My in-laws did not approach me directly about becoming a spirit bride. I received their request through my father, who sat me down rather formally one evening to consider my options. I would never make you do this, he said several times, although it was clear he wanted me very much to say yes. He was still wearing his work clothes, which every day except for this one he changed out of immediately upon arriving back home, and as I sat across from him with his dark suit, his clasped hands, I had a kind of premonition, even before a word was said, that things were about to shift. The woman next door had had a dream, he explained, a recurring dream where her dead son crouched in the corner of her room and told her, crying, that he had no one now that he was dead. He needs a wife, she told my father. For the loneliness.
I don’t think I felt I could really have declined; still, if the offer came to me today, with all the greater freedoms that I have as an adult, I doubt I would do anything differently. The next day we met with the family, and the day after that I was married.
The dress my mother helped me pick was an awkward length, but everything else we could find on such short notice was either ugly or too tight or smeared with someone else’s makeup at the neck. They did not make wedding gowns for someone of my age—nor, for that matter, would my parents have lavished money upon such an expense if they did—and so what I ended up with, as best I could tell, was a confirmation dress meant for a late religious bloomer. The wedding itself took place in my neighbours’ apartment. My new in-laws arranged a few chairs in the middle of their living room and put some sprays of flowers here and there. The ceremony seemed to go on for hours: as soon as the wife was done speaking her husband would start in, and once he had finished, she would pick up the theme again. Listening to these speeches, I felt like a dancer who didn’t know my steps and was forced to look down at my feet or the feet of my partner. My parents too were uncomfortable and unsure whether they should treat this as a happy occasion or a sad one; both had dressed in black just in case. Only the groom’s parents seemed to know what they were doing, as if they had seen spirit marriages before in movies or read about them in a book, or perhaps they were simply the custom in the family. Beside me, propped up and pristine on a dining room chair, stood a framed picture of my husband, a school portrait taken several years before his death. In time, my mental image of him would come to take on the qualities of that photograph: the same clothes, the same smudgy focus, and behind him the same bright blue paper sky.
When the ceremony was over, my in-laws gave me a silver ring and put their son’s matching wedding band on the cushioned seat of his chair. They did not ask me to kiss the photo. I was fifteen, a fact that seems strange to me all these years later, until I consider all of the other strangeness, after which I think: yes, I might as well have been.
*
The arrangement went like this: a couple times a month, Saturday mornings usually or else some weekday after school, I would go over to my new in-laws’ apartment for a visit. My mother would make sure I dressed nicely, which to her meant modest and slightly old-fashioned, and she would insist on doing my hair for me like she used to do before family functions when I was small. In the absence of explicit strictures or instructions, from my husband’s parents or from the culture at large, each of us imagined for ourselves, more or less, what these sessions should be like. My father, for his part, would make himself scarce as the time of my visit drew closer; now I was passing over to that other household, which both was and was not mine, and there was nothing for him to do but relinquish his claim to me and let me go.
I’m leaving now, I would say at the threshold of our home, as though departing for a great voyage, and would head to the neighbors’ alone.
When my in-laws greeted me at the door, they would kiss me—though never before had they touched me—and conduct me to the area of the living room where the ceremony had been held and where the chair with my husband’s school portrait still sat. Sit down, sit down, and they would bring me a seat so that I could be close to him, and then withdraw. This, I supposed, comprised the great purpose and labour of what it meant to be a spirit bride: abiding, remaining, in the confected hairstyle that would collapse if I wobbled my head, in the stiff dress that made it difficult to relax my spine or breathe too deeply. A stray sunbeam illuminated the dust as it settled on the photograph; I would waver about whether to clean it with my skirt hem, then decide that doing so might rupture some kind of order beyond my understanding.
Have your recurring dreams gone? I would ask my mother-in-law, who stood watching from the far corner, saying nothing.
Yes, she would reply from the shadows, making it clear within the space of a single syllable, that the continued resolution of this suffering—hers and my husband’s both—was dependent upon the faithful execution of my duties.
