make this shell of a man recover his health and spirits.
I knelt down and put my arms around him. “I’ve found you, Kay!” I said, holding my wet cheek against his cold face. He felt like a sack of bones wrapped in parchment when I hugged him. “It’s going to be all right. I’ve come to take you home.”
He looked up at me then, and at first his stare was cold and emotionless, as if he had trouble remembering who I was, but I got him up and made him walk around, and gradually his eyes cleared a little, and he began to mumble responses to my questions, and before long we were both crying. “Gerda,” he whispered. “Where have you been all this time? And-where have
He was like somebody waking up from a long nightmare. At one point he looked around the room, and said, “This place is cold and empty. Let’s get out of here!”
“The sooner the better.” The Snow Queen could come back any time now, and, since I wasn’t armed, I wanted to be gone before she returned.
We had a long way to go to get back home, and Kay had an even longer way to go to get the craving for the Snow Queen’s powder out of his system, but we took it slowly. First, out the garden and down the mountain, where Rudy met us and helped us back to the highway. Then back to the city, and finally the long journey home to Denmark, where Kay could get long-term medical care for his condition.
It is spring again now. More than a year has passed since Kay took off on the wild ride with the Snow Queen, but he is almost his old self again. He grows stronger every day, and he’s talking about getting out of therapy soon, and looking for work. Maybe he’ll become a gardener in the country. He’s growing roses again.
I looked at him, tanned and fit in the warm sunshine, with roses in his cheeks as pink as the ones on the tree, and I whispered, “Peace, O Lord.” This time I wasn’t swearing.
AN AUTUMN MIGRATION
THE GHOST OF my father-in-law arrived today, smiling vaguely as he always does-or did, taking no notice of me. He acted for all the world as if I were the ghost instead of he. Not even a nod of greeting or a funny remark about the weather, which was about all the conversation we’d ever managed when he was alive. I’m not very good at conversing with people. Stephen says that I have no small talk. I listened a lot, though.
With my father-in-law, I became an audience of one to his endless supply of anecdotes, and I think he enjoyed having someone pay attention to him. He used to tell funny stories about his days in the Big One, by which he meant World War II, and he could always find a way to laugh at a rained-out ball game or a broken washing machine. This did not seem to endear him to his energetic wife and son, especially since his inability to hold a job made ball games and washing machines hard to come by, but his affability had made him a comforting in-law for the nervous and awkward bride that I had been. We were never really close, but we enjoyed each other’s company.
Later I sometimes shared Stephen’s exasperation with the smiling, tipsy ne’er-do-well who could never seem to hold on to a paycheck or a driver’s license, but in truth I would have forgiven him a great deal more than poverty and drunkenness for giving me a few moments of ease in those early days when I had felt on trial before Stephen and his exacting mother, for whom nothing was ever clean enough.
I didn’t hear the front door open and close-or perhaps it didn’t.
When he arrived, I was alone, of course, in that long emptiness of the suburban afternoon. I told myself that I was waiting for Stephen to come home, but I was careful not to ask myself why. Certainly I was not expecting any visitors that day-or any other day-and my father-in-law was as far from my thoughts as he had ever been in life.
I had been dusting the coffee table, a favorite pastime of mine, because you can make your hand do lazy arcs across a smooth wooden surface while thinking of absolutely nothing, and if you happen to be holding a damp polishing rag in your hand at the time, it counts as actual work. When I looked up from my shining circles, I saw my father-in-law clumping soundlessly up the stairs in his baggy brown suit and his old scuffed wingtips. He was probably wearing a worn silk tie loosened at his throat. He looked just as I remembered him: a portly old gentleman with sparse gray hair and a ruddy face. I even fancied that I caught the scent of Jack Daniel’s and stale tobacco as he sailed past. He was carrying the battered leather suitcase that used to sit in the hall closet at his house. I wondered where he was going, and why he needed luggage to get there.
He did not even glance around to see if anyone was watching him before he went upstairs. Perhaps he was looking for Stephen, but Stephen is never home at this hour of the day. For most of the year I scarcely see him in daylight. He works very hard, unlike his dad-or perhaps because of him-and he doesn’t talk to me much these days. He is impatient with my depression, although he always asks if I am taking my medicine, and he is careful to remind me of doctors’ appointments. But I know that secretly he thinks that I could snap out of it if I wanted to. An aerobics class or a new hairdo would do wonders for me, he suggests now and then, trying to sound casual about it. He thinks that depression is a luxury reserved for housewives whose husbands have adequate incomes.
Perhaps he is right. Perhaps those who are forced to go out and face the world with such a mental shroud about them throw themselves in front of trains or run their cars into trees rather than endure the tedium of another dark day. I have thought of such things myself, but it would take too much effort to leave the house.
I always promise to
I am tired all the time. I manage to get the washing done every day or so, and by four o’clock I can usually muster enough energy to cook a pork chop or perhaps some spaghetti, so that Stephen won’t get annoyed with me, and ask me what it is I do all day. I push the emptiness around the polished surfaces of the coffee table with a polishing rag. It takes up most of my time. There is so much emptiness. I force myself to eat the dinner, so that he won’t lecture me about the importance of nutrition to emotional health. Stephen is an architect, but he thinks that being my husband entitles him to express medical opinions about the state of my mind and body. It is practically the only interest he takes in either anymore.
He is not so observant about the state of the house. He never looks under the beds, or notices how long the cleaning supplies last. With only the two of us, there isn’t much housekeeping to do. He has offered to hire a maid, but I cannot bear the thought of having someone around all the time. I do enough housework to get by and to stave off the dreaded cleaning woman, and he does not complain. I am so tired.
My father-in-law was still upstairs. At least, he hadn’t reappeared. I could not be bothered to go and look for him. I sat down in Stephen’s leather chair, running the polishing rag through my fingers like a silk scarf.
“Stephen isn’t home!” I called out, in case that made any difference to my visitor. Apparently it didn’t. Shouldn’t a ghost know who is home and who isn’t without having to make a room-to-room search? Surely-ten months dead- he was sober?
I wondered if I ought to call my mother-in-law in Wisconsin to tell her that he was here. He died last November. She’d be glad to know where he is. She had wanted to go to Florida for the coming winter, but she said she didn’t like to go and have a good time, with her poor husband alone in his urn. They had been married fifty years to the month when he passed away, and they had never been apart in all that time. He had always talked about taking her somewhere for their fiftieth anniversary, but by then he was too ill and too broke to manage. They spent their anniversary in his hospital room, drinking apple juice out of paper cups. Now his widow talks wistfully of Florida, and Stephen has offered to pay for the trip, but she says that she hates to travel alone after all those years of togetherness. Why shouldn’t she, though? He is.
I wonder why he has decided to call on us. It seems like a very unlikely choice on his part. I can imagine him haunting Wrigley Field, or a Dublin pub, or perhaps some tropical island in the South Pacific, or a Norwegian fishing village. We gave him a subscription to
