04

She carried the urn to the very edge of the rock. The valley floor dropped away beneath her. The river below moved under its skin of ice. It felt wrong to think that the same water would pass, in time, by the back of a parking lot, a landfill, a cluster of houses that had never heard of him.

“Here,” she said.

She tipped the urn.

The ashes leapt forward, seized at once by the wind. They did not fall straight. They rose in a gray veil, whirled, spread, then thinned. Some swung back toward her. They dusted her coat, her lashes, the cracked leather of her gloves. She did not step away. Some of them hit her face. They tasted of nothing. A fine grit on the tongue.

She remembered him on the couch three months earlier, blanket up to his chest, eyes shut. The oxygen machine hummed. His breath hitched, stole itself, and came back. She sat in the chair that had molded itself to her over the years, its cushion flattened to her shape. She watched his chest, counting each rise and fall, afraid that if she stopped he would stop.

Once, without opening his eyes, he said, “You’re hovering.”

“It’s my job.”

“Your job is to outlive me,” he said. “Not to keep me here.”

Now she wiped her face with the back of her glove. The last of him drifted downwind, seeking hollows, bark, and drifts where rabbits would tunnel. She looked along the frozen overhang. Snow had already taken her boot marks, rounding them and softening their edges.

She screwed the lid back on the empty urn. It seemed smaller, a vessel whose purpose had passed. She considered pitching it into the valley. Let it spin, catch the light, vanish in some forgotten gully. Instead, she slid it into the pack. They had carried enough things together to know that one did not simply leave a thing behind because it had finished its task.

Her throat hitched once, hard. A sound escaped her, half laugh, half cry. “You bastard,” she whispered to the wind and the man who made her swear. The sob that followed surprised her. She stood in it until it spent itself, short and ugly and true, then brushed her cheek with the heel of her glove and started down.

The wind had picked up. The first real gust slapped her face, drove the snow sideways in thin sheets. Her cheeks burned. Her fingers ached inside the gloves. It was no longer a day to wander.

The descent took longer than it should have. Her legs felt tired, and the snow that had seemed clean and fine now hid treachery. Twice she sank to her knees in a drift where a rock dropped away beneath her. Once she went down hard, sliding on her side, her shoulder taking the blow. The pack, with its empty cargo, thudded against her spine. She lay still, listening to her breath and the deep quiet beneath it.

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