“How did she die?” I ask.
Portia tells me and then adds, “It happened fast. She was planning on making a trip up here, but her doctors forbade her, and she simply didn’t have the strength, so she wrote because there was no other way to contact you. She even overnighted the letters in the hopes of reaching you in time. And she wasn’t sure you were still here, or else maybe she would have come looking for you. She tried to contact you—very hard. Finally, she ‘gave you to God,’ her exact words. Check your PO box. It’s all there.”
“Okay,” I say, although I’m not sure why, because it’s not okay in any sense of the word.
A wave of guilt overcomes me.
I don’t feel like crying so much as vomiting, which is confusing, because maybe it means I am just still hung over.
“You’re having a hell of a week,” Portia says. “I’m sorry.”
“Maybe you will find this a bit strange, but I’m not sure I can handle any more information,” I say. “I just don’t want to hear any more right now, okay? I’m sorry. But I need time to digest all of this, and . . .” I don’t finish my sentence. I have no idea what else to say.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know whenever you’re ready, but of course it doesn’t have to be right now, if you’re feeling overwhelmed. My showing up here like this and dropping the news on you—it would be a great shock for anyone under any circumstances. And we can start saving you in a few days. I’ve set some time aside for this.”
“I don’t need—,” I say, but no more words follow, because I absolutely need some sort of help if I am to keep breathing and thinking and occupying space here on earth.
To her credit and my great surprise, Portia respects my request and doesn’t push it, which makes her very unlike my deceased mother—and actually helps me to trust her a little.
Sitting on my couch, we both look out the window at the mountains in the distance and act like mountains ourselves—breathing stoically, silently.
Unmovable—if only for a time.
A long time, actually.
And I begin to respect Ms. Portia Kane’s ability to just sit and be.
At first I’m mentally challenging her to beat me at this stillness, this passiveness, this giving up—and I’m looking forward to her failure. But somewhere along the line, I start to draw support from her, much like I did from Albert Camus, and if I am being honest, some part deep down inside me begins to worry that she will leave before I am ready to be alone, just like my best four-legged friend did—that no living thing is able to be around me in my present condition.
But of course we eventually get up off my couch and begin moving about again.
Albert Camus once wrote, “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” And that is exactly what Portia Kane and I do for a few days as we take walks together, share meals, wash and dry dishes, stare at sunsets, and avoid speaking about anything of consequence whatsoever. We rely on politeness, common courtesy, to get us through the hours. It’s almost like we are playing estranged father and daughter who are suddenly forced to spend awkward time together in the Green Mountains of Vermont—although neither of us would put it that way.
I think I am mourning my mother, but I can’t be sure.
I’m definitely mourning Albert Camus, who was much more in tune with my emotions and feelings than my mother ever was. My dog was there for me, and even though he might have committed suicide to escape my existential crisis, he loved the real true me in his own way.
I’m not quite sure what I am doing allowing this former student to sleep on my couch and live in my house.
In no way whatsoever does it seem smart.
I sometimes think maybe she’s just as sick as Edmond Atherton, but masking it to heighten her inevitable betrayal; she will kill me in my sleep and end all of this thinking I am doing—take the first question off the table permanently.
But after a few days it becomes clear that this woman is pure of heart, and her intentions—albeit delusional and wildly misguided—are driven by a need to make things right, if only in some simpleminded way. It’s obvious that she has been deeply wounded, broken by life, and is now attempting to live by a code. And there are moments I find myself thinking back to when she was in my class, remembering snippets of why I spent so much time with her when she was eighteen, maybe because she showed promise simply as a human being. She had the altruistic heart of a dreamer and unchecked ideal notions about the world—the perfect fool, smiling up at the sky with one foot already over the edge of the precipice. For some reason the dreaded word extraordinary keeps popping up in my mind, and I try to kill it every time, even though a former student showing up at my exact moment of need—just in time to save my life, actually—is indeed out of the ordinary.
Could she be Edmond Atherton’s antithesis?
The universe evening things out?
Some sort of cosmic order?
Or maybe Portia and I are each silently daring the other to speak first, to open up, to be prematurely vulnerable so that the other can strike first, wound deeply, and win.
Regardless, I don’t ask questions and she doesn’t offer answers.
We just politely exist together for a time, in a heavy silence that sometimes feels like being buried alive under twenty feet of snow—a foot or so for every year since we last danced this number. It’s as if we’re in a hollowed-out snow cave heated by the flame of a single candle, and we’re wondering if some emotional rescue team will ever arrive with the metaphorical equivalent of Saint Bernards wearing small barrels of brandy around their necks, and yet we have no way of knowing for certain if anyone even knows we are still alive. I come to appreciate this trapped, helpless, loss-of-control give-up-to-inevitability feeling more than I thought was ever possible.