They May Not Mean To, But They Do

27

Joy woke up and, as usual, Aaron was dead.

What was coming was clear to her, and it was a vast emptiness, a blank, much like the winter with its white horizon, dense and low, no distance to the sky at all. The emptiness was everywhere, in every room at every hour. She could feel it draining the life out of her until she, too, would be empty. In the shower, she cried because, there, no one could hear her, though she knew there was no one to hear her anywhere.

Molly had gotten her a medical-alert contraption that came with a wristband with a button on it. Sometimes she pushed the button by accident and a man’s voice from the machine asked her if she was all right. It was company.

Wanda stayed on, going home only on the weekends to tend to her alcoholic husband. She made breakfast for Joy. She practically fed it to her with a spoon. Wanda missed Aaron, too. Sometimes they cried together. Sometimes they cleaned drawers.

Walter appeared once to pick up a sweatshirt he’d left behind. He helped her change two burned-out lightbulbs in the kitchen ceiling fixture. He said he would come back and make Foo-foo for her one day. When he left, his absence was acute.

On the weekends, Elvira came at night. Joy would not stay alone. Alone was impossible, it made her shiver, it made her head swim, it made her heart pound, it made her knees buckle, it made her ears ring.

Her children lived in some other world, one that she could see but had left behind, like the wake of a ship. Their lives foamed and splashed while she hurtled forward, away from them, but toward nothing. Well, toward something, and they all knew what that something was.

There wasn’t enough money for Elvira or Wanda. She was spending like a drunken sailor, an old decrepit drunken sailor. The children offered to help pay, which was kind but humiliating. And she knew they couldn’t afford it. An archaeologist and an environmentalist? They were hanging on by a bourgeois thread. She understood she would have to stay alone eventually. She listened to the wind rattle the windows and knew she was abandoned. She told Molly and Daniel she would not be on the dole.