She was quiet, slipping her arms under his shoulders and cradling his head in the warmth of her lap. She brushed her soft hands against the many cuts and bruises on his skull. She brought her soft lips there and kissed him, the way she used to do every morning and night during all the years of their marriage.
Then she said, “It’s not your fault, Charlie, that you see things this way, but I want you to try hard and keep what I’m about to tell you in your mind, because it will make things easier and be more pleasant for you than those other thoughts: We had a fight on the terrace, and I went to bed. When I woke in the morning, you weren’t there. I figured you had gone for a walk on the golf course until I saw our bathing suits had fallen from the railing, and I went down to the parking lot to get them. That’s when I discovered the Oldsmobile was not in its usual spot. The keys, I realized when I came upstairs, were missing too. And so was that old pig. Oh, Charlie. I had the police searching for you down there. I kept calling your cell phone too, which turned up at a gas station not far from the apartment. Someone there said that they saw you fall and drop it in the bathroom. That you hit your head. But that’s all they knew. And while the Florida police kept looking for you, I contacted the ones here in Providence in case somehow you’d made it all the way home. But they kept coming by the house and looking around, calling me back to say no one was here. I even sent that boy over who turns on the pipes and boiler for us, but Todd couldn’t find the key so he left a note for you instead.” She stopped and was silent for a moment, holding him still, caressing his head. She was crying now, but kept talking in the gentlest of voices: “Finally, since no one had any luck finding you, I gave up on you being down in Florida still. I had to do something, so I got on a plane and came here myself to see if you made it home. And now here you are. But what has happened to you? Are you all right?”
“I killed you,” was all Charlie said again. He was as certain of it as he had been of the business with the money and the groceries. “I saw you fall.”
“No,” she responded, and hugged him close. “None of that happened.”
He stared around at the pieces of the broken pig and the golf balls that filled the kitchen in their house, where they had lived happily for so many years before becoming snowbirds, moving north and south with the sun in an effort to dodge the cold and the gray winter skies over Providence and so many unpleasant elements of life in their final years. But there were some unpleasant things you could never outrun, no matter how hard you tried. And anyway, he thought, maybe all of it was just a trick of his mind. Maybe he was still back in Florida on that terrace watching their bathing suits blow away and dance in the wind before falling to earth. Maybe he was already in some Detroit nursing home where his brother had put him and everything that had happened was nothing more than a terrible vision out a window beside his bed. And there was another maybe, one he considered when he first saw that light she brought with her, when he felt the indelible softness of her skin and heard the sound of her voice comforting him when he never thought he would hear that voice again. This final maybe should have frightened him most of all, though it did not so long as Joy was with him. But how could he be sure she was? He looked up at her face, reached with his fingertips to try and feel her tears. He closed his eyes and opened them to see her there. He closed his eyes and opened them to see that she was not there. And in this way, Charlie Webster kept on blinking.
She was there. She wasn’t there.
She was. She wasn’t.
She was.
UNDER THE SHEPARD CLOCK
BY ANN HOOD
Downtown
The storm began as soon as I stepped out of the Shepard department store. I struggled to get my umbrella open, but the wind immediately blew it inside out, rendering it useless. Frustrated, I tossed it in the nearest trash can. The rain came down in horizontal sheets, wetting my shopping bag enough to cause it to give way and send my new, carefully chosen tube of Murderous Red tumbling out. I’d had my hair done the day before, and I could feel it deflate under the onslaught. The smell of hair spray mixed with spring rain.
In the middle of this calamity, I heard someone call my name.
I looked up from retrieving my stray lipstick and saw a man hurrying toward me. Tall, wearing a London Fog raincoat (I recognized the brand because my husband Jim had the identical one), and holding a large black umbrella aloft, he grinned at me from beneath a dark walrus mustache.