The light that came into the room from outside was not bright, but Shadow’s eyes had become used to the dark. There was a woman sitting on the side of his bed.
He knew her. He would have known her in a crowd of a thousand, or of a hundred thousand. She was still wearing the navy blue suit they had buried her in.
Her voice was a whisper, but a familiar line. “I guess,” said Laura, “you’re going to ask what I’m doing here.”
Shadow said nothing.
He sat down on the room’s only chair and, finally, asked, “Is that you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m cold, puppy.”
“You’re dead, babe.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I am.” She patted the bed next to her. “Come and sit by me,” she said.
“No,” said Shadow. “I think I’ll stay right here for now. We have some unresolved issues to address.”
“Like me being dead?”
“Possibly, but I was thinking more of how you died. You and Robbie.”
“Oh,” she said. “That.”
Shadow could smell—or perhaps, he thought, he simply imagined that he smelled—an odor of rot, of flowers and preservatives. His wife—his ex-wife ... no, he corrected himself, his late wife—sat on the bed and stared at him, unblinking.
“Puppy,” she said. “Could you—do you think you could possibly get me—a cigarette?”
“I thought you gave them up.”
“I did,” she said. “But I’m no longer concerned about the health risks. And I think it would calm my nerves. There’s a machine in the lobby.”
Shadow pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and went, barefoot, into the lobby. The night clerk was a middle-aged man, reading a book by John Grisham. Shadow bought a pack of Virginia Slims from the machine. He asked the night clerk for a book of matches.
“You’re in a nonsmoking room,” said the clerk. “You make sure you open the window, now.” He passed Shadow a book of matches and a plastic ashtray with the Motel America logo on it.
“Got it,” said Shadow.
He went back into his bedroom. She had stretched out now, on top of his rumpled covers. Shadow opened the window and then passed her the cigarettes and the matches. Her fingers were cold. She lit a match and he saw that her nails, usually pristine, were battered and chewed, and there was mud under them.
Laura lit the cigarette, inhaled, blew out the match. She took another puff. “I can’t taste it,” she said. “I don’t think this is doing anything.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me too,” said Laura. When she inhaled the cigarette tip glowed, and he was able to see her face.
“So,” she said. “They let you out.”
“Yes.”
The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. “I’m still grateful. I should never have got you mixed up in it.”
“Well,” he said, “I agreed to do it. I could have said no.” He wondered why he wasn’t scared of her: why a dream of a museum could leave him terrified, while he seemed to be coping with a walking corpse without fear.
“Yes,” she said. “You could have. You big galoot.” Smoke wreathed her face. She was very beautiful in the dim light. “You want to know about me and Robbie?”
“I guess.”
She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You were in prison,” she said. “And I needed someone to talk to. I needed a shoulder to cry on. You weren’t there. I was upset.”
“I’m sorry.” Shadow realized something was different about her voice, and he tried to figure out what it was.
“I know. So we’d meet for coffee. Talk about what we’d do when you got out of prison. How good it would be to see you again. He really liked you, you know. He was looking forward to giving you back your old job.”.
“Yes.”
“And then Audrey went to visit her sister for a week. This was, oh, a year, thirteen months after you’d gone away.” Her voice lacked expression; each word was flat and dull, like pebbles dropped, one by one, into a deep well. “Robbie came over. We got drunk together. We did it on the floor of the bedroom. It was good. It was really good.”
“I didn’t need to hear that.”
“No? I’m sorry. It’s harder to pick and choose when you’re dead. It’s like a photograph, you know. It doesn’t matter as much.”
“It matters to me.”
Laura lit another cigarette. Her movements were fluid and competent, not stiff. Shadow wondered, for a moment, if she was dead at all. Perhaps this was some kind of elaborate trick. “Yes,” she said. “I see that. Well, we carried on our affair—although we didn’t call it that, we did not call it anything—for most of the last two years.”
“Were you going to leave me for him?”
“Why would I do that? You’re my big bear. You’re my puppy. You did what you did for me. I waited three years for you to come back to me. I love you.”
He stopped himself from saying / love you, too. He wasn’t going to say that. Not anymore. “So what happened the other night?”
“The night I was killed?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Robbie and I went out to talk about your welcome-back surprise party. It would have been so good. And I told him that we were done. Finished. That now that you were back that was the way it had to be.”
