Archive of Our Own ^beta

The apartment Patty Blum Uris grew up in was on the 14th floor of a building on the Upper West Side, overlooking the Hudson on Riverside, with pale green walls and overstuffed leather furniture. Her parents, professors both, had lined the walls with bookshelves and framed antique bookplates, tasteful vases cradling market flowers on Mondays and Thursdays. It was cozy and familiar. It was unremarkable. It was hers.

Patty’s room faced the water. It was just big enough for a full bed and her dresser, and in later years, a beanbag stuffed between the bed and a bookshelf of her own. Her mother offered to redecorate, but Patty shrugged her off -- she liked it as it was, draped in fairy lights and postcards from her friends away at camp and on vacation abroad, piles of books on the floor slumping into the furniture, the yellow walls scuffed from where she’d kick her jellies and chucks against the wall. By the time she left for college, her artwork had joined the band posters on the wall and a tiny flock of delicate ceramic birds hung suspended from the ceiling over her bed.

It hadn’t changed at all the summer she brought Stanley home to visit for the first time. He slept on the couch in the living room in deference to her parents -- what did they think was happening when they were on their own at school? she’d wondered, but the look in her father’s eye had brooked no argument. Patty found him in the kitchen in the mornings, politely drinking coffee and making conversation with her mother. She stood in the doorway wrapped in her ratty pink terry cloth robe and looked at his mussed hair, his bleary eyes, as he sat at the table in the kitchen she grew up in, and thought, not for the first time: this one.

One afternoon, her parents had both left the apartment to run errands and visit friends, leaving Patty and Stanley to ostensibly pay a visit to the Met. They’d ended up curled around each other in her bed, Stanley’s hand tangled in her hair, sharing breath as a summer storm rolled through the mid-Atlantic, Firecracker playing on the stereo.

“Patty,” Stanley had murmured against her lips, hips hitching into hers. “I--”

“Shh,” she’d said, and kissed him harder. Even though it was just the two of them in the apartment. Even though it might as well have been only the two of them for miles. “I’ve got you, baby, go ahead. It’s okay.”

Stan’s breath was hot against her skin, his hands hot against her back, sweat springing up on between them everywhere they touched. Patty wanted him closer, wanted to smell like him, spicy and dark, wanted to taste the moan caught in his throat.

The afternoon narrowed to encompass his hot human body, pulsing and alive beside hers as he cried out, thrusting deeper. His hands clutching at her, fierce and insistent. The beat of his pulse against her lips when she kissed his neck, his cheek, waiting for his breathing to slow. Waiting for him to come back to her. Finally, his shuddering breaths turned to laughter, and he opened his eyes.

“Hi, babylove,” Stanley had said, smiling at her, and twined their fingers together, guiding their hands up to press a kiss to the inside of her wrist, lingering there, tender and sweet.

++

In the past twenty-four hours, Patricia Blum Uris has learned a number of things that she has never wanted to know:

When you call 9-1-1, the dispatcher will ask you to do CPR. When you call 9-1-1 and the firefighters arrive, and then the ambulance, minutes later, the police trailing after, and the person for whom you have called 9-1-1, who is your husband, who is, is-- mortally wounded, upstairs in your home... When that happens, and the firefighters and the paramedics and the beat cops walk up and down the stairs and tell you what you knew the moment you opened the bathroom door, the firefighters will leave first. Then the paramedics. The officer will remain in the hall, where he must stand sentry until the coroner arrives.

After the coroner leaves with the body that was your husband, your stairs and the hallway between them and the front door and the hallway upstairs between them and the bathroom all will be covered in muddy boot prints.

You will not clean them up. The coroner will give you a list of funeral homes. The police officer will take a report and leave a list of companies that clean crime scenes and accidents, neither of which this is. It is your home.

“They’ll make it like it never happened,” he will promise awkwardly. He's only slightly taller than you, barrel-chested, only a few years older than you, even though his hair has gone completely silver. He’s wrong, too -- nothing can erase this dark stain of a day, and all the dark shrouded days that will come after.

After he leaves, you will stare at the ceiling and at the wall. You will look at the puzzle on the coffee table, unfinished. Your phone will chime to let you know that the reservation for your hotel in Buenos Aires, an airy room with a king bed and a view, has been confirmed. You will think of all the people who must be called, the paperwork that must be filed, the arrangements that must be made. You won’t know if you have enough scarves to drape all the mirrors.

Stanley always knew exactly what to do.

But Patty knows exactly what to do now, too: she goes and sits on the back porch and listens for the trilling coo of the screech owls roosting in the copse of ashes that stretches beyond the property line. The night is warm and dark as a womb, the air silken on her skin. She closes her stinging eyes and waits for the dawn.

++

Patty doesn’t sleep, even though she’s exhausted. She heads back indoors at dewfall, just after the coming sun begins to lighten the overcast night into a hazy gray. Her tailbone hurts from sitting out on the deck for so long, and her shoulders are tired of hunching. She stretches as she stands, reaching up to grasp at the sky, and lets her arms fall to hang at her sides, heavy and sore.

There are people she needs to call. Arrangements she needs to make. Stan’s work. The neighbors. A funeral. Their parents. A headstone.

The cleaners will be here soon.

She makes coffee instead and stares out the window, watching the sun rise on a world with a hole ripped through the heart of it.

Stanley isn’t much of a morning person. He forced himself into it when he had to, and Patty helped: clothes laid out beside the bed, coffeemaker standing by with water and grounds, travel mug at the ready. On their tenth anniversary they’d gone to Puerto Rico. Patty had grand plans to relax and read the backlog of books she hadn’t been able to stop herself from buying, to drink rum, to fuck her husband every morning and every night in a beautiful, light-filled room with the windows open wide to the sounds of the street below.

Stanley had booked a birding expedition in the middle of the jungle at the crack of dawn. They’d gone to bed early, laid their clothes out the night before, set the alarm. Still, Patty had ended up dragging Stanley out of bed and hurrying him out the door, staggering and bleary-eyed. He’d fallen asleep with his head on her shoulder on the ride out. She didn’t move a muscle -- just watched his steady breath and the slow approach of sunrise in turn.

The coffee pot sputters and Patty realizes she’s crying, calmly and silently, remembering the way Stan’s eyelashes brushed his cheeks as he slept, his small snores damp against her neck, his body slumped against hers, the warmth and weight of him. Her arm had been half asleep and tingling with nerves by the time they’d reached the preserve.

There are people she needs to call. She takes down two mugs when she goes to pour the coffee. She has to put one back.

After the Rabbi Uris passed (a major cardiac event, they’d called it, at 72, and they’d all lamented how young he’d been) Stan’s mother sold the tidy colonial he’d grown up in and fled Derry for a villa in the same gated community her sister had retired to in Sarasota. Patty remembers reading the real estate listing over Stan’s shoulder.

“Tuscan inspired,” Stan muttered, clicking through slide after slide of inscrutably proportioned open plan living spaces and tiled floors, every surface a different shade of warm beigey-brown. “Golf course views. Who the fuck designed this place?”

“At least she decided not to move in with us,” Patty sighed. Her mother still made pointed comments about the house with a third bedroom they’d decided not to make an offer on, despite the fact that she had declined to move to Atlanta and was cozily and happily installed in the in-law unit at Patty’s brother’s in Connecticut.

“Lucky for us.” Stanley grinned, turning to hook an arm around Patty’s waist and tow her into his lap, slipping a hand up her blouse to cup her breast, brush a thumb over her nipple. “We couldn’t do this if she lived here.”

“Why Stanley, you’re hardly doing anything at all,” Patty had said, and he’d gone on to prove her wrong.

It’s only just past 6:00 a.m. Patty doesn’t want to wake Andrea, but she knows she can’t put it off much longer. She should have called last night. She shivers, despite the heat. It’s been seven hours, and Stan’s mother still doesn’t know.

She dials and watches steam rise from her coffee mug as the phone rings. A part of her hopes no one picks up, that somehow she can abdicate this horrible responsibility. She’ll hang up and head upstairs, and there, silhouetted in their bedsheets, or humming and brushing his teeth in the ensuite--

“Hello? Stanley?”

“Andrea,” Patty says. “It’s me.”

“Patty? It’s awfully early to be calling,” Andrea says. It doesn’t sound as if Patty’s woken her -- she can hear china tinkling in the background, the remnants of breakfast, maybe, or Andrea’s morning cup of tea.

