Happy Family Part 13

Call Me Ishmael.

Disaster! We are robbed; someone stole the car from Montclair. I should call the police, the insurance? Tell me what to do," Cici shouts into the phone. Cheri thinks, I knew it, I just knew this would happen.

"Mother," Cheri says, interrupting her free fall of fretting. "Cici! It's not stolen. I know where it is."

"You know? Why you not say something?"

"Michael borrowed it. It's been sitting there for years unused; it's not like you need it, so just calm down." It takes a moment for this to register with Cici.

"Your husband stole my automobile? Why you no tell me?"

"It's not stealing, it's borrowing," Cheri says. "It's safe and you'll get it back, so whatever you do, don't call the police. I'll take care of it."

"He is a wolf in cheap clothing, always so nice to my face. What he uses it for? It is my property and I do not want any-body using it. Where is it, you tell me right now."

"You're overreacting, as always. It's just a car, Mother, he'll return it in perfect condition, please don't worry."

"Who are you to say what is and is not important? You think this is funny? You no tell me where it is, I will tell the police and they will stop him."

"Cici, I can't take this c.r.a.p right now. You're concerned about a G.o.dd.a.m.ned car and meanwhile Michael's got cancer." Cheri stops herself from saying more. She knew she couldn't put off telling Cici forever but she hadn't planned on breaking the news this way. "It's in his pancreas. Which is bad, and he's not doing well."

"Cancer," Cici says quietly. "Where is this pancreas?"

"It's behind the stomach. I didn't want to tell you and have you worry," Cheri says. She also didn't want to have to answer her mother's endless questions or deal with her fear.

"Why he not get the surgery to remove the cancer like they did for Cookie?"

"It's not in a place where it can be removed. Look, just tell me you won't call the police about the car. Don't screw this up for Michael."

"What? I am in the city doing nothing and you take my property, you no tell me why or that your husband he is sick with the cancer, and I screw up? Why you no tell me? Your father, he would not like that."

"I didn't care what he thought when he was alive, so I certainly don't care what he might have thought now that he's dead. This isn't about you or Sol."

Cheri is angry that she allowed herself to be caught in the crosshairs of her mother's myopia. Cici's helplessness infuriates her and makes her cruel. It doesn't help that Cici's call came on the heels of her learning through a colleague that Samuelson was in Was.h.i.+ngton presenting a list of locations in Iraq that needed to be protected, number one being the Iraq museum. If she weren't benched, waiting on word from the academic gestapo, she could be adding her voice to the protest, taking part in something meaningful. Her heart feels like it's one of John Paul Whatever Number's squeaky toys, and she doesn't have any more Ativan refills left. She'd called Dr. Vega, who, true to her word, wouldn't give her more Band-Aids without seeing her for another session. Too bad that among Michael's cornucopia of new meds there wasn't anything Cheri could use.

Michael has been in the hospital since the funeral two weeks ago. They'd put a stent in to drain the bile and that had stopped the jaundice, but the cancer has metastasized to his liver. The doctors brought up chemo, but Michael's response was "Appreciate that it's never too late to nuke, but I'm still going to pa.s.s." The Gonzalez regimen had gotten him this far-the clinic would continue to adjust his enzymes and supplements-and he was sticking with it. With steadfast resolve, Michael insisted he would do things his way, and finally the doctors had no choice but to discharge him. But as he and Cheri approached their street, he let out a deep groan. "Are you okay? Should I pull over?" Cheri asked. Michael's face was painted with fear and he buried his head in his hands and began to weep. They sat in front of their house for what felt like a long time; she made little circles on his back until he pulled himself together. "Okay, I'm done," he announced. But they both knew a corner had been turned; Michael's homecoming was the beginning of the end.

