by Laura Brodie
But that night, as the sunset spread across the treetops, he assumed Penelope’s role himself. Leaning over his easel with a moist rag, he daubed out the geese he had painted that afternoon. His work was not complete; he would need another day.
The next morning he woke early, painted for an hour, then rescued his fly rod and tackle from the cobwebs in the storage shed. Dead beetles fell from his hip boots when he shook them out. He reached a gloved hand down into the toes to feel for mouse nests, before donning the boots like plaster casts and lumbering off through the woods. A few times the tip of his rod caught in honeysuckle vines, but eventually he emerged at his favorite fishing hole, where the river descended in wide, stairstep ledges. There he tied his lucky fly, waded in above his knees, and began whipping the water’s surface, his line whistling a tuneless song. Initially he thought of Sarah, and all the excuses for his disappearance, but after the first bite, nothing else mattered for the rest of the morning.
Walking back two hours later with a pair of trout in his bucket, David glimpsed the green patch of his backyard and froze. A policeman was standing on the dock, pistol holstered at his side.
Of course, David thought as he crouched behind a tree. He should have expected this. Someone would have to be dispatched to search the cabin. They had probably combed the woods from Buck Island to this spot, maybe with dogs—dogs that had caught his trail on the bank near the canal locks, and had led them all the way to the cabin’s back door. Maybe the dogs would catch his scent now and howl him out, sheepish and apologetic, the ludicrous truant.
The policeman on the dock removed his hat, and David relaxed. He knew this guy. It was Carver, Carver Petty, a black man in his late thirties, the favorite local cop among the college crowd. Carver was the kind of man who never arrested students for public drunkenness, unlike his overly zealous colleagues. When he found college kids vomiting in park bushes, he drove them to the campus hospital, where they could sleep it off under a nurse’s observation.
“You’re a good man,” David had often said, taking some staggering freshman off Carver’s hands. To show his thanks, David had offered free medical care for Carver’s nine-year-old daughter, saving them the copayment at her pediatrician’s office. She had been raised by Carver ever since his wife walked out eight years earlier. Luckily the child was blooming with health, her problems limited to mild bronchitis in the winter, poison ivy in the summer. David sent them home with free samples of hydrocortizone.
So now Carver had come to investigate the cabin, the last place where Dr. McConnell was known to be alive. David tried to remember whether he had left any signs of current habitation. He hadn’t eaten breakfast, so there was no food on the table, no radio playing, no door propped open. There was only his painting, still wet on the easel. He wondered if Carver had noticed; perhaps he was waiting for the doctor to show himself.
As David wondered what to do, he watched Carver place his hat over his heart, look out across the river, then wipe his eyes with his left hand. And with that small gesture of grief David knew that he was safe.
An hour later he was alone and back at his painting, scraping away a layer of feathers with his palette knife. Tomorrow he would return home, so he told himself. It would be the third day, the proper time for the dead to rise. He could appear to Sarah first, and perhaps she would forgive him. Or perhaps not. The time for forgiveness might be long gone.
The next morning, threading through the woods on a slow walk, David tried to concoct a plausible story. Amnesia was comical, a broken limb too easily disproved. Hypothermia, however, gave him pause. Now there was a logical diagnosis. He could claim that after his near drowning, the rainy hike had left him bedridden with severe chills, compounded by a twisted ankle. He had attempted a trek to the general store on the second day (which would explain why he had missed Carver’s visit), but the swelling had been so bad he’d had to turn back after a mile.
David was reviewing his symptoms with professional detail, nearing the western side of the cabin, when suddenly he stopped. Margaret’s blue Accord was parked in the drive, which could mean only one thing. Sarah had come looking for him. She would see his dishes in the sink, the painting on his easel, and the game would be over. Sarah would recognize the signs of life.
