She felt like an insect whose head had been severed from its body but whose legs kept soldiering on. Apparently still going. To the bathroom, for instance. She stared at the beady eyes staring from the medicine-cabinet mirror and worried a comb through the gnarled garlands of hair. Then she dressed and creaked into the hall. So late. The townhouse seemed to echo as she crept down the steep stairs. An inky blip and she was on the second floor already, in the kitchen. Fridge, stovetop. Her stomach rumbled. She opened the fridge and located the juice and set the carton on the counter. She heard something moving in the walls. She ignored it. And then, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, she removed the frying pan from a cupboard. The stove’s gas control clicked and the pilot light caught. Here she was. Famished—beyond belief, she discovered, composing and consuming a killer omelette. Extra pieces of toast. Finished, she licked the crumbs—delicious, like sawdust—from her plate and disposed of it in the garbage container then stood before the stainless sink and admired the spackle of eggshell. She worked the faucet and water gushed. Here were her hands equipped with their marvel of skin and nail. So she was still covered. Safe.
Work—messages returned and new ones sent, appointments reshuffled, amends made, fingers crossed. The morning streamed by in her first-floor office. She hummed tunelessly, head bent to her tasks, pleased at the absence of the usual ear-achy vertigo and leaky sounds that followed a dive trip.
Mid-afternoon she hopped in her car and gassed up at the nearest gas station and then headed out, wheeling the wheel beneath sugar-dust clouds. Bright summery fall—as if she’d only imagined the cruel northern weather of the past weekend. Or it existed in a past so ancient she could discount it. In no time she was travelling the cemetery’s drive. First time in months. She swept beneath the chartreuse and saffron and fire-opal leaves of sycamore and hickory, elm, maple. She soon stood before the double plot. Marilyn Wolfe, begat of Wolfes—what the cancer and subway bomb had left behind. In her mother’s case, what the years of starvation topped by medical treatments had wrought. As for Marilyn’s father, what the private search organization she had hired was able to retrieve from among the rendered fragments, enough at least to hold a proper funeral. Now she rattled the small, customary stones in her hand. She was of a long line of sensitive, flinching people, survivors begat of one of history’s more exigent planned enterprises—a thousand-year-plus genocidal ingenuity of mass graves and incinerations that in her mind took on the shape of the cloud of starlings, too large and dark for her to fully apprehend, that murmured the otherwise clear sky before settling to call and cry in the nearby stand of pines. Sole child. Last in line. Almost gone herself. However strange she might feel at the moment, who was she to throw herself away? And with herself, the turquoise ring lost at age nine. At thirteen, the misplaced dragonfly-shaped notebook containing her sketches of weeds and wasps and also a taped-in scab from Jane’s fabulously distressed, bike-accident-prone shins. Even her mother’s middle-aged late-night Ativan clamouring in the living room armchair outside Marilyn’s teenager bedroom. You dirty little, you daddy’s little. Even her father’s crack at her jaw one evening outside an ice cream shop when she didn’t walk as quickly as he wanted. Spoiler, spiteful, her parents sometimes labelled her. Mom, Dad! Dead but not gone, not when Marilyn still dreamed them alive, meeting her on a subway platform or in a department-store shoe department. Looking good. Like your new hat.
No, she thought now in the cemetery. She’d had her close call. Now she had her work cut out for her. Up here she’d protect what she still could.