What Comes After

by Joanne Tompkins

  That evening, after Isaac went to his room, she returned to the nursery. The light from a floor lamp softened the space, and she sat in the overstuffed chair and cried. Not out of joy but because nothing in the world could terrify her the way happiness could.

  * * *

  —

  OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS, this disturbance of happiness was softened by a familiar creep of fear. At night, even in the lucky hours when the baby slept peacefully inside her, Evangeline lay awake, the presence of the completed nursery pressing down on her chest, squeezing out the last air she had. The permanence of what was arriving and the loss of who she was and had been—who she’d never get a second chance to become—could no longer be ignored. Strange how she hadn’t really thought about that before, all the deaths that accompany birth.

  Her mother’s absence was magnified a thousandfold by the approaching arrival. She wondered if her mother knew and thought she must, because if she didn’t, if Evangeline could be so truly alone in the world, then it was as if she didn’t exist at all. But if her mother did know and wasn’t there, what did that say about Evangeline?

  For weeks, she’d lain awake, pondering this: how would the baby’s parentage sort itself out? No one had mentioned any kind of testing. The baby would be born “early,” unusually heavy for such a “preemie.” But it would look like babies do, soft and unformed, a mewling lump of flesh. It would take a while for features to clarify and likely years, perhaps never, before some telling detail asserted itself. If, after those first weeks, the baby’s eyes turned green or hazel, Isaac and Lorrie could think it was either of the boys’. Brown eyes would suggest Daniel as the father, but her mother had brown eyes, and besides, Evangeline already sensed the baby would not.

  Whatever the baby’s eye color, at some point—and Evangeline realized this with a start—she would confess. She would tell them the truth: neither boy was the father. Isaac would act with graciousness, would insist she remain in the house. His God would demand he provide shelter to the slut and her bastard child, though of course he would never think such words. Not with such harshness. He had a self-image to protect. But swimming beneath any surface kindness would be other feelings, darker and more complex, and this is what she worried about: how what was felt but not spoken, not even allowed to be thought, would weigh between them. Wasn’t it the anger lurking beneath the surface that killed things in the end?

  Yet even with all this worry and rightful fear, Evangeline knew that something bigger and more powerful was happening to her. For the first time in her life, she could feel in her chest the hearts of others—both Isaac’s and Lorrie’s—with such consistent clarity that she was willing to pay the awful price of truth. Their pain, their need, now hers.

  It was a wonder—a painful, horrible, terrifying wonder—this unexpected understanding of love.

  64

  Three times, I’d attempted to write a note of invitation to Lorrie for Evangeline’s shower. Three times, I tore it into bits and buried it deep in the trash. I was afraid she wouldn’t come. I was afraid she would. When I managed to leave my fourth effort in her mailbox, a sense of liberation overtook me, as if I’d long been chained to a barren spot and had finally been released.

  Later, when I watched her across the kitchen—saw her eyes shining on the girls, saw them laughing together—I struggled to picture the Lorrie I had seen before the fire the past fall. I confess, I worked hard to summon it. Daniel had called me to that spot. His blood was being burned. To let go of that moment would be like letting go of my son himself.

  * * *

  —

  AROUND THE TIME OF EVANGELINE’S SHOWER, Rufus’s eyes began to be deviled by his inner eyelid, the nictitating membranes, thin and milky, like gauze curtains closing against the light. It made him ghastly, a ghost dog risen from the grave. I expected Evangeline to be repulsed, but his appearance brought out a new tenderness in her.

  The following Wednesday, she arrived home after school with drops from the drugstore. “I’m worried about those inner thingies—those nicotiney things—that they’ll dry out,” she said. “Seems they could get stuck that way. The pharmacist guy said this might help.”

  She sat next to Rufus and tipped drops into the sluice of his lower lids. “He said to do it this way. Just setting them in. Nobody wants drops splatting on their eyeballs.” She closed his lids and massaged them gently.

