1.

It smells like rubber chickens and mylar balloons and Play-Doh. Over there, on that little bent-legged table, a pair of plastic slinkies watch over the room like fetish totems. A rare deck of Jerry’s Nugget playing cards received just weeks earlier as a birthday present, arranged in an unfinished game of solitaire. Crayons, the big box with 120 colors, 23 of them named after foods —actually 24, because he once ate a Robin’s Egg on a dare. Legos. Plushies. Hot Wheels. A disembodied bicycle horn. Brought them all here in a suitcase, whatever he could grab. He’ll go back for more tomorrow, but now, with the hospital room arranged into a kind of dollar-store cabinet of curiosities, Jeff Carpenter dons a red clown nose, pulls the rainbow wig down over his scalp, and he walks over to his dying wife’s side.

“All right, sweet lady. It’s just you and me now,” he says, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “And finally, I’ve got you right where I want you.” He clears his throat, begins flipping through the withered paperback in his hand. Not Your Grandmother’s Joke Book, the name plastered across the cover in an electric yellow font*.* Purchasing it this morning, turning it over in his hands like a precious jewel, Jeff had muttered, “We’ll see about that.”

Jeff and Maggie Carpenter. He’s got a book full of racy jokes, and she’s got nowhere to run. For him, a dream; for her, a nightmare. No, no: It’s just a nightmare. Even if Maggie can’t scold him for “toilet language” like she normally would. Even if she can’t get up and storm out of the room, but grinning nonetheless.

2.

On Thursday, Maggie is assigned a dedicated nurse, someone who will be here shortly and whose name is Beverley and who, Jeff is assured, will take tip-top care of the lovely lady here. Jeff follows the doctor out into the hallway.

“Doc, so sorry, but okay now, be honest: Do you think there’s any way she’s, like, aware of what’s going on around her?”

“Honestly, Mr. Carpenter, there’s no way for me to know that. But I’ve heard the same stories about coma patients you have. We’ve got no way of knowing.”

Jeff has been testing that hypothesis in his spare time, whispering in Maggie’s ear all sorts of swear words, limericks, outright insults, dumbfounding political opinions, risqué innuendo, actual dirty talk, Breitbart talking points, childhood confessions of quasi-sexual-assault, detailed horror film synopses, Afroman lyrics, erotic Roger Rabbit fan-fiction, diatribes directed at deceased in-laws, subsections from the Texas State Constitution, passages from the latest James Patterson paperback, just about the foulest stuff he could muster, and all in the hopes of hearing the heartbeat monitor speed-up slightly. Something to let him know that she is still there, awake underneath herself.

Which would, of course, justify all the toys.

A few moments later, someone knocks on the door and lets themselves in.

Beverley has heard about this particular coma patient, or more specifically, has heard about this particular coma patient’s husband, but she hadn’t yet come around to see the room. Only the tubes and monitors and braindead woman on the bed make clear that she’s still in the ICU. Crayons and balloon carcasses are strewn atop the linoleum like explosion detritus. One of those ghastly cymbal-banging monkeys is lying on its side in a chair by the window, tossed there haphazardly. It looks up at her with cold, empty eyes. Her mother would say it’s a bad omen. And also, perhaps, the man on the other side of the bed. He’s holding a half-empty balloon tight to his chest. He is looking up at her like a child caught singing showtunes into a hairbrush.

“I’m Beverley,” she says to the husband. “I’ll be Mrs. Carpenter’s nurse.”

Jeff reaches for her hand. “It’s nice to meet you,” he squeaks, his voice as high as a cartoon mouse’s. “Sorry,” he says, looking down at his balloon, “I wasn’t expecting you to show up so soon.”

“Listen, you don’t need to take all this stuff away, but I do need you to clean it up somewhat.”

“You came at the perfect time, actually,” he says, his voice buoying back to normal. “I’ve found myself lacking discipline lately. And you can see the results.”

He’s a pale man with a disconcertingly straight smile, full head of brown hair, seems to be in fairly decent shape. At 25, she wouldn’t have given him a second look. Now, however, she thinks well, well, well what do we have here? But that’s age for you. Beverley figures him to be in his mid-thirties. Still a baby. Hint of a paunch under the Strahan jersey. Maybe he stress-eats. Stands somewhat asymmetrically. Scoliosis?

“I’m going to take her vitals now,” she says.

The nurse is efficient, even brutal, manhandling Maggie’s arms as one would a Stretch Armstrong doll. Jeff twice considers intervening. But this Beverley is the kind of tall, elegant woman he has always found it difficult to chide. At one point, she lowers her face so close to Maggie’s he thinks they’re going to kiss.

“I didn’t brush her teeth this morning,” he blurts out. “Uhh, I’ve been doing that. Brushing her teeth. Actually, should I be doing that? Can’t hurt though, right? Either way, her breath doesn’t always smell like that. So...please don’t hold it against her.”

Beverley doesn’t acknowledge him, but she does remove the pink-haired Troll doll from the crook of Maggie’s arm with an added tenderness, and then, when finished stabbing an otoscope into her ears and nostrils, carefully places it back again.

“I’ll be back in a few hours. Please do something with—” Beverley gestures around the room “—all this.” And she leaves.

After tidying the room somewhat, Jeff pulls a chair next to Maggie’s bed, and they watch Welcome Back, Cotter reruns on the little hospital TV until he drifts off. Maggie would have liked this one —Julie’s sister from Nebraska visits and Epstein gets the hots for her. She would have said what she always did about look how handsome John Travolta is, and God, he really was so young once.

3.

There’s no one reason Jeff can only seem to cry in the bathroom. It’s just something about being alone and in such a little room, tiled floor-to-ceiling, listening to the fan have an epileptic fit within the walls. And the toilet seat always so, so cold. Or maybe it’s because he hasn’t decorated in here at all, so it feels like a more appropriate place to be sad. That can be fixed. He goes outside and grabs two Lego dinosaurs off the windowsill, placing them in attack positions atop the biohazard disposal box. He’s named the pterodactyl Lenny. And the velociraptor is Paul. It’s good to name things. And he always got a kick out of animals with human names. He and Maggie met a pig named Boris once. That just about killed him.

In the afternoon, the doctor comes in with a prognosis. “It doesn’t look good,” he says, which is a strange way to start a conversation. He comes around to the other side of the bed.

FYHWOOOOWEEEEHwooooooooooo!

Startled, the doctor leaps back, both feet leaving the ground, off of the throat of the stuffed penguin he’d accidentally stepped upon. His heel must’ve stomped the spot where the squeaker is.

“That’s Larry,” Jeff says, snatching the penguin up off the floor. “He’s very mischievous. You’ll have to forgive him. Say you’re sorry, Larry.”

Fhwoooooweeeeehwooo.

4.

The first time Jeff cries in front of Beverley is a Sunday. July 4th weekend. There are fireworks on the Navesink which he can see through the window, and that just about does it. Because he and Maggie loved fireworks, and she can’t see them even though he can, and that just seems too unfair. He’s clutching Maggie’s fat thumb tightly in one hand, Larry the squeaking penguin in the other, and Beverley is still here too, lingering by the door. Eventually, she steps back into the room, floats over to the bed, and squeezes Jeff’s shoulder while he sobs. If he were a child, she’d be saying something like, “There, there, it’ll all be okay.”

