The Wilderness Read Online Free PDF Page B

and finally he placed the knife down.“Besides,” she said, “you didn't meet me to go shopping today.”
    “Pardon?”
    “I said you didn't meet me to go shopping today.”
    He will never forget the way she brought her hands to her hips so as to challenge him not to lie. He did not lie.
    “I'm sorry, I completely forgot. Are you punishing me?”
    “No, of course not.” She sat at the table and leaned forward on her elbows, her hair crowding behind her ears and her eyebrows arched. “You forgot last week, you put the coffee in the oven instead of the fridge, you sometimes forget my name.”
    “What is this?” he demanded to know. He was angered now by the slipping of the conversation from plums to death to God to this,
this,
whatever this was. An accusation perhaps, though of what he was unsure.
    “Can you say anything, Jake, except
what is this?”
    “If you could start making sense, yes, then I could stop asking you to clarify.”
    She stood and took a bowl from the table. “I'm going to pick some cherries.”
    Then she walked barefooted to the French doors, and slipped outside.

    After her death he stared into the dark and demanded a ghost. He had read bereavement leaflets that warned gently of the appearance of the deceased, at the foot of the bed, out of the corner of the eye, a smoky presence you might put your fingersthrough. If such a thing came he was not to be alarmed— no, far from it, he was to be comforted. And so he waited.
    Each night he sat in his study and looked through an album of photographs Henry had put together for her memorial. There is one of her on that same day of her death, after she went out into the garden barefooted, and she is up the ladder in the branches of the cherry tree in her pinafore and shoes and socks that made her look like Alice in Wonderland. The more he sat in his study looking at those photographs, the more he became convinced that if she came back to life and he could ask her just one question, it would be this: When did you put your shoes and socks on?
    The question plagued him out of all proportion. Maybe he was wrong about the bare feet. But he was not wrong about the bare feet. He
remembered
it. He would make himself a mint julep and swill it with the troubled concentration of a detective.
    After closing the album he always sat back in his seat and replayed this scene: Helen barefooted in the kitchen on her last day alive, slicing salmon and plums, making mention of his forgetfulness for the first time as if she had been saving this conversation—as if, before dying, she wanted him to know she knew that it was not just a bit of absentminded aging but dementia, an illness; that her knowledge of this would go some way to protecting him after she was gone.
    This is where I see God, in these—in these consistencies between things,
she had said. Did she really say this, or is it just the kind of thing she might have said? Were her feet really bare, or was going barefooted just the kind of thing she would have done? And in perfecting that scene in the kitchen, has hesimply perfected his version of it? And isn't it true to say that the more perfect the memory the less accurate it is likely to be? Like a Nativity scene on a Christmas card, rendered so many times it now no longer represents anything of the real birth of Christ.
    Dogged by these uncertainties, willing her ghost to come, he rid the house of milk, knowing Helen's near phobia of it. For months he settled for black coffee and found himself remembering those days, so far back—before Alice's birth— when she did drink it, when she loved it, when her freckled skin itself was like cream dusted with cinnamon, when she would tell him his eyes were washed with milk, and when she loved the cherry blossom that curdled on the branches. But it was not to stay that way, and by the time she died her aversion to it was stronger than any aversion she had to anything; just the smell of it, she would say. Just