IV. Remains - Part One

The cabinet he was building when Marie died was a white oak sideboard with dovetail joints and a hand-rubbed finish that would take four coats to get right. He was on coat two when she went. The sideboard sat in the garage for six months after the funeral, the second coat half-applied, the brush still in the mineral spirits where he'd dropped it when the phone rang, the bristles splayed and ruined and fossilized in the evaporated solvent like something pulled from amber. He didn't move it. He didn't finish it. He worked around it the way you work around a piece of furniture in a room that's too small — adjusting, accommodating, never asking the obvious question, which was whether the thing should still be there at all.

Paul was a cabinet maker. He had been a cabinet maker for twenty-two years, working alone in the two-car garage of a ranch house in a neighborhood where the lots were a quarter-acre and the trees had been planted when the houses were built and had grown tall enough now to make the street feel like a corridor, a green tunnel that light entered at certain angles in the late afternoon and at no other time. The garage was his shop. The house was where he slept. The distinction had been clear when Marie was alive — the shop was his, the house was theirs — and the distinction had collapsed when she died, so that now the house was a place he passed through on the way to the garage and the garage was a place he stood in surrounded by tools and unfinished work and the white oak sideboard with the ruined brush.

He measured in sixty-fourths of an inch. This was not an affectation. Sixty-fourths were the unit at which wood became honest — where the grain revealed its true direction, where a joint's tolerance announced itself, where the difference between a cabinet that would last fifty years and a cabinet that would rack in ten became visible. He had always operated at that resolution. He had loved Marie at that resolution. He knew the exact distance between the moles on her left shoulder blade — three and a quarter inches, he'd measured once with a flexible rule while she was reading in bed, and she'd laughed and asked him what he was doing and he'd said he was taking inventory, and she'd said of what, and he'd said of everything, and she'd turned the page and let him measure because she understood that this was how he loved, in sixty-fourths, in specifications, in the precise documentation of a body he intended to know completely.

She died on a Tuesday in October. She was making coffee. The coffeemaker was the drip kind, a Mr. Coffee, twelve cups, and it had a beep that sounded when the cycle finished, a small electronic chirp that he'd heard every morning for nineteen years and that had become invisible the way all domestic sounds become invisible — the furnace clicking, the ice maker dropping, the particular creak of the third stair. The chirp went off while he was holding her hand on the kitchen floor. She'd been standing at the counter. She'd said his name — "Paul?" — with the slight rise at the end, the question-inflection that was not a question but a summons, a way of confirming he was in range. He'd looked up from the kitchen table where he was reading the paper, the actual paper, the physical newspaper he still subscribed to because he liked the way it folded and the way the ink smelled and the way the news felt less urgent when it arrived on paper. He looked up and she was sitting on the floor. Not falling. Sitting. As though she'd decided to sit down in the middle of making coffee and had chosen the floor. Her legs were folded beneath her and her back was against the cabinet below the sink and her eyes were open and looking at something past him, past the kitchen, past the house, and by the time he reached her the looking had stopped.

The ambulance was four minutes away. He held her hand on the floor. The hand was warm. The coffeemaker finished its cycle. The beep sounded — small, electronic, ordinary — and the ordinariness of it punctuated the most extraordinary moment of his life and he heard that beep now, every morning, because he had not changed the coffeemaker and had not changed the setting and the machine brewed twelve cups for one person at 6:15 and beeped when it finished and the beep was a small death every morning and the coffee went cold by noon and he poured it out and the next morning the machine did it again.

The urn was on the mantel. Brushed steel, cylindrical, the kind the funeral home recommended for its simplicity and its weight. He'd chosen it because it felt substantial in his hands, because the heft of it corresponded to something — not to Marie's weight, obviously, the math didn't work that way — but to the weight of the fact of her. He talked to it. Not in words, usually. He'd pass through the living room and his hand would touch the urn the way his hand used to touch her shoulder when he passed behind her chair, a gesture so habitual it had outlived its recipient and continued in the air of the room like a radio signal after the station has signed off.

Six months. He worked. He took commissions — a bookcase, a kitchen island, a set of floating shelves for a woman who lived in the new development on the east side and who asked him three times during the consultation whether the shelves would hold the weight of her crystal collection and who he reassured three times with the patience he applied to all clients, the patience of a man who understands that what people are really asking when they ask about load-bearing capacity is whether things will hold. He ate. He slept on the left side of the bed. The right side was made and would remain made. Her reading glasses were still on the nightstand — progressive bifocals in a tortoiseshell frame, one lens smudged with a thumbprint he had not cleaned because the thumbprint was hers and cleaning it would be a third death, the death of the last oil her living skin had left on any surface in the house.