He wondered if he should walk into the cabin and confess everything, trusting that the women’s wrath would fade over time. And perhaps that would have been the right thing to do, but instead he found himself sneaking up to the kitchen window, peering through the glass from behind a rhododendron. He saw Margaret throwing away his food—the ham, the mayonnaise, the apples and tomatoes. She must hate me, he thought as he watched his supplies disappear into her plastic trash bag. But then he considered Sarah, standing beside his easel, examining the brushes soaking in turpentine. And oddly enough, her eyes were not angry, her mouth was not prepared to scold. She appeared sad and contemplative, an expression he had witnessed in hospitals and at gravesites. David realized that he was looking at two widows, come to clean the mess left by a dead man, and for the first time since his absence, the shame swept over him.
He crouched with his back to the cedar boards and pressed his fingers against his temples. What an idiot he was. What a son of a bitch. He, the doctor, was causing pain.
Had Sarah been alone he would have revealed himself at that moment, but he dreaded Margaret’s disdain. In the face of her pragmatic nature his retreat into the woods seemed pathetic. He would have to wait for some future occasion when he could speak to Sarah alone.
Glancing into the window, he saw her approach his bedroom, and he circled quietly to the northern side of the cabin. Through unwashed glass blurred with a spiderweb, he watched her smooth the mattress, pull the sheet tight, and fold it down six inches, perfectly horizontal. She tucked the edges under the mattress, fluffed two pillows and placed them over the fold. Then she sat on the bed and stared at the closet.
If she cries, I will go to her. He never could bear to see Sarah cry. Whenever she was troubled he had always hurried to correct the problem with a joke, a bouquet, or a prescription. That was why he had felt so helpless during the miscarriages, why he had stayed in the basement at night while she cried in bed. Because all he could do was offer cups of chamomile tea, kiss her forehead, rub her shoulders, clean the bathroom and the bloody sheets.
It all came back as he searched Sarah’s face for hints of anguish. There were no tears, no sobbing. Her expression was stoic, which made him stare all the more. Did this woman really miss him? Sarah was so difficult to read. Not like his young female patients, who seemed to welcome college as the age of display, saying “Look at this, doctor. Look at me.” His wife never invited observation, which was one of the things that appealed to him. Sarah had layers of reserve that shielded a heart which was genuinely, intensely warm—whenever he could reach it. In these past few years it had gotten harder for him to touch that heated core, she guarded it so closely. Still, he felt an odd thrill in looking at her, trying to interpret her subtlest gestures. Of course he recognized this spying as a shallow temptation. Doctors knew the horror and the fascination of other people’s tragedies; the spectacle of human suffering was a sadistic pleasure.
David pulled himself away and walked back into the woods. Fifty yards past the cabin he sat at the base of a small hill and waited for the sound of a door closing, the start of a car’s ignition. When he heard the clatter of Margaret’s tires spinning on gravel, he looked back and watched a flash of blue metal, carrying Sarah far away.
• 12 •
That night in the cabin David felt, for the first time, unmistakably dead. For the past few days he had reveled in the possibilities of a new life, but now he mourned the old one. He tried to reassure himself that there was still time. Time to confess, to return to his previous routine. But how could his former life be anything other than diminished?
Tomorrow he would have to go to the general store, to replace the food that Margaret had thrown out, and there he wou
ld face the telephone, waiting like the wife he was neglecting. That would be the moment of reckoning, the point of no return.
All night he slept fitfully, thinking of Sarah sitting at the foot of this bed, surveying the room with those sad, dark eyes. It was cruel to let a woman mourn for a living man, cruel to leave her alone in their empty house. But their marriage had already been a form of grief, and any momentary joy she felt in his reappearance would not last long. He told himself that their best hope for happiness was to change their lives, and this was a change beyond imagining.
By sunrise his mind was already set. He would stay at the cabin and try to create a new life, something Sarah might want to share. When the time was right, he would return to her, and ask if she wanted to start again.