“I need to tell you-- are you sitting down?” She clears her throat, staring at the wall next to the stairs. Stan’s best man -- Andrew, his college roommate all four years -- had their wedding invitation framed for a first anniversary present. It hangs there, thick cream cardstock and looping green letterpress. Their ketubah hangs in their bedroom, above the headboard -- the same paper, the same ink.

“...Yes.” Andrea’s long exhale fuzzes the receiver into static. “Patricia. What’s happened?”

She wants to lie. She wants to hang up and drop the phone down the garbage disposal. If no one else knows -- if she’s the only one -- then maybe it’s not real. Maybe she imagined it. Maybe there’s still something she can undo, to prevent the loss, to stop her life from rending in two, a Before and an After.

Then, she sees it again: the filthy tread of bootprints, still on the stairs.

“It’s Stanley,” she says, and starts to cry.

++

Phone calls and arrangements consume the remainder of the morning. After Andrea -- her single ragged gasp and cry, followed by asking, through tears, if she’s called the Rabbi -- it’s Patty’s own mother. She, too, cries and starts packing on the phone with Patty as she books the 2:00 p.m. flight from Palm Beach.

The cleaners show up at nine in a canary yellow van marked Blake’s Biohazard/Crime Scene Xtreme Clean in swooping hand-painted letters, complete with sparkling asterisks. As she lets them in, she looks up and down the block -- if the neighbors hadn’t known before, well, they certainly do now. Patty takes lunch with Rabbi Pimsler on the back porch, rather than bear witness to their work, and by the time she leaves, the boot prints are gone, and the bathroom has been, in the parlance of the unfailingly kind Lindsay, “restored.”

Sara and Chris from down the road swing by to drop off a zucchini loaf and offer their condolences, a comfort and an annoyance both. The news, it seems, has spread. Patty is appropriately gracious, then chucks the dish in the refrigerator and manages a shower -- in the ensuite bath -- and a change of clothes, plucked from the dryer, before the mothers arrive.

She owns a lot of black, she realizes, sorting through the tangle. Maybe too much. She and Stanley do laundry separately, for the purposes of marital harmony, and this load is entirely hers. She pulls a pair of wrinkled linen pants free from the pile, and slips into a flowing top, black and gauzy silk, that Stanley gave her for her birthday one year. It should be comfortable enough, on a hot day with no breeze to speak of, and an unending march of company cycling through the house.

It’s nearly eight by the time the phone stops ringing and visitors stop arriving and the arrangements have been made -- such an innocuous phrase, like a bouquet of flowers, or the construction of a nest -- including settling Andrea and Mom into their customary lodgings: the guest room and the Doubletree Inn ten minutes away, respectively.

“I can stay here,” her mother offers, purse over one arm and one stockinged foot tucked back into the toes of her Ferragamo mules.

“It’s okay, mom,” Patty says. “Andrea’s in the guest room, and the mattress on the bed--”

Her mother nods, one hand braced on the wallpaper as she rocks her heel into the shoe. “I can manage, Patricia, if it would be a comfort to you. It’s just, my back--” she gestures vaguely over her shoulder.

“Right. Really, it’s fine. I’ve -- I’ve been snoring lately, tossing and turning, you know. You wouldn’t sleep a wink,” Patty says, nodding. She wishes they didn’t have to do this; neither one of them wants her mother to stay here.

“Sweetheart,” Her mother steps toward her, heels clicking on the wood floor of the foyer. The mess on the floor is gone: there’s just her mother, in an inky silk sweater set and bouclé skirt. She places her palms on each of Patty’s cheeks and tilts her head down so she can look her mother directly in the eye. Her hair is frizzing slightly in the humidity, despite the climate control in the house. Patty holds her breath, bracing herself. “My baby. I’m so sorry this is happening to you. It may not seem that way now, but his memory will become a blessing. And when you marry again, you will understand this test from the Lord. In his great plan, this could be the end of the desert for you, and you may find yourself in a paradise full of milk, honey, and abundance.”

Patty knows her expression would look absolutely unhinged to anyone paying attention. Fortunately, her mother never is. Instead, she’s escaping onto the porch and to the safety of her rental sedan. “Good night, mom. Drive safe.”

“I love you, honey.” She opens the passenger door and sets her quilted Chanel on the seat. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“You, too, mom.” Patty watches her drive away. She closes the door and slides down to sit against it, the fight gone out of her.

Can you believe her? She wants to ask, but there’s no one there to answer.

She imagines Stanley in the doorway, shaking his head. Remember when she started asking about the viscosity of your cervical mucus during the Seder last year? In the absence of younger relatives, they’d had to rely on Patty’s youngest cousin, now 23, to ask the Ma Nishtanah. Her mother had already been in fine form thanks to the bustle of the holiday preparations, and ended up turning her attention toward Patty’s uncooperative womb.

How could I forget? Patty imagines Stan rolling his eyes and huffing out an exasperated sigh.

Well, he would have said, offering her a hand and smiling the smile he saved just for her. We’ll just have to keep practicing until it takes, pulling her up from the floor and into his arms, drawing her away.

But he’s not here to share this moment, or any of the countless inconsequential stories of the day -- the unfortunately alliterative names of the Rosens’ newly rescued puppies, the cleaners’ yellow van, the return of the orange-crowned warbler’s migratory chirp, overheard as she sat on the steps drinking her coffee that morning. It’s only Patty, sitting alone on the freshly cleaned floor, until she hears Andrea coming down the stairs and she rises, dusting herself off and straightening her clothes, to greet her.

Andrea goes to bed soon after they eat, eyes puffy in her slack face. Patty declines her offer of company. She brushes her teeth not long after and lies awake in bed, trying to corral her mind, keep it right here in bed with her. The house is quiet, and if she doesn’t let herself wander too far, she can pretend it’s any day. Not the day after yesterday, not the day before tomorrow, but some other day, where she can expect to hear Stanley’s footsteps on the stair as he comes to bed, up late reading a novel -- lately, he’s been deeply invested in pulpy mass market horror, and she can’t pretend to understand it -- or finishing a puzzle. If she could only stay in this moment, somehow extract herself from the current of the day and the cruelly passing hours, so that she is always moments away from Stanley opening the door and smiling at her, surprised and saying, still awake, babylove?

++

She can’t fall asleep until suddenly she is, and finds herself dreaming: a broad shallow river, a verdant expanse of forest. Children she’s never seen before, riding a fleet of dented bicycles alongside her, charging down a pitted residential road. A sunny pond, turtles swimming in it, traversing a bed of smooth, rounded stones, that transforms into a creek, then joins the rapids, surrounded by tall reeds, mountains beyond.

There’s a boy with glasses who darts and weaves around her, chased by another with a cast on his arm, red-faced and screaming. She doesn’t know them but everything here feels familiar. Patty’s sure she’s never seen this angle of sunshine before, but there’s something about the way it catches the surface of the water, the way the mild breeze tangles in the weeds.

“Stan the man!” It’s the kid with glasses yelling from across the water. “C’mon, you’re going to miss it!”

“I’m coming!” A boy appears at her elbow -- lanky, taller than the other boys, curls spilling over his forehead. She’s seen pictures of him, of course, but not many at this age: at the strange cusp of childhood and what comes after. He darts past her, surefooted on the flat, smooth boulders that traverse the water.

“It’s gonna blow,” the little one screams up ahead. “I know it is! I know it!”

“C-c-c-c-- fucking shut up,” shouts a fourth voice. “It’s going to be fine. Mike and Bev are only a few minutes behind us.”

“Stanley,” Patty calls. He’s at the far edge of the water, moments from disappearing into the weeds, but he stops and looks back at her, expressionless. “Where are you going?”

He opens his mouth to answer, but she can’t hear him -- the water’s suddenly too loud, a trickle rising to a rush around her ankles, and as she turns and looks upstream, a dull roar -- a cascading glut of water, roiling with muck and debris, barreling toward them and washing them both away.

The next morning, Patty wakes to the sun and the sighing coo of the mourning doves nesting outside the bedroom window. She thinks to tell Stan about her dream. And then she remembers.

++

The dream sits with her through the brief and familiar funeral: the black ribbons, El Malei Rachamim, the psalms and the blessings. The Rabbi gives the eulogy; they recite the Kaddish. And then Patty is offered the shovel. Her focus narrows. A metal spade, clean and unassuming -- she hates it. She thinks of weekends spent side by side in the garden, of her husband’s dark, thick hair that she will never touch again, and bends forward, shoving her hands deep into the loam. She pours earth from her cupped palms onto the coffin, a final, reluctant offering.