  Rufus didn’t resist, not in the slightest. I was glad he was accepting Evangeline’s ministrations, but a melancholy fogged over me. Only a month back, he’d put up a hell of a fight when I attempted to administer drops for a mild infection, twisting his head out of my grasp again and again. When Rufus was in his prime, Dr. Abrams and I working together couldn’t hold his powerful neck still enough to accomplish it.

  I liked to think the drops did soothe him, but those inner lids didn’t retreat. He was shutting down in other ways too. Despite coaxing, he was reluctant to eat and lost weight rapidly. I thought this was his right. Isn’t this how many animals, including some humans, chose to die? Death is certain. Yet stories rain down on us of souls who “bravely battled” their fatal condition “until the end,” as if being at war with an unalterable fate is the highest possible good. Rufus’s next great transition was death, and how he chose to approach it was his alone to decide.

  The dog’s form was abandoning him. About the time he began refusing food, I was cutting an apple for an afternoon snack. Rufus trotted to my side as he always did, waiting for his treat. I held out the slice. Rufus put his nose to it, then backed away, confusion on his face. This seemed odd, so I went to the fridge, found a piece of leftover steak, and cut him a bite. Again he leaned in, nostrils twitching, then backed away, fixing me with a look of betrayal. I understood then. The tumor had destroyed his sense of smell. An apple is not an apple without a scent. Nor is meat meat. He couldn’t understand why I would taunt him with fakes.

  I remembered how a week before, I’d found Rufus in my closet, rummaging through my dirty laundry. When I knelt to pet him, he poked his runny nose into my armpit, rubbing hard as if in search, and when he pulled back and studied my eyes, the look on his face was one of great sadness.

  Without his sense of smell, I was fading from him. He was not only lacking any appetite but very much blind, for it was my scent that told him what he needed to know, where I’d traveled during the day, whom I’d been with, whether I was happy or anxious or sad. He would breathe me in, swirl me over his palate, let the state of my heart form inside him. Even love—or its absence—can be tasted in the invisible language of scent.

  Sometimes over these past months when he’d rush to greet me, I’d think of all that he wouldn’t find emanating from my skin, the emptiness of it. He knew of my aloneness. And now I knew his.

  The world with its spring rains and sap rising in trees, with hatchlings hidden in brambles and storms approaching, had taken shape in his mind through smell. When he put his nose to the ground or lifted it to the breeze, time was not linear but layered, everything there—past and present and future—all of a piece. Every plant and animal left traces of their lives, stories of struggle and calm: shrubs impregnating the air in great clouds of scent, deer grazing in a morning’s soft drizzle or thrashing panicked through a night wood. A universe of stories. All now lost to him.

  I didn’t talk to Evangeline about this, and I failed to take into account the ferocity of her attachment, her youthful belief that death is always the enemy. I came home the next night to find Rufus out of his chair, sitting upright, Evangeline kneeling beside him. She had mixed canned dog food with chicken broth and was injecting it into his mouth with a feeding syringe.

  Rufus had no interest in eating, but he kept his eyes, open and surprisingly clear, upon hers. When she squirted the brownish gray liquid into his mouth, he gagged but dutifully attempted to swallow. Much of the liquid oozed out the sides of his lips and dribbled down
his chin, but his look of fixed devotion didn’t change. When she praised him, he thumped his tail in happiness, something beatific in his expression, as if every ounce of desire he held for himself had been relinquished and he cared only about this one task—easing her suffering.

  Watching this marvel of a creature so willingly gagging and swallowing food that had to be tasteless, knowing it would sustain a life he was ready to depart, was perhaps the most pure-hearted act of love I have ever witnessed.

  Evangeline looked up at me, her face a wreck of grief and hope. “This is working,” she said sharply. Defiant. Already at battle. She put another squirt in his mouth. Again he gagged before managing a partial swallow. “See. He wants to eat.”

  I went to her and touched her shoulder. That was all.

