The Fountain

It’s funny what the night will do to a man. In daylight, he could carry almost anything. Bills on the kitchen counter. The doctor’s phone call. The empty chair across from him. The words he should have said twenty years ago and the ones he wished he could take back. Daylight gave everything edges. There was coffee to make, grass to cut, groceries to buy. A man could stay busy enough to believe he had made peace with his life. But night was different. At two in the morning, the house became enormous. The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen like some machine keeping watch. Pipes clicked behind the walls. A car passed somewhere beyond the bedroom window, its headlights moving briefly across the ceiling before disappearing. Then everything was still again. That was when the dead came home. Not as ghosts. Nothing so dramatic. They returned as voices. His father laughing on a summer afternoon. His mother calling him in for supper. A dog scratching at the back door that had been gone fifteen y...

  It started off as a cold. That was what everyone called it, including the doctor, and there was comfort in the smallness of the word. A cold was something you carried around for a few days like loose change in your pocket. You drank soup. You complained about your throat. You slept beneath an extra blanket and watched afternoon television with the volume turned low. His wife brought him tea with honey and stood in the bedroom doorway telling him he looked terrible, which was the sort of thing only someone who loved you could say with tenderness. Outside, November worked its way through the trees, stripping them a little more each morning. He watched the leaves tumble past the window and thought how strange it was that the world could look so beautiful while you felt so miserable. By Thursday the fever arrived. By Friday the cough had settled deep inside him, somewhere beyond the reach of tea and blankets. On Saturday morning his wife said, "We're going back to the doctor....

On Friday morning, the old man sat on the porch with his coffee and believed he understood the shape of his life. The dog slept beneath his chair. A cardinal worked the hedge for breakfast. Across the street, someone dragged a garbage can toward the curb, its wheels making that hollow plastic thunder against the pavement. There were bills on the kitchen counter, tomatoes ripening beside the fence, and a loose board on the back steps he had been meaning to fix. Nothing seemed particularly urgent. Nothing seemed about to change. He had lived long enough to know better, of course, but knowing a thing and believing it are two different matters. By Saturday night, rain had come. A friend he had not heard from in twenty years called just to say hello. The dog chased a rabbit through the wet yard and returned covered in mud and happiness. The old man found a photograph behind a drawer while looking for a screwdriver, a summer afternoon from forty years ago, everyone young and squinting into t...

  He had never meant for anyone to hear him sing alone. Singing was different when there were twenty other children around you, all wearing white shirts that smelled faintly of starch and the wooden closet behind the sacristy. You could disappear inside the sound. But one Wednesday evening, after choir practice, Sister Margaret touched him lightly on the shoulder and said, “I think you should sing the solo on Sunday.” The boy looked behind him, certain she was speaking to someone else. She wasn't. The solo was only eight lines long, but by the time he walked home they had grown into something enormous. He imagined forgetting the words. Or his voice cracking. Worst of all, he imagined the whole church becoming terribly quiet while everyone waited for him to fail. He practiced everywhere. He sang softly in his bedroom with the door closed. He sang while brushing his teeth, while taking out the trash, and once beneath his breath in the grocery store until his mother smiled and pretend...

She found the box on a Tuesday afternoon while looking for something else. That was how the important things usually returned to you. Not with trumpets or warnings, but beneath old blankets on the top shelf of a closet, covered with dust. It was a small cardboard box tied with a blue ribbon she recognized before she remembered why. She sat down on the bedroom floor and pulled the ribbon loose. Inside were the letters he had written when they were young and dating, before the mortgage and the children and the years that seemed to gather around a marriage like rings inside a tree. His handwriting leaned slightly to the right, impatient and hopeful. Dear Annie, the first one began. She smiled because no one had called her Annie in forty years. Not even him. She read them there on the floor while the afternoon moved quietly across the room. He had written about missing her after only two days apart, the yellow dress she wore to the county fair, how he had driven home after kissing her go...

  The rain had been falling since before breakfast, steady and silver against the kitchen windows, and the little boy stood by the back door wearing his yellow rain slicker. It was too large for him. The sleeves swallowed half his hands, and the hood leaned over his forehead so that he had to tilt his head back to see the yard. His mother had bought it that way because boys grew quickly and raincoats cost money. He liked it large. When he wore it, he felt less like a boy and more like some small explorer properly equipped for whatever waited beyond the door. His red rubber boots completed the uniform. Outside, the gutters overflowed, and the driveway had become a collection of shallow brown rivers. His mother looked at him and said, "Don't go far." He promised he wouldn't, although neither of them had ever agreed upon exactly how far far was. He stepped into the rain. It tapped against the hood like a thousand tiny fingers and made the whole world smell of wet earth...