“How do you know that?”
Remy had no answer.
April turned back to the newspaper. “Reporters still call me all the time.” She folded the paper. “They come across so caring and compassionate; ‘It must have been horrible to lose two people in one day.’ I say, ‘Oh. Do you think?’ I put them off… say I don’t want to talk about it yet. ‘Maybe later.’”
“Why don’t you want to talk about it?”
“You don’t talk about it,” she said, “what happened that day.”
“I don’t really remember it.”
“Oh,” she said. “I remember it.” She looked away, at the place where the floor met the wall. “Lawyers call, too. They’re even more persistent.”
“What do they want?”
“A third.” She looked back down at the newspaper again. “It just surprises me, I guess. Afterward, I really thought that everything would change… I don’t know… that we would be different. Stores would never open again… businesses shut down… lawyers quit their practices and run into the woods.” She smiled wistfully. “I just assumed the newspaper would stop coming out. Instead…” She chewed a thumbnail. “This whole thing… it just became another section in the paper. Like movie reviews. Or the bridge column.”
Remy looked up at the dresser in April’s bedroom, to see if the picture she’d kept up there was still facedown. Her husband. Derek. But his picture was gone.
April was staring at the newspaper, and seemed to be choosing her words with great care. “I just don’t know how we all got so…” And then she stared off again, as if the rest of the sentence were somewhere out the window.
“So… what?” Remy asked.
“Used to it,” she said.
April looked back, one breast peeling off the comforter so that he could see a dark nipple. His eyes traced her neck and her face: dark, serious eyebrows arched over candy brown eyes. She watched him staring at her. “What?” she asked.
“You’re beautiful.”
“You always say that like it’s the first time you’ve ever seen me.”
“It is,” he said.
She turned back to the paper again and read for a few seconds. “Here. Look at this woman.” April slapped the paper. “Allowed herself to be cut in half by a magician for her twin granddaughters’ birthday party. I mean… that’s so… what? Funny and ironic and sad and wonderful. Everything. I don’t know what to feel about that. How are we supposed to feel about that?”
“Alive?” Remy asked.
“Well, I’m tired of feeling like that.”
She reached back with her hand and rubbed his thigh and Remy thought that maybe he could take this skidding life, as long as he landed here sometimes, in this nest of bedding in April’s apartment, glancing down at her body, at her slender back and notched waist. He wondered if this could be enough, if this could tether him, the pressure of another person against his skin. Remy wanted to say something, about them, or her, but he found it impossible because he had no idea what had already been said. Maybe that was normal, too. Maybe every couple lived in the gaps between conversations, unable to say the important things for fear they had already been said, or couldn’t be said; maybe every relationship started over every time two people came together.
She hit the newspaper again. “Or this guy. Bought a vintage motorcycle for himself when he turned twenty-two. Rode it across the country and camped in the Canadian Rockies for a month to shoot photos of migrating geese. Jesus. Who does that?”
April turned to face him again and her long dark hair pooled in his lap. Remy recalled the pictures of March. Her face was wider than April’s, and darker. Their father was right: even though she was older, April seemed younger and frailer than her younger sister had been.
April’s eyes narrowed then as if she were thinking the same thing. “So… do you ever think about what yours would say?”
“My-” Remy opened his eyes.
“Your portrait in grief. They’re not like obits – see. They’re not résumés or tributes. They’re more like crosscuts, a strobe flash on one part of your life. One moment. One theme. So what would yours say?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said.
“I know what mine would say.”
“What?”
“She saw death as just another wedding she wasn’t invited to.”
“AND DO you see them now?” The voice was calm, almost to the point of being alarming.
“See what?” Remy asked. His eyes were closed and he was sitting on a soft couch somewhere. He felt with his hands. A leather couch.
“These… what did you call them… floaters? Flashers?” the calm voice asked. “Can you see them now, with your eyes closed? Yes? Are they here? Are they with us?”
The calm voice made Remy increasingly anxious and he crossed and uncrossed his legs. “Sure. They’re always here. I get used to ’em, but they’re always here.”
“Describe them. What do they look like?”
“Strings. They look like strings.”
“Strings.”
“Right. Little segmented strings.”
“Strings?” The man sounded intrigued.
“Yeah. I said. Strings.”
“And do these strings tie you to the world, Brian? Is that what they do? Are these ropes binding you, or holding you down? Are they keeping you from being who you long to be?”
“No. Not ropes. Strings.” Remy opened his eyes. The man across from him was in his late forties and balding, wore narrow blue-rimmed glasses and had pursed lips like someone sucking a milk shake through a straw. He had a yellow pad of paper open on his crossed leg. The nameplate on his desk read: Dr. Rieux. They were in a small office in an old building, an office with nothing but a desk, a chair, and the couch where Remy sat, his arms at his sides. The rest of the room was taken up with bookshelves, a framed diploma, and a cartoon poster of a boy fighting a huge dragon, the dragon huddling in fear as flames burst from the little boy’s nose.
“Isn’t this what your strings are?” Dr. Rieux asked. “Aren’t these the tethers that keep you from floating away?”
Remy looked back at the psychiatrist. “No. They’re little pieces of tissue floating in my eyes. My ophthamologist says they’re floating in the gel inside there, the vitreous humor. The tissue surrounding it is shredding. He’s worried it could eventually lead to the retinas detaching.”
“Oh. Retinas.” The psychiatrist was noticeably deflated. “Huh.” He frowned and flipped through his notes. His voice lost its smoothness. “Okay, what else have we got?”
“Well,” Remy said, “there are the gaps.”
“The what?” Dr. Rieux didn’t look up from his notes.
“I’m having gaps.”
“You’re having what?”
“Gaps,” Remy said. “I’ll be doing one thing and suddenly-”
“EVERYTHING FADES after a while,” Guterak was saying. “Maybe that’s all it is.” His pool table was heavier than it looked. Remy waited at the top of the stairs to see which direction they were going – in or out. Paul pushed. Okay. They were taking the table out. Remy strained under the weight as he backed it down the wide staircase.
“I mean, it couldn’t last forever, right?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said. Even though it was a small one, and even though the legs were taken off, the slate top was massive and unwieldy, like moving a slab of concrete, like moving a driveway.
“At first, the whole thing felt like a break from the world, like a fuggin’ snow day,” Paul said. “Remember? You know, when you were a kid and it snowed so much they closed the school? Remember those days?”
“Yeah,” Remy said, struggling against the pool tabletop. “Kind of.”
In the kitchen, they turned the tabletop sideways, grunting and huffing. Paul kicked away a plastic football, but it hit the counter and rolled right back in his way. “Just a sec. Hold up.” Paul set his end down to move the ball. Remy looked over at the Guteraks’ refrigerator, which was littered with paper: school lunch menus, report cards, pictures of friends’ kids, even a picture of Edgar. The kitchen had a vague, stale smell, and Remy imagined a crust of bread wedged beneath the dishwasher, or an orange rind behind the fridge. Finally, they got the pool table through the back sliding door and loaded it onto the bed of Paul’s black pickup truck, next to boxes of tools, a television, a dresser, and an ice chest. Paul went back in for the legs of the pool table as Remy stood outside, watching a checkmark of birds dissolve into an ashen sky.