over the dirt beside the pawn shop, gouging out lakes and moats and islands with a broken stick, and the old Italian woman who didn't speak a word of English, and the man she heard whistling morosely for his dog every evening – well, the whole idea seemed absurd to her.
Of course, any number of people might have survived the virus and remained alive to remember them. But Marion found that idea even harder to believe than the other. She had been there, after all, when the virus spread across the plains and into the heartland. She had seen what it could do.
Phillip took a deep breath, pounding his chest. 'You know, I love this,' he said. He swept his fingers through the leaves of a bay tree. 'Just being able to walk wherever I want to go, whenever I want to go there. After Number Two, I thought my walking days were over.'
Number Two was how they referred to his second heart attack. In their last few years, Marion had nursed him through Number One, Number Two, and what they had taken to calling Number Two-A, a minor stroke, after which their family doctor had told him that he should avoid all strenuous activity: swimming, bicycling, aerobic walking – anything that might overtax his heart. There were certain things you didn't have to worry about when your heart stopped beating, though, and one of them was heart failure.
'It's like you're born with all these blessings,' he said, 'only you don't realize they're blessings until you lose them. And if you're thick-headed enough, like me, you don't even realize you've lost them, not until they come back to you. You know what I mean?' He squeezed her hand as if to punctuate the question.
'I'm glad it makes you happy,' Marion said. And she was, although of the two of them, he was never the one who had made a predicament out of his happiness. That had always been her territory.
'Yes, but I'm not sure you understand,' he said. 'It's not just the walking I'm talking about, Marion – '
But they were at Bristow's already, and the noise of the diner cut him short.
Bill Bristow had been a toll booth operator for nearly forty years – that was what he'd told Marion and Phillip – but he had never wanted to be. He had spent rush hour after rush hour, day after day, staring out at the lines of traffic and imagining himself as a successful restaurateur. It had been his lifelong dream. And so when he died, only a year or so before the virus hit, he had decided to open a diner – nothing fancy, just hamburgers, chili, and baked potatoes, the kind of place that would serve breakfast all day long.
It had been his good fortune, he said, to set up shop just a stone's throw away from the monument. Now his restaurant was the oldest one in town.
'The Byrd family!' he exclaimed when he saw them, and Marion thought, Or two-thirds of us, anyway. 'My favorite customers, the Byrd family! Just like the real birds – they come and then they fly away, and you ask yourself, when will they come back again? I've got a booth by the window for you. Will a booth by the window be okay?'
'A booth by the window will be fine,' Phillip said.
'Excellent!' He escorted them to their table and called a waiter over to take their drink order. Then he bowed and excused himself, saying, 'Such a busy morning,' as he backed away.
When he was gone, Marion whispered, 'It's like eating in a burger joint with an overexcited French maitre d'.'
'I think it's charming,' Phillip chuckled. 'He's obviously playing the role he's always dreamed of. We should all be so lucky.'
Four elderly Korean women were sitting in the booth behind them. Marion could hear their mah-jongg tiles clicking and see their small gray heads bobbing over Phillip's shoulder. A little girl, maybe three years old, knelt beside them with her legs folded underneath her, sucking on a peppermint stick. When she saw Marion looking at her, she bit the stick in half and crammed both ends in her mouth, crunching at them until she was able to swallow. She gave a triumphant smile. The smile meant that Marion couldn't have any.
Soon the waiter reappeared to take their order. Then he left and Phillip began stirring a packet of sugar into his coffee. Next he would take a slow, pondering sip from the oval of the spoon, make a face as he decided that the coffee was not yet sweet enough, and empty a second packet of sugar into the cup, watching it break the surface, just as he always did. Time had made a wreck out of his body, Marion thought – a wreck out of both their bodies – but he was still a little boy in some respects, marooned at that age when discovering his own habits was a sort of game for him. The game had to be played the same way every day, or the pieces would fall to the floor, the board would collapse, and the illusion that you were shaping your own life – that you were in control – would break. It was one of the many things Marion had loved about Phillip at first, then somewhere along the way stopped loving, and now loved again.
The service at Bristow's was unusually fast that day, and the waiter was already laying their plates on the table when Marion caught a glimpse of her daughter out the window.
A hook caught in her stomach.
She tapped on the glass and was about to call out, 'Laura, Laura,' but then the woman turned her head and it wasn't Laura at all, just a stranger who happened to have Laura's self-contained stride and ginger hair, stopping at the curb before she crossed the street.
This wasn't the first such apparition Marion had seen. As usual, she was embarrassed by her mistake. Why did she keep expecting her daughter to turn up everywhere she looked? Perhaps because she had run across so many other people she recognized in the city: neighbors, friends, cousins, casual acquaintances, along with hundreds of faces she could not quite place but was sure she had seen somewhere before, plus a few that seemed to have grown out of faces she had known in much younger configurations.
Even her own mother, who had passed away almost twenty years before, was there, though not her father, who had died when Marion was still a teenager and had vanished from the city, it seemed, just as Marion was arriving.
It was only from talking with people like Bill Bristow, people she had never met before she came to the city, that she realized how unusual her situation was. Many of the people who remained behind knew very few of the others. And some of them, a couple dozen at least, who had died in the late phases of the virus, seemed to know none at all. They had simply closed their eyes and woken one day in a city full of strangers.
Marion turned to Phillip. 'So what are we doing here?' 'What we're doing is enjoying a couple of ham-and-egg sandwiches.'
Sometimes her distaste for him reared back up in her before she could stop it. She grimaced. 'No. What I mean is why are we here as opposed to someplace else. Here as opposed to wherever everybody else is.'
'I know what you meant, honey. But I can't give you an answer. I don't think anybody could. 'What are we doing here?' For that matter, what were we doing there? Why were we ever anywhere at all? I think the only thing we can do is stop asking impossible questions and just make the best of it,' he said. 'Go for a walk with your wife now and then. Sleep in occasionally. Eat whatever sandwiches come your way.' He took a bite of his own, as if to illustrate the point. 'Which brings me to what I was getting at outside – '
Two men were deep in conversation at the next table, and one of them said, 'Laura,' or at least Marion thought he had, and so she hushed Phillip in order to listen in. She only had to wait a few seconds before the word turned over again, like a piece of shingle caught in a heavy current, and she realized that it was actually 'laurel.' She caught herself sighing. In the sound there was an echo of the one long sigh that had been the last few years of her life.
She said, 'My mind is playing tricks on me again. I'm sorry, Phillip. Where were we?'
By then, though, he had lost the thread of whatever he was going to say, or at least the inclination to say it. They finished the rest of the meal in silence.
The food was excellent. Marion could sense her bad feelings drifting away from her as she ate, and by the time she was finished, her mood had lifted entirely. She watched Phillip drink the last of his coffee and return the spoon to his cup with a tiny clink, pushing them both to the side of the table. Then, as an afterthought, he wadded his napkin into a ball and dropped it in after the spoon. Next he folded his two empty sugar packets together and put them in the cup, as well. She was pretty sure that if the cup had been just a little bit larger, he would have found a way to fit his entire plate in there. He reminded her of the little girl with the peppermint stick, forcing as much of the candy into her mouth as she could. Looking over Phillip's shoulder, Marion could see the girl still slouching down in her chair, playing with the ends of her hair as the mah-jongg tiles clacked into place around her. Marion winked at her, but the girl didn't notice. Phillip noticed, however, and, assuming the wink was meant for him, he winked back at Marion, a look of delighted surprise taking over his face. This was the funniest thing Marion had seen all day. It must have been half a minute this time before she realized she was smiling.
