 This story is part of a new web feature: the calendar Pinup Series. We'll be bringing you great new work online each month. —The Eds. Driving
by Katherin Nolte
They were found, pink-skinned, a day later. The one I loved in bed. The one I also loved in a rocking chair, wooden cane in his lap.
“I’m securing the house,” the detective said.
I could hear the string of bells tied to the front door.
“I know where you are,” I wanted to tell him. “You’re in the front hallway. I hear the bells. I know exactly where you are.” But instead of speaking I was silent, trapped in an apartment a hundred miles away, cradling an indifferent phone.
* * * * *
I had called on Tuesday, but there was no answer. Ring after ring after ring. I knew then, but I tried to talk myself out of it. Do not think the worst, I told myself, because I knew what the worst was.
When I couldn’t reach them on Wednesday, I called the phone company. Maybe, I wondered, something was wrong with the line? And then I called the police. I thought I’d have to explain myself. I rehearsed in my mind exactly what I would say. They’re old. They get confused. One has bad knees. The other can’t hear. But the police needed no persuading.
“Would you like us to do an elderly check?” the operator asked.
As if it were routine procedure. As if the elderly routinely needed to be checked.
* * * * *
The next day, the local news showed a video of paramedics wheeling two covered bodies from the house.
I could see the red geraniums on the porch. I could see the steps on which, eighteen months old, I’d bent over in my Easter dress and flashed a pair of frilly white underpants at the 8-millimeter camera.
The ones I loved had made the news.
Filmed by a cameraman who knew them as nothing more than shapes under a white sheet, things that no longer were, being wheeled away on a gurney.
An ignorant cameraman put them on TV. Look, everyone, look what I saw.
How I wished I could call and tell them.
* * * * *
On Thursday, I went to the house, the house they’d built, and saw it—the rooms I’d stood in for fifty years—for the first time.
Everything was smaller. The whole world—in the blinking of an eye, in the forgetting of a key—had shrunk.
* * * * *
There were rumors. Suicide was whispered. Friends and acquaintances, old men and women, hard of hearing and bad-kneed themselves, wondered.
I did not wonder.
I found a table set for dinner, a load of towels, still wet, in the washing machine. The one I loved had started a letter:
Dear Olivia,
I’m writing a letter to knock the cobwebs out of your mailbox! August has been an uneventful month. There was a terrible storm last week and we were without power one evening for four hours. We couldn’t even watch the evening news. Well
Well.
Here was a life that had been interrupted. No suicide, just death’s ever-vigilant net.
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