Chapter 3 #3
I have been a hospice nurse for six years. I have held the hand of two hundred and forty-eight people at the end of their lives. I have come home alone after every single one of those deaths. I have never, not once, in all those years, been asked to sit with someone afterward.
"Yes," I say. "I'll come."
He nods. He turns. He goes up.
I go down.
I do not go to the wake. I do not go to my cottage.
I sit on the porch of the main hall for half an hour, in the cold, watching the light fail over the ridge, until I cannot feel my hands.
Then I get up, and I go inside, and I drink one cup of the funeral coffee, and I eat half a sandwich because Della puts it in my hand and tells me to.
Then I walk back up the hill.
The workshop window is bright in the dusk. The lamp is on. The door is half open. Inside, Thaddeus is at the stove with the kettle. He hears me come up the path and turns.
"You came," he says.
"I came."
"Tea?"
"Tea."
I sit in the chair by the stove. He hands me a mug.
He pulls up a stool across from me. We do not speak for a long time.
The workshop smells of wax and clean wood and the faint, faint trace of fresh earth from his boots.
The kettle ticks as it cools. Outside, a wind has picked up and is moving through the maples below the cemetery, and the leaves are coming down in handfuls.
"I never told you my mother's name," I say.
He waits.
"Joanne. She was forty when I was born and forty-nine when she died.
I was twelve. The cancer was in her bones by the time anyone caught it.
She was at home—a small house in Hazard, the proper Hazard, Hazz-erd—and there was a nurse who came in the last six weeks.
Marjorie. I do not remember Marjorie's face.
I remember her hands. I remember that she made my mother less afraid.
I remember that when the moment came, she was the one who told me what was happening, and she did not lie to me, and she did not protect me from it, and she sat with me afterward and let me cry. "
"That's why."
"That's why."
He nods.
I drink my tea. He drinks his. The wind keeps moving outside. The dusk thickens into night.
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"Why did you ask me up here?"
He sets down his mug. He looks at the floor for a moment, then back at me.
"Because you were going to go home alone after Edwin," he says, "and you have gone home alone after two hundred and forty-eight deaths, and I did not want you to go home alone after this one."
I do not move.
I do not breathe, for a second.
"How did you know the number?"
"You told me, two weeks ago. You said patient two forty-eight in passing, like it was a date. It was the date. You have been counting."
"I have been counting."
"I have been counting too." He looks at his hands. "Two hundred and thirty-seven coffins."
"Edwin is two thirty-eight."
"Edwin is two thirty-eight."
We sit with that, the way we sit with everything. The numbers are not a competition. The numbers are an inventory. The dead we have walked.
"I do not know how to do this," he says, finally.
"Do what?"
"Want someone."
I look at him.
"It has been a long time," he says. "I have not. I have not wanted anyone in fourteen years. I do not know what it is supposed to look like. I do not know what to do with my hands."
I am quiet for a moment.
"Thaddeus," I say.
"Yes."
"I think you are doing it. Right now. You asked me up here. You made tea. You let me sit. That's wanting someone. That is what wanting someone looks like, when you have been alone too long."
"That is all?"
"That is all, in the beginning."
He looks at me. His eyes in the lamp light are not amber, the way I had thought. They are deeper than amber. They are the inside of a piece of polished oak, the kind of brown that has gold in it but only when the light is just right.
"All right," he says.
"All right."
"Will you come up tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"And the day after."
"Yes."
He nods.
I finish my tea. I rise. He rises too. At the door, I pause. I look at him.
I do not know who reaches first. I think it is me. I think I lift my hand and place it, very lightly, against his jaw. The skin there is rough with the day's stubble. The line of his cheekbone is warm under my palm. He goes very still.
I do not kiss him.
I do not, tonight, kiss him.
I just hold his face for a long moment, the way I hold the hands of the dying when I am telling them, without words, You are not alone, you are not alone, you are not alone.
He closes his eyes.
I take my hand away.
"Tomorrow," I say.
"Tomorrow."
I walk down the hill in the dark, and the wind is at my back, and the cottage when I open the door is warm because Della has been in and lit the stove, and on my bedside table beside the carved wolf and the carved word HAZZ-ERD is a small jar of pressed wildflowers I did not put there, because the women of Bone Hollow have decided, apparently, that I am one of them now.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
I open my notebook.
Patient #248. Name: Edwin Talbot. Age: 79. Time of death: 6:47 PM. Final words: "Tell her I'm sorry about the wallpaper." Good death. Pack. White oak coffin, carved by T.M.
I close the notebook.
I do not, for once, eat cereal standing at the counter.
I sleep.