“I want to see the…the fall spectrum. Fading autumn. Why won’t you let me leave?”
Forty-seven days, head to heel and her question hadn’t slipped. Why won’t you let me leave? Inside me, where poets and writers throw feelings of marriage and misery, another sour scratch—another tally—etched across my heart.
Her heart monitor pecked at the silence like a persistent poking finger. I prayed to God, eyes opened, that with His Divine mercy He might whistle home the tears pooling at my eyelids. See, back then, whenever I watched my wife lie in bed this great warmth would always swell in my chest, in my tally-counter, like the comfort of a campfire or the rush of a warm drink. But when I watched her now, lost under a papery blue hospital scrub, sunken in this thin, bread-slice of a mattress, my eyelashes could hardly kept the tears from dribbling.
She crinkled the nearly transparent sheet creased under her arms, tossing her chin from shoulder to shoulder. I swallowed hard and kneeled, though my joints were no better than rotted wood and one popped. I took her knotty hand, skin wrinkled over the knuckles like dried papier mache; green veins formed ridges over her hand bones.
She coughed raggedly, long life having stretched her vocal cords thinner than a plastic sack and tore them, I imagined, so that wheezing rips and holes were scattered along whole course of her throat. When she spoke, she whistled; when she coughed, she hacked.
“I wish I had two lives, Wilson, but only the two if I had em both with you. Otherwise, God could keep em, both of em.”
“Oh, please…” I kissed her knuckles. “But we…maybe we could live two lives, dear.”
Marley hack-laughed. “Ha…! I didn’t drink enough medicine to believe that…” her voice, I noticed, shrunk in strength as her sentence reached its end.
“But we can live life again, babe. Think! 1957, October.”
“57? You…” Marley’s gears seemed to jam; her eyes traced the brim of her brows. Suddenly, she walloped with ecstasy. “You said… said you loved me! For the first time, yes, and—”she hack-laughed again, “you were quivering like a boy on stage…We…we were under a tree, isn’t that right? And the pretty leaves were falling on our heads…is that… is that how you remember it?”
“Can’t remember. But in October of 1957 we got naked for the first time.”
She tossed her head aside and tripped into a coughing spasm. “Oh, did we? I can’t remember. It mustn’t… mustn’t have been that impressive to me.”
“Hey, lady.”
“How bout… Spring… uh, seventy-six?”
“1976?” I thought for a moment and when the idea clicked, I happy-danced my arms, flapped them like a crane. “Now, there’s a memory; we left a jazz party, or something. I was in my sharpest black suit, you had that lofty dress. And I think I was upset…a rotten party host, maybe? Anyhow, you would have traded everything gold if it meant my happiness, so on our way home you suggested a detour to Charlie’s Beach. We danced right there. In our dress. Waves at our shins. It completely ruined my dress shoes.” I chuckled
“Sorry…” she hacked, then her eyes rolled upwards like loose marbles. Silence. My lungs constricted with terror and I shook her violently.
“Marley!”
Forcefully, her eyelids peeled open. “Sorry… no, we’d been leaving your mother’s funeral. But the moonlit dance, yes, I remember that just the same.”
“I suppose there’s a reason I remember your dance, and not my mother. She gave me life as a boy, but that night, yes, I was so low but you gave me life as man. You raised my head.”
“And now, we’re here—” her voice turned choppy, “and my life is just rushing away!”
“Babe—”
She coughed terribly, as if someone had ran vacuum over cold gravel; her back arched, a hollow scream shaped her lips. She flattened against the bed.
“Marley…”
Her eyes were closed, her mouth hardly parted, but she spoke. “We had a good life, Wilson. I will… I will see you in the next one.”
And someday, Christ as our God, we will.