She ends up saying, “There, there, it’ll all be okay.”

Jeff gathers himself rather quickly. Rubbing his nose with his hairy wrist, he says, “When this is all over, we should double-date.” He holds Larry aloft. “What do you think? Pretty handsome, huh? He was giving you the eyes earlier.”

Beverley says, “Honestly, the little bowtie made me think he was gay.”

Jeff, laughing now, briefly forgets that his wife can’t see the spectacle around her.

5.

“Even by your standards, this is totally unacceptable,” she says to him, nevertheless kneeling down to admire his handiwork. “Someone could trip.”

“Who’s coming in here but you and me?” he asks. “Anyways, watch this.” He crawls carefully to the other side of the room, being careful not to crush the orange track with a wayward toe. “You should move. Yeah, that’s perfect. Okay, do you prefer Mustangs or Maserati’s?”

“Are those my only choices?”

“I have more at home, but these are the only ones I brought.” “Mustang.”

“Mustang! Good choice. American made, American tested.”

So it’s the Mustang, shimmering and blue, that Jeff picks up from the sill and places down on the orange track. Behind it is a small contraption with a motor that Jeff rather dramatically activates with the pressing of a black button. It produces a muted whirring sound. “Ready?” he asks.

“I suppose so.”

Jeff pulls the car backwards into the motor, leaves it there for a moment, and then lets it rip.

The Mustang is a blue blur blazing across the floor, racing across a short flat length of track and then veering suddenly to the right, then back to the left, climbing up a small hill but sizzling down it with accelerated speed, into the first loop and around, right into the second loop, seeming to slow for a split- second near the summit but picking back up again as it rolls back down, now onto the third loop —largest and tallest— but the speed is so great you can hardly see the tiny car as it spins upside-down, shooting into the final straightaway now, here it comes rising sharply up a ramp, and there it goes careening off the edge of the world, forward forward forward like a bullet, smacking grill-first into a bloated mylar balloon taped to the wall—

KARASH!

The balloon pops violently, the car ricocheting off the wall, shreds of thin metal exploding outwards, raining down in feathery swoops.

Beverley, gasping, clutches her heart out of instinct, and now struggles to catch her breath. All she can think is, I’m showing my age. All she can feel is rage. Naturally, she scowls at Jeff, preparing the words with which to scold him for his soon-to-be-forcibly-dissembled contraption.

But Jeff isn’t concerned with her at all. He’s pushed himself high onto his knees so that he can see up onto the bed, his sweet face crumpled into a pout as he stares at his wife. “I thought the sound might wake her up,” he says.

But the monitors don’t miss a beat.

Beverley remembers now that she’s just a nurse. “You need to get all this out of here,” she says firmly, standing, dusting herself off. “Now,” and she sweeps out of the room.

Halfway down the hall, she hears another balloon pop. The Maserati. She imagines Jeff again on his knees.

6.

After a not insignificant amount of internal deliberation, hospital administration begins allowing patients from the children’s ward to make chaperoned pilgrimages down to Maggie Carpenter’s room.

Jeff, meanwhile, has taken to wearing the clown wig while walking around the hospital. The nose, however, makes him break out in hives, so he only wears it in the afternoons when the kids come by.

“Don’t you, like, have to work?” Beverley asks him. It’s a Wednesday.

“Yes and no,” he answers. “Anyways, Maggie was the breadwinner. My earnings were what she referred to as ‘vacation money.’”

“No kids?”

Jeff shakes his head. “We were getting ready to get ready to try.”

One little boy named Tobias grows particularly attached to Jeff, coming down to see him whenever possible. Tobias’ parents both work long hours, and neither visits as often as they’d like to. They are only too happy that their son has found a friend in “Big Jeff.” And Big Jeff has started accumulating toys specifically for Tobias’ sake.

“This is a Bakugan.

“These are Yu-gi-oh cards. This one, Exodia, is the best. But you have to have all five pieces to summon him. Otherwise he’s just a foot.

“This is an old music box my grandmother gave me when I was about your age. Wanna see how it works? The song is from a long time ago, from when my grandmother was young. Okay, now you try.”

The nurses up in the children’s ward soon grow accustomed to the music box’s tiny, tinny melody. Before long, they’re humming it in the halls, they’re humming it at home. Their girlfriends and husbands and wives and children want desperately to know what the hell it is they’re always humming. But none of them can pinpoint the source. It just becomes another thing they carry home from work.

7.

Maggie has been in the ICU for nearly three weeks when Jeff first brings Beverley flowers.

It’s only a few, and just a sampling of the same wildflowers he brings for Maggie. “They grow in the woods behind our house,” he says, “and there are simply too many to leave alone.” For Maggie he stuffs a vase fit to bursting, whereas Beverley receives only a small bouquet of Bluebells, Wood Sorrels, and Wild Strawberries, all wrapped carefully in brown parchment paper.

“I’m not sure if Maggie is aware of anything right now, but if she were, she would be so thankful for all the work you’re doing,” he says, taking Beverley’s hand and giving her the bouquet and curling her fingers around the exposed stems. Her skin is soft. Recently buttered. He catches a whiff of the cocoa scent, his subconscious briefly flickering with a desire to know how her fingers would taste. Cocoa butter never smells better than when it’s been spread over skin, given the earthy augmentation of hand.

“It’s time to give Maggie her bath,” Beverley says. “Then I should make myself scarce.”

After giving thousands of sponge baths to hundreds of patients, one can become numb to the human body’s nuances. But Maggie Carpenter has such especially smooth skin, at least where the sores haven’t started forming. If Beverley, on the other hand, were to go without moisturizer for this long, she’d begin to crack all over like a salt flat. Their differences don’t end there. Maggie’s skin is pale, for instance, like the daisy petals in the vase on the nightstand. And she has the kind of sandy-blonde hair that white women spend years in the sun carefully crafting. A very small nose, from some angles almost invisible, and straight, uniform teeth, almost identical to Jeff’s. Maybe her father was an orthodontist. Beverley’s was a firefighter.

Maggie is a very beautiful woman. Jeff —Beverley recently concluded— is a very beautiful man, his tall and stringy figure actually quite becoming, and she can’t help but imagine the two as newlyweds standing beside each other, perhaps in front of a barn, Jeff with his pitchfork, Maggie looking at him askance, the two painted from the same palette, works of the same artist.

As she scrubs, Beverley tells Maggie all that Jeff has been up to. One talks to the comatose for the same reasons one talks to a pet. Because you have something to say, because they’re there, and because you’re not really interesting in spilling your guts to something that’ll respond.

Among other things, she says to Maggie, “He loves you very much,” and, “You’re very lucky.”

