IV. Remains - Part Two

He measured her hands. He couldn't help it. It was Tuesday — four days after the box arrived — and he was kneeling beside it with a flexible rule, the same one he'd used on her shoulder blades that night in bed, and he was measuring the distance from her wrist to the tip of her middle finger. Seven and three-eighths inches. He had never measured her hands when she was alive. He had measured other things — the shoulder-blade distance, the length of her foot when he was building a shoe rack, the height of her reach for the coat hook — but never her hands, and the absence of this measurement had been, he realized, a gap in his inventory, a blank field on the form, and the blank field had bothered him in a way he could not articulate because the inability to articulate it was the point: he needed to know her completely, and completely was a number, and the number was seven and three-eighths inches, the measuring was the point, the act of applying a rule to a surface and receiving a figure in return. The transaction between instrument and object that was the only language he had ever fully trusted.

Her hands had moved.

They'd been at her sides when he opened the box on Thursday. He was certain of this. He'd spent an hour looking at her on Thursday, and the hands were at her sides, palms down, fingers slightly curled. Now they were on her stomach. The fingers were interlaced. The position was specific — the way she slept. Not every night. The nights she was cold. The nights she pulled the blanket to her chin and laced her fingers over her stomach and her breathing slowed to the rhythm he knew so well he could have set a metronome to it.

He measured the displacement. Her hands had moved approximately fourteen inches from their original position. He wrote the number on a scrap of oak with a carpenter's pencil. He didn't know why. The number was evidence. Evidence of what, he couldn't say. Change. Motion. The impossibility of motion in a body that was not alive.

He didn't tell anyone. His sister called on Wednesday and he let it ring. She called Thursday and he let it ring. She texted: Just checking in. Call when you can. He did not call. He closed the shop — a note on the website, a voicemail greeting that said he was taking time off for personal reasons. The bookcase commission, the floating shelves — he emailed the clients and offered refunds and they responded with concern and he did not respond to the concern.

He began sleeping in the garage. Not beside the box — not yet. On the camping pad he kept for the fishing trips he no longer took, unrolled against the far wall, beneath the window that looked out onto the backyard where the dogwood Marie had planted their third year was budding. From the camping pad he could see the box. The box sat on the garage floor in the center of the space where the car used to go, and the workbench lamp cast its warm cone across the white casing and the hum was the only sound and the hum was company. Better company, if he was honest, than the house. The house was full of absence — the hook at her height, the glasses with the thumbprint, the coffeemaker's beep. The garage was full of presence. The box hummed and the hum said: something is here. Something is being maintained. Something warm is on the other side of this wall.

He stopped shaving. He stopped changing the sheets on the bed he no longer slept in. He stopped checking the mail — the box at the curb filled and overfilled and the mail carrier left a bundle on the porch and the bundle sat in the rain and the envelopes swelled and dried and curled and he stepped over them on his way to the garage. His sister called on Monday. Wednesday. Saturday. He let it ring. She texted: Paul, I'm worried. Call me. The text sat on his phone's lock screen for four days. On the fifth day, the phone died. He did not charge it.

Wednesday of the second week. He opened the lid and she had rolled onto her side.

She was facing the wall he slept against. Her knees were drawn up slightly. Her hands, still interlaced, were tucked against her chest. Her hair had fallen across her face — one strand, dark against the white surface beneath her, crossing her cheek and touching the corner of her mouth. He stared at the strand for a long time. It was the strand that always fell. In nineteen years of sleeping beside her he had tucked that strand behind her ear more times than he had said her name, and the strand was here, in the box, doing what it had always done, and the doing of it was the cruelest detail yet because the strand did not know that Marie was dead. The strand was just hair. It fell because gravity and texture and the specific wave pattern of her hair directed it to fall, and the falling was mechanical, and the mechanical didn't care about death, and the not-caring was a kind of innocence that made him sit down on the concrete floor and put his face in his hands and stay there until the feeling passed.

He reached into the box. He moved the strand of hair from her face. He tucked it behind her ear. The ear was warm. The hair was soft. The gesture was so familiar his hand completed it before his mind authorized it — the muscle memory of nineteen years of the same motion, the same strand, the same ear. His hand knew her ear the way it knew a piece of oak — by grain, by temperature, by the way the surface responded to the lightest pressure.

