I found the matches and stood up, wondering only where to do it. The living room. Sit on the couch, start the fire there and finish. The walk from Hugh’s room to the living room seemed five miles long. It felt like I was walking underwater. Not bad or disturbing, only slow-motion and incredibly detailed. I saw everything around me with extreme clarity. Was it because this was the last time I would see these things? Good night hall with the beautiful wood floors. Hugh got down on his knees right there and, sliding his hand back and forth over that floor, looked up at me with the happiest smile. “This is all ours now,” he said, his voice full of wonder. Good night staircase. Stopping, I looked up and remembered the day we had made love at the top. I wished I could smell Hugh in that final air. Would I see him where I was going? How wonderful to smell him one last time. I looked up the stairs and remembered him on top of me, his weight, the softness of his lips on my throat, his thumbs holding down my hands. He’d had keys in his jeans pocket that day. When he moved on me they cut into my hip. I asked him to take them out. He tossed them across the floor. They rang out as they hit and slid. Good night keys.
In the living room I stared into the empty fireplace a moment and then put my hand in my pocket. It was there. It was time, so I took it out. Because of all the mad things happening when I picked it up in the basement at Hugh’s silent urging, I hadn’t looked carefully at the piece of wood I now held in my hand. I had more or less forgotten about it until I was standing in the lobby of Fieberglas talking to the nurse about Frances. Then the only way I can describe what happened is that the wood came to me the way a good idea or real fear comes. All at once, as if through every pore in your body. Yes, it had been in my pocket the whole time, but suddenly I became aware of its presence again. Or maybe I just remembered it and, in doing so, grasped its real importance and what to do with it. A small piece of wood about seven inches long. Dark on three sides, light on the other. The side where it had broken off the baby’s crib when McCabe/Shumda threw it against the wall.
There was a fragment of a figure carved on it, but the way the wood had snapped off made it impossible to decipher what it was. The back half of a running animal. A deer perhaps, or a mythological creature that fit the rest of the extravagant, fantastical world that had been carved on that wonderful old cradle. Our child’s cradle, our baby girl. I thought of her, the only sight of her I would ever have. Then I thought of Declan and what his father had said. And I knew what I had to do, and it was right, but if I were to somehow survive what was about to happen, I would regret doing it forever. I looked at the wood in my hand and because I felt I had no other choice I said, “I’m sorry.” I had two pieces of wood to burn. Two pieces for my marriage of sticks: The one in my hand from the cradle, and the one from Central Park I had picked up the day we knew it was going to happen. Two sticks were enough for a marriage. More would have been better. I would have loved to have a huge bundle of them for a world-sized bonfire when I was eighty years old and at the satisfied end of a marvelous life. But I had only these two and they would have to be enough. They were important though—as important as anything. One symbolized Hugh, this one our child. Where in the house was the Hugh stick? I thought but then realized it didn’t matter because soon it would be gone too.
Without knowing why, I knew when I lit it, this wood would ignite as if it were made of pure gasoline. Breaking off a match from the pack, I put it to the striking pad and flicked my hand. A flame snapped open, flaring and hissing a second before taming down to the size of a fingernail. Lit match in one hand, the wood in the other. Good night life.
I looked up one last time. At the window were faces. Many many many of them. Some were pressed to the glass, distorting their features—bent noses, comical lips. Others hovered in the background, waiting their turn to get close as they could to the window, to this room, to me. And I knew all of the faces were me, all the me’s from past lives who had come to watch this happen. To watch the end of their line, last stop, everybody out.
“Good-bye.” Calmly I put the match to the wood and the world exploded.
I heard the blast and saw a blinding flash of light. Then utter silence. I don’t know how long it lasted. I was somewhere else until I was back in the living room, sitting by myself on the couch, holding both empty hands in the air in total surprise. It took time to realize where I was and of course I did not believe it. Everything was so still. My eyes readjusted to the normal light in the room and the colors, the things around me, everything was exactly as it had been.