Once finished, Beverley sets Maggie back down, checks the woman’s vitals, and replaces her chart at the foot of the bed. There, she adjusts Maggie’s blanket, momentarily pulling it off of Maggie’s feet, and GOD DAMN, those tootsies are absolutely massive! Jagged and flat as a board, they are the lone blemish on the woman’s petite porcelain figure. Feet like an ogre’s, and godawfully ugly too, gnarled nails and covered in corns. A bunion. A bruise. And the longer second toe, which is as freaky as anything. Whereas people have told Beverley she has nice feet. Not people. A person. A man named Marco she saw for a few months. He liked to suck on her toes. His tongue practically massaging the webbing between them. And, okay, he never explicitly said she had nice feet, but it was pretty heavily implied. Maggie’s feet, meanwhile, would never inspire a man’s mouth. A few small black hairs sprout from a big-toe knuckle. Beverley replaces the blanket.

Retrieving her bouquet on the way out, Beverly suddenly thinks it meager. She steals a few flowers from Maggie’s vase. There, that’s better.

8.

Tobias is prescribed a type of chemotherapy the hospital doesn’t provide, so he is transferred at once to Johns Hopkins, 150 miles south. Already transferred there by the time Beverley tells Jeff. She thought he deserved to know, her heart pounding as she informs him. She was afraid to give him bad news.

He looks very distraught. Beverley says, “I’m so sorry,” and then, without premeditation, she gives him a hug.

No, more: She wraps herself around him, resting her hands on his shoulders, her forearms pointed upwards, parallel to his spine. She becomes aware that she is clinging to him but doesn’t remove herself. Softly, into her ear, Jeff says, “I hope they do one of those Make-A-Wish things for him. He was always talking about John Cena. He loved John Cena. Bev, be honest, do you think they’ll let him meet John Cena?” The hair on Beverley’s neck stands up straight. She wonders if he can feel her getting goosebumps.

Also, there’s no good way to answer a question like that. Why try? As soon as she opens her mouth, he’ll pull away. So Beverley keeps quiet, and Jeff keeps close. She’s never held a man like this so close against her cheek before. Nor for this long.

9.

The first time Jeff and Beverley kiss, he pulls back and asks, “Does this make me a horrible person?” His hand remains entrenched in her back pocket.

Beverley has been here before. Other loved ones of patients with dire prognoses, gripped by emotions too powerful to be consciously separated. Grief blooms so near to love, to arousal, to ecstasy, to terror. Few spouses, mothers and sisters and children have enough experience with this sort of sentiment to keep from drowning in the overall soup. She has rebuffed advances. Of course she has: A beautiful woman with curly hair like this, a neck like hers, a birthmark like that one, supple hands which smell as hers smell, and a nurse no less? Hunched men who grabbed at her as if she were a dancer. A father who promised her not-insignificant amounts of cash if she’d help take his mind off a dying daughter. She has filed formal complaints. She has removed hands from her nape and said if you try that again you will lose that hand, you think anyone will trace a missing scalpel back to me? She has dawdled in hallways and accepted a crying head on her shoulder, though not the lips against her collarbone which came thereafter. She has paced through a Halloween store with a young nephew, gazing furiously at the Sexy Nurse costumes, and thought This is where it comes from. This is how it starts. She has had an abortion because of a man she met in a hospital. Not a patient or family member of a patient. An intern. Just an intern. She never told him. You don’t tell men some things. He was the last man she consented to kissing in her place of work.

And then Jeff. She accepts his kiss —he kissed her, all right— even though he has a Curious George doll in one hand and is very deliberately pressing it against her ass. Or maybe she accepts it because of the Curious George doll. And then he pulls away, asks if this makes him a horrible person, and she says, “No, sweetheart, this doesn’t make you anything.”

He says, “We both know that’s not true.”

They’re alone in the hallway outside of Mrs. Carpenter’s room, and it is very late. Beverley says she has to go check on other patients. When she comes back, Jeff is asleep in a chair beside his wife, hunched over at the waist, his head resting on her belly, their fingers intertwined.

So this is how it’s going to be, she thinks. This is how it’s always going to be.

10.

Things have lately gotten grim enough that friends have flown in to visit. There is Ramona, a florist. And the gang from college: Eric, Antonio, Mykaela, a bald man Maggie has only ever referred to as Rogaine. The neighbors, Rodney and Ashantee. Aunts Lila and Lydia. One living grandparent, Otto, who is wheelchair-bound and who sits alone with Maggie in total silence, stroking her hand without saying a word, just wheezing softly to himself, oxygen tubes in his nostrils, much on his mind.

Jeff waits outside during these visits, sometimes eating a popsicle in the cafeteria, giving Maggie’s visitors the privacy to say whatever goodbyes they need to say to her. Today will be the last day they spend with her, he thinks. I wonder how many of them know that.

Sucking on a Bomb Pop, Jeff turns over on his tongue the numerals of Beverley’s address, thinking how he has seen the inside of her apartment, has parked on her driveway, has cooked Chicken Picante on her stove, has thrust himself into her on the cold tile of her tiny kitchen, her nipple in his mouth. They no longer talk about the morality of their sex. Nothing so sensitive and slow, and which includes so many fondling fingers, could possibly be that bad.

Jeff arrives back to the hospital room in time to hold the door open as Maggie’s grandfather is wheeled out. The man’s face is contorted in distress, his stomach bulbous, and he doesn’t utter a word. Later, as Jeff is cleaning up, it becomes clear that the Curious George doll is gone.

Without thinking, he says, “That liver-spotted bastard stole my monkey.”

None of the monitors seem to notice.

It’s suddenly late. Beverley is off today. And the other nurses generally keep away during the nights. Maggie and Jeff will be each other’s’ only company until morning. Like the old days. When they were young and dumb and just becoming lovers, they would draw scalding baths in a crusty tub and fall asleep there, Jeff’s back against the porcelain, Maggie’s against his belly. He would wake up and their toes would be touching just above the water’s crest. The two of them never had the kind of incredible sex you read about in Cosmo, but sometimes he would cry afterwards. The sheer wonder of how closely she’d hold him. They built a marriageable relationship on the back of shared cereal preferences, a deep concern for the Amazon, and mutual dreams about settling down somewhere not too far from the coast. Two kids. A cat. A sloop would be nice.

Once, they were on a couch, and it was raining, and Jeff was playing with a Rubik’s cube, and Maggie was hemorrhaging herself to keep from giving him advice on it, when he said, “If you told me you’d killed a kid, I’d compile a list of the countries that wouldn’t extradite you.”

Maggie chewed on the comment for a second, then said, “If the roles were reversed, I think I’d freak out first, and then come up with a list.” She tickled his wrist with her giant toes. “But I’d come up with a list all the same.”

It was the most meaningful thing anyone had ever said to him. That is not an embellishment.

That was on a Monday. The next day, while Maggie was at work, Jeff drove to the diamond district, bought a ring, came home, and hid it in his underwear drawer (boxers). He intended to wait for a suitably-romantic occasion but couldn’t bear the weight of his secret. He proposed to Maggie on their concrete stoop that very same night, on the kind of mosquito-mad summer evening you look back on with regret as you maniacally scratch your ankles. They sat for a while longer, warming their hands over a propane fire, and then they got up to go fall asleep in a bathtub like they used to, all those years ago.

11.

Jeff removes everything from the hospital room personally, excepting Maggie herself. She is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in a well-attended ceremony, while the toys and games are laid to rest atop a tarp in the garage of a home still deeded to Mrs. Magdalena Carpenter. At some point, those documents will require adjudication.

