I touched every part of him and held it in my hands. I cupped his elbow in my palm. I dragged his pubic hair out straight between my fingers. I held that part of him that Mr. Harvey had forced inside me. Inside my head I said the word gentle, and then I said the word man.
“Ray?”
“I don’t know what to call you.”
“Susie.”
I put my fingers up to his lips to stop his questioning. “Remember the note you wrote me? Remember how you called yourself the Moor?”
For a moment we both stood there, and I watched the water bead along his shoulders, then slip and fall.
Without saying anything further, he lifted me up and I wrapped my legs around him. He turned out of the path of the water to use the edge of the tub for support. When he was inside of me, I grabbed his face in my hands and kissed him as hard as I could.
After a full minute, he pulled away. “Tell me what it looks like.”
“Sometimes it looks like the high school did,” I said, breathless. “I never got to go there, but in my heaven I can make a bonfire in the classrooms or run up and down the halls yelling as loud as I want. But it doesn’t always look like that. It can look like Nova Scotia, or Tangiers, or Tibet. It looks like anything you’ve ever dreamed.”
“Is Ruth there?”
“Ruth is doing spoken word, but she’ll come back.”
“Can you see yourself there?”
“I’m here right now,” I said.
“But you’ll be gone soon.”
I would not lie. I bowed my head. “I think so, Ray. Yes.”
We made love then. We made love in the shower and in the bedroom and under the lights and fake glow-in-the-dark stars. While he rested, I kissed him across the line of his backbone and blessed each knot of muscle, each mole and blemish.
“Don’t go,” he said, and his eyes, those shining gems, shut and I could feel the shallow breath of sleep from him.
“My name is Susie,” I whispered, “last name Salmon, like the fish.” I leaned my head down to rest on his chest and sleep beside him.
When I opened my eyes, the window across from us was dark red and I could feel that there was not much time left. Outside, the world I had watched for so long was living and breathing on the same earth I now was. But I knew I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead – in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death – the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human – feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light – all of it part of navigating the unknown.
Ruth’s body was weakening. I leaned on one arm and watched Ray sleeping. I knew that I was going soon.
When his eyes opened a short while later, I looked at him and traced the edge of his face with my fingers.
“Do you ever think about the dead, Ray?”
He blinked his eyes and looked at me.
“I’m in med school.”
“I don’t mean cadavers, or diseases, or collapsed organs, I mean what Ruth talks about. I mean us.”
“Sometimes I do,” he said. “I’ve always wondered.”
“We’re here, you know,” I said. “All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn’t have to be sad or scary.”
“Can I touch you again?” He shook the sheets from his legs to sit up.
It was then that I saw something at the end of Hal’s bed. It was cloudy and still. I tried to convince myself that it was an odd trick of light, a mass of dust motes trapped in the setting sun. But when Ray reached out to touch me, I didn’t feel anything.
Ray leaned close to me and kissed me lightly on the shoulder. I didn’t feel it. I pinched myself under the blanket. Nothing.
The cloudy mass at the end of the bed began to take shape now. As Ray slipped out of the bed and stood, I saw men and women filling the room.
“Ray,” I said, just before he reached the bathroom. I wanted to say “I’ll miss you,” or “don’t go,” or “thank you.”
“Yes.”
“You have to read Ruth’s journals.”
“You couldn’t pay me not to,” he said.
I looked through the shadowy figures of the spirits forming a mass at the end of the bed and saw him smile at me. Saw his lovely fragile body turn and walk through the doorway. A tenuous and sudden memory.