Was something supposed to happen? Was something already happening, beyond my perception, on another plane of existence? But I felt nothing and never would in all my years of spirit bridehood, only the honey-slow passage of second upon second, accreting like dirt or like dust but never to be wiped away. When I shut my eyes during those sessions that seemed both airless and out of time, I imagined my spirit husband as he appeared in the dream that had started it all, only not in his parents’ bedroom but lingering just outside in the hallway, keeping his own kind of watch. Our marriage, I saw now, had given him no lasting peace; it had merely locked us both in a kind of protracted tangle of mutual waiting.
I saw you, my mother-in-law would sometimes say, out of the blue. At the orchestra recital. Walking home from school I saw you. Playing with your dog in the park. Little comments, with no tether to time—did she see me yesterday or five years before?—that made me feel sharply observed, that made me wonder if the conversation with my father that had led to my marriage had not been the result of an unexpected emotional overboil on her part but a carefully choreographed stratagem. Or else, still standing apart, she would instruct me: Show your ring, and I would hold up my hand and twist it so that the silver band caught the light and played in reflected flashes across the protective glass of the photograph.
*
I went away for my studies, but whenever I returned home to visit, I would go over to my in-laws’ the day after my arrival. Often, beforehand, I would print out photographs of my current life so that I could lay them out on the dining room table like a hand of cards waiting for its player. My in-laws liked to see them like this, big, tactile, so they could slide them around, making and breaking stories and in that way, somehow, involving themselves in the action.
By the time I graduated, my own parents had divorced and my mother had moved to another city to be with her new lover. My father, disconsolate, would pace around what had once been their home in an exaggerated performance of his own uselessness. An important part of his sense of being a man was tied to not knowing certain things and making sure that others knew he didn’t know them. He would call and complain about tasks he couldn’t complete, objects he couldn’t find, the sad and putrid little meals he had scraped together for himself. He would work himself almost into tears. I doubt if he would have put on this act if I were a son instead of a daughter. The calls came at odd hours: sometimes, in the strained attention of his silences, I suspected that he was attempting to ascertain whether I had a man with me. Usually our conversations would end with me agreeing to go over to his apartment the next day to put the instruments of his life in order. As I peeled eggs or cleaned the stove, he would lay down whatever he was working on and observe my movements, not so as to learn them but merely to look. I think he derived great satisfaction from seeing what a competent person he had created.
You should get a spirit bride, I told my father once, but he didn’t appreciate the joke.
In the morning, I would do housework for my father, and sometime in the late afternoon I would call into my in-laws. I would buy the unpleasant bread I knew my mother-in-law liked, which had the taste and texture of cooked rice smushed together into a loaf, or else I would bring a few flowers. What a good daughter you are, the wife would say when she greeted me at the door, and I never was sure if she meant towards my father or towards them. I wondered what kind of a son my husband would be if he were alive, a good one or a bad one. Now that he was dead, all badness was ruled out: he could be perfect, he was perfected.
My mother-in-law had gallbladder problems that greatly circumscribed her choice of meals. When I came for lunch, she usually served a clear broth, or else a salad of grated carrots and pale festoons of iceberg lettuce. Her overlarge glasses made her already-watery eyes look full of tears, and it would take me several minutes to calibrate myself to the fact that I hadn’t walked in on the middle of a personal tragedy. My in-laws would ask me about my work, about my parents. They would discuss their health. When his wife was out of the room my father-in-law would surreptitiously pass me a sheaf of bills in a pale blue envelope. My attempts at refusals were never successful. I would use this money to buy my father groceries at the vegetable shop or to pay for his shirts to be cleaned or for a maid to come round the following week so I wouldn’t have to. If there was anything left over I would leave it for him by the key dish before I left. I had long ago made it a rule never to use this money for myself; I considered it a dirty wage and would have been happier not to have to touch it with my fingers.
