Remarkably Bright Creatures(25)

Folded in a neat pile on top of her washing machine is the flannel bathrobe that she retrieved from Charter Village last week. Lars wore it nonstop for years, the nurse had explained. Tova wishes she’d left it there. Why would she want her dead brother’s old housecoat? Couldn’t they wash it and pass it on to someone else? Donate it to charity? Cut it up into rags for cleaning, which is what Tova usually does with her own clothing when it’s outrun its useful life?

Many people cherish things like this, the nurse said when Tova hesitated.

So now it sits in her house, a reminder to Tova of how she is unlike many people.

Last week, she’d held a pair of scissors to its hem, ready to make rags, before changing her mind, deciding she had plenty of rags for now.

The collection of Lars’s personal effects also included a small stack of photographs. Some were very old, slices of the childhood she and Lars shared. These, Tova filed among the boxes of family photos in her attic, tucking them between her own albums.

Some were rather new, relatively speaking, featuring faces Tova didn’t recognize. Slices of the life Lars led after their estrangement. Middle-aged adults smiling at a cocktail party, a group of hikers pausing under a mountain waterfall. This was a Lars she never knew. These, she threw in the trash.

There was one photo that fit neither of these categories. It featured Lars with a teenage Erik on a sailboat, perched side by side. Two pairs of long legs dangling, suntans offset by the boat’s bright white hull.

It was Lars who taught Erik to sail. Showed him every trick in the book, a solution to every improbable nautical scenario. Such as, how to leave an anchor rope cut clean.

This photo hurt to look at. Tova nearly tossed it in the trash but stopped at the last minute and buried it in the back of her kitchen drawer that held pot holders and towels, even though it didn’t belong there, either.





Day 1,311 of My Captivity


IF THERE IS ONE TOPIC OF CONVERSATION HUMANS never exhaust, it is the status of their outdoor environment. And for as much as they discuss it, their incredulity is . . . well, incredible. That preposterous phrase: Can you believe this weather we’re having? How many times have I heard it? One thousand, nine hundred and ten, to be exact. One and a half times a day, on average. Tell me again about the intelligence of humans. They cannot even manage to comprehend predictable meteorological events.

Imagine if I were to stride over to my neighbors, the sea jellies, and, while shaking my mantle with disbelief, make a comment such as: Can you believe these bubbles these tanks are putting out today? Preposterous.

(Of course, this would also be preposterous because the jellies would not answer. They cannot communicate on that level. And they cannot be taught. Believe me, I have tried.)

Sun, rain, clouds, fog, hail, sleet, snow. Human beings have walked their earth on two feet for hundreds of millennia. One might think they would believe it already.

Today, salty-smelling sweat collected on their foreheads. Some of them fashioned the pamphlets handed out at the entrance into fans and waved them in front of their faces. Nearly all of them wore shorter garments, revealing their fleshy legs and strappy shoes that slapped back on their feet with each step.

And they refused to cease their prattle about the heat. Can you believe this weather we’re having? Seventeen times today.

A change of season has come. It has been coming for a while, as it does, with longer periods of light and shorter periods of dark. Soon I will see the longest day of the year. Summer solstice, the humans call it.

My final summer solstice.





Nothing Stays Sunk Forever


The following afternoon, Tova sits next to Barbara Vanderhoof under a hair dryer at Colette’s Beauty Shop, which has occupied the same storefront with a painted-pink door in downtown Sowell Bay for nearly fifty years. Colette herself is in her seventies, same as the Knit-Wits, but she refuses to retire and fully cede the salon to the younger stylists she’s hired over the years.

Thankfully. Although Tova is hardly a vain woman, she allows herself this indulgence. And there’s no one else she’d trust to do her hair in just the right way. A few minutes earlier, she watched Colette trim Barb with her deft and careful hand. Colette really is the best hairdresser around.

“Tova, dear. How are you doing?” Barb leans over as far as the helmetlike dryer will allow, putting undue emphasis on the word “doing.” As if preemptively cutting off any attempt Tova might make to feign her own okay-ness. Barbara has always been efficient about slicing away other people’s nonsense, a quality Tova can’t help but admire.

But Tova also prides herself on maintaining no such veneer. She answers, truthfully, “Quite all right.”

“Lars was a good man.” Barb removes her glasses, letting them dangle from the beaded chain around her neck, and dots her seeping eyes with the corner of a handkerchief. Tova bites back the urge to scoff. It isn’t the first time she’s watched Barbara insert herself into another person’s tragedy like this. Barb and Lars couldn’t have met more than a handful of times, back in those early years, before Tova and Lars began to fall out of one another’s lives.

“He went peacefully,” Tova says with an air of authority, not adding that this is thirdhand knowledge. But the woman at Charter Village had clasped her arm intently while assuring her that Lars would’ve felt no pain at the end.