“Mm. Thank you, babe.”
“You’re welcome, darling.” The ghost of a smile crossed her face. “We got maudlin. It was sweet. We got stupid. I got very drunk. He didn’t. He had to drive. We were driving home and I announced that I was going to give him a goodbye blowjob, one last time with feeling, and I unzipped his pants, and I did.”
“Big mistake.”
“Tell me about it. I knocked the gearshift with my shoulder, and then Robbie was trying to push me out of the way to put the car back in gear, and we were swerving, and there was a loud crunch and I remember the world started to roll and to spin, and I thought, Tm going to die.’ It was very dispassionate. I remember that. I wasn’t scared. And then I don’t remember anything more.”
There was a smell like burning plastic. It was the cigarette, Shadow realized: it had burned down to the filter. Laura did not seem to have noticed.
“What are you doing here, Laura?”
“Can’t a wife come and see her husband?”
“You’re dead. I went to your funeral this afternoon.”
“Yes.” She stopped talking, stared into nothing. Shadow stood up and walked over to her. He took the smoldering cigarette butt from her fingers and threw it out of the window.
“Well?”
Her eyes sought his. “I don’t know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn’t know then I can’t put into words.”
“Normally people who die stay in their graves,” said Shadow.
“Do they? Do they really, puppy? I used to think they did too. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps.” She climbed off the bed and walked over to the window. Her face, in the light of the motel sign, was as beautiful as it had ever been. The face of the woman he had gone to prison for.
His heart hurt in his chest as if someone had taken it in a fist and squeezed. “Laura ... ?”
She did not look at him. “You’ve gotten yourself mixed up in some bad things, Shadow. You’re going to screw it up, if someone isn’t there to watch out for you. I’m watching out for you. And thank you for my present.”
“What present?”
She reached into the pocket of her blouse, and pulled out the gold coin he had thrown into the grave earlier that day. There was still black dirt on it. “I may have it put on a chain. It was very sweet of you.”
“You’re welcome.”
She turned then and looked at him with eyes that seemed both to see and not to see him. “I think there are several aspects of our marriage we’re going to have to work on.”
“Babes,” he told her. “You’re dead.”
“That’s one of those aspects, obviously.” She paused. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going now. It will be better if I go.” And, naturally and easily, she turned and put her hands on Shadow’s shoulders, and went up on tiptoes to kiss him goodbye, as she had always kissed him goodbye.
Awkwardly he bent to kiss her on the cheek, but she moved her mouth as he did so and pushed her lips against his. Her breath smelled, faintly, of mothballs.
Laura’s tongue flickered into Shadow’s mouth. It was cold, and dry, and it tasted of cigarettes and of bile. If Shadow had had any doubts as to whether his wife was dead or not, they ended then.
He pulled back.
“I love you,” she said, simply. “I’ll be looking out for you.” She walked over to the motel room door. There was a strange taste in his mouth. “Get some sleep, puppy,” she told him. “And stay out of trouble.”
She opened the door to the hall. The fluorescent light in the hallway was not kind: beneath it, Laura looked dead, but then, it did that to everyone.
“You could have asked me to stay the night,” she said, in her cold-stone voice.
“I don’t think I could,” said Shadow.
“You will, hon,” she said. “Before all this is over. You will.” She turned away from him, and walked down the corridor.
Shadow looked out of the doorway. The night clerk kept on reading his John Grisham novel, and barely looked up as she walked past him. There was thick graveyard mud clinging to her shoes. And then she was gone.
Shadow breathed out, a slow sigh. His heart was pounding arrhythmically in his chest. He walked across the hall and knocked on Wednesday’s door. As he knocked he got the weirdest notion, that he was being buffeted by black wings, as if an enormous crow was flying through him, out into the hall and the world beyond.
Wednesday opened the door. He had a white motel towel wrapped around his waist, but was otherwise naked. “What the hell do you want?” he asked.
“Something you should know,” said Shadow. “Maybe it was a dream—but it wasn’t—or maybe I inhaled some of the fat kid’s synthetic toad-skin smoke, or probably I’m just going mad ...”
“Yeah, yeah. Spit it out,” said Wednesday. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”
Shadow glanced into the room. He could see that there was someone in the bed, watching him. A sheet pulled up over small breasts. Pale blonde hair, something rattish about the face. He lowered his voice. “I just saw my wife,” he said. “She was in my room.”
