I told the man on the porch that I was not there to make trouble, and my voice came out thin and strange, the voice of someone who has been awake for three nights. He studied my face for a long moment. He was in his eighties, tall and stooped, with a cardigan buttoned wrong and a pair of reading glasses hanging from a string. Then he stepped aside and said, “You had better come in. She will want to see you, even if she does not know why.”
The house smelled of lemon polish and old books. In the front room, in a wing chair by the window, sat a small white haired woman with a blanket across her knees, watching a bird feeder with great attention. She turned when I came in, and her face lit up with a smile I knew, a smile she had given someone else every week for two years. “Ellie!” she said. “You came!” The man beside me closed his eyes. I did not know what to say. So I said, “Hello, Margaret.”
I do not know how I knew her name. It came from nowhere, the way a word comes when you have heard it said in your sleep. The man, whose name was Arthur Pell, told me everything in the kitchen while the kettle ticked. Margaret and my wife had been roommates in nursing school in 1971. They had stood up at each other weddings. When Margaret began to forget things, seven years ago, my wife had stopped by every week for an hour.
And then the disease took a turn. Margaret reached a stage where she was ashamed to be seen. She had been a proud woman, a head nurse, and she begged Arthur to keep visitors away. Everyone from church and from the old hospital drifted off, politely, one at a time. Only Ellie remained. She asked Arthur once, in the doorway, whether she should tell her husband where she was going, and Arthur said that Margaret would be mortified if anyone knew. So my wife said book club, and kept it.
Some lies are only love wearing a coat that does not fit, and the heart that tells them pays for every one.
I sat down on a kitchen chair and put my face in my hands. Thirty three years, and I had imagined a hundred other things. I had read her messages in my mind. I had measured her in my head against the worst possible woman. And all the while she had been sitting in a living room an hour away, reading aloud from the old poetry book of Margaret, braiding the thin white hair, and answering the same question forty times with the patience of a saint.
Arthur told me the last piece slowly. Every week, he said, he had told his wife that Ellie was on her way, and Margaret would wait by the window. Since the funeral, Margaret had asked each Thursday where Ellie was. He had told her that Ellie was away. He had been unable to bear the truth. “I told my wife you were on a long journey,” he said. “It seemed kinder. But I think she knows. I think some part of her always knows.”
I went back to the front room and sat on the footstool near her chair. I said my name was Tom, that I was the husband of Ellie, and that I had come in her place. Margaret looked at me with her clear, confused blue eyes. Then she reached out and touched the front of my jacket, right over the pocket, in a gesture I had seen my wife make a hundred times. “Is it Thursday?” she asked. I said, “Yes. It is Thursday.”
I read to her for an hour. The poems were in a book with a green cloth cover, marked with a pressed violet at the page of Ellie. I read badly, with the wrong pauses, and Margaret corrected me twice. Arthur stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame. When I finished the last stanza, my voice broke, and Margaret patted my knee and said, as if consoling a child, “She was a good nurse, you know. The best I ever worked with.” I could not answer.
On the way out Arthur walked me to the car and held out a small envelope. Inside was the key to the house and a note in the handwriting of my wife, dated three weeks before she died. If Tom ever comes, it said, let him in. He will want to be angry. Do not let him stay angry. I read it standing in the driveway with the sun low over the fields. It was her voice exactly, dry and loving and absolutely sure of me.
I come on Thursdays now. I bring a thermos and a library book of poems and sit in the wing chair when Margaret naps. Arthur and I have worked out a rhythm. He sleeps in the afternoon, which he has not done in two years, and I make the soup. Some days Margaret knows who I am. Some days she thinks I am a very polite stranger. Either way, she asks if it is Thursday, and I say yes.
I have not turned off the account of my wife. The little map is still there on the tablet, with its small blue pin forty minutes from home, and every week a new line is drawn across the countryside. Now the line is mine. Somebody has to keep that quiet hour. She kept it for seven years, and I mean to keep it for as many as I am given.