  She froze, then dropped the syringe. Her lips contorted, and she turned from me, her frame shuddering. I lowered my rebellious knees to the ground, set them down gently between girl and dog, and put an arm around each. Evangeline bristled, but only for a moment before letting go and leaning in. Rufus too shifted his weight against me. The love that sizzled between them swept me up in a terrible aliveness, an aliveness that rendered senseless the labels of dog and man and girl and contained a moment that was not a moment but a place without time, a place holding nothing and everything.

  A lifetime there. Millions of lifetimes.

  Then gone. All that blessed emptiness, that overwhelming fullness, gone. A return to one second. And the next. We appeared again: A dog. A girl. A man. All of us grieving.

  65

  The next week, Rufus moved less and less, often collapsing in his effort to get outside. I found myself carrying him out to the grass and back in, hoping to provide him some small dignity. As he could no longer even attempt the jump to Evangeline’s bed, he slept beside her on a blanket on the floor. Several times, I woke to her voice whispering through my door. “Isaac. It’s Rufus. I think he needs out.” I’d rouse myself, pull on a pair of jeans, and fetch the poor animal.

  She would have carried him herself if she could have. But even had she been as strong as Lorrie, Evangeline’s first duty was to her child, to protect herself from strain. She was closing in on the last weeks of her pregnancy. Maybe I’d forgotten how huge a woman got at the end, but I couldn’t imagine another three weeks of growth.

  To my surprise, Evangeline had asked me to be present at the delivery. “You know, up by my head, keeping me company.” Of equal surprise was how much I wanted to be there, how it seemed right, the way I’d feel if she were my daughter.

  The third Saturday of May started with the usual drizzle, but by midmorning sun lit the new grasses of the field. Rufus’s breath came as wet, wheezing gasps that racked his ribs. When I walked into the kitchen that afternoon, I half expected to find him dead. Instead Rufus lifted his head with a buoyancy that’d long been missing. His eyes were clear, the inner lids stowed away, and the muscles of his head and neck restored, held in place by some new purpose.

  To my amazement, he dragged himself out of his chair and lumbered to the back door. With difficulty, but with a steadiness of intent and execution that could not be explained, he took himself outside. I didn’t go with him but stood at the window in case he needed me.

  I spent most of the next hour watching him, dumbstruck at what I saw. I almost called Evangeline, but she was taking her afternoon nap, and her sleep had been fitful these last weeks. I also felt certain that if Rufus had intended Evangeline to be part of this—his ceremony of remembrance—he’d have arranged it accordingly. As it was, he chose me, one of his beloved humans, to witness this aspect of his final journey.

  This dog, who for more than a week had been unable to support his own weight, was trudging across the acre back field, keeping up a steady pace through the long green grass. Once he reached the back gate, he sat and stared through the wire mesh at the field where deer often congregated. He had spent much time there in his life, never ceasing to be fascinated by the wildlife that ventured so close to his domain.

  He sat in great stillness for nearly ten minutes. I was about to go to him, thinking his energy had failed, but he got up and plodded back to the old oak from which he’d once fallen, the remnants of Daniel’s tree house hidden in its spring leaves. Again the dog sat and stared—into the tree this time—his posture remarkably straight, as if keeping guard.

  He continued this practice, moving to the empty center of the field, facing the house. I picked up binoculars and startled to see his eyes, clear and directly on mine, as if peering into my soul from that great distance. I couldn’t bear the pain and turned away. When I did, he lumbered to the other side of the house, settling beneath the old plum where he and Evangeline had lain together that first night. When he returned inside, he belly-crawled under the kitchen table, a place where he’d spent many hours, forever lying awkwardly over one set of feet or another, waiting for Daniel to slip him bits of chicken or steak, willing to accept broccoli too.