"If you can't go on the road, the road will come to you," Bertrand said, invoking his virile magic. Like Michael, he seemed to deal with his grief by throwing himself back into his work. It was as if he'd clapped his hands and the Oompa-Loompas converted HMS Base Camp into a set. Giaccomo, Michael's cameraman, was suddenly everywhere at once, subjecting every detail of their lives to his lens. His very un.o.btrusiveness made his work more insidious. Cheri didn't like to be photographed under normal circ.u.mstances; it made her self-conscious and provoked the half smile everyone thought was a smirk. Jessica had launched a website for the film and chatted with Michael by phone daily about their social media outreach. But the good news was she'd gone back to wherever she came from, most likely a college out of state.

"You wanted him to be working and not beading." Taya's voice blasted through the phone. "It took cancer to kick his a.s.s into gear and turn him back into the man you fell in love with, that's why you're upset. Listen, go back to that shrink. You need to talk to someone who specializes in this kind of thing. You're so not a Jew."

In response to Cheri's silence, Taya continues on: "Cheri. Talk to the shrink. Because, unlike me, who does nothing but obsess and talk about myself all day, you actually have real issues you're dealing with. Hold on a sec, this f.u.c.king guy's about to take my parking s.p.a.ce. Hey, no-"

Silence confirms they've been cut off. Cheri could have argued that her distrust of shrinks sprang from her being a cop and having to pa.s.s psych evaluations, some while amped on amphetamines, rather than from her not being Jewish, but Taya's point was made.

It wasn't as if Cheri shunned all forms of help. She'd had numerous online sorties with pancreatic-cancer support groups where people told one another "I'm praying for you" and swapped stories about how their husbands' t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es swelled up like grapefruits at the end due to a salt imbalance. So that's what they had to look forward to. She'd even gone with Michael to a visualization group for people with cancer at the hospital. She detested consciousness-raising, especially in a herd n.o.body would volunteer to join, but when Michael wanted to go, she went along.

She sat with Michael in a circle of strangers, eyes closed, imagining their diseased organs to the beat of a therapist's word drum. But instead of visualizing Michael's pancreas, she had an image of him from the first vacation they took together, Michael singing "My Cherie Amour" like Stevie Wonder, his gray chest hair matted with salt, holding a trail of silvery fish in one hand, a Cuban cigar in the other. "Cherie amour," he croons as he sloshes out of the boat and wades to sh.o.r.e with long strides, a pair of local Portuguese fishermen in tow. "We got your breakfast!" He was her Diego Rivera, her Hemingway, her Marc Bolan. The memory made her bone-crus.h.i.+ngly sad, but the exercise seemed to cheer Michael, which was the point. "You should try the caregivers' support group," the therapist had said afterward, handing her a flyer. "They have much better snacks."

She thought about calling Dr. Vega again as Taya had suggested. There was something comforting about her silk blouses with the bows at the top and her fernlike plants. Despite her frugality with the scripts, Cheri liked her. They'd have the same conversation about Cheri going on some daily antidepressant with a name like Relieva. The commercials featured people balled up in bed, then suddenly out in a park playing Frisbee with a cute puppy. Why not show a homeless guy sitting in his own feces saying, "Homelessness is no problem since I've been on Relieva"? The last time she'd seen Dr. Vega, she didn't even know about Michael's diagnosis. Even with the Ativan she hadn't been protected from emotional surges and she has to steel herself for what she knows is coming.

Dr. Marlene Vega leans forward in her chair. "Why did you come here today, Cheri?"

"Honestly, I need more Ativan."

"I can give you a script but that's not going to resolve anything, and I think you know that. Underneath the anxiety is loss. You've got to grieve; if you don't, it will keep showing up in other ways. There are no shortcuts. The only way to really address what's going on with you is to acknowledge it and talk about it."

Cheri hesitates, contemplating what lurks behind and beneath her usually impenetrable facade. Giving it form makes it more powerful. "I have all of this knowledge," she finally begins. "You want to know about ancient funeral rites-in any culture-I'm all over that. I can talk about death mythically, religiously, contextually. But when it comes down to dealing with it in a real person-my husband-I don't know where to begin."

"Your father died unexpectedly. How did you deal with his death?"

