Nevada Barr - A Superior Death

“To old friends and better days,” Anna said.

Patience would drink to that. Tonight, Anna suspected, Patience would drink to anything. “Too much light,” the woman said. She turned off the lamps at the ends of the sofa and opened the drapes that had obscured the black square of night beyond the picture window.

With the lights out, the window ceased to show a blind eye, but looked out across the sparkling waters of Rock Harbor. Raspberry Island was a ragged silhouette against a pearl-gray curtain of fog that hung further out on the lake.

“It doesn’t take much here,” Patience said as she curled her little body up in an armchair. “Even a half-moon throws enough light. I do this all the time. Not all the time,” she amended. “When I can browbeat little Miss Video into turning off the television. You never had kids?”

Anna thought she sounded a bit wistful. “Never did.” She drank her wine.

“Never wanted them?”

“Never wanted them.”

“You were married, though,” Patience said. “I got that from Sandra. Widowed, she said, not divorced. Supposedly that’s easier to take. Probably depends. I would like to have been widowed, like to have widowed myself with my bare hands a time or two-” Patience stopped abruptly and fifteen seconds ticked by audibly on a clock Anna couldn’t place. “If I’d had more than a couple of tablespoons of wine I’d blame it on the drink. As it is, I shall have to accept the fact that I am an insensitive clod. Nerves-will you buy that? My mouth is just running away with me. I hope I haven’t been riding roughshod over any old wounds.”

“Talk doesn’t open them,” Anna answered truthfully.

“What does?”

“Forgetting. Thinking you’re healed, you’re as strong as you used to be, that you can leap those old buildings at a single bound. Then the wounds open and you fall and you wonder if you’ll ever be the woman you were.”

They sipped in silence, watching a late-arriving sailboat, sails furled, motoring up the channel.

“Divorce isn’t like that,” Patience said. “The wounds maybe aren’t as deep-certainly aren’t as deep-but everybody, everything rubs salt in them. Other women that look like the Other Woman, his friends, your friends, things he kept, things he didn’t get, kids that want to call Daddy every time you yell at them and come to Mommy anytime they want money. Money. God yes, money! Suddenly at thirty-five you’re shopping for clothes at Wal-Mart and dusting off your library card because you can’t afford even a paperback. At least with death you can look tragically beautiful in something black and silk you bought with the insurance money.”

Anna laughed. “Patience, you would sell orphaned virgins into white slavery before you would wear anything from Wal-Mart.”

“I would,” Patience admitted.

“Zachary wasn’t insured.” Anna wasn’t sure why she told that to Patience, it just seemed natural. “He’s been dead seven years.”

“What happened?”

“Hit by a cab crossing Ninth Avenue in New York City.” Both women laughed.

“Sorry,” Patience said.

“It’s okay. It strikes everybody funny. Me too. Comedy of the absurd, I guess. Divorce: is that when you went to work in the winery? After the divorce?” Anna moved the subject back to Patience.

“It seemed genteel somehow,” Patience said. “Paid genteel too: eleven sixty-five an hour. How anyone is expected to live on that is a mystery to me.”

Since joining the Park Service, Anna had never made anywhere near $11.65 an hour but she didn’t say so.

Patience poured the last of the wine into their glasses. Alcohol was beginning to warm Anna’s muscles, relax her brain. “Did you grow up rich?” she asked rudely.

Patience didn’t seem to mind the question. “We had ‘plenty,’ as Mother endlessly reminds me, but not rich, no. My parents own a pig farm in Elkhart, Iowa.” She said it in the tone of a nineteenth-century gentlewoman admitting to a fallen sister or an idiot child.

“Good honest work,” Anna remarked mildly.

“The place smelled of pigs. All my clothes, my hair, the boys I dated, the food I ate, smelled of pigs. I can’t remember not wanting something better. Even when I was tiny, I had this little kid’s vision of heaven. You know those ornate white iron lawn chairs-the ones that look as if they’re welded from fat vines?”

Anna nodded.

“Somehow that was the height of class in my little pea brain. I’d fantasize for hours about sitting in a lawn chair like that, wearing something chiffon, and snubbing boys that had manure on their boots.” She laughed. “Silly. But the dreams got me out of there. That’s what I needed them for.”

“What do you dream of now?” Anna asked.

“Bigger lawn chairs, finer chiffon, and tycoons to snub.” Patience unfolded herself from the armchair. “Dead soldier,” she announced and carried away the empty bottle. Anna stayed where she was, enjoying the moonlight on the fog, enjoying the buzz of the wine. Another pop, more gurgling: Patience was opening a second bottle.

“I’m working in the morning,” Anna protested.

“Not to worry.” Patience brought the wine and two fresh glasses. “This is the good stuff. Too good for me, I kept telling myself, but this talk of pigs has driven me to open it. Once in this life I will have the best. You lucked into it by sheer accident. Here.”

Anna sipped. It was the best; the best she had ever had. A red wine, though it showed black with only the moon for light, rich and so warm Anna finally understood all the effete talk of sunshine and hillsides and aging in wood.

They drank without talking. The wine was the event. In silence they finished the bottle. Patience said goodnight by a simple touch on Anna’s arm. Anna lay in the moonlight a while longer enjoying the solitude. She picked up the wine bottle and turned it in her hand. The stuff was excellent. On an NPS salary Anna doubted she’d ever have the money to buy a vintage that fine. The bottle looked the worse for wear, the label wrinkled and faded. Something was vaguely familiar about it. Anna thought of turning on the lamp but moonlight and alcohol won out over curiosity.

Tonight, it was enough that it had gotten her high.

Regardless of the quality of the wine, Anna had had too much. Near two in the morning she awoke with the jitters. The bit of moon had continued on its wanderings and the channel was now in shadow. The island was so still she could hear the faint creaks as the apartment building talked to itself.

Alcohol poisoning and the cold hour of the night crowded in. The world seemed a sordid place; people a cancer that was spreading, killing the earth; killing one another.

Wishing she were a cat or a shadow or at least sober, Anna lay on the sofa and stared into the dark until unconsciousness finally took pity on her and returned.

When she awoke again it was light but fog hid any trace of the coming sunrise. She looked at her watch: 5:40 a.m. A dull ache at the base of her skull and a parched feeling told her she would be getting no more rest for a while. Giving in to her hard-earned hangover, she got up and stumbled into the kitchen for a glass of water.

The wine bottles were gone and the glasses set tidily on the counter near the sink. Patience must have had as bad a time as she, Anna thought, creeping about her apartment in the dead of night doing domestic chores. Anna drank off half a glass of water standing at the sink, then refilled the glass. Theoretically, rehydration helped a hangover. Theoretically a lot of things helped a hangover. In reality only the passage of time worked out the poisons. Anna looked at her watch again: 5:42. It was going to be a long day.

Molly would be up at six. She always was. A woman of strong habits, Anna’s sister rose with coffee and a cigarette to watch the six o’clock news and went to bed with Scotch and a cigarette and The Tonight Show’s opening monologue.