Rusty Vandermolen

---

You do not know him. That is the first fact and it stays a fact: you have never seen this man's face, never heard his voice, never stood in a room he was standing in. Whatever the arrangement was that sent you back, it did not consult you on the address.

The room is the color of a lamp left on for nobody. Somebody switched the monitors off but left them on their arms, screens dead and grey, leaning over the bed like men who have already said what they came to say. The sheet is pulled to his waist. His left hand rests on his stomach and there's a band on the ring finger, plain gold, worn down to a soft shine at the sides. His chest does not move. Down at the end of the bed, one foot has come out from under the sheet, and there is a tag on the toe, cardboard, a string, a woman's careful handwriting.

You arrive in him the way water arrives in a boot.

The breath comes first and it comes enormous. It is not a gasp. It is the whole room emptying into one pair of lungs, ribs going wide, the sheet lifting off the belly, a sound out of the throat like a man coming up through eight feet of cold lake and finding the surface exactly where he left it. Then the exhale, and the shudder after it, and then you are behind two blue eyes looking at an acoustic ceiling and thinking: *low*. That is the first thing you learn about him. From here, the ceiling is farther than you're used to. He is five foot five.

You sit up. The arms do it for you, and they are better arms than you expected from a man of fifty-six — shoulders that hold their shape, forearms with cords in them. Somebody kept this body. Somebody swam laps, or stood eight hours a shift, or both. The head is shaved smooth and cool and your palm goes over it without being told to, and you understand that this is a gesture he had, that the hand knew the route.

You lean forward and take the tag.

*Vandermolen, Rusty D.* A birthdate. A room number. Time of death in the same careful hand as the name.

You read it again. You read it twice because the first time it was only ink, and the second time you were waiting for something to open — a house, a wife's face, a street with mountains at the end of it. Nothing opens. Rusty Vandermolen is a name on a piece of cardboard tied to your own foot and it means precisely as much to you as any other stranger's name. Less, maybe. Strangers usually come with a face.

That's what you'll never make anybody understand, later: you didn't take him. He was already gone. There is nothing of him in here — no memories waiting in a drawer, no voice, no opinions. You got the machine and the maintenance record and not one page of the diary. A wedding ring and no wife in it.

---

You put your feet on the floor and the floor is very close.

The body has a headache with a fist in it. You will find out why in nine days when a doctor with a cuff on your arm says a number and frowns, and you will find a hospital list on the phone with three prescriptions on it, and you will take them, dutifully, because whatever else you are you are not a man who ruins a thing he was handed for free.

The phone. It's in a plastic bag with a watch and a belt and a set of keys, sitting on the nightstand in a bag with the hospital's name printed on it. Somebody had to sign for those things not yet. Somebody has been called and is driving.

Fifty-one missed messages by the time you get it open. The lock screen is a bungalow porch — a rail, two chairs, a strip of Denver rooflines and behind them the Front Range going blue at the edges. The last message is from *Dee*: **im in the elevator. dont let them take him yet. i want to say it properly.**

You are still sitting on the edge of that bed reading it when the door goes.

---

You want to say something clean about what you did in that room, and there isn't anything clean. She came around the door and she stopped and every part of her face fell in different directions at once. And you said, "Hi." Because you are not brave and because it was the only word in the body's mouth.

She screamed. Then she laughed. Then she got down on the floor beside the bed with her forehead on your knee and said *thank you thank you thank you* into your leg, and you put a hand on the back of her head because the hand went there by itself, because it had been there before, ten thousand times, and it knew the way even if you didn't.

They called it a Lazarus event. There is a paper about it. Two doctors argued in the hall about whether the time of death was written wrong, and you let them, and you let the pastor from Dee's church come and pray over you with his palm on your bald head, and you let the whole congregation on Sunday stand up and weep at you while a man at the front said *the Lord is not finished with our brother Rusty.* You stood there in a borrowed suit that fit you exactly, being five foot five, being a miracle.

You have never believed in anything. You believed in whatever it was that shoved you back down the pipe into a dead man's ribs, which is not the same, and which you cannot say out loud in that building, and which you have therefore stopped trying to sort out. Sunday mornings you sing. You've got his voice, and it turns out he could hold a note.

---

Learning him is a job with no manual and no end.

The wife: Dee. Forty years of a woman and no access. So you learn her like a language, from scratch, at fifty-six, while she thinks you're simply *changed* — quieter, they all say, since. She tells you stories and you laugh in the right places and file them. You know now that his mother's name was Marguerite. That he hated cilantro. That the shaved head started in '09 because he was losing it anyway and hated the halfway. You don't remember any of it. You *know* all of it, which is a different organ entirely, and some nights you lie there next to her doing inventory, terrified of the day she asks about something nobody ever bothered to tell you twice.

She says: *You don't touch my hair anymore when we watch TV.*

You start touching her hair when you watch TV.

The job: the casino, thirty-two years of it, and the hands are the only thing that came with the body. First shift back you stood at an empty blackjack table with the chips racked and the felt swept, before open, half-lit, and you picked up a deck to see what would happen, and the hands did it. Riffle, strip, riffle, box, the arc of a card sailing to third base and stopping dead on the line. You didn't do that. He did. His hands are still hands — no drumming, no fidget, nothing restless in them; they sit where you leave them like tools on a bench and then they know things you don't. In the pit they say he's got his edge back. They say it like a compliment.

The money: twenty-two thousand in savings, some in a retirement account, a bungalow with eleven years left on it. He was careful. You've kept being careful, because it's her house too.

The drinking: a beer at Dee's brother's, on the porch, one, slow, mountains going pink. That's who he was and it's easy enough to be.

---

Then there is the letter.

You found it in the garage in a coffee can, and you read it because a stranger in his body has no manners. A woman's handwriting, not Dee's. *Lorraine.* Dated nineteen years ago. Four pages that don't ask him for anything and don't forgive him for anything either, and one line near the end: *I'm not sorry we happened. I'm sorry you're the kind of man who can't be two places, because I always thought that was the best thing about you.*

He kept it in a coffee can under paint thinner for nineteen years. He didn't answer it — there's a stamped envelope in there too, addressed, never mailed, sealed.

You sat on the garage floor with a dead man's secret in your hands and understood something. This is the whole of what he left you: a woman who loves you and doesn't know you're gone, a set of hands that can still deal a shoe, a blood pressure to keep down, and one envelope he couldn't post.

You put it back in the can. You put the can back on the shelf. Whatever that was, it was his, and he isn't here to want it anymore, and you are not going to spend a stranger's life spending a stranger's regrets.

---

There is no way back. Nobody offered one and you have stopped listening for the offer. This is the arrangement now: forever, in a small strong body with a headache, on a porch in Denver with the sun going down behind the range and Dee's feet in your lap.

She said last week, "You came back different."

"Yeah," you said.

"I don't mind," she said. "You're kinder."

And you thought: I'm not kinder. I'm careful, the way you're careful with a house that isn't yours. You water the plants. You don't move the furniture. You learn where the step creaks.

But she looked at you the way she looked at him for forty years, and you took it, because you have nothing else and no way to give it back, and because — God help whoever's keeping the books — you have started to want it.

The tag is in a drawer in the kitchen, under the takeout menus. *Vandermolen, Rusty D.* You take it out sometimes and read the name twice, the way you did the first time. It still means nothing.

It's yours now anyway.