Blue Field(17)
The ferry continued its churn over wrecked schooners and stunted white fish. Partway through the crossing—increasingly frigid and splattered, the sky dehiscing sleet like grey seeds—she tried not to watch a sparrow, spastic in the slurry wind. It seemed desperate to alight, likely having followed the vessel too far from land. Finally it spiralled into a dust-up of feathers and foam.
Three days later she woke pinned to the mattress. Nine in the morning. How late. Her husband’s big head on her belly. He brushed his lips against her navel and gently massaged her hip. For two nights he’d slept downstairs on the couch. For two days and nights she’d mostly lain stricken upstairs in the bedroom of their tower-tall townhouse in a smart old-new mixed district across the river from her scuffed former place. Now—no thanks to her, to anything she’d done to change his mind—she located her legs and arms, slowly gathered her other parts enough to make love. After, she wiped a smudge of sweat from his neck. I missed you, he said.
Yes? she peeped—and then she dozed and then woke to him pulling on pants and selecting a shirt from his closet, his shoulder blades so sharp she marvelled they didn’t cut his skin. She half expected his knobby spine to rattle. She wondered at his sudden weight loss. She wondered if she should worry about his worry over her. Over them. She marshaled her remaining strength and sat up. I miss you already, she called as if across some vast gulf.
She felt like an insect whose head had been severed from its body but whose legs kept soldiering on. Apparently still going. To the bathroom, for instance. She stared at the beady eyes staring from the medicine-cabinet mirror and worried a comb through the gnarled garlands of hair. Then she dressed and creaked into the hall. So late. The townhouse seemed to echo as she crept down the steep stairs. An inky blip and she was on the second floor already, in the kitchen. Fridge, stovetop. Her stomach rumbled. She opened the fridge and located the juice and set the carton on the counter. She heard something moving in the walls. She ignored it. And then, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, she removed the frying pan from a cupboard. The stove’s gas control clicked and the pilot light caught. Here she was. Famished—beyond belief, she discovered, composing and consuming a killer omelette. Extra pieces of toast. Finished, she licked the crumbs—delicious, like sawdust—from her plate and disposed of it in the garbage container then stood before the stainless sink and admired the spackle of eggshell. She worked the faucet and water gushed. Here were her hands equipped with their marvel of skin and nail. So she was still covered. Safe.
Work—messages returned and new ones sent, appointments reshuffled, amends made, fingers crossed. The morning streamed by in her first-floor office. She hummed tunelessly, head bent to her tasks, pleased at the absence of the usual ear-achy vertigo and leaky sounds that followed a dive trip.
Mid-afternoon she hopped in her car and gassed up at the nearest gas station and then headed out, wheeling the wheel beneath sugar-dust clouds. Bright summery fall—as if she’d only imagined the cruel northern weather of the past weekend. Or it existed in a past so ancient she could discount it. In no time she was travelling the cemetery’s drive. First time in months. She swept beneath the chartreuse and saffron and fire-opal leaves of sycamore and hickory, elm, maple. She soon stood before the double plot. Marilyn Wolfe, begat of Wolfes—what the cancer and subway bomb had left behind. In her mother’s case, what the years of starvation topped by medical treatments had wrought. As for Marilyn’s father, what the private search organization she had hired was able to retrieve from among the rendered fragments, enough at least to hold a proper funeral. Now she rattled the small, customary stones in her hand. She was of a long line of sensitive, flinching people, survivors begat of one of history’s more exigent planned enterprises—a thousand-year-plus genocidal ingenuity of mass graves and incinerations that in her mind took on the shape of the cloud of starlings, too large and dark for her to fully apprehend, that murmured the otherwise clear sky before settling to call and cry in the nearby stand of pines. Sole child. Last in line. Almost gone herself. However strange she might feel at the moment, who was she to throw herself away? And with herself, the turquoise ring lost at age nine. At thirteen, the misplaced dragonfly-shaped notebook containing her sketches of weeds and wasps and also a taped-in scab from Jane’s fabulously distressed, bike-accident-prone shins. Even her mother’s middle-aged late-night Ativan clamouring in the living room armchair outside Marilyn’s teenager bedroom. You dirty little, you daddy’s little. Even her father’s crack at her jaw one evening outside an ice cream shop when she didn’t walk as quickly as he wanted. Spoiler, spiteful, her parents sometimes labelled her. Mom, Dad! Dead but not gone, not when Marilyn still dreamed them alive, meeting her on a subway platform or in a department-store shoe department. Looking good. Like your new hat.
No, she thought now in the cemetery. She’d had her close call. Now she had her work cut out for her. Up here she’d protect what she still could.
And so thinking she stared into the shiny granite marker at the shrunken, dry-eyed figure until a series of black saccades shredded her vision—and when they cleared, a faint memory scraped to life and she squeaked into motion and placed her quartz nuggets on top of the headstone. Bird-ee a bird called and a chipmunk wrestled a pinecone by a rose bush. But beneath her feet the dead remained dead. Let them, she thought. Let the dead go on doing their dead things. She herself was here. Barely here. And that was enough. Enough! She touched her cold fingertips to her eyelids. Black branches wheeled like cold constellations and her ears rang. No one answered. Meanwhile she would work and work and pay her respects here and here only and day would follow day and she would with all due respect follow her days to a far-off end.