Your ashes were returned to me in a heavy-gauge black plastic box whose lid would not yield to the pressure of fingers but had to be pried open with a knife. Inside: a plastic bag bearing a few pounds of dust and grit and a little metal coin with the number 7759D stamped on it. The number corresponded to the one on official crematory documents, so I would be assured of having received the correct remains.

I poured the ashes out into a bowl and looked at them. Dug my hand into what was left of you. It came out gray. I licked my palm, and then I had taken some of you inside me.

What I wanted was to sit with my bowl and a spoon and eat you up, grind what was left between my teeth.

What I did was I borrowed Mariette’s car, put the bowl in the passenger seat, and drove to the reservoir where we used to feed the ducks. I stood for a while on the bank and then tipped the bowl into the dark water. The ducks, expecting bread, plunged after the sinking crumbs. They surfaced, disappointed, but dove again and again.

Back home, I threw out the box, but 1 kept the little coin. Currency minted for the dead, the words Rockwood Cemetery in raised letters in a circle around the number. When I went back to college I had it in my pocket and I would take it out sometimes and look at it. There was a little hole punched in the coin, as if it were a charm, part of a necklace.

Yesterday when I went to return a bracelet to my jewelry box, I saw it there, 7759D. 1 picked it up, looked at it for the first time in years. Touched my tongue to it, taste of metal. 1 thought of that time 1 looked up from the breakfast table and saw you through the window, walking toward the darkroom. It was February and the night’s rain had frozen, covering the driveway with ice. You slipped just outside the door to the studio, you slipped and hit your head on the corner of the cement steps. I could see, as you stood, the blood on your temple. It was the only bright color in the gray winter sun.

You put up your hand and touched your head and then you looked at it, so redon your fingers, as if you also were surprised by such frank evidence of your vulnerability.

I used to think I wanted you to die, but after that morning, as I stood up from the table, my throat closing with fear, I realized that nothing frightened me more than the idea of losing you.