A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [119]
Every now and then in a sudden calm she lifted her head and spoke. Early on she said, “When I account for my children, like a mother duck, I think, Audrey is in the den, Lizzy is in the ground. How many times do I have to say Lizzy is dead, before I’ll know it? How many times? When people ask me how many children I have I need to say two. Because I still have two, don’t I? I always sound flustered and the people get mixed up and embarrassed. Oh, but one is dead, they’ll finally figure. But I still have two children. Lizzy is still my child.” She lay back against me and it continued, the rolling and thrashing and sobbing. “It feels like we’re only the husk for some wild thing tearing around inside us,” she wailed.
In another lull she said, “Wouldn’t it be handy if you could take your eyeballs out, let them get on with the long tiresome work of crying?” We had laughed a little before our losses brought us down. “What am I going to do, Howard?” She kept asking that same question again and again.
I said I didn’t know. I can’t say how long we wept and then how long we lay quietly. I knew that time was passing only because the moon kept rising. We lay on the floor sniffling. She was awfully heavy in the crook of my arm. I could feel her eyelashes on my neck and her breath through my shirt. I was afraid to move, afraid the slightest change might make her go away. When the moon passed over the windmill she hoisted herself up and looked into my face. Where her glasses had gone I can’t say. “Sometimes I just want to die,” she said in that soft way under her breath. “I just want to die so I can go where Lizzy is. Sometimes it seems a punishment, as if I’m trapped on earth.”
I pulled her back down and kissed her dark hair. “No,” I said. “It’s all right here.” I hated to think that she wanted to die. Everything about Theresa radiated goodness. A person could understand her uncomplicated sorrows. I could feel her relaxing again into my chest. We would get up in a minute. I would turn on the glaring porch light and we’d resume our life. We were tired, and finally insensible. I could hardly lift my head. We must have both slept for a while. Perhaps she also thought she’d break away in the next minute, and the next, and like counting sheep, the exercise put her to sleep. It felt good, to sleep. For the first time in what felt like months I slept soundly. Her skin smelled so fine as I drifted off. I don’t think I dreamed about anything but her strange, foreign smell.
In my memory, when I go back to that night, the clock does not tick. The only thing that moves is the night sky. On the porch that means nothing to us. We were leaden, spellbound, like Shakespearean lovers who have drunk a potion. When she woke, sitting up in alarm, I turned and pulled her back to me. That action surprised me as much as anything. I knew her movements in my sleep. That I was lying on the floor in the middle of the night with my wife’s friend, my neighbor’s wife, my children’s playfellow’s mother, did not seem to matter. “I need to go home, Howard,” she said into my shirt.
“Stay.”
“I can’t,” she whispered. She hovered over me, stroking my cheek with her knuckles. I didn’t want to wake up. I unfolded her hand and brought it to my lips. She let me. She smiled, as if it was an indulgence, allowing me to kiss each finger, one by one. I made a point to smell her skin as I kissed. It came to me that hers was the fragrance of an early spring morning. It wasn’t the efforts of a genius soap manufacturer. It seemed to me that it was her own scent, that smell of fresh loamy earth and light. “You smell nice,” I uttered. “You smell like spring dirt.”
She laughed out loud and then quickly put her small hand to her mouth. “Coming from you I take that as a compliment.” She shook her head. “Dirt.” She leaned down. I thought she was going to kiss my forehead. “Dirt,” she said again. “I love that.”
We may both have thought of Alice. Theresa may have considered for an instant