Dani tried to stand up, but she couldn’t get her legs under her. She tried to dig from a sitting position, with the shovel between her knees, but she couldn’t put enough pressure on the spade. So she laid the shovel on the grass and used her hands.
The surface was so dry she formed her slim fingers into claws and scratched. Dirt crammed under her short nails, and one bent backward, but she didn’t stop. By the time the sun set, she had marked the outline of a hole large enough to hold the Captain’s small body but had scraped only two inches down. The dirt grew cool, crumbly, moister but not damp. Her clenched fingers ached as the sky turned to gray and then to black. Her eyes adjusted enough she could see her hands, but little else, the yard a charcoal sketch of itself. She flexed her hands and stretched her shoulders, and she kept on, scratching and scratching, wondering when she would feel it: the metal rod of a blunt instrument, flakes of decomposed paper. The earth gave way, inch by inch. She had no idea how long it would take to make a hole deep enough.
Outside the Window
August 15, 2009
Dear Dani,
Every time I start a letter to you, I never know how to begin, and so often I never do. Too often I have not said what I should say. I have left pages blank for too long.
I saw the news yesterday. It was in the paper here, and on the radio, too.
I am sorry, Dani, for what this news makes us examine again. As if we ever stopped. I am the first to say, I do not want to revisit that time again. But that is my fault, not yours. It was not hers, either. I am the one at fault. I know that. I have had eighteen years to turn it inside out.
We never have talked about what happened. I have respected your wishes that I stay away. I assume you read my letters, even though you do not write back. I know you cash the checks, which is fine. I hope the money helps in some way.
What you do not know, because I do not always send them, is I write letters to you every morning. It is how I start my day before I head in to work. I tell you what is outside my window that morning and throughout the day. Yesterday, I told you about a half moon hanging over the western sky. I told you the morning’s temperature (today, 63). A few days ago, I told you about the deer grazing five feet from the window, so close I could see the ripple of their necks as they swallowed acorns they nipped from the grass. I have told you over and over about the winter pines and bare oaks in silhouette at dawn, about the stillness of the air, how it seems as though time stops on some mornings. Hardly newsworthy details. But something about sharing it with you makes it seem real. I often feel as though I am watching the world from a distance.
It hit me today that I have lived here, looking out this window I once found so alien, longer than I lived with you. Seventeen years with you, eighteen years here. I was forty-four when I left, I’m sixty-two now. Headed out of my second act and into my third, as your mother might say. Living in a cabin. Selling houses part-time in Flagstaff, painting houses in the warm months, painting mediocre paintings in a studio with southern light. In a life I never could have imagined then.
But here we are.
Still I do not know how to begin to tell you everything. So I will begin with the most recent news from my window:
It is barely light out; I have become an early riser though I still do not sleep well. The sky through the pines is blue this morning, with a fat white scar of a cloud. The cloud looks like a zipper, like a spine. Otherwise, the sky is as clean as a plate. I have the window open, and the air smells of pine needles. The wind has picked up, and the tops of the pines sway. What else? It is trash day. The neighbor is pulling in his bin. He wears a red wool cap even in summer. His name is Errol Jorgenson, and he’s a retired army sergeant. A robin lands on the boulder to the left of the window, a worm hanging from its beak. Its breast is the color of rust.
Do you remember your old Squareback? The hood and tails and doors were thick with rust when I found it. I sanded it, primed it, and found the original green and repainted it. It may sound strange, but it is among the most satisfying tasks I have ever accomplished. I sold that car a few years ago to a young man hitchhiking on his way to Albuquerque. I never drove it anymore, left it parked on the side of the cabin. I drive a regular pickup now. With the roads here in winter, it is good to have four-wheel drive. The drive into Flagstaff is about a half hour each way, but I have come to like it, the time it takes to transition from work to home. Everyone here on the road in the Village knows each other, but we keep to ourselves. What else? The kitchen could use a new coat of paint. Ironic, with all the painting I do. This spring I had a new roof put on. We do not need air-conditioning here, but we have a wood-burning stove.
We—just me.
Oh, Dani, how to begin? How to end?
I look at her photograph in the paper, and it is a wonder to me that I have days now when I do not wake up seeing her face, that I go full days without even thinking of her. There was a time I believed I would not stop seeing her everywhere. That I would not stop waking with her face behind my eyes. That I would not stop hoping she would show up on my doorstep and come inside. I am sorry if that is painful to read. But it is the truth, and the truth is something I think you and I need a bit more of between us.
The night I left, you asked me: Why? Why her? Why did I do it? I did not have an answer then. I don’t know, I told you, over and over. This question of course has haunted me. Why? Why her? A teenage girl, my daughter’s friend? Why would I walk knowingly into such a minefield? Why would I do such a thing?
The first time I opened the door and saw her on the doorstep, I thought not of her but of me. Of my awkward teenage self. Growing up, I got teased a lot for my nose. Beaker and the like. I was skinny and clumsy, had a habit of hanging on to my elbows as though I could keep myself from flying apart. At first, I saw Jess only in the light of memory. I looked at her as if on my former self: empathetically, fondly, wishing for her to hang in there.