The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [20]
Usually, by the time the sun came up, he already knew what he was going to write, but on the morning of the accident he had run short of ideas and finally, standing over the stove, had allowed himself to resort to the spaghetti remark. There was one particular note he had been saving for their anniversary, a note he was sure she would like—I love it when you wear my blue jeans, even if you do, too, drip chocolate sauce on them—and if he had known it was their last morning together, the last time she would pad across the linoleum in her thick winter socks, the last time she would open the refrigerator looking for cream for her coffee or jelly for her toast, he would have used it a few months early. At the very least he would have written something more intimate than I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall.
This was what she did: when she wanted to test the spaghetti she was cooking, she would fling a strand against the wall, and if it stuck, she knew it was ready, and if it didn’t, she would try again a few seconds later. Sometimes, after the pot had finished boiling, she would throw an extra strand just for the pleasure of seeing it whip through the air and flatten so suddenly against the plaster. The next day he would find the pieces she had flung hanging over the stove, brittle and yellowed, clinging to the wall in precisely delineated loops and twists that left funny little abstract maps of themselves in the paint when he chipped them loose.
It was something he had always teased her about, that runelike series of curves and squiggles in the kitchen. The pasta motif, he had called it. And now, suddenly, the sight made his stomach clench. It took the best part of his life, the only part he had ever felt he understood, and consigned it to the past. Worse, it summoned up an image he had been trying to suppress ever since he woke with his injuries shining out of his skin.
Patricia’s body as their car struck the bridge stanchion.
Her long hair whipping against the window.
Spaghetti patterns of blood on the dash.
He had always known that their time together would one day be spent. That it might be spent so soon, though, was a possibility he had never allowed himself to imagine. He was a fool. He crumpled the note up and tossed it in the trash. Then he fished it out and smoothed it flat against the counter. He couldn’t bear to read it, but he couldn’t bear to throw it away, either. He would have to put it in a file somewhere and try his best to forget about it.
That was when he remembered her journals—seven of them, each page filled from corner to corner with transcriptions of the notes he had left her. She kept them lined up on the glass and oak espresso table in the room where she exercised. Once or twice, hearing the springs of her equipment stop, he had peeked in to find her stretched out on her Nautilus or her rowing machine, paging through the journals as if they were old diaries she was investigating for traces of the thoughts that used to preoccupy her when she was young and brave, when she was unchanged. He attached the Post-it note to one of his crutches and carried himself across the house. Patricia’s exercise room had always been a sanctuary for her, the one place in the house where she could play her music, burn her candles, and sort through her baskets of yarn and crochet hooks in privacy. Now it felt overwhelmingly empty. When he flipped the light on, the objects that greeted his eye had an unusual tidiness to them, a strange and frightening aura of completeness, as if the treadmill