Luck Read online

  Three

  A side from her bedroom—they each have their own bedroom—Sophie’s only private space in this house is her little office, a room off the front hall that would originally have been a coat-and-hat-and-boots room for earlier, more sociable occupants and their guests. Now it contains desk, chair, phone, computer, shelves, filing cabinet.

  Everything in it has a sharp connection to Phil. Among other things he refinished this old oak desk and its matching chair with the curving arms and spindles and upright back that he found at an auction. When Sophie arrived four years ago, there was space to spare when she sat in the lap of this chair. Now her hips touch each side, she damn near fills it up.

  At the moment she also feels stuck to it, glued in place. “You’ll find things much simpler and quieter here,” Nora said when she and Phil hired Sophie. Simpler, anyway. For the most part.

  It’s perfectly simple to reach for the phone book and look up funeral homes. One small, manageable task at a time. A little too simple are the rules of engagement Nora has set out in such brittle fashion she might still have been talking to the man from the morgue: “No visitation. Closed casket. Day after tomorrow if that’s at all possible. And cremation.”

  In which case, what’s the point?

  “Make sure the funeral home understands about visitation especially. I won’t have these people staring at him.”

  Sophie and Nora are both divided and bound by their local disasters. Common experiences, some known, some not, make them comrades, but adversaries as well. Never mind that Sophie offered to do this, if she’s going to organize funeral arrangements, Nora might have given her a say in what exactly she’s organizing. “Are you sure? Cremation, that’s kind of a big decision.”

  “No, it’s what he would want. Burn whatever doesn’t get used, which I gather is everything—that’s what he’d say. If nothing else, he didn’t like waste.” That’s true. He built a huge wood-and-plastic-framed composter at the very far end of the yard, and got mad if he found eggshells or coffee grounds in the trash. There he is, hollering, “Okay, who threw orange peels in the garbage?” There are his stomping footsteps, there’s the back door slamming behind him as he pounds out with his handful of peelings.

  Here is the silence of that voice not yelling, those footprints failing to flatten the grass.

  Funny to discuss his funeral and yet be startled to remember he’s dead. Not funny-funny, of course; funny-strange.

  “Day after tomorrow, that might be hard.” For the funeral home, Sophie meant, to make whole what was presently being dismembered. Also an unseemly hurry to have Phil disposed of. That kind of hard, too.

  “Maybe. But it’s what I’d prefer.”

  “What about people from out of town? It’s awfully short notice.” Not a mob of mourners, necessarily, but Phil was a gregarious person, with friends and acquaintances here and elsewhere. Here they’d be people he drank with and guys he played poker with every week or went fishing with now and again. Elsewhere he had clients, suppliers, all sorts of people attached to him professionally who grew attached personally.

  “They can change their plans on the fly. Or have a memorial in their own good time, if they want.”

  “But won’t no visitation seem odd?”

  “It’s a little late to worry about what’s considered odd around here, don’t you think? Anyway, I have no intention of standing around for people to gawk at.”

  “Even his friends?”

  “They’re not mine.”

  And whose fault was that, and what did it have to do with Phil?

  Another funny thing: this felt as close as Sophie and Nora have come to an actual quarrel. They were more amiable with the living Phil than the dead one, it seems. But it’s early hours yet. There’s a lot to absorb. Phil is dead. As Nora said: how can this be?

  There is only one funeral home, called Anderson and Sons, in the phone book. Having the local death monopoly must make for brisk business—what if they can’t fit Phil in at short notice? Although Sophie supposes it’s basically a business built on short notice. Has she met Andersons? Might an Anderson, or an Anderson son, be the proper owner of one of those bags of shit left on the doorstep not so long ago; could an Anderson tyke have been among those scrawling rude words on the fence in the dead of night?

  She knows what Nora means: some known and all unknown locals are suspect. It’s not a nice feeling.