It is still some weeks before Jeff is comfortable making love to Beverley in the house deeded to his dead wife, but once comfortable, they’re doing it right there on the bed, on sheets that have remained unwashed since Maggie last slept upon them, her lost smell still sometimes emerging, phantasmagoric, from within its creases. Beverley cries out as Maggie never cried out. And Maggie would never have uttered such toilet language. While conjoined like this, neither Jeff nor Beverley cares much about the souls which once roamed this place. Insulated by Beverley’s clutches and by the blanket around them, Jeff finds courage enough to ignore the great doom of his past, and he slows his movements and brings his forehead to hers and says, “I think I’m in love with you.” Beverley murmurs, “Yeah, well, let’s see how you feel in about 30 seconds.”

“Give me more credit than that.”

“Okay. 35 seconds.”

He lasts a hair under four minutes. Pretty good. They collapse down, Beverley stretched atop Jeff’s torso, protecting him from any vengeful specter which may have been waiting for this opportunity to pounce. She says “Look at me,” and he does.

“I’m pretty sure I’m still in love with you,” he says.

“Yeah, well, let’s see how you feel in the morning.”

They do not fall asleep right there in the nude, sticking to each other like lunch meat, but much later. After Beverley opens a book. After Jeff says something about the backyard, and goes outside to prune weeds with a headlamp. A sunflower patch Maggie planned out and planted in the spring; Jeff swears in the eyes of God he’ll keep it alive. He wants to have a sign made. “Maggie’s Garden,” or something along those lines. He’ll hammer it right into the ground. He’ll think of a more creative name.

Later, in the bathroom as they prepare for bed, Beverley asks, “What is that thing?”

“It’s a water pick. It does what floss does.”

“So why not just buy floss?”

Jeff shrugs. “My dead wife had expensive taste.”

Laying beside each other, he asks, “Dho you alwaysh shleep wisht sthat sthing on?”

“First of all, sweetheart, it’s called a bonnet. And yes, I am a black woman, and so I wear this every night. Do you always sleep with that thing on?”

Jeff pops the retainer out of his mouth. “Do you want me to develop loose teeth?”

“To match your flapping gums?”

“That’s very funny.”

“I think I love you too,” she says, “even with your midnight gardening.”

“Let’s see how we both feel in the morning.”

In the morning they wake atop silk sheets a dead woman once ordered from a magazine. They groan, turn to face each other, and confirm that their feelings have not changed.

“What will people say?” Beverley asks.

“All sorts of things,” Jeff answers. “They’ll hate me.”

“Not exclusively you.”

“Your friends will disown you.”

“I have too many of them anyways.”

“Okay. Well, what do we do now?”

“I guess we just...go on...together?”

And away they go.

12.

Beverley is alone in the house that Jeff and his dead wife built. There is a sign bearing Maggie’s name out in the backyard garden, shoved into the earth with Beverley’s blessing. There is no use denying Maggie’s presence here. Though by all appearances Beverley is the woman of the house, most of her belongings have yet to be moved in. She and Jeff decided a slow integration process would be best. A pragmatic choice. Really, it was Beverley’s idea. She is being careful not to overwhelm her paramour. And when he needs to go out into the yard in the dead of night to do whatever he does there, she lets him go alone and does not say to come back soon.

Everything in this house is slick with the residue of Maggie Carpenter’s preferences. That the coffee mugs, for instance, are in a cabinet beside the sink and not, as at Beverley’s own place, beside the stove, was a choice made by the deceased soul who once loved the man she now loves, and who was loved by him.

Beverley is not blind to the kind of person Jeff is. If she said something to him like, “I want to rearrange the kitchen,” he would minimize the whole thing, laughing her desires off as ridiculous. He would trivialize her. He would pretend that the notion didn’t make him want to throttle a cat.

Lately, questions come to mind that she never worried about asking before. Like, When is our anniversary? Is it the day we kissed, the day we first made love...or, you know, the day you found yourself unmarried?

Her mother has serious reservations about this union but, to her credit, only shares them when asked. “He doesn’t want me to be like his wife,” Beverley said to her on the phone the other day, “but I think he may want his life to continue on basically uninterrupted.”

“Does he want kids?”

“I don’t know what he wants.”

“Don’t you talk about it?”

“He doesn’t know what he wants either.”

“So, you’ve fallen in love with a grieving child.”

“Oh Ma, isn’t that how it works for most women?”

Beverley does love the house though. The kind of house where you can stand in the kitchen holding a hot mug of coffee with both hands, blowing the steam from the surface, and gaze out at the backyard through the window above the sink. In the winter, you can watch snow falling. In spring, the Ginkgo will bud. All summer you can host barbecues out on the patio, or grow tomatoes, or install a hummingbird feeder.

But trying to get to know the house in any deeper sense is like opening up another woman’s underwear drawer and trying to grow accustomed to the odor. This building has only begrudgingly adopted her. It is aware that Beverley has usurped its owner. She fears Jeff will one day feel the same way. Usually, you enter a relationship wondering what you will come to resent about your partner, but Beverley has spent weeks slowly absorbing all Maggie Carpenter’s minutiae, and she is only too aware of all the ways they two are not the same. Every day is a new journey of discovery, another difference between She and Her. And Jeff will notice them eventually if he doesn’t already.

Such is the augury of all who consume another woman’s home, marriage, man. Beverley stands in front of a stainless-steel sink that a dead woman picked out after much painstaking deliberation, looking out into a backyard with trees a dead woman had planted. And the man she loves is at the cemetery again, standing over the remains of his dead wife, laying wildflower bouquets on the grave even though he has long- since ceased bringing them home for her.

Venturing into the garage, Beverley sees the giant blue tarp laid out over the concrete floor, and all the toys and dolls and games from Maggie’s hospital room sprawled atop it. She kneels down amidst them. There’s the pink Troll. And the Hot Wheels track in pieces. This is the only place in this house that is even somewhat a marker of her history too. A neat 16x20-foot-square. Oh look, Larry the Penguin. A slinky glowing slightly in the dark, and she shifts its weight from hand to hand in a phosphorescent arc. Eventually, she lays down with her head on a stuffed orangutan and accidentally falls asleep.

She wakes as Jeff is laying down beside her, his arms inchworming across her hip. When her shoulder begins to itch, she says, “Please take the clown nose off.” She hears it flop to the floor.

Seeking a more comfortable position, Beverley squirms around, moving her knee up and around something hard that’s made of plastic. It comes down upon the bicycle horn.

HEEEEEEEEEEHUR.

The sound echoes throughout the concrete garage. Jeff says, “Do that again.”

She says, “What? This?”

HEEHUR. HEEHUR.

“Yeah that. Keep doing that.” They’re giggling now. “Don’t you dare stop.”

Jeff takes the horn inside and nails it to the wall outside the kitchen. He says We have to squeeze it whenever one of us passes by. “And that way we’ll always know where to find each other.” Today, Beverley decides, is a fitting anniversary. She celebrates it in secret, trumpeted by the sounds of a circus. The old house has never heard such sounds before…

1.

