strips over. They won’t all look the same, and that’s all right. It’s your hands that matter.”
OVER THE WEEKS, Charlie disappeared, as steadily as water evaporating from a boiling kettle. Watched pots, Tom thought, and took a leave from his work to sit with her, his eyes never leaving the ever-deepening curves of her face, the tips of his fingers resting next to hers when her skin could no longer tolerate touch.
“Isn’t that a bitch,” she said, with her slow, steady smile, “just when you most wanted to jump my bones.”
And he couldn’t tell her that he did, he would, that he would take whatever of her was left. Instead he commandeered every part of her care that required touch, washing her by hand when she could no longer stand in the shower, massaging lotion into her feet and legs and hands when the medications sucked the moisture from her skin, buzz-cutting her hair when it grew past her self-imposed one-inch limit.
“Bloody hell, Tom,” she said, “at least I shouldn’t have to worry about my hair. You think people really won’t know I’m sick?”
And he learned to cook, whatever she could eat, adding the subtle and gentle spices that gave flavor without attacking her decimated stomach lining, the greens and yellows and reds that brought the outside world to her.
“Promise me you’ll keep cooking when I’m gone.” Charlie’s voice was insistent.
“I’ll eat,” he said, frustrated. “Don’t worry about me.”
“Not just eat,” Charlie corrected him. “Cook.”
Finally, even food was no longer a topic. The house lost the smells of cooking and Charlie lived only on air and water, diving deep into her mind for longer and longer periods of time, coming back only to look into him, as if her eyes could tell him everything she had seen while she was gone. Then one day she met his eyes, dove, and simply disappeared. Tom was left behind in a stunning vacuum, surrounded by stacks of useless medications and bandages, holding only a feeling, deeply lodged in his bones, his brain, his heart, that even though Charlie had told him again and again that it wasn’t about winning, he had lost.
After the weeks and months of watching, of life suspended in the bottomless well of Charlie’s illness, the world seemed absurdly practical. There were bills to pay, a lawn to mow, laundry that smelled only of sweat and last night’s microwaved dinner. Incoming phone calls reverted to casual check-ins from friends; no longer was he the source of grim updates. The hand-delivered meals from helpful neighbors slowed and then disappeared. He went to the grocery store without wondering if she would be there when he returned, the churning in his stomach replaced by a more certain and deeper ache. She was nowhere and everywhere, and he couldn’t stop looking.
The only people who really wanted to talk about Charlie’s death were the service providers and government agencies, who all wanted proof, in hard copy. He became the dispenser of death certificates, sending forth missives of mortality to phone service providers, credit card companies, life and health insurance, the Department of Motor Vehicles and Social Security. It was amazing, he thought, how many people cared to know, for sure, that you were dead.
Charlie had been clear that she didn’t want to be buried. “Not unless you can turn me into compost,” she told him firmly, then explained to him what she wanted. So one night a group of friends gathered and ate dinner on the beach that Charlie loved—slices of dripping cantaloupe from the old fruit vendor who cried when he heard the news, fresh fish marinated in olive oil and tarragon and grilled over a beachfront fire, chunks of thick-crusted bread from her favorite bakery in town, a spice cake Tom made from Charlie’s own recipe. Afterward, they threw her ashes in great arcs out to the water. What only Tom knew was that each of them carried a tiny bit of her home with them that night, baked into the cake they had eaten.
After that, Tom stopped talking. It was as if all those conversations, the hard ones while she was alive and the prosaic ones after her death, had used up anything he would ever want to say. It was simply too much trouble to open his mouth, to think about what someone else might want or need to hear. His mind was busy, although he couldn’t have told anyone with what.
ALMOST NINE MONTHS LATER, on what would have been Charlie’s