I finished planting the seeds, covered all my buried treasures in a thin layer of topsoil and used the hose to spray a fine mist over the little garden plot. It wasn’t the ideal place to grow a garden, I knew. Better outside the den windows, or off the narrow patio that faced north, toward the shed. Next summer I’d strategize. I’d be smarter by then, I thought. For now, I was pleased that I’d accomplished what I’d set out to do. I collected my tools into the red plastic pail and threw a rock I’d unearthed into the pine woods so I wouldn’t trip on it. Charlie, seeing the gesture from afar, galloped up from the lake, wanting to play.
I threw him a stick. It soared through the air and skidded deep into the pines. Charlie went after it, deftly but at a respectable pace. He was calm and happy enough not to be hysterical. He knew it was just a stick, after all, and not a hunting rifle firing at some grouse or hare or marten. There was no bleeding body tumbling through the underbrush to snag and deliver. He took his time. In the moments that I was alone there, waiting for Charlie to come prancing back with the stick between his teeth, a gust of cold swept through as a cloud covered the sun, and I shivered and felt a little melancholy, and my mind drifted once more to Walter. It was a simple thought: He was gone and would never return. He was deceased. He was only ashes now, sitting in the bronze urn on my bedside table on the second floor, which was just a loft area over the kitchen, with a window above my headboard so I could gaze up at the stars over the lake at night. The loft wasn’t meant to hold much weight, so all I had up there was the bed and table. Any more and I feared the floor would give way and we’d go crashing. When Charlie tossed and turned at night, I could hear the beams creaking. Not that I was truly worried. I slept so well in Levant. It was deadly quiet, just a few loons cooing. I had held onto Walter’s ashes for longer than I thought I would. I’d brought them out to Levant with the idea that I could scatter them in the lake—my lake—and have him disintegrate into the water so that I would always have him there, lapping at my feet, enveloping me when I swam, or tickling my fingers as I grazed the surface on my boat rides to and from the little island—my island. But I hadn’t scattered them yet. Soon, soon, I told myself. When it gets warmer.
I whistled for Charlie. I could hear him scrambling around, probably pawing through the dry, slippery pine needles. Charlie had never met Walter. He might have been born the day Walter had died, in fact. I’d never done the math before, but now it seemed to make sense—one life vanishes, another arrives. Nobody will ever know who killed her. I knew what had killed Walter. It wasn’t something I liked to remember. Those last nights in the Monlith hospital ward, how the nurses looked down on me pityingly, the doctors idle in the doorway. “Any day now,” they kept telling me, as though Walter’s death was taking too long, and I’d been acting impatient for it. As though death were something to wait for at all. No, I wasn’t that type of woman. I wouldn’t wait for death. I would hold on tight to life, caress Walter’s hand, pet his head, kiss him on the cheek and forehead, as long as there was life still in him. I had no idea if he could hear me when I spoke. I talked a lot while he was dying. I thought that was what I was supposed to do. We’d spent nearly four whole decades together in Monlith, barely talking some days, not out of spite, but just that there seemed to be no need. We were of a mind. We knew each other. But then, suddenly, when Walter was dying, I had so much to say. I cried and wished and prayed, though I’d never been a praying woman before. “Oh, please, God, give him one more day,” I said, head down next to his on the starched, white pillow, a sour chemical smell emanating from his wan body. And each day, my prayers were answered. Until the day they weren’t. And then he was in a better place, as they say. But not quite gone. His body was there, lying in repose quite calmly, as though he’d had a hard day at work and had taken, as sometimes he’d been wont to do, a sleeping pill or one of my lorazepams. “Is he just sleeping?” I asked the nurse. How silly. “I was just talking to him like I always do, and then that machine started . . .” I’d done my best. I’d been as interesting as I could. I’d tried very hard to keep Walter there in the room with me. Years before his illness, I’d said, “If you die before me, please, send me a sign. However you can. Just let me know that you’re around, and that it’s all right over there, wherever we go when we die.” He must have thought I was just joking. “Yes, yes, Vesta. I will. Don’t worry.” I tried to remind him in the hospital room. I even spoke up to the air in the room, as though Walter had left his body and was in the space above his bed, floating in the cold, sterile air of the hospital. Over the next few minutes, his body went slack in a way I’d never seen it. His hands became cold. A blur.
Charlie came back, scampering now not with the stick I’d thrown out there, but a rotting red branch of fallen pine, feathery almost in its soft state of degradation. “Good boy,” I called him, and patted my pocket for a treat. They were in my coat, however, which I’d hung up after the dawn walk. The treats were crumbled now, most likely, between the black rocks that had held the note down on the ground. Her name was Magda. I shook the thought away. All I had to do now was go back inside, rest for a while, and begin preparing lunch for myself out of the last bits of food I had to tide me over until the next day, which was Monday, when I’d go to town for my weekly shopping. I took the radio out of the window and turned it off. Charlie was standing in the open doorway with his big rotting tree branch, not wanting to drop it and come in.
“My name was Magda.” I imagined a voice on the Christian call-in show. “Nobody knows who killed me. It wasn’t Blake.”
“Good morning, Magda,” Pastor Jimmy might say. “I’m sorry to hear about your problem. I hear a deep sadness in your voice today. If it is any consolation, you are not alone. All of God’s creatures die. Death is a natural part of the life cycle, and it is not an end. Don’t for a minute see it as something to feel bad about. May I ask, where are you calling from? And how might I help you? Do you have a question to ask?”
“There’s my dead body, out there in the birch woods, across from the old Girl Scout camp that now belongs to Vesta Gul. I don’t know if there’s anything you can do for me, pastor. I just thought I’d call in.”
“Vesta Gul, you say? What kind of name is that?”
No answer.
“Do you have a message for Mrs. Gul, in case she’s listening?”
“Please, come and find me. I’m out here, somewhere near you. You’re the only one who knows.”
What silliness.
The voice I’d imagined was more like my voice—polite, a singsong lightness under the gravity of death. Magda would be more high strung. Any dead girl ought to sound hysterical. I had never allowed myself to sound that way. Walter nipped my moods in the bud the moment a twinge of anything untoward showed on my face.
I shook my head and opened the refrigerator.
“Charlie,” I said, “let’s go to town. All this food is old and yucky. And I want a good cup of coffee. My head is spinning.”