Ghost Chapters From The Green Books, #5
These are the logs I kept after my husband died. They may be included in the book I am writing as a gift for him. When I slip his book into his great grandfathers bookcase the gift will be delivered.
Outside In, 4/12/2020
I’m searching for where you have gone, Nicholas. Sirens wail every day in East Hampton now. The country has lost twenty thousand souls since you left, and I wake up desperately needing to tell you my toenails are so long that they hurt under my heavy blankets. There is no reason to leave bed at all this Easter Sunday. Ants run on the kitchen counter. They cluster on the one bare spot on the apple in the clear bowl on top of the fridge. They form a delicate line from the white porcelain base to the rim of the toilet. They are searching too, but do not tell me for what. This is bullshit. Days and weeks go by, and every day you are still not here.
I know if you could be anywhere it would be your garden. Most days I can’t find the courage to venture out because the leaves are not raked from the flower beds, and weeds are springing up. Each tiny head of a spring flower goes in like a knife. Today I open the door to your shed to take my tree basket out, and I see evidence of your hands. Garden tools neatly stowed over the winter, hoses coiled, wire tomato cages stacked, green plastic plant buckets nestled inside of one another with your trowels and stiff wax gloves sitting inside. Even you garden shoes, the stinky beige Keds, have been placed by your hands there. As a prayer. As if there was going to be another Spring.
I wrestle the great egg-shaped basket out of the shed door. I throw it down and hug it like a child. I scream, not caring what the neighbors think. I stand on the rickety wooden bench and heft the basket onto my shoulder in order to hang it from it’s chain hook on the branch. I have the will to at least hang the tree basket on Easter Sunday. One thing at least has been accomplished!
I visit your office. The quietest place. I sit in the chair across from yours and I listen. I ring the black chime that Dorothy gave me, in case you are in the neighborhood to hear the call, hitting it lightly three times with the wooden stick with the black ball at the tip. I take your gold Persephone coin from where it sits on red velvet at the bottom of the God box you made for me before we knew we were in love. I put my nose in and inhale the scent you placed there before I close the lid, and I sit in the fullness of your absence and silence.
The box is the first thing you ever made for me. What on earth were you thinking making me this as a married man? You covered my perfectly square box in gold and white hand-painted paper. You aded pieces from your large found-metal collection, brass filigree V’s, four metal feet, and short rusting brass nails driven into the lid so that the spikes poke through on the inside. Code. You lined it in red velvet with a pearl in the bottom corner. And it is still generously sprinkled with your cologne. Were you giving me the full explanation of all of your aspects in code? Soft and spiky, decadent and frugal at the same time?
Last night the full moon out of your office window could not be ignored - swollen, yellow, and bouncing off the peak of the Dayton’s barn in the distance. I put on my coat and head across the back lawn to see if you are there. Of course you are - in the silence, in the mooncast of light coming through the lace of the branches of the Katsura tree, and everywhere else underfoot in the stumbling dark.
When I turn to go back inside I see your black papier mache crow sitting on the sill of your office window, silhouetted in the gold square of lamplight. Crow was my first real gift to you, handmade by a woman in Bulgaria. In my rented room on Underwood Drive we made a Christmas tree on the bedroom wall out of string lights, and hung it with all of your childhood ornaments. We didn’t hear the delivery man knock so you didn’t get to open your gift on Christmas morning. You begged to know what it was, but how could I explain the irony of a bird having flown half way across the world, only to be stopped by a sliding glass door?
Standing outside with the moon behind me looking in I can imagine that you are inside where the light is. It’s easy. I do it every day. Whichever room I’m in is the one you’re not. I step through the door and into that square of light, and my reflection is in the window now from the inside of the glass. Standing in the absence where I had just looked for you, I understand a thing way past words. There is nowhere to look. It is going to be me that I will find whenever I go looking for where you are hidden.