The Window

                 The Window III, Robert Delaunay, 1912



Some mornings the Great Blue Heron rises to the sky only the wind in his wings. Other mornings I disturb him, or her, and she launches off the dock in the dark with an unpleasant gronk.

Yesterday I dropped a copper washer. I saw the blurr, heard it tink off the fuel lines, then it was gone. Smaller than a dime with a hole in the middle it’s a compression washer meant to make an airtight seal when the piston squeezes air against the injector. 

This is one of those times when I put effort into a thing and it ends up worse off than when I started. Now the project is more complicated, time consuming, and expensive than first imagined. My engine problems are small peas compared to Rosalie’s situation though. She has asked me to come. I said I would. Sooner the better, she said. 

I took the long way around to her house. I avoided town and skirted the toes of purple hills, the front range peaks still lower than the snow, which creeps down at night, or in clouds. Rosalie can see those hills from her kitchen window.

It seems like she’s been dying for so long. She’s been talking about it for long enough. But I guess that’s what happens, when you think about it. Most of us are pretty good at disguising our impending death from ourselves until something or other becomes too blatant and insistent to ignore. Of course many of us get away with it for decades. Others aren’t so lucky. The thing about Rosalie, she’s never been diagnosed with an illness anyone can identify. You’ve got death, said Archer, one man in her orbit who was actually a doctor. After she heard that she’d say, Have you heard, I’ve got death. 

You came, she said weakly. I wasn’t sure. 

There wasn’t much left of her, she hardly rippled the bedsheets. I tried connecting her to the strong, vibrant woman who used to straddle me in bed. That thing about making sense of the past in terms of the present is so hopeless I might as well try to count the stars. It was odd she was alone. Where was everyone? Everyone being whoever the hospice person was that day. 

No, she said, I’m alone. She just went home. Said see you tomorrow Rose. I don’t know how she knows that. 

Can I get you anything, Rosie? 

Come, this is not a time to be silly. There is nothing to get.

Can I do anything? I’d like to feel useful besides just sitting here. 

Sit, she said. She looked like she wanted to move her eyes in the direction of the chair, but nothing happened. She kept looking at the ceiling somewhere over my head. I did sit down and could tell she was less there than before. This was not how she wanted things to go. For years she’d say offhand she didn’t want to linger and fall away piece by piece. But that’s how it turned out more or less. 

I should have done something about this sooner, she said. He pulled the chair up close to her bed and thought about the copper washer somewhere under the engine. It was weird how you can be so close to something and yet not be able to find it. The washer wasn’t the first thing to disappear under the engine, but he couldn’t remember what else he’d lost. 

Rosalie dozed off in rough breathing. Some exhalations reminded him of the great blue heron early in the morning.  He saw the great bill take a fish and spin it to swallow head first, if you called that swallowing. Her breathing was disconcerting and he got up and went into the kitchen for a glass of water. It was October, but the calendar on the pantry door still showed August. 

The house was old and not very firm in the world. She’d stopping maintaining it years ago and most of the glazing putty fell away from the sash and when it rained the water soaked in around the panes and if it rained hard enough with a wind pushing it the water bubbled to the inside and dripped onto the sill and sometimes all the way to the floor. The muntins’ mortice into the sash loosened as the wood weathered, and then the wind rattled the glass in the sash, more habit holding the window together than physical connections by then. 

He was looking out the window at the old fields gone to puckerbrush and raspberry wishing she had made a plan for the land after she was gone when the gunshot rattled the glass. She’d had it under the bedclothes, and didn’t she say a long time ago she would not be scared to do that at some point. He should have just stayed with her and not left for the glass of water. He’d been thirsty though, and frankly wanted to get out. He wanted to look outside at living things past the forlorn of the house but now he thought he’d rather of stayed with her. 

It was pretty simple. She had no family. She’d lived her life as friends become mothers and then some of them grandmothers and then one or two great grandmothers and some came out happy and some lived through drugs and accidents and suicides and she was lucky to have no tragedy but not a lot of anything else either which is the way those things tend to go. 

The list was on the bedside table. The funeral home which included a crematorium, the location of her exact cemetery plot within her family’s plot where two hundred years of ancestors were buried. Sundry instructions on the business of death. The name of a realtor, the name of a lawyer she’d named as executor. There was even a clipping from a magazine with a picture of the urn she wanted for her ashes. 

They’d had a sort of fling half a century before. Half a century. Good grief, does anything that happened that long ago mean anything in the present. The cells of your body regenerate themselves every seven to ten years. Fifty years divided by ten is five cycles of complete cell regenerations. It’s a wonder we remember anything and who’s going to make the case we’re the same person now that we were then. 

Someone down the chain of lists placed a notice in the paper for a service and internment of her ashes at the cemetery. Somehow I got notice in the mail, a card with a picture of her from a long time ago. I gasped at her youthfulness. A parenthesis of years between the date of birth and the date of death. I couldn’t imagine who else would be there she had outlived so many. 

The morning was brisk with frost, and a hoary rime hung in the shadows into early afternoon. The grass crushed, and maple leaves cracked in the shade and melted in the sun. The sun honed the air to a splendid burnish. For some reason Rosalie’s kitchen window came to mind. She loved that view through the waves and bubbles of the old glass and used to sit for hours watching the light change on the hillside. 

Two men in suits brought the urn from a long black car that would have made her cringe. There was no one else at first except a gray squirrel who minded his own business shuttling acorns to his own niches up in the treetops. The hole for the urn was small when you’re used to casket sized holes. A few feet away were headstones of other Granthams and a Landross, a name I’d never heard. It felt strange to realize I didn’t  know very much about her life. 

It was a few minutes before 1000. A man about my age walked up the knoll carrying a spray of red roses and stopped short of the urn, which one of the men had placed on a velvet draped board that spanned the hole in the ground. In startling succession three more men appeared from below, and as they ascended the hill, several more came into view behind them, and again, another group, clearly not together, but walking with common purpose, so then I lost track of how many showed up. I didn’t recognize any of them. Some brought flowers. One carried a guitar and strummed a soulful melancholy of minor chords. One lit a candle in a glass cylinder and set it down next to the urn. Another carried a small book of poetry and lip read while shifting from one foot to another. He was tall, well over six feet, and one could tell prided himself on the sharp cut of his clothes and the shine on his shoes. He didn’t look like Rosalie’s type, but then he finished reading and tore a page from the book and folded it into a small rectangle then knelt down, lifted the lid off the urn, pressed the paper to his lips and dropped it inside. A few muttered, and several did little to disguise their peevish sparks. 

Many years ago Rosalie and I made love on an island beach and now what was left of her was inside the urn. There didn’t seem to be a satisfactory way to think about that. I sort of felt like getting back to the engine. Maybe I could find that washer and finish putting things back together, because after a little time goes by chances are one will see things differently. Maybe it was right there in plain sight. 

It was odd with no one leading the occasion, and Rose specifically said no weird church stuff, no prayers. After some time I thought I had paid my respects by showing up and took a few steps backwards thinking to ease away when a woman I had not seen came running toward the urn, scooped it up and took off down the hill, screaming all the way, sounding more like the ghastly heron in the dark than anything human. Before the astonished attendees could respond she started her small green car and bounced away over the lumpy cemetery road. And that, strangely enough, was that.