“Kissing Dan is like saying the psalms, outrageous winter faith. Every morning she feels more certain that she should leave him, that leaving would be the loving action.”
An Excerpt from The Mountains May Depart
2020 Honorable Mention for the Landmark Prize for Fiction
2019 Finalist for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize
First Published 2021 in The Windhover
Finalist for the 2019 J.F. Powers Prize (as “Bedtime Story”)
I
His alarm softly rings and she stirs to the mass of him lifting itself from the mattress, the harsh scrape of his stubble as he kisses her on the cheek. He moves and she listens, lying still: his visit to the bathroom, the shush of his dresser drawers, the weight of his feet on the stairs. The coffee begins to percolate. The back door thumps closed. He is gone.
If she is more asleep than awake she can almost recall the old pleasure of the near-dawn, the cotton sheets and the hot-coffee smell, her husband’s small noises mingling with the sun in marigold hues through the window, the slow filling of the house, a deep breath before the exhale of day. But now she’s expecting a sound that won’t come: the little roar of poured-out Legos in the next room over. It is not before and she hardens to this reality as she forces herself out of bed and onto her knees. She forces herself to do this every morning while he jogs. It brings her no comfort. She does not feel close to God when she prays. She prays anyway. She prays, “Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy.” She prays, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits—who forgives you all your iniquity, who heals all your disease, who redeems your life from the Pit.”
In her prayers God is like an unseen creature, immense and aloof, stamping and snorting in the fog beyond her vision. She is taken by the audacity of the psalms, so many imperative sentences: “Hide your face from my sins,” “Do not cast me from your presence,” “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.” As if God will do these things simply because she tells him to. There is as much sense in praying the psalms as there is in telling the Bitterroots to cast themselves into the Pacific. Who is she? The words come like pointed fingers, what she is, and she tries not to think of them. She reads the sentences on the page, forms them with her lips. She speaks them aloud and tries to mean them. It is like trying to start a fire with two sticks: “For God alone my soul in silence waits, from Him comes my salvation.”
She closes the prayer book when Dan returns through the back door—another thump—into the kitchen, vigorously noisy in the way only a man can be, taking a cup from the cupboard, filling it with ice, filling it with water, glugging it down. As he sacks the kitchen, she rises to dress for the day, black slacks, green polo, and when she hears him heading up the stairs she takes a final look in the mirror, her unwashed hair, and heads down. She meets him on the stairs, red-faced and still perspiring.
“Good morning,” he says.
“Good morning.”
She kisses him and continues down. Kissing Dan is like saying the psalms, outrageous winter faith. Every morning she feels more certain that she should leave him, that leaving would be the loving action.
She steps from the landing into the living room where the morning light pools. The sun through the front window fills the house with a watery light that makes all her things look cheap, the wine crates mounted on the walls as shelves for her books, the frayed upholstery on her wingback chair, the decorative birdcage slotted with mail, mostly junk. All cheap. Only the hardiest of the plants have survived the winter, the succulents, which need no care, and the peace lily that collapses in a sulk when it goes too long without water. The orchids and herbs on the TV stand have all withered, and she reminds herself again that she ought to pull up the stalks and put them in the garbage.
In the kitchen she spreads the newspaper across the table and sips her coffee slowly. She is trying to teach herself to like it black and has found the sugar easy to part with, but she misses the cream. Some days, not today, she’ll retrieve the half-and-half from the fridge and feel a tug of guilt as she stirs it in, but not today, today she takes it black as she flips through the newspaper, skimming the headlines on her way to the comics: wildfire in Idaho, more protests on Wall Street, Obama at the Vatican, and the Top Hat is closing and reopening under new ownership.
Never before has she had so much time to read—no papers to grade, no e-mails to delete, no (no, don’t think of those things)—but so little appetite for books. At Christmas she picked up an Alice Munro collection only to put it down halfway through the first story. All she can manage is the newspaper and occasionally, when she needs to remind herself that she is still, somehow, a poet, a little T.S. Eliot, gloomy and cerebral, a nice distraction. Beyond that literature just asks for too much: empathy, emotion, imaginative energy, Come, follow me, but she just can’t. The fictional sorrows of Munro’s women are too much. She is sticking with Dagwood and Garfield and J. Alfred Prufrock until it’s time to leave for her shift at the laundromat, and Dan is already jaunting down the stairs.
“How’s Ziggy?” he asks.