"On a literal level? Great. I identified the body, made the funeral arrangements, coordinated with the executor of his will. My mother was a wreck so I handled everything. Crisis brings out the best in me. What I couldn't figure out was what to do about his other family. I spent years keeping my mouth shut to protect Cici; I didn't want it all to blow up now. How would they even know he died?"

"You didn't tell me the details, only that your parents were happy together at the end. Do you think Sol ended it with the other woman?"

"I didn't know. How would I? After I outed Sol I wanted nothing to do with him or my parents' dysfunction. All I knew was that the last three years of their marriage was a glorious revival. Sol stayed home with Cici and served the Great Unwashed by volunteering at a walk-in clinic. I a.s.sumed he'd broken things off with Catherine. That's her name: Catherine Webster. I looked up the t.i.tle of the house in Rye after Sol died-it was under her name. I thought about writing to her and her son over the years but I never did. Now, I had a real reason to contact them. I even paid to get their e-mail address; I thought it would be less invasive than a phone call. But what could I say? 'Hi, there, I'm your half sibling. I'm sorry to tell you but Sol Matzner just dropped dead carrying a turkey across Eighty-first Street.' Maybe they didn't even know him as Sol Matzner. These are the things you have to think about with someone who led a double life."

"So you didn't contact them."

Cheri flashes on the image of the little boy in his snowsuit reaching his arms up to Sol. "I cut out the New York Times obituary, put it in an envelope, but at the last minute, I didn't send it. Maybe if I had been a better person I would have, but I didn't think it was my burden to bear. I looked for them at the funeral. The boy would have been in college. Ironically, he'd have been twenty-the same age I was when I saw Sol shoveling snow that day. I knew I'd recognize him. They didn't come. That's when I felt this deep pit of...I don't know, longing. I'd never wanted to know them," Cheri says, "but suddenly I wished I did."

Dr. Vega gives a consoling nod. "You may have been an adult when you discovered Sol's secret but you were also his child. All children long for a sense of family. However fractured yours was, these people were connected to you. They were the other piece of the puzzle."

"I was really worried that Sol might have mentioned the other family in his will. I wouldn't have cared about the money, but my mother still didn't know anything about them-she's always lived in Ciciworld. She had her fantasy about our family; it was all she had. I wanted to protect her."

"And were they in the will?"

"No," Cheri says, remembering her meeting with Sol's attorney, how he chose his words with the discretion of a man used to carrying other men's secrets. "But he took care of them financially, in a separate arrangement, neat and clean so Cici would never find out. But Sol's lawyer clearly knew that I knew about the other family because he went out of his way to tell me that Sol had ended his 'other relations.h.i.+p' but had insisted on honoring his obligations. It's not like I wanted to know the details, but I was glad that he'd provided for his child. It wasn't that poor kid's fault that he was born to Sol any more than it was mine that Sol adopted me."

"So Sol provided for his biological son and he didn't provide for you? Only for Cici?"

"No, actually. His will was extremely complicated, but bottom line: Cici got all of his a.s.sets-the house, the apartments, the jewelry-but he left me his patents in a separate trust."

"That's interesting," Dr. Vega says noncommittally, "let's get back to that in a minute. You said you'd had a moment of wanting to know Sol's other family. Have you thought about contacting his son? Do you know his name?"

"Thinking about him is like thinking about my biological parents. If I contacted him, then what? I'm not going to get to know him as a sibling. What's the point? I can a.s.sure you that his version of Sol-the one I saw shoveling snow that day-would be very different from the version I grew up with. He'd say how loving and supportive a father he was, and I'd be like, Well, not really, kid. And what would that say about me? Plus, he won't know why Sol led a double life any more than I do. Truth is, we see our parents only as our parents-that one particular role-and whatever damage they do in that capacity is permanent."

"That may be true, but you're also suggesting that Sol's biological son would see his father in a purely positive light, as opposed to what you experienced. And that this would say something about you. What would it say?"

There is a long pause. Cheri looks down and takes a deep breath.

"That I wasn't good enough," Cheri says quietly.

"And this other child was?"

