The Weekend: A Novel by Peter Cameron

Marian was about to pretend she hadn’t asked her question, but then Lyle said, “Yes.”
    She stood up and tried, gently, to untwist Tony’s torso, model it after Lyle, but Tony’s stiff doll limbs would not cooperate. She got him as flat as possible and then covered him with the blanket, smoothing it over him. She could not bring herself to cover his face, which she touched with her fingers. His hair was dirty. Marian and Lyle had intended to give him a shampoo that evening.
    Lyle was sitting up, watching her.
    “It was what he wanted,” said Marian. “To die here. With you.”
    Lyle raised his shoulders toward his ears and shook his head, and then his whole body, in a soblike way. “I don’t know what he wanted,” he said.
    Marian sat down on the bed and held Lyle again while he cried. This time was shorter, and she thought: Every time now will be shorter, fewer and fewer tears until there are none. But she was wrong. The arc of Lyle’s grief knew no pattern.
    When he was finished crying this second time, Marian said, “I’m going to call the police now.”
    “Yes,” said Lyle.
    “Why don’t you come downstairs with me, and have a drink?”
    “I’ll come down,” said Lyle. “In a minute.”
    “O.K.,” said Marian. It seemed an awful thing to say: O.K. How could you say O.K. with Tony, dead, in the room? But she said O.K. It was O.K. for Lyle to sit there, if he wanted, a while longer.
    She went downstairs. Her call to the police set in motion a great deal of complicated activity that involved the rest of the afternoon and evening, for death is complicated. Looking back on it, she saw the moments she spent in the house alone with Lyle and Tony’s body as the eye of a storm. There had been the awful activity of Tony’s illness and the subsequent difficult period of his mourning, but those hours in between had been so quiet and still, as if a hush had settled on them, on her and Lyle and Tony, momentarily, and then been blown away.

7
    “THIS IS ODD,” SAID Lyle. “Usually she’s here waiting.” He and Robert stood in the parking lot of the train station, which, now that the train and the cars that had arrived to meet it had departed, was empty and quiet.
    “Should we sit down?” asked Robert. There was an uncomfortable-looking bench, made from slabs of concrete, near the sidewalk where they stood. Beside it were several newspaper-vending boxes.
    “No,” said Lyle, rather abruptly, and then, upon hearing his tone, he added, “I want to stretch my legs.” He began pacing, as if not to pace would prove him a liar. Robert sat on the bench and watched him. It was just beginning to feel hot. Robert stretched his bare legs into the sunshine, obstructing Lyle’s route.
    “Sit down,” he said to Lyle. “Relax.”
    Lyle paced a little more just so it would not appear that he was taking orders from Robert, and then sat beside him. “You seem nervous,” said Robert.
    “I am,” said Lyle.
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know,” said Lyle.
    “I’m the one who should be nervous,” said Robert.
    “Why should you be nervous?” asked Lyle.
    “About meeting John and Marian.”
    “But I just told you how friendly and wonderful they are. You have nothing to be nervous about.”
    “Then neither do you.”
    “Yes,” said Lyle. “I suppose.” He leaned back against the bench. He actually felt as if he might be sick. It’s the train, he tried to tell himself, although he knew it was not. Nothing about who he was, or where he was, or whom he was with, or where he was going, felt right in and of itself, and the thought of him sitting here beside Robert waiting for Marian to pick them up and take them to the house suddenly seemed immensely foolish and frightening. He was wondering if there was time to cross the platform and take a train back to the city, when he saw a car pull off the main road and drive down the hill toward the station. It was Marian. He tried to say something but couldn’t speak. So