It was a couple of months later when her husband first spoke of dying. Maybe she should have been more forceful in her arguments, but she didn’t really feel much of anything beyond the near-constant pain and the too-rare, alcohol-induced numbness. He mentioned it occasionally at first. They went back to work, but his heart certainly wasn’t in that. He brought it up more and more often until she realized he was serious. He wanted her to go with him. She thought about that, too. Should she? She didn’t believe in an afterlife. She didn’t believe they’d be together after that last moment. It did mean a lot to her that he didn’t want to go alone. But she was a little hurt, if that was still possible, that he was determined to go anyway. And he was. He had decided. At last, for him, the only questions were how and whether she’d accompany him.
She never thought of him as a coward. She didn’t think of herself as brave. Those were labels that had nothing to do with the situation. She actually thought maybe he was braver, because she didn’t know what lay ahead after death. And she wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be something worse or something just as bad. Or maybe just nothing. She’d read in an obituary once about a couple who had taken their lives together some years before. But that made perfect sense. They were both old, failing, about to be no longer in control of themselves. That was the perfect time, and that’s what she would have done. But she just didn’t know about it right now. It was strange. It was not because she could imagine any sort of a future. She couldn’t. But there were still moments when she liked looking at the world. Especially the things in her son’s bedroom. She liked to look at his stuff and think about the joy he took in the world. He really had. He had been one of those children who was alive with the pleasure of everything around them. She spent a lot of time in his room, looking at and touching his things. Listening to the music he’d listened to. Not the children’s stuff. He’d loved the Beatles and Coldplay. At six years old, he’d fallen in love with Nirvana and the Gorillaz. He’d liked to listen to Pearl Jam during chemo. They seemed to give words to the feeling, he’d said. He had been such an interesting person. Maybe it was that it was like a slap in his face to turn away from the life he’d fought so hard to keep. She didn’t know. She never said that to her husband. Maybe it was sentimental foolishness, but as long as she lived, her boy would live a little too. Inside her. And not anymore at all, if she died. Or was she being silly? Maybe they were all really dead already. That’s how she felt sometimes. But not when she was in his room. She felt sad beyond all measure, beyond all words to describe. But she felt that he was still a little bit there. And she didn’t want to give up that little bit.
They didn’t discuss this question with anybody else. Neither of them had any other real friends. Not in their business. Or among their acquaintances from the neighborhood, from their son’s school. No one that they could trust. Just each other. That’s how it had been until their son had come along. Then just the three of them. And that was enough. Now there would be just her. If she didn’t go with her husband. And the cats, of course, who had always been hers. She couldn’t imagine leaving them behind. Well, then, she’d have to take them with her. And that got messy and complicated. It wasn’t really fair either, to them. And that’s how she ended up finding the prospect of suicide kind of ridiculous. At least for her. By every other standard, suicide made sense. She couldn’t really argue against it. She just knew that the cats would abide. And so would she. At least as long as they did. And then she’d see. It didn’t mean that she loved the cats more than her husband. But miserable as she was, devastated as she was, filled with howling, hot-and-cold-running pain as she was, she just wasn’t ready to go yet. And the one thing she didn’t ask him to do was to stay for her sake. He was beyond that. They loved each other still, but it was a broken love now. Because he was broken.
How do you make love to someone when you know they’ll be gone forever the next day? They didn’t sleep that night. And they didn’t kiss. Those things seemed so alien to them now. They hadn’t made love since their son’s death. They’d held each other for hours on end, but they hadn’t made love. They had no desire. Making love was life-affirming. They weren’t. In her mind, she thought about it that last night. There was part of her that wanted to spend the entire time naked and entwined with her husband, sweating and mindless. If they’d been two strangers, they might have managed it. But he could only look at her, as if to memorize her face, in case there was a chance he would forget, wherever he was going. There wasn’t anything to say. He didn’t reproach her for not joining him, and she didn’t reproach him for leaving her. They seemed to understand.
How do you spend the last few hours with someone when you know there will never be anything after that? They sat next to each other on the sofa, the sides of their bodies touching, their hands together, saying nothing. All the business side of things had been taken care of. It was a strange, empty feeling now. It was too soon to even know what they felt, well, she anyway, would have time later to feel all the things she couldn’t feel now. They didn’t sleep. They didn’t talk. Tears rolled down her cheeks sometimes. His hand occasionally trembled. They watched it grow dark around them and then watched it grow light. And once it had reached that point, there was no reason for her to turn to him and tell him that there was always tomorrow. He could wait one more day. She couldn’t go through that night again. And he’d made his decision. The date was arbitrary, but it had been set. In that last hour, as they sat side by side, he took her hand in his and stroked it gently, feeling the bones, softly rubbing the skin. This was the hand of the only woman he had ever truly trusted, the only woman he knew was always on his side. Even now, she wouldn’t betray him, even if she couldn’t go with him. She wouldn’t try to hold him back from what he needed to do. That was love. Wasn’t it?
She sat there next to him as he stroked her hand, tears pouring silently down her face. And then it did happen, one last time. He pulled her pants down as he dragged her onto the floor and pulled off his own, tore off his shirt, as she tore off her own. And he entered her, one last time. Not with passion, but with a kind of quiet fierceness. And she wrapped herself around him, and they rolled a little back and forth, first him on top, then her. And still they said nothing. Her tears were still flowing, and he still looked grim. And they closed their eyes and concentrated, feeling each other, inside and out. They came, not dramatically, but quietly, tenderly, and for the last time together. And that was the most difficult moment. How to detach from each other and what to say then. It was sunrise, and it was time for him to go. Again, a time arbitrarily set, but set. Agreed upon.
