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We’d all made this home our headquarters, eating and sleeping wherever we could find room. We took comfort in each other. None of us wanted to be alone, or even separated from this big, fat, Greek mortuary.
The Smythes were all together, except for the one who’d given us our name.
Growing up, Dad was rarely in the same room with all of us. There was always a body to prepare, a service to hold, cars to wash, paperwork to complete.
It felt like that now.
With the house full, he was just off somewhere in a different room.
I turned from the doorway to the empty room and climbed higher, to the attic. The door was open and a thin beam of the weak afternoon sunlight targeted the threshold.
The room was so different now, so quiet, missing the riot of color from my old bookshelves and anything on the walls, the bareness of the room gave a man space to breathe.
Or a woman.
I closed the door silently behind me and walked to the bed where my wife appeared to be asleep on the scratchy polyester patchwork quilt. I sat on the opposite side of the bed from where she lay with her back to me, her body curled into an apostrophe. I removed my shoes and lay behind her. Mirroring her position, but not touching her.
Then I thought, fuck that. Who knew how much longer she was mine to touch? Pulling her close to me, I moved her hair and fitted my legs against hers. From the sound she made, I could tell there was a smile on her face. God, I needed to hold this woman. Hold her and hold her for the rest of our lives. It didn’t matter what Idid to earn income. I’d figure something out, as long as I could feel her warmth at my side for as long as we lived.
“I came up here because it’s where we started. I just wanted to live in that moment a while longer.”
“That’s what drew me, too.” I said.
“Silly, isn’t it? How we pine for each other. Instead of expressing what we want from each other, we hide it. When we both wanted the same thing. We dance and pretend and hold each other at arm’s length. We love each other so... politely, waiting for the other person’s needs to show so we can slip in and fill them unobtrusively. What if we had asked for what we wanted from the start? Would we have ended up some place different?” she asked.
She was still facing away from me, curled up onto her side, her black hair spilling over the pillow.
“I—”
“No, don’t answer. It’s a rhetorical question. I know there’s no way of knowing objectively. The butterfly wing effect and all.”
I stroked her hair. It was so soft. It felt like the only safe place to touch.
“Don’t go, Decca. Don’t take the job.” I blurted it out without thinking. My breath left my lungs in a whoosh, but when the air refilled again, clean and easy, the words had felt right. Even if whatever she had to say in response wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
I turned her onto her back so she could face me. There were tears in her eyes. She used her long sleeves to blot them away.Oh, please God, no.
I continued, “It would be a shame to let an almost complete skeleton go to waste.”
She curled away from me again.
“In order to build a metaphor based on love, you have to love me, Gus. I know you do in the Christian sense. The way you’re called to love, but I don’t know if you do in the other sense.”
“And what sense is that? The sense of how I’m basically jumping at the door every evening, waiting for you to come home so we can cook dinner together? Because nothing feels right until I can see your face. Or that I’d rather sit in front of a fire with you, not talking, than do pretty much anything else? Or the sense that, no matter how many orgasms I’ve given you, I’m still not satisfied finding ways to make you limp with pleasure? Or that you’re my favorite person to listen to music with, or discuss theology with? What about whatever sense it was when I was being ripped in half watching you leave the other morning, but even still, I was swollen with pride at your achievement? Doesn’t all that add up to me loving you?”
“You never said the words.”
I grimaced. “By the time I did the math that made me realize I’d been in love with you since the night we met, I didn’t think I could find the words to make you believe me. It didn’t occur to just tell you how I felt without trying to make it poetic. Then I kept thinking about the job, and I thought the best thing to do to push you was to back away. But I was shit at that, too.”
She sat up and faced me, crossing her legs.
“I turned it down.” She fiddled with her fingers. “The job. Like I always planned to. Actually, they turned me down. They didn’t want me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” She shrugged. “It was what I wanted when I was in grad school. I thought being the director of the Body Farm would give me the clout I desired back then. I love the idea of my name on all those articles being published and having a woman on top. Butwomen already are on top and have been for years. Forensics is a female-dominated field now; I don’t need to prove myself. I don’t have to climb a ladder to reach a rare first edition of a book that’s not even in the genre I want to read.”
“But—”