Her mother, always true to form, opts for the shovel. Patty stares at the dirt under her fingernails on the drive back to the house until, halfway there, Andrea reaches out to clasp her hand, and then they’re both crying, quietly, painfully, in the back of the car. Then they arrive, and Patty must get out of the car, and wash her hands, and go into the house to light the candle and wait.

++

Even though she would be flying back to Florida three days after the funeral, Andrea insisted on seven days of shiva in a tone that brooked no argument, was simply a statement of fact. Patty wasn’t in any shape to push back, only to prepare herself and the fridge for a parade of deli trays and casserole dishes. Now, with platters of food sprouting on every flat surface and the tidal ebb and flow of the crowd, she’s grateful for the ritual. There’s comfort in the familiarity, enough to cut through the murky, uncharted depths of grief in which she finds herself.

Still, after the fifth offer to make her a plate, Patty excuses herself for a brief respite from constant flow of voices. She finds herself looking around the room for Stan -- to exchange a glance, to share in her misery -- and being struck, again and again, by his absence.

It’s the same in their room, after she washes her hands and sits on their bed, closing her eyes against the murmuring voices beyond the door. When she opens them again, his things are still on the nightstand, untouched: folded glasses, a half-read book, an empty mug, a small dish of pocket change, headphones, his ring.

It’s a plain gold band, just like hers. When they’d gotten married straight out of school, it was all they’d been able to afford. They hadn’t wanted for anything more than the promise of each other, in partnership, in love. Patty remembers the daisies: looped through her engagement ring when Stanley had proposed and filling the bouquet in her hand at the ceremony, and her vision blurs.

She’s crying when she reaches for the ring, to slip it on her own finger, and maybe that’s why it happens: Stan’s book tumbles to the ground, immediately followed by Stan’s phone. The screen lights up, a stack of email notifications and NYT headlines overlaid on her smiling face, a favorite picture from their last trip to the Keys, and one more:

(207) 159-4557

4 MISSED CALLS

Patty freezes, remembering: the vacation, the puzzle. The low buzz of a vibrating phone in the background, and Stanley disappearing up the stairs.

She picks up the phone. Holds it in her hand, feeling out the weight of it: just like hers, almost -- it’s missing a shadow on the corner of the screen where she’d dropped hers, a fingernail-shaped scratch on the edge where her keys had raked the glass. Stan always took meticulous care of his things in a way that felt impossible for her to achieve.

She slips the phone in her pocket and heads back down the stairs, and she can feel it bounce against her hip the whole way down.

++

It takes her five tries over the course of two days to get a hold of Mike Hanlon. The first two calls go unanswered, and the third, directly to voicemail. The fourth tells her the number’s been disconnected.

Mike picks up on the fifth. “Hello?”

“Hello. Is this Mike Hanlon?”

“Speaking,” he says. She can hear cars in the background, the low hum of a busy street, the strange punctuation of a honking horn breaking through the call. Mike still sounds confused, though affable. Polite. “Who is this?”

“Patty.” He doesn’t respond and she pushes her finger against the tiled edge of the kitchen counter. “Patricia Uris. Stanley’s wife.”

“Patty,” Mike says, carefully, weary. “Yes. How are you?”

Patty ignores the question. “I’m sorry to have called you so many times. I’ve been trying to reach you to let you know that Stanley’s funeral took place yesterday.”

“Oh,” he says quietly. She can hear him breathing over the line. “I see.”

“I’d wanted to extend an invitation to you,” she says. She still isn’t sure why she’s doing this, but it seems important -- the number in the phone bill, three times. The boy in her dreams who shares his name. The way Stan never spoke of his childhood, except in the vaguest abstraction, how he never remembered the stories behind the photos in his parents’ albums. “And anyone else who might want to attend. Who might be grieving.”

“Thank you,” Mike clears his throat. “I know this must be a very difficult time.”

“Do you?” Patty doesn’t know why she says it. Maybe because she’s heard it from so many people already, maybe because she doesn’t know Mike Hanlon from Adam. Maybe because he was, as far as she knows, the last person to have a conversation with her dead husband.

“I do.”

The line goes quiet. For a long moment, Patty almost feels ashamed. She doesn’t know Michael Hanlon from Adam, but here she is, calling him up uninvited. What if he was in the middle of doing something important -- cooking, or driving, or reading a book. And here she is, interrupting him, and for what? She’d never heard his name before in her life, not until that night. How important could he be, if Stanley never mentioned him, not once in the past twenty years? “I’m sorry, I--”

“Patty,” Mike interrupts. “If there’s anything I can do--”

“How did you know him? Who was Stanley, to you?”

“We were friends -- close friends -- when we were kids in Maine.” Mike sounds surprised, and perhaps a little taken aback.

“What was he like?” Patty bites her lip, resentful of the desperation plain in her voice. She’s listened to fragments of stories about her husband all day long, eaten them up like crumbs left behind on a platter, but she wants more: she wants Stanley beside her, hunger that will never be sated; absent that, she wants whole slices of her husband’s childhood, the parts of him denied to her. “Tell me about him. Please?”

“I… Of course, Patty.” Mike says. The background noise is muffled now. “I can do that.”

++

The phone call with Mike Hanlon ends, predictably, in tears. He’s in the middle of telling Patty a story about Stanley teaching himself to count cards, luring two of his friends into a game of poker with increasingly tempting stakes, until the inevitable.

“So Stan flips the last card over,” Mike says, “And of course, it’s the two of spades. Richie throws his cards in the air, just gives up and lays down on the floor -- that’s his allowance for the entire summer, plus all of his X-Men comics, plus his lunch dessert for the month of September. All of his worldly possessions at age 12, essentially. And, Eddie, man, Eddie -- he just loses it. He’s yelling about calling the state gambling control board and the police department, that card counting is illegal, and Stan’s just sitting there. He’s cool as a cucumber, shuffling the deck and watching Eddie, until he stops screaming long enough to take a breath. And this kid says -- Stan the Man, we called him and this was exactly why -- he looks Eddie right in the eye and says, deadly serious: ‘Call the cops. I don’t give a fuck.’”

“Oh shit,” Patty says, laughing so hard she’s crying, and then she’s crying -- because that’s her Stanley, that’s him exactly: preserved in Mike Hanlon’s memory at 12 years old, alive in a story she’s never heard before, but so undeniably him. “Oh, shit.”

“I know, Patty,” Mike says hoarsely, and she realizes he’s crying, too. “I miss him, too.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I just--” and she’s back to laughing again, snorting and crying, snot everywhere. Fuck. This poor stranger on the end of the line must think she’s absolutely out of her mind, off her rocker, a complete weirdo.

“You don’t need to be sorry,” Mike says. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through, but -- I understand. I miss him too.”

The thing is, Mike doesn’t feel like a stranger. She can imagine the two of them riding their bikes down the streets of small-town Maine, playing sandlot ball, running after their friends through the woods with perfect clarity. He feels familiar, like a long-lost relative, and she loves him immediately for how much he loved Stanley despite thirty years’ distance, almost as if no time had passed for him at all.

“I missed him for a long time,” Mike’s saying. “But I couldn’t just -- pick up the phone. Sometimes things get in the way and sometimes, you think it’s better to leave things well enough alone. And now...”

He falls silent. The connection crackles with static. Patty remembers it again: the ringing phone. Stanley’s puzzle left unfinished as he wandered upstairs to take a bath.

“Can I ask you something?” Patty doesn’t wait for a response. “What did you say to him that night?”

Mike clears his throat. When he finally speaks, he starts slowly, like he’s walking through the memory. “Not much. I reminded him of something he said to me when we were kids that stuck with me over the years and asked him to come visit. He said he would.”

Patty starts to cry again, quietly this time. “I’m sorry, Mike.”

“No, Patty, I’m sorry.” Mike sounds upset. “Please don’t apologize--”

“Are you busy this week?”

“I’m… not,” Mike says carefully. “I’ve been packing, but other than that, no.”

“I’m sitting shiva this week. For Stan,” Patty wipes the tears from her cheeks with her sleeve. She has to clear her throat to talk. She’s so fucking tired of crying. “Do you think-- can you come?”

++

The days pass in a blur of visitors and casserole dishes, punctuated by kaddishim and sunsets. The fourth morning, she doesn’t get out of bed -- her limbs are too heavy, her head dragged back into the dark veil of sleep, mercifully dreamless, and awakes at dinner time to assemble a sandwich from the deli tray, consume fruit salad and poppyseed babka, and return to bed for a normal night’s rest.

The constant company is a comfort and a curse -- the weight of Stanley’s death looms over them all, a shadow in the room. For every compassionate heart, there are a half-dozen visitors - coworkers, neighbors, her least favorite members of the congregation - who treat her like an object of curiosity, the subject of whispers and stares, pitiable, terrifying.

