my age might die. She worked as a nurse at the
same hospital where I was born. She glanced at
me over her shoulder and didn’t say anything for
a long time, and I knew it was a question with
a hundred sharp edges, one I should have left in
the drawer. She was quiet so long I thought she
wouldn’t tell me, but then she gave a list: In car
wrecks and fires, in rivers and lakes and swimming pools. Some were killed by wild animals or
big dogs that jumped fences. Even then she knew
I had an active imagination, and I believe she was
reluctantly trying to narrow my fears.
There were ways she didn’t mention. She did
not say some kids get sick. But she didn’t lie and
say they went to sleep.
Once on the way home from the grocery store,
a cardinal darted in front of the car. We pulled
into the gravel drive, and there it lay on the front
bumper. We pushed it into a brown paper bag
and buried it in a pile of cinders. Its feathers were
red as my grandmother’s lipstick.
My grandfather was a volunteer fireman. After a
call he often slept well into the morning. Once he
came out in his old white robe. He still smelled
of smoke, rancid and harsh. His face had black
streaks from soot. There was something in the
way he moved that scared me, the thickness of his
reluctant voice, as if any sound might break him.
My grandmother filled the bathtub and steam
billowed into the hall. My brother was still just a
tiny thing. She took my grandfather’s hand, led
him to the tub. He shed his robe, stepped in, and
she settled my brother in his lap. They lathered
his hair with baby shampoo, rinsed it with water
from a tea cup. She scrubbed the soot from my
grandfather’s neck, washed his shoulders. Then
she toweled him off and he fell asleep in the
recliner with my brother on his chest. My grandmother made us coffee in the kitchen, cut the
crusts from my sandwich. She said that a young
girl had died in a fire last night, that my grandfather had found he r hiding under her bed, cradled
her, brought her out but couldn’t revive her.
When I closed my eyes I could smell the smoke
on the dead girl’s skin.
I’d thought of death as far away, a hundred
years, farther than China, beyond the stars or
Santa Claus. But now the idea crawled in close,
and carved a den in my imagination. I didn’t
want to sleep. My parents brushed their teeth and
crawled into bed. I listened as they watched the
local weather on their small black and white that
sat on the cedar chest. Reruns of Columbo or
Quincy followed. Sometimes the National Anthem would play and leave only the soft fuzz of
the channel gone off the air. Most nights they’d lie
there talking, my father’s voice a rough, unintelligible mumble, my mother’s like a timid bird.
Long after they stopped talking, I would think
of what fire does to the flesh, of the tips of cigarettes and how curtains catch and rooms erupt in
flames. I imagined boats swamped with water and
the squiggly things in the muck. I began to think
of death as a person, not dressed in the dark cowl
of old movies, but a naked child who looked like
me. This idea must have come from a dream—
that when I was born so was my death, half a
world away. When I lay with my ear turned into
a feather pillow, my heartbeat echoed there, the
soft crunch of footfalls in the snow. I could hear
the slow and steady progress as this other child
searched for me. My sleep was his animation.
When my eyes closed I shined like a beacon that
drew him in. Like a dream that falls apart, the
image of his arrival was frayed at its end.
I can’t tell you how old I was when I came up
with this, but I was still in early elementary. I
never said a word to my friends, worried such talk
would give him breath and skin. I was careful to
sleep so I could not hear his movements, silence
an amber that held him in place, lost in the
leaf litter of the woods where his feet were cut
by stones and twigs. This fear stayed past high
school and car payments, past retirement funds
and advanced degrees. I often wonder where he’s
wandered off to. April when the sun is gentle.
October when the leaves burn bright and wine is
crisp on my tongue.
The losses add up. A nephew who dove for
a volleyball and never got up, a friend whose
heart attack was so sudden he broke his nose in
a fall and was found after school by his daughter.
My father-in-law who couldn’t sleep at the end.
Sometimes even the best doctors don’t have a
thing they can do.
Scientists in the lab have tripled the lifespan of
the mouse, and there are jellyfish that never die
but remake themselves perpetually. I do not think
they dream or sleep, that they have reason to
think of twins flagellating toward them through
the depths. They are born without hearts, without
brains to spin dreams from the dark.