The Edge of Mercury
She was making a list. Too many things had been disappearing and Emma believed in ghosts. She looked up at Henry standing at the sink. He’d used too much dish soap again. White foam freckled his arms and dripped into the basin. He was so attentive with his chores. She thought of getting up, of grabbing hold of his arm. Numbers were scribbled on the pages in front of her.
Last week, on the way to the mailbox, she’d heard a voice distinctly saying her name. It was a man’s voice, half-whispered but urgent, as if he had something important to say and wanted her full attention. She supposed it was the wind or a flight of fancy, but there were so many other strange things. They’d been happening more and more. The bath left running when she’d gone to answer the phone was turned off when she returned. Henry had been outside pruning trees. The radio turned off when she knew she’d left it on. Things disappeared and reappeared. Eight years ago, she’d lost her favourite brooch on a trip to New York, and last month she’d found it sitting next to the bathroom sink. She almost cried when she saw it. Henry swore he didn’t know where it had come from. Nights sometimes, when she was watching TV, she thought he’d come into the room, thought he was sitting in the corner chair, but he was already in bed. Asleep with his pants on again—she’d stopped bothering with that. And how many times in the night had she felt him stroking her hair, touching her shoulder, only to turn and find him curled into himself at the other edge of the mattress? She wrote all this down, pressing the pencil firmly to the paper. “Did you water the roses?” he asked. “It’s gonna be hot all week.” Henry was looking out the window at the yellowing weeds. “No,” she answered. “It’s gonna be hot,” Henry said. He ran the water again. Water the roses, she wrote at the bottom of the page. It had been hot. They’d kept to the house, shopping at night if they had to. She’d thought of a movie or an air-conditioned mall, but never decided to go. Henry fell asleep at the movies. He didn’t like any of the ones she picked. Space travel movies, that’s all he’d watch. She used to have a nightmare, hadn’t had it in years. In the dream she’d be standing over the sink, just where he was now, and she’d see him in the yard looking through his telescope. It was night. Everything dark and unseen but her husband and the stars. It was good, usually, the beginning of this dream. Because how often do you really see a person? There he was, his pants loose at his waist revealing white skin. She smiled. She’d had the dream so often. It changed from time to time. Sometimes she’d call out to him and he would turn his head and there would be nothing there. Nothing at all. Sometimes she would watch as Henry was devoured by the sky. It was slow; the blackness came and blotted him out in patches. It was disgusting. Why dream such things?Water the roses, Henry thought. Emma won’t remember. She flits from thing to thing, always up and doing something else. He scrubbed the bottom of the pot, trying to rub the black out. It needed something stronger—a soak in vinegar and soda. The yard went dry again. Nothing he could do. Burrs stuck in his socks. He spent hours picking them out. Didn’t bother to change his clothes much lately. Emma complained. Dirt and whatnot on his pants; it made him feel productive to see it add up the way it did. Why put on another pair? People don’t make sense. Change their clothes every half hour. Wash their faces three times a day. Pay attention to trivial things. She reads to him from the paper in the morning, “So and so adopted a puppy. So-and-so wed.” Who are these people? Why is this written down for others to read? Fill their minds with chatter. At the store the girls talk about their teams and their shows. What are you going to do with your future? he wants to ask them. Emma’s chair scraped against the tile. There she goes again, he thought. It bothered him more lately. He could sit in one spot for three hours and in the meantime she’d have made a thousand revolutions around every room. He could always concentrate. Once in awhile a young man would search him out to ask him about Palomar. How did they know him? Astronomy bled into cosmology and there was the entire universe to grapple with. Distracted, absent-minded. He loved his work. Now they wrote about implosion, dark matter. The solar system was archaeology—they wanted the whole universe. The way the new generation changes things. Challenging Einstein! Now Anne calls to tell him about her therapy. “Dad, you were never there.” What did she want him to say? The steel wool scraped his fingertips raw. Emma was playing the piano. It was fall. She was playing the piano and Anne was outside chasing the dog. They ran around the trees, girl shrieking, dog barking. So much lightness in the air around them. The laughter bubbling up, filling his head. The piano—staccato high notes bouncing. He was dizzy. They kept spinning, wearing patterns into the grass beneath their feet. Stop that, he thought. Stop. But there was no one. It was another time. He put down the pot and picked up a bowl. Emma’s oatmeal from this morning. It was easy to wash clean. Just hot water and a sponge.