"That's what I felt when I found out about him. Jonathan." She rarely even thinks of her half brother by name. Nor does she wonder where he lives or if he's married or whether he has a family of his own. These things would all make him more real.

"But you also said that Sol left you his life's work, his proudest accomplishments. Not just his money, but his patents."

"His lawyer couldn't believe I wasn't thrilled. I'd never have to work again," Cheri says. "But it felt like a payoff for my silence."

"Maybe it was Sol's way of making amends."

"I don't think so. I think he knew it would p.i.s.s me off."

Dr. Vega raises an eyebrow. "You were talking about how you'd felt as a child. It was very vulnerable. Then you went right to anger about the will. Anger's a lot easier for you, but underneath the anger there's a lot of sadness, the little girl in you who doesn't feel worthy of her father's love. Growing up, you didn't feel safe. You haven't known many safe places where you can be vulnerable, have you?"

There is another long pause. "No, I guess I haven't," Cheri says.

"Dealing with Michael's cancer puts you in a vulnerable place. You're safe here to be in that place."

"What if I don't want to be vulnerable," Cheri says, crossing her arms over her chest, her voice returning to its usual volume. "I feel like a child having a tantrum, but I don't want to deal with this s.h.i.+t. I. Don't."

"Our work is to forgive ourselves first. For all the anger, pain, and disappointment we lug around every day. For not doing enough or being enough. Then forgive others: Michael, Sol, Cici. You know the list. And take responsibility. We create our own reality with our choices in relations.h.i.+ps, what we say about ourselves to ourselves."

"I can take responsibility for choosing Michael, but not for Sol. I didn't have a choice there."

"It has no bearing from a psychological standpoint, but you probably know there's a school of Buddhist thought that says we choose our parents before birth."

"It would be very screwed up of me to choose birth parents who gave me up, and then Sol and Cici-a real glutton for punishment," Cheri says with a smirk.

"It could also be a perfect lens through which to view the lessons you've learned, and are learning. We can look at everything we go through without judging it as good or bad but as an opportunity for growth. Our parents all leave us in the end; we start separating from them from the moment we're born. Forgiveness won't change the past, but it can change the future."

"'It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,'" Cheri says. "If only it was as easy as you and Saint Francis make it sound."

While Michael's engaged with Bertrand and his edits during the day, Cheri retreats into the solitude of her den, noodling with Peter's photocopies. Translating is an occult connection between worlds, a crossed wire that allows her to communicate with a scribe in old Babylonia, a man who, thousands of years ago, pressed his stylus into wet clay. What was he saying? She seems to have found a fragment of a letter that pertains to a funeral in the ancient city of Hebron. Genesis has Abraham born in the Mesopotamian city of Ur and being buried in Hebron. Since the discovery of these tablets eleven years ago, rumors swirled in archaeology circles that they could prove the existence of the biblical patriarch Abraham. The fragment mentions a funeral procession accorded to a man of great stature and respect with his two sons in attendance, though there are no name identifiers. Could this be the kind of evidence that fueled those rumors? The kind of once-in-a-lifetime find every scholar dreams of running across. Of course, it's all wild speculation and conjecture without the pieces of the Tell Muqayyar tablets in Baghdad.

Are you Isaac or Ishmael? It occurs to her that in all her years of posing that question to her students, she'd never applied it to herself. Cheri has always identified with Abraham's outcast son, Ishmael. But her conversation with Dr. Vega about Sol's will has made her rethink her family mythos. She heeded her call to become a cop. Like Ishmael, she couldn't have gone farther afield from her father's kingdom. She would have cast Jonathan as Isaac. She suspected he'd be a doctor, a chip-off-the-old-Sol block in his tennis whites. The Chosen Son. Biological progeny trumps adopted misfit. But then why did Sol leave her his patents? Was it atonement? She remembers their lunches when she was in college, how she'd glimpsed who Sol was before he was her father. Sol had also been an Ishmael. He heeded the call to marry Cici and was disinherited, exiled from his tribe. Did he leave her his patents so as not to do to her what his parents had done to him?