“The pharmacist squirted him with one of those lapel flowers, because ‘laughter is the best medicine.’ ”
“Oh, that’s funny!” he says without laughing. These days he always speaks loudly when he wants to cheer her up—it’s as if he’s confused being sad with being hard of hearing. As he pours his cereal he says, “You don’t see those practical joking gadgets much anymore! My grandfather got my brother one of those hand buzzers for his birthday once—he was obnoxious!”
“I’ll bet.”
She turns from the comics to the horoscopes: “Tasks today of any kind are apt to feel like the labors of Heracles.” Has it always been like this? He is thirty and she is thirty-one. Married seven years, and it feels like longer. Maybe now that he’s asked about Ziggy he’ll be quiet. Through the winter he was acceptably sullen, but now with spring tilting into summer he’s grown manic, jolly one moment and brooding the next. Good god, the summer—May’s nearly here and Dan is done teaching the first week of June. What will she do when school lets out and he’s just… around? He insists on dashing himself on her sadness. He ferrets her out, finds her crying in the bedroom, the office, the pantry. “What’s the matter?” What a stupid question. She says, “That’s a stupid question.” But he keeps trying.
It can’t go on forever. He sits down with his cereal bowl, and though he makes no further attempts at conversation she can feel him searching her face for signs as she reads the Dear Abby: “Dishwasher Sows Discord Between Husband and Wife.” It is as if she is the dregs of a tea cup or the entrails of a bird. He stares quite openly.
When his spoon scrapes the bottom of the bowl he carries it to the sink, and she is glad, if reflexively annoyed, when he jingles the keys like a leash. “Ready to go?”
She nods. To the garage, to the car, into town and across the bridge. The sun is cresting the mountains now, and the sky is stretched with rays of thin white light. All this was once underwater, a glacial lake, the whole valley.
When he pulls into the parking lot of the laundromat he leans across the armrest for an awkward hug.
“I love you,” he says.
She speaks the response and tries to mean it.
II
A dead thing within him has wormed itself awake. Six months gone since Sam died and Dan has begun to catch himself catching glimpses of Kaitlyn Lakes. Sam was his son. —is my son. Sam was and is my son. The boy was four years old when he died. That was September, but suddenly, somehow, it is April. It is April and the world is warming and Kaitlyn Lakes’ knees are peering out from beneath the hemline of her skirt. Numb all winter, now this, those bare knees nested one inside the other as she flips through an old issue of NEA Today on the far side of the teachers’ lounge. She’s blond, two years out of college, five or six years his younger. She dresses professional, but underneath— He hates that he has these thoughts, but there they are and lately he is inclined to indulge them. A part of him keeps saying that he deserves these glimpses, that it is April and the world is warming and he deserves restitution.
In the mornings, every morning, as he puts on the coffee and ties his running shoes, he resolves to swallow back his if-onlys: if only Sarah hadn’t been fiddling with her cellphone, if only she hadn’t been in such a hurry, if only she’d checked the blind spot, then— It’s all as neat as ninth grade geometry, but he will swallow back these if-onlys forever if he has to, because he loves his wife goddammit and she blames herself too much already. He is thirty, almost thirty-one, and he knows how the story goes: Couple loses son, only son. Couple falls apart. He can feel the narrative passing over their house like weather, and there are moments—now even—when he is seized with the desire to hold her and hold her, his wife. The brisk way she undresses in the evening, a toss of her hair, lately it takes almost nothing, but in the bedroom she shudders at his touch. They haven’t had sex since September.
He rolls over, big spoon, and kisses the back of her neck. Wisps of blond hair cling to his beard.
She says, “I’m too tired for cuddling.”
“You’re tense,” he says, and with the pad of his thumb he begins to work a small circle into the muscles of her shoulder. She allows him the massage but takes no pleasure from it (no little moans). He soon stops.
“I love you,” he says.
“I love you too.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, Dan.”
Outside there is a rumble like thunder as a length of train cars comes slamming to a stop. He begins to count to himself. He counts in multiples of thirteen—twenty-six, thirty-nine, fifty-two, sixty-five.…
Beside him her breaths begin to swell and deepen, and he is dimly jealous, though he knows she’ll startle awake once or twice before the morning. It seems to happen every night: she’ll sit straight up and when he asks what’s wrong she’ll say nothing. Nightmares, he suspects, or neck pain leftover from the crash. Maybe both. He is tired of not knowing.
That morning after his shower, while she was downstairs with the newspaper, he entered her office and opened her writer’s notebook (a cardinal sin in their house) to the latest entry, the scraps of a poem, not promising:
these are the days you would summarize and skip over
if only you knew there was some sentence coming after
A line break, perhaps a pause, then she wrote:
These days which we would cross out, God takes note of them, I suppose.
