52

Rita, Now

A woodpecker. A chiseling sound. Beak on bark. Or skull. But Rita can’t see the bird. She can’t see anything. Someone’s turned the stars out. It’s dark in there. Robbie’s not bothered by it. He can read the silhouette of the trees at night like an Ordnance Survey map under an Anglepoise lamp. Robbie knows where he is on a path by the timbre of the crunch beneath his soles. Rita needs Robbie. She fumbles around, arms outstretched, like blindman’s buff, looking for him, like a slipped thought. Then she remembers: Robbie’s not there. Robbie’s dead. She’s alone. She’s been alone for ten years now. And if she does get out of this forest, she will still be alone, so she doesn’t need to escape, does she? She can stay there. Peacefully disintegrating. Lie down on the soft mattress of earth while the woodpecker pecks and the dry leaves spin from the sky. Easier like this.

Rita’s eyelashes knit together, sealing the darkness inside. A hand grabs hers. She tries to shake it away—she’s busy dying here!—but it’s strong as a carpenter’s clamp. She can feel its calluses, the thickened pad of skin under the wedding ring, the small hard scars from slipped hammers and nails, and she can hear Robbie’s voice, Robbie who is not there, whom she misses like a severed limb, Robbie, saying, “You damn well don’t give up, Rita Murphy. You’re needed.” Then something about life having the structure of a tree—concentric annual rings, stitched through by radial lines—as he rushes her through the shadows toward the tiniest chink of blue-white light, his hand gripping tighter, and then, out of the silence, a voice saying, “Rita? Rita, blink if you can you hear me.”