It's the afternoon and she hasn't even had breakfast. Is this the soiled linen of working at home? Too much time to think, wearing the same clothes for days, forgetting to do up her belt after going to the bathroom and then thinking, Why bother? Soon she'll be that woman at the post office dressed in black jeans and a work s.h.i.+rt, middle-aged with no husband or kids, just parcels to post. She looks out the window and is startled to see Michael at the far end of the lawn. It is sunny but cold, and he's wearing sweats and a wool cap. His arms extend above his head, palms facing each other, fingertips reaching toward the sky. He goes through a series of poses: bending over in a swimmer's stance, leaning on one leg, standing with his hands folded as if in prayer. She's seen him do yoga hundreds of times, has come to think of it as yet another practice that leads to avoidance rather than integration. Yet here he is, alone on a cold winter's day, saluting the sun. He stands in this moment, on this day, in grat.i.tude, humility, in spite of. We are capable of such great acts. We rise up even when our legs are almost too weak to hold us. We claw our way out of darkness and isolation with just the memory of light to guide us. We find ways to practice our faith even when we're hunted because of it. We are all so vulnerable, so close to nothingness, and yet we survive.

It fills her with a reverence for the terrible and beautiful experience of being alive. She closes her eyes and thinks she can see the daisy chain of all beings, trees and wind and sea, sunlight and the reflected light of stars that burned out long ago. She imagines lines like arteries and veins, the spinning helix of DNA forming an infinite superhighway of energy running through her hands and into Michael's and up beyond s.p.a.ce. Michael loses his balance and folds himself into the child's pose. Cheri is ashamed of how quickly she goes to judgment. She's ashamed of all the conceptions-right and wrong-she's ever had about this perfectly familiar and yet still unknown man. Oh, Michael, she thinks, I'm sorry.

Michael.

The thesis of The Palmist was turning out to be true. n.o.body was able to tell Michael when he was going to die. He had proven his doctors wrong and outlived their prediction by three months without chemo or radiation. Whether this was due to the Gonzalez regimen, an act of sheer will, or a fluke of nature was anyone's guess. But it was getting harder and harder to manage his pain-the latest episode landed him in the ICU. A foul hospital patient, Michael was sullen and snapped at the staff. He turned his frustration on Cheri, yelling, "Just get me the f.u.c.k out of here." The doctors made it very clear that Michael had only two options: he could stay in the ICU with IV nutrition or go home with hospice care. Michael had already made his medical directives clear and given Cheri power of attorney. As much as it frightened Cheri to leave the safety net of the hospital, she knew she had no choice but to get him the f.u.c.k out of there.

Cheri was ill-equipped to be a nurse. As a child she'd fantasized about being a ninja warrior and leading underground revolutions against Orwellian forces. She was physically fearless, but being a nurse required facing very different enemies, the kind Cheri's time as a cop didn't prepare her for. Some people were natural caretakers, fluffing a pillow without disturbing the sick person, never saying things like, "Well, if I'm doing everything wrong, why don't you get someone else to wipe your a.s.s?" But she was flummoxed by Michael's impatience and demands, all of which made her feel incompetent. In the hospital she was always in the way of someone else trying to do his job. She dropped ice chips on Michael's chest and had missed the lesson on how to properly apply a cool compress to the forehead. She wouldn't want somebody as clumsy and clueless taking care of her. So when the option of having a full-time nurse was raised by the hospice administrator "for an extra fee, of course," she said, "Yes, whatever it costs." Michael was right; perhaps she would have been a s.h.i.+tty mother. But at least she could make sure Michael had everything he needed to be comfortable. He had to know she was dipping into her trust fund for all his medical expenses, but he never asked where the money was coming from. Michael's silence on the subject was an undeniable sign of just how bad things were getting.

