Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

She is attracted to their darkness, but she likes the moment when they turn again and find some meaning that sideswipes them: I really loved her. I loosened his shirt before he drifted through the floodgates. My husband put the stove on a layaway plan.

And before they know it, their taxes are done, the insurance claim is laid out, the mortgage companies have been noted, the paper is slid across the table for them to sign. Sometimes it takes them an age just to sign, since they have something else to say — they are off and chatting about the cars they bought, the loves they loved. They have a deep need just to talk, just to tell a story, however small or reckless.

Listening to these people is like listening to trees — sooner or later the tree is sliced open and the watermarks reveal their age.

There was an old woman about nine months ago — she sat in a Little Rock hotel room, her dress spread out. Jaslyn was trying to figure out payments that the woman wasn’t getting from her pension fund.

— My boy was the mailman, the woman said. Right there in the Ninth. He was a good boy. Twenty-two years old. Used to work late if he had to. And he worked, I ain’t lying. People loved getting his letters. They waited for him. They liked him coming knocking on the door. You listenin’?

— Yes, ma’am.

— And then the storm blowed in. And he didn’t come back. I was waiting. I had his dinner ready. I was living on the third floor then. Waiting. Except nothing happened. So I waited and waited. I went out after two days looking for him, went downstairs. All those helicopters were flying over, ignoring us. I waded out into the street, I was up to my neck, near drowning. I couldn’t find no sign, nothing, ’Til I was down there by the check-cashing store and I found the sack of mail floating and I pulled it in. And I thought, Holy.

The woman’s fingers clamped down, gripping Jasyln’s hand.

— I was sure he’d come floating around the next corner, alive. I looked and looked. But I never did see my boy. I wish I woulda drowned right there and then. I found out two weeks later that he was caught up high in a treetop just rotting in the heat. In his mailman uniform. Imagine that, caught in the tree.

The woman got to her feet, and went across the hotel room, went to a cheap dresser, yanked a drawer open.

— I still got his mail here, see? You can take it if you want it.

Jaslyn held the sack in her hands. None of the envelopes had been touched.

— Take it, please, the woman said. I can’t stand it no more.

She took the sack of letters out to the lake near Natural Steps at the outskirts of Little Rock. The last light of day, she walked on the bank, her shoes sinking in the loam. Birds rose by pairs, bursting upward and wheeling overhead with the sun red on their cupped underwings. She wasn’t sure what she should do with the mail. She sat down on the grass and sorted them out, magazines, flyers, personal letters to be returned with a note: This got lost some time ago. I hope it’s okay to send it on again now.

She burned the bills, all of them. Verizon. Con Ed. The Internal Revenue Service. That grief wouldn’t be needed now, no, not anymore.

She stands by the window, the dark down. A chatter in the room. She is reminded of white birds, flapping. The cocktail glass she holds feels fragile. If she holds it too tight, she thinks, it might shatter.

She has come to stay, to be with Claire for a day or two. To sleep in the spare room. To accompany her dying, the same way she accompanied Gloria’s dying six years ago. The slow car journey back to Missouri. The smile on Gloria’s face. Her sister, Janice, in the front seat, driving. Playing games with the rearview mirror. Both of them pushing Gloria in a wheelchair along the banks of the river. Up a lazy river where the robin’s song wakes a brand-new morning as we roll along. It was a celebration, that day. They had dug their feet down into happiness and weren’t prepared to let go. They threw sticks into an eddy and watched them circle. Put a blanket down, ate Wonder Bread sandwiches. Later in the afternoon, her sister began crying, like a change in the weather, for no reason except the popping of a wine cork. Jaslyn handed her a wadded tissue. Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Gloria left with a smile on her face. They closed her eyes with the glare of the sun still on them, rolled the wheelchair up the hill, stayed a little while looking out over the land until the insects of evening gathered.

They buried her two days later in a plot near the back of her old house. She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried. A quiet ceremony, just the girls and a preacher. They put Gloria in the ground with one of her father’s old hand-painted signs and a sewing tin she’d kept from her own mother. If there was any good way to go, it was a good way to go.

Yes, she thinks, she would like to stay and be with Claire also, spend a few moments, find some silence, let the moments crawl. She has even brought her pajamas, her toothbrush, her comb. But it is clear to her now that she is not welcome.

She had forgotten that there might be others too, that a life is lived in many ways — so many unopened envelopes.

— May I see her?

— I don’t think she should be disturbed.

— I’ll just pop my head around the door.

— It’s a little late. She’s sleeping. Would you like another drink …?

His voice rises high on the question, unfinished, as if searching for her name. But he knows her name. Idiot. A crass, lumbering fool. He wants to own the grief and throw a party for it.

— Jaslyn, she says and smiles thinly.

— Another drink, Jaslyn?

— Thank you, no, she says, I have a room at the Regis.

— The Regis, awesome.

It’s the fanciest hotel she can think of, the most expensive place. She has no idea even where it is, just somewhere nearby, but the name changes Tom’s face — he smiles and shows his very white teeth.

She wraps a napkin around the bottom of her drink, places it down on the glass coffee table.

— Well, I should say good night. It’s been a pleasure.

— Please, I’ll show you down.

— It’s okay, really.

— No, no, I insist.

He touches her elbow and she cringes. She resists the urge to ask him if he has ever been president of a frat house.

— Really, she says at the elevator, I can let myself out.

He leans forward to kiss her cheek. She allows him her shoulder and she gives a slight nudge against his chin.

— Good-bye, she says with a singsong finality.

Downstairs, Melvyn hails her a cab and soon she is alone again, as if none of the evening has happened at all. She checks in her pocket for the card from Pino. Turns it over in her fingers. It’s as if she can feel the phone already ringing itself out in his pocket.

The only room at the St. Regis costs four hundred and twenty-five dollars for the night. She thinks about trying to find another hotel, even thinks about a phone call to Pino, but then slides her credit card across the counter. Her hands shake: it is almost a month and a half’s rent in Little Rock. The girl behind the desk asks for I.D. Not a moment worth arguing over, though the couple in front of her were not asked for theirs.

The room is tiny. The television sits high on the wall. She clicks on the remote. The end of the storm. No hurricanes this year. Baseball scores, football scores, another six dead in Iraq.