Listen to the Silence

Monday

SEPTEMBER 4

3:21 P.M.

"I can't do this," my older brother John said.

I brought the rented Cessna level over the Pacific, pulled back on power till the engine made the distinctive purr that told me, without looking at the tachometer, that it was at the proper RPM for slow flight.

"What?"

"I said, I can't do this."

I glanced at him. A nervous flier under any circumstances, he hunched in the right seat, his arms wrapped around the plain cardboard box and metal urn on his lap. His blond hair flopped onto his forehead, and there were pronounced lines between his eyebrows and around his mouth. For all his forty-eight years, he resembled a miserable, scowly little boy.

"Why not?" I asked.

He shrugged, looked away.

Oh, God, he was exhibiting full-blown symptoms of the infamous family failing—the inability to properly deal with one's dead. It was the reason he held two containers of ashes, Pa's in the box, and our paternal grandfather's in the urn. The urn had lingered for twenty-some years on the top shelf of our father's coat closet, and yesterday I'd come down to San Diego determined that Grandpa would be scattered along with Pa. Now it seemed John was no more capable of this duty than our father.

I decided a matter-of-fact, unemotional approach was called for. "If you're worried about opening the window while we're in flight, it's no big deal. And you don't have to lean out. Just tip the container toward the plane's tail."

"Why the tail?"

"Because if you do it toward the nose, the prop wash'll blow the stuff back inside."

Wrong image to call up. John winced and closed his eyes, big hands protectively cradling the containers.

"They're not just 'stuff,' you know," he said.

"Sorry. I'm as unhappy about this as you, and I guess I don't want to think of what's in there as Pa and Grandpa."

He nodded in acceptance of my apology but didn't look at me. After a minute he asked, "Shar, are you sure this is what Pa wanted?"

"He put it in his will."

"But that will was made a while ago. Maybe he changed his mind."

"Then he'd've added a codicil. Pa was meticulous about details." Meticulous, except for the minor detail of his father's remains residing with the overcoats.

"Well, what about Grandpa? He wouldn't fly, ever. D'you really think he'd appreciate being hurled out of a plane?"

"Beats spending eternity on the shelf next to Pa's baseball caps."

"You're being pretty damn flippant for somebody who just lost her father!"

"And you're making a huge, painful production out of this! Just scatter them!"

He was silent again, clutching his precious cargo.

I could sympathize with his inability to perform this final rite; letting go had never been all that easy for me, either. And he'd been closer than any of us to Pa, particularly in these last few years. Still, somebody had to—

"For God's sake, hold the plane!" I exclaimed.

"Do what?"

"Put your feet on the rudders and your hand on the yoke and keep us level." I opened my window.

"What're you going to—"

"Feet on the rudders, like so." I pointed down at mine. Slowly John positioned his. "Now touch the yoke with your right hand—lightly, don't grip or yank on it. Just make little adjustments."

"I can't—"

"You've watched me do it. It's easy."

"I… okay." He made a few experimental moves.

"That's right. It pretty much flies itself. You're doing fine."

"Doing fine," he said doubtfully.

"Now give me one of them." I motioned at the containers while loosening my seat belt.

"Uh, who?"

"Grandpa. He's been waiting longer."

After a hesitation, he passed the urn to me. Looked straight ahead as I pried the lid off. I twisted in the seat, extended my arm through the window, and tipped the receptacle. Watched the ashes and bits of bone be borne away on the air currents.

James McCone, finally out of the closet.

I resisted an unseemly urge to giggle as I put the lid back on the urn and stuck it in the carrying space behind me. John would be furious with me if I laughed at a time like this. He didn't share my offbeat and sometimes irreverent sense of humor, although I was fairly sure both Pa and Grandpa would have appreciated the absurdity of the situation.

Suddenly the plane's nose lurched upward and it started rolling violently from side to side. For some reason John had pulled back on the yoke, was now gripping it with both hands and trying to steer the aircraft like a car.

"Let go!" I yelled. "Get off the rudders!"

He hung on, grimacing. By the time I wrestled the controls from him, the stall horn was wailing.