The nurse, Robyn, came with an electric hospital bed, an emergency kit, and a j.a.panese husband who was a paramedic and a former chef who worked alongside Robyn in his off-hours. Robyn told Cheri, "I've got five minutes to win your trust. That's an established fact in my line of work. I am here to make Michael comfortable and help him transition with dignity and peace. That means keeping him out of pain and managing his symptoms." She pointed to a small silver cylinder with a black b.u.t.ton on top-it looked like the clicker Cheri used to use to move through slides while lecturing at the university. "This pump will deliver medication at higher doses than they give at the hospital; Michael will control how much morphine he gets and when. Now I want to set things up, so show me whatever room he's most comfortable in and we'll get started."

In no time, Michael was set up in his former office, which Cheri now dubbed HMS Sickbay. Cheri knew Michael would want to spend his last days in the place where he was the most creative, surrounded by his movie posters, The Palmist art, Indian rugs, Sit with your fear and find your love notecard, guitar, and photographs from various decades, including several of Michael and Cheri. With Robyn around and his finger on the morphine joystick, he and Cheri finally slept through the night. Robyn was Mary Poppins and Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy rolled into one six-foot-tall dreadlocked black woman. She briefed Cheri on the IV lines and the emergency kit filled with drugs to combat nausea, anxiety, fever, and pain, and told her what to expect in Michael's last days. Cheri was well aware that in other centuries people had rituals and customs for dying, written guides to ars moriendi. The Sumerians had a checklist of things to do before burying their family members underneath their homes; they had incantations to sing, grave goods and offerings to gather, rituals to perform. All Cheri had to rely on was A Caregiver's Guide to the Dying Process. She relished the irony that you would never be able to recall the two largest events of your life: your own birth and death. The descriptions of the most elemental transitions of existence were lost between worlds. There were near-death experiences of going into the light, but those sounded too much like alien abductions for Cheri's taste.

The house was now ensconced in the dome of illness; visitors-the few Michael wanted to see-seemed to automatically lower their voices. Cheri's world revolved around Michael's bodily minutiae while the rest of the world spun on and had larger life-and-death issues. The war in Iraq was days away.

Cheri has stopped waiting to hear from Samuelson about the review board's "findings"; their endless deliberations have dragged on week after week. She is in the kitchen making herself and Robyn coffee when her cell buzzes. "I only have a moment. But I wanted to be the first to tell you." Samuelson's voice is laced with self-congratulation and m.u.f.fled by sounds from an airport. "The review board did not find sufficient merit for discrimination. Your faculty suspension is relieved." Cheri can barely process the news before Samuelson goes on. "However..." He pauses, and Cheri waits for the other shoe to drop. "You will be required to restructure your curricula and have it approved by the committee before resuming your teaching duties. We obviously don't want further complaints of this nature. A detailed report is forthcoming." As he is rus.h.i.+ng off the phone, Cheri just manages to ask about what's been done to protect the museum in Baghdad. "We have warned the DOD. I have told them in no uncertain terms that the museum is the number-one site they must protect. They have a.s.sured us that troops will be placed throughout the city as soon as it's been secured. The museum is closed so we aren't likely to get further communication for a while. I will keep you informed."

This dire a.s.sessment takes a moment to sink in. What kills her the most is the timing: she's been waiting for endless months to be exonerated and now the tablets are in lockdown, behind the doors of a closed museum, in a city being bombed and invaded. But at least she was exonerated; she is not going to lose this career ignominiously, as she lost the last one. She would have expected to feel not just relief but elation. Of course, her liberation comes with handcuffs. The committee's report would be voluminous, quoting the university's bylaws to justify the censors.h.i.+p they'd inflict on her. She can't begin to think about the implications this has for her future as a professor. No time now to think about the news, good or bad; Michael is at the end of the end. Relief, when it comes, is a whisper.

When Cheri goes into Michael's sickbay, he's sitting up in bed working on number three on Robyn's to-do list: put your affairs in order. "What do you want to do with this?" Robyn holds up a striped cape.

