Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

Finally she switched the radio off and turned in her seat. “So John’s coming in today, right? Joan told me a while ago you were expecting him.”

“He is,” Thomas said. There was a muffled thud from the trailer, and he slowed down. “With his girlfriend.”

“Ah-ha,” she said. “So I don’t need to come for dinner, then.”

“Right,” Thomas said. “We didn’t figure you’d want to.”

“No. I’ve got plans,” Sarah said. “You know, most people love doctors. He didn’t like me very much.”

“It’s not you. He’s got other things going on. It’s not you.”

“What kind of other things?”

Thomas sighed. He adjusted the heater on the dashboard. “We don’t really know, I guess.”

“Is he seeing anyone now? You know, a therapist?”

“No,” Thomas said. “Well, yes. Sort of. The last one figured out some sort of medication regimen that seems to be working for him. I think the girlfriend has helped.”

“Joan told me you guys talk a lot.”

“More like, he talks.”

“Are you worried about him?”

Thomas gripped the steering wheel. This wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to know who had been visiting her, blocking him in, but he didn’t know how to bring it up. “Worried like how?”

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. She was absently chewing one of her fingers. “Do you think it’s helped? I don’t— I’m not trying to pry. Not my business.”

“The therapist helped,” Thomas said. “Jocey’s helped. The medicine’s helped.” He felt his throat tightening. “It’s hard to know what he wants sometimes. It’ll straighten out. He will, that is. I’d rather not talk about it. That’s all I’ve been doing. Talking.”

Sarah adjusted in her seat. “Got it,” she finally said. “I’m glad things are working out.”

They went back to driving in silence. The heater was cranked and pushing hot air directly into Thomas’s face. He took his hat off, tossed it on the dash, and adjusted the vent. Sarah, Joan. John, for Christmas. He cleared his throat. “So you’ve got plans tonight?”

“I do.” She’d been digging around in her pockets, and stopped. “Now, that,” she said, “that’s healing nicely.”

At first Thomas was confused. Then he remembered—his forehead, the stitching, the scar. “It is,” he said. He lowered his head so she could get a better look. As she leaned over the center console, he brought his speed down. He’d taken the stitches out four days ago, in the mirror with sterilized tweezers like Sarah had instructed.

“Very nice,” she said.

“Something to be proud of,” Thomas said. He was glad the conversation had picked up again, had moved past John. He glanced at the road, then brought his eyes back to hers. Her lips were pursed. “You can barely see it,” he said.

Sarah unfastened her seat belt, and moved closer to study the scar. When he’d shown up, bloody, at her door, she’d been so concerned. She had guided him inside her apartment, sat him down in the kitchen. Wiped the blood away gently with a wet and warm towel, applied pressure. Took his face in her hands to inspect the wound and then decided, if he was up for it, that she could stitch him up right then and there. She’d given him painkillers and a small shot of anesthetic so he wouldn’t feel the needle. And he hadn’t felt it, not exactly. He’d closed his eyes. He could feel pressure and tugging and knew the wound was coming together.

“You should see the wood,” he’d said, a joke.

“I believe it,” she’d said back.

At night, while talking—or, rather, listening—to John, he would return to this surgery again and again, rolling the memory around in his head like a marble. The rhythmic tugging. Their proximity. She had been able to help him, in a concrete way. It had been so simple. At one point he’d reached out, put his hand on her hip to brace himself, and she’d let it rest there. Her skin was warm. He could feel her hip bone in conversation with the rest of her body as she concentrated on her work. When, periodically, she’d reached behind him for the faucet, her loose shirt brushed against his upturned face. Thomas had sat with his eyes closed, his hand more alive than any other part of his body. He had loved the touch of her skin. Sarah was professional and quick, and had patted him on the shoulder when she was finished, the way dentists, postcavity, do. The whole thing was over before it had begun.

Now, in the truck, they were close again. If you would reach out, he thought. If you would just reach out, I can handle whatever’s coming next . And then she did just that, a quick, darting gesture, her hand on the side of his face, her thumb compressing, lightly, the skin near the wound. Thomas felt her breath on the side of his face. “Not bad,” she said.

He was now going well below the speed limit. He hadn’t seen any other traffic, did not see why this wouldn’t be allowed, but behind him, suddenly, there was honking. He sat up straighter and looked in his side mirror. A red pickup was almost on the gate of his trailer. Thomas slowed even more, rolled down his window, and motioned for the truck to pass. As the driver pulled parallel, Thomas looked over, just in time to see the man in the passenger seat move his eyes from him to Sarah. He was dressed in red and white camouflage. He looked vaguely familiar.

“Do you know that guy?” Thomas said. The truck had slowed to Thomas’s speed. Sarah said nothing. The man rapped at his own window, then made a gun with his fingers and pointed it at the two of them. Then the rust-gutted truck was speeding ahead into the distance, weaving in and out of lanes, as if driving a cone course. “Weird,” Sarah said. They’d been silent while it happened.

“Someone oughta shoot his tires out,” Thomas said after a few minutes.

“Someone will,” Sarah said. “Eventually.”

The flowers Joan had bought and placed on the mantel were already beginning to wilt. She turned the vase, stood back, turned it again. Yesterday, she had talked to her therapist about John, hoping he could help her out of what, in the last few days, had become a panic. Children aren’t going to be what you want them to be, he said. I don’t want him to be anything! she said back. Tears again. Some people, he said, just need more time. When she asked him how much time was enough, he fixed her over his desk, and said that was something she ought to think about. “When he talks—what he says—it’s like an infection, like an earache. I can’t get it out of my head,” she said. “It has the ring of verdict to it.”

“But you’ve told me”—here he flipped his notes, to make sure. “The two of you have stopped talking. That he only talks to your husband, now.”

“When we talked,” she corrected. The last time she’d been on the phone with John, the last time he’d asked for her, she had been unable to give him what he needed, and he had said: I’m thinking maybe you don’t love me . And at the moment he said it, at the very moment the words were out of his mouth and coiling toward her over the line, it had been true. He had made it true. Now, lying in bed, she would listen to Thomas down the hall, saying yes, or no, mumbling inaudibly so it sounded as if the floor itself was humming softly with the murmur of her husband’s voice. Sometimes, unable to sleep, she would imagine John’s side of the conversation, and in her head this would become a conversation between her and her husband, the conversation they never had, a constantly invoked What have we done? To what degree is this our fault? How much longer will this take?

“You’re confessing this to me. He sounds like he’s confessing to you,” her therapist had said. He cleared his throat.