Survived By
Every light in the house is on. I did it at midnight, one switch at a time, when I knew I wouldn't sleep. The couch is the one place they all reach.
At five past four on Thursday morning a car door shuts in the street.
I don't move. I've got my arm over my eyes and one boot off. The side door opens. Her feet come across the kitchen, quick and light, and stop at the arch. It gives a little under a person's weight.
She stands there.
Water drips off something onto the floor. Slow. Her coat. It's been raining since dark, and I can smell it on her from across the room, wet wool and the cold of a car that's been sitting. I keep my breathing the way I've kept it all week. In through the nose. Slow.
She doesn't touch a switch. Nine years she's gone behind me turning off what I leave on. She stands in the arch with the whole house lit around her and doesn't touch one.
I count. It gets to a hundred and ten.
Then she goes up.
I lie there with my arm on my face. I don't sleep. I go back to the boathouse instead. It's a place I can go with my eyes shut.
Wednesday, September 9.
Leah wants the shelf over the workbench cleared, and she's at work in Kalamazoo, so it's me and a contractor bag. Forty years of my father in coffee cans. I take them down one at a time, thumb the lid, tip them out. Screws. Fuses. Bobbers with the hooks all locked in each other. A can of drawer pulls nobody ever put on a drawer. The bag gets heavy and the shelf gets bare, and the light through the doors lays a square on the floor that slides while I work.
The last can is a Chock full o'Nuts, yellow gone to tan, the lid pressed on hard. I give it a shake. It doesn't rattle like the others. Something inside slides and settles, dry and light.
I work the flat screwdriver under the rim and go around a quarter inch at a time. The lid squeals. I've done this to a thousand other people's paint.
Newsprint on top, the color of tea, and it smells like his pipe. The Aldine Sentinel, the week it came out, folded in quarters and then quarters again by a man who never folded anything. I know the date without reading it. I don't read the headline. I open it one crease at a time with the flats of my fingers, the way you'd open a drawing, and there's a photo. Two girls on a dock, gray, grainy. The big one has her arm hooked around the little one's neck. The little one's squinting into the sun with her hands in her pockets. There's a caption under it. My eyes go past it like they go past a nail I don't want to hit.
Under the Sentinel there's a page from the Traverse City paper, folded once. I know it before I open it. Four inches of column. A name, two dates, a church. The last line lists who's left.
…and her sister, ____ Marsh, 13.
The blank is mine. I won't put it in. On the paper it's a name, and somebody has drawn a ring around it. Twice, in pencil, hard enough to dent the page. A carpenter's pencil, the flat kind. The ring has that chisel edge. He sharpened them with a pocketknife, and nobody else I know did.
In the margin beside the ring he wrote 6/20.
I read it four times. My hands hold the paper. They're the only part of me that does.
Six-twenty is the day I got married.
I sit down on the boathouse floor with my back against the wall, where I sat once until three in the morning. The paper's on my knee. Under the planks the water knocks on a piling. My father knew who she was for seven years, every year of my marriage. He shook her hand at the courthouse. He asked about her on every call, in his TV voice, and waited for me to answer.
I figure he did the math the night after the engagement dinner, when he'd met her mother. I wasn't there for it. I've never known what it looked like on his face.
I put the Sentinel back in the can and the lid on the can and the can on the shelf where it was. I keep the obituary. I fold it small and put it in my jacket.
That evening I go to the yard on Chicago Drive for two-by-fours and sit in the truck in the lot with a receipt and a pencil.
Go. Tell. Stay.
I don't write anything after them. I've never needed to.
I get home at nine. The hall light is on at the top of the stairs and she's standing under it with a basket of towels against her hip, still in her work clothes. She says I'm late. I say the yard kept me.
I don't remember crossing the hall. I remember the basket on the floor, because I've taken it out of her hands, and then I have her face in both of mine.
It's a small face. I never noticed how small. I hold it with my thumbs under the bones of the cheeks and turn it to the bulb, and I look. The eyes first. Then the mouth, then the line of the jaw. I'm looking for a girl on a dock, gray and grainy, with her face gone tight against the sun, and she's in there. She's around the eyes. The bulb is full in her face and she squints into it, and I have her.
"What?" she says.
Her hands stay at her sides. She doesn't pull back. She lets me look for as long as I look.
"Nothing," I say.
I let go. I pick up the towels and put them in the linen closet where they go, and she says good night and goes into her office and shuts the door.
At three I'm in the kitchen with the light on and a glass of water I don't drink. I stand at the end of the counter, not at the sink, because from the end of the counter I can see the foot of the stairs. The jacket's over the chair at my elbow. I take the paper out and read the last line under the bulb. The blank. The ring. The date. I read it with one eye on the bottom tread, so that if she comes down I see her feet before her face and have the paper away.
