Dear Paul

She is an old woman, her hair wrapped tight in linty curlers, sky blue nightgown hanging off her shoulders. She laughs quietly to herself, listening to the smoke alarm blinking gently through the thick fog of her eyes. “Damn, I think I’ve burnt them again,” she tells the voice behind her, his chuckles greased by years of tobacco-smoke.

“We got bagels someplace in them drawers, those eggs ain’t even good.”

“Good cause they’re not for you,” she says in between bites, dusting the crumbs from her sky-blue tablecloth, the one Paul told her had a real nice nuance, all subtle-like, the way you like it. She runs her hand over the tablecloth and imagines the soft colour each morning, blue-cool like the robins that used to nest on the lamppost outside, the pair of them making exactly three eggs each year, Paul told her, and she liked that idea.

“They’re not back, are they?”

She asks him, the tines of her fork scraping against the cracked china plate, and he waits a minute before saying no, that no, they haven’t been back since the lamppost fell and split-open on the driveway, and no one ever came to fix it. That since he watched her spend two days pouring sawdust on the oil to clean the daisies they’d planted at its base, the flowers had never recovered, though she changed their pots and moved them far away.

“I guess there isn’t much of a point in coming back if they’ve found somewhere good.”

“Yeah.”

The woman looks out the window, holding her empty plate in her hands a second before she gets up from the chair, squinting through her greyed-blue eyes. She told anyone she knew how much she loved the colour blue, that her ma’d given her a great gift with those blue eyes, that she could see the sky better than anyone else, right through up to the sun.

Then they started losing things together, her and Paul, and she didn’t mind so much that the sky was getting darker and her fingers looked like shaking shadows when she’d put them up to the lamp-light. He’d put his arm round her shoulder and they’d been content, because they’d had a long and happy life together, and ye cain’t be expected now to hold onto everythin’ forever. That’ll do us no good.

So they put their arms round one another and watched the robins, the flowers, the neighbours leave, and she didn’t say anything when Paul grew thinner and thinner, and woke up at night in a sweat, clutching his stomach and rolling back and forth, because everything goes eventually, and one day when she woke up and Paul was stone-cold beside her, she put her arm around him and cried, because dammit Paul if only you’d said something earlier, because we all lose something but he’d gone and grew a tomato-sized lump right on the left-hand side of his stomach and now her eyes had gone grey and there was no one to make the eggs, except his voice in a box in the kitchen that somehow talked to her and told her he was still there.

“You know, the Za-linskis left two years to this fall, didn’t they?”

She thinks fondly of the family now that two years-time has erased the whines of their newborn in the early hours of the morning, and she stumbles over their name she once wrote down in phonetics and pinned on the fridge, but now she guesses each time and prays she isn’t too far off.

“You know, I asked them where to, but they never told me.”

She runs her hands over the black box sitting across to her, feels the white note with her husband’s name scrawled in his lopsided writing. Its edges are peeling and she flattens them with her bitten nail.

He waits a minute before he replies.

“Ye told me last week.”

The china plate chips as it hits the rust-lined sink.

“I guess I did.”

“Paul?”

She says, more of a whisper now, and she says his name more often each day, brings his box up to her bedroom and sits him on the nightstand, letting his voice fill the space beside her. He used to say the same three different lines when she called out for him, and she liked them because she could hear the click of the tape and the scratchy rolling of the chair down in the living room, and she could almost see Paul sitting there on that chair, talking to her, rocking back and forth as his kidney burrowed slowly out of the bottom of his shirt.

Then he started changing, his voice began to grow deeper and softer with hers as the years passed, started singing songs to her she’d never known Paul knew. And when she talked to him and asked him if he was still there, she didn’t hear I love you and then the same, wincing static, but Paul’s tobacco-lined voice, aged five years with her own, saying, ye know I am, honey, right across from ye, right down here.

In her bedroom, talking to him at night, she began pulling him close to her, pressing his black box with his tearing label tight to her ear, and the static was gone, the creak in the rocking chair, the whisper in the living room at night.

He laughs like Paul had, barrel-chested and loud, warns her every time she’s about to trip over the third stair, chuckling each time she does, and she carries him in her arms and asks him to look out the window and tell her what he sees, and Paul is there again, standing beside her and leading her by the arm, fingers round her shoulder, going,

“That damn rain again today, best not to go outside.”

