As I stared out the window at the night, I thought at last of what Chelsea said to me before she passed on with a fluttering close of her eyes and an exhalation full of effort.
The thick black sky hovered over the snow, which was tinted blue by the moonlight. It was two months since her passing, and her last words carried more significance, an added weight. I cupped my chin in my hand and leaned slowly forward. It was strange because what she said was not at all cold or dark like the night. Her words did not prick or sting me like the blunt needles of the distant pines. They just came to me. I suppose I thought that the arrangements for her cremation and discussing different, random trinkets and memories with our kids and family would let the words fade away, because I wanted them to. Even now, though, I could not answer her question.
The night she died I sat beside her with a blank face, my tired eyes fixed on the comforting outline of her feet under the green quilt. I held her hand and listened to her breathing, which graduated into quieter and quieter inhalations and exhalations. I swallowed often. I kissed her hand at regular intervals. She was calm and ready, waiting for her life to leave her. Though I knew she was strong, I could not comprehend the slight smile on her face. It was the kind of expression you often see on the faces of athletes after they have lost a close match; it was the smile of comfortable resignation.
I touched the ring I gave her on our wedding day. It was gold. Scratches and streaks had accumulated from her years of working on the farm, hoeing the garden, spreading feed out for the chickens, preparing all the meals. We had worked hard and had made enough to retire, and then no more than a month later she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. Her bleeding had been frequent even though she was a ways past menopause, so we knew something was wrong. After she was diagnosed, I thought to myself how embarrassed I would have been if I’d been in her shoes. But Chelsea never got embarrassed. That was her strength.
My reflection in the window shimmered yellow and orange from the flames waving at me from the hearth. Wind stirred the snowdust on the banks outside and sparkling helices spiralled up and towards the sky, merging with the stars. When we had retired from the farm life and sold the acreage and moved to a home on the outskirts of town, I had vowed to surprise her with a trip to China. She had never been out of Canada and had never once complained about our life. She always went along with what I or someone else suggested, even if she was asked or insisted upon what she wanted.
“It’s fine,” she’d say, “whichever you go along with suits me fine.”
Family friends had recommended China to us, and with a fair mass of time and money on our hands, I saw the opportunity to do something grand for her. But before I could telephone my daughter and inquire as to how to go about organizing the trip, Chelsea began to bleed and became sick. Soon afterwards she was confined to bed, and in two months’ time she lost her pleasant, plump cheeks and tummy. It was as though a little person inside her was gradually pulling her skin tighter and tighter, stretching it across her bones like a cloth stretched across a table. Her hands became narrow and grey. Her leg muscles became staunch and unsettling. Her wedding ring jingled with looseness when she had the strength to knit. I felt that when I hugged her, even gently, I crushed her, or suffocated her. Her age left her at the bottom of doctors’ lists, and the cancer attacked her silently and viciously.
Two days before her passing she looked at me, her eyes clearer than I had seen them in weeks, and said, “It’s almost a joke, dearest.”
She lay on the bed, the quilt covering her up to her neck. The sun filled the room with its bright winter radiance. We were alone in the bedroom of our log house. I sat beside her on a hard wooden chair.
I swallowed. “The cancer?” I asked.
She shut her eyes and smiled. “Yes.” She opened them. Electric blue.
“I don’t understand how that’s a joke, Chelsea.”
She inhaled, and took breaths with every few words.
“Well…you know how they say that…women should check their breasts…every month for lumps?”
I leaned forward and pulled the corner of her pillowcase outwards, straightening it. “Yes, I know.”
She chuckled a bit. “Well, I was thinking…about how silly it…would be if I…lifted my skirt each month…and, sort of picked around, pushed it, felt…around for anything.”
She chuckled again, softly. I chortled and pulled my chair close and shook my head.
I said, “I never knew you to allow your mind into such places.”
She smiled. “It happens,” she said. “To everyone.”
I nodded slowly. “I suppose it does.”
“Mmm.”
She manoeuvred her hand out from under the quilt and let it roll open, palm up. I put my hand there and savoured the silence we shared.
I chuckled. “Hm?” she asked.
I raised my eyebrows, as I often did with touchy subjects. “Well, I think I heard somewhere that women sometimes use a little mirror to check the undersides of their breasts. So imagine if you…”
I angled the index finger and thumb of my free hand to make it appear as though I held a small mirror. I inched it towards my crotch, then stopped when she chuckled. She coughed, and then showed me her full-fledged grin. She had kept her teeth, unlike me, and though they were a soft butter-yellow, they were straight and intact. I squeezed her hand.