Towards evening my mother-in-law would bring out a platter of melon wedges stuck through with skewers, and we would eat them noisily. I was always struck by how few objects the two of them had in their home, by the oceans of space that flowed incongruously between sofa and television, between kitchen door and dining room table. It was as though they were preparing to move away and had only this last box’s worth of possessions to pack up before they left. These meagre things, this watery fruit, these desolate meals of soup or dry salad: I wondered how anyone could make a life out of so little substance. And yet they seemed to, my in-laws, they seemed strong enough and in decent health if not exactly vigorous. By the end of my visits the conversation would usually have run dry, but this seemed not to bother them; they were content simply to look at my face and smile, like flowers opening themselves towards the warmth of the sun.
After those visits, I would feel very tired and sad; usually I would not have the energy to return to my apartment across town and would end up sleeping at my father’s. I would go to bed without even having eaten a proper dinner and leave my father to reheat for himself whatever I had prepared that morning. My childhood bedroom possessed the purest darkness I have ever known: not even light enough to see my fingers, my sheets, and I would fall into sleep like a stone into water. Only in the morning could I resume the great business of living. I would give my father a harangue about his uselessness and he would cower a bit. And then I would leave.
*
It was true that my husband had loved me once, or had said he had, or had thought he had. We had dated, whatever that means at such a young age. Eleven we were, maybe twelve: and we would make self-conscious circuits around the narrow school courtyard for all to see, again and again, again and again, together. Or else I would be chatting with a group of my friends and he would stand a bit apart with his hands in his pockets, saying nothing but projecting somehow a proprietary air that I didn’t appreciate but couldn’t quite yet put a name to. Later we would walk around the park alone and he would lay his hand on my arm and then snatch it away, over and over, torn between wanting and not wanting to touch. He would go very red in the face; I would burn him, he would burn himself up. Eventually I got very tired of this and said, It’s enough, just like that, and walked home. And that was the end of it all.
But the September we were both thirteen, my husband died from an infection after swimming in a contaminated lake: some kind of rare bacterium had gotten into his ear canal and from there, over the course of a week, destroyed his brain. At first there was talk at our school of arranging a visit to say our goodbyes, but later it was decided that this would be too disturbing. One afternoon, towards the end, our teacher told us to pray for our classmate. Heathen that I was, I bowed my head and attempted to count the invisible little hairs on my knuckles while the others did whatever prayer entailed. Later I heard that this teacher had received a talking-to and was almost dismissed.
Somehow, in her years of passing me, noticing me, observing me, my mother-in-law had gathered the impression that I was a decent daughter and would make a decent wife. The image she and her husband had had of me when they asked my parents to make me a spirit bride must have been prepubescent and sweet. Softened as if by distance, the distance of the three stories between her balcony and the courtyard where my mother-in-law might once have watched me play and thought: nice girl. Did she know that her son and I had dated, if that was the word, a couple years before his death? Did she know how he had treated me—his touching and untouching—and was she at the root of it all? Something she had said, some idea she had planted in his brain about the wickedness of flesh? By the time my husband died, I would not even have called us friends, though indeed we once had been. Not long before he drew his final breath, I had been unable to do so much as muster a pretend prayer on his behalf; later, beyond the will of either one of us, I became his wife. Things as strange as that happen every day, and some even stranger.
*
After I returned from a visit to my in-laws, my boyfriend would usually spend the next few days going on about this spirit marriage of mine. Often these conversations took place while we were in bed together.
If we get married, he would say, only half-teasing, what are you going to tell his parents?
But we can’t, I would reply. I’m already married.
Not really.
I am. Despite everything I felt very protective of my spirit husband. I imagined the placid blue of the lake; I imagined him shivering in the shade after, digging drops of water out of his ear with the corner of a towel.
You don’t even wear the ring. This was true: I usually kept it in my spare change dish and only put it on for my visits.
Maybe I’ll start, then, I’d reply, and turn over, and remove his hand from wherever it lay resting on my body, and shut my eyes determinedly.
