9 Letters (20 page)

I saw John Lawson walking down
the street, heard him whistling show tunes. Made me laugh.

“Luke?” he asked,
squinting at me.

“Evening.”

He strolled up, eyeing me in the
bed of my truck. “It’s 3:30 in the morning, man.”

“Sounds about right.”

“What’re you doing?”

“I was too drunk to drive,
about three hours back. Laid down, took a nap, now I’m just
kind of watching the dead streets of Kansas City being dead.”

“You need anything?”

“Need a lot of things, John
Lawson.”

My walls were crumbling. I don’t
open myself up to people like that, not people who were
half-strangers. Not to anyone, really.

“You need to get your shit
straight,” John Lawson said. Seemed I was hearing that a lot,
lately.

“It’s a nice night,
though,” I said.

He thought about that.

“It is,” he said.

“Goodnight,” I said.

“Goodnight.”

I made it home and found out King
had taken out his loneliness on my couch cushions like I’d
wanted to take it out on that lumberjack at Lou’s. Maybe King
was a wild dog too, a street dog who thought he was a coyote. I was
jealous. He didn’t have to think so much about the consequences
of his actions. He could just do what he thought he should do.

But that wasn’t true. King
wasn’t a coyote.

King loved riding in my truck, he
loved playing nice with the other dogs at the park. He loved when
someone cooked for him, when someone took him on walks. He loved
sleeping in bed with someone warm and he loved being safe and he
loved knowing that life was going to be alright.

He wasn’t a coyote.

I wasn’t a damn coyote
either.

I stormed up the stairs, hurrying
like the tears were going to fall out of my face if I didn’t
move fast enough. Pulled out my phone. Scrolled through recent calls.
Found Natalie.

Four in the morning.

I didn’t care.

It rang four times, then went to
voicemail.

“Hi,” I said. “It’s
Luke. I miss Emily so much. Every day. I miss her so much. I’m
sorry I was an asshole last time we talked. Call me.”

Then I hung up the phone, and I
did what I should have done more often.

I sat on the edge of my bed, I
put my hands up to my eyes, and I cried. I bawled. Wracking sobs that
came over my body until I was shaking and I cried like it might wake
up the neighbors. I cried, and I cried.

And as I fell onto my bed, curled
up in a ball, King jumped up there with me, and I rested my head on
his side and I cried some more.

When you haven’t slept,
nothing feels real. Which is a good thing, when your wife is in the
hospital room next to you, dying.

On the day that she died, I
hadn’t slept in I don’t even know how long, but I knew
she was going to pull through. I knew it in my bones. I knew it with
every last part of me. It was faith. I had more faith in her than I
had in God. I had more faith in her than I had in the idea that the
earth rotated around the sun or that flowers smelled sweet or that
pork tenderloin tastes like bliss.

Natalie was there with me, that
morning. There hadn’t been a minute that her sister or her mom
hadn’t been with her, and her dad only went out of earshot when
someone needed something. He cooked us three meals a day, and the
whole lot of us had basically moved into the hospital waiting room.

Me, though, I never left her side
except to use the bathroom.

Emily was awake just then, but
she could barely talk or think owing to the pain she was going
through. She mostly mumbled, and sometimes she kissed me, and
sometimes she’d reach out for my hand and I held it like we
were kids still, just falling in love for the first time.

The harsh smell of hospital
chemical clean and the scent of flowers fought to break through the
congestion that had built up in my nose from crying. The daylight
filtered in through the blinds in the tiny vertical slit of a window,
and all I could hear was Emily breathing. Even when other people were
talking, most of the time all I could hear was her faint breathing.

Her eyes were bright, despite it
all, but they were sunk into hollow sockets with all the weight she’d
lost. Her lips were brittle and cracked, but she was still beautiful.
Unbearably beautiful.

“She’s so strong,”
I told Natalie.

“You’ve told me,”
she said.

“She’s the strongest
woman I’ll ever meet,” I said.

“We need to let the nurses
give her drugs, knock her out. That look in her eyes, that’s
pain.”

