[
Part I]
[
Part II]
[
Part III]
[
Part IV]
Part VHe rescued the upended tea kettle from the streaming water that rose perilously around it, making it bob and rattle against the sides of the sink. He filled it, turned off the water, and made tea. When it was done he brought the teapot over to the square table along with all of the appropriate implements. He didn’t have to search for them; they simply appeared, in whichever drawer he opened, in the order in which he needed them.
As she was wimpering, her sobs steadily winding down, and walking over to take a seat, he went to the closet and retrieved the thick flannel shirt that hung in the center of a forest of empty hangers. He put it on, feeling his skin expand into it, and the fabric shadowed all the contours of his body as if it had been cast from him in plaster.
She had never drank tea before. She didn’t know what to do with the strainer and leaves. He instructed her, while allowing his eyes to take little detours from what he was doing and skip across her face, her disheveled hair, and her pale little fingers that she set on the lip of the table like a row of stripped, bleached bones. It was hard for him not to see her for what she was. Her small, pleasant face with its wet dark eyes, red blossoms on her cheeks, and her round childish body that bloomed with breath were all an illusion. She was – like he was – a walking skeleton.
He didn’t know why, or what force continued to sustain the convincing mirage of warm skin, working lungs, and nerves that still prickled and felt pain around the shape of a spirit that had presumably left all of those things behind some time ago. Perhaps the soul was not a solid thing, but a wisp of smoke that needed a container to keep its form, lest the wind blow and dash it into nothingness. In that case, one vessel might work as well as any other, but it provided a degree of welcome consistency if the new wardrobe matched the old. His current skin jacket was actually an upgrade over the first, which he imagined was not in particularly good shape after being beaten and shot to death in the alley behind a diner.
She knew the truth. He saw it, swimming on the surface of those big, glossy eyes, making lazy twists and cartwheels, and weaving between the stripes of her irises. He imagined that she usually wore glasses; she looked like the type to have her face permanently embedded in a book. He had been that type himself at her age, which was not very long ago, but slightly longer if you counted the three months in which he had been wandering through the forest on his hands and knees.
He supposed that those months could represent any length of time back on Earth. It might have been years or seconds since the gun discharged at his throat – a thing that sounded quite grisly, he had to admit, but he had only ever felt the force, and not the pain of it, before his vision was blistered to red, then charred to black, and finally was set ablaze with the brightest color of them all: the white of the snow as it swirled and lapped at the empty bowl of the sky, churning up old memories out of the ground and new thoughts from the tops of the trees that mixed together in front of him as if the entire world was his mind, and he was only a tiny traveler lost inside it.
He hadn’t been surprised. No one knew what to expect after death, so nothing could be unexpected. He had been slightly satisfied to find that it wasn’t what
they had believed – he wasn’t surrounded by fire and brimstone, nor did he see any sign of the God who had allegedly discharged their instructions to kill him. He was pleased by that, but only for a moment. After all, they were half right; he wasn’t in Hell, but he wasn’t in Heaven, either.
And he wasn’t alone. That was the surprise, which came hurtling at him at a million miles an hour with a scream like a battle cry and all the steely strength of those two white bone hands. She had delivered him out of his death’s nest, the icy enclave where he might have perished a second time, to wake up in a different world entirely – who knows what color or what element would greet him there: white or black, fire or ice, it didn’t much matter; nothing had much mattered until she came along.
Now, as she sat there wheezing and crying, he knew that she was a child, with the soft down of a child’s plumpness still affixed to her body – although it was beginning to shed in some places, like her wrists, which were lean and long. She was a young, sad little thing, but there was an iron core in her. He would have known it even if she hadn’t just dragged him singlehandedly out of the wilderness and pummeled him back to life. He could see it, built into all of her bones, and sparkling behind her large and innocent – yet dark and sharply intelligent – eyes.
She might have grown into an impressive woman if she had lived, with that metal will of hers that he knew she must have built up in the course of battling something truly terrible – something like the bullies that had shadowed him like vultures all through school, until they finally descended, in his first year of college, to pick his bones clean once and for all. They had hardened him, too, but his insides were more like a wad of unyielding scar tissue than a skeleton of steel. His own soft baby fat had been scraped off violently long ago. There was nothing kind nor innocent in him anymore, and on the day he died he didn’t much regret the loss of the life that lay before him.
She bent over the cup to sip her tea, but it was too hot and she recoiled, using a phrase of which she probably didn’t know the meaning. She grimaced and smiled at him apologetically and he saw that she had one canine tooth that hadn’t fully descended. It hovered, one level above all the others, with its sharp tip pointing directly toward the place it intended to take, except that it never would; it would stay suspended there, just as she would stay suspended, as if in amber, as if the entire world they now inhabited was nothing but a sticky, viscous bubble in which they were trapped like insects and could never escape.
He felt sorry then – the first time in ages he had felt sorry for anyone but himself. This was a step forward for him, he knew, but he didn’t mark it in his mind. Steps forward only counted when you were alive. Now he was dead and the long, twisting thread of every step he had ever taken was unfurled. There was nowhere ahead for him to go, nowhere to arrive, but only the snow that ensured that his every movement was as ineffective as his entire wasted life.
*
When he told her that he was dead, like her, but didn’t tell her how it had happened, she knew that the circumstances of his death were either shameful or gross. Possibly they were both, and he was trying to protect her from it. She found this a bit funny. He considered himself dead enough to no longer have a name, yet he was painstakingly aware of her feelings, as if that whole game – whereby adults stood on one side of the room, and children on the other, and nothing harmful or important was allowed to pass between them – even mattered anymore. He knew she was a corpse, but he treated her like a little girl.
