The thought tore at him. The guilt over leaving her to die in the bathtub threatened to crack his ribs. It was too big to contain.
He scaled the cemetery wall and called until he found her, a small white form in a sea of graves and dark grass, huddled and scared, clawing desperately in the dirt. Her ankle was broken and hung at a sickening angle.
He pulled her up by her shoulders and wrapped his arms around her, hugged her tightly against him.
“Oh Katie, oh baby,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you. You scared me so bad. You’re going to be okay.”
An ant emerged from her hairline and idled on her forehead. Another crawled out of her nose. He brushed them furiously away.
She returned to the cellar. He spent a few days getting it into some kind of order, moving precarious stacks into smaller and sturdier piles, and giving her some room to move around in. While she slept in the daytime, he brought down the television set and its stand, a lamp, and a small box where he kept the books she had once liked to read. He left the mattress on the floor but changed the sheets regularly. When he was not at work he spent all his time down there with her, though he had taken to sleeping upstairs so that he could lock her in when she was most likely to try to wander.
“I can’t risk you getting lost again,” he told her. “It would kill me.” Then he closed the door and turned the lock. She heard his steps tread the floor above her.
She had taken the dead robin and nailed it to one of the support beams beside the mattress. It was the only beautiful thing in the room, and it calmed her to look at it.
Her foot was more trouble than it was worth so she wrenched it off and tossed it into the corner.
“That was Heather,” Sean said, closing the cellar door and tromping down the stairs. He sat beside her on the mattress and put his arm around her shoulders. She did not lean into him the way she used to do, so he gave her a little pull until it seemed like she was.
When he’d noticed her missing foot the other night, he’d quietly gone back upstairs and dry heaved over the sink. Then he came back down, searched until he located it in a corner, and took it outside to bury it. The crucified bird had not bothered him initially, but over the days it had gathered company: two mice, three cockroaches, a wasp, some moths. Their dry little bodies were arrayed like art. She had even pulled the bones from one of the mice, fixing them with wood glue onto the post in some arcane hieroglyph.
He was frightened by its alienness. He was frightened because it meant something to her and it was indecipherable to him.
She was watching something on tv with the sound off: men in suits talking to each other across a table. They seemed very earnest.
“She wants to come home for the weekend,” he said. “I said it would be okay.”
She pulled her gaze from the screen and looked at him. The light from the television made small blue squares in her eyes, which had begun to film over in a creamy haze. It was getting hard to tell that one eye was askew, which made him feel better when he talked to her. “Heather,” she said. “I like Heather.”
He put his fingers in her hair, hooked a dark lock behind her ear. “Of course you do, baby. You remember her, don’t you.”
She stared for a moment, then her brow furrowed. “She used to live here.”
“That’s right. She went to college, and she lives there now. She’s our daughter. We love her.”
“I forgot.”
“And you love me, too.”
“Okay.”
She looked back at the television. One of the men was standing now and laughing so hard his face was red. His mouth was wide open. He was going to swallow the world.
“Can you say it?”
“Say what?”
“That you love me. Can you say that to me? Please?”
“I love you.”
“Oh baby,” he said, and leaned his head against hers, his arm still around her. “Thank you. Thank you. I love you too.” They sat there and watched the silent images. His mind crept ahead to Heather’s visit. He wondered what the hell he was going to tell her. She was going to have a hard time with this.
What is the story of our marriage?
He went back to that night again and again. He remembered standing over her, watching her body struggle against the pull of a death she had called upon herself. It is the nature of the body to want to live, and once her mind had shut down her muscles spasmed in the water, splashing blood onto the floor as it fought to save itself.
But her mind, apparently, had not completely shut down after all. She remembered him standing over her. She looked up as the water lapped over her face and saw him staring down at her. She saw him turn and close the door.
What did she see behind his face? Did she believe it was impassive? Did she believe it was unmoved by love? How could he explain that he had done it because he could not bear to watch her suffer anymore?
On the rare occasions that he remembered the other thoughts — the weariness, the dread of the medical routine, and especially the flaring anger he’d felt earlier that same night, when the depression took her and he knew he’d have to steer her through it yet again—he buried them.
That is not the story of our marriage, he thought. The story is that I love her, and that’s what guided my actions. As it always has.
He was losing her, though. The change that kindled his interest also pulled her farther and farther away, and he feared that his love for her, and hers for him, would not be enough to tether her to this world.
So he called Heather and told her to come home for spring break. Not for the whole week, he knew that she was an adult now, she had friends, that was fine. But she had family obligations and her mother was lonely for her, and she should come home for at least the weekend.
Is she sick? Heather asked.
No. She just misses her girl.
Dad, you told me it was okay if I stayed here spring break. You told me you would talk to Mom about it.
I did talk, Heather. She won. Come on home, just for the weekend. Please.
Heather agreed, finally. Her reluctance was palpable, but she would come.
That was step one.
Step two would be coaxing Katie out of the cellar for her arrival. He’d thought that being locked down there at night, and whenever he was out, would have made coming upstairs something to look forward to. He’d been wrong; she showed no signs of wanting to leave the cellar at all, possibly ever again. She had regressed even further, not getting up to walk at all since losing her foot, and forsaking clothing altogether; she crawled palely naked across the floor when she wanted to move anywhere — a want that rarely troubled her mind anymore. She allowed him to wash her when he approached her with soap and warm water, but only because she was passive in this as she had become in all things.
Unless he wanted to touch her with another purpose.
Then she would turn on him with an anger that terrified him. Her eyes were pale as moon rocks. Her breath was cold. And when she turned on him with that fury, he would imagine her breathing that chill into his lungs, stuffing it down into his heart. It terrified him. He would not approach her for sex anymore, though the rejection hurt him more than he would have dreamed.
He decided to woo her. He searched the roads at night, crawling at under twenty miles an hour, looking for roadkill. The first time he found some, a gut-crushed possum, he brought the carcass into the house and dropped it onto the floor in front of the cellar door, hoping the smell would lure her out. It did not; but he did not sulk, nor did he deprive her of her gift. He opened the door and rolled the animal wreckage down the stairs.