I sit on Olive’s front stoop and gaze down the bluff road. The moon has faded, exhausted like the rest of us. My throat is raw, my chest choked with smoke and a sadness I can’t cough away. Stop that, Daddy used to say when I was little, because coughing reminded him of Mama. I wonder if he’d scold me now.
In the distance the wreck still steams, pink in the dawn light. The sheriff is down there now and Dr. Nesbitt and some other folks. But not me.
Olive has given me a glass of water, a damp washrag, and a pillow to sit on. She and Mrs. Nesbitt are resting inside. Except for the long telephone conversation I had summoning Dr. Nesbitt and the sheriff from the Futters, I have hardly spoken since we arrived here. I can’t even think. I don’t want to.
I hear men’s voices and car doors slamming. The county car snakes this way. I cover my face. It means there will have to be talk—descriptions, explanations, plans. Tears run under my fingers, in my mouth, down my neck. My hankie is soaked. I tilt my head and blot my face against the collar of my robe.
Mrs. Nesbitt and Olive come to the door when Dr. Nesbitt and the sheriff get out of the car. I look up, desperate to see Marie with them.
She is not.
Dr. Nesbitt hugs his mother a long while, then the older ladies go inside. He sits beside me on the step. His eyes are rimmed red, his shirt dirty and stuck to his back. He smoothes away a soggy curl matted to my cheek and looks at me with such concern and respect that I straighten my shoulders a bit and raise my chin.
We go inside to Olive’s round breakfast table. The sheriff rubs his forehead, as though enough massage will revive his frayed mind. His fingernails are grimy, his cuffs stained dark. Olive brings a pitcher of lemonade that is surprisingly sweet and cold. I pour it carefully, the same amount in each glass.
The sheriff clears his throat, begins slowly. “Cecil was thrown from the car before it exploded.”
My heart skips. Mrs. Nesbitt looks stricken.
“He did not survive, if that concerns you. But we were able to make certain assumptions based on evidence.”
I watch a sunbeam spread across Olive’s dingy carpet. I want it to crawl into my lap.
“The car trunk was full of liquor bottles—thus the series of smaller explosions you described over the telephone. But Mr. Deets’s fatal driving maneuvers were a result of more than moonshine. The deceased, in addition to the predictable injuries, was covered with bite marks on his arms and hands, even his neck.”
“Marie,” I whisper.
Dr. Nesbitt shakes his head. “She was a hobo dog at heart, no stranger to the rougher side.”
The sheriff slides paperwork in front of him. “I’m sorry, Avery, but I need the certificate, if you could…”
Dr. Nesbitt fills in the form: Missouri Bureau of Vital Statistics Standard Certificate of Death. His handwriting is calming to watch. He fills in the date—Sept 24, 1926—then turns to the sheriff. “Lowell, I don’t know this information—the name of Cecil’s father, his mother’s birthplace.”
I look off. Never once have I considered his having parents. What must they have been like? How do you raise a Cecil?
“Why, I just imagined he crawled out of a flaming hole in the ground,” Olive says, draining her lemonade. “And tonight, thank God, he crawled back into the inferno.”
We shift in our chairs. Dr. Nesbitt clears his throat, swallows, and proceeds to the “Medical Particulars” section. On the line that begins “I hereby certify,” he prints:
“Deader ’n hell,” the sheriff remarks with a sigh.
“Beautifully put,” Olive says as the officer folds the form into his pocket. After he leaves she remarks, “Cecil could put two and two together. He’d been stalking all of us since Dot left. He knew that when the Sheriff and Avery were at Newt’s, he could come hunting her.”
Olive wipes her mouth with a gray hankie. “Demonic doesn’t mean dumb.” She looks from Dr. Nesbitt to his mother to me and proceeds cautiously with her next remark. “And dead doesn’t always mean gone.”
“Oh no, Olive!” I say. “Cecil is gone.”
“But the dog… ,” Olive says, “is invisible now. Not gone.”
Mrs. Nesbitt sighs, her voice weary. “Forgive me, Olive, but I can’t hear about your dog problems right now.”
“I am not speaking of my dog difficulties. I am telling you that Marie is not gone unless you make her so.” There is fierceness and kindness in Olive’s face. “Dead and gone versus a spirit—there is a difference. It’s a choice we make with loved ones who’ve passed.”
Olive looks toward the door and smiles slightly, as though she has seen Marie trot through it.
I climb from our car and walk across the yard determined to avoid the broken liquor bottle, the ruts and tracks, the flashlight left on the porch. But of course I do look at them and, hardest of all, the moment I step in my room I stare at Marie’s lumpy blue blanket on the floor. My mind flashes to Atchison, to Daddy’s slippers—how they also held his shape.
My sheets and pillow are a rumpled mess. I grab Rosie and sit on the rug by Marie’s bed. There’s dog hair and the curve of her back pressed in it. I fill my nose with her scent.
Everything is so still, so unbearably quiet and empty. My stomach knots around the raw pain of missing her. I think of her stumpy tail, her habit of getting stepped on, her fierce love and protection of us.
“Marie?” I whisper. “Are you all right?”
I sit a while, watch my goddesses watching me. I smell coffee brewing, hear the telephone ring for the third time since we’ve been home.
I run my finger around the blanket’s bound edge. “I love you.”
My back aches. I stand and stretch, not knowing what to do with myself. By the wall a tiny movement catches my eye. I bend down. A furry, silver-brown spider is building her web between my bedpost and the window. It’s in an odd spot and the design isn’t perfect. The tiny silk ropes are crooked. It is more a loopy oval than a circle, but the spider just keeps spinning back and forth as naturally as can be, knitting her new home in the air.