'Or then again, maybe the man who asked us for the match this afternoon was right, and God is just out there playing games with us to see how we'll react. Or maybe it's chance. In the end, maybe it's nothing but chance.' He smoothed a crease from his pants as he stood up. 'There's the long answer. The short answer is, I don't know. But I'm glad we're here, Marion.'
He went to the sink to wash his face. She heard him running the water until it was hot enough for the pitch to change, then the rapid welling sound as he cupped his hands to the faucet followed by the sudden collapsing splash, like a tarp giving way, as he emptied the water onto his face. When he came back out, his hair was slicked back in mixed wet and dry strands, except for a thin loop that had come loose from the thatch to dangle over his eye. 'We're here,' he concluded, 'and things are pretty good, and that's enough for me.'
He sat down beside her on the couch. She was tired and so she rested her head on his shoulder.
'This is nice,' she said after a while. 'You didn't really help me with my question, but this is nice.'
'I know it is. It's been a long time, hasn't it?'
'What do you mean, 'It's been a long time'?'
'A long time since we could just sit together quietly like this. A long time since you would let me, or since I would risk it. You know, sometimes I look back on the last ten years of our lives, and it feels like we were nothing but roommates. I was the bumbling roommate you had to pick up after, and you were the sensitive roommate I had to keep from upsetting. I don't know what did it to us. Maybe it was Laura's going away to college, the two of us being alone together after all that time. I don't know. But that's what we were, isn't it? The crazy thing is that I didn't even notice until it was all over. It took dropping dead, of all things, for me to see things so clearly.'
It sounded as though he were about to laugh, but the laugh turned into a spasmlike inhalation, and he sneezed loudly, jarring her head with his shoulder. 'Whew! Excuse me. I wasn't expecting that. Anyway, that's what I mean by 'It's been a long time.' I mean I'm glad I'm your husband again. I'm glad you're my wife. If my vote counts for anything, I say we keep it that way. I must have tried to tell you that a dozen times today, when you haven't been so… frustrating.'
As usual, his speech had cracked apart into a mass of springs and cogs at the end, the parts of a statement rather than the statement itself. He had left her with the impression that he was about to clarify himself but had decided to opt out at the last second. Still, she knew what he meant, even if she wasn't quite sure how to respond to him. Finally she just gave up and said what she was thinking, which was, 'I didn't know you'd realized anything was wrong.'
The look he gave her was as old as time. He leaned over and said, 'I'm going to change out of these clothes before we head back out, okay?'
Then he stood up and disappeared into the bedroom, shutting the door.
It was a mistake for her to think of him as innocent, uncomplicated. She knew that. But there was something about his fussi-ness, his obedience to certain long-established routines, along with the carelessness with which he presented himself to the world, that made it easy for her to imagine him as a child. She had imagined, for instance, that he was the one who had never seen their marriage clearly – or seen himself clearly, for that matter. That he was the one who was half-broken by every little sickness that came his way, and by nostalgia for the way he used to be, and by worry over what had happened to Laura. But she was beginning to suspect that it had been her all along. She was the innocent one. She was the child.
She felt for a moment the child's guilt and panic that she was to blame for something – for finally getting to know him, maybe. She knew that it wasn't the getting to know him part that would convict her in the end. It was the finally.
She cast the feeling aside and forced herself up from the couch. It was five-thirty, almost time to leave. She had to get dressed. Outside, the sun had all but disappeared, and the apartment had filled with those textureless blue shadows that were just a few degrees darker than the sky. She could hear Phillip snapping his jacket together in the bedroom. Each snap locked into place with a satisfying little click, much louder than it ought to have been in the falling darkness. She went to the door and prepared to knock, lifting her hand to the wood. It was an interesting sound.
SIX. THE STATION
The bulges in the snow were graves. At first Laura had mistaken them for natural formations, like the terraced ridges that sometimes appear on beaches or deserts when the wind blows just swiftly enough to carve its own patterns in the sand and just slowly enough not to disturb them. She had even – shamefully, she now realized – climbed on top of one of them, balancing herself at a flat spot along the crest to look out over the ice toward the bay. But as the days passed and the station remained deserted, the truth gradually dawned on her. The zoologists and technicians who had manned the station were dead. She had read their names on the duty roster that was tacked to the bulletin board: Armand Koen at the top, Nathan Sayles at the bottom, and between them eighteen others. Twenty names for twenty graves, strung out along the back side of the building like a row of beads.
One of them must have stayed alive long enough to bury the others – but who, she wondered, had buried him? What had killed them all in the first place? And how long ago had they died? She searched the station carefully, but it offered her no clues: no journal, no voice recording, not even a message inscribed on a post somewhere, a single cryptic word like the settlers of Roanoke Island had left: 'Croatoan.'
Croatoan. Cro-Magnon. Caveman. Cave painting. Graffiti. Confetti.
Confetti. She had been in elementary school when the last of the manned space shuttles had exploded over the launch gantries of Cape Canaveral. The footage had shown a million fragments of plastic and aluminum tilting and floating in the coastal wind, catching the sunlight in a great mass of sparks before it rained down over the spectators in the stands. At the time, when her teacher turned on the television, Laura had thought – all the children had thought – that they were watching an old-fashioned ticker-tape parade. They had laughed and whispered, and someone at the back of the room had even applauded. Then Ms. Terrell had told them that they ought to be ashamed of themselves. 'I can't believe you children, celebrating tragedy like that. It's terrible, that's what it is.'
Soon enough, the image on the television screen had cut to the exact spot of the explosion, a strangled black cloud in the robin's-egg blue of the sky, and they had all realized what was going on. The silence that had filled the air was so complete that it made the classroom seem empty, she remembered, just the skeletons of a few dozen desks and chairs packed together on the carpet. It was the same silence Laura had heard the evening she arrived at the station. The sun had almost vanished by the time she drove the sledge into the center of the encampment. She was exhausted, of course, but she was also elated. She parked beneath a wooden overhang and slid out onto the ice. The wind was completely still. Surely someone must have heard the sound of her engine cutting off, but no one came outside. She would just have to surprise them at the door. The snow around the building was unbroken – no footprints, no sledge tracks, only a few small holes where some icicles that had fallen from the edge of the roof stuck out of the ground like fence posts. She had to punch through the crust with her boots in order to clear a path to the front door. When she got there, she banged on it with her fist. No one answered. What was going on?
She tested the lever and found the door unlocked. 'Hello?' she called out as she stepped inside.
The lights were still working, and so were the heating panels. She could even hear the receiver crackling on a table in the corner. But there was nobody in the station.
Her heart sank. She had journeyed untold miles across the cold and the darkness and the broken ice, and for what? She walked through the sleeping quarters, the bathroom, the kitchen, and the dining room, expecting at every turn to find someone reading a book, eating beans out of a can, or shuffling a deck of cards in that noiseless way people had of sliding them back and forth in blocks between their palms. As far as she could tell, though, the building had simply been abandoned. There was no sign of recent human presence, no damp boots or sweating glasses of water. The rooms were quiet and undisturbed. It would have been obvious to anyone that they had been forsaken.
In the open space of the living room there was a couch. She discovered that it was long enough for her to stretch out on at full length. She propped her feet up on the armrest and stared at the ceiling. Slowly her skin began to prickle and flush as her capillaries opened up. The warmth from the heating panels wafted over her in
