“This isn’t ruin. This is wonderful. Why would you ever take out that book?” I said.
I looked right into her, and I saw what love was to her.
“The book was for him. In case it got too hard for him and he didn’t want to live through it. In case I couldn’t stand to watch his pain.”
I didn’t want to understand what she was talking about. It was ruin; she was right. It was opening yourself to be destroyed. One minute you have everything. And then the next it’s all gone.
This was that time.
“He has pancreatic cancer. He wants to work as long as he can, which they say is less than a month. The baby will be here after the first of the year. The book was in case he wanted it. To go as he chose. It’s his right, after all. It’s his life. But then I couldn’t go through with it. Even a minute less time of him in the world would be too hard. I returned it.”
Nina’s face was blotchy; the rims of her eyes were a pale red. Even I could see that color.
“I can paint the room and you can watch me,” I said.
“We can paint tomorrow,” Nina suggested. “At least there’s time for that.”
We sat there in the dark, holding hands. And then I knew the answer to my question.
This is what it was.
II
As soon as it was strong enough, I set the mole free in the yard at dusk. I put it on the grass near the hedge and it disappeared. One minute it was there, the next it was gone. I suppose this was familiar territory, the scent of the hibiscus, the feel of the dried grass. The mole didn’t leave any tracks; it just vanished.
I thought about the way old blind women in stories found their lost loves and recognized them even though fifty or a hundred years had passed, even if their husbands or lovers had been turned into stags or monsters. I thought about how the familiar imprinted itself on you — a hedge, a scent, a touch. If someone had taken a photograph of Lazarus and me together and pinned it to a wall, anyone who’d seen it would have thought, They aren’t meant for each other. They don’t belong together. So we didn’t take any photographs. I had questioned how it was possible for this man to love me all along, but I had finally begun to understand the reason: I knew him. If he came to me as a bear or a deer, I would still know him. If I were blind, if it was at dusk, if a hundred years had passed, I’d still know.
That couldn’t be taken away, despite ruin, despite time.
That night I drove out and we went walking through the orchard in the dark. During the day, the workers Lazarus had hired called to one another and the picking machinery was noisy. But at night you could hear every breath, every beetle.
I told Lazarus about my brother. I looked for blame everywhere: if we’d never lived in New Jersey, if we’d breathed different air, if he’d had a different diet, had never come to Florida, if we’d had different parents, grandparents, a different genetic makeup, maybe his cancer wouldn’t have happened. There was another, earlier theory my brother had told me about, the uncertainty principle, a theorem that predated and informed chaos theory. The simple fable to illustrate it explains that a cat will live or die depending on the utterly random decay of a single atom. And so it was for Ned. One cell affected another; one bloody random cell utterly defined everything. Why it should happen to him, it was impossible to know. There were not hundreds of possible answers, but thousands. All unknowable and random. All out of reach.
“What do I do for him?” I asked Lazarus. I thought a dead man would know such things.
Lazarus laughed. He rarely did. “You’d have to ask him. It’s different for everyone.”
“If you had a few weeks to live, how would you want to live it?”
I wanted him to say, Like this, walking with you in the dark. I wanted him to help me through, but Lazarus wasn’t like that. It wasn’t his fault. He was too trapped in his own life to really think about someone else’s.
“If it was me, I’d want to be free. Like I used to be. I thought my life was nothing, until I lost it. If people knew who I am, they’d want to know what happened to Seth, and I doubt they’d believe me. They’d think I killed him, took his money. So here I am. Stuck.”
Trapped in the wrong shoes, in the woods where every path led back to the exact same place. I understood how Lazarus might want to be in his own skin again. This wasn’t his life. That was why I wanted to remember everything about this night. I was going to lose it, all of it, I could tell standing there. Sooner or later. Ruin. I looked at every leaf, every star.
“I think I’ll be found out anyway,” Lazarus said. “I think people are starting to realize I’m not the right Seth Jones.”