LANIGAN BOOKS

The trouble, that day, began in the cheese aisle, as it so often did, though afterward Margaret could never have said why. Henry had been fine in the car. Fine reading out the list in his good clear voice, the voice that still belonged to the man on the answering machine, a younger, Henry stored somewhere inside the little black box by the phone and already out of reach. Then he stopped with a wedge of something in his hand and looked at her with that scary blankness she had learned to recognize before he did. She moved closer, as one might to someone about to fall. “We have plenty at home,” she said. “Leave that.” She eased it from his hand, put it back, and guided them both toward the tinned things, where the choices were fewer. A woman by the yogurt watched for a moment, then made herself stop. Margaret was grateful for the effort. Over the past two years, she had become a connoisseur of the small mercies strangers paid her: the well-timed averted eyes, the suddenly patient cashier, the man at the pharmacy who pretended not to hear Henry call him by another name. People were kinder than she had expected. It was one of the few things the illness had taught her that she would rather not have known, because it meant she had spent a good deal of her life expecting less of people than they were willing to give. Henry held her arm down the next aisle. His grip was light, trusting, and it hurt her a little, this new willingness to give himself over to her completely, now that she could no longer say, with any confidence, that he had ever given her the whole of himself. Thirty-one years of marriage, and she had never asked him the question. She had carried the silence the way she carried everything, carefully, two-handed, and now there was no one left to ask. Only this gentle stranger wearing Henry’s face, leaning on her, certain of her at last. She found the things on the list and a few that were not. At the checkout Henry was charming to the girl, the old charm surfacing unpredictably, like something rising through dark water. He told her she had a lovely face. The girl, who could not have been twenty, flushed with pleasure, and Margaret felt the familiar double pull of it: pride that he could still do this, that the warmth was still in him somewhere; and beneath the pride, so old and worn she barely felt its edges anymore, the cold little thought of how many lovely faces there had been over the years, and how readily he had always found them. ✦ The house, when they came back to it, did its work on her as it always did. She had loved this house once without complication. They had bought it the year Ruth was born, when the rooms had seemed impossibly large and full of a future they had not yet had to live in. She had stood in the empty kitchen with the estate agent’s sheet in her hand and felt the particular vertigo of too much luck. Now the rooms were full, and the future had mostly happened. The house held all of it the way a body holds its years, invisibly, in the joints. It held the friends too, the ones who came and went, and the ones who no longer came at all. Claire and Roger, who still brought wine at Christmas and stayed too long. Viv, who had moved to Halifax and rang Margaret every few months with a brightness that made both women tired. Marian and Paul from across the road, who had let themselves in through the back door without knocking, as if the two houses were joined underground. For twenty-eight years, the four of them had eaten at that kitchen table, passing plates, finishing bottles, raising children in parallel until first Paul, and then, two winters later, Marian herself had vanished from the shared pattern of their lives. Cancer took both. The table still had four chairs. Only Margaret and Henry were left to fill them. Henry had taken Marian’s death badly. In some ways, worse than Margaret, though Margaret had been the one to sit with her at the end. For months afterward he had retreated into himself, and she had thought it was grief. Only later did she wonder whether it had been the first frost of his own decline, silvering him over before either of them knew what they were seeing. Perhaps it had been grief. Perhaps it had been illness. Perhaps one had opened the door and let the other in. ✦ She helped Henry into his chair by the window, where the afternoon came in long and he could watch the road. He liked the road. He could not always say what year it was, or whether Ruth had children, or whether his own mother was living or dead. The answer changed. Some days he grieved her freshly, and Margaret had learned that correcting him was a cruelty. The kinder thing was to let the dead die again gently and bring him tea. But he could watch a road for an hour and be content, and Margaret had stopped asking herself what he saw there. Sometimes, though, when his face took on a look she remembered too well, she wondered whether some intact part of him was watching from behind the illness, understanding more than he would ever say. Sometimes she thought it was only movement. Proof that the world was still going on outside the window, with or without him in it. She put the shopping away. She wiped a counter that did not need wiping. These were the rituals that held the day in shape, and she performed them with that grave concentration of a woman much older than fifty-four, though she did not feel old. That was the thing no one told you. Inside the managing and the wiping, inside the careful reading of Henry’s face for signs of fear, confusion