Emily, Alone Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  TWO-FOR-ONE

  JUST VISITING

  MYSTERIES OF THE BRAIN

  THE VIEW FROM THE FIFTH FLOOR

  CLOSE TO NORMAL

  THE RESURRECTION

  PILGRIMS

  THE BELLE OF THE BALL

  THE DAY OF REST

  KINDRED SPIRITS

  FAMILY PICTURES

  ALL-WHEEL DRIVE

  HIGHWAY ROBBERY

  KLEENEX

  EXTRAVAGANCE

  CHRISTMAS CHEER

  THE BUSIEST DAY OF THE YEAR

  PRESS FOR ASSISTANCE

  THE HOSTESS WITH THE MOSTEST

  EARTHLY POSSESSIONS

  THE GIFT

  HOUSEKEEPING

  UNDER THE WEATHER

  INGRATITUDE

  FORGETFULNESS

  MYSTERY!

  PF

  BEE MINE

  A BAD HABIT

  EXPRESSIONS OF SYMPATHY

  THE DAMAGE

  SPRING AHEAD

  THE FLOWER SHOW

  THE PROBLEM WITH GOOD FRIDAY

  CURIOUS

  THE GROWN-UP TABLE

  POWER OF ATTORNEY

  Chapter 392

  THE CRUELEST MONTH

  ALMOND BLOSSOMS

  DRIVE-BY

  THE VIRTUAL TOUR

  THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS

  THE MYSTERY OF MARCIA COLE

  BETTER OR WORSE?

  WHITE ELEPHANTS

  INNOCENT VICTIMS

  LOVE, EMILY

  THE START OF THE SEASON

  TUBBY TATERS

  CYD CHARISSE

  IMPROVEMENTS

  HARD TO KILL

  OLD HOME DAYS

  EXIT, STAGE LEFT

  ALSO BY STEWART O’NAN

  FICTION

  Songs for the Missing

  Last Night at the Lobster

  The Good Wife

  The Night Country

  Wish You Were Here

  Everyday People

  A Prayer for the Dying

  A World Away

  The Speed Queen

  The Names of the Dead

  Snow Angels

  In the Walled City

  NONFICTION

  Faithful (with Stephen King)

  The Circus Fire

  The Vietnam Reader (editor)

  On Writers and Writing, by John Gardner (editor)

  SCREENPLAY

  Poe

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Stewart O’Nan, 2011 All rights reserved

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  O’Nan, Stewart.

  Emily, alone : a novel / Stewart O’Nan. p. cm.

  Sequel to: Wish you were here.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47606-2

  1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Older women—Fiction. 3. Life change events—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title. PS3565.N316E’.54—dc22 2010035333

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated..

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  For my mother,

  who took me to the bookmobile

  Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life—startling, unexpected, unknown?

  —Virginia Woolf

  TWO-FOR-ONE

  Tuesdays, Emily Maxwell put what precious little remained of her life in God’s and her sister-in-law Arlene’s shaky hands and they drove together to Edgewood for Eat ’n Park’s two-for-one breakfast buffet. The Sunday Post-Gazette, among its myriad other pleasures, had coupons. The rest of the week she might have nothing but melba toast and tea for breakfast, maybe peel herself a clementine for some vitamin C, but the deal was too good to pass up, and served as a built-in excuse to get out of the house. Dr. Sayid was always saying she needed to eat more.

  It wasn’t far—a few miles through East Liberty and Point Breeze and Regent Square on broad streets they knew like old friends—but the trip was a test of Emily’s nerves. Arlene’s eyes weren’t the best, and her attention to the outside world was directly affected by whatever conversation they were engaged in. When she concentrated on a thought, she drove more slowly, making them the object of honking, and once, recently, from a middle-aged woman who looked surprisingly like Emily’s daughter Margaret, the finger.

  “Obviously I must have done something,” Arlene had said.

  “Obviously,” Emily agreed, though she could have cited a whole list. It did no good to criticize Arlene after the fact, no matter how constructively. The best you could do was hold on and not gasp at the close calls.