Some nights after that she comes down and finds me there. I have it back in the pocket by the time she reaches the landing. She looks at the glass. She never says anything about it, and I never say anything about the light.
Tuesday, September 22.
I tell my wife I have to see a man about a mantel. She says good. She's on the phone with a roofer.
There's a binder on the desk at Birchwood with a pen on a chain. Visitor, patient, time. I write A. and under relation family friend, which is a thing I can write.
Room 114. She's awake. Bed cranked up, tube in her nose, a machine in the corner counting her breaths. The window looks on the lot. She's watching it like a TV with nothing on.
She turns her head. She looks at me for a good while. Then she says my name. Only that. Adam. It's the first time in seven years she's said it without something in front of it.
"Mrs. Marsh."
She looks at the closet. "That door sticks."
I go get a plane out of the truck. I take the door off the hinges, and it's the head that's binding, the top corner, where the house has settled and nobody adjusted the jamb. I take a sixteenth off. I hang it back. It swings like a page. She watches every stroke and doesn't say anything, and neither do I.
When I'm done I stand there with a curl of pine in my hand.
"What was she like?" I say. "As a girl."
"Which one."
I don't answer that. I can't put a name in that room. She waits.
"Quiet," she says at last. "She watched everything. You could feel it on your neck."
She closes her eyes.
I sweep up the shavings with my hand. I take them out with me.
Thursday, September 24.
I sign the lease on my phone in the Hallorans' drive, standing next to the truck. Six months. I don't know what it's for. That's not true. I know what it's for. It's for going.
Friday, October 2.
I sign the binder the same way. Nobody at the desk looks up. There's a man in the hall with a cart, and I go past him and down the corridor toward 114 with my hands out of my pockets so nobody thinks I'm anything.
She's awake. She's cranked up higher today. The window is gray, and beyond it is the lot and the rows of cars, and mine is in the third row, and she knows it.
"You parked crooked," she says.
"It's a truck."
"You fixed my door."
"It was sticking."
"Sit."
I sit. It's the chair for family, orange vinyl, with a split in the seat. I put my hands on my knees. The room smells like the inside of a plastic bag. On the tray there's a cup of ice chips going to water, a Bible she isn't reading, a paperback with a broken spine.
She looks at me and waits. She's a bookkeeper. She'll wait all day for a figure.
I've built the sentence. It's four words. It's the one that starts with I. I've had it ready for twenty-three days. I've said it in the truck and in the shower and in the studio to the radiator, and every time it comes out clean and short, like a good cut.
"Mrs. Marsh," I say. "That October."
She goes still. The way a person goes still in a house when they hear a step.
"I was —"
The word won't come. It's there. It's in my mouth like a nail. I've held one there before, working alone, and you learn to talk around it, and I do.
What comes out isn't what I built. It's nineteen years old.
"Did she have a light?"
The machine counts. Once. Twice.
She looks at me. It goes on. It goes on long enough for the parking lot to come in, a car door, a cart wheel squealing in the hall. Her eyes are pale and watery and sharp and there's nothing in them I can read, and I've read a lot of faces in a lot of doorways. She looks at me the way I'd look at a board I'd been told was sound.
Then she puts her hand on the rail. The hand is all knuckle. She finds the button on its cord and presses it, and doesn't look away while she does.
A light comes on over the door.
I don't move. I could. I'm a big man in a small chair and there's a door. I stay where I am with my hands on my knees until the aide comes in, a young woman in a navy fleece with a lanyard, a little green toy hanging on it.
"Mrs. Marsh? Did you ring?"
"This man is leaving," Joan says. Her voice is dry and even. "He's tired me."
The aide looks at me. She isn't a fool. She's got a kid at home and a certificate and a way of standing between a bed and a stranger.
"I'm sorry," I say. "I didn't mean to."
"That's all right, hon. She tires easy."
I get up. The chair squeaks. I go out of that room the way I've gone out of every room I ever shouldn't have been in, at a walk, with my hands where they can be seen. In the truck I sit with both hands on the wheel. It's a long time. The lot goes on around me. On the second floor, a window, and a shape in it, and then the shape moves.
I drive home. I get there at nine at night. I sit down to eat without washing my hands.
Thursday, October 8.
She knows when I'm coming. Not the time. The minute. She's got the porch lamp on and the kettle going before the truck's in the drive. I say I'm home and she says I know, and turns back to the stove with her back to me, and I stand at the door with my keys in my hand.
Friday, October 9.
I get down on my knees behind the truck. Rear bumper, the left side, where the steel folds over. I run two fingers along the inside of the fold. Black plastic, flat, about the size of a book of matches. There's a little rubber ring in the corner for a key chain.
I hold it in my hand. It's warm from the exhaust. I put it back in the fold and press it flat with my thumb until it clicks.
I left it so she'd see where I go.
Wednesday, October 14.