I dropped my hands to the couch and felt its rough wool beneath my palms. Turning my head slowly from side to side, I took in the view. Nothing had changed. Frances’s house, our possessions, home again. Even the smell was the same.
No, there was something else. Hugh. Hugh’s cologne was in the air. Then I felt hands on my shoulders and knew instantly that they were his. Hugh was here.
The hands lifted. He came around the back of the couch and stood in front of me. “It’s all right, Miranda. You’re all right.”
I stared at him and could only repeat what he had said, because it was true. “I’m all right.” We looked at each other and I had nothing to say. I understood nothing but I was all right.
“You’re not allowed to kill yourself. When you burned the wood, you could only give them back what was theirs. Now you have the rest of your life. That belongs to you.”
I looked at him. I nodded. All right. Anything was all right.
“Thank you, Miranda. You did an incredible thing.”
I looked at him and I was empty as death, empty as an old heart that’s just biding its time.
Somehow, from some place I didn’t know I had, I was able to whisper, “What now?”
“Now you live, my sweetheart.” He smiled and it was the saddest smile I had ever seen.
“All right.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out something. He offered it to me. Another piece of wood. A small long silvery piece that looked like driftwood. Wood that had been floating in some unimaginable sea for a thousand years. I turned it over in my hand, examining it carefully. Shapeless, silvery, soft, old. Yes, it must have been driftwood.
When I looked up again Hugh was gone.
There was a nice song on the radio years ago. They played it too much but I didn’t mind because it kept me company and I’m always grateful for that, I often found myself humming it without realizing. The title was “How Do I Live Without You?”
I have come to realize this is an essential lesson: In order to survive, you must learn to live without everything. Optimism dies first, then love, and finally hope. But still you must continue. If you were to ask me why, I would say that even without those fundamental things, the great things, the hot-blood-in-the-veins things, there is still enough in a day, in a life, to be precious, important, sometimes even fulfilling. How do I live without you? I put you in the museum of my heart where I often go, absorbing as much as I can bear before closing time.
What more can I tell you that you need to know beyond what I already have? I had a life. I never married, had no children, met two good men I might have loved, but after what I had experienced, it was impossible. I was proud of myself though, because I honestly tried with real hope and an open heart to fall in love again. No good.
I went back to selling books and I did well. Sometimes I was even able to lose myself in what I was doing, and that was when I was happiest. All the time I thought of Frances Hatch and how she had done it—lived a full and interesting life after she had cut the thread. So many times I wished I could have spoken with her, but she died three days after we last met.
Zoe married Doug Auerbach and they were happy for a long time. When he died ten years ago, I moved out to California to live with her. We became quintessential L.A. old ladies. We ate only free-range chicken and took too many vitamins. We spent too much time in malls, went to aerobics classes for seniors, wore thicker and thicker eyeglasses as the visual world became f
oggier and surrounded by increasingly soft edges. We made a life and watched the sun set over it.
I always woke earlier than she and made the coffee. But she was punctual, and by nine every morning she joined me in the backyard to read the newspaper and talk about what needed doing that day. We had a garden, there were a few friends, and we reminisced unendingly. Of course I never told her any of my real story.
For my birthday one year she bought me a pocket telephone. On the package was a note she had written that said, “Now you’ll really be a California gal!” When I opened the box and saw what it was, I asked who on earth would ever call me? Zoe said sexily, “You never know!” And I loved her for her optimism and I loved her for the lie. I knew she had given it to me because she was worried. I had been having fainting spells, swoons she liked to call them, and they were getting worse. My doctor, an Irishman named Keane, joked that I had the blood pressure of an iguana. Sometimes I pretended I wasn’t feeling well just so I could visit him.