Emma didn’t play songs anymore, but made up her own melodies. Maybe it didn’t sound very good, but she loved the way it felt not to care, not to think about where her hands had to go. For years she’d played strictly, even taught Anne, “Now arch your palm.” She held a ruler under the girl’s hands as she’d been taught. And a ruler to her back. Anne in her tutu squirmed and giggled. “You’re tickling me!” She wanted to be a dancer. A dancer should know something about music. Now Emma played with her eyes closed. Her hands wove the sounds together. She wondered if Henry had noticed. He used to love to listen. He would come to her father’s house every Saturday—a well-dressed, quiet man. “Harvard!” her father liked to point out to anyone who would listen. “He studies at Harvard!” After dinner, they were left alone in the front room. Her father called it the parlour. For months they hardly spoke. Emma wasn’t accustomed to suitors. She played the piano and Henry listened, sitting on the couch behind her, hands clasped between his knees. He paid attention to music in a way she’d never known possible, as though every tiny detail mattered, every note, the up and down movement of her elbows, the weight of her foot on the pedals. When she glanced at him, she caught him looking at her in the way she’d observed people looking at paintings. It made her nervous. But Henry kept coming back. Emma began to pay attention to herself under his gaze. She noticed the fluidity of her movements, the rise and fall of her breath against beats to a measure. She noticed the freckles on her arms, the curve of her waist. Now Henry was eighty-three. The tap ran in the kitchen. There were the roses. There was her list. What would she do with it when she finished? Her hands were splayed across two octaves, the webbing between her fingers stretched thin. The room was darkening and Emma hummed a melody. There hadn’t been that many dishes. He did everything so slowly now. It chilled her to think of him like this. There was just something about the bend of his back over the sink, the way his feet rooted to the floor, as though she’d seen an image that would always remain fixed to that spot. An old man washing dishes. His dirt-heavy clothes, beads of soap and sweat stuck to his pale skin. He was strong, unquestionably solid, and yet there was nothing about her husband that Emma could ever touch, could ever hold on to. He would always be there, just out of reach. She would remain at a distance, observing him. A car drove past the house. She used to pace the yard, waiting for him to come home, his dinner in foil on the stove. She used to yell so fiercely—she wanted a husband, not a scientist. “That’s your line,” Henry would say. “Put it in the papers.” She played one note of a song, over and over, her eyes closed. What had happened to all that anger? It fell asleep somewhere along the way. Buried itself, sunk down and gave up. You can only repeat yourself so often before your words lose the thread of the thing they were sewn to. She mouthed lyrics without sound, imagining the two of them dancing, his hand warm at her back. Emma noticed a red blooming beneath her eyelids. A light had been turned on. Henry. She smiled and continued to play. He turned off the water. Emma was singing, a halting song. There was a room in the house where he used to sit, going over images. The scarred surface of a planet. Her voice just outside, putting their daughter to sleep, a lullaby. A grey wash of dust brightened by heat. He’d held his face closer to the photo. He’d brought it home to show them Mariner’s miracle. A pearl, his wife had said. It looks like a pearl. In the bedroom, Anne’s voice lilted questions and his wife shushed her. The edge of a crater raised from an impact four billion years ago. Listen, Emma was saying. He looked through the magnifying glass. The ticking of a clock. What had made that crater? Listen. A song. She was singing, the girl’s eyes closing. The edge of Mercury and behind that, behind that, silence. “Who made the pearl?” his daughter wanted to know. It all came down to questions he could never answer. Just listen. That’s all a man could do. She was singing and he was listening, her father clearing his throat in the next room. She was singing and he was listening, running his finger along the edge of a planet, standing at the sink, lost in a wash of time. He couldn’t isolate a single note.