It smells like rubber chickens and mylar balloons and Play-Doh. Over there, on that little bent-legged table, a pair of plastic slinkies watch over the room like fetish totems. A rare deck of Jerry’s Nugget playing cards received just weeks earlier as a birthday present, arranged in an unfinished game of solitaire. Crayons, the big box with 120 colors, 23 of them named after foods —actually 24, because he once ate a Robin’s Egg on a dare. Legos. Plushies. Hot Wheels. A disembodied bicycle horn. Brought them all here in a suitcase, whatever he could grab. He’ll go back for more tomorrow, but now, with the hospital room arranged into a kind of dollar-store cabinet of curiosities, Jeff Carpenter dons a red clown nose, pulls the rainbow wig down over his scalp, and he walks over to his dying wife’s side.

“All right, sweet lady. It’s just you and me now,” he says, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “And finally, I’ve got you right where I want you.” He clears his throat, begins flipping through the withered paperback in his hand. Not Your Grandmother’s Joke Book, the name plastered across the cover in an electric yellow font*.* Purchasing it this morning, turning it over in his hands like a precious jewel, Jeff had muttered, “We’ll see about that.”

Jeff and Maggie Carpenter. He’s got a book full of racy jokes, and she’s got nowhere to run. For him, a dream; for her, a nightmare. No, no: It’s just a nightmare. Even if Maggie can’t scold him for “toilet language” like she normally would. Even if she can’t get up and storm out of the room, but grinning nonetheless.

2.

On Thursday, Maggie is assigned a dedicated nurse, someone who will be here shortly and whose name is Beverley and who, Jeff is assured, will take tip-top care of the lovely lady here. Jeff follows the doctor out into the hallway.

“Doc, so sorry, but okay now, be honest: Do you think there’s any way she’s, like, aware of what’s going on around her?”

“Honestly, Mr. Carpenter, there’s no way for me to know that. But I’ve heard the same stories about coma patients you have. We’ve got no way of knowing.”

Jeff has been testing that hypothesis in his spare time, whispering in Maggie’s ear all sorts of swear words, limericks, outright insults, dumbfounding political opinions, risqué innuendo, actual dirty talk, Breitbart talking points, childhood confessions of quasi-sexual-assault, detailed horror film synopses, Afroman lyrics, erotic Roger Rabbit fan-fiction, diatribes directed at deceased in-laws, subsections from the Texas State Constitution, passages from the latest James Patterson paperback, just about the foulest stuff he could muster, and all in the hopes of hearing the heartbeat monitor speed-up slightly. Something to let him know that she is still there, awake underneath herself.

Which would, of course, justify all the toys.

A few moments later, someone knocks on the door and lets themselves in.

Beverley has heard about this particular coma patient, or more specifically, has heard about this particular coma patient’s husband, but she hadn’t yet come around to see the room. Only the tubes and monitors and braindead woman on the bed make clear that she’s still in the ICU. Crayons and balloon carcasses are strewn atop the linoleum like explosion detritus. One of those ghastly cymbal-banging monkeys is lying on its side in a chair by the window, tossed there haphazardly. It looks up at her with cold, empty eyes. Her mother would say it’s a bad omen. And also, perhaps, the man on the other side of the bed. He’s holding a half-empty balloon tight to his chest. He is looking up at her like a child caught singing showtunes into a hairbrush.

“I’m Beverley,” she says to the husband. “I’ll be Mrs. Carpenter’s nurse.”

Jeff reaches for her hand. “It’s nice to meet you,” he squeaks, his voice as high as a cartoon mouse’s. “Sorry,” he says, looking down at his balloon, “I wasn’t expecting you to show up so soon.”

“Listen, you don’t need to take all this stuff away, but I do need you to clean it up somewhat.”

“You came at the perfect time, actually,” he says, his voice buoying back to normal. “I’ve found myself lacking discipline lately. And you can see the results.”

He’s a pale man with a disconcertingly straight smile, full head of brown hair, seems to be in fairly decent shape. At 25, she wouldn’t have given him a second look. Now, however, she thinks well, well, well what do we have here? But that’s age for you. Beverley figures him to be in his mid-thirties. Still a baby. Hint of a paunch under the Strahan jersey. Maybe he stress-eats. Stands somewhat asymmetrically. Scoliosis?

“I’m going to take her vitals now,” she says.

The nurse is efficient, even brutal, manhandling Maggie’s arms as one would a Stretch Armstrong doll. Jeff twice considers intervening. But this Beverley is the kind of tall, elegant woman he has always found it difficult to chide. At one point, she lowers her face so close to Maggie’s he thinks they’re going to kiss.

“I didn’t brush her teeth this morning,” he blurts out. “Uhh, I’ve been doing that. Brushing her teeth. Actually, should I be doing that? Can’t hurt though, right? Either way, her breath doesn’t always smell like that. So...please don’t hold it against her.”

Beverley doesn’t acknowledge him, but she does remove the pink-haired Troll doll from the crook of Maggie’s arm with an added tenderness, and then, when finished stabbing an otoscope into her ears and nostrils, carefully places it back again.

“I’ll be back in a few hours. Please do something with—” Beverley gestures around the room “—all this.” And she leaves.

After tidying the room somewhat, Jeff pulls a chair next to Maggie’s bed, and they watch Welcome Back, Cotter reruns on the little hospital TV until he drifts off. Maggie would have liked this one —Julie’s sister from Nebraska visits and Epstein gets the hots for her. She would have said what she always did about look how handsome John Travolta is, and God, he really was so young once.

3.

There’s no one reason Jeff can only seem to cry in the bathroom. It’s just something about being alone and in such a little room, tiled floor-to-ceiling, listening to the fan have an epileptic fit within the walls. And the toilet seat always so, so cold. Or maybe it’s because he hasn’t decorated in here at all, so it feels like a more appropriate place to be sad. That can be fixed. He goes outside and grabs two Lego dinosaurs off the windowsill, placing them in attack positions atop the biohazard disposal box. He’s named the pterodactyl Lenny. And the velociraptor is Paul. It’s good to name things. And he always got a kick out of animals with human names. He and Maggie met a pig named Boris once. That just about killed him.

In the afternoon, the doctor comes in with a prognosis. “It doesn’t look good,” he says, which is a strange way to start a conversation. He comes around to the other side of the bed.

FYHWOOOOWEEEEHwooooooooooo!

Startled, the doctor leaps back, both feet leaving the ground, off of the throat of the stuffed penguin he’d accidentally stepped upon. His heel must’ve stomped the spot where the squeaker is.

“That’s Larry,” Jeff says, snatching the penguin up off the floor. “He’s very mischievous. You’ll have to forgive him. Say you’re sorry, Larry.”

Fhwoooooweeeeehwooo.

4.

The first time Jeff cries in front of Beverley is a Sunday. July 4th weekend. There are fireworks on the Navesink which he can see through the window, and that just about does it. Because he and Maggie loved fireworks, and she can’t see them even though he can, and that just seems too unfair. He’s clutching Maggie’s fat thumb tightly in one hand, Larry the squeaking penguin in the other, and Beverley is still here too, lingering by the door. Eventually, she steps back into the room, floats over to the bed, and squeezes Jeff’s shoulder while he sobs. If he were a child, she’d be saying something like, “There, there, it’ll all be okay.”

