I had, but I had never said them. “I was three.”
“What else?”
I closed my eyes and thought. “Wind.”
“Wind. You mean what it sounds like?”
“No, not exactly.” I opened my eyes. “I think he felt like wind.”
“Well, he was a pilot, so maybe that’s why. Maybe it was just something that happened one time, something you remember. It doesn’t matter which.” Her eyes, as she spoke, had never left me. Her gaze felt like a warm room I had stepped into. She stood and took my arm. “I’m glad you’re telling me this. Something else, Jordan.”
She leaned her face into mine. And I was thinking, for those moments, only of her; as if for the first time in my life I was having a single thought. Then we parted and the thought of Kate was suddenly woven like a thread through everything, all that had ever happened to me, the clean smell of the pines and the lake and the memory of my long lonely winters; the very turning world we stood on. They say that the moment your life appears before your eyes will be your last, but I’m here to say that it’s not so very different when you kiss a woman like Kate, whoever your Kate may be.
“So, a big day in more ways than one.” She peeked over my left shoulder and then my right, and dropped her voice to a whisper. “You think anyone saw?”
“We’ll know soon enough, I guess.”
“And you didn’t mind?” She peered into my face as if she were reading tiny print. “I didn’t ask, which was sort of rude.”
“God, no.” I would have given it all back, every cent, to kiss her again. “I’m glad you did.”
She let her eyes fall. Her lashes, I saw, were thick with moisture. In all the time I’d known her, I didn’t think I’d seen so much as a tear from her, and I wondered why she was crying now, what I’d done to deserve it. Then she put her hands to my chest and gently pushed me away.
“Okay,” she said, and wiped her eyes quickly with the back of her wrist. “Show’s over, folks. Now go help Harry catch his fish.”
NINE
Harry
I never saw her again, my nurse with her knitting needles. I had dreamt her, of course, or the morphine had; I knew this without being told, as I also knew not to ask. Still, I thought she might visit me again, or I hoped she would, that night by the lake when I slept but did not sleep, dreamed but did not dream, was awake every minute and also not. The final unmaking of time, all its solid, familiar order undone, so that even the rhythm of day and night has lost its meaning and one is everywhere in one’s life at once; all that night I drowned in time. And when dawn came—when the blackness of the shades began to pale, and the sky began the slow unlocking of its captured light—I was so surprised to find I was alive I assumed I actually wasn’t. I was dead, but Meredith and Sam were not; while I had slept and died the earth and its heavens had flipped like a cake from a pan, and it was they who were alive, and missing me.
“Pop?” The creak of the cabin door, and behind it, a sweeping arc of day. Morning fills the room; in the chair by my bed, my grown son, Hal. I feel these things without looking. Just lifting my eyelids seems to require an impossible effort, like lifting a piano or reciting the phone book.
“Pop, it’s Hal.”
I thought I said something. I thought I said, I dreamed I was dead, Hal. I saw your mother and brother. She was giving him his bottle in the armchair by the window, the one with the maple tree outside. The leaves were fat and green, and it was long ago.
“How’re you feeling, Pop?”
The baby began to cry; his diaper was wet. She changed him on the dresser, softly humming a song through the pins she held in her mouth. That sweet time of bottles and diapers, the smell of talcum and steam from the stove and the quiet house, and days folded into days. The taste of pins. It was a good dream, Hal.
“That’s okay, Pop.” His hand takes my wrist; he is watching me breathe, I know. I do my best to give him good breaths. But all the air I possess seems to