On the ride to the store, he considered everything that he was leaving behind. The college would be fine without him; several physicians in town would be happy to take his place, and his student patients came and went so frequently, he had made few strong connections. For serious ailments, undergraduates usually went home to their family doctors, and as for the faculty, most of them avoided the college waiting room, dreading sick students who might plead for extensions.
All in all, he felt surprisingly few obligations toward other human beings. His friends were so busy with their jobs and children, they wouldn’t have much time to mourn, and Nate had so many consolations between his women and his wealth, he would never suffer for long. Only Sarah had the capacity for extended grief. Sarah, with her memories, her poetry, her inconsistent philosophies. He could not leave her in limbo. Eventually he would have to go to her, to explain everything and give her the power to decide what should happen next in their lives.
At the store he withdrew two hundred dollars from the ATM. He guessed that Sarah wouldn’t notice; she never balanced her checkbook and maintained only an approximate notion of what the totals should be. Their funds were always sufficient, and when the bank sent its monthly statements she simply glanced at the balance and threw the sheets onto his pile of papers to be filed. Widowhood would probably change her habits, but that would take months, and by then they would have spoken. In the meantime, the money machine would serve as his accomplice.
He was going to need more supplies. Two pairs of underwear were insufficient to start a new life, and the general store offered meager groceries—canned fruit, Wonder Bread, milk cartons with overdue expiration dates. He needed warm clothes, medicines, and hardware. He needed, alas, a Wal-Mart. Sarah almost never visited the one on the outskirts of town. If he went there in the early morning, he could probably avoid anyone he knew.
David planned his shopping for the following Tuesday, and prepared by growing a seven-day beard. When the time came, he wore a baseball cap, his knapsack, and black sunglasses that darkened the sunrise to a midnight glow. He pedaled along side roads as much as possible, averting his face whenever a vehicle passed. The mountains were grueling and his legs were weak; he had to push his bike up some of the hills, so that the forty-minute car ride to Jackson took nearly three hours. It was almost nine o’clock when he arrived at the supercenter, an hour behind schedule, but when he scanned the parking lot for familiar cars, he recognized none.
Inside the door, he angled his face away from the security cameras. Removing his sunglasses, he hurried through the aisles, indiscriminately grabbing fishing line and hooks, underwear and socks, a sweatshirt, blue jeans, a spatula, tape. Each minute was an excruciating exercise in paranoia. He cringed at every possible encounter, maintaining an aisle between himself and all other shoppers, but it was a needless precaution. The strangers remained isolated in their own concerns, more attentive to prices than to people.
The only person who looked him in the eye was the checkout girl, who smiled and asked, “Credit or debit?” He had automatically run his card through the machine—the Exxon Visa that Sarah rarely used. Now he would have to sign his name on a piece of dated paper, the first tangible proof of his life after death.
“I’m sorry. Can I pay with cash instead?”
“Sure. Just press cancel.”
Outside, next to the riding mowers, he emptied his plastic bags into his knapsack, and was surprised at how few of his provisions fit inside. Glancing around, he kicked off his shoes, pulled his new blue jeans over his shorts, and tied the sweatshirt around his waist. He stuffed fishing line into his pockets and tied tube socks around his handlebars, looking like some kind of bike-riding homeless man. But no one stopped, no one stared. Silly, to have imagined himself as a magnet of attention. He could probably ride through town as unnoticed as every other ghost.
Only at the parking lot exit, when a blue Accord pulled up on his left, did he feel his stomach clench. There was Margaret, the ubiquitous woman, concentrating on the red light. Slowly, very slowly, avoiding sudden movements, he turned his handles to the right and coasted into the gas station on the corner. He stood behind a pump and watched until the last trace of blue had disappeared down the road, then he pedaled ferociously away from town.
