第13章 Sera Goes Inland

Serafina Marzullo left Brackwater in the summer of 1983, at the age of twenty-eight, with two suitcases and a nursing certificate and a mother who stood at the bus depot and did not try to stop her, and she did not come back to live in the city again for thirty-six years, and she spent most of that time convincing herself that the leaving had been a matter of taste. She had grown up in the back of the house the way Rocco had, but a boy in that trade grows toward it and a girl in that trade grows sideways, because everybody in the room knows what the boy is going to be and nobody has decided about the girl, and a person who is not going to be anything in particular in a house spends a great deal of time watching it from the edge. Sera watched. She watched her mother's hands, and the patience of them, and the way her mother could take a face that had gone to ruin and give it back to a family looking like the person they had lost, and she understood early that this was a kind of love and that it was also a wall. The wall was the silence. The house on Ferrona Avenue was warm at the front and cold at the back, and the cold was not cruelty; it was the temperature of the work. You do not stand in the room and weep with the family and then go into the back and set a jaw. You go into the back and set the jaw, and you do it well, and you come out and you are a man at a door who knows what to do with his hands. What Sera could not bear, in the end, was not the dead. It was the way the living in that house had arranged themselves around the dead, forever, in a row, facing the door, with their backs to each other, and nobody ever turning around. She had asked her mother once, when she was fifteen, why she had never put her own name on the sign. Her mother had been washing her hands at the drain in the prep room and had answered without turning around, which was how she answered most questions that mattered. "What would I put on it," her mother said. "Marzullo and Daughter. And then every family on the east side would go to the Puleos, and your uncle would lose the house, and I would have my name on a sign over a dead business. You think that is pride. It is arithmetic." Sera had heard the arithmetic all her life. It was the family's religion. It was the thing her uncle and her father and her whole house believed in the way other families believed in a saint, and she had never once seen the arithmetic turn out in favor of anything that could not be counted, and she had decided, in her quiet way, to go where the count was the other way. Wendover was a college town three hours inland, in a valley with a river that did not run to the sea, and it had a hospital and a hospice and a great many people who had come there from somewhere else and were making new arrangements with the word family. She took the nursing certificate and got a night job on the ward and finished a degree in the mornings, and she became, over twenty years, the person a hospice sends into a house when the family has run out of words, because she had grown up in a house where the words ran out early and had learned, from the far side of a wall, how to be in a room with a dying person and not flinch and not perform, which turned out to be the whole of the job. She told people, when they asked, that she had left the funeral trade because she was more interested in the living. It was true in the way that a coat is true. Underneath, she had left because she had watched her mother and her uncle sign a house over to the dead and had decided that she would not do it, and because there had been a summer, when she was a girl, when she had found a page in the keeping book that did not agree with itself, and had shown it to her mother, and her mother had taken the book from her hands and closed it and said, in a voice that Sera had never heard before or since, that some things in that book were for the ones who kept it and not for the ones who lived in it, and had never spoken of it again. Sera had understood, at fifteen and again at twenty-eight, that the keeping book was the true floor plan of that family. Everything else in the house could be moved. That could not. And a person who leaves a house does not leave the floor plan; the floor plan leaves with them, and they carry it into every other house they live in for the rest of their lives, and Sera had carried it, and she had never once in Wendover found a room that matched it, which was the whole reason she had gone there. Her mother died in the spring of 1993 and left her an envelope with three sheets of paper in it and no letter, and Sera read the sheets at her kitchen table and recognized them at once, because they were the sheets from the summer she was fifteen, in her mother's hand, with the two names and the numbers that did not agree. She put them in a drawer and did not come home for the funeral, and when people later asked her why, she said that the drive was long, and that her uncle had the house in hand, and that a family that had buried half of Brackwater did not need another pair of hands on that particular day. All of which was true. What was also true was that the sheets in the drawer had frightened her, and that she had spent her whole adult life learning how to sit with a person in the last hour of their life, and had never learned how to sit with the last hour of her own. She kept the drawer for thirty years. She moved house twice and took the drawer with her. And then, in the spring of the year her uncle turned ninety-nine, she got a telephone call from her cousin Rocco, whom she had not spoken with in four years and had not seen in six, and he said the thing that everybody in that family had spent a lifetime learning not to say out loud, which was: the book is wrong, and the ones who can read it are dying, and I need you to come home. ---