Since her husband’s death, people keep telling Meredith to rest, but she feels nervous all the time. She no longer strides about town, spine straight, dress flirting. Lately, she hesitates, she questions, she shivers. She wears wool tights under her pants but her legs are always trembling with cold. (Unlike Henry who had crackled with heat. He wore t-shirts year-round and, in the dead of winter, liked to open up all of the windows of the house.)

She doesn’t tell anyone how restlessly she sleeps, how she can’t stop herself from clawing at the mattress in the middle of the night. Instead, she goes over to her friend Helen’s house for biscuits and tea and tries to pretend everything is fine. At home, she talks to her daughter Jane over defrosted dinners and curls up with the cat to watch period dramas. But Henry won’t let her rest. 

Maybe she’ll go back to the library next month and work shifts while Jane’s at school. She misses the paper cuts on her hands. She was secretly proud of those thin red lines, of their humble, manageable sting.

She had met Henry in London, Ontario when she was in her first year of university, struggling to cover her tuition with shifts at Huron College library. He’d watched her over the top of To Kill A Mockingbird for five Wednesday afternoons in a row as she strode past his chair. She remembers the heat of his eyes on her hips, her thighs. He barely turned a page when she was in sight. 

She discovered later that it was Henry who had hid books for her to discover. She uncovered The Power of One nestled up with Love Story in her cubbyhole when she pulled out her scarf (how he snuck into the employee’s room, she still didn’t know). In the shadowy corner of the Politics section, Meredith found Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Where The Wild Things Are heaped on top of each other, pages splayed, shamelessly rubbing fonts. 

That afternoon, after her supervisor left and they were finally alone, she wrote her number on his library card. When he said goodbye and started to walk away she pulled him to her, biting his lip when they kissed.

A few years later they got hitched and moved to Burr. Meredith worked weekdays at the small library there, while Henry commuted to his new job in London where he worked as a risk analyst. 

On weekends, Meredith and Henry rocked in big wooden chairs on their freshly painted porch, dipping their knees and faces into the sun, awed by what they’d done, by the new life they’d begun. They took horseback riding lessons from their neighbor on Saturday afternoons, breathing in horsehair and leather, spurring the horses’ flanks with their thighs. 

On hot summer evenings they walked through the countryside, stepping around fox dens and catching fireflies with their hands, feeling the wings throb inside their fingers for a moment before they let them go, to blink like tiny flashlights through the trees.

When the library finally switched to a computerized system, Meredith loved beaming the red light along barcodes as she checked out books for customers, especially new customers. Before reading the information that flashed up on her computer screen, she would take a darting look at the person across the counter and guess whether they read romances or crime novels, if they returned their books on time, and if not, whether they requested extensions or just allowed the fees to mount. She was pleased when she was right, but also when she was wrong. She liked being surprised by people. It was like finding a watermark in an old book, or deciphering marginalia on a page. 

Henry had surprised her like that. The way he’d shed his gentleness in the change room and emerge like a big stealthy cat in his wrestling singlet, eyes bright as he and his opponent circled around and around on the mat. Henry almost always pounced first, almost always won. From practice bouts at Huron College in London, Ontario to the World Wrestling Championships in Toledo, Ohio, she watched him hunch over a hundred prostrate bodies on the floor, shyly victorious, looking up to see her reaction. 

She’d prop up her head with an elbow while he slept, willing his parted mouth to disclose its secrets. The childhood in Paris, Ontario, he refused to speak of. The family she’d never met. The reason he sometimes shouted in his sleep things she didn’t understand. The time she woke up to find him standing on the bed, pressing his hands against the ceiling and grinding his teeth, as if he was holding up the room, the whole house, as if everything might collapse the minute he let go. 

*

Meredith and her husband had believed that things were simpler a hundred years ago, when folks were more in tune with the land. It was Henry in particular who had taken this romantic notion to heart. Henry, who wore sunscreen reluctantly, and who, for minor ailments, chose unpasteurized honey from his beehives as his go-to medicine. 

