Almondine

T O HER, THE SCENT AND THE MEMORY OF HIM WERE ONE. WHERE it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away.

He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric.

Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her.

And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him.

Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him.

As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor.

And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask.

H IS MOTHER’S COUGH WAS BAD IN THE MORNINGS, THOUGH IT was gone by the time they’d finished chores. At school one afternoon, he was called to the office. His mother had telephoned. She would pick him up in the circle drive fronting the school. At first he thought nothing of it; sometimes errands coincided with the end of the school day. He waited under the long-roofed entryway as the buses revved their engines and lumbered forward. He didn’t see the pickup until they were gone. His mother sat in the cab, head tipped back, until a coughing fit curled her forward. He trotted up the sidewalk, watching the truck rock on its springs. When he opened the door, the heater was blasting.

What happened? he signed. You look terrible.

“I’m not sure. I got dizzy working in the mow and went to the house to lie down. This thing has gotten-”

She thumped her chest lightly, which triggered a spasm of coughing. She crossed her fists over her chest and doubled up, then rested her hands on the steering wheel. When she looked over at him, her face was shining with sweat.

“I called-” she began, then switched to sign. I called Doctor Frost.

When can you see him?

She looked at her watch. Ten minutes ago.

Then go, he signed. Go!

DOCTOR FROST PRACTICED OUT OF a converted house east of town. His waiting room contained a half dozen chairs and a coffee table covered with ancient National Geographic magazines. A tall, narrow window had been cut into the back wall for his receptionist. Before they could sit down, the doctor appeared, sandy-haired, with wire-rimmed glasses, and led Edgar’s mother to an examination room. Edgar sat on the couch and looked out the windows. The sun was sinking below the treetops. A pair of jays screamed at each other from the pine trees, launching themselves into loopy, tumbling flights. From inside the exam room came an indistinct conversation.

“Again, please,” he heard Doctor Frost say, and another fit of coughing.

A moment later, the doctor appeared at the receptionist’s window.

“Edgar,” he said. “Why don’t you come back and join the party?”

In the examination room, Trudy sat in the corner on a chair. Doctor Frost patted the black exam bench and asked Edgar to untuck his shirt and he pressed a stethoscope against his ribs.

“Cough,” he said.

Edgar exhaled a quiet gasp.

“Clear,” the doctor murmured. He jotted a note on his pad and turned and pressed his thumbs into the soft skin under Edgar’s jaw, looking absently into space, then looked down Edgar’s throat with a small, lighted examination scope.

“Say ‘Ah.’”

A-H-H-H-H, he fingerspelled.

Doctor Frost glanced at his mother.

“He just said ‘ah’ for you,” she said weakly, and smiling.

“Okay, sense of humor intact,” the doctor said. “Try anyway.”

Then he clapped Edgar’s shoulder and told him to button up. He folded his arms across his clipboard and looked at them.

“Edgar’s lungs are clear. He hasn’t picked up what you have, Trudy, which is pneumonia. I need to run a lab test on that sputum sample, but there’s really not much doubt-the crackle in your right lung is pronounced. I’m tempted to send you up to Ashland for chest x-rays, but I’m going to hold off and maybe save you a little money. Right now this is mild, and you’re a young woman, and we’re catching it early. We’re going to get you on antibiotics and knock it out quick. There’s a catch, though-”

“This is mild?” his mother interjected.

“Relatively, though I wish you’d come in three or four days ago. This stuff is nothing to fool with. I’m not trying to alarm you, but I want you to understand that pneumonia is dangerous. People die from it. Any worse and I’d have you in the hospital.”

His mother shook her head and started to say something, but before she could speak a coughing fit took her. Doctor Frost waved his hand.

“I know, I know-a possibility we want to avoid. So you’re going to have to do what I say. All right?”

She nodded. Doctor Frost looked at Edgar until he nodded, too.

“Here’s my concern. Edgar’s cough reflex is abnormal. Coughing involves constricting the vocal cords, which, as we know, is difficult for him. With pneumonia, coughing is good and bad. It’s bad because it wears you out. But it’s good because it gets the crud out of your lungs. If Edgar catches this, he’ll naturally be less inclined to cough, and the bad stuff will accumulate in his lungs. That would be worse than for the ordinary person. Much worse. Understand?”