There’s a part of her that doesn’t blame them. She feels it, too -- the violent rupture between one phase of life and the next, unexpected and like nothing she’d ever imagined. She’d be lying if she said other dangers had never crossed her mind: a car crash, a heart attack, all manner of other, more sudden deaths were legible to her. Life ends, Patty knows, and in its brevity reminds us of its blessing, but she still can’t make sense of Stan, her Stanley, ending his own. Every morning, she wakes and remembers. It seems impossible, a nightmare, a misunderstanding. But every morning, Stan’s still dead.

Her mother and Andrea head back to their respective homes after the first three days have passed. Her mother is widowed, and her mother-in-law, but perhaps they don’t remember what it’s like. Or maybe it was different for them. Patty’s mother once confided in her that she hadn’t been particularly excited to marry her father, so much as she had been excited to move out of her parents’ house, to start her own family, claim a new name. But she and Stanley… Patty sometimes thinks back to when they were first dating, how much time they’d spent together: a Friday night date, breakfast at noon on Saturday, if they even managed to leave the bed, and Saturday afternoons spent with friends or watching movies or out: at a museum, to a park, any place neither one of them had been, somewhere new to discover together. Sundays were for more late mornings in bed, laundry, and studying, their feet tangled under the table in the library.

It never went away; Stanley was her favorite person and she his. The best part of marrying him was getting to do life with him: taking turns waking up early and making each other coffee, entertaining each other with an endless deadpan string of bird-related puns while they went through the car wash until one of them faltered or laughed, cleaning up the mess of a leaking basement pipe side by side, miserable and frustrated and tired, but glad she wasn’t doing it alone. She and Stanley had spent their youth on each other and were luxuriating in their middle age as a couple, and had planned on growing old together, too. Ten years ago, when they’d gotten serious about trying to have a baby and distracted themselves from a series of devastating and expensive failures by focusing on estate planning, with the idea that soon, they would have someone to plan for, they’d selected adjacent plots in the cemetery. It had felt romantic at the time -- she’d looked at him over her capirinhia at the restaurant that night and thought, you and me, forever, and it had felt right.

That was when she’d thought that forever was at least forty years ahead of them. Fifty, if she was lucky. She knows better now.

A family of two, Stan had whispered to her after the last miscarriage. You and me, babylove. And who would be her family now?

++

The morning after she sleeps all day, Patty rises early. The rest of the house is quiet as she showers and dresses to morning birdsong, padding downstairs to fix coffee and pick at a thick slab of leftover carrot cake.

She’s excavating raisins when the doorbell rings, earlier than she would expect anyone to arrive, but Amy from two blocks down tends to play fast and loose with the boundaries of neighborly interaction. Securing the tie on her robe, Patty goes to answer the door, bracing herself for another poorly-baked bundt cake, or an unnecessary inquiry into her lawn care provider.

“Hello?” It’s not Amy. There are strangers standing on her doorstep, the five of them, with the same shell-shocked expressions, walking open wounds. Four men and a woman, all looking like they’ve been to the edge of hell and back, and she has no clue who they might be.

“Patricia,” the tallest man says, stepping forward. She recognizes his voice immediately. “I wish we were meeting under better circumstances. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

She allows him to envelope her in a hug -- one of the best she’s had in her life, reassuring and sympathetic -- and studies him as she pulls away. He’s dressed in a fine dark gray sweater, with warm brown skin and warm, kind, brown eyes, the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners.

“Oh, Mike. Thank you,” she says, and lets her hand rest on his shoulder. He’s broad and comforting, though no less haggard than the rest of them. She wants to laugh about it -- the whole awful situation, the fact that Stan’s gone, and the six of them are crowded around her front door because of it, looking like shit on the bottom of a shoe. “And I see you brought company.”

They sit with her. Pale and redheaded Bev has procured a puzzling combination of assorted pink-box donuts, a full spread of bagels with the works on the side in little take-out containers, and several strips of scratchers. Patty’s grateful and has one of each pastry, famished after her hibernation, fastidiously assembled at her direction after scruffy architect Ben warmly offers to fix her a plate. He tucks a holographic bright pink GEORGIA JACKPOT card in with her napkin. Patty wins $250.

“I’ve never won before. I guess you’re good luck,” she says, and takes another bite of glazed old-fashioned.

It’s a joke. They look just as hollow as she feels: bags under their eyes, smiles fragile and tremulous, shoulders weighed down with exhaustion and grief. She’s never met them before, but she recognizes it in them immediately: the sharp knife’s edge of costly survival, of outliving. The storm that can’t be weathered.

And yet, they’re here, in her living room, morning light pouring through the windows, a pink donut with rainbow sprinkles set on a plate on the coffee table.

This is as comfortable as Patty’s ever been around strangers: telling stories about the time Stan decided to rearrange his extensive non-fiction collection from Dewey Decimal to Library of Congress; the time she got seasick on a birding boat trip and Stan missed the entire thing because he insisted on holding her hair back the whole time, despite his lifelong status as a sympathetic puker; the way he couldn’t stand cringe comedy, could barely sit still in his seat or the discomfort, but didn’t blink an eye at the goriest slasher films.

“The summer right before high school, we watched Weekend at Bernie’s like ten times,” Bill explains. “Stan hated it. He thought it was the stupidest movie he’d ever seen. But he went with us almost every time.”

Bev’s nodding. “Yes, and he complained about it the whole time. Richie and Eddie would be saying the lines with the actors, and Stan would sit there, pissed off, eating all the popcorn.”

Patty nods gravely. “Thank you all for being here today, because you’ve just solved one of the greatest mysteries of my marriage.”

“Really?”

“You have no idea,” Patty shakes her head, setting her coffee to the side. “Stan used to say lines from that movie all the time. When we first started dating, I just thought he was a fan. It was one of those stupid couples’ running arguments we used to have -- he insisted he’d never seen it, but he would quote it constantly. And then, when I tried to prove it to him, he would refuse to watch it because it was, and I quote ‘inane, idiotic slop.’”

“Stan is wrong.” Bill points at her, pinking in excitement. “That movie is a cinematic masterpiece about the dogged and meaningless pursuit of wealth and status in America.”

“That movie is absolute garbage about two dumbasses and a dead body,” says Ben.

“I give it an 8.3,” Richie says, shrugging.

“It’s a cult classic,” Patty says. “And it definitely does not hold up thirty years later.”

“Nope,” Bev agrees, raising her coffee mug. “It does not.”

“Stan really did hate that movie,” Ben sighed.

“Yeah, and he was wrong,” Bill says, shaking his head.

Bev turns to Patty. “Every time we saw it, he had to point out that none of it made physiological sense and that the movie was objectively disgusting if you thought about it for just one second.”

“Him and Eddie,” Ben adds. “But Eddie thought it was fucking hilarious anyway.”

“He was a man who appreciated a shitty joke,” Bev agrees.

“No wonder he always laughed at yours, huh, RIchie?” Bill says.

From there the conversation destabilizes into shouted insults, and then two separate conversations, and then five. Ben and Bill volunteer to tidy up the kitchen, Richie ducks into the bathroom, and Mike asks another question about Stan. Patty likes them, she realizes, watching Mike and Ben laugh at an escalating argument spilling out of the open kitchen, not just as Stan’s friends, but as human beings. It’s as welcome as it is unexpected: her house feels like a home, with them in it.

Patty steps out to get some air under the guise of taking out the trash and finds him by accident, tucked around the side of the house, lighting a cigarette in the narrow clearance between the siding and the neighbors’ sagging fence. He looks up when she steps around the corner, guilty, like he’s a teenager she caught behind the school.

“Sorry, I can--” he says, hunching his shoulders and moving to step around her, but the path is too narrow, and Patty stands her ground. He looks grizzled and guilty, skin wan and dull under all the scruff, like a plucked chicken. “I, uh. Didn’t mean to. I can put it out.”

Patty looks him up and down. This close, the bags under his eyes look even worse than she’d thought, and the hand with the cigarette is shaking slightly. She knows the feeling.

“Actually... Do you have another?”

“Uh, yeah. Sure. Knock yourself out.” Richie nods, fumbling in his pockets, and unearths a pack of American Spirits. Of course. Trust a Californian to smoke organic cigarettes. Patty accepts the cigarette and the light, and coughs lightly into her arm with her first drag.

“You okay?”

“Mmm,” she hums, exhaling another puff of smoke with a long sigh. Her throat aches in protest. “It’s just been a while.”