A mile later, where the fast-food restaurants gave way to farmers’ fields, he stopped by a meadow of Queen Anne’s lace and dropped his bike in the grass. His heart was pounding, his hands sweaty. At the edge of a barbed wire fence, he stared out across the pasture, and wondered if Margaret had noticed him. Surely she would have stopped and stared. He could still see her silhouette, an arm’s length away, and how strange it felt, to be fleeing from neighbors, cringing at all human contact. His exchange with the checkout girl had been his first scrap of conversation in seven days. With no telephone at the cabin, no television or computer, the bedside clock radio was his sole companion, its reception so weak all he could pick up was the local country music station. He preferred the sound of whippoorwills and even the cawing of these crows that now gathered before him, hopping among the goldenrod.
• 13 •
Two weeks later as he sat on the deck, thumbing through a newspaper from the general store, David came across the announcement of his memorial service. Saturday, four P.M., Jefferson Chapel. In lieu of flowers, donations were being accepted at the Rural Development Medical Clinic.
He read the item three times, wondering if he could get away with another trip to town. The service didn’t appeal to him so much as the idea of seeing Sarah, and trying to gauge her feelings. But going to town was risky. His Wal-Mart escapade had left him stu pidly fearful, dreading a knock at the door—Margaret or Sarah or Carver. But as each day had passed in solitude, he had become more convinced of his invisibility. The human brain manipulated visual data into objects that were comprehensible and expected. No one had expected to see him at Wal-Mart, just as no one would be looking for him at his own memorial service.
The next day he packed his knapsack with bottled water, a bag of trail mix, and a paperback novel. He had shaved his beard several days earlier, but his sunglasses and baseball cap made him confident. Most of the people who knew him would be inside the chapel. If he came late and kept his distance, the chances of detection were slim.
At five minutes to four he arrived in the woods at the edge of the college campus. Leaning his bike against a pine tree, he followed a circuitous route, shying away from the busy quad with its imposing perimeter of brick buildings from which a colleague might suddenly emerge. When the stone chapel appeared, he veered to the opposite side of a hedge twenty yards to the left. There he stretched on his side in the grass, pulled the book from his knapsack, and tipped his head toward the pages so that the ball cap shadowed his face. Behind his sunglasses he closed his eyes and listened to the sounds floating through the chapel windows. “Amazing Grace,” “Be Still My Soul,” a collective recitation of the Twenty-first Psalm, then a long stream of speakers, distinguishable only as alto, tenor, and bass. A half hour passed before he heard the young reverend, his volume higher than the others, using words like Christ, redemption, and heaven. A breathy flute whispered Gounod’s “Ave Maria” and the air was hushed in benediction, br
oken by the organ’s cry of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
He turned and looked through the leaves as the human record of his life emerged from the chapel doors. First Sarah and her sister, Anne, arm in arm; then Anne’s husband and two daughters, followed by Nate with his latest blonde. The reverend gathered them into a receiving line as the congregation passed—administrators, faculty members, several student patients. His squash partner, his dentist, the owners of his favorite restaurant. Three cousins, two college roommates, most of Jackson’s medical community. He felt a grim satisfaction at the size of the crowd.
Sarah seemed to be enduring the condolences with admirable patience, accepting a handclasp from the dean she despised, a kiss from Mrs. Foster while her boys kicked at the shrubs. When most of the mourners were gone, she walked alone to a wrought-iron bench, and David followed on the opposite side of the hedge. In her face he saw none of the collapsing misery that had come with her miscarriages, only a drawn, tired expression.
Suddenly he crouched, for she had done something strange. She had stood up and turned in his direction, as if called by a familiar voice. Her eyes scanned the hedge, then stared into the sky, and finally she walked back to the chapel, placed her hand against its exterior, and began tracing around its edge, disappearing from view. He returned to his original vantage of the chapel entrance and watched Sarah appear around the corner. Nate offered her his elbow and escorted her to the car, while his girlfriend followed five paces behind. The three of them climbed into a blue Accord, and for the second time that summer he watched Margaret whisk Sarah away.