What exactly did my spirit marriage mean to me? I could spend many hours rolling this question back and forth, back and forth, the time fading away like colour from the sheets my father steadfastly refused to wash properly.
*
For the life of me I couldn’t understand what value my boyfriend saw in getting married. To me my right to marriage was like a one-cent coin: something I’d happily cast into a pond but would never expend the effort to bend over and recover if dropped. But with him it was different. He was a carpenter; he enjoyed things that proceeded along carefully sequenced steps, that built to something. That had their end. It was not long before what had begun sarcastically—What will happen to your spirit husband when the two of us get hitched?—metastasized into seriousness. The third time he raised the topic, I began to have the feeling that this was the start of a wedge.
Sometimes my boyfriend joked that he was my secret lover or that one day my husband would come home early and catch us in the act. Other times––and this I completely understood––he seemed to think that my allegiance to my spirit marriage was a way out of addressing our own relationship.
If I were in your position, I would say to him when he was in one of these moods, pronouncing the words very slowly, I would feel exactly the same way, and rather than impressing and amazing him with my even-handed empathy, this response was more or less guaranteed to infuriate.
With a spirit husband you can have no arguments.
More than once I was visited by a perverse thought: that if I ever left my spirit husband my boyfriend would fall out of love with me, whether quickly or slowly, and that he would realize too late that the unseen tether that bound us to each other was the threat of another man’s affections, even a dead one. The challenge of it.
You have to admit the whole thing’s very odd, my boyfriend would say, as though this amounted to some kind of checkmate.
I admitted this freely.
*
Every year on my husband’s birthday his parents would ask me to visit the graveyard with them. We did not wear black: this was a joyful event, supposedly, and if his parents cried, they cried while smiling. My mother-in-law would bend down and with her fingernail scrape dirt and dust out of the incised grooves of the letters on his gravestone while her husband and I got rid of any dead leaves on the plot. Often on these visits there were still-fresh flowers on the grave, or a little mound of wax fruit. I wondered how often my husband’s parents visited when I wasn’t around. I didn’t know anything about the religious habits of my in-laws: I only know that they believed in spirit marriage, and in their son, and in me.
The cemetery was only sporadically maintained by its caretaker, and raking the long grass gave me the eerie feeling of running my fingers through a child’s hair. Or my mother-in-law’s, which was so thin that when the wind blew, I could see down to her scalp. On the walk back to the car, I’d try my best not to look at her as we talked, pretending I was deep in contemplation.
And I did have things to think about. For instance, I reflected on whether I loved my spirit husband. No, what I felt was more akin to something one might feel towards a wounded animal, a darling pet, the kind of emotion appropriately held for a lower form of life or no life at all. It was a kindly pity that was anathema to love among equals.
After these visits we would return to my in-laws’ home for a typically dour luncheon: a yellowish chicken broth, steamed potatoes, maybe a bit of shredded whitefish on a good year. By this point, as a rule, we would have long since run out of things to say to each other and lapsed into silence, and if I found these afternoons painful in the extreme, I had also learned, eventually, how to bear them. This was simply what it meant to be an adult, what it meant to be a spirit bride, and so I saw in my ability to withstand these social tortures a source of pride and even honour. My father never joined us, on these or any other occasions; indeed, he seemed never to interact with my in-laws at all beyond a cursory hello when passing in the hallway. Apart from the wedding itself, there was no sense that we were, we had become, one family. When I departed, my in-laws would not accompany me but would stand on the other side of their threshold waving goodbye as I walked the ten steps from their door to my childhood home. Crossing the bridge from death into life, or life into death, whichever.
*
Once and only once did I raise the possibility of a change to our arrangement, if you could call it that: when a colleague informed me there were rumours that I was being considered for a stint at a branch office in another city. A mark, he had said, of our bosses’ confidence in my abilities. Six months, they were apparently saying, though probably actually a year, and probably actually even more than that—a permanent change, in other words, provided I wanted it and was wanted in return.
