The Wake Trilogy: Gone Part 18

He's carrying a box in one hand and a basket of fruit in the other. He brings them inside and puts them on the kitchen counter. "This is to help sweeten your sorrow," he says.

Janie is overcome. "Thank you." The words seem too small to express what she is feeling.

He smiles and excuses himself. "I'm still on duty but I wanted to drop them off. I'm sorry for your loss, Janie." He waves and ducks out the door.

All of the nice.

All of it.

It only makes it harder.

4:28 p.m.

Lies back down on the couch, full of cake.

Thinks about what happens next.

Knows that soon she'll say good-bye to Cabe forever.

And that?

Despite the benefits, Will be the hardest thing she's ever done.

6:04 p.m.

She walks up Henry's b.u.mpy driveway, backpack on her back, carrying a suitcase and a bag of clothes. Two forlorn boxes rest in front of the door. Janie goes inside to deposit her stuff and then pulls the boxes inside.

She rips open the first box and pulls out a baby's snowsuit. Goes over the ancient computer and turns it on. Rifles through the notebook that contains the order log, then opens the file drawer under the table. Repackages the snowsuit and writes the address on the box.

Janie opens the second box. Pulls out a bubble-wrapped package.

A snow globe.

It's not listed as an item that needs to be s.h.i.+pped out.

It's for Cathy, she's sure.

Paris. Janie shakes the globe and watches the golden, glittery snow swirling about the gray plastic Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame.

How stunningly tacky.

Yet totally full of a certain sort of special.

Janie smiles, wraps it up again and puts it back in the box. Writes on the box with a black marker: TO CATHY, ONE LAST GIFT.

FROM HENRY.

Janie finishes her father's business and then she searches, and finds, the ancient rental agreement. Discovers that Henry's been month-to-month since 1987, just mailing in a check faithfully so it arrives by the first of each month. It'll be easy continuing on from here.

Oh, she'll let the landlord know Henry pa.s.sed on. But she'll make it very tempting for the landlord to accept Janie as the new tenant. She can even pay the first year in advance if she has to.

She shuts down the computer.

Pulls the sheets off the bed and puts them in the little old was.h.i.+ng machine. Decides she's going to clean up the place and sleep here tonight.

Here, in her new home.

It's such a freaking huge relief.

MEMORIES.

8:43 p.m. Still the funeral day.

The first evening in her new place. Isolation, day one.

Laundry done, house dusted, sandwich eaten, grocery list made, Janie sits on her new bed with Henry's shoe box full of memories.

Inside: a fourteen letters from Dottie a five unopened letters to Dottie from Henry, marked "Return to Sender"

a a small, tarnished medal from a high school cross-country team a a cla.s.s ring a two envelopes containing photographs a a loonie and a silver dollar a nine paper clips a an old driver's license a and a folded piece of paper Gingerly, Janie takes the photographs out of the envelopes and looks through them. Snapshots of Dorotheaa"tons of them. Photos of the two of them, laughing. Having fun. Kissing and lying together on the beach, blissful smiles on their faces. On the big gray rocks by Lake Michigan, a sign in the background that says "Navy Pier." They look good together. Dorothea is pretty, especially when she smiles. Unbelievable.

Janie also recognizes the living room in the pictures. Henry with his feet propped up on the same coffee table, the same old curtains on the windows, Dorothea stretched out on the same old c.r.a.ppy couch, although it all looks nearly new in the photos. Everything's the same. Janie looks again at the photos of the happy couple.

Well, maybe not everything is the same.

Janie puts the photos in chronological order according to the red digital time stamp marked on the corner of each picture, and she imagines the courts.h.i.+p. The whirlwind summer of 1986 where they worked together at Lou's in Chicago, then there's a break from photos in the falla"that must have been the time they were separated, Dottie in high school and Henry at U of M. Janie peeks at the letters in the shoe box from Dorothea and sees the mail stamps on each opened envelopea"all were marked from August 27 through October of that year. Fourteen handwritten letters in two months, Janie thinks. That's love.

The second group of photos begin in mid-November of 1986 and the last photo is stamped April 1, 1987. April Fool's Day. Go figure. Janie does the math backward from her birthday, January 9, 1988. That's about right, she thinks. Nine months before would have been April 9, 1987. Not much time went by after the last photo before they made a baby, and then it was splitsville.

She fingers the letters, extremely curious. Over-whelmingly curious. Dead freaking curious. She even picks up the first one and runs her index finger along the fold of the letter inside the envelope. But then she puts it down.

It's like the letters are sacred or something.

That, and eww. There's probably something gross written inside. It would be almost as bad as getting sucked into her mother's s.e.x dream. Ick and yuck. Blurgh. Once you read something, you can't erase it from your brain.

