Epilogue

"The past isn't over; it's not even past."

—William Faulkner

Because I'm moving from the house where we lived when we were married, and because I want to mark exactly the spot where we buried each cat, I call and ask you to come and help me remember. You come, of course. But I'm not prepared for the sight of you at the front door, your thin face thinner, your dark blond hair threaded with more gray than I thought you'd ever have, infinitely strange and infinitely familiar.

And you are not prepared for me. Squaw Valley? you ask, reading the words on my purple sweatshirt, as if wondering what I could possibly have done there without you, high in those mountains you introduced me to, that snowy range, those Sierras that were always ours together, hiking or skiing, the bright air sluicing into our lungs. How many miles did I cover, walking beside you, the scuffed boots you gave me in 1976 still the ones I wear?

We chat, though I am so busy watching you that I instantly forget what we are talking about, noticing only how your hands shake. I rub my tea mug against my palm until I hear a small clinking and catch you looking at my new gold band.

Outside, we walk to the copse of white pine where we buried three cats, one in each season but spring. You returned each time to dig the grave and weep with me. I recall the places exactly, it turns out, but know also it's important to do this together, the small bones that lie beneath us our family when we were young.

In the house I show you the stone carver's sketch. Nothing mawkish, but something flat—a paving stone really—inscribed with each cat's name and date. I place it on the table before you. You look at the page, framing it with both hands, leaning into the wood as if you need it to hold you up. You look and look, but do not speak, though I wish you would. Only later will I wish I'd touched your hand.

When it's time to go, you linger, telling me you remember repairing the rungs on the dining room chairs I still use. I give you the last few things I've found, cleaning out closets. You tell me of your trip to Europe—a summer vacation, tracing the route your new wife's father took through the Alps in the war. I mention my father, D-Day, though I don't know exactly where he was.

They have all that stuff mapped, you say. And they probably do. But I don't know any more what lies unmapped in the past or how it becomes the history our lives make as they connect to other people. I should let you go, you say, when the phone rings. But you pause there in the door to what was once our house, waiting for something.

As I wait too, though there are no words to describe this sadness that floats between us, as folded and refolded as those topographical maps you used to consult when we hiked, measuring the contour lines with a thumbnail as familiar as my own, saying, It's not far now. A few miles and we're home.