The Breakfast Table

Scott stood at the top of the staircase with one hand locked around the banister hard enough to feel the grain of the wood pressing into his palm. The cottage below him glowed with a warm amber warmth that pulsed softly against the plaster walls, firelight or lamplight he could not be certain which, and from somewhere beneath those floorboards came the hiss and pop of fat in a hot iron skillet. He had not moved since waking. He was not entirely sure he had woken at all. Every instinct he possessed insisted that the house had been empty when he collapsed into bed, emptied by years and grief and the particular silence that follows when the people who gave a place its meaning are gone from it forever, and yet the sounds rising through the floor struck him with a recognition so precise and physical that it was less like hearing and more like being struck open.

It sounded like her voice. Not a resemblance to it, not some trick his sleeping mind had assembled from old memory the way grief sometimes conjured phantom sounds in unguarded moments. It was her voice exactly as he had known it across a dozen years of marriage, warm and unhurried, carrying that faint lilt she always had on cold mornings when she was pleased with something, and the sound of it hit him in the chest with the weight of something that had no right to exist in a world that had taken her from him three winters ago. He descended one careful step at a time, one hand trailing along the wall for balance, the other gripping the railing as though releasing it might allow the whole architecture of this impossible moment to collapse beneath him.

The staircase groaned beneath his weight exactly as it always had, every board announcing him in its own particular register, and still the activity in the kitchen below did not pause. Another sound drifted upward through the floor joists and the old wool of the walls, threaded between the crackle of the fire and the whisper of rain still trailing itself across the eaves. A child's laughter. High and bright and entirely without self-consciousness, carrying that characteristic small snort at the very peak of it that Scott recognized the way a man recognizes his own handwriting, something known in the body before the mind has time to intervene. He stopped on the fifth step from the bottom and pressed his free hand flat against the wall and stood there while the world performed its impossible mathematics around him.

Thomas's laugh. Exactly Thomas's laugh, down to the breathless recovery at the end when he had exhausted himself and was trying to remember how breathing worked. Scott had not heard it in three years. He had believed, in some deep and wordless part of himself, that he would never hear it again on this earth, that it belonged now to whatever place held the dead and was therefore as unreachable to him as the far side of a locked door for which no key existed. His vision went soft at the edges. He tightened his grip on the railing until he felt the wood flex under his fingers.

Clara's voice came again, drifting up from the kitchen with the easy authority of a woman entirely at home in her own morning.

"If you steal another piece before breakfast, young man, there will be none left for your father."

"But I'm helping taste it," Thomas protested, and the snort came again, helpless and bright.

The words moved through Scott like a current. He had heard that exact exchange before. Not once, not twice, but on a dozen ordinary mornings he had failed to properly catalogue at the time because ordinariness does not announce itself as precious until it is over. He knew the shape of that conversation the way he knew the sound of his own name, and hearing it now, in a house that should have contained only silence and himself, produced a sensation that was neither comfort nor horror but some third thing for which he had no word, a terrible tenderness that made it difficult to breathe. He descended the final steps and stood in the narrow entryway to the kitchen and looked into a room that had no business being what it was.

Morning light came weakly through the rain-streaked windows and lay itself across the floor in pale uneven patches. Bacon crackled in the iron skillet on the stovetop, the fat spitting softly against the pan. Clara stood at the stove with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and the faded blue apron tied at her waist, the one with the fraying edge along the left pocket that she had never gotten around to mending, the one he had seen on her body so many times that the sight of it now produced a grief and a relief so tangled together he could not have sorted them apart if given years to try. Thomas sat at the small table, legs swinging beneath his chair in that restless way he had, poking at something on his plate with exaggerated concentration. The room smelled of coffee and rendered fat and the particular warmth of a house that contained living people. Scott stood in the doorway and could not speak.

Thomas saw him first, as Thomas always had, alert to his father's presence the way children are alert to anything that matters to them.

"Papa!"

The boy grinned and very nearly toppled his chair backward in his excitement to be recognized. Clara turned from the stove at the sound, smiling with that unhurried warmth Scott had spent three years trying to hold in his memory and failing, the slow erosion of grief taking her face from him piece by piece until he had been left with an impression rather than a person. She looked entirely well. She looked, impossibly, like herself. Not a reconstruction of her assembled from longing and sleeplessness, but her actual face with its actual small lines and the way her eyes moved when she was pleased about something, and the sight of it nearly destroyed him where he stood.

She crossed the kitchen toward him, wiping her hands on the apron in that particular way she had, two quick strokes across the front and then a smoothing motion along the sides.

"Mercy above, Scott," she said, reaching up to press her lips briefly against his cheek. "Why are you wearing that dingy old thing?"

Her fingers caught the collar of his wrinkled shirt and gave it a small admonishing tug. Her touch was warm. The warmth of it traveled up through the fabric and into his skin and down through him like something that had been absent so long he had forgotten it had a temperature. He stood with his arms at his sides and his mouth slightly open and his mind engaged in the furious, silent work of trying to understand what was happening to him, or to the world, or to the thin membrane that separated the two.

