The 100 Year Miracle Page 22

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know what?” Harry asked.

  “When it’s time to go?”

  “You go when there’s no reason to stay, when staying hurts people.”

  The railing Becca was leaning against was a thin rope of wood topping the piece of glass that ringed the balcony level. Each balcony, each landing, each set of staircases had nothing but glass to hold in the people and keep them from toppling hundreds of feet to the tile below. The architect would have called it airy. Glass inside of glass. Harry didn’t care for it. It made him want to climb down and spend the whole performance listening as best he could from beside the elevator banks on the ground floor.

  “I hurt people,” she said. “I don’t mean to, but I do.”

  Harry didn’t know what to say.

  Becca stayed where she was, bent a few degrees at the waist over the edge, her arms out to her sides and her hands resting on the wooden rail. Harry stood there, waiting. He wanted to see her go and not like before. Before she had walked away, out of his line of sight. The air had moved when she’d brushed past him. He’d felt it on the fine hairs of his arm. She wasn’t real. He repeated that to himself. And if she wasn’t real, then she had to materialize and dematerialize. She had to fade in and out like the musical score in a big battle scene. There was a trick to it, and he wanted to see the trick.

  Inside, the conductor had raised his arms and was commanding his troops, who had started to march through the first measures of Tchaikovsky. Tilda would be gathering her wrap and reaching for the purse she had stashed under her chair. She’d be begging the pardon of the patrons around her, who would be particularly irritated that she was disrupting the beginning. Their minds hadn’t even had a chance to begin to wander yet. No one’s foot had fallen asleep, and the wine hadn’t made it to anyone’s bladder.

  Harry looked over his shoulder, just a quick glimpse to see if the door was swinging open, and then he stepped as quickly as he could across the balcony. The glass-enclosed edge got closer with every step so that Harry had to give his head a little shake and order his eyes to stay on her naked back. When he was five feet away, he reached out his hand. He wanted to touch her just to see, just to convince himself, just to put his hand into the air where his mind fooled itself.

  She didn’t even turn to look at him before she did it. He didn’t see her face. Becca simply pushed herself up with her arms, lifted her feet from the floor, and pitched herself over that delicate piece of glass.

  Harry garbled a scream and lunged, clawing out with both hands. He touched nothing but air. And when she hit the cold, tile lobby floor, it was a thwap so loud Tchaikovsky couldn’t compete.

  “Harry?”

  “She jumped. I saw her. She jumped.” Harry’s voice was not his own. It was warbly and snotty, and he was pointing toward the ledge like a fool. It wasn’t real. He knew it wasn’t real, but he couldn’t help himself, and now Tilda would know. She would know everything. She would—

  Tilda rushed past him to the glass and leaned over, and the sight of her there, just as Becca had been seconds before, scared him so badly that he lost control of his own bladder.

  “No!”

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God!” Tilda said.

  She backed away so quickly that she nearly tripped in her high heels. She tore into her bag, ripping the dove gray satin, and had the cell phone to her ear when the first usher came out to see what the yelling had been.

  Tilda conducted both conversations at once. “A woman fell. Harry saw her fall.—Yes, I’m reporting an emergency at Benaroya Hall. We need an ambulance. I think she’s dead, but we need an ambulance.—Harry, did she say anything?”

  Harry looked down at himself. He was wearing black wool trousers, which was a godsend. He knew the front was wet, but as long as no one touched him—he looked back up, but Tilda wasn’t waiting for him. She was taking charge, ordering the ushers to get word to their troops. The musicians should stop playing. It was disrespectful to keep playing, but the patrons should all stay in their seats. No one was to leave the hall. Hundreds of people pouring into the lobby would only make things worse.

  The ushers, both men and women in their drab burgundy and black uniforms, rushed to obey without demanding any further qualifications. It was Tilda’s way, or maybe they recognized her. Tilda herself was still on the phone with the 911 operator while she sprinted as best she could for the switchback stairs that would take her down to the body below.

  Harry was afraid to look.

  31.

  They heard the ambulances before they saw them. Two pulled up in front of the hall, just outside the rounded wall of glass with its beautiful view that no one cared about at all. The red and white lights bounced from pane to pane, reflecting and multiplying. The men in their navy uniforms poured out of the vehicles in one orchestrated troop and ran through the doors into the lobby so large and open it could’ve hosted a ball. They rushed, rushed, rushed until they saw what was left of the woman, and the urgency went out of them.

  Harry was sitting on a bench with his cane in front of him. His insides felt as though they’d liquefied. Tilda was standing next to the body, guarding it from the looky-loos, those who insisted “please keep your seats” did not apply to them. One of them had picked up a small handbag lying fifteen feet or so away. Tilda couldn’t guard everything, Harry supposed. There was a wallet and a Washington State driver’s license inside, not much money, a set of car keys, a drugstore lipstick, and one tampon with a ripped paper wrapper. That’s what the looky-loo holding the purse said when she came over to him. Tilda had instructed her, as she’d already got her fingerprints all over everything anyway, to show the ID to Harry. The body had landed face-first and, well, none of them could really say for sure if the brunette in the photo was the brunette on the floor.