“Yeah, for me, too.” Richie barks out a humorless laugh. “I quit, like, 25 years ago. I’ve been falling back into bad habits lately, I guess.”

Patty takes another drag, trying not to cough, and leans back against the house. The jasmine from next door is creeping over the top of the fence again. She can’t smell it over the smoke. There’s something, she thinks, about smoking when you’re already hot and sweaty, layering heat on unbearable heat, that she’s always liked. She didn’t smoke much, after she met Stan, and almost never after they were married, but sometimes she craved it.

No reason not to, now.

Patty exhales, curls of smoke unfurling and tumbling over each other on their way into the air. Someone inside the house is washing dishes, the clinking plates ringing out over the hushed murmur of voices, the murmur of voices in the living room. She can hear Bev’s laugh, loud and watery, like the peal of a bell.

“What was he like?”

“What?” She turns to look at Richie, surprised.

“What was Stan like? As an adult. I mean, we were best friends when we were kids, but…” Richie laughs again, just once, in that same flat way. “I guess we lost touch.”

There’s a hummingbird in the jasmine, darting between the long-necked pink blossoms. Patty watches it duck and weave, the sheen of iridescence on its back like an oil slick, its throat a riotous pink. She taps her cigarette with a finger, scattering a puff of white ash.

“Stanley was kind,” she says finally. “Loyal. Smart. Steady.”

“Sounds like him.”

“Yeah,” she puffs out a breath, blowing the hair from her sticky face. “He’s kind of a smartass. I always loved that about him. And always so meticulous. He wanted everything a certain way -- his appearance, the house, the world. He liked orderliness. He liked making sense of the world.”

“Yeah. That’s Stan. He always looked at the rest of us like we were idiots, racing to climb over the fence when the gate was unlocked.”

“He always was pragmatic.”

“He was the mature one,” Richie says. He bends down to stub out his cigarette on the ground, pocketing the butt. “I never knew when to shut the fuck up, but Stan didn’t have that problem. I guess Mike was pretty responsible, too. Sometimes the two of them would egg the rest of us on just to see what would happen. Mike would still be laughing at us by the time Stan decided to intervene, though.

“All of you were really close,” Patty says. She looks over at Richie, tucked in his jacket, sweating in the heat. It only makes him look worse, infected and feverish.

“We were,” Richie says. “We were inseparable, for a while. Growing up in a small town in Maine is really shitty, especially if you’re different, and all of us were.” He clears his throat, shoving his hands in his pockets and shrugging. “We just understood each other.”

“He’s… he was my best friend.” Patty can feel her eyes welling up, and sucks in a long quick drag from the cigarette, willing herself not to cry, but the well of grief in her chest is bubbling up, flooding her lungs and making it difficult to catch her breath.

Richie’s brows knit together and he steps toward her, hand awkwardly outstretched, like he’s ready to shake but he’s not quite sure how. “Hey, are you--”

“I have this whole…” She hacks out another smokey cough, and has to clear her throat before she can continue. Her eyes refuse to cooperate; a tear courses down her cheek. “I have a life. A career. I have friends, hobbies, a-- a book group. And Stan wasn’t there, he wasn’t any part of that, but… my future is just-- it’s gone.”

She’s really crying now -- it came upon her quickly and silently, a sneak attack, and now she can’t fucking stop. Patty clings to her dwindling cigarette. She hugs her free arm against her chest, trying to restrain the sobs threatening to break free from the space around her heart. Her skin feels too hot and tight, her lungs too stiff to breath properly.

“We were going to go to Argentina next month. I-- I was going to get a new job next year. We were going to buy a house with space for a studio. We h-had dinner reservations last week and when w-we retired together…”

Patty dissolves. Each sob wrings all the air out of her, cracking her ribs and twisting her gut until there’s no more of her left to give. She sinks low, arms hugging her midsection, rocking on her heels. She presses her forehead to her knees, gasping as her shoulders shake, and feels Richie’s hand on the small of her back, flat and broad. The cigarette burns too close to her fingers; she drops it in the grass.

“Patty, Patty,” Richie says gently. “Hey, I”m right here. I got you.” He grabs her hand in his, pressing it to his chest as he breathes in deep, inflating his whole chest with air. “There you go. Do you feel that?”

She nods, feebly. Her face is wet, snot streaming from her nose, and she still can’t breathe, but Richie’s a solid, comforting presence at her side. He’s a stranger, she reminds herself, but she can feel the rise and fall of his chest under her palm, warm and alive.

“Breathe with me, okay?” Richie says. “In and out. In,” his body shifts against her hand, and she tries to focus on the sensation and follow along, unsteady as a colt. “And out,” he exhales, and she does, too, on a painful and punctuated sigh.

Richie keeps breathing and murmuring to her: in and out, a hand on her back and hers on his chest, as she comes back to herself.

And just like that, she’s breathing again, the tears abating as quickly as they’d come, leaving her shaking and red-eyed in their wake. “I don’t -- I don’t want any of it without him,” she says quietly.

“Oh-- Patty...” Richie starts to say. He lets go of her but stays close, crouched beside her. She makes no move to stand.

“I just don’t understand. I don’t, I don’t.” She shakes her head. “It breaks my heart, to think I had no idea, that he -- if he had just said something, or if I’d known, he wouldn’t have had to be alone. We could have done something about it, together. To think, to know, he was suffering like that, carrying all of it by himself, all alone--”

She breaks off into a lone sob, shoulders heaving, and closes her eyes. Her cheeks are hot and tight from drying tears and her head is pounding, but now that she’s started, she has to finish.

“If I’d known, I could have done something. I would have done anything. I keep thinking: if I’d paid more attention. If I’d moved a little faster. If I wasn’t so distracted, then maybe. Maybe I could have saved him, and he could be here with me right now.”

When she opens her eyes, Richie’s looking at her like she’s slapped him, wide-eyed and pale, his mouth slack.

“I’m sorry,” she says, swiping the heel of her hand under her eyes.

“Hey,” Richie says gently, resting a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t need to apologize for anything. I don’t know what it’s like to be you, but I know it must fucking suck right about now.”

“A little,” Patty agrees. “Maybe-- maybe actually a lot. But talking to you is helping.”

“That’s a first,” Richie says, but he squeezes her shoulder before he steps away to let her stand. He pulls the crushed pack from his pocket, lights a fresh cigarette and offers another to her. She accepts and lets him hold the lighter for her, cupping the flame with his free hand, shielding it with his body from a non-existent breeze.

“Thanks for that,” she mutters around the cigarette.

He nods. “I had a friend who -- he used to get asthma attacks. Or something,” Richie shrugs. “That used to work for him, a long time ago.”

They smoke in silence. The deep, measured breathing helps, and the noises from inside: Stanley’s childhood friends, gathered in her home, come so far to remember him, not out of obligation or proximity. Simply because they loved him, too. Patty watches a bumblebee drift over to the jasmine. Someone else inside is laughing, low rolling thunder.

“What was he like?” She asks throatily, bending to douse the cherry on the path. It leaves a black smudge on the concrete.

“Stan? When we were kids?” Richie digs into his pocket, fishing out the pack and his lighter. “I mean, it’s been a long time, but--”

“No. Not Stan.”

Richie stills. “I don’t know what you mean,” he says.

But Patty knows. His face is her reflection: exhausted, distant, dazed. Richie Tozier is grieving. Slumped against the side of her house like he can’t hold himself up anymore, free hand shoved deep in his pocket, hunching his shoulders. His eyes are red and tired, under eyes bruised, just like hers.

“Yours. What was his name? Ed?”

The laugh that comes out of Richie is something high and wheezy, too loud for the little alley pathway they’re standing on. He ends up squatting, bracing his hands on his knees as he rocks back and forth a little.

“Eddie. And he wasn’t mine,” Richie says, tucking a third cigarette between his lips and flicking open the lighter. Patty watches him, his flat knuckles, squared-off fingers. He looks like ten miles of rough road, staring down at his boots instead of meeting her eyes.

“Those will kill you,” Patty says softly. “If you keep smoking them like that.”

He snorts, tapping the end of his cigarette. “You sound like him. Sort of, anyway. You’re much quieter.”

“Eddie was loud?”

“He was. Among other things.”

“And concerned about smoking?”

“About everything,” Richie corrects her. “He was… not exactly a hypochondriac, but not far off. It’s complicated.”

“Sounds like it.”

“He worried all the time, but he was so brave. Eddie always knew how to lead us where we needed to go.”

“Like Stan?”

