Bonnie Nadzam - Lions

The second small glass he would carry to his chair, lamp, and bookshelf, which were situated beside the woodstove but facing the window, out toward the frontage road, as if he were on watch at the end of each day. When Gordon realized, as a boy, that this was what his father’s habit brought to mind, he was both worried and curious about the adversaries his father seemed to await every single evening of their lives.

“Nothing I’m expecting,” John told him, “which is why I’m paying such close attention.”

Here, at his chair and table, John would set down his second glass and clean his eyeglasses with a soft, faded yellow cloth, turn on the lamp, pick up his book from the night before or open a new one, and sip the second shot as he read.

“Rejoined the living, I see,” Georgianna said to Gordon now, with a smile. “You must be hungry.”

Gordon stared. The wind from outside filled Georgianna’s white curtains with moving light. Behind them, the shapes of trees, hedges. Next door May’s Barred Rocks and Rhode Island Reds clucked and screamed.

“He passed almost right after you left, Gordon,” Georgianna said. She lifted the whiskey, and sniffed it. “I can’t believe he drank this stuff.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Long time. Leigh’s in the kitchen.”

He sat down. “Can I—” He looked outside again, then back to his mother. “Can I still see him?”

“If you want to. He’s in Burnsville. We’ve been waiting on you.”

Gordon nodded. “I’m sorry.”

She waved her hand. Reached for a tissue.

“Has Leigh been here all day?”

“Just this hour. Everyone’s helping out.”

They were quiet a long time. Georgianna cried and Gordon stood to hand her another tissue. She took it and balled it up in her hand. He looked toward the kitchen door. He could see Leigh’s back, the knot of his mother’s apron tied around her waist. He turned back to his mother just as Leigh turned away from the kitchen counter and stepped closer to the doorway to listen.

“Was it — was he—”

“Peaceful,” she said, and nodded into her tissue. “Just fell into a deeper sleep. Hardly made a movement.”

Gordon struggled for a moment, and got it out in a whisper. “I couldn’t watch.”

“I know.”

“Did he say anything?”

She shook her head. “It’s like he was already gone. You saw him.”

They were quiet another minute.

“Mom,” Gordon said. “Did you and Dad ever talk about going back to Lincoln? With your parents?”

“Back to Nebraska?” She set down the whiskey and folded her hands in her lap. “Your dad’s work was here. You know that. And after Grandma and Grandpa died there was no reason to go back.”

“But you could have moved the shop.”

“Yes, we could have moved the shop.”

“He would have done well in a bigger city.”

“He certainly could have.”

“And wouldn’t it have been better for you?”

“Better? For me?” She shook her head. “I don’t know, Gordon. Why?” Then she smiled. “You’re trying to imagine what kind of woman might want to spend her life in Lions, and why.”

He shrugged. “I guess that’s right.”

“You’ve been traveling.”

“Traveling?”

“Your father always called it traveling. And he always came back so serious. So sharp. Ready to work.”

Gordon leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and half covered his face with his hands.

“I won’t ask you to talk about it,” she said. “I know that’s sort of against the rules, isn’t it?”

He smiled a little. Ran his sleeve beneath his nose. “I guess so.”

“He doesn’t begrudge those last days, Gordon. I know he doesn’t.”

“I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Don’t ever say such a thing.”

“It’s like my whole life I’ve been climbing a mountain,” he said, “and when I was up there, and knew he was gone, I could see.”

“What could you see?”

His eyes filled with tears and again his throat closed up. He spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Everything.” He pressed the insides of his thumbs to his eyes and felt his lower lip and chin begin to tremble. “And now,” he said. His voice cracked. Georgianna waited. It came out again in a whisper. “Now I’m coming down the other side.”

“Tell me one thing,” she said, “so that I know. In case I need you. Which direction do you go?”

Gordon’s eyes touched hers.

“Tell me,” she said.

“North.”

“Same place.”

“Yes.”

“OK.”

“You know where it is?”

“Of course I do.”

Where she stood listening in the doorway, Leigh’s knees went weak. She couldn’t hear any more of it. She turned from the door and crossed the kitchen slowly, her knees unsteady, her stomach unsteady, and went back to the counter where she lifted a cool, raw egg and held it in her hand. She looked out at the yard, and down at the egg, then cracked it into Georgianna’s mixing bowl. Two, three, four more, and she whipped them into a pale yellow foam.

In the living room Georgianna lifted and sniffed the whiskey again. “I didn’t marry your father as a way to get nice things, or to be confident that we’d be living a certain way,” she said. “Love is not about comfort or consolation, Gordon. Is that what you wanted to ask?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“You want to ask me if your father was crazy.”

“No.”

“It’s OK,” she said. “It won’t be the first time someone’s asked me. But I can’t answer it for you.”

He nodded.

“And Gordon, even if he was, it doesn’t mean you are. You don’t have to keep the shop. You don’t have to spend your free days up north. You don’t.”

He looked at her. He thought her hair was whiter. He’d never realized how much she resembled his father — the shape of the eyes, the long, even ridge of the nose, the wide cheekbones. Gordon had heard say of people who live side by side for many years that the cells and even atoms of their bodies begin to align with each other’s. Eventually they not only cease to look like themselves but begin to resemble each other. So what happens when one of the two of those people disappears?

She patted his hand. “It’s exhausting,” she said, as if she could hear his thoughts.

Years after this summer Leigh consulted a doctor about grief and hallucination, about grief and heartbreak. She was in Denver at the time, and found herself wandering around a pretty, green park that was, it turned out, a hospital grounds. There was a statue of St. Francis in the middle of a fountain ringed with flowers of stone, their crenellated petals sparkling with mineral glitter. She sat beside them at a bench beneath an alder and was soon joined by a physician eating his lunch out of a brown paper bag. He was old, soft around the middle, with iron gray hair and brown eyes. She imagined he had an old wife at home who had assembled this lunch, with sliced apples and a flat whole-wheat sandwich cut into four triangles, as if he were a child. They greeted each other, Dr. Saunders, his name tag said, and when he finished a triangle of his sandwich, Leigh asked if she might trouble him with a question.

“A medical question?”

“Of sorts.”

“Are you a patient here?”

“No.”

“Have family here?”

“I’m just waiting for someone.”

“I’ll try to answer it for you,” the doctor said.

She articulated the question as best she could.

“Ah,” he said, and smiled a little sadly at her. “Dying beside your one true love and passing into the eternal together. The stuff of legends.”

“Can’t a person die of grief?”

He smiled and shook his head. “I’ve never heard of any such diagnosis.”