The Accidentals Read online

  BUT HELEN, OUR Helen, was a jewel, a queen. She was Jim’s friend first, since she worked at the paper, but over the years, she’d gotten to be my friend too. Stuck at home with Noel when he was little and so wildly brilliant that a whole complicated assortment of tutors was the only way to teach him anything, I did freelance work to help pay the bills, but other than that, I had no outside contacts beyond nodding acquaintances with the neighbors, who viewed me with suspicion for keeping my son home from school. I’d latched on to Helen like I was drowning. For years we’d had a regular date for coffee every Monday, and then, after coffee, we were off to the Jazzercise class she’d made me sign up for with her, saying I needed to sweat, let it all hang out for an hour once a week. How else was I going keep from losing my mind staying at home every day? When Noel turned fifteen, she and Jim told me it was time for him to go to college. She helped him fill out application forms for Harvard and MIT and Caltech. When he got into all three, she kept me company while Jim and Noel went on campus visits, and when the day came for Noel to go for good, she drove the two of them to the airport and afterward brought over chicken soup and homemade bread and a bottle of Jim Beam.

  When I was diagnosed with cancer of the ovaries—a cosmic joke if there ever was one—it was Helen who drove me to postsurgical appointments and chemo while, as always, Jim worked nights and slept days. It was Helen who put a pillow under my head and a blanket over my legs while I lay on the bathroom floor, too weak to move after hours of kneeling at the toilet. When things were at their worst, she washed our clothes and got the plumber over when the sink clogged, made me up a fresh bed every time I soaked the sheets with hot flashes from the attack of the fiend called sudden-onset menopause.

  SO HERE JIM and I were, dragging our reluctant butts twenty miles out to the suburbs, to the Jefferson Parish Cooperative Arts Center for a concert we didn’t want to go to, meeting our friend Helen, who was waving at us from her seat. The interior of the place was all black. Black walls, black stage curtains, floors painted black. I felt as if I’d been sucked into a giant black hole in space. In a dark corner, an enterprising traveling masseuse worked on a man’s neck and shoulders as he sat on her stool with his face splayed out in the head support.

  Helen stood up as we approached our seats. She had on a red skirt and peasant blouse, gold-hooped earrings and a bangle of bracelets on her slim wrist. Against all that black, she glowed like the setting sun.

  Jim and I got to the aisle and I went in first. As I leaned over to sit down I felt my wig slip and reached up to right it. The thing was hot as blue blazes. The reason it had slipped was that I’d snipped the lining at the edges in the back to let in some air. Still, the top of my head felt like I was being torched, like I was some unfortunate saint tied to a burning stake.

  The main reason I hadn’t wanted to go to the concert had been the wig, having to wear it in July. A dull brown, woven thick as a blanket, it reminded me of an osprey nest. How I’d wanted to be one of those Audrey Hepburn types in chemo whose head had a lovely shape, who had high cheekbones and gazelle eyes that were only enhanced by a head bald as a post. As it turned out, my skull was cloddish and lumpy, as pocked as the moon (I told myself lots of people must have pocked heads; you just don’t know their secret unless they have the bad luck to go bald). Though my eyes, my mother’s eyes, were my best feature, without brows or lashes they looked watery and insipid. I was a walking toadstool. If ever anybody needed a thatch on top it was me.

  As I approached her on the aisle, Helen reached out and pushed me back. She grinned, her earrings sparkling in the stage lights. She said, “Let Jim sit in the middle. Give me half a man.” Helen had been married to a Toyota salesman named Fred, who complained of plantar fasciitis and made a beeline to his La-Z-Boy the minute he walked in the door. She’d left him a year ago and never looked back.

  Jim grinned and said, “I’m enough man for the two of you,” and scooted by me. Jim perked up in Helen’s presence, I’d noticed lately, even when he was worn out, even when he was sad.

  “I’ll say.” Helen winked at him, patting his hand as he sat down beside her.

