Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

She picked up the telephone, thought better of it, and put it back in its cradle. He’d call if he was stuck. And then, most likely, ask for Thomas. He wasn’t interested, these days, in talking to her. She unloaded half of the plates from the dishwasher before realizing they were dirty. Then she loaded them back in, packed a scoop of soap into the door, and started the cycle. The gift cards they’d bought for John were under the tree, along with the requisite sweater and a pair of pajamas she knew he’d never wear. The house had to be prepared, but she’d already done most of the cleaning. Thomas had to deal with the sick alpaca, which he’d been putting off. Dinner would have to be orchestrated. Then, if there was time, she’d promised Sarah, the medical student who rented the garret apartment above their garage and who was not going home for the holiday (a catastrophic divorce, she’d told Joan, had made family more of an idea than anything else), that they’d move some wood over so she’d have enough to make it through the weekend. The garage was not attached, and stood fifty yards away from the house, obscured from view. Thomas would stack the wood when he got back. He would, Joan thought passingly, do anything for that girl. Sarah was, in her own awkward and plump and helpless way, appealing to men like him.

So the waiting began. Through the kitchen window, Joan could see the alpacas standing dumbly near the fence; the snow was starting to catch in their fur, and their large, expressive eyes were glued on the horizon, as if they were collectively willing some ancient, alpaca Godhead to materialize. Zachary—she’d named him after he’d become sick—was on his haunches, fifty feet away from the herd. She had tried nursing him back to health, warming bottles and feeding him like a newborn, but if that had helped, it had helped only marginally. The local country vet—who Joan secretly suspected despised her for the way they kept their animals ( recreational was the word he’d used)—had been out and told her it was a lost cause. Joan refused to believe him at first—the guy’d barely left his truck before he was back in it, talking about all the other animals who required his attention that day—but soon after his visit Zachary had stopped eating, and when he moved, if he moved at all, it was with clear and unhappy effort. The herd, no fools, had begun to shun him, and at night his pathetic bleating entered her dreams. She’d wake, thinking she’d missed something important, had left someone stranded, or had otherwise failed in some meaningful way. Two evenings ago, unable to sleep, she’d left the house to sing, softly, to him; but then she’d seen Sarah peeking through her window and had become self-conscious. This was the animal kingdom, she reminded herself. Silly to see metaphor where there was none.

She heard Thomas coming downstairs and turned from the window to greet him. “That was John,” he said when he came into the kitchen.

“I didn’t hear the phone ring,” she said.

“Cell phone.”

“Oh,” she said. Thomas walked halfway across the kitchen before remembering something upstairs. “Goddamn it, I’m unraveling,” he said.

“You’re just tired,” she said. “I didn’t sleep much either.”

Thomas looked at her. His eyes were bagged. His beard, which she still wasn’t used to, was neatly trimmed. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “It’s his birthday on Thursday. I’d forgotten.”

“I know his birthday,” she said.

He would be thirty. For the last year he’d been calling in the middle of the night, waking them, sometimes with nothing to say, sometimes angry, sometimes crying. It happened once a month. Maybe more. It was impossible to say what he wanted, needed, from them. Thomas would take the phone across the hall, and talk to him until he calmed down. John never wanted to speak to her, not recently at least, and when she asked Thomas what they talked about he gave her an abbreviated, bare-bones account. The rest, he said, was nonsense, that John had just wanted someone’s ear until he was tired enough to fall asleep. They’d been married for thirty-four years; she knew he was protecting her. She didn’t like being shut out, it drove the two of them away from each other and into themselves; but after John’s last visit, which had been frightening, and had shaken her, she was, at least partially, grateful for it. She was also grateful for Jocey, John’s girlfriend. Since they’d been dating, the calls had become less frequent; where they’d failed to find a way to help him, it appeared she succeeded.

Thomas walked back into the kitchen, holding his hat. The scar on his forehead, just below his hairline, was healing well. The accident had happened two weeks ago, when Joan was running errands: Thomas, chopping wood, had yanked their axe out of the stump too quickly and brought the blunt end to his head, opening a deep cut. He’d knocked on Sarah’s door, and she’d taken him inside and stitched him up. Joan had wanted to go to the hospital when she returned—when she saw his stitched forehead, his bloody bunched-up shirt on the floor—but Thomas insisted Sarah had closed it perfectly, and the hospital was unnecessary.

“So he’s on his way?” Joan asked. “He knows about the storm?”

“Already on the road,” Thomas said. “He does.”

“Do you think they’ll make it tonight?”

“I do.”

“Good,” Joan said. She wasn’t sure if she meant it. “Do they have an emergency bag? Just in case?”

“He said they’ve got jackets, and jackets, and jackets. He wants to go skiing while they’re here. I said that was fine.” Thomas picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter, inspected it, put it back down.

“Well, they’ve got a cell phone, at least.”

“Yes. At least they’ve got that phone, thank God.”

“You don’t have to make fun of me,” she said, and turned toward the window. The snow was coming heavier now.

Thomas moved to her side and rubbed small circles at the base of her neck. A comforting, nonsexual gesture. She wasn’t used to the way he looked with a beard; it wasn’t him, he’d never worn one; and for the last two weeks it had been a surprise, always, when he entered rooms. Another surprise: just this morning, she’d caught him masturbating in the shower. He’d apologized through the glass. When she’d asked him, later, and playfully she thought, what he’d been thinking about, he’d said, “Oh, nothing. You.” She was embarrassed. She knew it wasn’t true. What she imagined for him was an orgy of young women who looked just like Sarah, thirty upturned mouths, some bad music—but whatever image or scenario it was that he conjured, Thomas wouldn’t say, and this morning, of all mornings, the inwardness of the action had upset her.

“I’m not making fun of you,” he said. “You’ve barely slept. I wouldn’t do that.”

“All right,” she said. “All right.”

“I’m going to take Zachary down to the pit,” he said. “You want to say good-bye?”

She shook her head. “No.” Then she said, “I already did.”

They stood near the window, looking out at the snow. “Call if you need anything,” he said.

“I will,” she said. Then she said, “Say hi to the nudist for me, if you see her.”

She was talking about Sarah. It was a routine between them. Thomas squeezed Joan’s hand, grabbed his keys from the peg by the door, and left the house. On a walk last summer, a few weeks after Sarah had moved in, he’d caught her swimming in the river near their property. He didn’t realize—or, the word he’d used when telling Joan was notice —she was naked until he’d hailed her and begun a conversation. It wasn’t true, of course. He had noticed, her nudity had stopped him dead in fact, but he didn’t think about what he was doing—standing still, watching dumbly, and, the word had come later, peeping—until she’d looked up, started, and then, as she recognized him, relaxed, and put her hand over her naked heart. He’d been embarrassed; she, apparently, was not. She laughed, said something about not having a suit, and then waded to the bank and stood, nude, like some robust Greek emerging from a clamshell. One of her breasts was slightly larger than the other; on her hip was a scar like a holster. She’d asked Thomas to hand over her clothes, hanging on a branch behind him, which he’d done. Before he turned away, he caught sight of her stooping to step into her shorts and it had stilled him, even as he looked down the river to give her privacy. Midstream, there was a rock that was slowly parting the calm water, folding it over itself, and he concentrated on that until she’d said, okay.