She ends up saying, “There, there, it’ll all be okay.”

Jeff gathers himself rather quickly. Rubbing his nose with his hairy wrist, he says, “When this is all over, we should double-date.” He holds Larry aloft. “What do you think? Pretty handsome, huh? He was giving you the eyes earlier.”

Beverley says, “Honestly, the little bowtie made me think he was gay.”

Jeff, laughing now, briefly forgets that his wife can’t see the spectacle around her.

5.

“Even by your standards, this is totally unacceptable,” she says to him, nevertheless kneeling down to admire his handiwork. “Someone could trip.”

“Who’s coming in here but you and me?” he asks. “Anyways, watch this.” He crawls carefully to the other side of the room, being careful not to crush the orange track with a wayward toe. “You should move. Yeah, that’s perfect. Okay, do you prefer Mustangs or Maserati’s?”

“Are those my only choices?”

“I have more at home, but these are the only ones I brought.” “Mustang.”

“Mustang! Good choice. American made, American tested.”

So it’s the Mustang, shimmering and blue, that Jeff picks up from the sill and places down on the orange track. Behind it is a small contraption with a motor that Jeff rather dramatically activates with the pressing of a black button. It produces a muted whirring sound. “Ready?” he asks.

“I suppose so.”

Jeff pulls the car backwards into the motor, leaves it there for a moment, and then lets it rip.

The Mustang is a blue blur blazing across the floor, racing across a short flat length of track and then veering suddenly to the right, then back to the left, climbing up a small hill but sizzling down it with accelerated speed, into the first loop and around, right into the second loop, seeming to slow for a split- second near the summit but picking back up again as it rolls back down, now onto the third loop —largest and tallest— but the speed is so great you can hardly see the tiny car as it spins upside-down, shooting into the final straightaway now, here it comes rising sharply up a ramp, and there it goes careening off the edge of the world, forward forward forward like a bullet, smacking grill-first into a bloated mylar balloon taped to the wall—

KARASH!

The balloon pops violently, the car ricocheting off the wall, shreds of thin metal exploding outwards, raining down in feathery swoops.

Beverley, gasping, clutches her heart out of instinct, and now struggles to catch her breath. All she can think is, I’m showing my age. All she can feel is rage. Naturally, she scowls at Jeff, preparing the words with which to scold him for his soon-to-be-forcibly-dissembled contraption.

But Jeff isn’t concerned with her at all. He’s pushed himself high onto his knees so that he can see up onto the bed, his sweet face crumpled into a pout as he stares at his wife. “I thought the sound might wake her up,” he says.

But the monitors don’t miss a beat.

Beverley remembers now that she’s just a nurse. “You need to get all this out of here,” she says firmly, standing, dusting herself off. “Now,” and she sweeps out of the room.

Halfway down the hall, she hears another balloon pop. The Maserati. She imagines Jeff again on his knees.

6.

After a not insignificant amount of internal deliberation, hospital administration begins allowing patients from the children’s ward to make chaperoned pilgrimages down to Maggie Carpenter’s room.

Jeff, meanwhile, has taken to wearing the clown wig while walking around the hospital. The nose, however, makes him break out in hives, so he only wears it in the afternoons when the kids come by.

“Don’t you, like, have to work?” Beverley asks him. It’s a Wednesday.

“Yes and no,” he answers. “Anyways, Maggie was the breadwinner. My earnings were what she referred to as ‘vacation money.’”

“No kids?”

Jeff shakes his head. “We were getting ready to get ready to try.”

One little boy named Tobias grows particularly attached to Jeff, coming down to see him whenever possible. Tobias’ parents both work long hours, and neither visits as often as they’d like to. They are only too happy that their son has found a friend in “Big Jeff.” And Big Jeff has started accumulating toys specifically for Tobias’ sake.

“This is a Bakugan.

“These are Yu-gi-oh cards. This one, Exodia, is the best. But you have to have all five pieces to summon him. Otherwise he’s just a foot.

“This is an old music box my grandmother gave me when I was about your age. Wanna see how it works? The song is from a long time ago, from when my grandmother was young. Okay, now you try.”

The nurses up in the children’s ward soon grow accustomed to the music box’s tiny, tinny melody. Before long, they’re humming it in the halls, they’re humming it at home. Their girlfriends and husbands and wives and children want desperately to know what the hell it is they’re always humming. But none of them can pinpoint the source. It just becomes another thing they carry home from work.

7.

Maggie has been in the ICU for nearly three weeks when Jeff first brings Beverley flowers.

It’s only a few, and just a sampling of the same wildflowers he brings for Maggie. “They grow in the woods behind our house,” he says, “and there are simply too many to leave alone.” For Maggie he stuffs a vase fit to bursting, whereas Beverley receives only a small bouquet of Bluebells, Wood Sorrels, and Wild Strawberries, all wrapped carefully in brown parchment paper.

“I’m not sure if Maggie is aware of anything right now, but if she were, she would be so thankful for all the work you’re doing,” he says, taking Beverley’s hand and giving her the bouquet and curling her fingers around the exposed stems. Her skin is soft. Recently buttered. He catches a whiff of the cocoa scent, his subconscious briefly flickering with a desire to know how her fingers would taste. Cocoa butter never smells better than when it’s been spread over skin, given the earthy augmentation of hand.

“It’s time to give Maggie her bath,” Beverley says. “Then I should make myself scarce.”

After giving thousands of sponge baths to hundreds of patients, one can become numb to the human body’s nuances. But Maggie Carpenter has such especially smooth skin, at least where the sores haven’t started forming. If Beverley, on the other hand, were to go without moisturizer for this long, she’d begin to crack all over like a salt flat. Their differences don’t end there. Maggie’s skin is pale, for instance, like the daisy petals in the vase on the nightstand. And she has the kind of sandy-blonde hair that white women spend years in the sun carefully crafting. A very small nose, from some angles almost invisible, and straight, uniform teeth, almost identical to Jeff’s. Maybe her father was an orthodontist. Beverley’s was a firefighter.

Maggie is a very beautiful woman. Jeff —Beverley recently concluded— is a very beautiful man, his tall and stringy figure actually quite becoming, and she can’t help but imagine the two as newlyweds standing beside each other, perhaps in front of a barn, Jeff with his pitchfork, Maggie looking at him askance, the two painted from the same palette, works of the same artist.

As she scrubs, Beverley tells Maggie all that Jeff has been up to. One talks to the comatose for the same reasons one talks to a pet. Because you have something to say, because they’re there, and because you’re not really interesting in spilling your guts to something that’ll respond.

Among other things, she says to Maggie, “He loves you very much,” and, “You’re very lucky.”