But today Paul is quiet, watches her fumble with the dishes in the sink, holding onto the oven rail to catch her breath. They sit together under the warm lamplight, her forehead marked with red lines, pressed against him.

His breath hitches with the static-lines.

“..”

“It stopped rainin’, today.”

He is quiet in her lap.

“Oh, Paul,” shifting in her seat. “Isn’t that nice.”

“It stopped rainin’.”

She sets him on the table and wrings her fingers in her lap, turning them in the yellow light. His breath is slow through the static mumble, and she watches her fingers shake as if belonging to another, burn spots marring the sallow folds of her skin, veins running across the backs of her palms bruised plum-purple, pooling with the wine toppled over in the kitchen cupboard, the wine she emptied one rainy night and told him

“God, Paul. I can’t live here anymore. I’m dying, Paul, and not like you did. I’m losing everything one by one and I don’t know who I’ll be when I have nothing left.”

And he was atop her cupboard then, his voice trickling down to her ears like sunlight though they were barricaded in the basement below from the thunderstorm.

“But I’m here, honey. I’ve never left.”

And he sang to her, sitting with her lips blue-red, sniffling in their blanket wrapped around her. He sang the old ones at first, then others she’d never heard but they sounded all so same and made her feel so warm and she sat there crying, listening to her husband sing, clutching the folds in the blanket and imagining his worn-leather hands.

“It’s rainin’, honey. We just hafta wait for them skies to clear.”

“I want to be buried with you, Paul. With my momma and your brother and everyone else we had.”

“I know.”

“God, Paul.”

Her cheeks burning under her frozen hands, flushed from the empty bottle, head leaning up against the cupboard, basking in the sound of his voice.

“I forgot where.”

But the wine is a distant memory now, and her knees burn when she pulls herself up the stairs, the world has darkened, and she fears the rain.

“Do you want to sing, Paul?”

She cannot hear him breathing through the grainy sound.

“It stopped rainin’.”

She feels his eyes watching her, shoulders slumped over in the washed-out nightgown, her breath heavy, forced from her lungs as she nods towards the distant yellow light. He begins to sing then, gently into her ear, and across the room she hears Paul’s rocking chair creaking gently, breathing his last into a black metal box, before climbing upstairs to hold her hand for the last time.

He tells her it is still morning by the time she’s packed her bag, and she wraps him in a handkerchief and slings him round her shoulder, her own breath pounding in her lungs.

“Watch yer step”, he tells her, his voice warm in the crook of her arm, and she smiles to herself. He never used to remember the third stair on the porch that had gone crooked, that they’d left and never bothered to fix since her eyes darkened and they stopped going outside. But he tells her now, each pot hole, each fallen stick in the road.

“Is the park still there, Paul? The one at the end of the road with all the swings on it.” She listens to the gravel crunching under her feet, and the road seems so long.

“Ain’t here anymore, honey. Keep walking now.”

And she does, thinking of the flowers to lay on all their graves, of the daisies for her mother and lilies for Paul, but she can’t remember who liked which, and if there’ll be any in the store.

We’ll find somethin’, he whispers, though she thinks they’ve passed the store a long time, though her head is spinning. When she sits, the hard road a cloud of dust, she tells him her heart hurts.

“Oh, Paul.”

It hurts to say those words too.

“I thought I’d make it, I really did.”

He breathes through the static, and she feels for her husband’s loping scrawl, but the note has fallen, a sticky residue left coated by the dust and sand. Running her fingers across the harsh black lines, she thinks of all they used to have, of the graves without the flowers in a burial yard she can’t remember, of the robins and the days without the rain.

“Almost there, honey.”

He sounds just like Paul in his last days, when he’d look at her from his chair and say her name, his throat tightening, eyes sunken in.

“We’ll find ‘em.”

He breathes in the static darkness and his voice sounds like the parched wind, beating sand against an endless desert plain, the houses fallen down one by one and left to dust, the families having packed their bags and left, a long black line down the horizon, holding one another, whispering It’ll be better over there, again and again to the piles of brick and the two-story home with the old couple, who held each other’s arms and looked out the window. And he saw them all fleeing the desert, with their black boxes under their arms, listening to hundreds of voices whispered through crumbling static and the remnants of their lovers leading them on, down the long road, to the rain.

“Hafta get to the end of the road.”

Paul tells the empty desert, satin handkerchief fallen loose around him.

“Almost there, honey.”

Paul can almost hear her in the wind.

“Let me sing ye a song.”