A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [23]
“Never mind,” he had said.
In bed we closed our eyes over a veil of tears and lay awake. It was no use trying to sleep and well before dawn I slipped down the creaking stairs. Out of long habit I went over, opened the refrigerator, and stood motionless in front of its maw. The light had burned out weeks ago and it was all a darkness. The green glow of the digital microwave clock on the far counter, as soft as candlelight, illuminated the room. When I shifted my weight from my right to my left foot the raspberry Jell-O on the bottom shelf, with banana and pineapple chunks embedded inside, caught the light and seemed to wink. Howard had told me that the church ladies were distributing food to the Collinses, that Nellie had carefully marked our Tupperware with masking tape and an indelible ink pen and then taken several dishes over to the church kitchen.
He had not said a word on the way home. When we were just inside he asked me when the funeral was going to be, as if he expected me to have learned something between the car door and the threshold. I had gaped at him, my eyes wide and mouth slack, like a dolt, and of all things, I had laughed. I couldn’t think where it was I wanted to be, where I could go to feel steady. The lingering smell of fresh bread, the abundance of food made from scratch, the sink scrubbed clean, the place mats that had been cleared off the table and stacked neatly in a pile on the cold wood stove, the saltshaker filled to the brim—every one of those details made me feel a stranger in my own kitchen. Life is nourishment, Nellie seemed to be saying with her food. Here is life!
I went out to the porch and sat on the swing. Heat lightning flashed in the distance and lit up the sky for an instant, before I had time to see. There were so many miracles at work: that a blossom might become a peach, that a bee could make honey in its thorax, that rain might someday fall. For Lizzy there would be no more miracles. I thought then about the seasons changing, and in the gray of the night I could almost will myself to see the azure sky, the gold of the maple leaves, the crimson of the ripe apples, the hoarfrost on the grass. Lizzy somehow suddenly belonged to the earth. We would want to look at the beauty, trying to see through her eyes, and yet at the same time she was the air, the flower, perhaps even the moon now. All we could do, the only act left to us, was to look.
When I woke up two hours later I was still on the swing outside. I had slumped over and slept, my cheek resting on the scoop of the garden trowel. Howard’s rusted, stained T-shirts were hung up, shirt after shirt, on the clothesline. I wondered if I had hung them out. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the birds were chirping sweetly in the lilac bush by the feeder. I pulled myself up into a patch of pale light. It was another perfect morning. The green was slowly burning out of the grass and the dried ends would prick my feet if I walked across the lawn. The swallow in the nest in the far corner of the porch looked at me with distrust, I could tell, as if he thought I might run for him and crush him in my hand. I remember realizing that if I had ever felt rooted, it was nothing more than wishful thinking on my part. I had been simpleminded to think that I had come to a point of repose. The bottom, the solid ground of the world, had gone out beneath my feet.
I went upstairs, stepping carefully around the loose boards that groaned, to Emma’s room. Maybe this was home, I thought, this one small room with a bed and a dresser in it. There were feathers on the floor from a doll quilt, dried-out Magic Markers with no caps in sight, pennies hidden in the pile of the rug. I sat