January Thaw -- v

“You don’t even know,” she says, but there’s a gracious, soft smile on her lips. “You remember every detail of how you described it between Garrett and me, up here at this secret place, don’t you? You told the world. You took me here,” and she has to reach for words now, “—and all I’m asking of you is my name,” she says again, but not angrily. She’s not after revenge—that’s not it. And even he knows it; he feels it in the pitch of her words. “To you I was a character, that’s all. Do you know how that feels?” And then again, “Tell me my name.”

It’s difficult for him to look into her eyes, which is to say into her soul, so he pulls a hand up across his face as if something is there to wipe away.

Seconds pass. A minute. Two minutes. Her waiting is relentless.

There are no cars coming up the road to the cemetery. Somewhere far away, a coyote. He knows he could stand here forever and not remember because it is no longer in the vault of his memory. He remembers exactly how he created her story, where he was sitting, how he walked around the room, how careful he was with the details, how hard he worked to get it right, how the next morning he went over and over it again, that lovemaking in this secret place.

He looks up to see she’s still waiting.

“You don’t remember,” she says. Her shoulders drop. “Admit it. You don’t know me at all. You don’t even know my name.” She is turning him in her hands. She can.

There have been moments in his life when deep regret pitched up against the sheer force of his indomitable will, moments he doesn’t want to remember. But it’s still hard for him. Her will is immense. He knows the silence she’s created here and now, outside of time, could go on for days, and he doesn’t know her name.

And all the while he’s standing there frozen, his face empty, the smile on hers grows seemingly more considerate because she knows she has forever. She feels no need to speak. It wasn’t how she’d planned it—what she might say, how they might talk—because she never guessed he wouldn’t remember her name, not after what he’d done, how much he’d written. But they have arrived where she wanted to take him, where, she might have said, she needed to, for his sake, and hers too, maybe. But then she wasn’t thinking of herself. Credit her this: she’s been in the neighborhood for years and years, and even though time is immaterial—and maybe because it is—there’s grace in this woman’s spirit and no more spite.

That’s why, just then, in his silence, she steps closer.

Nothing is said. She remembers that he had given her a life that she might not have had—he wasn’t wrong. People sometimes drive up to the cemetery, get out of the car, and walk to her grave; and she knows—she simply understands—that when they stand there and read the words her husband had carved in the stone—“Wife of Garret Van Engen,” words that were somewhat too shadowy with mildew now—when people stand there, people she doesn’t recognize, no blood relatives, she understands they are there because of him, because of what he had done.

It is 75 years since she’d died becoming the mother she never would be, and in that time she’d come to understand that if it weren’t for this man, few, if any, would ever pause before the stone the way some visitors still do. In those first years, people stopped often, some of them—women—even crying, her folks, full of regret for the way they’d handled everything now that their daughter was gone. Her father had come for years, but that was behind her now, and he was here, too. But then, fewer and fewer had come, her husband gone away, buried elsewhere; no one but strangers ever stand before her stone. What she’d come to understand was not so much that he had given her life—only God could do that—as prolonged it, even if the facts weren’t square and what he’d written was more than he should have. He had their love right, she told herself. That much he’d had right after all. It was strange. Maybe she was more a part of his secret place than she’d ever been in life itself, a place he’d created.

Bravely, he looked up at her once again, but still without the name she wanted. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s been so very long.”

“You can’t use that one here,” she tells him, and she comes even closer to him. Once again, she brings her hands up to his elbows, then pulls herself near him, has him, this big man, in her grasp. “You really don’t know, do you?”

He has to force himself to look into her eyes, and he’s struck by the fact that there is nothing menacing there. He shakes his head.

“Not even a guess?” she asks.

What he sees in her eyes is something he doesn’t remember ever seeing before, something it takes him some time to understand. It’s shocking in it guilelessness, and it seems to him like nothing human he’d ever seen. He remembers, as a boy, being told about it, what it might be; but it’s taken his death for him to see it for real, if this can be said to be real. And because there seems no anger, he opens himself in a way hadn’t, this writer who for so many years opened himself to his readers. “I don’t remember your name,” he says. “I’m an old man, and I don’t know it, and I’m so very sorry.”

She’s been holding him at the elbows, but with those words her small arms circle his broad chest and she holds him tenderly as a lover, not a lover in any sense he might remember either, but a lover that is, as she is, not of this world.

“It’s not June,” she tells him, pulling back again. She tightens her lips, stares. “That’s a beautiful name, and I wish it had been mine, but it’s not. My name was Jennie.” She backs away slightly, let’s his arms go for a moment, then reaches for an elbow again and gently pulls him with her. “Let me show you,” she says.

For the first time, he smiles. “It’s not that,” he says, “I know where you are. I remember your stone—when it was new. I used to come here. As a boy, I used to come here.”

She takes his hand, and the two of them walk back from the fence line into the center of things, from the far reaches of the northwest corner. She pulls her hand away for a moment and then pushes her arm into his, and he takes it as a gentleman would.