He Tells Us Sometimes to Wander

There are men on rooftops today. They are hooded or lidded or head-covered in some manner and swing their arms when the winds kick up. The clouds become a sharp thing to slice the landscape in half.

I just realized there are always men on rooftops. I just realized my phone has been set to vibrate for three hours and I missed all the important things. The first message is from Lenny’s girlfriend whom I dislike both for her taste in cuts of pants and her insistence in converting Lenny to a brand of hatred I choose to chuckle about for the way it skins my nerves. Lenny has fallen from the roof while hanging sets of old Christmas lights that belonged to the girlfriend’s folks, the big kind with oversized bulbs. The girlfriend painted little images of the baby Jesus on each bulb and Lenny was stringing them carefully when his foot hit the loose gutter and he sliced his arm nearly off in the fall. The girlfriend’s voice is wheezy on the phone and I can hear the hose running all the blood through the grass. I watch the capped men out my window. They are not attached to anything. This is their job, this height.

The cloud cover is moving faster than my fingers this morning and I think to tear my nails down to the quick even knowing it won’t change the course of the day. The gauzy sky will separate. The mountains will reveal other mountains. Lenny’s torn body will be opened and stitched closed with a boredom he didn’t earn. I feel my skin loosen.

I file things because it seems a reasonable thing to do. My hands look sixty against all the bright white. We sort everything by date in overstuffed folders, which makes it hard to concentrate when you really need to. Last week’s folder grabs my skin apart between thumb and pointer and I jump a little, think of Lenny and how all roofs I see have flat tops and Lenny’s had a pointed top and how it barely rains enough to need gutters when all they do is go loose with the weight of snow.

It’s so cold today I wonder if the water will freeze some of Lenny’s blood to his lawn until spring. After work I stop at a house two blocks from Lenny’s to say goodbye to Sylvia who was diagnosed with cancer last fall and has decided to die today as well. This is straightforward. She planned this three weeks ago and can’t be held for others’ loose gutters. I knit her a small soft hat last week. It says goodbye in bright letters. We laugh. We talk about how she’ll have someone to recognize and maybe heaven is more relaxed than we realize. She and Lenny used to hold hands under the table like no one noticed. Once, I accused the girlfriend of killing Sylvia with her bad thoughts.

Sylvia decides to die at 6:30. Dinner is ready at 7. I think I hear birds losing control in flight.

After dinner, I say a hurried prayer for the girlfriend because she might have loved Lenny enough to need it and because I said awful things to her when Sylvia got sick and I know better than to think anyone can deteriorate a body that way just by thinking so. Two men are moving Sylvia down the stairs and I can see the shape of her face, how it doesn’t look like any other faces, how her arm swings below the sheet and is so soft I think to reach for it and is so unlike the color of her just an hour ago. I blink hard until her fingers look fluid and slow.

I look at my hands where the joints are starting to fall away. We all tidy the house to a sterile sound and greet the night air with our faces red already. We all sing the sidewalk with tired shoes.

Each of us walks a lazy route that doesn’t suggest home. I watch the others scatter in new directions, wearing a path in the snow collecting since Sylvia passed and thinking the cold might shut out our memories. I walk to the tracks. They’re so quiet and I think if I could just hear that shaking sound I might make it the last two hours of the day. The shapes in the snow are fresh and I walk the rail until the streetlights step back and I see him, kneeling, moving the snow around with his fingers. My arms are barely visible now.

“She was waiting for the train.” He doesn’t turn.

I stare at the tracks until I’m sure the moon is done for the night.

“I told her her nose would fall off.” He’s adding layers of clothes to his small body. I envy his hips. I shift mine. My jeans are heavy.

“We lose things,” I start to say and he stands, looks at my coat and then my eyes and walks off where I know there’s nothing for a day or so. The woman in the snow is larger than I expected, to be hidden behind such a wanting body. Her eyes are wide and collecting the white specs. She doesn’t look afraid. I lift my face and try to not look afraid and it is difficult. The middle of me seems to be deteriorating. I kneel close to the woman’s face, look hard at the way her failing skin deals with the cold and my knees become the snow and I think of the summer Lenny and I spent forgetting each other and my toes are breaking off and I remember the soft sand of Sylvia’s hair, how she never got the color right and my hair is frost cracking downward and I think of the girlfriend and her ridiculous mouth and the woman in the snow smiles up at me, her mouth so close to mine.

We will wait for summer.