But death winds the clock and one morning Zoe didn’t show up for coffee. She was a robust woman and I don’t think she was ever sick the whole time we lived together. When I went into her room at ten-thirty that morning and saw her lying peacefully on her side in bed, I knew. Her children, neither of whom had even the slightest trace of her goodwill and energy, came to the funeral but left on the first plane out.
12. Stories Written in the Snow
The doorbell rang. The old woman looked up quickly from the notebook and frowned. She did not want to be interrupted, especially not now when she was so very close to finishing. What an amazing notion—soon she would be done.
No one ever rang her doorbell anyway, that was a given. Once in a great while someone wearing a brown United Parcel Service uniform brought her a package from Lands’ End or another of the mail-order companies that supplied her with sturdy practical clothes made out of warm materials like Polartec or goose down. She needed all the warmth she could get because her body felt cold almost constantly now, despite the fact that she was living in the desert heat of Los Angeles. Sometimes at night she even wore a pair of electric blue Polartec gloves while watching television. If someone had seen her they would have thought she was crazy, but she was only cold. More than wisdom, irony, grace, or peace, old age had brought cold, and she was never really able to escape it.
Pausing a moment, she remembered she had ordered nothing, so whoever was at her door now could only be mistaken or a nuisance. Would you like to subscribe to this magazine? Would you like to believe in my God? Would you happen to have a dollar for a guy down on his luck?
The bell rang again—so loud and annoying – ding-dong ding-dong! There was no way to avoid it. Grimacing, she put down Hugh’s fountain pen and reached for the cane leaning against her desk.
She was fat now. Recently she had even begun calling herself that, although she’d known it for a long time. She was an old woman who had grown much too fat. She liked to sit. After Zoe died she had stopped going to exercise class. She liked cookies. Hugh once said, “Eating is sex for old people.” Now it was true for her.
Her knees were weak. And her hips and God knows what else. It was an effort getting up or sitting down. When you were as old as she was, everything was an effort, and when you weighed twenty-five pounds too much you did a lot more with a groan than ever before. The year she died, Zoe had given Miranda the cane for Christmas. It was a very nice one too—made of oak and slightly crooked, so that it had a kind of jaunty character. It reminded her of something an Irishman would use. Ireland. Hugh always said he was going to take her to Ireland—
The doorbell rang again. Damn! She was sure she was almost finished writing her story, but now this interruption would disturb her train of thought. She didn’t know if she’d be able to get back into it later. Writing demanded her full attention. More and more, her memory played hide-and-seek with her. She felt compelled to get everything down on paper as soon as she could before something inevitable and dreadful like a stroke or Alzheimer’s disease roared into her brain and like a vacuum cleaner sucked it empty.
Leaning hard on the cane with one hand and pushing down on the desk with the other, she raised herself out of the chair. After a few small, unsteady, dangerous steps, she moved slowly across the shadowy room.
The room never got full sunlight. She liked it that way. She kept two lamps burning in there almost all the time. At night when she was exhausted and going to bed she would walk out and leave them on on purpose. She liked thinking her workroom was always lit. As if some kind of bright spirit was in there guarding the important things like the diary and her thoughts. Yes, she felt she left her most important thoughts in that room because it was where she did all of her diary writing. How silly. The silly thoughts of a silly old woman.
That’s what she was thinking as she gradually made her way across the house to the front door. Who could it be? Why did they have to come calling now? What time was it anyway? She stopped walking and looked at her watch. It was an enormous thing, the watch with the largest face in the store—bought so that she could read the time without having to put on her glasses.
“Wow!” It was five in the afternoon. She had been writing for hours. That was good news because it meant she was inspired, anxious to know how she would end her account. That end was so near now. She felt she could reach out and touch it. When she was done, Alzheimer’s or heart attack or whatever horror could take over and she wouldn’t care. Really, she wouldn’t care.
She peeked through the window in the front door but saw no one. If this was a prank by a neighborhood kid—ring the bell and run—she would be annoyed. But better that, because then she could go right back to work. Or maybe she would make one quick detour into the kitchen to see—the bell rang again. How could it? She had just looked and no one was there. A short circuit? Whoever heard of a doorbell short-circuiting?