"Bertrand got me that for my birthday a few years ago. It's a Tibetan snow cape. Mark that with a red sticker to give to Bertrand, please." As Robyn puts a red sticker on the cape and sets it aside with a stack of other color-coded possessions they've sorted through that morning, Cheri remembers itemizing their wedding presents the same way. Back then they were deciding what to exchange and what to keep. Some of Michael's friends have already made their journey to say good-bye, leaving with boxes and wet eyes. Filming for The Palmist has concluded, so Giaccomo wrapped his visit by pulling Cheri aside and asking what Michael had done with all his drug samples from the apothecary cabinet. For a moment, Cheri wished she had a few baggies to hand out to Michael's loyal followers. Bertrand was the hardest one to watch make his final descent down the stairs. It made her throat clutch with sadness. "Thank you for taking care of him," she'd said quietly as he leaned on her for support.

"Okay," Cheri says now, turning to Michael. "What's next?"

Ever since Robyn arrived, Michael seemed to be doing better. Cheri had been reluctant to taper off his G-tube feedings, despite Robyn's explanation that Michael's body wasn't absorbing much of the nutrition anyway and stopping the feeding would decrease his bloating and make him more comfortable. But Cheri had done it, and Robyn had been right-the difference was notable.

Today Michael has color in his sunken cheeks, and his eyes look clear. He'd felt rejuvenated enough yesterday to sit at his desk and edit the final footage of The Palmist. He moved around his office holding on to chair backs and other objects for support, calling out, "Dead man walking," and he weakly suggested going out for dinner. "Twin Anchors," he said. "Maybe I'd have a bite of ribs just for the taste." Cheri smiled. Until Michael got sick, she hadn't realized how attached she was to the cycle of meals. His inability to ingest pained her.

"I'll go out for my dinner break now and leave you chickens to it," Robyn says. "While everyone's feeling good, this is the time to do number four on the list." Robyn taps her finger four times on the table. Cheri knows this is the number for funeral preparations. Years ago, when death was purely theoretical, they'd jokingly agreed that if either of them ever became more vegetable than meat, the other one would put him or her out to sea on an ice floe. "Careful, there, don't get any ideas about committing senilicide when I'm just plain old," Michael had said.

"Whatever you do, I am not going in Sol's plot." Michael settles his back against pillows and rearranges his IV pole.

"Wait a second. Do you honestly think, even in your wildest imagination, I'd suggest burying you in Sol's plot?" Sol's will provided for a family plot, with s.p.a.ces reserved for Michael and Cheri; they had laughed at the notion of family members who didn't like one another in life being confined together for eternity.

Michael is about to say something flippant and then stops. "Forget it. I can't get it up to Sol-bash. One thing being a dead man walking teaches you is that none of it matters. The petty bulls.h.i.+t, the squabbles." He dismisses it all with a wave of his hand. "Burial is out. I don't want the whole pomp and circ.u.mstance of marble and headstone unveilings. Sign me up for fire."

"Okay. So cremation," Cheri says. "Do you want a rabbi or ceremony or any of that?"

"No service, no funeral. n.o.body reading poetry or eulogizing. Throw me a party and screen The Palmist. I've gone over my cut with Jonah and Bertrand, so when they say it's ready, go with it. I made a list of the booze and food to serve; play Hendrix, and-it's all written down, along with a list of who to invite. Make it an Irish wake minus 'Danny Boy' and the other maudlin c.r.a.p. People should get loaded and have a good time." Michael looks up at her. "That means you too, Cheri." Their eyes meet for a long moment. Cheri offers him a sad little salute.

Michael continues: "That's all I want. The instructions are in the yellow file on the desk, along with the name of the place to do the cremation. There is something, though, that I need you to do, to promise me."

"Sure," she says.

"I need you to make sure that my body is really cremated and not dumped in a storage unit. This place has its own crematorium so it's not outsourced. They all claim to be ethical, but who knows what happens when n.o.body is looking."

Cheri thinks that sounds a bit paranoid but bites her tongue.

Sensing her skepticism, Michael adds, "Remember that cremation scam in Georgia last year? They found bodies in an ex-con's garage, piled up like in the Holocaust."

"How would I check? It's not like I can go in with you."

"You watch," he says, "from behind a window or a part.i.tion. They let you if you request it in advance. It's also good for you, by the way. Helps with closure."

"To watch your body go into the furnace?"