And so thinking she stared into the shiny granite marker at the shrunken, dry-eyed figure until a series of black saccades shredded her vision—and when they cleared, a faint memory scraped to life and she squeaked into motion and placed her quartz nuggets on top of the headstone. Bird-ee a bird called and a chipmunk wrestled a pinecone by a rose bush. But beneath her feet the dead remained dead. Let them, she thought. Let the dead go on doing their dead things. She herself was here. Barely here. And that was enough. Enough! She touched her cold fingertips to her eyelids. Black branches wheeled like cold constellations and her ears rang. No one answered. Meanwhile she would work and work and pay her respects here and here only and day would follow day and she would with all due respect follow her days to a far-off end.
Then it was December and really so beautiful, so unseasonably warm. For weeks the silver maple outside her office curled its branches prettily like lashes and the wet breeze batted them. One whole half-day she watched from her window as a hawk, one wing dangling at an odd angle, perched in the honey locust. Most days she texted her husband and he texted her back. She combed through her curls and long strands curled on her desk and December turned wetter then clear. Then the days grew longer. April arrived. The people two doors down in the tower of a townhouse identical to her and Rand’s, the couple with the peach tree they’d planted in organic soil and never pesticided, these people had the peach tree cut down and a parking pad put in the tree’s place. Marilyn combed and combed her hair though sometimes her curls pulled back, defiant, and some of her hair fell out. She viewed such drama—there for all of her to see, though who was watching the watcher? she wondered—on the drawing pad and once she even drew around her hair irregularly shaped moles related to a work project. Dot dot. Dash dot dash. Dots like pompoms. Dots, snow, birds. She saw them everywhere. Dot dot dash dash, dots jouncing into the air, skirting the ceiling and flashing through the windowpane, clear through. Her ears rang. Outside, a blue sky. Its screen of dot dot dash. Then she left her desk to fix a nice lunch and drink and after, all business, cross-sectioned the dangerous moles and pressed send. She read the news. Yesterday another explosion. She napped. She woke and her head ached. She ate again, ate the way a mere mortal might, hungry all the time! Little wonder. How else honour a mother who’d died curved-fingernail thin. A father who’d told her mother not to eat so much. Father in bits. Dots and dashes.
Another April arrived. Wait, Marilyn told it. Nuh-uh, nope. You most certainly do not.
Part Three
16
She held court as if the waterfront diner were a lavish chamber beyond which lay opulent vistas. She pronounced on an expensive procedure touted in certain doctors’-office magazines, and a new restaurant in New Downtown where the chef conjured abalone foam on dry-ice chips. The phantom sensation of motion from the previous afternoon on the bay—the boat’s fast gloss over blue water—presented like silk slipping repeatedly from her skin. Never mind the sunburn. The itching and bloat. The greasy early breakfast so she could steal time with her friend who in an hour or less would suit up. Down to some sticky underworld she’d go with Rand, already at the underwater-cave site tweaking gear. Some treasure—Jane sullen, coughing and breathing wetly over her soggy pancakes. When she glanced at her handset for only the fifth time Marilyn dropped all pretense. Done? she grunted.
All yours, Jane said and lifted the stringy hair off her neck and let it drop. Go crazy, she said.
Nearly a year had passed since Marilyn had given up diving, but she could still remember the business of trying to force food into the hair-trigger gut. She wound a finger through the syrup pooling on Jane’s plate and tasted it—an unravelling sweetness gone almost before she knew it.
You done? Jane asked.
Marilyn’s scarfed eggs reappeared like scalding liquid in her chest. Queasy, she considered her choices. Offer advice and admonition and come off pissy-jealous. Or better—stash Jane under the motel-room bedcovers and crank the death-metal AC, crack one of the bottles of decent vintage Marilyn had bought at a city boutique before driving up on her own a day later than Rand and Jane. Marilyn chewed the inside of her cheek while men in colourful shorts and women in pastel capris and flips straggled into the diner. Like them, she was a tourist now. You go ahead, she told Jane. It’s on me.
Jane shoved to her feet. There was a downward list to her chapped lips. You sure? she said.
You’re not still here, are you? Carry fucking on.
Nothing to do now but watch Jane’s back, her rigid upper torso and driving strides. See you? You too? The diner’s screen door flapped open and shut and rattled the picture windows bleached with glare. She squinted. Outside, a family with fishing poles claimed the white-washed dock. On the rocky shore below two kids wagged their guppy bodies and barked like little generals, haughty with desperate joy on the last long weekend of summer vacation. She knew what it was like—the ruthless effort to make the most of what was left. She fumbled at the plates in front of her. Semi-blinded by sunspots, she nested the melon-slice garnishes, inhaled the deepening, ascending scent of musk and ylang-ylang. She called for the bill and paid. On the dusty road she groped in her shoulder bag and clapped her oversized sunglasses into place. She felt terrible, stretched and distorted as if her insides were too large for her skin. For a moment she hung back in the diner’s oasis shadows. Terrible. Time to kill.
17