Maybe someone was trying to trick her into opening the door. These were dangerous times. Terrible things happened to old women living alone. They were such easy prey. Watch the news any night and it was easy to be frightened. She had many locks on her door, but so what? Life had certainly taught her harm comes in any door it wants and doesn’t need a key. Yes, she grew quickly worried, but again it was only because she hadn’t finished her diary. Her prayer, if she had been a religious woman, would have been, “Please let me finish. Give me the strength and the time to finish. The rest is yours.”
Uneasily, she peeked again through the window in the door and saw something odd. The first time she had looked only straight ahead. Now she moved from side to side and saw that the steps leading to her front door were covered with cookies.
“Waa—” bewildered she pressed up closer for a better view. Cookies. That’s right. From the sidewalk across the small but perfectly kept front yard to the door were sixteen octagonal paving stones. She had liked those stones the moment she first saw them. They reminded her of an English country cottage or a magical path in a fairy tale. Zoe had liked them too, and when it was necessary to dig up the entire yard years ago to repair the septic tank, both women insisted the workers replace the stones exactly where they’d been.
Now cookies covered each one. Well, not exactly covered. With her bad eyes, she could clearly see five of the stones leading to the house. On each stone were four? Yes, four cookies, big ones, like the kind Mrs. Fields and Dave’s sold in their stores. Miranda loved them. Chocolate chips. With dark or light chocolate chunks, macadamia nuts… it didn’t matter. She loved big chocolate chip cookies and here they were on her front walk!
An unfamiliar dalmatian loped onto her lawn in a hurry to get somewhere. But he must have caught their scent because, slamming on his brakes, he started gobbling. Dogs don’t eat when they’re excited, they inhale, and this guy was no exception. He ate so fast, jumping from stone to stone, that Miranda began to giggle. She didn’t know who’d put them there but she doubted they meant the cookies for this fellow.
“Follow the
yellow brick cookie. They’re your favorites, right?”
She froze. The voice came from directly behind her. She didn’t know this voice, but it was a man’s and it was definitely right behind her, near her.
“Don’t you recognize him? It’s Bob the dalmatian. Hugh and Charlotte’s dog. Say hi to Bob.”
He spoke calmly, his voice quiet but amused. She had to turn around because there was nothing else she could do.
Shumda stood five feet away wearing a gray sweatshirt with “Skidmore” printed across the front, jeans, and elaborate blue running shoes. He had not aged at all from the last time she had seen him, decades ago.
“I had a whole little scene planned out with a follow-the-yellow-brick motif but it didn’t include old Bob. Cause I know you loves dem cookies.”
What could she say? It was all over. The time had come for her to die. Why else would Shumda have come? How many years had it been? How many thousands of days had passed since she last saw this handsome bad man on the porch of the house in Crane’s View, New York?
“What do you want?”
He touched both hands to his chest and put on a wounded expression. “Me? I don’t want anything. I’m here on assignment. I’ve been given orders.”
“You’ve come for me?”
“Voilа. Es muss sein.”
“Where… What are you going to do?”
“I’ve come to take you for a ride in my new car. It’s a Dodge! I asked for a Mercedes but they gave me a Dodge.”
She hated his voice. It was a nice one, deep and low, but the tone was mocking and arrogant. He spoke to her as if she were a stupid child who knew nothing.
“You don’t have to address me like that. I’ll do what you say.” It came out hard, steely.
He didn’t like that. His eyes widened and lips tightened. Something between them had shifted and he hadn’t been prepared for that. He’d probably expected her to whine or beg, but that wasn’t her way. His unsure expression changed to a leer and suddenly he was back in charge. “I told you I was coming, Miranda. A long time ago. Don’t you remember that dog you liked that was set on fire?”
The Marriage of Sticks Page 23
