realized he could leave himself and breathe the water. He could go or he could stay. The water was spacious; it was he; it would hold him. He let himself breathe. The pain vanished. The coldness of the water came into him, an icy relief. He was rising and he left himself, he let the water have him. He let it have him.
The current carried Ben's body with a steady insistence south-west, back toward the shore. Minnows browsed over his face, and occasionally one darted halfway into his open mouth, hung there with its gills twitching, and sped away again. As Ben moved through the water the bottom rose, grew lighter and more distinct. Strips of watery sunlight played over him, caught the translucent shine of his eyes. Then the sunlight began to fade. His body didn't reach the beach at Shelter Island until after sundown, and by then the beach was empty. The waves kept pushing his body onto the sand, pushed it and pulled it back and pushed it that much farther forward again, until finally at high tide, just before midnight, a wave laid him on the sand and retreated and did not return. Ben's body lay face up on the sand, one arm flung back over his head and the other angled awkwardly over his chest in a contorted position particular to the dead. It was a clear night. The Crab and the Seven Sisters were out. Ben's body rested undisturbed on the beach for several hours, facing up. He was spangled, ominous, full of a dark and abandoned beauty. A sprinkling of small shells had caught in his hair and a circle of translucent white glass, worn smooth as an opal by the water, lay in his open mouth.
1994/ If he'd come home earlier.
If he'd visited Cassandra more.
If he'd loved the way he should have.
If he'd been less selfish.
If he'd gone in the boat.
If he hadn't said no.
1994/ Susan thought she would steal him. She was awake. She hadn’t taken the pills. She lay in bed, thinking about what she’d do.
She needed to see him. She’d had no time.
She lay in bed thinking about where he was. The embalming would be finished by now and everyone would have gone home. He’d be there in the strange building with green imitation-leather chairs and white-wigged porcelain figures silently bowing in the curio cabinet.
She knew what was coming tomorrow. The gifts of food, the friends with condolences. There would not be a second, not a second, for her to be alone with Ben. Even if she demanded privacy at the funeral parlor it would be a contained privacy, with friends and family on the other side of the door, waiting generously but with mounting impatience for her to finish up so they could all get on with the business at hand. And she’d have Todd to take care of. He lay in bed beside her, breathing under the sleeping pills she herself had only pretended to swallow. She didn’t want sleep, not now. She wanted every minute.
It wouldn’t help her, a stolen hour at the funeral parlor with Ben lying quietly in his navy-blue suit while the wristwatches ticked down the hall. It wouldn’t help to sit with him in a room amid the hush of flowers, the shifting particulars of colored light.
She wanted no one to know where they were, not even Todd. She wanted to carry him out onto the grass and sit with him while his body was still his body, before the changes started. She wanted to comb his hair and she wanted to sing the songs of his childhood into his cold, familiar ear. If she could do that, she might be ready to relinquish him to mourning, to the realm of the dead. If she could do that, she might continue to live as someone she recognized.
She got quietly out of bed. Todd murmured, slept on. To avoid waking him, she didn’t get dressed. She went downstairs in her nightgown, took a coat from the hall closet. She walked barefoot out onto the cold stones of the porch.
She drove to the mortuary and parked behind the building, in a space reserved for staff. She turned off the ignition, turned off the headlights. She sat in her car watching the clapboard wall, the single window in which a potted geranium bloomed. She wasn’t sure why she’d come. She hadn’t meant to break into the mortuary, not really, although the thought had been somewhere