"You look absolutely ragged," she continued, studying his face with the mild concern of a woman cataloguing a familiar problem. "And heavens, have you shaved at all this month?"

He stared at her. He understood that his face must look extraordinary to her, whatever she was, wherever she had come from, whatever law had been suspended or rewritten to make this morning possible. He could feel the weeks of beard growth rough against his own palm when he raised his hand to his jaw, the automatic gesture of a man checking to see whether his own body is still performing its usual functions.

"You're dead," he said. His voice came out as a dry, ragged thing, barely above a whisper. "You are both dead. I buried you. I stood at the graves in the rain and I…"

He stopped. The kitchen was very quiet for a moment. Thomas had gone still at the table, watching the adults with the particular attention children give to anything that sounds like trouble.

Clara blinked at him. Then she laughed, soft and unhurried, the sound of a woman too fond of her husband to be properly annoyed by him.

"We are not dead, you silly man," she said. "You must have had a terrible nightmare."

"No." He shook his head, and the motion felt effortful, like moving through deep water. "No, I remember. I remember the fever, and I remember the doctor, and I remember…"

"Hush now." She pressed her palm against his cheek. Her hand was warm. Her hand was entirely, undeniably warm, carrying the specific living warmth of a person who has been standing near a hot stove and has blood moving through her veins and air moving through her lungs, and Scott felt something in him crack open at the sensation of it, some long-sealed place in his chest that had forgotten it was sealed. "You've been working too hard again. Look at you. You're pale as candle wax."

"Papa looks like a ghost," Thomas offered helpfully from the table.

Clara clicked her tongue in gentle reproach and turned Scott toward the hallway with both hands on his shoulders, guiding him as she had always guided him when he had been working too long and needed someone to move him from the place where he had gotten stuck.

"Go get cleaned up," she said firmly. "Breakfast is nearly ready, and you still have to finish the manuscript before the courier comes tomorrow. Go on. Shoo."

She ushered him into the hallway with a firmness that brooked no argument, and Scott went, because he could not think of anything else to do, and because some part of him that was older and less rational than the part that kept saying impossible, impossible, impossible was already drinking in the warmth of her hands on his shoulders and the smell of bacon in the air and the sound of Thomas resuming his cheerful monologue at the kitchen table, and that older, less rational part of him did not want to ask questions that might end this.

The washroom was immaculate in a way that stopped him in the doorway. He remembered it differently. He remembered towels gone gray from too many months without proper washing, a basin filmed with a thin residue, the mirror spotted at its corners with the damp of a house that had long since given up being cared for. What he found instead was fresh linen on the rack and warm water steaming gently from the pitcher on the shelf, prepared as though someone had known he would need it, and when he looked at his own face in the mirror, he barely recognized the creature staring back at him. Weeks of beard growth. Eyes that had gone dark beneath with sleeplessness and something worse than sleeplessness. The face of a man who had been surviving rather than living.

He reached for the razor with a hand that was not quite steady.

The familiar rituals held him. The slow drag of steel across skin. The cold shock of water. The mechanical requirements of a body that needed to be washed and dried and put into clean clothes, which he found folded on the bed as though placed there by someone who had anticipated his morning. He worked through these things with a kind of numb obedience, and all the while his thoughts ran beneath the surface like water under winter ice, pressing upward, asking questions he did not yet know how to answer. Had grief finally crossed some interior threshold and taken him over entirely? Had loneliness and isolation and the cold and the desk and the long sleepless months assembled themselves into something that could perform this particular cruelty on him, a waking dream so precise in its details that he could not locate the seam between it and reality? The possibility frightened him. The alternative frightened him considerably more.

When he returned to the kitchen, Thomas was already working through his breakfast with the focused dedication of a boy for whom eating is primarily a logistical challenge to be solved as quickly as possible. Clara poured coffee into Scott's cup and set it before him and smiled when she saw that he had shaved and combed his hair, a smile of such ordinary domestic satisfaction that he had to look away from it for a moment.

"There," she said. "Now you look like yourself again."

He sat. The chair was solid beneath him. The coffee was hot between his hands. The steam that rose from it carried the particular smell of Clara's coffee, slightly stronger than most people preferred it, the way she had always made it. He ate slowly and carefully, like a man who is not certain the ground beneath him will continue to support his weight but who has decided to proceed anyway, because the alternative is to stop entirely, and stopping entirely is its own kind of ending. Slowly, with great reluctance, the part of him that kept saying impossible, impossible began to lose ground to the part of him that was simply, desperately, grateful.

