AFTER THE RATTLE of her exit ceased, Thomas listened for the last sounds of Song on the porch and crawled onto the great blank bed. He didn’t understand what he was searching for until he knew it was missing: it was not in the snowy wool blanket that lay folded at the foot, or in the folds of the enormous down comforter, or lying on top of the pillows. He discovered no odor, no stray hair, no impression of a body’s weight resting. The lack of evidence of her gave him a feverish chill, and then fatigue settled, vaporlike, around his collarbone and temples. He had come all this way and failed: she felt nothing for the property across the country or the woman decaying inside it. He wanted sleep the way the terminally ill finally turn their curiosity towards death and begin their small negotiations with it.
When he awoke, he saw the men’s faces arranged around the bed like beads on a shared string, moving in one line, secured by Song’s place in the center. He gathered the blankets around him, and Song smiled without showing her teeth. From the lilac patch of sky through the window, he knew it was the hour in which they would use their saved-up speech.
“We hope you slept well,” she began. “I’ve done the listening I need to, and think I’ve found a bridge of a kind.” Thomas looked up at the woman, her white hair backlit by dusk, and realized his position in her bed would make disagreement absurd and impossible. Though she spoke in gentle peals, and glowed the pink of a long walk, she had not arrived in the spirit of compromise, but rather to offer one firm solution. The men now bowed their heads, and he saw, for the first time, the shared aquiline nose, the eyes the color of alpine lakes. These were her sons.
“We don’t have any right to that property, unfortunately.” They nodded. “Or interest.” They tittered. “However.” Their heads dropped again.
“I’ve come to believe that your friend Edith and I might enjoy meeting each other. Reuniting, you might say. We could forgive each other for who we once were. She could live out the rest of her identity here. She would rest. She would be safe.”
Presented with the possibility of Edith in this strange place, all of Thomas’s repressed intentions for her appeared in vivid presentation. All along—on the airplane that had crossed the Midwest in the middle of the night, in the darkening library where he’d looked for any meager trace of her daughter, around the curves of the narrowing two-lane highway—he had assumed he would be the one to protect Edith. He would be gentle with her when she was furious, would keep her mind at ease with whispered comforts, preside over the moments in which her febrile confusion became fear, bring her water with decorative straws and simple games in subdued colors. He would hold the crook of her elbow and guide her through the neighborhood, naming the streets she had known much of her life. It was supposed to be me, he thought, and knew, simultaneously, that the reality of the task, the hushing and the spoon-feeding and the laundering of soiled sheets, would have been too much for him to hold.
The only word of protest he summoned was weak, led nowhere.
“But—”
“Of course, there’s the matter of the house. I cannot accompany you back there, but I am willing to assume the temporary authority, of my former self and name, in order to sign over all rights to you, if you can arrange for her to arrive very soon.”
“Song, I would have to go back across the country to get her. I’m not sure I can do it so quickly—”
“I can give you two days. You’ve already upset our arrangement by coming, and I can’t guarantee my answer will be the same beyond that. We will welcome Edith, and you will deal with the building however you see fit. She will be cared for here. We’ll build a bed for her near mine.”
Jenny’s sons—Edith’s grandchildren, Thomas reminded himself—nodded in echo of her earnestness. He let himself imagine it: Edith waking and breathing in the elevation, the clean air like none she’d had in sixty-odd years. Edith sitting in a little wooden chair by the vegetable garden while someone picked jewel-dark roots and rain-polished greens for her dinner. Edith on the porch at dusk, babbling out the fragments of her life as they surfaced in her mind to an audience of passing chickens, then growing quiet again. And just as he had in the days after his body betrayed him, he tried to cajole acceptance with outward expressions of agreement he hoped would move inward. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” His chin wagged up and down wildly, like a simple toy sent into motion by an eager hand.
THEY ARRIVED in the late afternoon, after a stretch of silence punctuated only by the occasional sound of the turn signal or a sigh from Edward. The fireflies wouldn’t appear for another few days, and much of the campground radiated absence, stretches of empty sites, wooden tables free of human clutter, squat and blackened grills.