Nothing, they stressed, had been decided yet. All the same, the sound of the work, the novelty of it, intrigued me. But I was more than a little concerned about how my in-laws would take the news; they struck me, both husband and wife, as people who could hardly weather those kinds of shocks. My time away for college had been bearable, permissible. But in the years since I’d graduated my in-laws had made it clear, in their inarticulate yet forceful way, that now that I had returned, they expected me to remain. It would be best, I thought, to bring the matter up only if things reached a point of clarity. My boyfriend let it be known that he felt differently.
Whether you decide to take the job or not, he said, run it past them. Their reactions will be illuminating. Uncharacteristically, I decided to take his advice.
The weekend after I first heard about the potential job offer, I went to see my father, and when I had finished my futile attempt to impart the rudiments of existence to him I knocked on my in-laws’ door.
My husband’s mother could tolerate neither milk nor sugar nor anything with caffeine, and so what they drank in the afternoons, in place of proper tea, were fruit infusions, garishly artificial in hue and more or less devoid of flavour no matter how long they steeped. It was as I was preparing one of these concoctions for us, in any case, that I delivered the news: There’s the possibility of a position opening up at another one of our regional offices, I called to my in-laws from the kitchen, and if it comes through, I think I might take it.
Very swift, very firm, came a voice from the kitchen: You can’t leave. I looked up to see that my in-laws were staring at me through the doorway, their bodies and facial expressions oddly mirrored as they sat across from each other, the same pursed lips, the same slight tilt of the head. And though it was undoubtedly my mother-in-law who had spoken those words, somehow I had the sense that they had come from two bodies at once, like a double flute whose twin pipes fed into a single mouthpiece. Yet when I brought the tray with our cups at last to the table my in-laws did not continue in this vein but moved on to some other topic, as though the matter had already been more than adequately resolved by this proclamation; we discussed the coming rains, and some repairs they had done to their plumbing, until even these strained topics were exhausted and there was nothing to do but sip at our drinks. Later, when I opened the blue envelope my father-in-law had given me, I saw that it contained twice the amount of money as usual.
You can’t leave. The more I thought about my mother-in-law’s words, the more they felt less like a plea than a command. I spent the night at my father’s, and when I returned home the next morning my boyfriend was there to greet me. I told him the whole story, down to the horrible tea we had drunk and drunk in lieu of speaking, and down to my in-laws’ eerie double-voiced interdiction: You can’t leave.
Isn’t that funny? I asked him.
No, he replied. It’s not funny at all.
My boyfriend took me by the shoulders and leaned in close like parents do when they need to impress something upon a small child. His eyes were alive with a light I had never seen in them before.
I am begging you, he said, to live.
My boyfriend could never be a spirit husband, I reflected as I held his gaze measure for measure; he could never be the type. No, no, I thought, luxuriating in my chosenness, it had not been chance at all that I had been made a bride—my in-laws had seen something in me, some trait or capacity absent in other people, my steadfastness, my great forbearance.
The rumour of the job offer ultimately came to nothing, but the damage to my relationship with my boyfriend was done. Because from that moment onward there was no more joking between us. Things deteriorated, or rather they continued down the track they had always been on, whose trajectory I was only now able to perceive. One evening, with a wild expression on his face, he asked if anything had ever happened between my husband and me before his death. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be furious: What a question! Not even a kiss, not even the meagrest shadow of a kiss; how dirty that boy had made me feel when he was still alive, not by anything we did but by his refusal almost even to contemplate doing anything with me, hand on, hand off, hand on, hand off, as if I were a thing that could pollute him entirely. On one level all of this felt so unreal, things that had happened in another era and to another person, things, really, that had not happened. And yet against the gauziness of it all was weighed the blunt fact of the silver ring in the coin dish along whose curve was mapped the arc of my life.
*
My boyfriend accepted more or less without protest the condition I laid down when I said I would introduce him to my in-laws: that he not disclose the nature of our relationship. I think I had really worn him down by that point, or else he realized, probably wisely, that having won such a concession it was better not to force the point any further.