Thomas talked through most of breakfast, a long and enthusiastic account of fish he intended to catch at the creek, techniques he had developed, the superior knowledge he possessed on the subject of worms and their relative effectiveness as bait. Clara listened with the patient amusement she had always brought to Thomas's enthusiasms. Scott watched them both and said very little and felt the hollow place in his chest, the one that had been open and cold and wind-scoured for three years, very slowly and cautiously begin to consider the possibility of something other than emptiness.

Perhaps it had been a nightmare. A very long, very detailed, very persuasive nightmare, the kind that grief produces when it has been too long without resolution. Perhaps none of it had been real. Perhaps he had never stood at two small graves in the rain with dirt on his boots and nothing left inside him that functioned properly.

The thought was terrifying in its hopefulness.

After breakfast he stood beside Clara near the doorway while she gathered the plates, and he watched the way she moved through her own kitchen with the ease of long practice, knowing where everything was, her hands going to things before she had consciously decided to reach for them.

"I should finish the manuscript today," he said.

"You should," she agreed, not looking up from the dishes. "You've been worrying over that story for weeks."

He leaned forward and kissed her. She turned into it the way she always had, easy and unhurried, entirely unsurprised by his wanting to. Her lips were warm.

"I'll take Thomas fishing this afternoon," he said quietly.

Thomas erupted from across the room with a noise that suggested this was the finest news ever delivered in the history of human speech.

"You promised last week too!" he accused.

"And this time," Scott said, and felt something that might, if he were careful with it, become a smile, "I intend to keep it."

The writing room looked different in the daylight. The great walnut desk, which had crouched in the stormy dark of the previous night like something ancient and patient and not entirely meant for human use, now sat simply in a bar of pale morning light that brushed across its polished surface and showed him the warm grain of the wood beneath all that darkness. He touched the edge of it with two fingers. The strange cold he had felt the night before was gone, or diminished to something he could almost convince himself was only the coolness of old wood in a room that had not yet fully warmed. The carvings along its edges still caught his attention when he looked directly at them and then seemed to slide away from his gaze when he tried to examine them closely, but he had no name for that either, and the morning was too full of other impossible things to spend much effort on the desk's eccentricities.

He sat and pulled the blank pages toward him and began to write.

The words came with a speed and a certainty that startled him. He had spent the better part of the last year laboring over prose that felt assembled rather than written, sentences hauled into place through sheer mechanical effort and then stared at with the dissatisfied recognition of a craftsman who knows the difference between work that lives and work that merely functions. What moved through him now was nothing like that. Scenes unfolded behind his eyes with a clarity that made his hand work fast to keep pace. Dialogue arrived complete and correct on the first attempt. Characters told him things about themselves that he had not planned and that turned out, when he examined them, to be exactly right. He wrote through the morning and into the afternoon with the focused intensity of a man who has remembered something he thought was gone from him forever, and the light changed around him without his noticing, and Thomas knocked once on the door to remind him about the fishing and received a distracted promise that he was almost finished, almost, just a few more pages.

By the time he set down his pen, evening had claimed the windows and the manuscript before him was as close to finished as a manuscript can be without being finished, a matter of hours rather than days. He sat for a long moment in the quiet room and looked at the pages stacked neatly beside the desk and felt something settle through him that he had not felt in years. Not happiness exactly. Something quieter and more durable than happiness. The sensation of having done what he was meant to do, of having filled the space he occupied in the world with something that justified the space.

The cottage smelled of supper when he came into the main room. A covered plate waited for him at the table. Clara and Thomas had already gone up to bed, the house carrying that particular settled quiet of a place that contains sleeping people rather than the raw hollow quiet of a place that contains no one. He ate slowly, standing at the table, listening to the distant sea working itself against the cliffs and the last trailing edge of the storm muttering away to the east. When he finally climbed the stairs and eased himself into bed beside Clara, she stirred without waking and shifted toward him in the easy unconscious way of a woman long accustomed to the weight and warmth of a particular body in a particular place.

"You work too hard," she murmured, most of it delivered to the pillow.

He lay still and listened to her breath. The sound of it filled the room with something that had been missing from it for three years, a specific quality of inhabited air, of space that contains another living consciousness. He reached out carefully and found a strand of her hair and moved it back from her face. Fear still lived somewhere behind his sternum, small and cold and persistent, the part of him that had buried two people and did not understand what it was lying beside now, or what law had been suspended to make this possible, or what the cost of it might be.

But exhaustion was deeper than fear tonight, and the bed was warm, and Clara was breathing beside him, and he allowed himself, cautiously and with the full knowledge that caution might be insufficient, to close his eyes.

Sleep came quickly.

It came so quickly, in fact, that he did not hear the sound that began shortly after midnight.

Or perhaps he did hear it, in that dim and unreliable country between sleeping and waking where the body registers things the conscious mind has not yet consented to receive. A scratching, faint and rhythmic, rising from the room below. The sound of something moving across paper in the dark.

Not at the door.

At the desk.

Soutenir James Winter Ink

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Chapter 3

Chapter Two