Sourland

— underwear, toiletries — a clean shirt, socks — for possibly he’d be in the hospital overnight as he’d been the previous time. Sophie was chattering brightly, nervously. Sophie could not have said what she was telling Matt nor did Matt appear to be listening to her. He was fumbling to put on his trench coat — quickly Sophie came to help him. Strange to her, and disconcerting, that her husband was breathing as if he’d run up a flight of stairs.

Matt was fifty-six. Not a tall man but giving that impression. He’d become soft-bodied in the torso and midriff, he was overweight by perhaps fifteen pounds, the young lean husband she’d married in Madison, Wisconsin, had vanished. His dark hair had become sand-colored and was thinning at the crown of his head. His somewhat small gray-brown eyes were creased at the corners with a fierce inward concentration.

Sophie saw that Matt had washed his face and damp-combed his hair but hadn’t shaved. Metallic stubble shadowed his soft-jowled lower face like an encroaching shadow. She felt a stab of love for him — a stab of terror — for in love there is terror, at such times. She knew that if she went to kiss him he’d have stiffened, this wasn’t a gesture he would have welcomed right now. He wouldn’t have pushed her away but in his distracted state he’d have stiffened, drawn back. On his ghastly pale-blue lips a small fixed smile.

Worse yet: he’d have relented and kissed her to humor her. His lips would be icy, against her skin.

This had not happened. Yet Sophie felt the impress of the icy lips against her overheated cheek.

Still the wave of love for him flowed into her, like an electric current. She could not bear it, how she loved this man: the connection between them, that was in danger of breaking. Suddenly it was a possibility, the connection might be broken. Such desperate love Sophie felt for her doomed husband yearning and insubstantial as a tiny flame buffeted by wind. Such desperate love, she had to hide her face from him, that he wouldn’t see, and chide her.

She slid her arm through his — he didn’t resist, but leaned against her — surprising to Sophie, they were almost of a height as if the man who’d once been inches taller than she had become diminished overnight, aged.

She led him through the darkened downstairs of the house and to the door that led into the garage. Telling herself Exactly as it was last time. So it will be this time.

In the car driving to the hospital she spoke calmly asking Matt how he felt, if his condition was the same or if he felt worse. She asked him please to fasten his seat belt but he seemed scarcely to hear. In subsequent days, weeks, months the surviving spouse would see herself behind the wheel of the car which was not her accustomed place when she was with her husband for always her husband drove their car, not Sophie; she saw herself beside her stricken and distracted husband in their gleaming-white vehicle propelled forward by momentum as irresistible as the lunar tide or the sway of galaxies with not the slightest comprehension of where they were going or that their desperate journey was in one direction only, and could never be reversed. As time cannot be reversed. She would see herself as the bearer of Matthew Quinn to his grave. She would see herself as the person who betrayed him for never would he return again to their house. Never would he return to the life he’d so loved, in that house.

If she’d known: that Matt had slipped out of bed in the middle of the night. That he’d spent hours on the tax forms, instead of waking her and asking her to take him to the hospital.

Had he known how serious the fibrillation was? Or had it steadily worsened, while he’d worked on the tax forms?

She couldn’t bear to think He risked his life for something so trivial! For our financial well-being. For me.

Now he was gone from the house. The husband was gone, the husband would not return. Yet a dozen times a day she heard his voice — not as it had been on the morning of his departure but as it had been, before — nor did she hear his labored arrhythmic breath that had so terrified her — though the house was empty, deserted.

Except for the surviving spouse, the house was deserted.

The husband had vanished utterly in the way of the incinerated. Made not into soft powdery ashes but into coarse-grained ashes and bone-chunks “buried” in an aluminum container in a cemetery several miles from their house where for years they’d walked — for they were frequent walkers, hikers, bicyclists — they’d loved the outdoors in its more benign weathers — admiring the older, eighteenth-century gravestones and giant aged oak trees buttressed by iron rods like the fanciful drawings of invading Martians on the paperback cover of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. How innocent they’d been in those days! You could say how blind, how stupid. How utterly oblivious. Walking in the cemetery with no regard for what lay moldering beneath their feet.

Now, they’d been punished for their blindness. The deceased husband, the surviving spouse.

In a haze of anesthetized grief she’d purchased a plot in the quaint “historic” cemetery. At the open grassy area at the rear, where new graves were dug. Fresh graves, unrelenting. Matt’s “remains” were set beneath a small rectangular grave marker the crematorium provided. Set in frozen grass in what was called a double plot for which she barely recalled writing a check. In a kindly avuncular voice the funeral director had urged You might as well secure a double plot, Mrs. Quinn This is a practical step.

The widow wished above all to be practical. You don’t want to embarrass, upset, or annoy others. You don’t want to become a spectacle of pathos, pity. The widow resolved that grief itself might become practical, routine. Though at the present time her grief was slovenly and smelly as something leaking through a cracked cellar wall.

Also her grief was demented. For often in the night she heard her husband. He’d risen from their bed in the dark, he’d slipped from the room. Possibly he was using his bathroom in the hall just outside their bedroom. Every sound of that bathroom was known to her, they’d lived together in this house for so long. In her bed on her side of the bed her heart began to pound in apprehension waiting for him to return to bed with a murmured apology Hey! Sorry if I woke you.

Maybe, he’d have called her Sophie. Dear Sophie!

Maybe, he’d have brushed her cheek with his lips. His stubbled cheek against her skin. Or maybe — this was more frequent — he’d have settled back heavily into bed wordless, into his side of the bed sinking into sleep like one sinking into a pool of dark water that receives him silently and without agitation on its surface.

Often in the night she smelled him: the sweat-soaked T-shirt, shorts he’d worn on that last night.

4

Soon then Kolk entered her dreams. Like the rapid percussive dripping of thawing icicles against the roof of the house. As she was vulnerable to these nighttime sounds so she was vulnerable to Kolk by night.

In her dreams he was a shadowy figure lacking a face. The figure in the photograph, hand uplifted.

A greeting, or a warning.

She had believed that the man was dead. The actual man, Kolk.

In their few encounters in Madison, Wisconsin, many years before they’d spoken little to each other. Kolk — was his first name Jeremiah? — had been one of Matt’s political-minded friends but not one of his closest friends and Sophie had never felt comfortable in his presence. There was something monkish and intolerant in Kolk’s manner. His soot-colored eyes behind glinting wire-rimmed glasses had seemed to crawl on her with an ascetic disdain. Who are you? Why should I care for you?

He’d never cared enough to learn her name, Sophie was sure.

It was said of Kolk that he was a farm-boy fellowship student from Wisconsin’s northern peninsula who’d enrolled in the university’s Ph.D. program to study something otherworldly and impractical like classics but had soon ceased attending classes to devote time to political matters exclusively. It was said that Kolk had an older brother who’d been a “war hero” killed in World War II. Among others in Matt’s circle who spoke readily and assertively Kolk spoke quietly and succinctly and never of himself. He had a way of blushing fiercely when he was made self- conscious or angry and often in Sophie’s memory Kolk was angry, incensed.

He’d quarreled with most of his friends. He’d insulted Matt Quinn who’d been his close friend.

He’d called Matt fink, scab. These ugly words uttered in Kolk’s raw accusing voice had been shocking to Sophie’s ears. Matt had been very angry but had said We have a difference of opinion and Kolk said sneering I think you’re a fink and you think you aren’t a fink. That’s