The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [21]
He went to press the Post-it note into Patricia’s most recent journal, but beneath the window, on the table where it should have been, there was an empty slot with a boundary of dust around it. Where could it be? He tried to recall—had he seen the book in her hands the day of the accident? Maybe so. But when he went to the front hall and opened the box the hospital had labeled with her name, he found only her clothes, her shoes, and her pocketbook, along with a small plastic bag holding her wrist-watch and jewelry.
She had definitely taken the journal into the car with her. He was sure of it now. He remembered her clutching it to her hip as they left to meet their reservation at the restaurant. “What if I get bored and need something to read?” she had joked, whispering to him with her hand alongside her mouth, “I’ll let you in on a little secret—the guy I’m dining with today is a real snooze.” But if it wasn’t in the box, then where was it? Who would lose a dead woman’s handwritten journal? Who would steal it?
Who, as it developed, but the woman who had shared her recovery room. The hospital spent a week or more attempting to track it down before discovering that she had taken it. Apparently, she had adopted it as some sort of charm or talisman, a sad, sick symbol of God-knew-what illness or unhappiness. She had actually been reading it—reading it!—as if it were her own cache of personal letters. She had spoken with Patricia, had watched her die, had believed he was dead, too—or at least so she said. But none of that excused her, none of it healed him, none of it made his life one bit easier or brought his wife back from the dead. When she finally placed the journal in his hands, apologizing for what she called “this misunderstanding,” he felt himself shaking with relief and exhaustion. Absurdly, he found that he was afraid of dropping the book. The idea came to him that it was Patricia herself he was holding, that she had fallen and twisted her ankle, maybe, and given him her hand, and he was bearing her up as she limped through the snow. Soon they would both be inside again. He would place a pillow beneath her foot and kiss her toes one by one, starting with the pinky, and they would drink half a bottle of red wine, then wipe the stains from each other’s lips with their thumbs, and she would make a happy little upsy-daisy noise as he carried her upstairs to bed.
Instead, he brought the journal home, took it into the living room, and set it on his lap. His fingers flipped backward from the endpapers, watching as the pages filled with her handwriting. He had no need to leave the Post-it note inside, since she had already written it down. There it was in her own precise script, facing him one more time, the last sentence on a half-empty page, I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall, ending with that oddly turned period of hers, like a toppled v or a bird’s beak.
One morning, some six weeks after the accident, his editor woke him from a sound sleep to ask if he knew when he would be returning to work. “I realize you’re going through a rough patch, Jason. Grieving—check. Convalescing—check. I get it, I’m with you, I understand. By all means, you should take as much time as you need. But I’m telling you, you’re missing out on some of the greatest shots of your life right now. Have you seen the stuff Dawes has been producing? Or Laskowski? Even Christman gave us a front-pager yesterday! Christman for Jesus’ sake! I’m telling you, this Illumination thing is really big. Don’t just sit there in that house of yours and turn to stone on us. I can’t believe that’s what she would want, Patricia.”
He felt like the priest of some ancient blood religion, incensed to hear her name spoken out loud. “How do you know what she would want? Maybe