It was dark and Henry had turned on the light for her. She hated singing aloud but felt compelled to. Her face was flushed, her eyes still closed. She rested her fingers for a moment. He was there—leaning against the wall, just behind her left shoulder. She could hear his breathing, strained through a stuffed nose and see him in her mind’s eye, hands in his pockets, face lit with a smile. She heard the sound of a cup being placed on the kitchen counter. She opened her eyes. There was no one. Henry hadn’t left the kitchen. The light was off when she came in. Now it was on. Her mind couldn’t play such tricks. She had numbered them. There were at least eight things on the list. Now another. “Henry.” He turned, dripping water to the floor from wet hands. His quizzical look, bubbles floating around him—he was their daughter at five, fresh from a bath and about to ask another impossible question. Her heart made itself known in her chest. She nearly forgot what she’d come in to tell him.
“Henry. We have a ghost.” Henry turned to face his wife. “What?” “We have a ghost.” “A ghost?” “I just saw it.” “You’re telling me you saw a ghost.” “I did. Yes, I did. My eyes were closed and it got dark. Then the light came on. I thought it was you, but you were here the whole time, weren’t you?” Henry had read all the brochures in the doctor’s office. His mind attacked him with disjointed phrases. Warning signs. Personality changes. Alzheimer’s. Deterioration. Ghosts? “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” He didn’t mean to yell. “There were other things. Remember my brooch? It was sitting there, plain as day.” If it were a mouse he could chase it off with a stick, kill it and show her the carcass. How do you chase a ghost? White sheets with smiles cut out. People die. Their bones break down. The towel he was holding fell to the floor and he bent to pick it up. He thought about magnetite—slim evidence for life on Mars. One thing becomes another over time. Emma was standing in the doorway. She was breathless and frightened. Something had upset her. Where had she been? The street. A man had called her name, followed her halfway home. A burglar. A stranger. Henry wanted a knife, a bat, a gangster’s defenses. “I’m calling the police,” he said. “Don’t mock me, Henry.” “They’ll make a report!” “You don’t believe me? I lost that pin after your sister’s funeral. I wore it to your graduation.” She was looking at him like it was all his fault—everything that had ever gone wrong. He didn’t know what they were talking about anymore. “You don’t remember?” “I can’t keep track of these things!” “It was a ghost. Maybe not a bad ghost.” He glanced at the floor. White linoleum. “What did it look like?” She drew a breath and exhaled before answering. “I think I felt it more than—” she interrupted herself. “It’s strange. I imagined you. I mean I felt you watching me. There was a presence in the room with me. I’m certain, Henry.” “Me.” Henry ran a hand under his belt. His face was hot. The room was hot. He didn’t want this conversation anymore. A ghost that was him and not him. What did she want? He was used to having his responses mentally prepared, sorted by topic: the house, groceries, television shows, the weather. He had nothing for ghosts. Emma shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Her knee must be bothering her again. He needed to change the subject but she wouldn’t let it go. “I made a list,” she said. She thrust a piece of paper at him. He didn’t take it. “Did it scare you?” he asked. He could never match the excitement she came at him with. The things that filled her time didn’t interest him. Party decorations. The affairs of neighbours. He couldn’t force himself to care, even for her sake. A ghost was an excuse for an absent mind. Henry was pretending. He was tired of pretending. “No,” she said. “It didn’t frighten me at all. It was pleasant, actually. The feeling I used to get when you watched me play. That wonderful, warm feeling you give off at times.” She paused. “I sang to you. I knew you heard, but there was no one there.” Emma was a girl, twenty-five. She was standing in the doorway in her yellow flowered dress, her grey eyes clashing against that smile, those round cheeks. Her hands and knees were muddy; she’d come in from planting the last of the saplings. Henry blinked. He was lost. “Tell me what you think,” she seemed to say. Bold, flirtatious, proud. She scared him. “Tell me what you think.” He could never quite answer. He was an old man. His hands shook. Emma held one hand at the back of her neck, the elbow pointing towards him. Her grey hair hung loosely at her shoulders. She wore the blue jeans Anne had bought for her on her last visit. “So you can match Dad,” she’d laughed. The pants looked attractive—modern and simple like their daughter. She was still beautiful. It frightened him. “Do you remember how you used to listen?” she asked. Henry didn’t answer. He was staring at nothing. At a corner of the ceiling. He hadn’t said a word in what felt like hours. His mouth was open, his thin lips receding. His expression was blank. She realized that this was how he looked often lately. She felt the silence of the house around her. The refrigerator made a ticking sound. Moths clung to the windows. There was too much air; the night was too wide. She didn’t want to be left alone. She said his name and he started as if jolted from sleep. She wanted to cling to him, to tear at him, to dig under his skin. He looked at her coldly. “You believe in ghosts?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you mean, you don’t know?” She looked at the piano in the empty living room and imagined she could hear her song the way he must have heard it, thin and faltering. “I thought you said you saw this thing!” He was yelling now. The room swam with light. Henry’s face was too bare, his eyes wide in panic. He gripped the edge of the counter. “Henry,” she said.
