Eddie nodded. “When the time comes, I want you to promise to tell me I’m dead. Maybe ask Leda to do it, too. And Henry, get him to do it. There’s a kid who’d be happy to tell someone they’re dead.”
“What about Jonathan?”
He considered Jonathan for the part. “I’m very fond of your husband, but I don’t want him to think I’m a fool.”
“What if he thinks I’m a fool, telling you you’re dead after you’re dead?”
“It’s not like you go around the house saying it. In fact, I thinkyou can do the whole thing in your head, like a prayer. You can be praying to me: Eddie, you’re dead now. Trust me. You’re going to be fine.”
An enormous sadness came over me then, less like a blackbird passing the window and more like a pterodactyl, its great, leathery wings blocking the light. “Has Dr. Ocean told you something?”
“This isn’t aboutmydeath,” he said. “Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s more about death in general. You can think of it as your death, too. Once we’re comfortable with death, we’ll do a better job with our lives.”
“What have you been reading?”
“The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”
“Is it cultural appropriation to want to die like a Tibetan?”
Eddie looked at me sternly. “I want to do a good job,” he said. “I’d like my transition to be peaceful. I’m asking you for help.”
“Are you going to ask Skip and Polly to tell you you’re dead?”
Eddie ignored me. “This is what we’re going to do, right now, we’re going to practice. We’re going to tell Lucas Ekker that he’s dead and he needs to move on.”
“But you said it needed to happen in the first few days and he’s been dead for months now. The mushrooms have already finished him off.”
“This is about his spirit, not his body. Let’s assume his spirit is stuck in the bardo. Even if we’re late, we’re not going to do him any harm. And if we’re not late and he still needs guidance, we’ll be providing an invaluable service. I imagine that no one has checked in on his soul’s transition.”
“What if he’s not there?”
“Then we’ve wasted ten minutes of our lives that would haveotherwise been spent sitting here. What difference does it make?”
“Okay,” I said, but I still had my doubts. “Are we doing this aloud?”
He shook his head and closed his eyes. “No, go ahead, start.” And that was that. He was already thinking of Lucas.
Eddie had gone to a Buddhism seminar two weeks ago, the same week Jonathan and I had rented a house in Wellfleet. We had invited Eddie to go to the beach with us, but he said no. The speaker was someone he was excited to hear, someone whose books Eddie had read. Now I couldn’t remember who it was. I looked at Eddie in his giant chemo chair, the slowly collapsing plastic bag suspended overhead from a silver pole, the slender tubing bringing the poison into his body through the median cubital vein. Do your work, I prayed to the poison. Beat the odds, I prayed to Eddie. And then, because I’d been asked, I went forward in my own imagination to find my mother’s third husband. I didn’t think I was supposed to see him, and yet I did. I went into the backyard of the Winchester house that same late April morning he had died. My mother was sleeping, and I was the one who went outside to see what had taken him so long.
Lucas was in the grass, both of his long legs slightly twisted at uncomfortable angles, his blue chambray shirt and cloth jacket soaked with dew on his left side, the side he was lying on. His eyes were closed and his mouth was open and his white hair—Lucas did have beautiful hair—spread across the black dirt at the edge of the lilac bed. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. I thought I would be meeting him in the bardo, but what did I know about the bardo, or about his spirit for that matter? I knew this man in this body. I knew this yard. That’s what I got.
I lay down beside him. This was my imagination, of course,so it didn’t matter that the grass was wet. All my life I’d kept a distance from him, standing back an extra six inches, twelve inches, from what might be considered normal. What had started as a child’s quiet protest became a space that stayed between us for the rest of our lives. He was never a danger to me. I just couldn’t stand the change. Now I looked at his skin, his nose, his eyelashes, which were white and remarkably long. I put my hand on his shoulder. “You’re dead,” I said to him. “You had a good death, a sudden death but it was fine. Everyone’s fine. You need to stop hanging around now. Mom’s good. She sold the house. The new people need you to leave. We all need you to leave.” I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Goodbye, Lucas.”
I wondered then if Buddy had gotten stuck anywhere, but I doubted it. Buddy loved his life, but he knew it was over.
When I opened my eyes, Eddie was watching me. “How was it?” he asked.
“Perfectly fine. Not what I expected. You?”
“I didn’t really know him, of course. The last time I’d seen Lucas, I was still at Houghton, so he was young then. But I told him we were thinking about him, and I told him he should go.”
“What about Mary Carter?”
“What made you think of Mary Carter?” Eddie asked.
“Death makes me think of Mary Carter. Do you think she was stuck in the bardo? Is that what happened to her?”
He thought about it for a minute. “I keep forgetting you knew her.”
