Luck by Joan Barfoot Page A

physically hurting, frankly, for skin. This is maybe a more acute pain than if she hadn’t lost touch in the first place. In the end she curves herself around a pillow, partly for comfort—touch—and partly so no one will hear her weeping her way, at last, into sleep.
    Downstairs, Beth is awake longest. The living-room sofa is wide but has gotten quite lumpy—Philip was planning to rebuild it as soon as he had time between customers’ orders, so they’re stuck with it now. She tosses and shifts, trying to find a position in which barely upholstered bones don’t clash with springs. She is both less exhausted and less comfortable than the other two, and so sleeps less thoroughly. Despite her new upspringing of spirits, she is wakened several times in the night by unhappy images, she’s aware they are sorrowful although they’re gone as soon as she opens her eyes. Each time this happens, hope and optimism feel more and more squeezed, shoved about by a bullying sort of distress, and around four in the morning, that vulnerable hour, she, too, has a brief spell of weeping, although cannot think why.
    And so Philip’s absence begins making its differences: to air, weight, volume, and the rotations and constellations of individual left-behind souls. Pull out one of several props and see what tumbles down. Or see what rearranges itself, compensating for unexpected imbalances—these things, like life or death in the night, can go either way.

THE SECOND DAY

Seven
    N ora wakens early in a strange narrow white bed in a strange narrow white room. Philip is not beside her. Oh. She leaps up, much the way she did yesterday morning, although without the scream. She has slept in her underwear. Now she puts on yesterday’s disreputable black clothes. This won’t do, not for the whole day, but it’ll have to for now.
    Having slept and wakened and leaped, she is at a loss for where to turn next. She is, it appears, sadly inexperienced with events that cannot be controlled or undone. She has had a pretty smooth skate to this point—even death has previously come as a blessing as well as an occasion for sorrow, since when her mother finally took her last shallow breath, who could regret the end, any end, to her suffering? Who, also, could be surprised? This, though—this is a dive into the deep end of helplessness; or rather a merciless shove off a very high diving board.
    Philip is dead!
    Still, the quality of shock shifts on the second day after so unexpected and untimely a death. Brain cells zapped closed on the first day start popping open again, beginningthe necessary, chaotic work of absorbing severe injury, adapting to fresh facts, seeking new alignments and compensating adjustments. In this hit-and-miss effort, survivors become more of what they already are. Extremes bubble up in silent or noisy lament. Lurking weirdnesses step out of the shrubbery.
    Out in the upstairs hallway, going quietly into the bathroom (it’s so early the sun’s barely up, let the others sleep), then down the wide staircase, Nora can feel Philip everywhere. Not everywhere in the sense of expecting to find him in the bathroom, or in the kitchen brewing their first shared pot of coffee, or slamming cupboard doors or rooting through the fridge or wandering about in his socks asking where his workboots or waders have disappeared to; but as if he has spread out and dispersed, becoming a scattered, benign but still assessing presence in the universe.
    His absence is also everywhere, and so she continues to be startled that he is
not
in the bathroom, or downstairs making their coffee. The kitchen is, in fact, deathly quiet. She sits at the table, mug in hand, looking around as if she’s never been here before. The oak counters and cupboards, the pine table and chairs, the blue tiles on the floor, all those shiny appliances, the toaster, the coffee-maker, the food processor, the kettle, where did they come from? It’s as if she has taken bold advantage