  The voice that answers the phone identifies itself as Hendrik Anderson, whether father or son he doesn’t say. The name is vaguely Scandinavian, and becomes more so when Sophie tells him what they have in mind—what Nora has in mind. The voice takes on what she hears as a northern European formality, not accented but cool, as if it comes from a glacial place where sunlight is rare and barely warming. “It’s … unusual,” this Hendrik Anderson, this undertaker, funeral director, mortician, whatever the hell he’s called, says. “An unusual combination of requests.” Presumably he means it’s rare and, judging from his tone, unrespectable for mourners to desire speed and virtual anonymity in the treatment of loved ones, followed by swift transformation of flesh into ash.

  “But you can do it?”

  “Oh yes, if I get the body today there should be no problem.” Perhaps he thinks it doesn’t matter, since she’s an employee, not family, if he refers to Phil as the body. “But sudden death at a fairly young age, you see, there may be questions and, if so, delays.” He might not intend accusation, maybe he’s simply inept. Still, he’s right, who knows, the theory will go, if one of the three witchy women in the house on the hill is a killer? Which of them might draw the short straw in that sort of tale?

  “All I know is that the person who phoned from the hospital suggested they’d likely be finished by mid-afternoon.”

  “Then that’s promising. I can take care of confirming that and, of course, the transportation here from the hospital. You probably know, though, that there’s bureaucracy involved in even the simplest death. Not,” Hendrik Anderson hurries on, “that any death is simple, I didn’t mean that.” This blunder makes him more human, or less northern. It humbles him, and warms him up. Still, you’d think undertakers would know precisely what they mean at all times before they open their mouths, their opportunities for misspeaking being as capacious as they must be. “Beyond the, uh, physical requirements, there are legal ones. Considerable paperwork, plus quite a number of other details we handle.” He sounds as if details are onerous, as if details are not really blessed, life-saving occupation.

  Never mind. The point he is slowly making turns out to be that even in its most pared-down, fast form, the process will cost a shocking amount. Thousands! Not that it’ll be Sophie’s money, but the waste—Phil would surely have been appalled. Sophie is horrified. Living bodies in the place she once struggled were not treated with the hovering luxury with which Phil’s dead one will be.

  Because of Phil’s very high standards for what he created and built, each piece was unique, and because he didn’t take commissions from just anyone, the furniture he made was highly prized. Therefore very expensive. In the economics in which Hendrik Anderson is busy educating Sophie, three of Phil’s funerals might add up to one of Phil’s sofas. That makes better sense.

  “Then I’ll leave it with you,” she says, and, “I’ll be in touch,” he says, and when they hang up, she folds her arms on the desk and puts her head down. There’s no place to run. She can’t go home because this is her home, at least for now; although realistically not for long. She can’t see Nora sticking around without Phil, and even if she did, why would she need or want Sophie?

  Sophie has come a long way in her four years here, but whether it’s far enough to avoid falling back into virtue’s ghastly embrace is as suddenly uncertain as everything else. The whole point of moving here to be Phil and Nora’s resident practical person was to build fortress walls against suffering, but here comes suffering anyway.

  Now what?

  Oh, shit. Max. Poor old g
uy, waiting for Nora and Phil to show up for lunch.

  When Sophie gets through to the restaurant, she is told Max arrived for his reservation, waited an hour and left. That’s too bad. Maybe he tried calling. Sophie was on the line with Hendrik Anderson for, she guesses, a fairly long time. Time is odd today, not quite calculable. All stretched out, but in tiny, sharp, individual moments. She tries him at home. “Ah, Sophie,” he says, annoyance in his voice but also relief. Then his voice darkens. “What’s wrong, what has happened? Something has happened?”

  She hasn’t had to say the words before. This makes a difference, it makes her voice crack. “It’s Phil. I’m sorry to give you bad news, but Phil died in the night.”

  She hears a sharp breath, then courtly old Max’s first words are, “You’re kidding.”

  Kidding? No, she doesn’t think so. Who would kid about such a thing?

  “I’m sorry, Sophie, forgive me, that was a terrible thing to say. Was it an accident? How is Nora?”

  “No, not an accident. Something else, overnight, in his sleep. Nora’s okay, she’s just not up to talking to anyone yet. But we’re really sorry about leaving you to wait in the restaurant. There’s been a lot of confusion.”