There's a woman in a charcoal coat with a hood standing in the pines above the landing. I bought her that coat. I know the hood. She stands with one shoulder against a trunk, like somebody leaning on a doorframe who doesn't mean to come in. I look once. I don't look again, all day.
I say the word at dusk. I turn around and I look at the trees. Somebody's in them.
Tuesday, October 27.
I take the van.
I'm in the chair in 114 by half past eight. She's asleep with her mouth open. Nobody's signed the binder but me. I don't wake her. I sit with my hands on my knees and my thumbs on the split in the seat, and the machine counts, and some time near ten she says, without opening her eyes, "Adam."
"Yes, ma'am."
I've got nothing built. It comes out plain.
"Did she know who I was? When she married me."
The machine counts six. Her eyelids don't move.
"Ask her," Joan says.
That's all. She doesn't say anything else, and I sit there another hour in case she does, and I drive back down 131 at the limit with nothing in the cab but the smell of Deshawn's body spray. I'm home by two.
That night I read the page. I read it in the cab on my phone, with the dome light on. Blue ink on yellow legal paper, in her hand, a tidy small hand with the tails of the letters clipped short. A date at the top. 2/3. Nine years ago in February.
ADAM R. VOSS. 27. Finish carp. 1142 Ionia SW. Father Richard, Sun Tracker 21', Heartland claim M-206318, 10/17.
Ionia was my apartment. The claim number is my father's. The seventeenth of October is the day he filed it. The burst pipe on Lake Drive was the twenty-fourth of February, and I priced the trim, and she crouched by the baseboard in a gray suit with a moisture meter and gave me a name.
Thursday, October 29.
I go to work. She's still asleep at six. I make the coffee out of habit and stand there with the lid in my hand and put it on the carafe anyway.
Friday, October 30.
I'm off the couch by six. When she comes down at a quarter to seven in her work clothes, hair still wet at the ends, I've got the kettle going. I'm pouring in small circles, waiting for the bloom to settle, and she stands at the counter and watches me do it as if she's never seen it.
"Morning, Marsh."
"Morning." She takes the white mug from me and holds it in both hands. "I'm going to my mother's tomorrow night. I'll stay. Sunday I'll drive to the cottage from there."
"Leah's got it at four."
"I'll be there before then."
She drinks. She looks at me over the rim. I don't know what's in her face. It's a face I've watched across a table for seven years, and I look for the girl in the newspaper and can't find her, and I keep looking.
At the door she puts the mug down on the hall table. She comes at me, and I think she's going to say something, and she doesn't. She takes my collar in one hand and kisses me on the mouth. She doesn't do that at the door. Not in years.
She tastes like toothpaste.
She wrote my address down three weeks before she said hello.
"Drive careful," I say.
"You too."
The door shuts. I stand in the hall with my hand on the table where her mug is, and it's warm.
I'm at the shop at eight. Deshawn comes in at ten past with a coffee.
"Where's the fire?"
"The cottage. Sill."
"You look like —"
"I know what I look like."
The dot rides north with me. It's the cottage. She'll see it and know where. Leah wants the boat in the water before Sunday. I told her I'd do it today.
The cottage is brown stain and green roof and shut for the season. I let myself into the boathouse with the key from the nail. It's cold in there, cold like a cellar. The lift stands empty, the way it has since the fall I was seventeen, the cables hanging. The rowboat sits on sawhorses by the ramp.
Twelve feet, oars in the locks, green paint gone to chalk at the gunwales. My father's. There's a foot of rain in it. I bail it with the scoop, and that takes twenty minutes, and then I walk it down the ramp into the slip and it takes the water low and level.
On the bow thwart there's a brass cup hook, screwed in. The lantern hangs on it. Yellow plastic, a wire bail wrapped in black friction tape, four big batteries in the base. It's hung there since I was ten.
I've got a hand on it before I know I've moved.
I unhook it. It's lighter than I remember. I thumb the switch and it throws a hard white circle on the boathouse floor, on the planks, on my boots, on a coil of line. I find the switch without looking. I turn it off.
There's a rule. Any boat under oars after dark shows a white light, ready to hand.
I want to see what she does.
I carry the lantern out to the truck and put it behind the seat, where the jack lives, and shut the door on it. The cup hook stays where it is on the bow thwart, with nothing on it.
I'm back at the shop at seven. Deshawn's gone home and the bay is dark except for the bulb over the bench. The lantern rides behind the seat and I leave it there.
I put the phone on the glass of the old printer and send the two pictures over and print the sharp one on plain paper. The machine takes its time. Yellow paper comes out white. Her handwriting comes out gray. I fold it twice and put it in the envelope from the truck. Then I take the obituary out of my jacket, where it's been since the ninth of September, and put it in my wallet behind the license, with the list.
Sunday the clocks go back. It'll be dark by six.