"What the hell!" he shouted.

"It's okay. It's nothing." I controlled the stall with light, alternating pressure on the rudders, dropped the nose.

"Nothing?" he said weakly, wiping sweat from his pale face.

"Happens all the time to beginners." Thank God I'd gotten it in hand, though! The plummet that accompanies an uncontrolled stall was one experience I didn't want to treat him to—particularly on an occasion like this.

"I'm not beginning anything," he said. "My piloting minutes are at an end."

"Nonsense. You were doing great. Take over again."

"No way."

"It's that, or…" I motioned at the cardboard box.

He eased back onto the rudders, touched the yoke as if he feared it might burn him.

"Now give me Pa."

John's left hand grasped the box tightly; for a few seconds I was afraid he might refuse. Then, finally, his fingers loosened; they caressed it gently before he handed it to me.

I removed the lid. Hesitated, staring at the sea where Pa, a sailor, had wanted to be laid to rest. Tears blurred my vision, and I felt a wrenching under my breastbone. Images flashed through my mind: nothing momentous, just small things.

Pa putting together a swing set on my sixth birthday. His ruddy face beaming when I rolled my first strike on a family bowling outing. His photographs of us, in which he always managed to cut off some essential body part. The impish gleam in his eyes as he sang the ribald folk ballads that he knew vexed my mother. The key chain with the inlaid wooden fob that he'd made and proudly presented to me when I bought my house.

It was a minute before I could hold the box out the window and let his ashes trail away.

When I turned back to John, I was surprised to find him flying with a sure hand. He smiled at me and said, "Thanks."

"You're welcome."

I let him pilot for a few minutes more. Before I took over and headed for land, he dipped the wings twice in tribute to Pa and Grandpa.

7:10 P.M.

I hung up the phone and heaved a huge sigh of relief. From across the family room of my father's house in San Diego's Mission Hills district John asked, "So how's Ma?"

"Sad. Subdued. But she still found plenty to bitch about."

"Let me guess: Why couldn't Pa have a funeral, like a normal person? Why aren't you staying with her and Melvin, instead of in this empty house? How come we're letting Nancy make off with all his worldly goods?"

"That, and more." I joined John on the ratty sofa, picked up my glass of wine from where he'd set it on the end table.

"So what'd you tell her?"

"That Pa wasn't a normal person, so he could hardly be laid to rest in a normal way. That I didn't want to stay up in Rancho Bernardo because I've got things to do here. That Nancy deserves whatever's left, for putting up with him." Nancy Sullivan was the woman Pa had more or less lived with the past few years—both at her La Jolla condo and on the road in his Airstream trailer. He seldom visited the Mission Hills house, except to putter in the garage workshop where he'd died.

"And Ma said?"

"After that I tuned her out."

"She does have one point: Why stay here? This house is pretty depressing, with most of the furniture gone. Where'd you sleep last night? On this couch?"

"Yes. It wasn't so bad." And I'd been able to indulge my grief in private.

"Well, tonight you should try out my new sofa bed."

"Can't. I want to get started sorting through the boxes in the garage, so I can go home Wednesday or Thursday. Last week I picked up a couple of important clients; I need to oversee the jobs."

"Hy can't do that?"

"He's not really an administrator." Hy was a partner in a corporate security firm, Renshaw & Kessell International. He specialized in hostage negotiation and other, more esoteric, skills.

John got up and went to the kitchen for another beer. When he came back, I studied our reflections in the darkened glass door to the backyard. We were so different: he, blond and big-boned and snub-nosed; I, dark and slender with chiseled features that were a genetic throwback to my Shoshone great-grandmother. I was the only one of the five of us who had inherited Mary McCone's Native American looks. No wonder I'd always felt like the odd duck in an already odd family.

"The thing about Nancy getting Pa's stuff," John said. "That's just Ma being sour-grapesy because he found somebody else after the divorce."

"Why? She found Melvin before they split." Melvin Hunt owned a chain of coin-operated laundries, and Ma had met him while patronizing one of his establishments when her washing machine broke down.