He put his hand on the outside of the box, on the wall nearest her face. He held it there. The casing was warm. The hum vibrated through his palm and into his wrist and up through the bones of his arm. He held his hand there for a long time and the hum changed pitch — slightly, a quarter-tone, the way a motor changes when the load shifts — and he told himself this was mechanical and he did not believe himself.

Thursday. He moved the urn. He didn't throw it away. He couldn't — the urn was heavy and the heaviness had been the reason he'd chosen it and the reason was still operative even if the thing the heaviness represented was now in question. He put it in the hall closet, on the shelf above the coats, behind a box of Christmas ornaments they'd never gotten around to hanging — twelve glass balls, gold and red, still in the tissue paper from the store, purchased three Christmases ago when Marie had said this is the year we do a tree and then December had arrived and neither of them had brought it up and the ornaments stayed in the box and Christmas passed and the next Christmas passed and now Marie was in a box in the garage and the ornaments were in a box in the closet and the urn was behind the ornaments and Paul closed the closet door and the mantel was empty.

The empty mantel was worse than the urn had been. The urn had been an answer — she is here, she is this, she is ash and mineral and the weight of what remains when the fire is finished. The empty mantel was a question: if the body in the garage is Marie, then whose ash is in the closet? And the question spread, the way a crack spreads in a pane of glass, radiating from a single point of impact into the surrounding clarity. If the ash was not Marie, then whom had he been talking to for six months? If the body was Marie, then what had they cremated? The questions had no answers and the absence of answers was its own presence in the house, occupying the rooms the way the hum occupied the garage — constant, low, impossible to locate and impossible to ignore.

Friday. Saturday. He ate less. He ate from the pantry — cans of soup, crackers, a jar of peanut butter he went through in three days with a spoon, standing at the kitchen counter, not bothering with bread. The kitchen was the room where she'd died. He spent as little time in it as possible. He ate standing up because sitting at the table meant sitting across from the empty chair and the empty chair was an accusation he could not answer.

He moved the camping pad closer. From the far wall to the middle of the floor. Then to the floor beside the box. He lay on the pad with his face inches from the white casing and his hand against the warm surface and the hum traveled through the casing and into his palm and through his wrist and into the small bones of his arm and he could feel the vibration in his teeth when he pressed his jaw against the pad.

Sunday. He opened the lid. Her lips were parted. Her expression had shifted — concentration, or the memory of it, the face of a woman working a problem. He put his ear to her lips. Yes. She was breathing. Slow and shallow — a breath every ten or twelve seconds, each breath carrying warmth he could feel on the skin of his ear, a warmth so faint it might have been imagination except that imagination does not have temperature and this did. He closed his eyes. He listened. The breathing was not Marie's breathing — Marie's had a catch at the top of the inhale, a small hitch where the air turned, and this breathing was smooth and even and regular in a way that living breath is not. But it came from a mouth shaped like Marie's mouth and it carried a warmth that was the same warmth and the breath moved across his ear the way her breath had moved across his ear on ten thousand mornings when she whispered something he couldn't quite hear and he'd say what? and she'd say nothing and the nothing was always something and he never pressed because the not-pressing was part of it, part of the marriage, part of the agreement that some things are communicated in warmth rather than words.

He pulled back. He thought he heard something beneath the breathing — not words, not yet, but the precursor of words, the gathering of air, the positioning of the tongue. He closed the lid. He lay down on the floor and his hands were shaking and he closed the lid not because he was afraid but because he was not ready to hear what she was going to say.

The box hummed. Paul lay on the floor. His hand found the side of the container and held it there — the warmth coming through the casing, the vibration traveling into his palm, the body inside breathing and the body outside breathing and the two sets of breathing out of sync and the out-of-sync was the truth of it, the precise, measurable truth: they were not together. They were adjacent. Adjacent was what he had. Adjacent was what the box offered. And he took it, the way a man dying of thirst takes water that he knows is brackish, because the alternative to brackish is nothing and nothing is what the mantel offered and the urn offered and the empty right side of the bed offered and the coffeemaker that brewed twelve cups and beeped and went cold.

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