He pulled out, and she let him go. If she’d been imagining this, she would have thought that she would finally say something, protest, beg him not to leave her, but at the time, she felt none of those things because it was already over. There was no going back. Everything had changed when their boy died. Nothing could be the same. Nothing could be good again. The only wrong thing, they both knew, would have been to go on as if it could.
And she would remember him. And she would remember them. And she would remember what life was once like, for as long as she chose to live it.
They both got quietly dressed. And they walked through the empty house. He picked up his keys and opened the door from the house to the garage. And she followed him out. He got in the car and started it up, ordered the garage door to open, and drove forward toward the street, pausing then. And she stood watching, biting her upper lip, looking at him from behind. This was the last moment, when she could have run up to his door and put her hand on the glass of the window and told him not to go.
Or she could have run to the other side of the car, to the passenger side, and pounded on the door, made sure he stopped, and then she could have opened the door and jumped inside. And sat next to him. And smiled.
She could have been in that car.
But she didn’t do either. And for the longest time, she would not know why. If she’d been brave or a coward, felt the need to live the life her son had lost or merely to remain as a memorial to him. Or if it hadn’t been a choice at all, if she’d simply not been able to do anything but live, because something atavistic or animal in her couldn’t conceive of anything but going on as long as she possibly could, with or without a good reason to.
She stood there and watched him go. She was no longer crying. She stood there for some time after he disappeared down the road, the car gradually picking up speed and certainty. And then she went inside, sat on that same sofa, and waited for the phone to ring.
This was another house, not that one, where, on some level, she felt the man penetrating her yet again. But she was thinking of other things.
Souls.
He believed in souls. And the way to her soul, he thought, was through her vagina. Beep. Wrong answer. But there was no use trying to persuade him otherwise. He always could turn to pure pain. He knew she knew that, which was why she did everything he said.
She didn’t doubt that he had managed to shrivel many a soul with his approach, particularly the tack of making the victim the active party in the sex. That was extremely irritating. Kiss him. Blow him. Fuck him. She could appreciate the ingenuity even as she had responded the way he intended, with anger and dismay.
Souls.
She thought about souls sometimes, more years ago than now. Sometimes she let herself believe that they existed and that they went on. She liked to think that her husband and her son were together somewhere. Her husband would be driving a fire-engine red sports car with the top down, speeding down hilly, curvy roads, roads much like those out in the country where they had lived, with their son in the front passenger seat next to him. Was that illegal in Heaven? It certainly wasn’t done anymore here on Earth, though it had been in her day. Sometimes, after chemo, or when the boy was depressed from the endless battle, the two of them would slip out, in the day or even at night, and her husband would drive those roads, fast and well, making the boy cry out with pleasure at a sharp curve or a thrilling bump. Another woman might have been annoyed, worried, or even angry. She’d just wished she could go along too. But she recognized that this was a special thing between the two guys, something they could do to take the pain away temporarily. Because despite the ultimate goal of the battle they were fighting, boys don’t really believe in death. But they do believe in speed. And it makes them happy. It always worked. Right up until the end.
Oh, god. She just realized. Why her husband had chosen the method he had. He hadn’t needed her to be in the seat next to him. Their boy was. He always was.
Anyway, she liked to think that on some plane of non-existence, that’s what they were still doing. Together and free.
She liked to think of that, particularly now. And maybe, she told herself, after she died, they’d meet up and she’d finally be able to ride with them. That would be cool. To see their faces, as they glanced back at her, the wind whipping at all of them, the car lurching and bounding but under control in her husband’s competent, reliable hands. To see their faces, laughing and filled with joy. If only she were there now.
Because it was what she would have wanted, h
e never allowed her to pass out completely during that seemingly endless time when he had her down on the floor and was simply raping her repeatedly, brutally, and without letup. But she wasn’t exactly conscious then either. She was in a halfway place. A place not of dreams but of nightmares, sort of like that stage between going to bed and falling asleep. Images came into her head, unbidden. A gang of bad guys who needed to be stopped. She went after them; she was the law. But they wouldn’t give up. She and her partners had gotten them cuffed, but they were still dangerous. She knew they would never give up; they’d somehow get away, like all those brilliant, unstoppable serial killers in the movies. She would have to kill them. But could she? Now they were after her. No, not them, different bad guys, not sure who. But she had to run away. She was running and running down streets and through buildings. At least this time, nothing was slowing her down. Sometimes in her dreams she’d be trying to run but not able, for some reason, maybe just the thickness of the air, to move very fast at all. But she was moving now, running and running and running.
She never got the chance to do that with this man, to run away from him. It was all so claustrophobic, first a prisoner in her own bed, then within the confines of the house. Running is the basic act of self-preservation, the fundamental urge of all animals in danger. Her too. And she had never gotten the chance to do it. But she couldn’t, pinned down as she was, by the cuffs, by his cock. Pinned down. No way to run.
She tried to stay in this zone, because bad as it was, it was better than being fully awake for this part. But she found herself thinking, behind a scrim of suffering, about her choices, about her alternatives, about some other option.