And so he told her, in the plain words of a man who had carried a story too long to carry it neatly. His wife's name had been Anna. She had been twenty-nine. The baby, Hope, had come early and hard, and the doctor had been two towns away, and by the time he arrived, the bleeding would not stop. Martin had been sent out of the room — sent out, because that was what men were for, to wait in kitchens and pray — and he had stood in the kitchen of that house in the railroad town and listened to the sounds from the next room grow quieter and quieter, and he had told himself that quiet meant rest, that quiet meant she was sleeping, that quiet meant everything would be all right in the morning. He had believed it because he needed to believe it. When the doctor came out and put a hand on his shoulder, Martin had said, "She's resting," and the doctor had said, "I'm sorry," and Martin had understood, all at once, that he had been standing in a kitchen listening to his wife die, and that he had mistaken the sound of leaving for the sound of sleep.
"I never forgave myself for not being in the room," he said. His voice was rough, and he was ashamed of the tears that had come without his permission, but he did not wipe them away, because Sylvia was not looking away either. "I tell myself I would have done nothing. I tell myself my being there would not have changed the bleeding. But I was not there. And she died among strangers, and I was in the next room, listening to it happen and calling it rest."
Sylvia was quiet for a long time. The fire crackled. The storm pressed against the windows. Then she set down her mending, folded her hands in her lap, and told him her own night.
Henry Marlowe had died on a winter night, two years past, in the bed they had shared for twenty-seven years. He had been ill all autumn, a cough that would not lift, and Sylvia had nursed him the way she had nursed everything in her life: steadily, without fuss, with broth and clean linen and a hand on his forehead through the long nights. On the last night, he had woken near midnight and asked for water, and she had given it to him, and he had said, quite clearly, "Sylvia, you have been a good wife to me," and she had said, "Hush now, rest," because she was afraid of what a sentence like that meant when spoken in the middle of the night. He had slept after that, or seemed to sleep, and she had sat beside him in the chair and watched his chest rise and fall, and somewhere past three in the morning, she had fallen asleep herself, just for a little while, just with her head resting on the edge of the bed. When she woke, the room was cold, and his hand was cold, and he was gone, and she had slept through the moment of his going.
"I was in the room," she said, "and I missed it anyway. I was holding his hand and I missed it. So you see, Martin, being there is not the whole of it. We miss the moment either way. The moment is not ours to keep. What is ours is everything before it, and everything after."
Martin stared at her across the fire. The tears were still on his face, and he did not care. Something in his chest, something that had been knotted tight for three years, loosened — not all the way, not the way a knot comes undone when you pull the right thread, but the way a knot loosens when another pair of hands works at it beside yours.
"I have never told anyone that," he said.
"Neither have I," Sylvia said. "Not in those words. Not to anyone."
For a while, neither of them spoke of death again. Instead, slowly, almost shyly, they spoke of the living who had gone. Martin told Sylvia about Anna as she had been before the last hard month: how she laughed when she was nervous, which was often; how she sang while she shelled peas, off-key and unbothered; how she had taught Ned to whistle through a blade of grass on a summer evening, and how Ned had practiced for a week until the whole yard rang with it. He told her about the dress Anna had sewn for Alice before Alice was born, too big at first and then, all at once, too small, the way children's clothes always are. He told her about the way Anna had looked at him on their wedding day, as if he were a better man than he knew himself to be, and how he had spent the years since trying to become the man in that look.