“Not exactly.” Richie considers it before he answers. “Eddie knew how to get us where we needed to be. But Stan always knew where we should go in the first place. He knew what we were supposed to do.”

“Stanley always knew what to do,” Patty agrees. She sighs, and it shivers through her whole body, still recovering from her crying jag. “What about you? What’s your superpower?”

“Me? My superpower? I don’t believe in superpowers.” Richie shrugs. “I just call ‘em like I see ‘em.”

“Maybe that is your superpower.”

“Kind of a shitty superpower,” Richie says. “It’s fucking useless. Why not invisibility? Or time travel?”

“Time travel would be pretty nice right about now.” She sighs, blowing her bangs out of her face. Her skin’s itchy from dried tears and The day is getting hotter, and the general sense of moisture she’d had upon leaving the air-conditioned house has resolved itself into what would be an impressive pair of pit stains, were she not wearing black. “I’m probably going to head back in.”

“Yeah.” Richie nods, taking a final drag on his cigarette. “All right. But, Patty, listen. If you ever want… I’m glad we got to talk. I’m glad we came here and got to meet you. And if you ever need a friend...” He shrugs.

“I could use one of those,” Patty looks up at him with a shaky, thin smile. “I have a vacancy.”

Richie takes a last drag on his cigarette and tosses it to the ground, crushing it with his heel. “Yeah. Me, too.”

++

The final morning of shiva comes. Patty’s daily life resumes: she washes her clothes and goes back to work. She returns to her habit of running every day, longer and farther than she would if there were someone waiting for her to come home. The leftovers dwindle until Patty finally recovers the last container of stinking, slippery cold cuts from the back of the fridge. She runs out of stamps writing thank you notes, and takes the sympathy cards down from the mantle.

Instead of sending a card, she texts Richie and Mike and Bev to say thank you, and then to send the old photographs of Stan she unearths as she paws through paid bills and old account statements, scrap paper, navigating the bureaucracy of widowhood.

She reads somewhere that partners split memories between them: one knows where the extra bottle of detergent lives and whose birthday is coming up, the other has a handle on anniversaries and the charging dock for the cordless drill. Patty finds herself lost in her own home, sometimes -- looking for items and information that had, through force of time and habit, been very specifically under Stanley’s purview. She gives in, drives to Target after 11:00 p.m. for more fabric softener, only to kick over the one hiding beneath the skirted laundry sink while she’s loading the washer. The spare paper towels are still stored on a shelf taller than she can reach on her own. She can’t find the stepstool.

Patty leaves wet towels on the floor and forgets to clean the waterlogged bits of oatmeal and lettuce out of the dishwasher strainer, two of the very few sources of marital acrimony between her and Stanley. She aches for it, the small pettiness, the trivial but irreconcilable difference, especially since now that she’s forced to clean up after herself. She never had to, before. Stanley always did it for her.

She buys a hamper for the bathroom. In a weak moment, she thinks: there, I’ve fixed it. See? You can come home.

Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night with his name caught in her throat, and if she could get it out, find a way to say it in some sacred, perfect way, he would be called back to her. She never manages.

++

She finds the envelope a week later, sifting through drifts of old papers unearthed from the boxes on high closet shelves, from the overstuffed filing cabinet. It’s tucked between BLUM-URIS TAX RETURNS - 2012 and a thick folder of appliance warranties. Only two are expired, thanks to Stanley’s insistence on an annual post-tax season purge. Every year, he went into the project sleep-deprived and wild-eyed. On purge days, Patty always made a point of grabbing two bottles of beer from the kitchen on her way to the study once she’d gotten home from work. Stanley always stopped what he was doing to ask her day was, a bandaid on at least one of his fingers from the inevitable papercut, hair unstyled and soft, flopping over his forehead.

Patty takes a shaky breath in and exhales long and low, closing her eyes. Just that Spring, she and Stanley had sat on the floor across from each other, surrounded by the work of Stanley’s chaotic reorganization efforts. Warmed by the alcohol fuzz at the edges of her mind and the soft way Stanley had looked, leaning back on his hands in shirtsleeves and soft old jeans, bare feet akimbo on the floor in front of him, Patty had climbed into his lap and kissed him slow and dirty, laughing. They’d fucked over the desk in the early evening, like newlyweds, and ended up ordering pizza for dinner because neither of them felt like cooking, after.

She’s already crying when she picks up the files, hoping for the life insurance paperwork to materialize from beneath them, and instead a thin, flat envelope slips out, hitting the desk with a loud snap. Patty freezes.

The envelope is old -- not yellowed with age, clearly older than the files themselves. And on the front, in Stan’s uneven hand: PATTY.

The shock of it dries her tears, her mouth. She knows. She knows before she sets the files aside and stares, almost afraid to touch it. She knows before she holds it in her hands, the heft of it, the dry, powdery feel of old paper on her fingertips.

The glue under the flap is brittle and gives easily when she slips her thumb beneath it. This should be more difficult, she thinks abstractly, as she tugs the letters free.

Patty, the thickest sheaf begins, and she almost stops there, shivery, leaden dread growing in the hollow around her heart. But then she reads it again: Patty, the letters crooked, a faint impression of the pen left on the page that he once touched, and the part of her that is desperate for Stan -- for more of him, for any undiscovered part of him she can uncover, devour, hold inside of her forever -- urges her on.

I love you, she reads. I’m sorry. I hope you never read this. But if you do, there’s something you need to know.

The turtle couldn’t help us, I remember now. But I think Mike Hanlon can.

++

“What the fuck, Michael,” she says as soon as he picks up the phone. “What the actual fuck.”

“Hello? Patty?” Mike’s somewhere noisy, but Patty’s pretty sure he can hear her just fine. “Is that you? What’s--”

“Did you maybe,” she hisses, “just perhaps, leave a few things out of your stories about Stanley?”

“Oh?” Mike says, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. She wants to throw the phone at him, who gives a fuck how many states are between them. “Like what?”

“‘Like what?’ Like the damn clown,” she says.

“Ah. Yes,” Mike clears his throat. “That. It.”

She waits, but though the background noise subsides, as if Mike has stepped outside, or ducked into an adjacent room, Mike makes no further explanation. This only incenses her further, past the point of frustration, until she feels like it’s all going to boil out of her onto the carpet, until she’s crying.

“Don’t you think--” she stops, and has to start again. “After everything, after-- that I deserve some kind of explanation, something that makes sense?”

“You do, Patty,” Mike says quietly. “And what should I have said?”

“Something! Anything!” Patty knows he’s right, but it doesn’t stop the black hole feeling in her chest, so heavy she can barely breathe, barely stand. “I’ve been sitting here for weeks, thinking he just -- he left me, all alone, my best friend, my fucking husband--” her voice cracks and she has to pause to catch her breath, but she keeps going. “And this whole time, you knew-- all of you knew -- why. You knew why.”

“We did.”

“If I’d known, if I just could have helped -- I would have gone back with him in a heartbeat, he didn’t have to do it alone.”

“Patty…”

“If you could have just said something, just told me--”

“What? The truth?” Mike’s patience cracks. “Come on, Patty. You would have called me fucking crazy. We wouldn’t be talking now. ”

Patty hangs up on him and hurls the phone across the room. It hits the back of the couch and bounces to the carpet with a muted, unsatisfying thud. She doesn’t feel any better for having done it -- instead, she feels foolish and instantly contrite.

She rubs the heels of her hands into her eyes, curling over herself, breathing in deep. “Shit,” she mutters. “Shit, fuck, shit.”

Dragging her hands down to cup her cheeks, she tilts her chin up to stare at the ceiling. It’s not Mike’s fault. It’s not her fault. Stanley’s the only person she would have ever believed this from, and even then, the whole thing defies credulity. She thinks back to the sequence of events: dinner, jigsaw puzzle, Argentina, phone call, then...

She imagines Stan setting the phone down and turning to her. Saying, “Patty, there’s something I need to tell you.” She would have followed him to the ends of the earth, including shitsville, Maine, and then what? Patty thinks of Eddie, thinks that maybe the accident that killed him might not have been as accidental as Richie had made it out to be. She thinks of the seven of them as children, walking upstream to disappear into a dark culvert. She thinks of them as adults, alive and terrified, wading through a dank tunnel, her Stanley beside them, wearing one of his sweaters and the expression he got on his bad days: lost, bewildered, afraid. She remembers of the five of them on her doorstep and what it might have been like to find them there under different circumstances, to greet them with Stan fussing in the kitchen behind her, warmth and spices wafting through the house, to hold the door for a latecomer, darting up the garden path to duck inside.