  In the beginning they’d taken turns, but, honestly, as atrocious as Arlene was, Emily trusted herself even less. Henry had always done the driving in the family. It was a point of pride with him. When he was dying, he insisted on driving to the hospital for his chemo himself. It was only on the way home, with Henry sick and silent beside her, bent over a plastic bowl in his lap, that Emily piloted his massive Olds down the corkscrewing ramps of the medical center’s parking garage, terrified she’d scrape the sides against the scarred concrete walls. For several years she used the old boat to do her solitary errands, never venturing outside of the triangle described by the bank, the library and the Giant Eagle, but after a run-in with a fire hydrant, followed quickly by another with a Duquesne Light truck, she admitted—bitterly, since it went against her innate thriftiness—that maybe taking taxis was the better part of valor. Now the Olds sat out back in the garage with her rusty golf clubs as if decommissioned, the windshield dusty, the tires soft. She wasn’t a fan of the bus, and Arlene had made a standing offer of her Taurus, itself a boxy if less grand antique. The joke among their circle was that she’d become Emily’s chauffeur, though, as that circle shrank, fewer and fewer people knew their history, t
o the point where, having the same last name, they were sometimes introduced by the well-meaning young, at a University Club function or after one of Donald Wilkins’s wonderful organ recitals at Calvary, as sisters, a notion Arlene though not Emily found wildly amusing.

  Today, as always, Arlene was late. It was gray and raining, typical November weather for Pittsburgh, and Emily stood at the living room’s bay window, leaning over the low radiator and holding the sheer curtain aside. The storm window was spotted and dirty. A few weekends ago, her nextdoor neighbor Jim Cole had generously hung them, but he’d failed to clean them properly, and now there was nothing to be done until the spring. She would spend a morning tending to them herself, the way her mother had taught her, with vinegar and water, wiping them streak-free with newsprint, but that was months off.

  Outside, the trees and hedges along Grafton Street were bare and black, and the low sky made it feel like late afternoon instead of morning. The Millers’ was still for sale. Their leaves hadn’t been picked up yet, and lay smothering the yard, a dark, sodden mass. She wondered who would be looking to buy this time of year. The last she’d heard, Kay Miller was in an assisted living place over in Aspinwall, but that had been in August. Emily thought she should visit her, though in truth it was the last thing she wanted to do.

  When she thought of fashionable, flighty Kay Miller in a place like the one in Aspinwall, she couldn’t help but picture Louise Pickering’s final hospital room. The oatmeal bareness, the mechanical bed, the plastic water pitcher with its bent straw on the rollaway table. Consciously, she knew those places could be very nice, just as homey as your own bedroom, or close to it, but the vision of Louise persisted, and the idea that she was at an age where all was stillness and waiting—not true, yet impossible to dismiss.

  She was dying, yes, fine, they all were, by degrees. If Dr. Sayid expected her to be devastated by the idea, that only showed how young he was. There was no point in going into hysterics. It wasn’t the end of the world, just the end of her, and lately she’d come to think that was natural, and possibly something to be desired, if it could be achieved with a modicum of dignity, not pointlessly drawn out, like Louise undergoing all those torturous lastditch procedures because Timothy and Daniel refused to give up. She’d never wanted to be eighty. Practically, she’d never wanted to outlive Henry.

  A stale, metallic heat rose from the radiator, baking her shins. With her car coat buttoned up to her neck and her scarf already tucked in, it was oppressive. She let go of the curtain and turned away.

  On the front hall runner, Rufus sat at attention, staring at the door as if he might open it by sheer mind power.

  “I told you,” Emily said, “you’re not going anywhere. Go lie down. Go.”

  Reluctantly he padded to his spot at the bottom of the stairs and circled twice before collapsing with a huff on the rag rug, his snout pointed toward her.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I’ve got my eye on you too, mister. I don’t want to find anything when I get home. You know what I’m talking about.”

  He looked up at her guiltily, as if he understood, and part of her argued that it wasn’t his fault. Technically he was older than she was, ancient for a springer, and lately he’d taken to sleeping most of the day away, like Duchess before she died. He could also be bad—and he’d never been before—getting into the garbage or gnawing on a chair leg or peeing on the carpet right in front of her, as if he’d gone senile. “What am I going to do with you?” she asked, as she would a child, because there was no answer. She could only scold him and clean up the mess, and when she left him home alone like now, she worried.

  She heard Arlene’s car pull in before he did. Out front, through the gauzy curtains, a dark blob filled the driveway.

  Rufus barked a warning, pushing himself up off the rug. “Thank you,” she called as he trotted, barking, to the door. “We know this person.”

  He wouldn’t stop, and she had to make him sit, jabbing a finger at him so that he flinched, and she felt bad.

  “I’ll be back,” she said, pulling on her gloves. “You be good.”

  She’d just had her hair done yesterday, and cinched tight her see-through plastic rain hat before cracking the storm door, propping it with a hip as she popped open her umbrella. She pushed through, and the cold hit her—moist but not as raw as she’d thought. Lately the latch of the storm door had been sticking, hanging up on the frame, letting in a chilly draft that infiltrated the whole downstairs. For an extra second she paused on the stoop to make sure it clicked shut.

