Lions

~ ~ ~

Gordon woke at home in his room in early evening, sunlight leaping like copper-colored flames among the tree leaves outside. Smell of toast and coffee from the kitchen below. The clatter of cookware. He couldn’t have said what day it was, or how long he’d slept, but when he sat up straight his mind felt sharp. Outside the window, a shimmer of dandelion floss. The dry fields creaked. He could hear them.

Down the hall and stairwell, the wall clock, the framed wedding stills of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, even a very blurry, grim image of his great-great-grandparents in white ballooning clothes that looked as though they’d been fashioned from boat sails, and each of the smooth wooden steps, the flowers and stripes of the wallpaper — it was all looking out at him.

“Grief wakes you up,” his father had once said, talking of the loss of his own father. “You might not want it to, but it does.”

Now there was nowhere to hide. That Gordon had ever taken comfort from such things. From moonlight on the sidewalk. From wind in the trees. From familiar silverware, or clothbound covers of old books, or the faces and gestures of those he loved. The longer he looked at these things in the days to come, the more familiar and simultaneously puzzling they seemed. He put his hand to his head and went down the steps while all around him, the nail heads and floorboards announced that they were no longer simply what they appeared to be, though they were quite clearly nothing but nail heads and floorboards.

Downstairs, the front door was open. Outside the air was still hot from the day and smelled of the Sterlings’ small hog lot. Only late June and the clump grasses were already blond. Bindweed and vetch curled and spread themselves in a purple tangle over the ground. A warm wind bent the line of young alders John had planted, and sheets and thin, white tea towels billowed and leapt on Georgianna’s clothesline like long parallelograms of pale blue light.

Georgianna was sitting in John’s old chair with one small, heavy glass of whiskey beside her. His reading lamp cast a circle of yellow around her in the dim room, but her face was chalky. She was not reading but looking into the middle distance, like a woman under a spell.

John’s routine after work always went like this: washing his face and scrubbing his hands with Lava soap, then coming down for supper, and performing a little ceremony Gordon watched with great interest as a boy. In the cabinet just over the silverware drawer, where Georgianna kept measuring cups, an old red and black cardboard check box filled with rubber bands and paper clips, and an old, smooth, bent horseshoe, there were two heavy shot glasses, with one teardrop of air inside the bottom of each. Sometimes, Gordon would go into the kitchen and take them out of the cabinet and weigh them in his hand. Cool and heavy, like magnifying glasses. His father would fill them each up to the top with whiskey, and drink one standing there by the sink, all in one motion.

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.”

No doubt the old doctor believed he was making a helpful statement, but it sounded to Leigh like words from a man who’d never really loved anyone. Even an actuary — a mathematician — could tell you that a grieving person can be distraught, distracted, self-destructive; that there is, in fact, no place in the body where grief might not make its home.

“What about grief that makes you hear things?”

“Like voices?” He looked at her curiously.

“And see things.”

“Visual hallucinations, too?”

She looked out across the green. It was impossibly bright. “Where you imagine whole worlds,” she said.

He frowned. “Imagine, or see them?”

“Where it seems like,” she shrugged, “like you believe in unbelievable stuff.”

“It can be a lot of stress.” He looked up into the blinding blue sky above him. “I lost my wife, for instance.”

“I’m so sorry,” she told him, and she inadvertently glanced at his sliced apples.

“I live with my daughter,” he said. “Every morning, one lunch for my grandson, one for me.”

“That’s a nice thing.”

“That kind of stress can do a lot of harm,” he continued. He was looking at Leigh steadily now. “For a while, for a year even, you maybe really fall apart. I’ve seen that. That’s normal.”

“A year, even?”

“We all have our turn at loss, eventually. Then we understand the need to be patient.”

She stood. “Thank you. I’m so sorry about your wife.”

“Look,” he said. He half stood, as well, and caught his lunch in his lap and sat again. “It’s not my specialty. You should ask someone in the field. Would you like to talk to someone? Would you like a name?”

“I’m from out of town.”

“Well. OK. But do talk to someone in the field.”

She pictured the old ground behind their ruined houses, tiny, lace-winged insects glittering above the feathers of weeds.

In the Walkers’ kitchen Leigh set a cast-iron skillet of steaming eggs and a plate of buttered toast on the wood table by the window. She was afraid to look at Gordon. Afraid of what he’d seen. Afraid of what she might see in him, now.

Yes, everyone agreed, the boy changed that week. In town they remarked on it — his transformation, the striking resemblance to his father when Gordon lost a few pounds, when the sun had drawn lines around his eyes and across his forehead. Even after his first visit, his features seemed sharper. His gaze, sharper. He was sunburnt, and gave Leigh the impression of having visibly aged. He would not meet her eyes, which she took to mean he didn’t want to talk about any of it: where he was, what he’d seen, or what was now required of him. Suddenly she saw herself at the head of Georgianna’s table, in Georgianna’s apron, holding one of Georgianna’s wooden spoons.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. Gordon stared directly at her from across the room.

“You won’t stay and eat?” Georgianna asked.

“Can’t.” She raised a hand in farewell, or hello, and turned to the back door.

Georgianna went on setting the table for three.