The New World: A Novel Read Free

like infidelity added to death. If she thought for a minute that he would understand, Jane might have tried to tell these things to Dick, before her mother took the phone away from her and hung up on him.
    Jane stood for the hymns during the service but did not sing. Her aunt Millicent, who had arrived as always in tow with her mother, warbled prettily beside her, her voice very much like her sister’s, but without the confidence, strength, or control. Millicent had been out of her mind with dementia for almost five years. “As the deer panteth for the water,” she sang, smiling, “so my soul longeth after thee!” When she saw Jane looking at her, she winked, and Jane thought,
E
xactly
—this whole thing is a practical joke
. She knew already from her work—because her young patients sometimes died—how the world could seem unreal to the bereaved. That was something Jim used to talk about all the time, how he had spent the afternoon on the moons of Jupiter or in darkest Narnia, when he meant he had been professionally immersed in somebody else’s grief. It was all supposed to seem unreal or impossible, but it wasn’t supposed to be ridiculous.
    “Do you mean to tell me,” Jane had asked Brian, the Polaris customer-service representative, “that you think what you did was legal?”
    “Of course, Dr. Cotton.” He had a quality to his voice that she would describe to her mother as
furry
, meaning that when she tried to picture what he looked like she could only visualize a teddy bear, its face stuck in a stupid sympathetic half-smile. “Can you imagine that we would offer our service if it wasn’t?”
    “Oh, I’m sure it’s legal in
Florida
,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right. That doesn’t mean I won’t have the health department come confiscate every last drop of liquid nitrogen in your filthy buckets.”
    “We call them dewars. And, Dr. Cotton, I just want to tell you that everything you’re feeling is perfectly normal.”
    “Normal?” she said, and then she shouted, “I don’t think you people are allowed to use that word!”
    At the funeral, they sang “Abide with Me” and “When We Were Living” and listened to a succession of eulogies. Jane’s mother had sat up all night writing a sermon on the death of Abigail Adams, in which she expounded upon the gifts of time and silence, but it was Dick and his friends, who sat in a block and wore Viking helmets, who gave most of the speeches, telling stories—each one felt more endless than the last—about Jim at work and at play.
    Jane tried not to listen to any of the eulogies because it felt like all the speakers were conspiring to make her break down. Now she appreciated how fire arrows and a hurly match and Renaissance Fair turkey legs and even the burning boat and burning body would be easier to deal with than this train of perfectly sincere people who wielded their affectionate memories of Jim like heavy cudgels, all aimed directly at her face. And how many times could somebody hit you in the face before you started to cry?
    Millicent was lifting her dress by slow inches and looking slyly around the crowded church. She rarely disrobed completely, but she liked to flash her panties. Jane gently smoothed the dress down over Millicent’s lap, then pulled her aunt’s head to her shoulder. Dick had ascended the pulpit to imagine out loud the wonders of the future into which Jim would wake. He told them all not to be sad, because Jim wasn’t
really
dead: When you thought about it, he had just undertaken a truly remarkable
journey
. Dick confessed he’d been just as astonished as anyone that Jim had arranged to take this particular journey, but wasn’t that exactly the gift he had left them all, the very good news that every one of them could follow their dear friend into the future and
be with him forever
? He said more, but Jane plugged her ears and leaned forward, trying to look funeral-casual, as if she were overwhelmed