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This day

Hold fast

Hurt heart

Come home

My love

Come home

The poem requires mere seconds to recite. As soon as I’m finished, my inner critic begins to pick it apart. The structure is juvenile, the cadence Seussian. If one of my students submitted it, I’d suggest a revision.

But there are tears on my face. Sam’s eyes are wet, too. He can’t possibly know what the images mean to me, but through some linguistic alchemy, the words have carried meaning from my lips to his ears and touched his heart.

I step from the stage to the smattered clapping of a few polite homesteaders. I sag into the stupid chair, which seems closer, now, to Sam’s than it was before. Close enough that, were he to reach his hand toward mine, I’d be able to touch it. He must be thinking the same thing, because he extends his arm, the open palm an invitation. I think of that scene in Contagion where Gwyneth Paltrow gives her drink to an unsuspecting waiter. That touch was all it took to decimate the world. That isn’t how Covid works, though, is it? This virus travels lung to lung, not skin to skin.

When’s the last time I held David’s hand? Strolling through Central Park? Sunday shopping at the farmer’s market? No—it was the clasp I let loose when the triage nurse wheeled him away.

Suddenly desperate to overwrite that memory, I reach for Sam’s hand. His fingers thread through mine. The only person who’s touched me since David died is Sandra, but that was therapy. This is something else. I think of Juliet’s clever line the first time she holds Romeo’s hand: Palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss. What is it about Sam, I wonder, that makes me feel so Shakespearean?

Our hands link us through the next performance, a trio of children singing a folk song a cappella. The connection is broken when we join in a hearty round of applause.

“Here,” Sam says, holding out a bottle of sanitizer. He squeezes a dollop into my palm, another onto his. Separately, we rub our own hands together, killing off any trace of what passed between us. The idea of it lingers, though, like the smell of sulfur after striking a match.

Chapter 29

April 21, 2015

Schuywich, New York

My darling Evelyn,

My last letter upset you, I’m sorry. I would have taken it back and torn it to shreds, but when I asked where you’d put it, you didn’t recall having read it. No lasting damage, then. I started writing these letters to jog your memory, but now I’m writing them more for myself than for you. It’s important for me to inscribe our lives, even the parts that are painful to recall. Otherwise, what will become of our story when I’m the only one left to remember?

After you drove off with Billy and Mai, I followed Daddy’s path of snapped twigs and scuffed earth into the woods, still believing there was a chance to make things right. The words he’d said to Billy were horrible, but after what Mother told us, I didn’t think they were unforgivable. I’ll be able to talk some sense into him, I thought. He’ll listen to me.

Then I saw the rifle on the ground. It worried me that he’d dropped it so carelessly. Kneeling down, I was relieved to find the magazine empty. Then I opened the action. My heart just about stopped when I saw there’d been a bullet in the chamber this whole time. I took it out with shaking hands, cycling the action to be absolutely certain there was no more ammunition in the weapon. Pocketing the bullet, I propped the rifle against a tree and called out, “Daddy, where are you?”

I closed my eyes to listen as the echo of my cry quieted the knock-knocking of a woodpecker and the chitter-chat of squirrels. In a moment of silence when even the rustling leaves stilled, I heard something breathing. My body instinctively stiffened as I imagined a black bear snuffling through a patch of berries. But it wasn’t a bear’s breath. It was a man’s.

I ran toward the sound. Discarded bits of my father littered the ground: cane, shoes, socks, shirt. His trousers lay crumpled at the base of a white pine. Rickety rungs nailed to its trunk led to a deer stand. I climbed up.

There was Daddy, arms wrapped around his bent legs, his underwear the only scrap of fabric between his skin and the rough wood of the platform. His chest was heaving, his inhalations a staccato sequence of desperate gasps. He looked at me, eyes frightened and wild.

“It’s okay, Daddy, it’s all right now.”

I crawled behind him, pulling his shoulders against my chest and rubbing the roped muscles of his neck. I shushed and crooned and coached him to breathe. Nothing seemed to help, though. He kept on gasping. Afraid he’d faint or suffocate, I did the only thing I could think of. I started to sing.

“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.”

The pulse in Daddy’s neck began to slow. When his diamond ring turned brass, his chest shuddered with a sigh. He pulled in a deep breath as his cart and bull turned over, let out a long exhalation when he got a dog named Rover. I stopped myself after the horse and cart fell down, though. It was too absurd to sing that my shell-shocked father was the sweetest little baby in town.

“I can’t make it stop, Hazel.” He leaned forward, head resting on the knobs of his knees. I saw for the first time the puckered scars cut across his back like a road map to some hellish destination. “Sometimes, I just can’t make it stop.”

“I’m so sorry, Daddy,” I whispered. “Let’s get you home.”

I climbed down first, guiding his feet to the rungs as he followed. I gathered up his discarded clothes, wondering if he’d been hallucinating that burning box when he tore them off. I dressed him like a life-size doll, pulling his shirt over his head, steadying him as he stepped into his pants, sitting him down so I could lace up his shoes.