Shortly after moving to Burr, Henry had hired someone to dig a small pond behind the house. He liked to let everyone assume that the pond was there naturally, and the largemouth bass that he quietly stocked it with, too. 

He bought a child’s rod for Jane and taught her how to cast a line and reel it in. Meredith watched them standing side-by-side in the tall grass, heads tilted at the same angle, as the sun beat down on their khaki fishermen hats. 

In the beginning, they kept what they caught, and Henry gutted the fish in the kitchen sink. Jane held on to the edge of the island, fascinated by the flash of scales in her father’s hands. Meredith would ask her daughter if she felt like a snack, but no matter what she offered— a Macintosh apple, a cheese string, some raisins in a box— she was ignored. Her little girl focused completely on her father, on the quick, unsentimental way he deboned and descaled the fish, saving the silvery green heads for the cat. 

The barbecue still had a small handprint spread over the bars of the grill from when Jane had dared herself to touch it during that superstitious period that sensitive children are prone to. She had made odd dares for herself like “cross the room in five giant steps!” and, one fateful day, “touch the barbecue…or else!” In her overactive imagination, these dares possessed unmentionable consequences if she failed. 

Jane’s blistered hand had healed quickly, but the memory of her silent scream lingered, and Meredith noticed that her husband stared at the tiny handprint each time he heated up the grills. 

He’d brush the fish with President’s Choice teriyaki sauce or a homemade paste of butter and dill and lemon, but no matter how he dressed them, Meredith would complain that the fish was coarse and tasted like the pellets they were fed to supplement the pond diet of algae, weeds, leeches, and worms.

“Like kibble,” she’d explained to Jane, crinkling her nose, when her daughter had asked what “pellet fish” tasted like. Jane didn’t like fish no matter what they were fed, and it wasn’t fun grilling only for himself, so Henry eventually switched to catch-and-release. When city friends came by, they’d leisurely have a go, casting their line into the pastoral fantasy he’d so carefully cultivated, hoping for a tug.

Meredith liked to pretend that the pond was natural too, and treasured its unruly elements most. There was green slime and a small white rowboat with a hole in the bottom and mosquitos that swarmed over the stagnant water. There were snapping turtles that would swallow your toes, if you’d let them. There were frogs and toads, and, in the beginning, two Chinese geese, that if you didn’t look too closely, could almost pass for swans. 

The geese had been given to Henry and Meredith shortly after they’d moved to the country, as a sort of pond-warming gift. It was said that they mated for life, and it’s true that when the female was killed by the neighbour’s dog years later, that the male disappeared shortly thereafter. “Died of heartbreak,” Meredith told anyone who inquired after the missing geese. “Probably in the woods.” 

Jane clung happily to her mother as she listened to her recount the story. “It’s so romantic,” she told her once, sighing a little. 

Jane had inherited her mother’s fascination with the macabre. At eight, she folded origami headstones and beds for the stiff and ailing flies she found around the house, which she then lined up in her cemetery-slash-hospital shoebox. She persisted, despite Henry’s efforts to convince her that houseflies were germ-infested and yucky, but she did don a pair of faux silk gloves from the costume trunk as a concession. 

Meredith suspected that at times her husband wasn’t quite sure what to make of his little girl, who had no interest in sports and liked to dress up as a bat, swooping down banisters, arms outstretched. Once, when Henry reached into the closet for his coat, he discovered her fake-sleeping on her head, wings ceremoniously folded against her chest. She bared her fangs and he jumped.

On Saturdays, as Henry pushed her through the supermarket in the cart, she’d repeat things like “spaghetti” and “donkey” over and over, until the everyday words became unfamiliar and strange. 

“We may have a poet on our hands,” Meredith told him brightly in the tuna can aisle, trying to alleviate the concern she saw in his face as their nine-year-old daughter played with the syllables in her mouth.

In summer, the grasshoppers rubbed their legs and the bees buzzed, and the garden grew tall and lush. The tomato plants towered over their stakes, the fruit weighing heavily on their hairy green stems. Meredith’s husband plucked each one as if it were a gleaming ruby. 

“This was growing in the garden ten minutes ago!” he’d crow. 