  The program promised music that was a mix of Hindu songs and bluegrass. Hindigrass, it was called, a combination I couldn’t imagine. Clangy and shrill, it was like listening to an itch that couldn’t be scratched. There were three men and three women. Two of the men sat cross-legged on platforms covered in colorful tapestries, holding their instruments in their laps. One played drum, another some string instrument I’d never seen before, but which I would learn from Helen at intermission was called a sitar. It had a brass bell on one end, which the man clanged at odd moments, in no discernible pattern, as if to add some exotic accent to the piece.

  The violinist was a woman with long blond hair, which she tossed and flipped before and after each number. She wore stiletto pumps and the slit in her skirt showed off her very long, very white legs, which, I noticed, Jim was eyeing. A piano was shoved to one side of the stage, its wood glowing a burnished chestnut against the black wall.

  About two-thirds of the way through the performance the man with the sitar introduced a piece he said was about sundown, which in India, he said, is called “The Meeting of the Light.”

  To start, it was as clanky as the other songs, but when the blond violinist bowed her head over her instrument and began to play, her long white arm (to match those perfect legs) bending and straightening, the other players muted their music and the piece seemed suddenly to flutter and then soar.

  It was about midway through the Meeting of the Light number that I saw the cat. It was sitting under the bench of the unused piano, seemingly unbothered by the cacophony of sound coming from the players around it. It was a small tabby, thin, with a head the size of a child’s fist and ears twice that size. It was mostly white with swaths of gray and brown on its legs and tail as if it had just walked through a pile of dust.

  I wasn’t surprised to see it. Animals had a way of popping up in my life in untoward places and at inopportune moments. Over the years I’d come to respect their sudden appearances. It was as though they came to punctuate something, and without the space in time their intervention created, certain significant moments would have passed me by altogether. Laika, our Sputnik dog, was the apostrophe, right at the beginning with Jim and me, when I was so wrapped in fear I felt like a thousand-year-old mummy. What Laika taught me was you don’t always get to choose who belongs to you, or what condition they come to you in; you don’t get to decide the ones you’re responsible for, the ones you end up loving. When Noel was little, he would get unaccountably angry at me when I took him away from his numbers. For hours on end, Laika was the only sentient being he would allow to touch him. I’d find the two of them curled up in the back of Noel’s closet. Laika was just the right size; like her namesake, she didn’t mind tight spaces. Noel liked her to lick his fingers. He would dip them in peanut butter and sugar. When he spent hours in the back of the closet multiplying and dividing numbers that were three miles long, she would squeeze around him so that she was between him and the wall. She would wag her tail vigorously, making Noel’s strange numerical chantings into a private game. When I’d look into the closet, she would look back at me over my son’s shoulder and her eyes would glow.

  BY THE TIME I got sick, I had taken on too many animals. Laika was long gone, and over the years, I’d found that bringing as many animals as Jim could tolerate into the house made me happy in a way nothing else did. At first I’d fostered dogs for Orleans Parish Humane. One year I was named Foster Mom of the Year, having taken in and acclimated thirty-five dogs to human handling. All but one had gotten adopted after being in my care. The one, a little shepherd pup named Nanny because she looked a bit like a goat, I’d nursed from a wormy puppy. She’d turned up at six months old to have hip dysplasia and had begun hopping like a bunny on her stiff back legs. Her I kept.

  Those dogs of mine, they weren’t pretty to look at, and after Noel left, I
made a point to choose the ones I knew didn’t have a rat’s chance of getting taken. Schnauzer mixes with buck teeth, Chihuahuas with ratty puffs of hair around their backsides (I took on two of those, a brother and sister), min-pin crosses with comically tufted tails. The dogs that roamed my yard were accidental freaks of nature, the ones nobody in their right mind wanted. Without me, they’d have been rotting in plastic bags in the landfill. Now that Noel was down in Florida working at Cape Canaveral, they were what I lived for. Every few weeks, I’d get a call from one of a dozen shelters (none of which knew I was taking dogs from the other eleven) and I’d sneak a particularly sad case into the house. (There were so many by that point Jim couldn’t tell when another arrived.)

