Kathleen Alcott - Infinite Home

IT HAD BEEN EASY for Thomas to overlook the resemblance: only three photos of Declan as a young man gripped Edith’s walls, obscured by hanging plants that fell down from the ceiling in curls.

One showed their wedding, Edith shy on grand stone steps and Declan leaning in as though to prop her up, and another a tinseled Christmas, the grinning father supervising his son’s solemn assembly of a train track. The third photo, skewed somehow, showed the building freshly painted, the sky diluted, and Declan. Settled on the stoop, his slacks high on his waist and his white shirt crisp and his hair combed back, his cigarette between left thumb and forefinger like he learned in the war, his eyes met the camera as if in a brief nod of acknowledgment, decent but curt, eager to get back to a thought.

Thomas’s jaw, he saw now, was shaped like Declan’s, the soft lines leading to a broad dimple; his lashes similarly long and feminine; their eyes the same scratched brown, like a worn belt. They both carried all their strength in the shoulders, pursed their lips slightly instead of smiling with their teeth.

He could feel the tips of the plants brushing his shoulder blades as he lingered by the photos, as he waited for her while she fussed with something in the kitchen. She had denied his offers of help several times, and the apartment filled with sounds of cabinets opening and closing and her outbursts, spit from her mouth like cherry pits—“Curses!” and “I’ll be!” and “Jiminy Christmas!” Finally, she emerged with a dull silver tray, on which sat two jagged pieces of chocolate-dipped biscuits, four unevenly cut slices of cheese, one bruised apple, and two cups of iced coffee adorned with faded blue curly straws.

She had insisted on feeding him. He had arrived, for the third time that week, with a brown-bagged selection of art supplies, and he had promised himself that this time he would pin down a sustained conversation: about her will, her son, and possibly her daughter. Each time he had tried, he’d instead fallen quiet at the sweet cyan and maroon watercolored circles she was fond of making, and only reached out to pat the pale back of her neck. On the last occasion he had laid out brushes and acrylics and the paper to receive them, and Edith had painted a hammock suspended from a telephone wire on which four little birds sat singing to one another. Behind them, a pink sky relinquished its blush as it moved towards the edge of the page.

“What’s this?” Thomas had said.

She had seemed surprised at the question, then shocked that she knew the answer. She had pulled at the bunches of her slacks and looked out the window.

“That’s what it’s like when you think of your whole life. You’re fairly high up, and the lines get crossed and there are lots of little voices chirping, and you’re hanging from that and you try to find sleep.”

Today he could tell immediately: it was one of her off days. She was wearing too many colors, and spoke as if she’d just been dropped off on this planet, in this apartment.

“These things are delicious,” she exclaimed, waving the biscuits as though trying to keep the attention of a baby.

“And I like those too!” She pointed at the hanging plants that she herself had raised from tiny seeds.

“They’re beautiful, Edith,” Thomas said. He wanted her to know about her effort, to remind her about the little chair she stood on to water them, to present the proof of time she’d spent and cancel her forgetting. “You should be so proud at how they’ve grown. They need much more than light.”

He heard the lilt of his sentences and the sweetness in his tone, as though he were speaking to a worried child, and felt sick. He missed the woman who so calmly separated his life into pieces he could understand, and he needed her instruction.

“Edith,” he said. “Can we talk about Owen?”

Her lips grew hard and she sucked at her teeth. She hurled the stale cookie in her hand at the table.

“I don’t want to talk about him anymore!”

“Edith, I only want to help you — do you — is he—”

Strings of saliva dangled across her lips, over her bared teeth. He could smell her breath — like tea bags left out for days, the sweat of poor sleep — from where he sat.

“Declan! I’ve said it too many times! The boy doesn’t care for us and he’s got no interest in us caring for him. And that is that!”

Thomas didn’t think about what it meant not to correct her, only swallowed and took her hand and hoped the words might come out in a way that she could hear.

“Edith, I need to know what you want to do about the building. Your property. I have to hear you say it. Do you want Owen taking it over?”

“Declan,” she hissed. She clutched at the edge of her table, its dirtied lace tablecloth brown next to the bright moony white of her knuckles. “How many times. How many times did I say. Nothing of mine will go to him. It’s Jenny’s. It’s my sweet Jenny’s. It’s in the will and there’s nothing he can do about it.”

Thomas felt his resolution gathering, all parts towards a desperate act, remembered the dead man in the photograph and quietly begged his forgiveness. It’s for her own good , he tried to explain to Declan across years, and laced his hand into hers.

“Dear,” he said. “Where is the will?”

—

EDITH NAPPED while Thomas searched, lay facedown on top of the covers as he took apart the many years she had packed away methodically. He had kissed her forehead, damp from summer humidity, and brought a thin cotton sheet over her slowly vanishing body. She dreamt like a dog, kicking often.

On the hunt, in and out of boxes he found on shelves in the highest points of the apartment, he stumbled across various mementos that confirmed the great tenderness he held for her: a photo of her and Declan in one of those two-person horse costumes, the colors warm and soft like baking things rising.

They each wear a cowboy hat and a Western shirt, and stuffed cloth legs dangle beneath their torsos, comically short. Edith, at the head, wears the suspenders that hold up the mare’s comic snout and mane with pride and has a thumb slipped under each strap; she is just about to laugh. Declan, behind her, holds a can of beer in each hand and winks. The people around them, in Halloween costumes much milder and more comfortable, look on at their glow, the obvious volume of affection, with jealousy and apprehension.

Behind this, Thomas found a photo of them applying glue to strips of wallpaper with a solemnity meant for churches. He continued to move through the stack, his thumb light on the upper corner as he flicked, and stopped again on a photo of Edith holding a giggling baby up to the husky afternoon light on an unmade bed. It was the same room, he knew, where she lay now, managing ragged breaths.

When he found it, a stack of duplicates in a beige vinyl box, he passed his fingers through his hair in some wish to appear presentable. The words Last Will and Testament , formal and exclusive, kept him still a moment longer. He fought hesitation with the remembered moments of Owen and Edith, his sharp angles and the flashes of his gold watch as he grabbed at her elbow, then the image of Adeleine, looking out at him through the crack of her door, her eyes wild as though she were being chased by her end. The conjured images lent his fingers some electricity, assisted them in separating a leaf from the pile.

His tongue made a soft sound against the roof of his mouth as he surveyed it, a whole lifetime of days laid out in plans for divestment, as if the physical things weren’t tied to memories or moments, as if they had never quite approved of their human ownership and the bonds attached to them. Her clothes to the Salvation Army, her novels to a literacy foundation, her kitchen things to a homeless shelter.