  Harry had not gone anywhere near the body, and he didn’t want to look at the plastic card either. The woman holding it out to him was tiny and insistent, like a bird pecking at its reflection.

  “I only saw her from behind. It could’ve been anyone.”

  The bird woman twittered. “Such a horror.”

  Harry didn’t respond, and she had to go flit and chatter with excitement to someone else.

  The police arrived a few minutes after the ambulances. Harry told his version of the story, which was no story at all.

  Came out of the bathroom.

  Saw her from behind.

  She pitched forward.

  Nothing I could do.

  The police officer, a young Asian woman who’d suffered from acne in her youth that no one had treated very well, asked just two questions when Harry was done.

  “When you say she pitched forward, did she fall forward, or did she jump?”

  Harry was still sitting on the wooden bench by the stairs, as far as he could be from the body, which no one had moved yet. He hoped she hadn’t noticed his pants.

  “It wasn’t a jump exactly. The glass was too high to jump. She sort of lifted herself up and bent forward. It seemed voluntary.”

  The officer looked him in the eye and nodded while he talked. Harry wasn’t sure if that was her way of encouraging him to say more or if what he said agreed with what she saw. Harry didn’t know if the police could look at someone and tell if they were a suicide or an accident.

  “Did the woman say anything before she went over the side?” It was the officer’s last question.

  “No, she didn’t say anything. I don’t think she knew I was there.”

  Tilda stood nearby while Harry talked, close enough to hear but not so close as to look like she was interfering. When they were done, she shook the officer’s hand and thanked her for her work.

  “And who are you?” the officer asked.

  “Senator Streatfield.” She said like it didn’t bother her. “But please, call me Tilda.”

  Harry knew Tilda wanted to stay, but there were no more official duties, and if they didn’t leave in the next f
ifteen minutes, they were going to miss the last ferry back to Olloo’et. She didn’t even get to talk to the handful of reporters who had gathered outside near the ambulances. She gave them a long look before following Harry, who had metabolized every bit of the medication, as he scooted toward the elevator that led to the garage. They just beat the crowd, which was being released from the performance hall and ushered away. It took seven uniformed officers blocking off the lobby to keep all the old men and women from hurrying over to get a peek.

  Down in the garage, it was Tilda who took off too fast and had to wait by the car for Harry to catch up. She wanted to beat the snake of cars that would clog up the exits for the next hour. She held the door for him, and he didn’t look her in the eye as he lowered himself down butt first using his cane for support. One leg in. Then the other.

  “Are you okay?” Tilda asked when she’d spiraled them up from the lower levels back to the street, waiting for the light down the block to go red, so they could turn. “You’re not saying much.”

  “There’s not much to say.”

  Tilda turned and made her way around the block, heading up a steep grade toward the freeway entrance. She knew the city far better than he did. Still, if he had been well, he would have insisted on driving. She maneuvered like the local she had become since their divorce. If they could keep the pace, they would make the ferry.

  Harry watched the string of taillights in front of them. The farther north they went the fewer of them there were. Fifteen minutes passed.

  “Did you see the woman’s face?” Harry asked. He didn’t look at Tilda, and Tilda didn’t look at him.

  “Half of it,” she said. “Her head was turned to the side.”

  “Did you recognize her?” Harry asked.

  “No. Should I have? Did you?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  Tilda let thirty seconds go by, which was a lot under the circumstances.

  “Harry, if you have something to say about what happened, for God’s sake, say it.”

  Harry bunched up his hands in his lap. He didn’t know if he had anything to say about what happened because he no longer knew what was happening, not tonight, maybe not ever again. What had he said to that woman? He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t thought—She looked so much like Becca. He was certain it was her, a hallucination of her. Didn’t Tilda see it? She must have seen it.

  “Harry.” Her voice was sharp.

  “She just looked—” He was halfway through the sentence, and he had lost the will to finish it. He was being ridiculous. He was a ridiculous, old, sick man who said strange things and then had to be pacified by those around him. He was becoming someone to be avoided. He could see it happening as if from a distance, and finishing the sentence would just be one more piece of evidence to hold against him.

  “She looked like what?”

  Harry snorted like he always did when he felt cornered. “She just bore a little resemblance to Becca.”

  Tilda gripped the wheel until it hurt, her hands at precisely ten and two. She would make a perfect picture for the Washington State Driver’s Manual if she weren’t also the perfect picture of a woman struggling for control. Every muscle around every joint tightened, drawing her into herself, as tight as she could get and still operate the vehicle. Tilda looked and felt like the only living person to have experienced rigor mortis.

  This was the second time Harry had said a grown woman looked like Becca, and it was the second time that it wasn’t true at all. They had all had dark brown hair, but for the love of Pete, Becca had been a child when she’d died. Neither of them really knew what she would have looked like when she grew up, which was—Tilda supposed—what allowed Harry to paste her face on any woman he saw.

  “She did not.” Tilda said it without moving her jaw.