  We had a sizable yard, which had gotten as bald as I was, especially in prime places: under the trees for the resters, on the fence line for the pacers. I wasn’t irresponsible; when I got sick, I hired a high school kid down the street to clean up every afternoon. The dogs milled about out there, coming and going into the house through the dog door in the back, bringing in everything from dead birds to small tree limbs. I admit the debris had piled up. Actually, at the present moment, I had so many dogs that I’d lost count. As I listened to the music, in fact, I was wondering if they were all right, if anybody was fighting.

  Jim was long-suffering about the dogs, though now he’d taken to sleeping in Noel’s room with the door closed. He’d moved his clothes into Noel’s closet. The dog hair, he said. No room for him in the bed.

  “Aren’t you going a bit overboard?” he’d asked a few weeks before, looking out at our living room covered in dogs, peacefully lying about on the floor and furniture, their toys and other debris strewn across the floor. “We can’t even let anybody in the house anymore. It’s embarrassing.” He turned to face me, in the process stepping into a food dish. He hopped about, hitting the dish on a chair to dislodge it.

  “I’ll get somebody in to clean, I know it’s messy today. It’s my fault, I let it go too long. I haven’t felt well the past couple of days,” I said, craftily shifting the subject to the state of the house, then pulling out the cancer card for a double whammy.

  “Okay,” he said, “but, really, June, this is getting ridiculous. Some people would say you’re hoarding animals. I’m surprised we haven’t gotten complaints.” What he wanted to say, I knew, was what the hell was he going to do with a house full of ugly-as-sin canines when I passed on to my eternal rest. He was, in fact, peering at me as if I were already half gone.

  I patted him on the shoulder, then kneeled down and pulled the dish off his foot. “I promise. Sorry.”

  His face melted and he smiled at me one of those I know you’re dying and I don’t want to upset you smiles. One of the good things about cancer, aside from the fact that it gets you out of the house, is that people don’t say no to you.

  After Jim left our bed, I began to dream about Hil. It was always the same dream. She would visit me as I lay there alone and tell me dying wasn’t so bad. Then she would crawl in under the covers and practice-kiss me over and over.

  NOW EVERYONE WAS looking at the cat under the piano. Actually, now it had moved out in front of the piano, left stage. A woman behind me started to giggle. It was stalking something, given the look of the place most likely a cockroach (who could tell, since the stage floor, like everything else, was painted black). The cat crouched down, began to twitch its bottom and back legs, its tail flicking back and forth, oblivious to its surroundings. Then, after a while, it lost interest and walked over and rubbed the violinist’s leg. She jumped and lost her place in the music, causing the crowd to titter. Startled, the cat glared out at the audience, its green eyes flashing neon in the stage lights.

  Then it leapt into the air and ran across the stage in front of the players, hopped down from the stage, and disappeared. The audience gasped. The players faltered briefly, then began to play more frantically. The sitar guy dinged his bell.

  I glanced over at Jim, who was elbowing Helen. They were enjoying the moment together, Helen covering her mouth to keep from laughing out loud, her long thick hair, threaded with a few well-placed blond streaks, brushing my husband’s shoulder. I smiled, leaned forward to catch their eyes, join in the joke, but they were leaning in the other direction, following the cat’s progress as it began to make its way up the aisle like a bride going the wrong way.

  The violinist started up again and the music began to swell. I turned back to the stage, for the first time enjoying the concert. Then I felt something touch my leg ever so lightly in the dark, a feather of a touch. In our heyday Jim and I had been known to engage in public leg rubbing. I darted a look at him but he too had turned back to the stage, caught up in the music. The place seemed rattish; I shivered and quickly lifted my legs. Just then, another touch, lighter than the first, higher up, a tickle.

  Suddenly I smiled. Without even looking down, I knew the cat had found me. I let my hand drop down and felt warm breath. Of course, I thought.

  With all the dogs, I’d never had a cat, which struck me in that moment as a chasm in my life. Did this one need a home? Would it take to the dogs and, more to the point, they to it? It arched under my hand, its backbone disturbingly prominent. I reached underneath and lifted; no more than six pounds, I judged, fur over skin and bone, not much else. When was the last time it ate or drank? Would it get locked in this dreadful black auditorium and starve to death? I poured some water out of the bottle I keep in my purse (chemo makes me dehydrated) into my palm and lowered it. I felt the cat’s rough tongue lap the water. It was thirsty! By accident I touched its throat. It was purring!

