She takes my hand and squeezes it. We go toward the checkout. There is some commotion up front, I can’t see what—a crowd milling around, someone talking hurriedly and sharply. I don’t pay attention, just push through toward the front, Emily’s hand in mine, tugging her along—she can be distracted ten times in ten seconds, and I want very much to get her home, to get into the hot tub with her, to talk about the little gods of kissing-her-belly, rinsing-her-hair, touching-her-face.
When I get to the checkout I see him, just a boy really, not even seventeen. He wears a mask like the Lone Ranger’s, but his is just cheap black plastic with a rubber band to hold it on, something picked up from the 99-cent bin at an after-Halloween sale. He has a gun, though, and it jerks all over as he aims it here and there, warning people away from the exits, threatening the cashier, who just stands perfectly still, as if her brains have been scooped out or drained off. Emily doesn’t see the boy, the robber-boy; she is looking off to the side at a display of kiwi and passion fruit, oblivious, she can sometimes be so oblivious. “Ooh,” she says, and pulls her hand away from me and starts toward the fruit, moving on a course tangential to the boy-thief, the gun-boy.
“Emily, no,” I say, and she turns toward me with her eyebrows raised, and in turning she bumps into a dump-bin full of suckers and packs of gum, her hip thumping the display hard and making a little candy avalanche. The boy with the gun jerks his arm up, startled by my voice or the movement or the sound of falling candy or perhaps just strung too tightly with the frustration of the motionless cashier who won’t goddammit put the money in the bag like he told her. I don’t know if the boy means to do it or if it happens by accident but the gun goes off with a crack and a stink (small god of lead, small god of expanding gases) and Emily goes down, goes over, tumbles into the candy display and it falls down with her. She hits the ground in a rain of neatly-wrapped sugar, the little bag of espresso beans falling from her hand, and she doesn’t move, and the front of her is all red.
The boy-thief, killer-boy, runs away. Someone screams. Someone says something very calmly about calling an ambulance.
I drop my basket. The bottle of peach nectar tumbles out. It hits near my feet and explodes. Small god of the sound of breaking glass. Small god of small wet fragments.
* * *
Two days after Emily’s funeral, with her parents finally gone and everything settled except for the pain in my head, I put a chair out on the back deck and sit looking at the birdhouse Emily made last year. A family of jays lived there for a while, but they’re gone now, nothing left inside but bits of straw and sticks and string. My chest seems sometimes as empty as that birdhouse, and other times I think I’ve been filled with something hot and foul and gooey, cough syrup heated on the stove, thickened with molasses or blood.
I have trouble with time and living. Clocks don’t make sense. I cry. I’m too hot, or too cold. The covers stultify me, and I can’t sleep on my bed (our bed), so I stay in the living room on the couch, with my eyes closed so that I can’t see anything, not the watercolors Emily hung on the redwood walls, not the flowers she cut the morning we went to the grocery store, now dying in the vase. Nothing but the inside of my eyes.
It’s better outside, with just the natural world pressing around me, rather than the substance of the life Emily and I made together. Emily used to call this house our haven, our safe place, and I thought it would be so always. I never expected it to become a bleak museum of grief.
I watch the sky for a while, the sun moving, and gradually realize that my throat is dry; I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since Emily’s parents left. I get up and go to the door, part of my mind wondering why I bother, why I waste time keeping body together when soul is sundered. But it’s easier just to go along, to move without thinking. I go into the house, into the kitchen, and the first thing I notice is the smell of divinity fudge cooking, that sweetness that is almost too cloying, a sweetness that Emily loved far more than I did. Then I see the woman standing at the stove and think for a bright leaping moment that it is my wife, my Emily, somehow returned to me—but this woman is too tall, and her dress is too black—raven’s-wing black, slice-of-night black—with no designs or silver threads. Emily would never wear anything so dark, and anyway, she is dead.
I move closer, wondering who this black-dressed, black-haired woman is, why she is in my kitchen, but I don’t really care—I am not ultimately very interested. Perhaps she is a friend of Emily’s. Perhaps she is a thief.
She turns toward me, and her face is pale, white as sugar. She holds a wooden spoon. A large pot stands on the stove, empty and gleaming, and yet she moves the spoon inside as if stirring something, and the smell of divinity fudge rises up. I am suddenly furious (and even that feels strange, because I have felt nothing at all for days now, except sometimes a dull ache with sharp edges). Who is this woman, to come into my home, to touch Emily’s things?
I snarl at her and she drops the spoon with a clatter, her mouth opening in surprise as if I’m the one who should not be here. I step forward, not knowing what will happen, whether I’ll grab her or hit her or just firmly take her arm. Before I can touch her I am blasted in the face with a wave of hot air, and that air carries smells—divinity fudge, vanilla cookies, incense, rainwater, cinnamon, Emily’s skin. Emily’s skin. A hundred other smells, too, all of them keying instantly to memories of my wife, all of them bringing up fragments of images and moments. Memories that a week ago would have been sweet now twist like corkscrews, jabbing like knives, reminding me of all I’ve lost. I go down on my knees, my eyes closed against that scented wind, my chest twisting and contracting as if there’s some horrible crab behind my ribcage, writhing. I put my forehead on the cold linoleum and sob.
The smell, the storm of smells, fades. I lift my head, blinking, looking for the pale woman in black.
She is gone. There is no pot on the stove, no spoon. The kitchen smells like dust and nothing else at all.
* * *
I check the doors and windows, somewhat surprised to find that they are locked. I don’t remember locking them, but perhaps Emily’s father did so before he left. He is a large and capable man, slow-moving and sad, like a great and ponderous planet in erratic orbit. He would have locked the doors and windows for me. But that means no woman could have gotten in, and that means my mind is coming loose, not just hiding under a stone but actually coming loose, imagining things, imagining even the scents of grief.
I sit on the couch again and lean my head back, my eyes closed. I feel smothered, as if a wet curtain has been draped over me, stifling my breath. It’s not enough that my wife dies in a grocery store on a springtime afternoon; I have to lose my mind, too. But why do I need my mind, with my mind’s closest best companion gone?
I hear something like the movement of a bird and open my eyes. There is something on my ceiling, above the rafters, something like a black cloth pinned up at the corners and center—a drape, a canopy. I look at it blankly, trying to understand it with my eyes. After a moment I realize it is not just cloth but a woman in a long black dress. The woman is suspended somehow in the center of the ceiling, looking down, and her impossibly long skirts are spread out all around her, covering the ceiling. I did not see the woman at first because her skin is nearly as black as her dress, and her eyes are dark too, and she is not smiling, so I cannot even see her teeth. This is of course not the same woman I saw in the kitchen, but for some reason my first thought is: They’re sisters. Which makes no sense, as the other was white, and this one is black.