  I wasn’t sure he’d make it back through that maze of chair legs, but he did, and this time when he looked at me, it seemed a warning. He went to the door that led to the second floor, pawed at it and barked, the happy bark we used to receive on arriving home. I opened it and watched as he climbed the rough stairs. Twice a hind leg slid from under him, but each time he recovered and continued his trek. At the top, he stopped and gazed down at me, a lingering gaze that can only be described as a healing, an act of pure love, a look unlike any I have ever shared with another creature. I remembered how I’d imagined Daniel coming home the week he was missing, imagined him looking down on me from the top of the stairs.

  Rufus turned and headed toward Daniel’s bedroom. I didn’t follow. I don’t know why. Something private in his motions. I heard his nails on that plywood floor and his weight landing on Daniel’s bed, though how he managed such a feat I couldn’t say.

  About ten minutes in, I heard a whimper and went to him.

  I hadn’t been in Daniel’s room for many months. It hit me hard to see that form on his bed, as if it might turn and rise and become my son. But of course it was Rufus, and when I switched on the nightstand light, I saw he had returned to his former state: his face fallen, his muscles melted away, his eyes shielded by that inner membrane. I lifted up my beloved dog—my son, it felt—and carried him downstairs.

  In the kitchen, Rufus lay on the floor with great stillness, his cloudy eyes tracking me as I stripped the old blanket from his chair and replaced it with a soft, clean fleece. I tucked it carefully, smoothing every fold. Then I slid my arms under him, cradled him to my chest, and placed him on his chair.

  Once he made his final adjustments, I began to sing.

  66

  She didn’t usually dream during her naps, but on this third Saturday of May, she dreamed of men and four-legged beasts running to the second floor, of brilliant light spilling from Daniel’s room, of Rufus split open, his ribs sprung apart, his heart floating in midair.

  She woke with a start, and the dimness of the room, the dullness of her mind, made her twist toward the alarm. Four thirty. She’d slept three hours when she planned only one. She roused herself and made it to the toilet, amazed she’d lasted so long.

  After splashing water on her face, she was returning to her room but stopped short in the hall. Someone was singing, a lone man’s voice. Supporting her belly with an arm, Evangeline walked toward the sound. A contraction stopped her halfway, forced her hand to the wall. She’d been having Braxton Hicks for weeks, and she dismissed this as nothing more. She was due any minute if Dr. Taylor were right, but she’d heard a lot of women were late the first time.

  The spasm passed, and she made it to the kitchen. Rufus lay curled in his chair. Isaac knelt before him, his back to the door, cradling the dog’s head in his arms. He sang in a craggy voice, a low lamentation that gave each syllable its own space.

  “The o’cean is breath’
ing.

  The o’cean is breath’ing me.

  The o’cean is breath’ing.

  The o’cean is breath’ing you.

  The o’cean is breath’ing.

  The o’cean is breath’ing . . . us.”

  It was a song not of loss but of solace, and Rufus’s labored breaths wove through that pained sweetness as if he were singing too.

  A floorboard popped under her foot. A flicker of hesitation caught in Isaac’s voice and a muscle flinched at the side of his neck. He didn’t turn or stop, he simply sang the song once more. When he was done, she went in and laid a hand on his back. She saw how far gone the dog was and sank to her knees before him. She didn’t cry. Something far too important was going on.

  Isaac’s full attention was on the dog, on the particularities of how his hands cupped Rufus’s head. He took another breath, and this time when he started again, she joined him, matching his tenor with her shaky soprano.

  On hearing her voice, Rufus opened his eyes. She regretted the effort it took, but the look was a miracle, for it was as if the skin of the sky had been peeled away to reveal all that was or, as Evangeline later said to Natalia when attempting to explain it, “the nature of love or God or some shit like that.”

  Who could say how long she was held in that place? When Rufus’s eyes released her, she was still singing, but Isaac had fallen silent. Rufus was transformed. His eyes were open and serene, his lips almost a smile. He appeared more himself than he had in months, his muscles clear and full as if he had leaped into that chair with the energy of youth. Death—having completed its task—had left his body at peace.

  She threw herself on Rufus, keening and wailing, the pleasure of her grief intense.