But it was clear that he interpreted this as a kind of victory. In the week leading up to the dinner party, I would come home and find bridal magazines or pamphlets for wedding venues sprawled across the coffee table, the kitchen counter, the sofa. It was absurd; he hadn’t even proposed, and yet he was acting like our engagement was a fait accompli. I never acknowledged these little displays, simply walked past them and into the bedroom where I could consider alone the question of how best to stage manage our upcoming visit.
Around this time, too, I remember, my boyfriend began developing a new line of attack: Why did your parents let you go? he would ask me. Other times: But why did they give you away? To his way of thinking it was very simple: they should have refused the request unequivocally and without delay. It was a framing I had frankly never considered. The answers I formulated, doubtless laboured and inelegant in their phrasing, in any case never satisfied him: that that was simply what one did for another person, giving, giving of oneself. Except that they did not give of themselves, my parents, but gave rather of their one and only child.
On the evening of the dinner party, my boyfriend dressed, I noticed, in an outfit I’d never seen before: a chunky knit, vaguely dad-ish sweater paired with beige pleated slacks. Clothes that, while nice enough, seemed almost consciously outmoded compared to what he usually wore, either his flannel workshirts or the breezier things he wore on his off hours. As though we were travelling back in time, as though with the step over the threshold we were also stepping back into our childhood, a time before we knew each other, a time even before I was married, so that he could reset, at last, the pieces.
My in-laws, for their part, looked much as they always had. They did not talk much to my boyfriend, or my friend, as I called him in their presence, merely cast long silent glances his way that were vaguely admiring—for who can say that my boyfriend in those days was not beautiful?—without ever seeming particularly curious about this guest of theirs. To draw out the thread of conversation a bit I suggested that we play dominoes until the vegetables that would comprise our horrible dinner had finished boiling to death. At one point, during our game, my mother-in-law said that dominoes could be used to speak to the dead, a comment that had no prelude and which received no verbal response from anyone at the table.
We did not touch all throughout that evening, my boyfriend and I. Only via the attenuating medium of the domino tile, as we reached for the same piece while drawing our starting six, did we touch. When my mother-in-law announced that dinner was almost served, I went to the bathroom to wash my hands, and as I opened the door, I saw that my boyfriend was waiting for me just outside. I love you, he said, only rather than sounding ardent his voice seemed merely sad. I looked down the hallway towards the kitchen where my in-laws were just—just—out of earshot; I looked at my boyfriend in his dopey sweater from some decade past. And I said nothing in return. My husband had told me the same thing once, many years before, and like my boyfriend now his voice had been shot through not with passion but with pain. Never, never would I be able to make someone feel as intensely as I made my husband-to-be feel then, I thought, that boy who could not even bear to rest his hand on the naked flesh of my arm. My boyfriend and I were no longer capable, at our age, of such intensities. And I moved to squeeze past him, and I proceeded down the hall towards the dining table.
I had really thought that the presence of a new face would enliven them a bit, but even over dinner my in-laws were mostly content to sit and smile in silence. Despite myself I felt a bit of proprietary embarrassment: had their capacity for flowing speech atrophied as much as that? Surely, they had not always been this way. During my childhood, at least, I don’t remember ever finding them particularly strange. But it didn’t matter much, because my boyfriend proved remarkably capable of leading the conversational charge himself. As he chatted away, making this or that blandly complimentary observation about their apartment (half bare), their view (the same as my father’s only shifted a few feet over), the few items of wooden furniture that were present (this despite the fact that his interlocutors had demonstrated approximately zero interest in his carpentry skills when he’d mentioned them over dominoes), I found my mind wandering. When my concentration snapped back to the present again, I realized with a certain sense of horror that without much in the way of delicacy my boyfriend had somehow brought the subject around to my husband, asking questions that my in-laws proved able to answer with a surprising evenness and lack of emotion.