Emma had left him once. Called from a pay phone with the baby in her arms. A train station near San Francisco. He’d been up all night. Tell me where you are. I’ll come. Instead she told him about the weather. The scenery out the train window. The quality of light in the morning. On and on. What did I do? he’d asked. He had looked out at the yard and almost expected to see her there under her favourite tree. Heard her breathing over the line. A crackle. A hiss. The universe had been dated by a sound like this. An echo of radio noise like static over the phone. Emma was waiting for him. Always waiting for him. What are you thinking? Late at night, sitting up in bed. In the car while he drove. Standing in the doorway, keen and angry. She was pulling at him. What are you thinking? How could there be an answer? His mind was his own. A vast expanse he couldn’t explain in words. The operator came on to ask for more change. He held his breath. If the line went dead, how would he find her? She would take their daughter. She would take on another life. Another house. Another husband. A street looking over the ocean. The silence over the line seemed to stretch. He heard her crying. He thought he heard her crying. Why couldn’t he speak. “Don’t hang up,” he said. He looked up and saw her standing in the kitchen doorway. She looked shocked. “I’m here,” she said. “I’m sorry.” He directed the words to her bare feet. Her toenails were painted an odd sea colour—when did she paint her toenails? His wife was getting younger. It was absurd. He wanted to shake her into his world where people followed the simple rules carved into their biology. There was that look she used to take on so often, curious and angry, about to break open. A hook in his heart, pulled by the gravity of that stare. She was trying to tell him something, ask him something. She was pulling. She wouldn’t let go. And Henry wanted to shout, and to hold her, just hold her because she was something rare, something that defied logic, something perpetually waiting for him. Waiting for what?
He was staring at the floor, at the gap between their feet. Emma counted eight tiles. Her frustration was fading, replaced by worry. He had spoken from a memory. She imagined him in a few years, confused by simple sentences, easily upset. It was already happening. “There’s a lot of stars out tonight, Henry,” she said. “It’s a new moon.” He didn’t look up. “Will you tell me some of their names again? The way you used to?” “You never remembered.” “I probably never will,” she said. Emma walked across the kitchen to where he stood. She buttoned the top buttons of his shirt, pressed her palms to his chest and leaned her head close to his shoulder. His breath was warm against her neck. “Stars,” he said. She led him down the back stairs and into the yard. It was dark and they took small steps. There was a clearing just past the orchard where they used to sit on summer nights. Emma made her way toward it, pulling him along behind her. She knelt and helped him find the ground, watched him lie back and then lay down next to him. Dried yellow grasses caught in her hair. They tickled her skin, uncomfortable and comforting. The smell of those weeds, baked in the sun all day and cooling, reached out to her in echoes of memory, eclipsed one above the other—summer and the freedom always bound to the season, a feeling she imagined to be like flying. She turned her head towards him. “Tell me,” she whispered. Henry pointed to the sky. “The bright star there is Vega. And beside it, four stars make a square, you see?” She nodded. “Lyra,” she said. “You remember.” He was so pleased by this very simple thing. Emma didn’t understand why. But she said it again, liking the sound of the word in her mouth and his joy in hearing it. She leaned closer to him; rough wool scratched her cheek. Henry exhaled and she felt his arm curl around her, holding her to him. But she knew he had not moved.
