Over All the Living and the Dead

As often as she’d wished him dead, when Jim finally did break his neck, it came as a shock. Carrolynn stared down at the crooked body sprawled in the snow, the roof rake just beyond the reach of his outflung hand. She’d always figured she’d be jubilant if he ever managed to kill himself, but instead her thoughts were as frozen as the weather. Numb, I feel numb, she thought, blinking down at the inert form of the man who had been her husband.

She had so often dreamed of him drunkenly tumbling down the narrow stairs in their aging farmhouse. Or driving too fast around the ungraded corner at the river and plunging to his death in its icy embrace. Or slipping in the puddles he always left on the floor because he wouldn’t wipe his boots.

Just fantasies of course. Nothing she would have had a hand in doing. After all, she hadn’t had a hand in doing much of anything since she’d married Jim and her life had slowly telescoped down into the mere kernel of existence. But a woman can dream, can’t she?

And now her dream had come true. That morning, Jim had announced another storm on the way and said the snow on the roof was already too deep. He’d been up there since, pounding around as he shoveled it off. The thunder of his footfalls reverberating through the house had sent more lightning bolt cracks zig zagging across the plaster ceiling over their bed. Every now and again, there was the tremendous whump when the thick blocks of snow came down, so she only realized that one of those whumps had been him coming down when it had fallen quiet. So blessedly, blessedly quiet.

She supposed she should call the police. The thing is, she didn’t have a cell phone. Jim had told her point blank that if she had a cell phone, the next thing you know, she’d be tarting about town – his words, not hers – and what kind of man would he be then?

She didn’t think he was right about that, but she also didn’t say so. At least not to his face. Sometimes she told the dishes as she washed up after dinner, or the mop as she sponged away those muddy puddles of water, but she never told him. It was safer to stay quiet and mind her own business, even if her own business was whatever Jim told her it was.

A sudden melody coming from the body startled her into awareness. His cell phone lit up the front pocket of his flannel shirt, right over where his heart would be, if he had one. She was glad she didn’t have to fish around in his pants pockets to pull it out.

Her hands were shaking with the cold and by the time she had wrestled the phone free, it told her she had missed a call from someone named Marla. Figures, she thought. She paid attention to people and knew that when they accused others of something, there was a good chance that’s what they were doing themselves. She wasn’t stupid. At least not as stupid as Jim always told her she was. 

She didn’t know his code but knew enough to pull the insulated glove from his right hand and press his index finger to the back of the phone. Then she dialed 9-1-1.

Carrolynn was still standing there when the ambulance pulled into the driveway. Over the squeaking crunch of tires in the snow, she heard her husband say, “If I didn’t have to do everything around here, this wouldn’t have happened, Carr.”

He had shortened her name, making it smaller, the same way he had made her life smaller. Carr. She hated it. “Carrolynn,” she whispered to the body. The word was a ghostly feather floating from her lips, snapped up by the biting air.

“I can’t hear you, Carr,” her husband said from the snow. “Always mumbling.”

“Shut up,” she said out loud. It was the first time she’d ever said that in his presence. For a long moment, she held her breath, her shoulders hunched just a little, as she waited for him to answer her. She was still waiting when the paramedics pronounced him dead and took him away.

He had a lot to say at the funeral though. The flowers were a waste of money, the casket was too cheap, the preacher mumbled platitudes like a bored janitor. And hadn’t she put out an obituary notice? “Surely more people would be here, Carr, if only you’d let them know.”

People hadn’t come to the funeral for the same reason she hadn’t wanted to come. They didn’t like him. He had been self-centered, and cruel, and tight-fisted in every sense of the word. His best quality was that he was dead. She tried not to smile. It wasn’t appropriate to smile at a funeral, she told herself. She wondered if maybe laughing was more appropriate and had to pinch herself to keep from bursting out into giddy shrieks right there at the graveside. “You wouldn’t want to cause a scene, Carr,” he said from the grave.

The handful of his friends at the cemetery clutched their worn ball caps in calloused hands long enough to offer her their uncertain sympathies. Her own friends hadn’t come. She’d lost all of them around the same time she’d gained a husband. “You don’t want to hang around with them gals anyway, Carr,” Jim had told her. “Know-it-alls, the lot of them.”