  “He hadn’t been ill?”

  “Not as far as anyone knew. Including him.”

  “What a dreadful shock. Dreadful. Should I come, or wait to hear from Nora herself?”

  “I don’t know.” Sophie hears her voice quiver. “I don’t know what anybody should do. The service will probably be the day after tomorrow—can you come for that, do you think?”

  “Of course I can. And you tell Nora that anything she needs me for, I will do.”

  Ah, yes. Nora the widow. “Thanks, Max, I will.”

  Working her way through a brief list of other people who need to be told, Sophie learns that Max is not the only one to whose lips “You’re kidding” leaps. She phones one of Phil’s poker pals, a drinking buddy, a couple of suppliers and most intimate customers and several of his designer friends, establishing a telephone tree in which each person will call others within these various circles, and is disconcerted by how often that’s the first response. “No,” she says over and over, increasingly coldly, “I’m not kidding.”

  Once past that they do better. They’re ashamed. Like Max, they say, “That was stupid, I’m sorry,” and, “Oh no, that’s terrible,” and, “What a shock,” and, “What happened?” and, of course, “How is Nora?” It’s interesting that no one says, “This must be hard on you, Sophie, having to make this kind of call. Are you all right?”

  She is all right. Only tired of repeating the same words, and making clear she is not kidding even one little bit. She is a thirty-three-year-old woman with two political economics degrees and an unfortunate habit of screeching her way up out of nightmares, sometimes waking the household. She has been for four years a bookkeeper, errand-runner, clean-up person for two people who decided to afford such a person. She has kept track of their sales and commissions, their incomes and outgoings, work for any drudge with a gift for arithmetic. She has picked up upholstery and sometimes lumber for Phil, cadmium this and violet that for Nora, along with brushes and glues and needles of various purpose and size. All low-level, obedient grunt work not very open to error, and not requiring personal judgment either, since in the actual selection of paints, fabrics and threads, or of wood of particular grains, Nora and Phil made sure they chose for themselves.

  Sophie has also handled most of their correspondence, generally businesslike but for a time often obscene or threatening. Plus she has picked bags of shit off the doorstep.

  She sends ten per cent of her small wage to that overseas aid agency whose most successful volunteer she was not.

  That’s about it.

  Phil is dead? The more often she’s had to say those words, the more remote they’ve become from the fact: Phil is dead. No kidding.

  Too many bodies entirely, wherever she goes.

  It may have been an awful mistake, beginning the relearning of skin.

  Flesh is weak; sometimes surprisingly and suddenly so.

  Compared with Beth, Sophie is enormous; compared with Nora merely billowy, pillowy, zaftig. That’s how Phil described her: zaftig, he said, burrowing his face between her bountiful breasts—bountiful, he called them—and kneading her belly, her thighs, with his strong long-fingered hands.

  She had her nightmare—those withering arms, those sharp fingers—and woke herself up crying out. As she sometimes does, she crept downstairs from her tangled bed and, because it was a warm night, early summer, just a couple of months ago although it seems like for ever, poured a glass of red wine, that reliable sedative, and went outside to the front porch and its weatherbeaten old wicker sofa. In other skies elsewhere, millions more stars are visible than here. In the earth’s revolutions, the moon looks down on a terrible, glorious array of human activity: babies, loved and unloved, being born; middle-of-the-night acts of solace or cruelty being performed; kind words and vicious ones being spoken. In some places there would be laughter. The screen door squeaked open and there was Phil, in bare feet and green terry bathrobe, carrying his own reliable sedative, a six-pack of beer. Sitting, he adjusted the robe so it covered his thighs but left his calves and feet visible. “Okay if I join you?”

  “Of course. I’m sorry. I woke you up, didn’t I?”

  “Probably. Something did. But it’s okay. It’s a good night for not sleeping, don’t you think?” He seemed to mean the stars, the peacefulness of three o’clock in the morning, the crickets, the night-scent of the nicotiana planted by the steps of the porch, the comfort of company.

  Then after a while he said, “I’ve watched you for a long time, Sophie.”

