Sorrow arrived in
Boston and there was Kindness, waiting for her, tall and solemn, and she felt
immediately calm, as if she were seeing a friend whom she had known for her
whole life. He took her bag and they
walked to his truck with a picture of a tree on the side. He drove her to his home, a Victorian
three-story building with a weeping willow in the front yard and a latticework
arbor in the back. Dogwoods with white
flowering branches and clustered birch trees and impatiens and peonies. All this he had put in the ground with his
hands.
They went to
dinner at a small restaurant near his house and had wine with their vegetable
risotto and Sorrow grew softer and less afraid.
Kindness held her hand a bit awkwardly on the walk home. Back at his house, he kissed her cheek and
handed her a fresh towel; she took a bath and got in bed in an attic room with
antique wooden furniture and a Persian rug the color of a good Syrah, and slept
heavily as if she had drunk the whole bottle of wine.
In the morning,
Kindness took Sorrow out for oat and corn meal waffles with fresh berries and
then they walked around the arboretum as a soft rain fell. Kindness volunteered once a week there,
teaching first graders about plants. He
showed Sorrow the different forms of weeping trees and opened a pod to reveal
small white seeds hiding inside.
Later, Sorrow went
to a bookstore where she read from her latest graphic novel in the Sliver
Lake series, Saturn’s Return. Young women came up to her with bouquets of
flowers, bottles of pomegranate ginger lime tea, letters written in glitter and
arms covered with tattoos of quotes from her books. Kindness sat quietly in the back and watched
this.
The next day,
Sorrow and Kindness went to the Boston Gardens and walked among the smiling
roses and weeping trees and rode on the lake in a boat shaped like a swan. They went to Fenway Park and bought a Red Sox
jersey for Lennon. They went to the
Museum of Fine Arts; in one room there was a large statue of Quan Yin, paint
faded, palm upraised, long eyes filled with compassion. Sorrow stood before her, trying not to cry,
thinking of Saturn alone in a room with a needle, morning light harsh through
the glass ceiling on his upturned face.
Sorrow wondered if Saturn had been the one dimming the switches or if it
was the poltergeist of her own guilt that had done it.
As night fell
blue, she and Kindness walked the cobblestone streets of an Italian
neighborhood and ate bruschetta and pasta with pesto and then had cannolis for
dessert in a pastry shop with marble tables and the hockey game playing on
large screen TV’s. The Bruins won and
everyone cheered.
“You’re good
luck,” Kindness said.
Back at the
Victorian house, Sorrow took off Laine’s necklace and the tiny charm fell into
the sink. Clink. Sorrow reached down the drain for it and
realizing it was gone, called for Kindness. He came into the bathroom and told
her he would get it for her, not to worry. She stood hovering over him as he
reached in with a pair of chopsticks and tweezers a number of times.
“Maybe you should
go upstairs,” he said kindly and she did; she got in bed and closed her eyes,
visualizing Kindness’s deft hands retrieving the key and heart charm.
He was unable to
do it with the tweezers, so Kindness, who had told her he didn’t want Sorrow to
go back to her best friend without the charm, sawed off the pipe in his
bathroom. She lay upstairs in bed with
her eyes shut tight, waiting for him to come in and say the necklace was gone. Bad
things. But instead, she heard his laugh, gruff and soft.
“You numbskull,”
he said tenderly, entering the room. “It was on the floor.”
He had sawed off
the pipe and then found the charm on the floor!
She jumped up and down beneath him, gripping his shoulders. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Don’t worry,” he
said. “It’s no big deal. I can replace
the pipe. It’s just a small piece of
plastic. I’m just glad you have your
charm. Nothing was lost or broken and no one was hurt. Nothing bad happened. ”
That night she
left the guest room, crept barefoot through the darkened house, got into his
cherry wood bed and nestled against him.
His body felt tense but warm and she imagined that his heart, beating
loud in his chest, was larger than other hearts she had known. He lifted her face to his and kissed her firm
and soft on the mouth and between kisses they spoke, though they did not make
love. They spoke about being alone for a
long time, and forgetting how to touch another person and about how far apart they
lived and how sometimes love could feel like death and that perhaps, if you got
it right, in the end, death could feel like love.
“All I know is
that, when it’s time, I don’t want to hang around messing with dimmer
switches,” Sorrow said.
Bless
you, Saturn. Rest in peace.
She flew back to
L.A. the next morning, leaving behind the winning team and the swan boats, the
dogwoods like clouds and the rugs like wine.
Blue heart strung around her neck on a chain, the key dangling down.
There are no happy
endings, with only good things, because we all, eventually, die.
For the same
reason, perhaps, depending on what you believe, there are no sad endings.