Death or any other searing circumstance could bring out even the most private thoughts and feelings, those held deep and shied away from eyes that may or may not pervert or pollute what you had to share. I did not understand many things, but I always thought I understood my wife. We had seen each other every day for more than twenty-eight years. The conversation about inspecting herself and the mirror was the first time she unveiled such a thought to me, carnal, inquisitive or otherwise. She never appeared to be curious about things. She had a way about her. She either knew how to fix what was wrong, or she let the problem heal itself. She did not pull something apart and inspect it bit by bit until the solution presented itself to her. I wondered if she knew of her cancer long before she told me, and was waiting for it to leave. Then I drove the question from my mind. It was no longer important. It was important that she went in peace and with love.
The second time she revealed such a deep thought to me was the last.
I was alone with her in the bedroom. It was night. She’d ordered the kids out and asked that the door be closed and that the kids not listen from the hall. They obeyed her. Their footsteps progressed from the hall down the stairs. I thought to myself that Chelsea would never walk down the stairs again. I swallowed.
There was a single lamp on in the room, standing on the bedside table. The log walls surrounding us glowed tan, reminding me of the hot summers during which we toiled and sweated. Her head rested on two big white pillows, her neck slightly craned to the right so she faced me. Hollow and dry, her face looked even darker. With the lamp the way it was, the light pointed at the ceiling, the shadow dusted and aged her features. I stood to remove the black lampshade, but she opened her eyes and caught me.
“No,” she said.
I stopped, clasping the shade’s woollen edge. “No?”
“No, thank you.” She shut her eyes and resumed her resigned smile. I opened my mouth, but said nothing. I sighed and sat back down, staring at her. I took her hand and slowly bent over and kissed it. I was almost afraid some of her weakened skin would melt off and remain on my lips, but of course it did not.
“I love you,” I told her.
“You too,” her lips said.
Though my blank expression did not change, I sniffled and wiped tears away. I lifted and propped my chair closer to the bed.
“I love you deeply.”
I kissed her hand again. A chill rushed through my shoulders and caused my head and neck to twitch. I swallowed again. My mouth was dry. I stared at nothing in particular for a few minutes before her chest rose with a great breath that seemed to fill the room with its effort. I straightened in my seat, though I kept her hand in mine.
She spoke in a crisp, loud voice, and asked: "What makes sense?"
I blinked and did not breathe. My shoulders slumped a bit. Her eyes were closed when she spoke, though her brows were raised and her head was tilted even further to the right: questioning, inquisitive, like a television scientist.
She forced her eyes to open, searched and found me in one flick of her pupils. Then, her lids quivered and drew to a close. The air rushed out of her, deflating her. The hand that I held suddenly felt weightless; it went limp and each of the fingers collapsed as they were deprived of the vitality of oxygen. I kept her hand in mine. A humming sound tensed inside me and rang all throughout me. I began to nod, as though to reassure myself the end had come. That must have been the reason, because I did not stop nodding and staring at her for ten minutes before my daughter knocked on the door. At that point—I never removed my eyes from her—I placed her hand by her side, and I stopped nodding. I shook my head and let my tears drop to the quilt. I touched her cheek, stroking it, and I kissed my own fingers and planted them on her forehead. Then I looked at my daughter, who shook the doorknob with her grip. She started to cry. The rest of the kids came in, wide-eyed and tight-lipped.
I slept in my chair that night. My last night with her.
I touched the window and let my fingers slowly drop down the glass, leaving streaks that soon evaporated. That was two months ago. Between arranging for her cremation, organizing her ceremony, sorting through her belonging and receiving certain words of comfort from family and friends, I had not been able to seriously consider her last sentence. I had been busy respecting her wishes. Now, I had to ponder her question.
What makes sense? Why did she ask? I had thought this when she said it, but had not pursued the matter. She’d never asked these types of questions before. I pushed the thought of delusion or dementia from my mind. She had been calm until the very end. She knew what she was asking.
Maybe she was thinking of her death and wondering why she was being taken. No, that wasn't it. She wouldn't have been calm then. She knew things like that happened, and she had accepted that it was happening to her.
I puzzled. As far as I knew, nothing that mattered—death, love, justice, and the like—made sense. Maybe she was trying to tell me something. Maybe she said it so that I would discover something that needed discovering. But I was old, older than she was, and not much healthier. What was left to find that would make a difference? That would touch me?
I groaned and sighed. I grew tired of peering out the window. I rose from my chair and lifted the black iron grater and put it over the fireplace. I carried myself and Chelsea’s question with me up the stairs, into the bathroom, and finally into the darkness of the bedroom.
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