Once finished, Beverley sets Maggie back down, checks the woman’s vitals, and replaces her chart at the foot of the bed. There, she adjusts Maggie’s blanket, momentarily pulling it off of Maggie’s feet, and GOD DAMN, those tootsies are absolutely massive! Jagged and flat as a board, they are the lone blemish on the woman’s petite porcelain figure. Feet like an ogre’s, and godawfully ugly too, gnarled nails and covered in corns. A bunion. A bruise. And the longer second toe, which is as freaky as anything. Whereas people have told Beverley she has nice feet. Not people. A person. A man named Marco she saw for a few months. He liked to suck on her toes. His tongue practically massaging the webbing between them. And, okay, he never explicitly said she had nice feet, but it was pretty heavily implied. Maggie’s feet, meanwhile, would never inspire a man’s mouth. A few small black hairs sprout from a big-toe knuckle. Beverley replaces the blanket.

Retrieving her bouquet on the way out, Beverly suddenly thinks it meager. She steals a few flowers from Maggie’s vase. There, that’s better.

8.

Tobias is prescribed a type of chemotherapy the hospital doesn’t provide, so he is transferred at once to Johns Hopkins, 150 miles south. Already transferred there by the time Beverley tells Jeff. She thought he deserved to know, her heart pounding as she informs him. She was afraid to give him bad news.

He looks very distraught. Beverley says, “I’m so sorry,” and then, without premeditation, she gives him a hug.

No, more: She wraps herself around him, resting her hands on his shoulders, her forearms pointed upwards, parallel to his spine. She becomes aware that she is clinging to him but doesn’t remove herself. Softly, into her ear, Jeff says, “I hope they do one of those Make-A-Wish things for him. He was always talking about John Cena. He loved John Cena. Bev, be honest, do you think they’ll let him meet John Cena?” The hair on Beverley’s neck stands up straight. She wonders if he can feel her getting goosebumps.

Also, there’s no good way to answer a question like that. Why try? As soon as she opens her mouth, he’ll pull away. So Beverley keeps quiet, and Jeff keeps close. She’s never held a man like this so close against her cheek before. Nor for this long.

9.

The first time Jeff and Beverley kiss, he pulls back and asks, “Does this make me a horrible person?” His hand remains entrenched in her back pocket.

Beverley has been here before. Other loved ones of patients with dire prognoses, gripped by emotions too powerful to be consciously separated. Grief blooms so near to love, to arousal, to ecstasy, to terror. Few spouses, mothers and sisters and children have enough experience with this sort of sentiment to keep from drowning in the overall soup. She has rebuffed advances. Of course she has: A beautiful woman with curly hair like this, a neck like hers, a birthmark like that one, supple hands which smell as hers smell, and a nurse no less? Hunched men who grabbed at her as if she were a dancer. A father who promised her not-insignificant amounts of cash if she’d help take his mind off a dying daughter. She has filed formal complaints. She has removed hands from her nape and said if you try that again you will lose that hand, you think anyone will trace a missing scalpel back to me? She has dawdled in hallways and accepted a crying head on her shoulder, though not the lips against her collarbone which came thereafter. She has paced through a Halloween store with a young nephew, gazing furiously at the Sexy Nurse costumes, and thought This is where it comes from. This is how it starts. She has had an abortion because of a man she met in a hospital. Not a patient or family member of a patient. An intern. Just an intern. She never told him. You don’t tell men some things. He was the last man she consented to kissing in her place of work.

And then Jeff. She accepts his kiss —he kissed her, all right— even though he has a Curious George doll in one hand and is very deliberately pressing it against her ass. Or maybe she accepts it because of the Curious George doll. And then he pulls away, asks if this makes him a horrible person, and she says, “No, sweetheart, this doesn’t make you anything.”

He says, “We both know that’s not true.”

They’re alone in the hallway outside of Mrs. Carpenter’s room, and it is very late. Beverley says she has to go check on other patients. When she comes back, Jeff is asleep in a chair beside his wife, hunched over at the waist, his head resting on her belly, their fingers intertwined.

So this is how it’s going to be, she thinks. This is how it’s always going to be.

10.

Things have lately gotten grim enough that friends have flown in to visit. There is Ramona, a florist. And the gang from college: Eric, Antonio, Mykaela, a bald man Maggie has only ever referred to as Rogaine. The neighbors, Rodney and Ashantee. Aunts Lila and Lydia. One living grandparent, Otto, who is wheelchair-bound and who sits alone with Maggie in total silence, stroking her hand without saying a word, just wheezing softly to himself, oxygen tubes in his nostrils, much on his mind.

Jeff waits outside during these visits, sometimes eating a popsicle in the cafeteria, giving Maggie’s visitors the privacy to say whatever goodbyes they need to say to her. Today will be the last day they spend with her, he thinks. I wonder how many of them know that.

Sucking on a Bomb Pop, Jeff turns over on his tongue the numerals of Beverley’s address, thinking how he has seen the inside of her apartment, has parked on her driveway, has cooked Chicken Picante on her stove, has thrust himself into her on the cold tile of her tiny kitchen, her nipple in his mouth. They no longer talk about the morality of their sex. Nothing so sensitive and slow, and which includes so many fondling fingers, could possibly be that bad.

Jeff arrives back to the hospital room in time to hold the door open as Maggie’s grandfather is wheeled out. The man’s face is contorted in distress, his stomach bulbous, and he doesn’t utter a word. Later, as Jeff is cleaning up, it becomes clear that the Curious George doll is gone.

Without thinking, he says, “That liver-spotted bastard stole my monkey.”

None of the monitors seem to notice.

It’s suddenly late. Beverley is off today. And the other nurses generally keep away during the nights. Maggie and Jeff will be each other’s’ only company until morning. Like the old days. When they were young and dumb and just becoming lovers, they would draw scalding baths in a crusty tub and fall asleep there, Jeff’s back against the porcelain, Maggie’s against his belly. He would wake up and their toes would be touching just above the water’s crest. The two of them never had the kind of incredible sex you read about in Cosmo, but sometimes he would cry afterwards. The sheer wonder of how closely she’d hold him. They built a marriageable relationship on the back of shared cereal preferences, a deep concern for the Amazon, and mutual dreams about settling down somewhere not too far from the coast. Two kids. A cat. A sloop would be nice.

Once, they were on a couch, and it was raining, and Jeff was playing with a Rubik’s cube, and Maggie was hemorrhaging herself to keep from giving him advice on it, when he said, “If you told me you’d killed a kid, I’d compile a list of the countries that wouldn’t extradite you.”

Maggie chewed on the comment for a second, then said, “If the roles were reversed, I think I’d freak out first, and then come up with a list.” She tickled his wrist with her giant toes. “But I’d come up with a list all the same.”

It was the most meaningful thing anyone had ever said to him. That is not an embellishment.

That was on a Monday. The next day, while Maggie was at work, Jeff drove to the diamond district, bought a ring, came home, and hid it in his underwear drawer (boxers). He intended to wait for a suitably-romantic occasion but couldn’t bear the weight of his secret. He proposed to Maggie on their concrete stoop that very same night, on the kind of mosquito-mad summer evening you look back on with regret as you maniacally scratch your ankles. They sat for a while longer, warming their hands over a propane fire, and then they got up to go fall asleep in a bathtub like they used to, all those years ago.

11.

Jeff removes everything from the hospital room personally, excepting Maggie herself. She is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in a well-attended ceremony, while the toys and games are laid to rest atop a tarp in the garage of a home still deeded to Mrs. Magdalena Carpenter. At some point, those documents will require adjudication.