  Had she watched him? He was not unattractive. He was energetic, and male, and a bulwark against external difficulties and threats; hard not to wonder if he’d be a bulwark against internal ones also.

  But wonder only. No touch.

  “I’ve watched you for a long time,” he said, with no stalking, absolutely no obsession implied. “You’re very beautiful. Full of light.”

  Really?

  “A man could dream of burying himself in you, did you know that?” She shook her head. He turned and kissed her as if there were no question about doing so. When she’d almost stopped trembling, he picked up the tattered plaid blanket kept folded at the end of the sofa and took her hand and pulled her to her feet and led her off the porch, around the house, across the backyard, past his workshop, to the property’s last outpost of yard, and spread the blanket and dropped onto it and drew her down and proceeded to surround and cover her with his larger bones and fuller flesh. He was patient and very slow. Her own full flesh kept leaping away, but he touched and touched until his skin finally began to feel indistinguishable from her own, no longer electrically separate.

  This was more magical than he could have dreamed.

  He took her hands two months ago and laid her down and wrapped himself around her and pushed them slowly off together on a smooth, swift, downhill run—but not so often. They had to take care. If Nora knew—well, Nora is passionate when it comes to unforgiveness and vengeance, that’s clear enough from her attitude to this town. Anyway, even if nothing worse happened, if anyone found out, the private charm of the thing would be ruined. So when Phil said, “Shhh” or “Not today” or “Half an hour?,” Sophie heeded.

  He claimed to enjoy the geography of Sophie’s now-lavish flesh. Then again, since he also mistook her for someone who gives little thought to herself, it’s hard to know how clearly he saw her. She did not correct him. “It’s one reason I love you,” he said, and neither of them enquired why a gift for selflessness on her part would encourage love on his. Or for that matter, what form of love he intended. Their specific perspective on love anyway was for the most part horizontal.

  He could say all he wanted that he’d finally abandoned himself to opportunity and long desire, but there would have been ot
her factors, personal to just him, or to him and Nora, hard to say. Just as there were factors personal to just Sophie. Anyway, there is something to be said for knowing a good deal about reduced expectations. Phil was wary that Sophie might have what he supposed to be higher hopes. “You should know, I can’t see leaving Nora. I’ve been through that,” because indeed he had left one wife in favour of Nora, years ago when they were young. “I don’t think I want to go through it again.”

  “That’s fine,” Sophie said. “Fair enough.”

  When Nora said, Where there’s smoke, what did she mean? Wouldn’t revelations at this point be ironic? At best, ironic?

  People have died before overnight in Sophie’s experience, but mostly their hands were reaching out to receive, they were ebbing, demanding, panicking hands. Phil’s hands were enthusiastic and generous. In how he perfectly fitted together pieces of wood from his own designs, in the way he undid what he saw as mistakes and started again, in the way a particular wood of particular grain had to be chosen and shaped to become a particular sideboard or sofa or chair—that was exactly the minute way he understood Sophie’s body. To watch him run his hands over potential upholstery, regarding texture and colour with a view to how it suited a specific design, to see him so engaged he said he could hear how one fabric would sound when it encountered another, that was the same care he took with Sophie’s tentative skin. Even boisterous, he was paying attention. His hands spoke of delight that was infinite.

  So she felt.

  She must have been quite a challenge, a woman to whom touch was acidic, but Phil’s rough, hammering, carving, nailing, precise hands were scrupulous. She supposes with Nora as well, and for all she knows, over the years maybe others. Not Beth, of course. “No, I can’t imagine going to bed with her,” he told Sophie, laughing. “It’d be like making love to a garden rake.” Which meant, actually, that he could imagine it, just not in a pleasing way, not the way he could burrow deep into Sophie and come out gasping.

  At least he did not die in Nora’s arms, only in the same bed. Enough that Nora’s the widow, that she possessed the bed from which he could slip away at dead of night. It would have been an awful mess if he’d died in Sophie’s arms, which is the sort of thing that does sometimes happen. Of course, if he’d been with Sophie, he would not have been sleeping, he would have been active, alert to the very last second. With Sophie, he didn’t sleep. The opportunity did not arise.