“A ghost, you mean? You saw a ghost?”
“No. Not a ghost. She was solid. It was her. She’s dead all right, but it wasn’t any kind of a ghost. I touched her. She kissed me.”
“I see.” Wednesday darted a look at the woman in the bed. “Be right back, m’dear,” he said.
They crossed the hall to Shadow’s room. Wednesday turned on the lamps. He looked at the cigarette butt in the ashtray. He scratched his chest. His nipples were dark, old-man nipples, and his chest hair was grizzled. There was a white scar down one side of his torso. He sniffed the air. Then he shrugged.
“Okay,” he said. “So your dead wife showed up. You scared?”
“A little.”
“Very wise. The dead always give me the screaming mimis. Anything else?”
“I’m ready to leave Eagle Point. Laura’s mother can sort out the apartment, all that. She hates me anyway. I’m ready to go when you are.”
Wednesday smiled. “Good news, my boy. We’ll leave in the morning. Now, you should get some sleep. I have some scotch in my room, if you need help sleeping. Yes?”
“No. I’ll be fine.”
“Then do not disturb me further. I have a long night ahead of me.”
“Good night,” said Shadow.
“Exactly,” said Wednesday, and he closed the door as he went out.
Shadow sat down on the bed. The smell of cigarettes and preservatives lingered in the air. He wished that he were mourning Laura: it seemed more appropriate than being troubled by her or, he admitted it to himself now that she had gone, just a little scared by her. It was time to mourn. He turned the lights out, and lay on the bed, and thought of Laura as she was before he went to prison. He remembered their marriage when they were young and happy and stupid and unable to keep their hands off each other.
It had been a very long time since Shadow had cried, so long he thought he had forgotten how. He had not even wept when his mother died.
But he began to cry now, in painful, lurching sobs, and for the first time since he was a small boy, Shadow cried himself to sleep.
Coming To America A.D. 813
They navigated the green sea by the stars and by the shore, and when the shore was only a memory and the night sky was overcast and dark they navigated by faith, and they called on the All-Father to bring them safely to land once more.
A bad journey they had of it, their fingers numb and with a shiver in their bones that not even wine could burn off. They would wake in the morning to see that the hoarfrost had touched their beards, and, until the sun wanned them, they looked like old men, white-bearded before their time.
Teeth were loosening and eyes were deep-sunken in their sockets when they made landfall on the green land to the west. The men said, “We are far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods.”
Their leader clambered to the top of a great rock, and he mocked them for their lack of faith. “The All-Father made the world,” he shouted. “He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of Ymir, his grandfather. He placed Ymir’s brains in the sky as clouds, and his salt blood became the seas we crossed. If he made the world, do you not realize that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received into his hall?”
And the men cheered and laughed. They set to, with a will, to build a hall out of split trees and mud, inside a small stockade of sharpened logs, although as far as they knew they were the only men in the new land.
On the day that the hall was finished there was a storm: the sky at midday became as dark as night, and the sky was rent with forks of white flame, and the thunder-crashes were so loud that the men were almost deafened by them, and the ship’s cat they had brought with them for good fortune hid beneath their beached longboat. The storm was hard enough and vicious enough that the men laughed and clapped each other on the back, and they said, “The thunderer is here with us, in this distant land,” and they gave thanks, and rejoiced, and they drank until they were reeling.
In the smoky darkness of their hall, that night, the bard sang them the old songs. He sang of Odin, the All-Father, who was sacrificed to himself as bravely and as nobly as others were sacrificed to him. He sang of the nine days that the AB-Father hung from the world-tree, his side pierced and dripping from the spear-point’s wound, and he sang them all the things the All-Father had learned in his agony: nine names, and nine runes, and twice-nine charms. When he told them of the spear piercing Odin’s side, the bard shrieked in pain as the All-Father himself had called out in his agony, and all the men shivered, imagining his pain.
They found the scraeling the following day, which was the all-father’s own day. He was a small man, his long hair black as a crow’s wing, his skin the color of rich red clay. He spoke in words none of them could understand, not even their bard, who had been on a ship that had sailed through the pillars of Hercules and who could speak the trader’s pidgin men spoke all across the Mediterranean. The stranger was dressed in feathers and in furs, and there were small bones braided into his long hair.