The house was full of her measurements. Not literally — she hadn't measured anything, she was not the measuring kind, she was the kind who estimated and was close enough and laughed at him when he checked her estimates with a tape and found them a quarter-inch off. But her body had measured the house by occupying it. The dent in the sofa cushion where she sat. The wear pattern on the kitchen floor between the stove and the refrigerator, a path so specific he could trace it blindfolded, the linoleum slightly lighter where her feet had traveled ten thousand times. The height of the hook where she hung her coat — five feet, two inches from the floor, the exact height at which Marie's hand was comfortable reaching. He had installed that hook. He had measured for it. He had drilled the pilot hole at a height calibrated to one specific person's reach, and the hook was still there and the coat was still on it and the coat smelled like nothing now, the last of her scent evaporated months ago, but the hook was at her height and would be at her height until someone moved it and no one would move it because no one came into the house except Paul and Paul was not going to move it.

The box was on the porch when he came home on a Thursday afternoon in April.

White. Smooth. The size and approximate shape of a person lying on their back. It had no shipping label — or rather, it had a label, machine-printed, that contained only his address. No sender. No tracking number. No carrier markings. It sat on the porch boards in the four o'clock light and it hummed.

He heard the hum before he saw the box. Walking up the front steps with his keys in his hand and sawdust in the creases of his knuckles and the smell of white oak in his clothes, he heard a sound that was not the house and not the street and not the compressor in the garage. A low, steady vibration. Mechanical but not harsh. The sound a refrigerator makes in a quiet room — not when it's cycling, but when it's holding.

The box was heavy. He dragged it across the porch and through the front door and down the hall to the garage because the garage was where he dealt with things that were heavy and the garage had a floor he could drag things across without worrying about the finish. He cut the seal with a box cutter. He opened the latches — two of them, medical-grade, the kind you see on equipment cases. He lifted the lid.

Marie.

He knew it was Marie before his eyes adjusted to the interior because he could smell her shampoo — not the memory of it, not the ghost, but the actual molecular fact of it, the coconut-and-something-botanical that she'd used for years and that he'd smelled on her pillow for weeks after she died and then one morning it was gone and the pillow smelled like nothing and the nothing was the second death, the death of the last sensory trace.

She was lying on her back. Her hands were at her sides. Her skin was the color it had always been — warm, olive, the undertone that came from her mother's side, the Greek side that gave her the dark hair and the eyelashes that cast shadows on her cheeks when she looked down. Her hair was clean. Her lips were closed. Her expression was neutral — not the arranged serenity of the funeral home, not the wax stillness of the casket. This was the face he'd seen ten thousand mornings when she was sleeping and hadn't woken yet and the light from the window was moving across the pillow toward her but hadn't reached her.

He touched her hand. It was warm. Not residual warmth. Not the warmth of a container that had been heated. Body-temperature warmth. 98.6. The warmth of a living hand, except the hand was not living, could not be living, because he had held this hand while it cooled on the kitchen floor and he had held it again at the funeral home and he had signed the papers for the cremation and the ashes were on the mantel and the ashes were her and this hand was warm and the math did not work.

He sat down on the concrete floor of the garage. The white oak sideboard was behind him. The ruined brush was to his left. The box was in front of him, open, the lid tilted back on its hinges, and inside the box his wife lay on a white surface with her hands at her sides. Her hair clean and her skin warm and the box hummed around her, the vibration traveling through the white casing and into the concrete and into his body where he sat.

He stayed there for an hour. He didn't call anyone. He didn't reach for his phone. He sat on the floor of his garage with the door closed and the overhead light off and the only illumination was the workbench lamp he'd left on that morning, a goose-neck with a warm bulb. The light fell across the box and across Marie's face and the shadows it made were the shadows of late afternoon in a bedroom, the shadows of the hour when she napped on Sundays and he stood in the doorway and watched her sleep because watching her sleep was the closest he came to melancholy.

He closed the lid. He went inside. He made dinner — rice, a can of black beans, the meal of a man who is feeding a body, not a person. He washed the plate. He sat on the couch. The urn was on the mantel. He looked at it. It looked back. The urn held the ashes of someone he had cremated and the box in the garage held the body of the same someone and both of these things were true and neither of them was possible. He looked at the urn and the urn did not explain itself.

At midnight he went back to the garage. He opened the lid. She was there. She had not moved. She had not changed. The shampoo smell was still present, strong now in the closed space of the garage, and beneath it something else — her skin, the specific scent of Marie's skin that he had buried his face in ten thousand times and that he could distinguish from every other skin in the world the way a sommelier distinguishes wines, by note, by finish, by the particular way the scent developed over the course of a breath.

He put his hand on hers. It was warm. He stood beside the box with his hand on his wife's hand and the box hummed beneath his palm The garage was dark, the coffeemaker upstairs was set to brew at 6:15 and the urn on the mantel held the ash of someone he was no longer sure he could name.

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