Chapter 1

Every cell in my body leans into her. She reaches for my hand over the flannel sheet. She never reaches for my hand. She kisses my fingers.  She cries.  I’ve only seen her cry once in our 45 years and that was when our kitty Moshe died.   She asks.  Snow falls. The window clots with white.

I say yes. I promise.  “Abby, I will never tell the world what we are or were to each other.”

Yes, I can hear you, yes, yes, all of you who have lives that open and close like sheets on a windy line, who have secrets you hold dear, the rest of you displayed in bold print for the world to see.  Look at me, look at me, you’re saying.  I am Facebook; I am Twitter.  What are you?  What have you got to say for yourself?

You’ll say we were scaredy-cats to live this way in the first place—and to continue the ruse? Jig’s up, sweetheart.  Still under cover? No hot boots march the streets; no one bangs the door in the middle of the night. For heavenssakes, Fun Home won on Broadway.  It’s gay-friendly, trans now. Who gives a hoot?    You’re almost invisible anyway, old things—grey fading into grey,  nags in nagland, swayback neighers at the moon.

Yes, I know, I know. Our friends Shirley and Deb lived so deeply in the closet that when Deb died, Shirley didn’t go to the funeral. (Who am I to her that I should weep for her?)  Family swooped in, snatched the body and that was that.   We didn’t find out Debbie died until six months later– just after the Drumph took office—tons of  emails and texts sliding down the tube into the old dead letter box. Sick?  Yeah, we knew she was sick, but dead? How could she dead, for cripe’s sake?

Yes, believe me, I hate it, this hiding.   Always having to prepare my face to meet the faces I will meet. But I don’t know where to begin, how to dismantle my self, to set her loose again in the world,  arms thrown open to love and possibility.  When you’ve been an impostor, mon hypocrite, mon lecteur, for so long, lies trick with blue skies, dawn becomes midnight, empty becomes full, full empty; camouflage looks like truth, even when she parades down Fifth Avenue bare-ass-naked. Half-truths, warps, one elaborate staging after another, that was our life, our shtick.  Pulpless fiction, fun house mirrors, designs to confuse the eye, careful tromps de l’oeil.  Cockamamie cockapoos that’s what we became, when we could have been raging hounds of hell.

Yes, some days Abby did revel in the masquerade, delighted in being the technicolor queen du jour, a sterling imitation of who she really was, the master of what no one would dare to say out loud. They all guessed: dyke, dyke, grey dyke.  And left it alone. They loved her, the high-risk kids, the lost boys and girls at South Central—pierced tongues and noses and ears, caverns of chapped leather applauding her latest antic. A crown of plume d’orange, her mop a mazeful Medusa, whole bottles of  L’Oreal at our kitchen sink, no fancy beauty parlors for Abby.   She became one of them, wisecracks bristling off split ends, silver rings stapling the cusps of her ears and soul.

And so.  Now. Now. Snow. Minnesota. Cardinal wing flashing in the maple.  I call for the doctor.  I call for the nurse.  I call for the lady with the alligator hearse.

Amazing how simple it is at the end, how little melodrama.  The arithmetic of one plus one.  No puling hospice workers.  No priest, no last rites.  Friends arrive in two’s, leave in two’s.  Then it’s just me and Abby and the Divine Miss M.  No long-winded speeches for Mortality, no Sunday best. Rumpled muu-muu, a little cleavage, teased hair balls, that’s the Divine Miss M. Just shows up, does her thing, then packs it in for the next gig. No big deal, sweetheart, just relax.

Yes, I say yes. You’ll say that it’s not binding anyway,  a promise made under such duress.  But this is no giddy New Year’s resolution made in a froth of popping corks. How can I refuse?  Clouds heave. The cardinal pecks sorghum.  January snow sifts over brown, rattling things in the swamp.

She commands the quilt up, the quilt down.  She demands a wet cloth on her forehead.  I obey.  I put my hand on her heart to steady her along the way. For once, she keeps it there.  I feed her ice chips, one by one.   She spits them out.

I crawl into bed with her.  She turns on her side, pulls her long back away from me, shoulder blades tattooed with a neon Adam and Eve, palm trees, braying macaws.  No Air Force ink for Abby in spite of her years in the military.  But her hair.  I want to touch it one more time, still orange, still clamoring for attention.

“Don’t!  Please… don’t… El…sie… Not hit…ting…the…silk…yet. Not dy…ing Shiiit!”

I kiss her blowzy mane, step out for a glass of water.  When I return, she’s disappeared, mouth frozen in a ghostly 0.

“Abby!”

I touch her fingers.  The bulb above our bed shatters.  Bits of glass, jots of incandescent metal, spray like shrapnel up and down the comforter. She would have liked this, this fucking implosion.  No whimpering.  No simpering maudlin drool.  Bing bong for a big girl!

I crawl under the covers, face to face, head to head, quaint to quaint.  She cannot forbid me now. I am electric.  Lightning shoots through my liver, brain, fingertips. I apply myself to her large heart.   Zap, one..   Zap, zap, two….  She will love me again as she once did, be my own true love.  Abby!    But heart and fingers grow colder. Gone?  Gone?  Where?

Only her tangerine crest keeps the faith, blazes in the gloaming. And I can hear her voice in there, saying, “O for Christ’s sake, LC, at ease that shit.  It’s just your obligatory death bed scene! Cut the crap.  Ich bin dead.  Got it? Nothing you can do about it. And quaint, professor? Chaucer? God is dead and so is Chaucer. Gimme a fucking break!”

Mundane, Death is in the end.  No angels.  No hooded figures on horseback swinging scimitars.  Fingertips pulpy purple, hands stiff and stiffer, like Minnesota 20 below, like wind-chill minus 33, like the eelpout she used to toss out the door of her fisherman’s shack on Lake Mille Lacs—the abandoned heap of them, dorsal fins rising up now and pricking their way across the blank plain of eternity.   The final whiteout in the dead of January and no way home.  Reel it in, reel it in, baby, don’t let the line go slack on ya, dip the net, catch the slippery thing in your hands, feel its gills, razor-sharp as you take your final breath.

When the sun comes up, I sit on the floor next to the bed, hold her foot.  Abby. Dead.    Toenails, fingernails, doornails, dormice, dead.   I’ll make the calls—friends, funeral home, vets’ administration—the giant plastic Ziploc of Forever marching in with its mouth wide open, vacuuming her into oblivion.

But she begins to flutter.  Legs, arms, eyelids.   The more I stare, the more she moves, the world all before her, where to take her final rest unknown.  You know how it is with the dead.  I’m not alone in seeing such things.  Fingers reach out for one last touch, one final kiss; a foot kicks back at the inevitable, the temporary quietus over, pallid skin rosying-up like the dawn.  Blood flows back into the universe, thick and sassy and unctuous, the damned river pushing back the stents in the soul, platelets and erythrocytes and leukocytes slamming against the valves of the heart, like salmon thrashing upstream for a final spawn.

Is this not merely an unwilling sleep?