She waited until she was alone before she spit onto the mound of earth already thickly dusted with new falling snow. Then she limped away. Her right hip had never recovered after that time she had burnt the roast and he’d kicked her with his steel-toed boots. The same boots she had been sure to bury him in.

It was a longish walk. She couldn’t drive because she hadn’t renewed her license after a small fender bender a couple years before in the Hannaford parking lot. “We can’t afford to have the insurance rates go up because of your incompetence, Carr,” Jim had told her, ignoring the fact that he’d totaled two cars in the time they’d been together.

Well, things were going to change now. She’d been waiting for too long, the last eight years of her life spent on hold listening to the soundtrack her husband had chosen, a soundtrack of belittlement and isolation.

First things first - she’d get a license. She might want to wait until spring, though, she cautioned herself as she skirted the slush piles at the side of the road. Winter driving was dangerous. Not the best time to take a driver’s test. She tended to get pretty nervous in situations like that.

There were bills to pay at home, a job Jim had always handled. “You have no head for numbers, Carr,” he’d said, tempering the criticism with a benign little chuckle. And it was true she wasn’t very good with math, but surely she could do basic bookkeeping. She stacked the envelopes up into orderly piles and considered them soberly. She wasn’t sure what to do next because Jim had done their banking online and she didn’t know the password for his laptop. The darkened apple on its back stared up at her in an unblinking challenge.

Oh, how he would have mocked her as she sat there intimidated into paralysis by a laptop. She hunched her shoulders as the echoes of his laughter filled her mind.

She rose and stood at the window, gazing out at the rill where the roof rake was buried under the latest snowfall, reminding her that she would have to finish the job. The thought sent flutters through her chest. She had always been afraid of heights. She wondered if maybe there was anyone in town she could hire. Well, at least she could start by going out into the cold and rescuing the rake, which she should have picked up after the ambulance picked up her husband. Ex-husband.

“I am an ex-wife,” she said aloud. It wasn’t as exhilarating as she had expected. She’d hated being his wife but at least she’d been something. Now, staring out at the blank canvas of winter, she realized her own life was much the same, just an empty expanse stretched out before her, barren and unmarked. She could do anything she wanted. 

But she didn’t know what she wanted. She had never known. When all her classmates had been filling out their college applications and filing their FAFSAs, she’d just drifted through her senior year with no direction. Her mother had warned her to buckle down. “You won’t amount to nothing, Carrol, if you don’t do nothing.” Carrolynn hated that her own mother just lopped off the end of her name as if she wasn’t worth the bother of saying the whole thing. Even worse, her mother would always add her favorite catchphrase, “You’re a fool, just like your father.”

Her father’s voice was silence, as it had been since he’d walked away from her when she was five, whistling “Sweet Caroline.” As if that made up for abandoning her at a playground miles from home. “My name isn’t Caroline either,” she told the window and watched her voice turn to fog on the frozen glass.

Frozen. That’s what she’d been all her life, Carrolynn realized. She’d graduated without any plans at all, an aimlessness that sent her straight into Jim’s path. Jim, who already had a job and a house and knew how to do things like pay bills and rake the roof.

“Mom was right,” she told herself. The disappointment of it crushed her where she stood hunching her shoulders at the window. “You are nothing but a fool.” The strangeness of her voice in the empty house startled her. She had expected to hear Jim’s voice.

In the quiet that followed, a truth began to edge into the corners of her mind, filling the hollowness she hadn't known was there until she felt swollen with it, like there wasn't enough room inside of her for her self. “You are are such an idiot, Carr,” her voice told her. Her breath caught as a deep wave of grief radiated through her.

Jim had only ever said the things she was already telling herself.

The realization threatened to shatter her heart. She clutched at her chest with icy fingers, gasping at the shock. Something within her broke and finally, for the first time since Jim had plunged from the roof, Carrolynn began to weep.

The snow came down heavier; the fat flakes that had at first drifted so lazily began to take on a purpose of their own, falling thick and straight over the white world. Evening was approaching and the softening light was turning purple, like a new bruise.

Her breath frosted onto the windowpane, the only proof of her existence.

With her index finger she began to write her name in the soft white fog. She only got as far as ‘Carr’ before it faded, erasing the name with it.