  “Like I said, it was only a passing—”

  “Shut up!” A thing in Tilda—it would be impossible to say which thing—that had been wrenched too tightly for too long gave under the pressure. It gave with a snap, and when it did, it ricocheted around the car interior, making them both duck and wince.

  Tilda wanted to reel it back in. She wasn’t sorry, and she wasn’t going to apologize, even for good form, but she was going to smooth it, to change course, to renegotiate their present circumstances. Or at least she would have if Harry hadn’t opened his fool mouth.

  “Why did you do that?”

  Tilda began to answer. Everyone was allowed to lose their temper every once in a while. Just because she almost never exercised the right, didn’t mean it ceased to—

  “Why did you pretend like she never existed? Why did you try to erase Becca?” It seemed something inside of Harry had broken under the strain, too.

  The idea of neither of them being in full control would have scared Tilda if she was in a fit state of mind to think of it that way, but the careful series of roadblocks she had built between her mind and her mouth were suddenly unmanned, and the next thing left her lips before she even knew what it would be.

  “Because it was the only way I could stop hating you.”

  The truth is a physical thing that has weight, and the truer the thing is the heavier it is, becoming denser and denser. Tilda’s truth had the density of lead, and the weight of it pinned them down into their respective seats and pressed the backs of their heads into the chairs and even held their eyeballs in place, so that they could only see the road and not each other.

  “You hated me.” Harry said it as a statement and without self-pity.

  “Yes,” Tilda said, “I did.”

  “I hated me, too.”

  “I know.”

  “Why did you want to stop?” Harry asked. “Stop hating me?”

  The next words came a little slower for Tilda. She had to think about them and test them to be sure they were right. “Because I couldn’t bear to lose anything else.”

  Harry’s next words came a little slower, too, for all of the same reasons. “It didn’t work. We fell apart anyway.”

  “I know.”

  * * *

  It was almost midnight when Harry and Tilda pulled into the driveway. It was sprinkling, and the ferry ride had been choppy, which was always harder on her stomach at night when she couldn’t keep her eyes on the horizon line. They had stayed in the car the entire ride. Neither had made any move to get out, and they hadn’t discussed it.

  Back at the house, Harry wanted to go upstairs alone and, for the first and only time, Tilda let him go without argument. She stayed at the bottom and watched as he went riser by riser. She watched until he was all the way up at the landing, and then she followed the sound of the television to the den.

  Juno was in the same chair he had been in when they left. Several additional beer bottles had accumulated on the coffee table, and the open container of Chinese takeout—shrimp lo mein from the looks of it—had perfumed the entire room, which was the only evidence Juno had done anything at all. That and the channel had been changed from sports to twenty-four-hour news. They were showing taped footage of the Miracle.

  “How was the concert?” Juno asked.

  Tilda sank down onto the arm of the couch. She’d already taken off her shoes, and she was afraid, if she sat down for real, she wouldn’t be able to get up again. She’d fall asleep there and wake up the next morning smelling of grease and soy sauce, still wearing her burnt orange silk pantsuit with mascara smeared under her eyes.

  “A woman died,” she said.

  “During the performance?”

  Juno hadn’t been all that interested in her response before, but she had his attention now, even if she was too tired to want it.

  “Yes.”

  “What? Did she have a heart attack or something?”

  “She jumped off a balcony.”

  The conversation with Harry in the car had been so big that the woman’s suicide felt further away than it was.

  “Oh, my God.” Juno took his feet off the coffee table, which had been a rule
in Tilda’s house anyway, and sat up in the chair, fumbling for the remote to mute the television. Tilda wished he wouldn’t.

  “Did she land on the stage?”

  “It was out in the lobby,” Tilda said.

  “Oh.” This was far less dramatic than he had been led to believe. “That was probably pretty—you know—gross.”

  It had been less gross than Tilda might have imagined. Some blood, of course, but she’d seen traffic accidents that were worse. She could only imagine what the fall had done to the poor woman’s insides, but the bystanders had been spared the view.

  “It could’ve been worse, but your father saw it happen.”

  “Wow. What’s he saying about it?”

  Tilda read the closed captions that came across the bottom of the screen. She wished he’d turn the volume back on, just for a few moments. It would let her mind rest, and then she could work on forcing herself upstairs and into a shower. Harry was already taking his. She could hear water running in the old pipes. When she went up, she would take his pants and underwear from the hamper and throw them in the utility sink to soak.

  “He thinks the woman looked like Becca.”

  Tilda was sorry she said it as soon as the words were out. She really did need to repair those checkpoints.

  Juno snorted. It was the same snort Harry had done in the car. It was the sort of thing you wouldn’t think could possibly be genetic, and then it turns out to be. Tilda knew Juno wanted her to respond, but it was too much to ask of her that night. He had left the remote on the coffee table, and she reached for it, getting up from the arm of the sofa to do it.

  “It’s been like thirty years since she died, and he can still make anything about her.”

  Tilda shut her eyes and counted to three.

  “Becca died twenty-two years ago.”

  “Whatever. Twenty-two. My point is he’s been fixated my whole life, since I was three years old. You try competing against a dead person.”

  “Nothing that happened tonight was about you,” Tilda said.