It is still some weeks before Jeff is comfortable making love to Beverley in the house deeded to his dead wife, but once comfortable, they’re doing it right there on the bed, on sheets that have remained unwashed since Maggie last slept upon them, her lost smell still sometimes emerging, phantasmagoric, from within its creases. Beverley cries out as Maggie never cried out. And Maggie would never have uttered such toilet language. While conjoined like this, neither Jeff nor Beverley cares much about the souls which once roamed this place. Insulated by Beverley’s clutches and by the blanket around them, Jeff finds courage enough to ignore the great doom of his past, and he slows his movements and brings his forehead to hers and says, “I think I’m in love with you.” Beverley murmurs, “Yeah, well, let’s see how you feel in about 30 seconds.”

“Give me more credit than that.”

“Okay. 35 seconds.”

He lasts a hair under four minutes. Pretty good. They collapse down, Beverley stretched atop Jeff’s torso, protecting him from any vengeful specter which may have been waiting for this opportunity to pounce. She says “Look at me,” and he does.

“I’m pretty sure I’m still in love with you,” he says.

“Yeah, well, let’s see how you feel in the morning.”

They do not fall asleep right there in the nude, sticking to each other like lunch meat, but much later. After Beverley opens a book. After Jeff says something about the backyard, and goes outside to prune weeds with a headlamp. A sunflower patch Maggie planned out and planted in the spring; Jeff swears in the eyes of God he’ll keep it alive. He wants to have a sign made. “Maggie’s Garden,” or something along those lines. He’ll hammer it right into the ground. He’ll think of a more creative name.

Later, in the bathroom as they prepare for bed, Beverley asks, “What is that thing?”

“It’s a water pick. It does what floss does.”

“So why not just buy floss?”

Jeff shrugs. “My dead wife had expensive taste.”

Laying beside each other, he asks, “Dho you alwaysh shleep wisht sthat sthing on?”

“First of all, sweetheart, it’s called a bonnet. And yes, I am a black woman, and so I wear this every night. Do you always sleep with that thing on?”

Jeff pops the retainer out of his mouth. “Do you want me to develop loose teeth?”

“To match your flapping gums?”

“That’s very funny.”

“I think I love you too,” she says, “even with your midnight gardening.”

“Let’s see how we both feel in the morning.”

In the morning they wake atop silk sheets a dead woman once ordered from a magazine. They groan, turn to face each other, and confirm that their feelings have not changed.

“What will people say?” Beverley asks.

“All sorts of things,” Jeff answers. “They’ll hate me.”

“Not exclusively you.”

“Your friends will disown you.”

“I have too many of them anyways.”

“Okay. Well, what do we do now?”

“I guess we just...go on...together?”

And away they go.

12.

Beverley is alone in the house that Jeff and his dead wife built. There is a sign bearing Maggie’s name out in the backyard garden, shoved into the earth with Beverley’s blessing. There is no use denying Maggie’s presence here. Though by all appearances Beverley is the woman of the house, most of her belongings have yet to be moved in. She and Jeff decided a slow integration process would be best. A pragmatic choice. Really, it was Beverley’s idea. She is being careful not to overwhelm her paramour. And when he needs to go out into the yard in the dead of night to do whatever he does there, she lets him go alone and does not say to come back soon.

Everything in this house is slick with the residue of Maggie Carpenter’s preferences. That the coffee mugs, for instance, are in a cabinet beside the sink and not, as at Beverley’s own place, beside the stove, was a choice made by the deceased soul who once loved the man she now loves, and who was loved by him.

Beverley is not blind to the kind of person Jeff is. If she said something to him like, “I want to rearrange the kitchen,” he would minimize the whole thing, laughing her desires off as ridiculous. He would trivialize her. He would pretend that the notion didn’t make him want to throttle a cat.

Lately, questions come to mind that she never worried about asking before. Like, When is our anniversary? Is it the day we kissed, the day we first made love...or, you know, the day you found yourself unmarried?

Her mother has serious reservations about this union but, to her credit, only shares them when asked. “He doesn’t want me to be like his wife,” Beverley said to her on the phone the other day, “but I think he may want his life to continue on basically uninterrupted.”

“Does he want kids?”

“I don’t know what he wants.”

“Don’t you talk about it?”

“He doesn’t know what he wants either.”

“So, you’ve fallen in love with a grieving child.”

“Oh Ma, isn’t that how it works for most women?”

Beverley does love the house though. The kind of house where you can stand in the kitchen holding a hot mug of coffee with both hands, blowing the steam from the surface, and gaze out at the backyard through the window above the sink. In the winter, you can watch snow falling. In spring, the Ginkgo will bud. All summer you can host barbecues out on the patio, or grow tomatoes, or install a hummingbird feeder.

But trying to get to know the house in any deeper sense is like opening up another woman’s underwear drawer and trying to grow accustomed to the odor. This building has only begrudgingly adopted her. It is aware that Beverley has usurped its owner. She fears Jeff will one day feel the same way. Usually, you enter a relationship wondering what you will come to resent about your partner, but Beverley has spent weeks slowly absorbing all Maggie Carpenter’s minutiae, and she is only too aware of all the ways they two are not the same. Every day is a new journey of discovery, another difference between She and Her. And Jeff will notice them eventually if he doesn’t already.

Such is the augury of all who consume another woman’s home, marriage, man. Beverley stands in front of a stainless-steel sink that a dead woman picked out after much painstaking deliberation, looking out into a backyard with trees a dead woman had planted. And the man she loves is at the cemetery again, standing over the remains of his dead wife, laying wildflower bouquets on the grave even though he has long- since ceased bringing them home for her.

Venturing into the garage, Beverley sees the giant blue tarp laid out over the concrete floor, and all the toys and dolls and games from Maggie’s hospital room sprawled atop it. She kneels down amidst them. There’s the pink Troll. And the Hot Wheels track in pieces. This is the only place in this house that is even somewhat a marker of her history too. A neat 16x20-foot-square. Oh look, Larry the Penguin. A slinky glowing slightly in the dark, and she shifts its weight from hand to hand in a phosphorescent arc. Eventually, she lays down with her head on a stuffed orangutan and accidentally falls asleep.

She wakes as Jeff is laying down beside her, his arms inchworming across her hip. When her shoulder begins to itch, she says, “Please take the clown nose off.” She hears it flop to the floor.

Seeking a more comfortable position, Beverley squirms around, moving her knee up and around something hard that’s made of plastic. It comes down upon the bicycle horn.

HEEEEEEEEEEHUR.

The sound echoes throughout the concrete garage. Jeff says, “Do that again.”

She says, “What? This?”

HEEHUR. HEEHUR.

“Yeah that. Keep doing that.” They’re giggling now. “Don’t you dare stop.”

Jeff takes the horn inside and nails it to the wall outside the kitchen. He says We have to squeeze it whenever one of us passes by. “And that way we’ll always know where to find each other.” Today, Beverley decides, is a fitting anniversary. She celebrates it in secret, trumpeted by the sounds of a circus. The old house has never heard such sounds before…