Vigil for a Stranger Read Free

together, and cookies, and—what else? I’ve forgotten some of the details of that vision now. It was absurd, of course. I was suffering from the trip to Plover Island and from Emile’s coldness, all that had made me peculiar, made me see things, imagine things, my brother drinking tea with me, talking.
    Twelve years ago I ended up in the hospital: Yale–New Haven, where I learned to make baskets. And there was no Robbie, of course, just as there was no Pierce. It can take a long time for that kind of shock to leave the system, my shrink said, holding my hand. Old Dr. Dalziel, whose hair had turned white (I was told by a nurse) during the six months it took his wife to die of cancer. “Those were terrible things that happened to you, Christine,” he said. “It’s certainly not unusual that they affected you strongly, that you haven’t been able to accept them, you’re still grieving.” His white hair was brushed back from his high pink forehead, and his hand that held mine was curled from arthritis. He said: “You’re not crazy, please stop saying that right now.”
    Owen Price. Olive Prince.
    I let my book fall into the lap. I lay back and closed my eyes, as my seatmate had when she first got on the train. Owen Price, Olive Prince. I breathed deeply, and calmed down. Stamford, yes. Then Greenwich. Then express to 125th Street, then Grand Central. Get on an uptown bus. Go to the Frick, meet Silvie at 1:00. Lunch. Talk. George Drescher at the Aurora Gallery 4:00. Then maybe a drink at the Oyster Bar and home on the 6:22, the 6:47 at the latest. Train, James, home, a bite of something good, and bed. Bed, and then it would be tomorrow, and things always look different tomorrow. Tell James about this? Maybe—so that he can grip my wrists and say, He’s dead, Christine. You know he is. He’s dead, don’t do this to yourself —the way Charlie did twenty years ago, yelling at me when I refused to believe it. Pierce is dead, Chris — dead dead dead .
    I did calm down. I did begin to breathe regularly, the sweat dried on my back, I even returned to my book: Marcel and the madeleine and the tea—the scene, I figured out years ago with my shrink, that had probably been the inspiration for my own mad vision of Robbie coming to drink tea with me and take me into the past. I read, with pleasure and absorption and the love I always felt for the rich complex sentences, the elaborate and beautiful comparisons, the wistful remembering—but the business card stayed in my mind, crisp black letters on white: Alison Kaye, Haver & Schmidt.
    And I kept hearing Pierce’s voice in my head: “There are two kinds of people in this world, Charles—people who get over things and people who don’t.”
    Pierce was killed when his car went off a cliff in New Mexico. The car plunged 300 feet, straight down. The bodies were smashed beyond recognition—or almost. They were eventually found, retrieved, identified—teeth, whatever. I never got the details. The car, at any rate, was Pierce’s old VW, the one he had driven out there—the ancient rattletrap he’d owned for as long as I’d known him. There were two people with him, a man and a woman, no one I’d ever heard of. Think of that death, the spin into air, the going down. How long would it take? What would his last words be? “Holy shit” or “Help” or “Jesus Christ” or “No!” Or a wild “Whoopee” of delight.
    Charlie broke it to me. I was living in a town in eastern Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia—not far from Charlie’s home town, in fact. I had a job as an office temporary in an insurance firm where I stood all day in a huge, over-airconditioned room filing pink forms in tan folders in blue filing cabinets. My arms ached, my feet hurt. I had never hated a job so much, but the pay wasn’t bad, and I liked the