Death Before Facebook

pieces here, a look of severely reduced circumstances, poverty that might be genteel if anyone could be bothered to vacuum and dust. Skip was back to neglectful.
    Obviously embarrassed, Marguerite opened the heavy, dusty drapes. They looked as if they’d been chosen forty years ago and hadn’t been disturbed since, had simply hung here collecting dust, outlasting the fashions of nearly half a century, creating a pall of gloom.
    The room was better with a little light.
    “We don’t spend much time in here,” said Marguerite. “Everybody’s so busy.”
    “Everybody?”
    “My husband, Coleman, a self-described and self-taught computer nerd, as he likes to say. He has his office here, but he’s off at a meeting today. And Neetsie, our daughter. Well, she moved out a while ago—she has a studio of her own, can you imagine? Eighteen years old. And Geoff”—her voice caught—“I was so used to him. You know how you get used to a person?”
    Skip thought it an odd thing to say about a son.
    “Like a dog or something, I don’t know. Won’t you sit down?”
    “Actually, I’d like to see where the accident happened if I could, please.”
    “You want to see—” She stared, as if trying to understand.
    “Where you found him,” Skip finished. “I’m sorry. I know this must be hard.”
    “Oh,” said Marguerite, and Skip thought she meant not so much that it was hard as that she understood. “Come through here.”
    The dog at her heels, she led Skip through a dining room as drab as the living room, as dark and dusty, but clearly used—if only as a catchall. The table was piled high with stacks of mail, more old newspapers, magazines, the sort of everyday debris that accumulates somewhere in every house—but that usually gets cleaned up every few days. This looked like months’ worth. They went through a kitchen that seemed more lived in, was quite messy, in fact, in a homey sort of way, and finally through a mudroom. Three steps led down to a flagstone patio. “Up there,” said Marguerite. “That’s where Mosey was.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “You don’t know what happened?’
    “I just know your son fell from a ladder.”
    “Well, I woke up about ten o’clock and when I came in the kitchen I heard the most piteous meowing. So I went out and there was Geoff, lying on the patio with the ladder on top of him. Mosey, our little gray cat, had gotten up on the roof and Geoff fell trying to get him down.” She paused, remembering, her face drawing tight as she fought to control it. “It was like a story that told itself with one glance.”
    “What was he wearing?”
    “A T-shirt and a pair of old sweats, as if he’d gotten out of bed and thrown something on to come outside. No shoes. His feet—”
    “What?”
    She looked miserable. “His feet must have been cold.”
    Skip didn’t want to think about it either. “What did you do?”
    “I don’t know. I think I must have screamed or something.”
    “And then?”
    “I pulled the ladder off and put his head in my lap; and stroked him. But his head didn’t feel right.”
    “How did it feel?”
    She winced. “Not right. Soft.”
    “Was anyone else home?”
    “No. Cole was in Baton Rouge. I had to call 911 myself. I knew he was dead; I was hysterical.”
    “How did you know?”
    “He felt so cold. And his head.”
    “How long did you sit there with his head in your lap?”
    “Maybe a few seconds. Not long.”
    “When you got up did you let his head come down hard on the flagstones?’
    “He was my son!”
    Skip waited.
    “I put him down very gently.”
    Skip looked up at the roof. “Had Mosey gotten up there before?”
    “Oh, that cat. He goes everywhere.”
    “But there?”
    “I don’t know. Not that I know of.”
    “I’m just wondering—did you hear the ladder fall? Or Geoff yell or anything?”
    “No, I’m on the other side of the house. And besides, I could sleep through a hurricane. I take these pills to sleep and they put me so far out I wouldn’t know if a bomb fell.”
    Skip thought that might explain why she seemed so out of it. “Did you take one today?”
    “Last night, but I got up with Cole and then went back to bed. I’m okay to talk. Shall we go back in? Maybe I could make some coffee.”
    Skip liked it better outside and she didn’t want more coffee. But she said, “That would be nice,” thinking Marguerite might drink some herself. She seemed so dull and listless, her voice so devoid of