Chapter 8 #3
This is what she came up the hill to find a week ago. This is what she sat on the floor of the workshop and cried for. This is what we are giving each other, in the dark, in the cottage, with the snow falling and the cemetery silent on the hill above us.
She comes apart against me. Slowly. Shuddering.
Quiet. I feel her clench around me—long, slow, pulsing—and she presses her forehead to my shoulder and her whole body shakes with it, and I keep moving up into her through it, slow and steady, and the shaking does not stop for a long time.
I follow her, slower still—holding her tight against me, my arms locked around her ribs, my face in her hair—and I press up into her one last time as deep as I can go and I stay there, and the wolf in me and the man in me and the body of me all together for the second time in a month and the first time since fourteen years ago I knew that this kind of thing was even possible.
After.
She does not move. I do not move. We stay joined for a long time, the way we did not the first time, because tonight the parting is going to feel like something other than rest. She tucks her face into the side of my neck.
I press my mouth to her temple. Her hand is at the back of my head, fingers in the soft hair at the nape.
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"I love you."
I do not move.
She is the first to say it. I have, in three weeks, been waiting for the right moment to say it myself, and the right moment has never quite come, because the right moment with a woman like Rue does not announce itself in the way I had imagined.
I have been the man who buried his first wife and did not say the word love aloud to another human being for fourteen years, and the word in my chest has been waiting for the small careful invitation Rue has just given me.
I lift my head.
I look at her.
"Rue."
"Yes."
"I love you."
She closes her eyes.
She does not cry. She is past tears tonight. She does the smallest, quietest thing—she lets a long slow breath out against my throat, and the breath is the breath of a woman who has been holding herself ready for the answer and has now, at last, been answered.
"Thank you," she says.
"Thank you."
We lie down together. We stay joined for as long as our bodies allow.
When we do, finally, part, we do it slowly, and I pull the quilt up over both of us, and she fits herself along the length of me—her head on my shoulder, her arm across my chest, her leg between mine, the cherry medallion lying against the place where her hand rests on my chest.
"Tomorrow," she says, her voice already thick with sleep.
"Tomorrow."
"What are we going to do?"
"Whatever we want."
"Together?"
"Together."
She is asleep within five minutes.
I am not.
I lie awake in the dark of her bedroom and listen to her breathing, which is slow and even and unsurprised.
I listen to the snow against the window.
I listen to the small settling sounds of the cottage.
The stove. The kettle on the back of the stove that we did not, tonight, ever take off the burner.
The wood walls and the wood floor and the small wood beam above the bed that I built into the cottage two years ago when Della asked me to add a beam over her then-empty spare room because, she said, Someday someone is going to need a place to sleep, Coffin, and they will want a beam to look at.
Someone has come to need the place to sleep.
I look at the beam.
I think about the math.
The math is the math. She is going to outlive this moment, and she may not outlive me, and I am not going to get to build her coffin, because the man who builds her coffin will be some other undertaker, in some other place, perhaps in this same cemetery and perhaps in a different one, in a future I will not, by the logic of our two species, be alive for.
I think about Elena.
Elena, who I will visit on Sunday the way I visit Elena every Sunday.
Elena, whose grave Rue planted lilies on in October, the ones that will come up next April.
Elena, who would have liked Rue, who would have understood Rue, who would have looked at the woman asleep against my shoulder and said, in her dry careful way, Good. Took you long enough.
I think about Lily.
I think about the daughter I never got to know.
I think about whether Rue and I will, at some point in the future—not this winter, not this spring, but at some point, in some shape—talk about having a child.
I do not know. We have not, yet, discussed it.
I am forty-six. She is twenty-eight. The math, again, is the math.
We will have, when we have it, the talk about the math, and we will see what falls out of the talk.
For now, I think only this: it is December. The cemetery on the hill is full. The cottage is warm. Rue is asleep on my shoulder. The wolf in me is asleep too, deeply, peacefully, the way he has not slept in fourteen years. The fire in the front room is banked but warm. The snow is still falling.
I close my eyes.
I sleep.
The cottage is dark and warm and outside the cemetery is silent and the dead are resting and the living—the living, finally, after a long long winter—are holding each other.
The circle is complete.