  Just as I was pondering what to do, the cat looked at me and then glided to my left, its white body a cloud floating across the black floor. I followed its progress and was about to elbow Jim and point to the cat now skirting his legs, heading for Helen’s.

  Then the cat froze and, after a moment, looked back at me. It was now between Jim and Helen. I leaned forward to see what its next move might be. Wouldn’t it be fun if it jumped right up in Jim’s lap? Jim was wearing Birkenstocks. Maybe it would lick his toes!

  It moved forward a couple of paces and stopped again, still looking back at me, its eyes glowing as if lit from a hearth somewhere deep inside its skull. Then it lowered its head.

  I followed its motion, down to the floor between Helen and Jim.

  And what did I see there when I looked down, amused, ready to poke Jim in the ribs and point? I saw my husband’s left foot, in its weathered Birkenstock, dear and familiar, and Helen’s right foot, in its stylish red thong, pressed up against each other, two peas in a pod, ankle to ankle, calf to calf.

  The cat looked down at this roadblock in its progress down the aisle and gazed back at me, its eyes half closed. Then, in one tidy motion, it leapt over Helen and Jim’s feet (easy since they were pressed so tightly together) and disappeared into the black. Helen and Jim never knew it was there, never suspected a thing.

  I DON’T HAVE all the time in the world, so let me cut to the chase. If you find these scraps of writing after I’m gone, don’t tell Helen and Jim I saw their future in the face of a cat. They’ll think I was crazy as a loon at the end, that the cancer had eaten holes in my brain, that I’d gone back to being the bride of Christ (which I admit has its appeal at the present moment). Or worse yet, they’ll think this was sour grapes. After all, Helen and Jim both pride themselves on being good people, kind people.

  Don’t tell them what I predict: that a year from now, maybe sooner, they’ll be living the life I wanted, the life I should have had. They’ll return the dogs (I’ve kept impeccable records of who goes where), hire a landscaping outfit to roll patches of overfertilized neon-green sod across the backyard, and throw lawn parties with Japanese lanterns and margaritas in Mexican glasses with blue rims, crusty with salt. They’ll have the same work schedules and carpool; Helen will get promoted to editor of the “Living” section. They’ll go on a belated honeymoon to Paris and will n
ot see my mother’s ghost strolling the streets, not see her sitting in a sidewalk café sipping espresso, not hear her cursing the plundering house sparrows under her breath as they play in the puddles and eat crumbs. They’ll congratulate themselves on having found such a good college for my son, a place where he can thrive. Jim will tell Helen he couldn’t have managed without her.

  Then one day Helen will stand in front of the mirror and see a thickening (she’s fifteen years younger than me after all) and she and Jim will have a perfect child, a lovely child, who will grow up and go to regular schools and have friends and birthday parties and sleepovers and learn to drive and go to college and have little children the two of them can dote on in their old age and not be in any way unusual or difficult.

  Don’t tell them any of this. Don’t tell them how faithful I will be to them, tracking their every move, night and day, day and night, as long as they live, as ordinary and constant as weather.

  At their tastefully small wedding, say congratulations to the groom and best wishes to the bride, say June would be pleased. Say June would be happy for you.

  24

  Grace

  THERE’S A COMMOTION IN THE YARD, A FLUTTER, THEN A splash of color.

  I catch it out of the corner of my eye but don’t look up from my desk; there’s a piece of a sentence in my head (something about regret) and who knows where it’ll fly off to if I don’t write it down. Here it is Sunday afternoon, the article’s due tomorrow, and it’s a big fat mess. “Sites of Memory in Classical Poetics”: what was I thinking? And such a pretty spring day outside!

  My neck hurts (what I’d give for someone to come up behind me and massage it!). I need to sit up straight, get an ergonomic chair, go to physical therapy. My shoulders fold like the flaps of a box over my computer; there’s a hump at the base of my skull.

  I’m old now, no time to waste.