"I know, it's not logical, but Ma's not logical. Anyway, Charlene and Patsy already took the things they wanted when Pa moved in with Nancy. Joey doesn't care, and all I wanted were Pa's watch and service medals, which Nan gave me yesterday." We'd visited her in the evening, found her being well cared for by her grown daughter. "Is there anything in particular you'd like?"

I smiled wryly. "I've already got it—the dubious privilege of going through the stuff stored in the garage. Wonder why he specifically wanted me to handle that?"

"He said you were the only one with enough brains and patience for the task."

"Thank you, Pa—I think." I raised my glass and toasted the heavens.

9:15 P.M.

The garage was so crammed with boxes and bins and odds and ends of furniture that a car wouldn't fit—a manifestation of the pack-rat condition I'd come to think of as McCone's Syndrome—and the cleared area by Pa's workbench wasn't large enough to unpack things in. I went over there anyway, looked at the project he'd been working on when he died. A small box constructed of finely milled samples of exotic woods; the pieces were all cut, and it was almost finished. I'd glue the rest in place, and it would be what I'd take away to remember him by.

First things first, though: the cartons. I carried several into the house and got started.

Miscellaneous clothing and uniforms from his days as a chief petty officer in the Navy. Those I would give to Goodwill. Books, mostly adventure novels and thrillers. Donate to the library. More wood samples, broken and outdated tools, package upon package of corroded batteries, ammunition for guns he had no longer owned, half a dozen old cameras of the point-and-shoot variety, ancient packets of seeds and sacks of bulbs, hundreds of ballpoint pens, glue that had hardened in much-squeezed tubes, mason jars full of nails and screws, old road maps for damned near the entire United States and Canada, shelf brackets and hooks and braces, telephone cords and connectors, margarine tubs and lids—good God, hadn't he ever gotten rid of anything? And what the hell was I supposed to do with it all?

My eyes felt gritty and my head ached. I got up, fetched a couple more boxes from the garage, went to take some aspirin. Ten-fifty by the kitchen clock, and I'd scarcely made a dent in the accumulation. The contents of the next box would require careful sorting, too; it was labeled LEGAL PAPERS.

Birth certificate, marriage certificate, divorce decree. Retirement papers from the Navy. Two old wills, pink slips on the Chevy Suburban and the Airstream trailer. Grant deed on the house to a corporation Charlene and Ricky had once formed; they'd bought it from him with the agreement he could live out his days here—their way of ensuring that he wouldn't have to sell it and move when he and Ma got divorced. Funny, I hadn't thought about what would happen to the house. I supposed Charlene had gotten it as part of her settlement with Ricky; she'd probably want to put it on the market.

The idea of the place being sold didn't bother me, as it once would have. It was no longer home in any sense. Home was the earthquake cottage I shared with two cats in San Francisco's Glen Park district. It was Hy's ranch in the high desert country near Tufa Lake. It was Touchstone, our joint property on the Mendocino Coast, where our dream house was rapidly nearing completion. Even my offices at Pier 24½ were more of a home than this empty shell of a place.

The thought of those offices reminded me of the two new clients and my need to get back to San Francisco. I dug into the papers with renewed vigor. Passport. Expired Navy ID card. Old bank and savings-account statements. PG&E stock certificate. Small whole-life policy with Ma still listed as beneficiary. A folder containing report cards: mine. Why the hell had he kept them? Photocopies of my high school and college diplomas. I didn't know he'd made them. U.S. Savings Stamps booklets in each of our names, none full. Folder with copies of our birth certificates and…

What was this?

WHEREFORE, petitioners pray that the Court adjudge the adoption of the child by petitioners, declaring that each petitioner and the child thenceforth shall sustain toward each other the legal relation of parent and child, and have all the rights and be subject to all the duties of that relation; and that the child be known as SHARON ELIZABETH McCONE.

Shock washed over me like a flood of icy water. My hands started trembling as I gripped the photo-copied document.

… desire to adopt BABY GIRL SMITH…

… be known as SHARON ELIZABETH McCONE…

Adopted?

"Mama, Joey says I'm not his sister!"

"Why? Why would he say a thing like that?"