“The doctor says she has a
chance.”

“The doctor says she has a
chance of making it another couple of
days
,
maybe a week. A
chance
.”

“She can pull through.”
I turned to Emily. “You can pull through.”

“You’re being
selfish,” Natalie said, shaking her head. “You’re
being weak. My sister is in pain, and you want her awake because you
want every last bit of her life focused on you. Let her sleep. Let
her rest.”

I took a deep breath, let myself
really hear what Natalie was telling me.

“You’re right,”
I said.

Natalie pushed the nurse call
button.

I was crying.

The door swung open and the nurse
came in, and it didn’t even register than I was crying in front
of him. Faintly, I heard the muzak playing in the waiting room.

For a moment, I was overcome with
fury. That room, with its obsessive clean and its filtered daylight
and that godawful music, that room wasn’t where a spirit as
wild as Emily should die. She should die in the fields, somewhere,
with the waxing moon rising in the sky and wildflowers leaning in a
warm breeze and the sound of horses in the distance. I hated the
hospital, just then. I hated everyone who was trying to save her or
drug her or keep her from me.

Then I came to my senses. I
thought back to the last two weeks, with her in critical condition,
and how her family had come from far-flung corners of the country and
Mexico to see her off, and I realized those two weeks had been worth
it. I didn’t want her to die in the hospital because it wasn’t
how I wanted to remember her. I was being selfish.

“I’m so sorry,”
I said to Emily. I put my face up near hers, and she turned to look
at me. Recognition cut through the pain, I think. “I got to let
you go and rest, my heart.”

She smiled. “I love you,”
she said, so quiet I could barely hear her.

The sedatives went into her IV,
and I started humming her song while she drifted off into sleep. I
wasn’t humming it anymore when, an hour later, she drifted off
for the last time.

Three days later, I was at the
funeral. I sat in the front, and my mother sat next to me, held my
hand. I hadn’t said a word. Not for three days. Not to my
mother, not to Emily’s.

I knew they were staring.
Everyone was staring. I was glad I was in the front, where I didn’t
have to meet their gazes, where they didn’t have to turn back
to look at the spectacle of a broken man, a man who was twenty-three
and as good as dead.

I could hear them talking,
though. Whispers carry in a church, that’s one of the cruelties
of the world. My brother was in whispered conference with my father,
over in the corner.

Natalie and Emily’s parents
had their own concerns, and the three of them held one another tight,
huddled like players discussing a play. I could hear them sobbing. I
could hear her father sobbing.

I wouldn’t do that, not in
front of strangers. Because I wasn’t half as brave as that man
who rode bulls for a living.

A wooden cross loomed over us,
and my mind turned to darker thoughts. Nails driven into your hands
and feet, and then you’re left to die. That was a pain I could
respect. But it still couldn’t match what I was feeling at that
moment. I might’ve even traded places with the man if given the
choice, though I’m sure it was blasphemy to think it.

“For we know that if the
earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an
eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.”

It wasn’t the first thing
my brother said, but it was the first thing I heard. His voice boomed
out across the church and the whispers fell silent. He was
officiating. It was his church.

I didn’t want to believe
him, about eternal life. It wasn’t that I’d lost my
faith—not yet—it’s that I wanted to reject it. I
didn’t want to one day be in heaven and reunited with Emily.
Just then, with her earthly body in a casket at the front of the
room, I wanted to know that one day I simply wouldn’t exist.
That one day it would be over.

I’d spent three days in my
house, ignoring almost everyone who called on me, and not speaking a
word to any of them. My mother had come with my dinners. Dave had
come with my lunch. I hadn’t bothered with breakfast, and I’d
only picked at every meal. Most of that time, I’d sat alone, on
the edge of our bed. Emily’s shirt in my hand, breathing it in.
Her smell wouldn’t last forever. It was like an echo of her
voice, and it would soon fade to nothing.

I didn’t want to forget her
smell. I was terrified that I would.

As Mike went on at length about
how Emily wasn’t dead, but instead in the hands of the Lord, I
started to get angrier. First, at Mike, for telling lies like that.

