Luck by Joan Barfoot Page B

skin—if she’d known, what then? She would have said many more words, and different ones, she would have touched and stroked him, kept him awake rollicking and remembering right through the night. Like Scheherazade, she could have fended off bad ends with stubbornly wakeful tales and vivid, entertaining delights. People forget to do that. She did—him, too, she supposes—and then it’s too late. Now, no more rages and laughter, no more words and embraces, no more Philip rearing over and around her, no more of his fleshy flesh, no more shuddering and groaning and sighs. He used to say, back when they were working to fix up this house, “Come on, take a break, let’s go play in the shower.” She used to say, “Want to go find a forest to fuck in?” And sometimes they would. Now—never again? Her head spins so hard she feels drunk and sick and has to open her eyes. Even if urgencies grow less urgent in time, even if for the most part they are allowed to drift off towards some vaguely imagined, energetically passionate night in the future, they’re not supposed to drift right over the horizon, off the edge of the earth.
    Philip’s body, perfectly alive and luxurious yesterday, is being mutilated today.
    Nora is absolutely sure of her instructions to Sophie: damned if those villagers, townspeople, should be able toobserve him in the perfect vulnerability of his death. Philip wouldn’t have minded—he might even have enjoyed the attention—but Nora minds, and that’s what counts now.
    That’s interesting: that it’s only what she wants that counts.
    Interesting, and unspeakably lonely.
    Here’s a large aspect of grief: something finished, but in unfinished form, as if they were on the phone and Philip abruptly and for no good reason hung up. Half the conversation of her life is suddenly gone. From now on there will be silence at the far end of each sentence. Nora’s regretful body thrusts hard beneath Beth’s sheet—now, now she would pitch herself at him. She is alarmed to hear herself whimper. There is no one but her to hear that sound either.
    Is it true he died in his sleep? Or did he waken in panic and pain, trying to flail but failing, desperate to be rescued, unable to waken her beside him, sleeping as she was, as she would have thought, like the dead? He would have been furious, and vastly injured, that in the moment he most needed her, Nora left him to die on his own in the dark.
    Or perhaps he just buggered off. Not so different from, say, her father whistling out of the house and into the more expansive world of, according to Nora’s mother, whiskey and the arms of stray women. Can death be a similar whim? It’s not impossible to see Philip, a man given to impulse, choosing on the spur of the moment just to amble into eternity. Maybe he looked at her sleeping soundly beside him, and shrugged, and took off. There was no particular evidence he might be inclined towards that, but her mother always said she foresaw nothing either.
    Whatever happened, sleep must be more perilous than Nora could have dreamed, containing far more dangers than even those terrible nightmares of Sophie’s that makeher cry out, waking everyone. Too bad that didn’t happen last night. Philip might have been saved. Instead, at some accidental point in the darkness, life turned right over. Fucking Philip, how could he?
    Shock, physically electric, shoots straight through Nora’s body, giving fierce, surging notice that every part of her, top to toe, is affected by this. Every part hurts. Were there signs, did he mention last night that he didn’t feel well, was not as sharp as he might be? No, she’d have heard him and asked questions. Beth would have got up from the Scrabble game and made him one of her teas.
    Maybe he felt perfectly fine and just fell into bed, fell asleep, then found himself tumbling much further. Maybe there was no flailing, no panic, no rage or injury. No intent either. Accident, happenstance