AFTER FOUR DAYS, no sleep, little food, no showering, no improvement in your condition, I began to see things that didn’t exist. Rats scuttling across the floor, gray curtains flapping at the edges of my vision. Infants with your face, beard and all. Many of your friends had returned to their lives, coming to the hospital periodically with grave faces and comforting things in their hands. I paid no attention to them. I was concentrating, as if listening for music very, very far away, which if I heard it, would make everything all right.
On the evening of the fourth day, my father helped my mother sneak me into the attendings’ locker room, where there were showers. I let my mother bathe me, as if I were a little girl, and put lotions on me, and dress me. Her face was pinched and gray; she looked old, I noticed with surprise. I could have done all of this myself, but I was concentrating too hard on the impossibly distant music.
You appeared before me in the murk and cold of my mind, your dark body. Over and over again my hands grasped your arm and I began to pull you upward, airward, skyward, again.
When I was clean it was time to visit. I went in and began to tell stories. I had grown used to this changeling in the bed where my husband should have been, and told him stories he had told me. But I embroidered them, perverted them, willing him to wake up and correct me. The first time he killed a deer, a twelve-point buck. The first time he ever had sex with a girl (Jinny Palmer, on the Fairy Springs docks, in broad daylight). That crazy night in his freshman year in college when those boys did everything they could to get arrested, short of murder or rape, and were never caught.
Did I imagine the tightening of your thumb on my palm? The flicker across the face? The swallow? Did I imagine you would open your eyes and wheeze out, That’s not the way it went, not at all? Did I hope you’d be angry when you opened your eyes and say, You have the story all wrong, Celie, you have it all wrong?
I did. I do.
On the fifth night there was a commotion, running, loud beeping noises. My father was summoned from my side in the waiting room, where he and my mother were spelling each other, and he was gone for quite some time. It was very late and your family was at home, trying to sleep.
When my father came back, his face was red. Oh, honey, he said. I’m so sorry.
Just say it, I said, my voice rough with thirst.
He said, A mistake. Too much drainage. The vesicles collapsed. He’s gone. I’m so sorry.
Dead? I said, very calmly.
Oh, said my father, stricken. Oh, honey. Not entirely. But in a way, yes.
WHEN YOUR FATHER heard he roared. He stomped down the corridor, shouting, We’re suing, we’re suing the goddamned pants off this goddamned hospital, until my brother, home from Boston, slipped a tranquilizer in his iced tea and put him out for a few hours.
When your mother heard, she pulled herself up and nodded, and went out for a walk that lasted four hours. When it grew dark we sent teams out to look for her and one of your friends found her sitting on one of the boulders at the lake, shuddering in the dusky drizzle, and staring at the swollen water. She was soaked when she came back, and came over to me, lifting her hands like cold wet lumps of paper to my cheeks. She opened her mouth and everyone hushed to hear what she was about to say. But she just breathed and blinked and closed her little mouth again.
GRIEF IS becoming a stranger to oneself. It is always a surprise to see how old, how womanly, one actually is. The crow’s-feet by the eyes, the lines by the mouth, how, translucent, a woman’s temples bare their tender blue veins to the world. That gold band hanging loose, so much flesh lost over the past few days. Down the empty corridor, ringing with voices and distant sounds of the hospital, steel and mop and rubber shoe. Into the vague green room, thick with shadows that waver like seaweed in the corners.
See the strange woman look around, make sure all are assembled. On the other faces, there is more than fury and sadness. Also a fatigue, a relief. The darkened room. The quiet machines. The sheet pulled over the body that is only flesh, over the bruised face. The turning away.
I SEE YOU NOW just leaving rooms I am in. The hem of your khakis flashing beyond the door frame. The wind in the room still shifting. The smell of you, musk and clove and even the stink of your fatigue when you’ve come in from a long day outdoors, hunting or snowmobiling or cross-country skiing; all this, a moment before I turn around.
Is that you? I call, but there’s no answer. Just this house still empty of furniture. I turn to my books but can’t read. Maybe the telephone rings then and breaks the jangling quiet, or a crow flies past the window with a songbird in its beak; carrion comfort. I hold on to the tiniest of visions for as long as I can, savoring them like the aftertaste of a long-gone cup of tea.
OUR DIVER FRIEND, the one from the wreck and the falling dive buddy, changed his song. He chose an odd moment for it, at the wake, avoiding my eye over the cold cuts (funeral meats, I thought; terrible expression). He grabbed my elbow hard, whispering urgently. I let him. There was a comfort in his wine-tart breath in my ear, and I watched the window as he whispered to me. Outside, it still rained and rained.
He told the story again from the beginning: the scaly wreck, the chasm, the strange fishes. He broke off where he had before, where you and I had once thought he’d paused to build tension. Watching his buddy fall and be slowly swallowed by the dark chasm, teetering between his own life and the chance of saving another’s. Now, under the strange slow hush of Bach and conversation, the diver blinked and blinked and shifted the glass in his hand.
Instead of telling me about his decision, though, the quick flipping down into the dark maw, the laughter, catching his buddy, he said, Listen. I have to say it. I didn’t go after him.
What? I said. I heard him through the gray felt I’d thickened around myself since the phone call, the hospital.
I watched him go, he said.
What? I said, again.
By the time I saw him, he said, he was too far gone. I had to let him go.
I pulled away, my fists clenched. But your crazy laughter, I said.
He looked at me, the very whites of his eyes wine-stained.
But the love, I said.
That was all true, he said. Only after I couldn’t see him anymore. When I was just staring down into that trench, just suspended there alone.
I stared at the diver, his purple face. He was trying to tell me something, but it was too raw. A story can also be cruel. And when I remember this scene, I remember it static, my hand in mid-slap, hovering near his left ear. On his face a curious look, almost voluptuous, his cheek tilted up as if to accept the blow, eyes closed and lips nearly bent in a smile.
IN JULY, THE SUN at last came out, dried the mud, sopped the wet from the air. The bodies of water abated, and the greens were so green they filled all of us with wonder. So many different shades lived in the world that summer. For some moments, in some especially strong lights, I felt the generosity of such green as a salve, drawing the sick grief from me.
But even in those deepest greens, hiking in the hills (the maples, the ferns, the pines, the scuttling toads), I caught a memory. When my heart at last righted itself, it beat, but furiously.
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, it said into the lovely day.
Long ago, before I found you a second time, when I must have been in college, I was home, driving on East Lake Road. It was a cold day but the lake hadn’t yet melted and large pieces of mist flaked off the lake in pastry layers. I was listening to public radio. On one of the shows, a narrator, his voice soft but emotionless, was telling a story about Niagara Falls. There was a sound effect of roaring water — harsh, impersonal — behind his words, a strange contrast to his hush.