She decided she wouldn’t treat him like a corpse, either, but like the very silly young man that he appeared to be. In life she would have cowered a bit more beneath his gaze, and wondered what he was thinking and what he thought of her.
That game, she was relieved to find, seemed to have ended, at least for her. He had seen her cry and she had seen him when he was weak and shaking, so there was scarcely anything more they might worry about the other finding out.
She sipped her tea, more cautiously this time. The heat opened her throat and felt good in her stomach, where it rapidly quenched a certain acid melancholy that had been building there for minutes, but she didn’t like the taste. It was bitter, and made her pucker in all of her features in a way that made him smile a little behind the teacup raised to his lips.
“I didn’t want to die,” she was telling him, while the bitterness still wormed on the surface of her tongue. “I just wanted to do something. Nothing else ever worked. I tried everything. I wanted to move away, but my mother couldn’t leave her job. I thought she loved her job more than me.”
“Well, she didn’t,” he said, tipping his cup in her direction; its steam sent tendrils curling back towards the bottom of his chin. “After all, she came with you.”
Joni froze then, with her cup halfway on its journey to her mouth. She thought of her mother, alone in the damp apartment with her small mountains of yarn and the wood-burning stove, and for the first time considered it: how long had it been since they moved in? Two months, three maybe. Yet it had been a week before her mother came; Joni had arrived there by herself, with her battered old suitcase and one set of keys, and waited out the lonely days with her cheek pressed against the moist and peeling wallpaper in the corner of the bedroom – until her mother joined her. When she had arrived, with her own suitcase and familiar quilted bags, Joni had leapt up from the floor and embraced her with all the strength she could muster out of the dark and choking air. She hadn’t given much thought to her mother’s face, which was deeply wrinkled like the lines kicked up in a rug, nor the deep purple circles that had appeared around her eyes.
She came with you. And so she had, and joined Joni, the landlady, and all the other people who lived at the little compound that cupped the curve of the forest in a patchy crescent. Who were they, all those glassy-eyed people who wandered aimlessly between the buildings like gray ships set out to sea without their sails? How had they come to be there – how had she come to be there, when she hadn’t experienced any sort of travel or even the suggestion of motion in the period before her arrival and after the very last moment of her life that she recalled?
She had been lying in her room, on the floor. She had taken the pills, one by one, gagging in between because she wasn’t accustomed to swallowing pills whole; her pediatrician still prescribed antibiotics in pink chewable tablets for her, when she needed them.
She expected to hear her mother’s footsteps, tapping out the brief space between the kitchen and Joni’s bedroom with her small brown penny loafers. She heard nothing, but felt hot, incredibly hot, as if the life was being seared right out of her; she sensed it sizzling, crackling, jumping off of her skin in little sparks. She clung to life like a child straining to stay awake. One more minute, she pleaded, just one more with this floor below her, with this ceiling that was freckled with a crazy dash of glow-in-the-dark stars. One more minute with the familiar posters on her wall with their peeling edges, with this air that held within it every breath she had ever breathed. Please don’t take me away from my old blue quilt with its soft layer of pills and shredded edges, she thought. Please don’t take me away from my old stuffed animals. They sat in a tidy arrangement on the bed across the room and watched her with the same quiet expressions they had worn every day of her life.
Meanwhile she watched the door, waiting for someone to open it and to wrench back the steadily spreading blanket of invisible flames under which she was pinned. She looked at the very place she expected her mother’s head to appear, but it never came. Instead she saw the picture for August on the calendar of photographs of Montana that her mother had bought her as a gift. It was intended as a means of conciliation after her mother’s refusal to move there, but to Joni it was salt in her wounds. Why did she want to move to Montana? Because it was the first image she saw when she opened a book on the United States, when she had decided to research places they could move. She was immediately attracted to the dense evergreen forests, which converged into a surface like velvet when seen from above. She had dreamed of cutting mazes between the trees, of finding new branches to climb, of meeting kind people who lived in sleepy hamlets in the short rifts between woods. In truth, she had never learned much about what Montana was really like. She knew the picture and she knew her own fantasy, even as her mother advised her that winters in Montana were snowy and deathly cold.
The taste of her tea didn’t improve, but she drank the rest anyway. He cleared the table and placed all of the dirty dishes in the sink.
She told him that she’d left the compound that morning, before her mother woke up, because she thought she might find her way back. The storm had started just as she had set out and quickly snared her in its great icy hands, and it hadn’t stopped crushing her until she had come across this house.
After the sink, he was at the window, peeling back a ghost-like wisp of white curtain.
“I think it’s stopped now,” he said.
She rose to her feet and joined him, peering beyond his pointing finger. There was no way to distinguish light from snow on the surface of the windowpane. They decided to venture out.
The blinding sunlight that burst through the open door pushed her back; then its warmth drew her forward, out into a long grassy lawn that unfolded from the base of the house like a luxurious carpet and fanned the base of the forest at its bottom edge. There was not a scrap of snow in the sky nor on the verdant ground. He came up behind her, stood next to her, and took her hand.
They walked together down the slope of the lawn to the line of the road that had now become visible, winking in and out between the densely packed trees. The smell of pine and fresh grass rose up around her until she was fully steeped in it. Passing beneath the trees, they trod across a dry floor of needles that gave way slightly beneath their feet, then buoyed back up like springs. They went together on the road that snaked on through the woods, following the brilliant light of nerve signals that still sparked along the ridge of every branch, and when sounds and syllables floated down from the canopy like leaves, they caught each one in their hands and left the meaning to settle where it may.
[© 2011 M.B.K]