I suppose he allows us to suffer so that he might wring out of us something true:
Lord, I have loved you, but only for my own sake.
Lord my ass, and he shut the book.
Before the accident they’d been religious people, regulars at a church that was also a coffee house, a hip little place with Mumford & Sons lyrics painted on the walls. At night in bed they used to join hands and thank God for the day and remember the less fortunate, and it hadn’t felt foolish, not then. What she thinks of God now he doesn’t know. She’s gone in for high liturgy, Lutheranism, a white-hair-and-hearing-aides crowd that takes its communion every Sunday, and she seems to find some solace in those rituals. Now we stand. Now we sit. It’s a fortress of a church, more German than Montanan. He imagines arrows fired from its narrow stained glass windows each time he follows her up the stone steps into the building, hot pitch spilling down its sides. When she closes her eyes for the Brief Order of Confession and Forgiveness, he pretends she is speaking not of God, but of him: If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, Dan who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
He knows, or is sometimes certain that he knows, that inside she is as wracked as he is—although, hell, for all she lets on she may only be composing a grocery list behind those cold breakfast table eyes each morning. Her eyes are like the dark eyes of a bird, indecipherable, and if he can’t decode her grief then how can he participate in it? How can I if she won’t let me? he says, not to God, of course, but to himself and to the ceiling.
He is getting angry. Deep breath. The shadows in the room are vague shapes cast by the street lights and the moon. They are far from their antecedents. Again he closes his eyes. Two eighty-six… two ninety-nine, three twelve.…
A year ago he and Sarah were two whirling cogs meshed together, coordinating drop-offs and pick-ups, slicing vegetables while the other stirred the sauce, making love while their son was asleep. He was wondering then, in those days, whether she too might want another baby, a second Sam, a little sister or brother. It was logical. Was back then. It wasn’t so long ago that she took the storybook from his hands and corrected him with a whisper, her words warm and arousing in his ear, a double-message. She said, “Blue Beard is neither a pirate nor a children’s story,” but her eyes flashed like doves in the rocks as she slid into the other side of the narrow little bed, wedging their son between them. Sam was sleepy but not asleep, twisting in his footy pajamas and pouting for the confiscated story. Dan had promised him pirates and parrots and buried treasure.
She stroked the boy’s blond hair. She said, “Can Mommy read you one of her favorites?” Emotions moved like little red clouds across his smooth boyish cheeks. He was verging on weary tears and buried his face in Sarah’s side, but her fingers through his hair kept him quiet. She read: “ ‘Attention please, we’re going to begin. When we’ve got to the end we’ll know more than we do now. There was a wicked troll… ’ ” The cadence of the story was not naturally her own. It took her voice a few sentences to find it, but when she did Sam’s face slowly reappeared, less red, and all three of them together listened to the tale: The troll had built a large mirror, a mirror that warped what it reflected, made beautiful landscapes look like boiled spinach and the best of men look hideous. (How she divined what was and wasn’t a “children’s story” was beyond him). The troll and his troll students were flying the mirror up to heaven to mock God and his angels “ ‘… and the higher they flew with the glass the more it grimaced till they could scarcely keep hold… ’ ” and the mirror shattered against the earth, and the slivers lodged in people’s eyes “ ‘… and the people either saw everything crooked or else had only eyes for what was wrong.’ ” Other slivers lodged in people’s hearts “ ‘… and that was horrible, for the heart became just like a lump of ice,’ ” and Sarah’s voice grew stronger as she came to the end of the section: “ ‘The evil one laughed till he split, it tickled him so. But out in the world little bits of glass were still flying about in the air. Now we are to hear all about it.’ ”
She turned the page to read on, then paused, said softly, “Sam-baby?”
A little whistle had settled into his nostrils.
She kissed his forehead and mouthed: I think he’s out.
They slid cautiously off the bed.
In the hallway: “Should we call it a night?” Again those dove-y eyes.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m not so tired.”
She took his hand in her own hand and led him to their bedroom. He latched the door behind them. If only….
Here they are, side by side but with air between them, like parallel lines extending untouching into infinity. They used to sleep with their ankles intertwined, but now— No, the thing to picture is two parallel lines meeting at a point on the horizon. An apex. He will get them there. She just needs more time, that’s all. In the meantime he will wash his mind with large numbers, multiply himself into slumber, and he won’t think about— No, he won’t think of her at all. He won’t think about anything. Not a thing. Nothing.
Three seventy-seven… three ninety… four hundred and three….
…four sixteen….
…four twenty-nine….
…four forty-two….
…four fifty-five…
… four sixty-eight….
♦
Ryan Rickrode 