Three days after that they flew to Boulder, where they had a pleasant lunch with five young Japanese women. It was a meal of pleasantries and politeness, and Shadow walked away from it unsure of whether anything had been agreed to or decided. Wednesday, though, seemed happy enough.
Shadow had begun to look forward to returning to Lakeside. There was a peace there, and a welcome, that he appreciated.
Each morning, when he was not away working for Wednesday, he would drive across the bridge to the town square. He would buy two pasties at Mabel’s; he would eat one pasty then and there, and drink a coffee. If someone had left a newspaper out he would read it, although he was never interested enough in the news to purchase a newspaper himself.
He would pocket the second pasty, wrapped in its paper bag, and eat it for his lunch.
He was reading USA Today one morning when Mabel said, “Hey, Mike. Where you going today?”
The sky was pale blue. The morning mist had left the trees covered with hoarfrost. “I don’t know,” said Shadow. “Maybe I’ll walk the wilderness trail again.”
She refilled his coffee. “You ever gone east on County Q? It’s kind of pretty out thataway. That’s the little road that starts acrost from the carpet store on Twentieth Avenue.”
“No. Never have.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s kind of pretty.”
It was extremely pretty. Shadow parked his car at the edge of town, and walked along the side of the road, a winding, country road that curled around the hills to the east of the town. Each of the hills was covered with leafless maple trees, and bone-white birches, and dark firs and pines. There was no footpath, and Shadow walked along the middle of the road, making for the side whenever he heard a car.
At one point a small dark cat kept pace with him beside the road. It was the color of dirt, with white forepaws. He walked over to it. It did not run away.
“Hey, cat,” said Shadow, unselfconsciously.
The cat put its head on one side, looked up at him with emerald eyes. Then it hissed—not at him, but at something over on the side of the road, something he could not see.
“Easy,” said Shadow. The cat stalked away across the road, and vanished into a field of old unharvested corn.
Around the next bend in the road Shadow came upon a tiny graveyard. The headstones were weathered, although several of them had sprays of fresh flowers resting against them. There was no wall about the graveyard, and no fence, only low mulberry trees, planted at the margins, bent over with ice and age. Shadow stepped over the piled-up ice and slush at the side of the road. There were two stone gateposts marking the entry to the graveyard, although there was no gate between them. He walked into the graveyard between the two posts.
He wandered around the graveyard, looking at the headstones. There were no inscriptions later than 1969. He brushed the snow from a solid-looking granite angel, and he leaned against it.
He took the paper bag from his pocket, and removed the pasty from it. He broke off the top: it breathed a faint wisp of steam into the wintry air. It smelled really good, too. He bit into it.
Something rustled behind him. He thought for a moment it was the cat, but then he smelled perfume, and under the perfume, the scent of something rotten.
“Please don’t look at me,” she said, from behind him.
“Hello, Laura,” said Shadow.
Her voice was hesitant, perhaps, he thought, even a little scared. She said, “Hello, puppy.”
He broke off some pasty. “Would you like some?” he asked.
She was standing immediately behind him, now. “No,” she said. “You eat it. I don’t eat food any more.”
He ate his pasty. It was good. “I want to look at you,” he said.
“You won’t like it,” she told him.
“Please?”
She stepped around the stone angel. Shadow looked at her, in the daylight. Some things were different and some things were the same. Her eyes had not changed, nor had the crooked hopefulness of her smile. And she was, very obviously, very dead. Shadow finished his pasty. He stood up and tipped the crumbs out of the paper bag, then folded it up and put it back into his pocket.
The time he had spent in the funeral home in Cairo made it easier somehow for him to be in her presence. He did not know what to say to her.
Her cold hand sought his, and he squeezed it gently. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. He was scared, and what scared him was the normality of the moment. He felt so comfortable with her at his side that he would have been willing to stand there forever.
“I miss you,” he admitted.
“I’m here,” she said.
“That’s when I miss you most. When you’re here. When you aren’t here, when you’re just a ghost from the past or a dream from another life, it’s easier then.”
She squeezed his fingers.
“So,” he asked. “How’s death?”
“Hard,” she said. “It just keeps going.”
She rested her head on his shoulder, and it almost undid him. He said, “You want to walk for a bit?”
“Sure.” She smiled up at him, a nervous, crooked smile in a dead face.
They walked out of the little graveyard, and made their way back down the road, toward the town, hand in hand. “Where have you been?” she asked.
“Here,” he said. “Mostly.”
“Since Christmas,” she said, “I kind of lost you. Sometimes I would know where you were, for a few hours, for a few days. You’d be all over. Then you’d fade away again.”
“I was in this town,” he said. “Lakeside. It’s a good little town.”
“Oh,” she said.
She no longer wore the blue dress in which she had been buried. Now she wore several sweaters, a long, dark, skirt, and burgundy boots. Shadow commented on them.
Laura ducked her head. She smiled. “Aren’t they great boots? I found them in this great shoe store in Chicago.”
“So what made you decide to come up from Chicago?”
“Oh, I’ve not been in Chicago for a while, puppy. I was heading south. The cold was bothering me. You’d think I’d welcome it. But it’s something to do with being dead, I guess. You don’t feel it as cold. You feel it as a sort of nothing, and when you’re dead I guess the only thing that you’re scared of is nothing. I was going to go to Texas. I planned to spend the winter in Galveston. I think I used to winter in Galveston, when I was a kid.”
“I don’t think you did,” said Shadow. “You’ve never mentioned it before.”
“No? Maybe it was someone else, then. I don’t know. I remember seagulls—throwing bread in the air for seagulls, hundreds of them, the whole sky becoming nothing but seagulls as they flapped their wings and snatched the bread from the air.” She paused. “If I didn’t see it, I guess someone else did.”
A car came around the corner. The driver waved them hello. Shadow waved back. It felt wonderfully normal to walk with his wife.
“This feels good,” said Laura, as if she was reading his mind.
“Yes,” said Shadow.
“I’m pleased it feels good for you, too. When the call came I had to hurry back. I was barely into Texas.”