The Geometry of Loss

The baseball sat on his nightstand for seven years—a paperweight for memories he couldn't quite uncrumple. Their son had hit it over the fence that summer, the summer before everything folded in on itself, before the doctors started speaking in paragraphs instead of sentences. Now it gathered dust beside her jewelry box, a leather sphere that contained whole afternoons of shouted encouragement and the particular way sunlight had caught her hair as she leaned forward to watch.

He found himself thinking about that hair often now—how it had thinned at the temples during chemo, how she'd made him shave it off that Sunday in November when the clippers hummed like some terrible insect. She'd joked about looking like a ex-convict. He hadn't laughed. Couldn't. The bathroom tiles were too white, the mirror too honest.

The hospice room had cable television bolted to the wall, thirty channels of static and game shows and news about disasters happening elsewhere. He watched it for hours sometimes, just to have something to listen to besides the machinery keeping her chest rising and falling. Last night he'd watched a documentary about Egypt—something about how the pyramid at Giza was aligned with true north, how ancient architects had calculated the position of stars that no longer existed where they once had.

It made him think about precision. About how some things are built to outlast their makers, how love might be the only structure that erodes.

"You're still here," she said, waking while the documentary's narrator described burial chambers.

He took her hand. "Still here."

"The fox," she whispered. "Did you ever..."

"The fox?"

"In the garden. Last summer. It came every evening. You said... you said it looked like it was waiting for something."

He remembered. The fox with its coat like rusted iron, standing motionless among the hostas, watching them through the glass door. He'd told her it was probably just scavenging. She'd said no, it was visiting. It had purposes they couldn't understand.

"I haven't seen it this year," he said.

"Me neither," she said, and something in her voice suggested she knew what that meant—that some visitors only come for the part before the end, that even wild things recognized when a space had become a place of departure.

She squeezed his hand with surprising strength. "You should go home. Sleep in your own bed."

"I'm fine here."

"David. The baseball," she said. "Throw it away."

"What?"

"It's just a thing. Things aren't memories. Things are just things."

He looked at the nightstand where he'd imagined the baseball sitting for seven years, but he was in the hospice room, not their bedroom. The baseball was home. She was asking him to let go of something that wasn't even in the room.

"Okay," he said. "Okay."

"Good," she said, and closed her eyes. "Now put on that cable garbage. I want to see if the pyramid show is still on."

So he turned on the television and they watched together as the screen filled with ancient stones, with constructions that had survived everything that had ever threatened to destroy them, and for the first time in months, he didn't think about the shape of his own collapsing world.