  Arlene hadn’t pulled up enough, and Emily had to deal with a treacherous slope of lawn and drop-off of curb while battling the passenger door. The reek of cigarettes that rose from the upholstery was immediate, as if Arlene had just finished one. Emily shook her umbrella before pulling it in after her, and still she dripped all over her coat.

  “Taking no chances, I see,” said Arlene, whose own hair was a deep henna she’d adopted a few years ago, and which, like Arlene’s carmine lipstick, Emily considered garish, too young. Her own color, though not natural, was at least plausible, a mousy brown streaked with gray. At their age, there was just so much you could get away with, and only if you remained tasteful.

  “For fifty dollars,” Emily said, “this has to last me till Thanksgiving.”

  “Does Margaret know what she’s doing yet?”

  As Arlene backed out, Emily craned to see if anyone was coming. Grafton Street was steep here, and with the rain it would be hard to stop.

  “You’re fine on my side,” Emily said. “She hasn’t called since the last time we talked, but they can’t afford to fly.” She didn’t say she wasn’t even sure Margaret was working, or that she’d been sending her checks every month so she could make her mortgage payments.

  “What about Kenneth?”

  “They’re going to Lisa’s parents’ place on Cape Cod.”

  “It’s tough to compete with that.”

  “Tell me about it,” Emily said. “I’d love to go to the Cape, but that’s not a serious option.”

  “It’s not.”

  “It would be if I were willing to spend nine hundred dollars on a plane ticket. It might have been possible if Lisa had let me know in advance, but that’s not how she operates.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “It’s nothing new.”

  “Well,” Arlene said with dismay, as if it were some consolation. They passed the Pickerings’ house and reached the stop sign at Highland. Emily stayed silent while Arlene waited for a break in traffic. Nattering, barely audible, WQED played their usual rushed Vivaldi. Over the years Emily had seen her share of accidents here—or heard them, first the heart-stopping screech of tires, then the empty split-second delay before the crunch of impact. Highland was flat and wide and fast, and regularly, as she puttered about the house, dusting the plants or thinning the magazines, the wail of a police car or ambulance beckoned her to the front window to see what had happened now. The worst brought her neighbors out, all of them clumped on the sidewalk to watch the fire trucks and debate the idea of a stoplight (never, Doug and Louise said; it would destroy their property values).

  There was a gap after a bus, but Arlene balked.

  “Did you hear about the bus driver in Wilkinsburg?” Arlene asked, turning to her.

  “No,” Emily said, and pointed to the road.

  There was another gap, and Arlene launched them across in plenty of time.

  “It was on KDKA this morning. This driver, I don’t know what he was thinking. He left his bus running outside a McDonald’s, and someone took off with it. They found it on the North Side, right behind Heinz Field.”

  “Maybe it was one of the Steelers,” Emily said, because they’d had some run-ins with the police.

  “Can you imagine, coming out with your Egg McMuffin and your bus is gone?”

  Emily was content to accept this as rhetorical, watching the stately brick homes lining Highland pass, their columned porti
cos and many chimneys a testament to the city’s former wealth. They perched high, each with its swath of lawn and loop of drive, separated from the common street by wrought-iron gates and black granite walls worthy of a churchyard. As a young woman from a dumpy backwater like Kersey, she’d coveted these mansions, though compared to the Fricks’ Clayton or the Mellon estate or the limestone monstrosities along Fifth Avenue, they were modest. Henry had always been practical in that regard. The house on Grafton had never seemed too big or too small for them. Even after the children left, they could still fill it.

  She thought of Rufus curled up under the dining room table, or settling in beside the hot air register by the hutch. In the late morning the sun slanted through the French doors that opened on her garden, illuminating a wedge of rug approximately his size, rendering visible a slow galaxy of dust motes above his sleeping form. Sometimes she had to check to make sure he was breathing. She wished she could do that, just laze the day away. The gray sky, the trees, the street—the Pittsburgh winter promised another five months of this, and worse. She could see why people her age scuttled off to Florida.

  “So it’s just us chickens?” Arlene asked.

  “It’s just us chickens,” Emily said.

  “Did you want to go to the club or do something else?”

  “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “How soon do we need to make reservations?”

  “Soon,” Emily said, remembering one of Margaret’s birthday dinners there. It must have been forty-five years ago, because Margaret was slim as a ballerina in her pinafore, curtsying to everyone for the fun of it. Emily’s own parents were there, a rare occasion, her father gawking in his cheap brown suit, impressed by the high windows and the murals on the ballroom’s ceiling, the white-gloved waiters circulating between tables to deliver iced pats of butter stamped with the club crest. Emily would have arranged for Margaret to have her favorite—yellow cake with chocolate frosting—and Henry would have paid by signing his name. Forty-five years.