The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [64]
WHAT SHE DOES IS THIS: she takes them out of the tin, separating them from her own toffees, and leaves them on the shelf.
She doesn’t eat them, but then neither does she throw them out.
Or does she? Perhaps she’s eaten one.
Six, seven, eight . . . Bigelow lines them up on the table, cursing himself for not having had the presence of mind to count them in the first instance, before leaving them in the tin. Thirty-one.
He replaces them on the shelf.
THE ONLY CURE, of course, is to see the woman. To stay in the house until she returns. She’ll find him by the stove, waiting. With an offering of some sort. Not food, that would seem like a demand. Not soap. Not perfume. And, of course, not the gramophone. Maybe a mangle, like the one in the picture. He could get it from town. Order one. But that would take too long. A pretty plate? No, it might seem like a comment on the ones she owns. Tea, then, or tobacco.
Because he can’t just come knocking on her door with a duck, not after what happened before. Because if he did, and she didn’t answer, he’d—well, he couldn’t stand that. So he’ll have to come in and then sit. Wait.
IN TOWN, the sound of hymns. Yellow light spills from the windows of the church onto the blue snow. Sunday noon, and the frozen streets are empty. Who could see, even if they cared to, where he was going?
By noon he is at the woman’s door, in her house. Because he has trespassed so thoroughly, her two rooms are as familiar to him as they were before she left, and he takes off his coat, he hangs it on the peg in the manner of a guest rather than an intruder. He arranges his gifts on the table, nothing much, just an assortment of small things—a packet of needles, a tin of cocoa, matches, and a small mirror in a hinged case. A set of two long-handled spoons.
It’s warm in the house, and when he opens the stove door to check inside, he’s surprised to see not just embers but flames. He sits on the chair, looking at the stabbing tongues of orange, feeding them twigs and straw from the basket of tinder. What can it mean, a fire left burning?
He could stand and go to check the back room, with its bed, the chest where she keeps the skins she traps. The shelf with the needle and the lump of beeswax. Two spools of thread: one black, one white. But for some minutes he just sits before the stove, its door open, and feeds it, single straw by single straw. Having considered the possibility that she is there, in the other room, he doesn’t want to get up and look, not just yet. He’s afraid of either outcome: her presence, her absence. But then, the last dry bit of grass is used. It curls into ash and drops onto the oven floor.
All along, peering through the binoculars, tracking her as she walked the blocks to the stores, visiting her house when he knew she was out, drinking from her glass, lying on her bed, all along he hasn’t known what he knows in this moment: whether she is home now, in the back room, or whether she returns later, he has embarked on something irrevocable. He feels calm as he stands up from the chair. Or at least he feels resolute, aware of the awful wet pulse of his life.
He opens the door to the second room, whose only light comes from a lamp, if a lamp is burning.
She’s dressed as if to go out, sitting on the bed with her hands in her lap, as still as a photograph. Wearing her dress, her only dress, with buttons all the way from throat to hem. Her hair, just exactly as it was the last time he saw her, when he watched through the window as she stared at the wall: one thick braid hangs over her right shoulder. Its end brushes her thigh.
She looks at him, neither through nor away but directly at his face in the way that she has: not surprised, not inquisitive. Not excited, not agitated. Not apprehensive. Not interested, and not uninterested, either. Not angry, not curious. Not judging.