Then she thinks about Mike, who stayed in that fucking town, stuck, alone, for nearly thirty years, then summoned them all to him as he’d promised, knowing what he was asking them to do. What was waiting for them.

Patty fishes the phone out from under the ottoman and hits the redial. He answers on the second ring.

“Mike,” she says. “I’m-- I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have--”

“It’s okay, Patty. I know -

“No, Mike, honey -- listen. It wasn’t you. It was the clown. It was that place, that horrible fucking crater you all call a hometown.”

“I knew, when I was calling -- what I was asking them to do.”

“It wasn’t fair. You didn’t have a choice.”

“I… didn’t,” Mike admits, but it sounds torn out of him, a hated truth. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Patty knows. “Stan wrote me a letter to find. He wrote you all letters, too. Do you want-- I could read it to you, if you want.” The letter doesn’t say much at all, cryptic and brief, but Mike cries anyway, and Patty can’t help but cry, too, reading the handwriting as familiar as her own. After, they stay on the phone, swapping stories for well over an hour, until Mike’s phone is about to die, and when she checks, Patty’s is, too.

“For what it’s worth,” Mike says before they hang up. “For what it’s worth, which may be a hell of a lot of nothing, I didn’t have a choice. But I think Stan believed he didn’t, either.”

++

She dreams it again that night: following Richie and Mike and Bev down the hillside, through the reeds, across the stream. She pauses on the river rocks in grass-stained chucks, arms spread for balance, forging a familiar and treacherous path.

Then, over the rush of the water, over the echo of little Eddie Kaspbrak’s outrage at a nebulous but slight, she hears it.

--Patty.

It’s Stan. Slowly, she turns her head toward the voice, and the strange physics of the dreamworld tumble and fold over each other: she’s standing in the river, and in nothing. The boys and Bev are ahead of her and behind her, and they’re not. Time is frozen but the river still runs, a rushing sound growing louder and louder as the shouts grow fragmented and robotic, a child’s toy running on dying batteries.

--Patty.

She blinks, and the world starts to spin around her, a sickly whirl that picks up speed, until it resolves into a streaky shape: a pinwheel, a dancer’s twirling skirt, a galaxy. A shiver rolls slowly through her leaden body. Every movement is separate and clumsy, like she’s caught in the flash of a strobe light or a sluggish animation frame.

--Patricia. It doesn’t sound like Stanley anymore. The voice resolves into the sum of every voice Patty has ever heard, distilled to a flat caricature of human speech, beamed directly into her brain. --Patricia. I’m here.

She jerks her gaze to the left. Moored in the not-river, luminescent nebulae eddying around its leathered feet, is a turtle.

What the fuck, Patty tries to say, but it comes out a slow hiss of air. The turtle swivels its massive turtle head to pin her with a single wet black eye.

--I usually stay out of these matters. But in this case… The turtle doesn’t appear to move, but heaves a weary, put-upon sigh. --It would appear that I have been mistaken, and so, am at fault.

Mistaken about what, Patty wants to say, at fault for what, but once again, when she opens her mouth: nothing. A waft of steam, a pillar of dust.

--Energy is eternal. But you can’t argue with results. Patty doesn’t know how she can tell, but he seems contrite, almost apologetic.

But what does that mean. The turtle shrugs, a slow wobbling of its shell from tip to tail, that seems to set the whole universe in motion, spinning like a top, faster and faster. Patty’s dizzy with it, felled to her knees in the great swirling cosmological mess, organs sloshing around inside of her.

I don’t feel so good, she thinks, and the turtle’s laugh rolls through her like another wave of nausea.

--You and me both, sister.

She wakes up with bile in her mouth and barely makes it to the toilet in time to vomit, violently and repeatedly. After, she still feels horrible, seasick, so she rinses out her mouth and gives up on going back to sleep.

She wonders, waiting on coffee, if she should be worried. Mike hadn’t mentioned anything about a turtle in his explanation, but who knows if he’d gotten around to everything. Stan’s letter had covered the very basics -- primordial extraterrestrial evil, blood oath, a return. She’d ended up on the phone with Mike for hours, and still hung up with unanswered questions.

Patty picks at pastry that one of the neighbors dropped off the day before - a braided knot of cardamom and poppy seeds, studded with pearl sugar - but the nausea from her dream hasn’t faded. Patty sets the bun aside and cradles her coffee cup between her palms, running a thumb absently along the rough clay rim.

The turtle can’t help us, Stan said once, and she hadn’t forgotten it, even though she’d had no idea what it meant.

“Oh, Stanley,” she says to the emptiness in the room. “Love, I think this time you got it wrong.”

++

The days roll in and recede. Patty moves through them but is not of them: she goes back to work, her mother calls, a neighbor brings by a lemon cake to share. The flowers start to fade as the nights lengthen and cool, until it’s suddenly fall. She’s back at work and exhausted, stumbling to bed well before 10:00 p.m. only to wake up four hours later to eat cut pineapple and leftover pickles in front of the television until she passes out again.

There’s something itching under her skin: a tether, a swarming. In the long stretch of afternoons alone, absent of purpose or routine, her mind wanders to olive trees and rivers, the foul silty smell of flood, alluvia, iron, wet leaves. It keeps her up some nights, and she’ll turn on the TV until Law and Order lulls her to sleep, or try to read a book. On occasion she sends out texts to the people most likely to be awake and respond, to keep her company in the dark. She’s learned that Richie and Mike are night owls, and are more likely to be awake between sunset and sunrise than not.

This time, she calls Richie.

“Patricia,” he says. He sounds blurred out, buzzed. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Hello, Richard.” Her back twinges and she resettles against the pillows. “I can’t sleep, and as it turns out, you’re the only person I know who would be awake and taking calls at such an indecent hour.”

“I’m honored, but Patty, baby: I’m not that kind of girl.” She hears a hollow clatter in the background, a crinkling wrapper.

“I don’t believe you,” she says.

He laughs darkly. “You shouldn’t. What’s got you up so late?”

It’s a stupid question, and they both know it. She sighs. “Just a bad night.”

“Mmmm,” Richie agrees. “So you want a lullaby?”

It’s almost midnight in California. Patty knows nothing about where he lives, but she imagines an outsize ranch with mission tile and white stucco perched on a hill, with a view of the valley and downtown in the distance, klieg lights illuminating the clouds and strands of freeway traffic roping out in every direction. She can hear the rustle of fabric, the click of a lighter and thinks of Richie, sprawled out on a green couch in a big empty room with a view.

“Those work for you?” Patty stares up at her ceiling, lit yellow by the bedside lamp. There’s a perpetual crack in the plaster above the headboard, starting to make itself known once more. Stanley had patched it three times since they moved in. Patty thinks she might just leave it, this time.

Richie coughs in her ear, smokey and deep. “Nope.”

“Then what does?”

“I’ll let you know when I figure it out. So far, staying up until I pass out and sleep for twenty-four hours straight, then waking up to do it all over again.”

“I don’t think that’s going to fit with my teaching schedule,” Patty sights. “I can fall asleep. But I keep waking up in the middle of the night and then I can’t get back to sleep.” Save for unavoidable and detested business trips, Patty had slept beside Stanley her entire adult life. The bed is too large and lonely, the room too quiet without his soft snores.

“So what do you do?” Richie asks.

“Think about him.”

“Yeah. Besides that.”

“Lie here,” Patty says. “Count sheep. Watch glassblowing and woodworking videos on Youtube.”

“I watch woodworking videos, too,” Richie says. The lighter clicks again. “In a manner of speaking.”

“I haven’t exactly been in the mood.”

“You sure? No feeling in the world like crying and coming at the same time. It doesn’t get more cathartic than that,” Richie muses. “This isn’t an offer, by the way.”

“I can honestly say I would never presume,” Patty says. “How about, instead of a lullaby, a bedtime story?”

“I just said Penthouse letters are off the table,” Richie says. “Come on, how many times do I have to tell you? You’re beautiful, but you’re just not my type.”

“Richie.” Patty sighs. He gets like this sometimes, she’s learning -- like a matador, ducking this way and that, trying to redirect her attention.

“Patricia, I’m--” he breaks off laughing, a high-pitched giggle that picks up momentum until it’s a full belly laugh. Richie’s choking on it, dissolving into a coughing fit on the other end of the line. The wheezing finally abates into a weighty silence.

"Richie?"

“I’m gay,” he says. Patty waits, and after a long, awkward pause, it becomes clear that Richie will not be elaborating further.