Janie puts the letters and the photographs back into the box. She picks up the loonie and wonders how long it's been since her father visited Canada. Smiling, she sets the loonie back down next to the silver dollar and picks up the cross-country medal. She turns it over in her fingers, holding it close to her face and squinting so she can see all the little nooks and creva.s.ses. "I'm a runner too," she says softly. "Just a different kind. The road kind." She holds the medal close and then she pins it on her backpack.

Next, Janie looks at the driver's license. It was his first one, expired long ago. His photo is hilarious and his signature is a boyish version of the one that Janie has seen around the house.

And then Janie picks up the cla.s.s ring. 1985 is engraved on one side, and LHS is on the other. There's a tiny engraving of a runner below the letters. The ring is gold with a ruby stone and it's beautiful. Janie imagines it on Henry's finger, and then she goes back to the photographs and spies it there, on his right hand. Janie slips it on her own finger. It's way too big. But it fits her thumb. She takes it off and puts it back in the box.

Then picks it up again.

Puts it on her thumb.

Likes how it feels there.

11:10 p.m.

After going through everything but the letters once more, Janie finds the folded-up piece of paper with words printed on it. Opens it.

MORTON'S FORK 1889, in ref. to John Morton (c.1420a"1500), archbishop of Canterbury, who levied forced loans under Henry VII by arguing the obviously rich could afford to pay and the obviously poor were obviously living frugally and thus had savings and could pay too.

Source: American Psychological a.s.sociation (APA): morton's fork. (n.d.). Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/morton's fork Janie reads it again. Remembers the bookmark in the book, and the one online. Remembers what the note from Miss Stubin said, about Henry wanting Janie to consider Morton's Fork.

"Yeah, I get it already, Henry. You had a choice. I know." She has considered ita"about a million times. She's known it since before she even knew Henry existed. Poor Henry didn't have Miss Stubin's green notebook. Didn't even know the real choice. "I'm way ahead of you, man," she says.

Janie knows which choice sounds like the better one to her. Or she wouldn't be here.

She crumples up the paper and tosses it in the trash can.

She gives a last glance at the letters. And lets them be.

Turns out the light.

Tosses and turns, knowing that tomorrow, she's got a lot of hard explaining to do.

6:11 a.m.

She dreams.

Henry stands on a giant rock in the middle of rapids at the top of waterfall.

His hair turns into a hive of hornets. They buzz around angrily.

If he falls in, the hornets might go away, but he'll die falling down the waterfall.

If he stays on the rock, he'll be stung to death.

Janie watches him. On one bank stands Death, his long black cloak unmoving in the breeze. On the other bank is old Martha Stubin in her wheelchair. Blind, gnarled.

Henry flattens himself on the rock and tries to wash the hornets out of his hair. That only makes them furious. They begin to sting him, and he cries out, slapping at them, futile to stop them. Finally, he falls off the rock and soars over the waterfall. Plunging to his death.

Janie snaps awake and sits up with a gasp, disoriented.

Sits there, sinking back into the pillow, trying to get her heart rate back down to normal.

Thinking.

Hard.

Harder.

And then she pads over to the computer and waits in the cool dawn for it to boot up and connect to the Internet.

Looks up Morton's Fork again. Why won't Morton's Fork just go away? Why do I keep running into this stupid concept? I know, already. Seriously. I. Get. It. I get it more than Henry ever got it.

She finds it. Paraphrases under her breath. "A totally suck-a.s.s choice between two equally terrible outcomes. Okay, okay. Right? I KNOW this."

She thinks about it more, in case she's missing something.

Thinks about Henry.

Henry's Morton's Fork was obvious. He chose isolation over the torture and the unpredictable nature of being sucked into dreams. That was his choice. That's what he knew.

Equally terrible.

Yes, Janie could argue that his options were equally terrible. It's a c.r.a.pshoot. He could have gone either way.

She thinks of Martha Stubin. About how, when she was young, her Morton's Fork was exactly the same as Henry's, and she'd chosen the other path. She didn't know, at the time of her choice, what would happen to her. But then, she became blind and crippled.

Which adds a factor. And it makes Janie's Morton's Fork different.

Janie has the most information of all of them.

Still, this is not news. She's had all this information since the green notebook.

Equally terrible.

The term niggles at Janie's brain and she begins to pace around the little house, the wood floor cool and smooth on her bare feet.

She opens the refrigerator and stares into it, not really seeing anything inside, and thinks about her options.

Argues with herself.

Yes, it's equally terrible. Leaving Cabe and society to go live in a shack, alone? Yeah, that feels pretty terrible. As terrible as becoming blind and crippled? Sure.

Isn't it?

But what if Cabe wasn't a factor?

Isolation. Going off to live alonea"hermits do it. Monks do it. People actually choose to do that. To isolate.

No one in his right mind chooses blind and crippleda"not after really thinking about it, like Janie did. Martha didn't choose ita"it just happened. She didn't know it would happen. No one would ever choose it.

No one.

Unless the only alternative is equally bad.

She's thinking. Thinking about Henry. How he lived. How he died. About how he grew calm, finally. After. Only after he got sucked into Janie's dream.