or return, she remained exactly herself: not old, not finished, but entirely present, still wanting things inside a life that had slowly stopped asking what she wanted. When the kettle had boiled, she stood with both hands flat on the warm counter and let herself, for the length of one breath, manage nothing at all. Out the window, the light was going amber on the hedges. Henry, in his chair, said something low and pleasant to the road. If Ruth had rung at that moment and asked how she was, Margaret would have said only, fine, love, we’re fine, he had a good morning. But Ruth did not ring. No one asked. So Margaret stood very still in her kitchen and felt the enormous, unspeakable loneliness of being needed completely by a person who sometimes did not know her name. ✦ The nurse was coming on Thursday. That was the other thing, the thing she had not yet made room for in her mind because there had seemed to be no room left. A man from an agency. Some relation of Henry’s by a cousinly thread Margaret had never properly traced, though Ruth had, because Ruth was good at those things. She said it was better this way. Daniel, Margaret remembered her saying, was family. Family meant better care. Someone with a reason to be kind. He would come twice a week and do the things Margaret had lately discovered she could no longer do alone. The doctor had called it help. Ruth had called it respite, brisk with relief because she could offer the word without having to live inside it. Margaret had nodded, as she nodded to most things now. The truth was that she did not want a stranger in the house. The house was the last place that was hers, the last territory of the marriage not yet entered by doctors and forms and the bright, terrible kindness of professionals. But she was tired in a way that frightened her. The tiredness had gone past sleep, past bone, into some deeper place she had not known could be reached. And there had been a morning the week before, which she had not told Ruth about and would not tell Ruth about, when she had stood at the top of the stairs with Henry’s weight against her and understood, with perfect clarity, that one day soon she would not be strong enough. That was what frightened her. Not the weakness itself, but the way it would arrive. Without drama. Without warning. On a regular morning, with the carpet under her feet and one hand on the banister, and afterward there would be no taking it back. So. The nurse was coming on Thursday. And, yes, his name was Daniel, Margaret reminded herself. Ruth had written it on the pad by the telephone in her firm hand, Daniel, with the agency’s number underneath, and Margaret had looked at the name for a while without any feeling attached to it. A name that belonged to no one yet. A man called Daniel was going to come into her house and lift her husband, and Margaret was going to let him, and that was the shape of the life she had now. She turned the pad face down on the counter without any apparent reason, and carried the tea through to the window, where the light was failing and Henry was waiting, trusting the woman he could not sometimes recognize to come and sit beside him in the dark. Margaret gave him the mug and sat across from him. The afternoon was almost gone. Outside, the street offered little movement. April had been trying, all week, to become itself, but the cold kept returning with a persistence that felt almost personal. The hedges were green. The light was green. Everything looked young and newly made, and still the house held its chill. Henry took the mug in both hands. His face gave nothing away. That happened more often now. The blankness was not always confusion. Sometimes it seemed almost like privacy, as though some intact part of him had stepped back from the window of his own face and was watching from deeper inside. He drank, then looked at her. “Do you think you could help me?” Margaret straightened at once. “Of course,” she said. “What do you need?” “A box.” “What box?” “Our box,” he said. He spoke calmly, with none of the fretfulness that sometimes came over him when he had lost the thread of a thing. That made it worse. Margaret searched his face, then the room, as though the box might declare itself from some shelf or corner. “All right,” she said. “What should I do with it?” “Burn it.” The words came cleanly. Almost gently. Margaret lifted her tea and took a sip, buying herself a moment. She was trying to tell whether this was one of the lucid passages, one of those small returns that could last five minutes or an hour, or whether he had only wandered into the shape of sense by accident. “Why?” she asked. Henry blinked. “What?” “I’m asking why you want me to burn it.” “Oh,” he said. Then he stopped. His face withdrew, not dramatically, not all at once, but as if a light had gone out behind a curtain. He turned back toward the window. Dusk was gathering over the bright new green of the hedges, making them look briefly unreal. Margaret waited. He said nothing more. She said nothing either. She had learned not to chase these moments. Pursuit only frightened him, or embarrassed him, or sent him further away. Still, she sat with the question between them, feeling its heat. Our box. Burn it. His right hand had begun to move against the arm of the chair, slowly, almost delicately, travelling over the fabric in short, strokes, as if he were writing something only he could see. Margaret watched his hand until it stopped. Then she rose and took both mugs to the kitchen. It was time to start dinner.