{Early one morning, I entered Lacond’s room to find a fine misting of glistening black spores clinging to the white sheets, and no sign of a body. The sheets smelled vaguely of lime. I knew what had happened. It had taken so long to happen that I didn’t feel grief in that moment. I just felt a sense of purpose.
{I rolled up the sheets and walked with them down to the River Moth. As I walked, I scooped up black spores in my hand and let them fall. On Albumuth Boulevard. On the cobblestones of the Religious Quarter. Smeared them along the walls in the abandoned Bureaucratic Quarter. Abraded the bricks of H&S headquarters with them. Dropped them on bushes and on park benches.
{When I got to the river, I tossed the sheets into the water and watched them drift and unwind, the last spores, drunk with moisture, disappearing from sight.
{Of course, I saved a vial of the spores to spread underground. No part of Ambergris was going to get rid of James as easily in death as in life.}
Somewhere, somewhen, in the last year, my {our!} mother also died, out in her mansion by the river. Her neighbors found her sitting in a chair, staring out at the water. She looked happy, they said, but no one likes dying, so I don’t see how that could be true. She looked as if she understood everything, they said. Or, at least, understood more than I ever did, despite my restless searching.
The strange thing is, the night before she died, the telephone rang at about three in the morning. When I answered it, there was no voice on the other end. Maybe it was a wrong number. Maybe she had decided there was nothing left to say. Maybe she just wanted to hear my voice before the end. I don’t know.
This was in the spring. The trees all around her home were in bloom—white-and-pink blossoms that drooped heavily from the branches. The lawns strewn with petals. It didn’t seem like the time for a funeral. The scent of the flowers drove out the scent of death.
Duncan and I accompanied the casket back to Stockton, over the River Moth by barge, and then by mule-drawn carriage. We buried her next to our father in the old communal cemetery next to the library where our father had spent so much of his time. There weren’t many people there for the ceremony: a few relatives, the Truffidian priest, an old friend of Dad’s—an ancient fossil of a man, stooped, bent, and a little confused {throughout the ceremony, the clasps of his suspenders hung over his shoulders, where he had flung them up while using the gents’ room}—and a couple of young people whose parents had known Mom. Standing there, surrounded by tombstones and bright green grass, it didn’t quite seem real. It didn’t seem true.
We didn’t stay in Stockton long—we had no connection to it any longer. It seemed like a foreign place, somewhere we’d never visited before. {Ambergris will do that to you—it becomes so central to your life that any other place is a faint echo, a pale reflection, a cliché in search of originality.}
When we arrived back at her mansion, we realized how much of a storehouse it had become—she had so filled it up with things, made by her, bought by her, and placed by her, that it almost didn’t seem as if she had left. {And yet, as it turned out, most of it had been stored on behalf of other people, the house emptying with each new relative who stumbled inside.}
“She was always so distant,” Duncan said, as we stood in the hallway looking at all of the portraits and photographs of family members she had collected over the years. We had an entire constellation of relatives we could seek out—some we’d met at the funeral—but, really, why bother now? It was too late. We’d been taken to a foreign place, and since then all the old bonds had snapped like rotted rope. The people we’d met in Stockton were just polite faces now, and I only resented that a little bit. Part of me was relieved to excuse myself from all the work it would have taken to hold on to those relationships. Better that they remain photographs, vague smiles and handshakes and fondly remembered hugs from childhood. We had been cast adrift by father’s death, and we had taken to it, in our way.
“She was always so distant,” Duncan said again. It took me a while to hear him, in that empty and cavernous place, surrounded by the images of so many dead people. There were as many tombstones framed on the mantel in that place as puncturing the earth in the Stockton graveyard.
When I did hear him, I turned toward him with a look of irritation on my face.
“She wasn’t distant. We were distant. We were odd and surly and distant. We crawled through tunnels and we didn’t talk much and we were always alone in our own thoughts. Not much of a family, if you think about it. We never knew how to be there for anyone else. So how do we know?” I said, and by now I’d raised my voice. What did it matter in that place? It would just echo on forever, the sound captured in the swirls of the staircase, floating down into the flooded basement. “How do we know it wasn’t us?”
Duncan’s face scrunched up and turned red, and I could tell he was fighting off tears. It was difficult to know, though, because most of the time he couldn’t produce tears anymore—or if he did, they were purple tears, semi-solid, that hurt as they slid out of his tear ducts. It’s a measure of how accustomed I’d grown to Duncan that this didn’t seem odd to me.
“I hardly ever visited her,” he said. {I meant I hardly ever saw her. I did visit her, but I never saw her. I tunneled up through a dry corner of the basement and left her gifts from the underground—things I thought she might appreciate. I’m sure she knew they came from me.}
“She didn’t mind. She was a solitary person. That was her choice.”
Before Dad Died, she had been as sunny and well-adjusted as the rest of us. {We were never well-adjusted, Janice.} But that death had killed us all as surely as it had killed our father. How could we deny that?
Surrounded by the awful weight of Mom’s things—the rugs, the paintings, the sculptures, the books, the bric-a-brac of collecting gone wrong—it seemed all too apparent. While the river, oblivious, gurgled and chuckled to itself outside the window. {Everyone always tells you that you become more alone as you get older. People write about it in books. They shout it out on street corners. They mumble it in their sleep. But it’s always a shock when it happens to you.}
We couldn’t keep the house. {How could we keep the house? We made all the inquiries, but it was impossible—Mom had been too much in debt, her money so ancient it didn’t really exist except as run-down property.} And we couldn’t keep much from the house {because it wasn’t ours!}. But I couldn’t bear to lose the hallway of portraits and photographs. Somehow, to lose the only tenuous connection between ourselves and those people we should have known felt as wrong as seeking them out, trying to enter into a relationship with strangers. {Those polite protestations of “we should make plans to get together,” which no one really ever believes, as we stood there by the gravesite in Stockton. Why did I make that effort for strangers and not for my own mother? I truly don’t know. Unless I had truly believed that she would outlive me. Or that she had died a long time ago.}