come home with me, I’d go home with you. I’d sleep on your sofa, at least for the night.” Eddie had a good sofa.
“You’re not sleeping on the sofa,” he said.
“Then the least I can do is take you home.”
“You should have been a lawyer,” Eddie said.
“Do what she tells you,” the woman in the elevator said. “It’s easier.”
And so we went back downtown together, Eddie and I, book and bag and cane. Jonas, the doorman, ushered us in. “Big day, Mr. Triplett?” he asked. That was how tired Eddie suddenly seemed.
“Long day,” Mr. Triplett said.
“But Daphne’s looking after you.” Jonas was a big man, probably my age. He was wearing a white short-sleeved dress shirt, a black tie and hat.
“Daphne’s always looking after me,” Eddie said.
“I’m going to get him upstairs,” I said to Jonas.
“You’ve got company,” Jonas said to Eddie.
Eddie looked around the lobby, but there was only one woman there going through her mail, some variety of doodle waiting at the end of a leash.
“Upstairs,” the doorman said quietly.
We leaned against the back wall of the elevator as we rode to the sixth floor. There were no end of people who might have come to visit, but probably only one who had the keys. Onlyone person other than me who Jonas knew to wave up. When we went down the hall, the door was open or Skip opened the door—it was hard to say.