I’d seen her die.

Then I realized it was God who’d
killed her. Who’d taken her away into heaven without her
permission. It was God who’d broken up my marriage, laughing at
the supposed sanctity of it. It was God who had left me alone in the
world. It was God who’d forsaken me, as he’d forsaken
billions of others before me. It was God I was angry with.

“There is an appointed time
for everything,” Mike said. “And there is a time for
every event under heaven. A time to give birth and a time to die; a
time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.”

Emily had never given birth.
She’d been taken from the world long before that. If God
insisted on cruel metaphors, seeing us like we were crops, He’d
pulled her in early spring before she could bear fruit. He’d
pulled her up from the soil like she was a weed.

Like He didn’t care about
her.

Like He didn’t care about
any of us.

“I believe my brother,
Emily’s husband, has a few words to say,” Mike said. More
lies. I didn’t have anything to say.

But I stood up, and I walked to
the front of the room, and I stood right in front of the coffin and I
faced the crowd.

“Emily was better than
anyone who’s come before her on the planet, and she was better
than everyone who’s going to come after her. She blessed us,
just by being in our lives. She blessed me. What matters in life
isn’t what we do, it’s how we do it. She used to tell me
that. She also showed me that. It didn’t matter to her if we
had money or status. It mattered that we lived life simple and right,
that we learned how to love our neighbors, that we learned how to do
what we could to keep the world headed the way it should be headed.
Love is what mattered to her. She taught me that. Love is what
matters. Just love.”

She was my heart, and today we
bury her. I didn’t say that part. I just went and sat down
before I started crying all the worse. Before all those pitying eyes
could be on me another moment.

Natalie was next, and her eyes
were drying up, and she said her piece without choking up.

“Emily was too much for the
world to handle, and anyone who ever met her knew it. She burned the
candle at both ends, and she did more in twenty years than most
people do in eighty. She lived the rodeo life and she lived the city
life and she went between them so easy that I know she ain’t
going to have a lick of trouble getting people to like her where
she’s going. I miss her, I’m going to miss her every day
of my life, and I can’t wait to see her again.”

If I could have shortcut my way
to seeing her again, I might have done it.

Instead, I stood up, and six of
us carried her casket out to the hearse.

We drove in slow procession
through town.

A few final words at the
gravesite, and that was it. Crows were in the trees above us, and we
were somber in the light spring rain in our dark clothes with the
darkness in our hearts. The fresh-dug grave smelled damp and earthy.
It wasn’t right that she was full of chemicals, that her body
was entombed in the fiberglass of that coffin. She was gone, and what
was left of her should be back in the earth. Back to being part of
the earth.

That was the end of Emily’s
life. The last we’d see her, the last we’d interact with
her remains.

It’s not proper to throw
yourself down into the grave and let them pile dirt up on you, or so
I hear.

I got a window table at the
restaurant, where I had a good view of the street. Ordered a Corona
while I waited, tried not to eat more than half the chips. My guitar
was in its case, leaning against my chair.

Then, when half the chips were
gone and Natalie hadn’t shown up yet, I decided that it was my
right as the person waiting for the other person to eat all the chips
if I wanted. It was a good spot. The chips were made in house. It’s
easy to tell.

Natalie pulled up outside, I saw
her truck, and she strode in like she hated every step she took. She
looked around the city like she hated everything about it.

I’ll talk trash on Kansas
City, and city life in general, as much as anyone else, but damn I’ll
defend it to the death against someone who just thinks we’re
all soft because there are buildings taller than the trees.

But it did my heart a little bit
of good to see her. That dangerous kind of good, where I had no idea
if it was actually hurting me or helping me. Emily and Natalie, they
weren’t the spitting image of each other or nothing like
that—Natalie was shorter, more wiry. A sharper face, darker
hair. But they had the same eyes, the same smile. They were two of
the toughest people I’d ever met, and they were tough in a
pretty similar way. Emily though, Emily’s tough was tempered
with kindness. Natalie’s wasn’t tempered too much at all.