Tell me about the dream you had, my boyfriend said to my mother-in-law at one point, although I had given him the contours of the story many times by now.
I walked into my bedroom to see that all the furniture had gone, she began, and in the far corner, where my dresser usually stood, there was my son, all curled up. I remember thinking: he is so small. He was still in his swimsuit, still wet from the lake, you know—here I expected her to waver, to break off, but she continued. And when he lifted his face from his knees, I saw that he’d been crying. His tears ran into the damp from his swim, but I could tell. And then he spoke to me and said that being dead was unbearably lonely, that he had no one where he was.
But did he actually say that he wanted a spirit bride as such?
She thought for a minute. I don’t think he ever used those words, no.
So how did you know that that was what was needed?
My mother-in-law seemed quite unperturbed by the accusatory tone of the question. It was just very clear that that was the perfect solution. And looked in my direction with beatific warmth.
The expression on my boyfriend’s face as he turned to me, meanwhile, was that of a prosecutor who had succeeded in pulling a particularly damning statement out of a hostile witness’s throat. But my in-laws seemed not to catch this smug look of his, and when my mother-in-law excused herself to go to the bathroom, my father-in-law took the opportunity to go over to his desk and take out one of his special blue envelopes. I did not open it when he laid it next to my plate, but it would have been obvious to even the most dimwitted of observers what it contained.
It was true that I had never told my boyfriend about the payments, although I insist on my honour that there was nothing insidious behind this omission. I had always given the money to my father, had never kept it; if I didn’t mention my wage, it was because I never truly considered it mine. But of course, it was undeniable how it looked now. And though I refused steadfastly to turn my head, I could see in my peripheral vision that beneath the shock and the sanctimony my boyfriend was feeling in that moment, in fact he was unimaginably elated by this revelation, brought almost to physical excitement by each new salacious detail turned up that evening that had been beyond even his wildest and most irate imaginings. I also sensed and in fact knew, as he shifted in his seat impatiently, that he had by this point gone beyond merely considering whether to reveal the fact that we were dating and was now only debating when best to deploy this little morsel of information for maximum effect. This was why I decided to pre-empt him.
The living room looks just like it did on the day we got married, I said once my mother-in-law had returned to her seat.
It’s true, said my father-in-law, looking around as though he was just waking to consciousness of where he was. We haven’t changed things much in all these years. Move the dining chairs and there you’d have it, more or less.
And the photo and everything, still there.
Yes, yes.
The kind of talk that was completely symptomatic of our usual airless conversations. Except that it was then that I did a thing I’d never done before, not even on my wedding day. I crossed the room to where the chair sat with the framed photo of my husband, bent down, and, smoothing my skirt with one hand and holding my blouse top with the other, kissed the glass just over where his lips were.
Walking back to the table, I gave my boyfriend the most beautiful, the most radiant smile I had ever given anyone before that point or have ever since.
When I looked up to gauge my in-laws’ reactions, there was no other way to say it except that they were overjoyed. My mother-in-law had an expression of open-mouthed awe; her husband, for his part, seemed to be fighting back tears. I did not know what would happen next. It seemed that nothing could or would, that after this there was no way in which time could in any meaningful sense progress. I touched my finger to my mouth: the glass of the picture frame must never have been cleaned in all the years since I first began visiting as a teenager, and now the dust of so many years had glued itself to my lipstick. Dust that must at least in part have been comprised of the skin of my in-laws, of my own skin, from the days of my youth now gone. Oh my husband, I thought, my poor spirit husband, whatever they said about him I knew the true cause of his death: because how could one survive in an environment like this, among these people? The thought occurred to me that they would never die, my in-laws, that they would live always, feeding, like a plant feeds on air, upon what remained of my youth and above all upon the perpetual youth of their son whose photograph still sat on the chair, his face now all but obliterated by the smudge of my too-late kiss. For this above all else was their true and real homeland, more than the possession-less apartment in which we sat, more even than the kingdom of God: the infinity and ever-flowering of this very moment.