“Thank you for telling me,” Patty says carefully. “But I--”

“I never told him,” Richie says. “He didn’t know. I’ve never told anyone that before. And now--”

“Oh, Richie,” Patty says, the puzzle pieces slipping into place in her mind, revealing the full picture of what Richie's struggling to say.

“Yeah,” Richie says quietly. His voice sounds thick and hoarse. “And I think, if I’d told anyone back then, or even now, if I could -- I would have told Stan first. Fuck, Patty. I miss them,” Richie says, cutting himself off with a gasp. “I miss Eddie. I miss Stan so fucking much.”

“I miss him, too,” Patty says. “I miss him all the fucking time.”

“Fuck,” Richie agrees. “I-- thanks, Patty. Thank you for listening to me, and just -- I wanted to tell you. I’m glad I got to tell you.”

She’s crying, again, always -- more in the past month than in her entire life before, she thinks sometimes. Richie’s sobbing in his house in California and laughing in her ear, “Some fucking bedtime story, huh?”

They say goodnight. Patty lies on the bed, staring at the crack in the ceiling, thinking about all the years Richie spent waiting for something that would never come, and the gravity of the absence on the other side of her bed.

She turns over to grope on the floor for a lightning cable. Instead, she comes up with the bookmark she’d knocked from Stan’s nightstand the day of the funeral held in her first. Patty is struck with the knowledge that she has no idea how to put it back, no idea where it belongs -- only Stanley knew where he’d left off in the book he’d never finish. She starts to cry again. He will never know the ending and Patty will never be able to save his place. He won’t be coming back to find out.

++

The sun rises on the end of her Shloshim and Patty rises late, irritable and relieved. She packs her things and a change of clothes, plucks a dirty pair of jeans from the pile -- she’ll do the laundry when she gets home, finally -- and yanks a cardigan over her tank top. She sits on the edge of her bed, staring at the mourning doves’ empty nest. She’s tired down to her bones with the knowledge that she has to get up; that the thing about living, about surviving, is that you don’t get to stop.

The community mikveh is a good twenty minutes away, when traffic’s agreeable, and Patty’s appointment is the first one available. The last time she was here, walking through the calming institutional blue halls, Stanley was by her side.

“I’m right here, babylove,” he’d murmured into her hair, her face pressed into his shoulder as she took one long, shuddering breath in. “You’re not alone.”

When she’d stepped back, he had kissed her forehead, bringing his hands up to cup her face. He’d kept them there, moving to unclasp her earrings and set them gently aside. He’d helped her undress, slow and deliberate, setting her folded sweater on the bureau, and followed her into the shower to wash her hair, her feet, with deft, strong hands. After she’d brushed her teeth, he’d helped her scrub her fingernails, and held the door as she stepped into the room.

Afterward, Stanley wrapped her in a towel and helped her dress. He slipped her ring back on her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, twining hers with his.

She does it alone, this time: looks at herself in the mirror, breathes in to her toes, and thinks, Here I am. Places her ring on the countertop, removes the chipped, months-old polish on her toenails. Empties her bladder. Lingers in the shower for the first time since, scrubbing every part of her clean, wondering at the life in her own body. Blows her nose, brushes her teeth. Scrubs her fingernails and toenails clean. Breathes in, as deep as her lungs will stretch: the fresh towel, the jasmine and rose in her shampoo, water and salt.

The attendant slips inside the room when summoned, along with a towel to preserve Patty’s modesty, and it’s time. Patty sets her towel aside and walks into the pool. She looks up at the ceiling, remembering the mikveh days before her wedding, fraught with excitement and expectation, the feeling of time, of forever, rolling out ahead of her, a steady river pushing onward.

One.

She slips into the water.

In the warm blue of immersion, Patty stretches her arms out as far as she can reach, fingers splayed. She can hear the water move around her, a gentle directionless rush. Her hair brushes against her skin as she watches the bubbles drift up from her body,

As she stands, the familiar lines run through her mind, their power faded but never forgotten: Baruch ata adonai eloheinu melech ha-olam she-heche-yanu, ve-ki-y’manu, ve-higi-yanu la-z’man ha-zeh.

She has kept alive. She has sustained through the worst tragedy yet to befall her. She has been able to reach this day.

Patty blinks her eyes against the wet. She holds her breath.

Two.

Patty goes under, leaning back, knowing the water will catch her. She unfolds into the weightlessness, a speck in the universe, the tiniest pinprick in time. Her heart beats in her ears, her lungs ache for air. She is here, she is alive. The water moves to make a space for her body. Air flows in and around her. Stan is gone.

Three.

She closes her eyes and pushes the air out of her lungs until there’s nothing left. She floats, limbs suspended, cradled in the living water as the last of her breath disappears and she’s left in the rushing, bottomless dark.

Her lungs start to burn, but she holds fast: strengthen my heart and give courage to my soul, she thinks, the words she settled on the night before, unable to sleep, her body rattling around the empty bed. Do not hide your presence from me. Gather into me the soul of my beloved.

The water moves around her, a barely perceptible eddy tugging her forward. Patty doesn’t follow, but she lets herself feel it all the same, eyes fiercely shut, her body eating up the last dregs of oxygen in her blood. She wants this feeling to be over. She doesn’t want it to end, to stand and step into the rest of her life, the waiting days of her widowhood that she will fill and savor and survive, and not a single one of them with Stanley beside her.

Gather him into me, she pleads one last time, until the drive to breathe propels her upward and she breaks the surface. Her feet touch the tile and she surfaces, gasping. Something inside her breaks loose, falling away as she rises, sluicing back into the pool along with the water as she ascends the seven steps.

“Patricia, are you--” the attendant gasps. She’s still holding up a towel to preserve Patty’s modesty, but her gaze has dropped toward the water below, still lapping at Patty’s calves. “Oh, dear.”

“What is it?” Patty looks down at her body, but it’s all there, whole: soft belly the color of the dusty-pale irises her grandmother grew in the backyard, round furred thighs, the solid knees and high arches of her father’s family. The sunless line on her ring finger. “I’m fine.”

And then she looks behind her, at the red unfurling in the water: a cardinal plume of smoke, an omen to be read.

++

The exam room is warm but Patty shivers anyway, paper gown rustling like a pile of leaves. She kicks her legs while she waits, like she used to in the pediatrician’s office when she was a girl. She wishes she were back there on the Upper East Side, staring down the prospect of a shot from Dr. Cipollini with a black-and-white cookie waiting for her on the other side.

Maybe she’ll get peach pie after this, she thinks after the doctor arrives, while she’s adjusting the rickety plastic speculum. Patty grits her teeth. Peach pie with whipped cream. The doctor squirts ultrasound jelly on her bare belly, warm and wet, slightly sticky where it’s drying at the edges.

“Do you want to see?” The obstetrician asks gently. Dr. Kramer is out, but this new woman is on call. She’s tiny and blonde, brown eyes soft, her brows knitted together in hollow sympathy. Her spray-on tan is rubbing off inside the collar of her white coat. “Or I can--” she struggles with the casters on the gray plastic ultrasound machine. It creaks and rattles until she manages to unlock the wheels with one dainty hot-pink shoe.

“Thank you,” Patty murmurs. She rolls her shoulders against the exam table and carefully presses her feet against the stirrups. The doctor nods, frowning at the screen. She presses the probe against Patty’s belly, slowly shifts the wand.

Patty breathes through her nose and stares at the acoustic tile. The grid disappears beyond the exam room walls. Nothing in the medical office appears to be square, she thinks, ignoring the pressure on her belly and the jarringly asexual movement between her legs.

“I-- hmm,” the obstetrician says. “I’m going to have you take a look at this.”

“Please,” Patty says, shaking her head. She’s clinging to the cliff’s face with her fingernails; she doesn’t know what’ll happen if she looks down -- but the doctor’s already turning the screen toward her and there’s nowhere for her to go, splayed by the footrests and pinned to the parchment. “I’d really rather -- oh. Oh.”

The doctor’s pointing to the monitor, at a familiar black circle coddled in tissue like static on an old television screen. Inside, though: a flickering specter, a fluttering wet jellyfish, a feathery pulsating ghost. Patty feels it like a hiccup in her throat, bubbling out of her, and then the doctor flips a switch on the side of the machine and fills the whole room with a tinny, racing heartbeat ricocheting off the walls and thudding in Patty’s eardrums, proof of life.

“Oh my god,” Patty says. Her head falls back against the table. She doesn’t look away from the screen, or the living writhing miracle-thing captured there, the throbbing white blob, even as her vision blurs, even as the tears overwhelm her. The heart beats on: here I am, here I am, here I am.