There were disadvantages to having her own room at Twin Pines, loneliness being one of them. Ruth had never thought she’d miss the racket of the ventilator or the extra nurses coming and going, but ever since the night her roomie Tish was hurried out on a gurney, Ruth had found that the silence in the room was at times deafening, especially late at night. Isolation was always there, of course, it was woven into the very fabric of the universe, in the vast spaces between the heavenly bodies, despite their irresistible attraction to one another. So, too, this isolation was a fundamental aspect of the human condition, to be born alone and die alone. Ruth had felt it as a girl in Shelton, where she was an object of curiosity and suspicion to her classmates, and even to her parents. She’d known it in those early days at UW, her first time away from home, before she’d befriended Mandy and the other girls at Leary. She’d known it as a young mother at the little one-bedroom house on Roanoke, marooned at home all day long, even as her young children tugged at her apron for attention. And it had visited her, too, alone on the farm at the ages of thirty, and forty, and fifty.
Like most people with a knack for survival, Ruth had learned long ago that this unsettling sense of aloneness, of separateness, could be held at bay with companionship: a lover, a friend, a familiar face. Even the nearness of strangers could suffice to some extent. And when that connection wasn’t possible, Ruth tried to stay busy with her hands, journaling and gardening, cooking and cleaning. And when tasks failed to bring solace, poetry had served Ruth, comforting her in fits and starts, and in moments of clarity and sureness, it allayed her fears, if only temporarily.
However, bedridden in an aftercare facility, there was very little Ruth could do to ward off the loneliness.
God, but what a relief when Abe arrived for his daily visit like clockwork, conveying a dirty canvas shopping bag, no doubt full of magazines and newspapers and crosswords to help Ruth fill the hours.
“Brought fortifications,” he said.
“God bless you,” she said.
Time, Newsweek, yesterday’s Kitsap Sun, a half-finished puzzle book, but something else, too, something unexpected. Ruth recognized the leather-bound journal immediately. Where on earth had he dug it up? She held it to her nose and sniffed it, and instantly that April afternoon came rushing back, that second day of their vacation in 2000, the day she’d bought the journal at the little boutique, five blocks from the hotel, along with the beret and the scarf, both of which were long gone. But the journal survived, which in itself was not so surprising. To be sure, there were others ferreted away in the back of closets, in boxes in the garage, notebooks dating back as far as college. Notes, observations, aspirations. Bits of verse, whole poems, enough to fill several chapbooks.
“It was the only one I could find that still had blank pages,” Abe explained. “I almost drove to Paper Products to get a new one, then I remembered they closed ten years ago. Is it moldy, is that why you’re smelling it?”
“Where was it?”
“In a box in the attic.”
“What were you doing in the attic?”
“Good question,” he said. “I went up there with a flashlight looking for something, but by the time I fought through the cobwebs, I forgot what I was looking for. I found those glass votives you were looking for ten years ago, though.”
“You shouldn’t be climbing a ladder like that!”
“Fair enough,” he said. “But it was important.”
“So important that you forgot it.”
“Touché,” said Abe.
Ruth smelled the old journal again.
“We can dry that out if it’s moldy. I just thought you might want it.”
“It was sweet of you to bring it,” she said.
She smiled, acutely aware of the slight crookedness of her new smile, along with the attending ache in her jaw. As she clutched the journal, there was a slight welling in Ruth’s chest. That people think of us when we’re not around, that they go out of their way to do little things simply because they hope to please us, we sometimes take for granted. They may not always be matters of great inconvenience, these small acts of consideration, but they add up to a great deal.
Ruth opened the notebook arbitrarily, landing on two lines of verse, the beginnings of an unfinished poem:
Perhaps the sentiment was a little blundering, the language a little trite, but it had been true when Ruth wrote it nearly twenty-five years ago, and it was still true today.
“The heat gun!” Abe cried out, startling Ruth from her ruminations.
The exclamation was so arbitrary, so devoid of context, Ruth thought Abe was having one of his moments.
“The heat gun! I just got to thinking of your moldy notebook, and it hit me. That’s what I was digging around for up in the attic!”
“You really shouldn’t have been up there. You could fall and break your neck.”
“That corner in the basement, below the broken gutter,” he said. “You know, behind the washer, it’s waterlogged again, and it’s starting to attract the carpenter ants.”
“Mason is supposed to take care of the ants. That’s what we pay him for—pest control.”
“I forgot to tell him about it last Thursday. So, I figured I’d blast it for twenty minutes with the heat gun, problem solved. Well, last time I used the heat gun was up in the attic, under that eave, after that damn atmospheric river, or whatever they called it, back in two-thousand-whenever-it-was. I remember, because I’d plugged it into the extension cord, and it drew too much power and blew the damn breaker. I got so preoccupied with the breaker box, I never finished in the attic. Anyway, it’s up there, if you want me to dry out that notebook.”
It didn’t matter that his stories were uneventful and largely pointless, it was so good to hear his voice, good to feel his presence there.
After four hours sitting with Ruth at Twin Pines, then fighting traffic through Poulsbo on the way home, Abe finally arrived back at the farm in the late afternoon, where John Duncan had already called it quits for the day, leaving his tool belt slung over the new handrail, perhaps as a signal that he’d finally complete the ramp in the morning and clean up the mess he’d left from the demoed stairs. Abe navigated the construction cautiously on his way to the front door.
He should have asked John to let the dog out, for he soon discovered that Megs had peed in the kitchen again, poor girl, in the very same place as always, as close as she could possibly get to the back door. No sooner had Abe located her under the kitchen table than he heard the listless thud of her tail three times on the linoleum as she looked up dolefully at him.
“Aw, it’s okay, old girl,” said Abe. “C’mon, I’ll take you out back for a stretch and a pee. Then we can eat an early dinner, how does that sound?”
Eventually, he managed to coax her out from under the table, and she labored across the kitchen and out the back door, into the yard, where she immediately squatted to pee. When she was finished, she turned around again directly without so much as a nose to the ground or a sniff of the afternoon air, and labored up the steps one at a time.
In the kitchen, Abe heaped paper towels on the puddle, then dished out a can of the three-dollar organic grain-free chicken formula, but Megs exhibited little interest in it.
“C’mon, girl, you gotta eat.”
Megs approached the bowl dutifully and gave it a sniff.
“Attagirl,” said Abe, less than optimistic as he exited the kitchen.
Retiring to the living room, he lowered himself into his La-Z-Boy and reached for the remote, which felt heavier than usual. He almost didn’t turn on the TV, and having finally remembered, briefly considered retrieving the heat gun from the attic, but decided against it, heeding his wife’s mandate.
After five minutes of KOMO news, Megs ambled into the living room and lowered herself onto the braided rug at the foot of his chair, licking her lips twice and paying out a sigh.
Abe bent over and patted her on the head.
“That’s a good girl, Megsy. Your mama will be home soon,” he said. “That’ll cheer you up.”