Meredith would laugh at Henry’s outsized enthusiasm. But it was true. The tomatoes tasted of sun and earth and her husband’s life-giving hands.

After watching Fried Green Tomatoes on TV, they began battering the tomatoes in flour and frying them up before they were ripe. They’d slice them in Western sandwiches and slip them in burgers or just eat them fresh. Jane liked the way the salt drew out the tangy-sweet flavours but when she asked her father to pass the shaker he’d lift his eyebrows and say, “The White Poison?” and Jane, unfazed, would roll her eyes and say, “Pass the White Poison, Dad.” 

Meredith had found this exchange amusing. Now she wonders if he’d known then that he had a health problem. Otherwise, why would he suddenly bedevil the saltshaker? There were so many bigger things to be afraid of.

There was also the time she put a cheap blood-pressure cuff in his Christmas stocking to tease him for being so vigilant about his health. He put it on one wrist, then the other. He made her do it, then Jane, but grabbed it back when their numbers were lower than his. He turned it on and off. Removed the battery and put it back in. They laughed at his determination to beat the cheap thing, tears running down their faces. It was broken, they were sure of it. 

Her husband had never said that anything was wrong when he came back from a doctor’s appointment, but maybe that was part of his wrestler’s code. Courage to Henry meant fighting each battle mano a mano. Courage was mind-over-body. Courage was coughing in the back kitchen where you thought no one could hear you and denying having a cold at all costs. Courage was confronting challenges with a positive attitude and a heap of backyard honey on a spoon.

*

Meredith wraps the blankets around her in a cocoon. The bed is too big, too cold. She listens carefully as the alarm clock throws its heavy hands against the seconds in the dark. She’s waiting for Henry to come back from the bathroom, mouth minty with toothpaste. 

Until she remembers. 

The cocoon is too tight, too constricting. She squeezes herself out of bed and tears off her nightgown, throwing it away from her. She turns on the light and pulls on underwear, jeans, socks, and a sweatshirt, and steps quietly past Jane’s door. In the kitchen, she ties her feet into running shoes, grabs a flashlight, and locks the door behind her.

The night reverberates with insects. She likes the way her footsteps sound against the chorus of hidden voices. Left, right, left, right. She follows the beam she strikes into the darkness, lured forward by what she sees framed in the soft warm glow. She’s not sure where she’s going. It doesn’t matter. She just goes.

As she walks, she sheds tension like a silvery husk, strides loosening with every step. She hears death’s imminence all around her, on the rustling spines of leaves and the wings of moths. She didn’t hear this deathly frequency when Henry was alive, when they’d convinced themselves that they were invincible. They were careful in enough ways, they’d thought. They never traveled at great speeds in cars, skied through trees, rubbed butter on toast, ate bacon or sweets. They deserved death on their own terms, when they’d decided they were ready, smiling softly in slumber, touching their wrinkled faces together in agreement.

*

When they were newly married, Meredith and Henry would drive to the Mustang to make love in front of the flickering screen. They circled until they found a spot shaded by trees. When the sun dropped, they fumbled seatbelts and bra hooks in the back seat, pressing their toes against the cheap vinyl, hot breath fogging up the glass. They traced their lips along necks and ear lobes and nipples in the dark. Meredith muffled moans with her hand as they rocked together in the backseat, Henry whispering, “Love you” down the nubs of her spine. 

Afterwards, they got dressed and lay on the grass in front of the hood, barefoot and bruised. Meredith rested her head on Henry’s chest, tucked her fingers under his. The night deepened. They watched stars mouth their lines on the screen and listened to the voices tuning in. 

Sometimes they stayed at the drive-in after everyone else had left. Meredith would turn the car’s radio dial until she found the Beatles, and they’d press their cheeks together and slow dance where the other cars had been, feeling the tire tracks under their toes, stepping over plastic cups and packets of ketchup. Cows stared at them from the other side of the fence, flicking their tails. 

They’d keep dancing even as the song ended and the commercials came on, until the grizzled man who owned the place finally came up to them and said “Show’s over, folks. Time to go home.”