We left Seattle for this place where we were to start a family, where we were to be at peace, where we were to find relief from our terrors and our passions. But one day I returned home to find the house empty, and Tess replaced by a slip of paper.
And now here I am, a man alone in the woods writing to Tess and to Claire, to my mother and father. To you.
I am trying to hang on to order, to believe in it, but now that I have told you everything, I’m afraid I’m beginning to spin away into some foreign and frightening land.
I can feel the frame shuddering.
I am rapidly approaching the present.
I have come to the end and she has not returned and I do not know what to do next.
What should I do? Tell me, please.
Now that I have realized our nation’s great dream. Now that I have pulled myself up by my bootstraps and worked hard and made of my life what I could. Now that I have money and quiet and a good place to live, what do I do?
What do I do if the love of my life has gone, and my parents are dead, and my sister has shunned me, and my friends have dissolved?
What do I do if I have come to the end of the story and there’s nothing else to tell, what do I do next?
There is no way to change the will of others.
The whole thing is falling to pieces.
This story, this eulogy, this letter, this prayer. The foundation, the frame.
I am running out of energy. I am running out of faith. I can no longer understand the system. The logic is faulty.
What good are more anecdotes, more stories of our great love?
One more.
I will tell you one more. I promise it’ll be brief. And then I’ll let you be.
Just the recollection of a few hours of a single day.
We were in this house. A wild storm was blowing through. We were trapped inside. We were drinking. We were listening to music.
Tess closed her eyes and began to count backwards from fifty.
“Hide,” she said.
I was in the entryway closet where we kept our coats. She was calling to me, singing my names, and I was laughing from cabin fever or love or bourbon or joy and I couldn’t stop. Soon she yanked the door open, and when she saw me there giggling like a little boy, she began to laugh and tackled me to the floor and we kept on like that until we had no more left. There were boots and shoes and sandals all around us. She reached up and pulled my father’s old down parka from its hanger and covered us with it. Her hand above us on the sleeve. I pulled the door closed. The wind and rain and thunder were shaking the house.
We stayed on the floor for hours, breathing, bundled in the pitch dark listening to the storm.