Tyler Thibodeau

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He does not know you are waiting. That is the first mercy and the last one.

You have been in the bell a long time — not inside it exactly, but *of* it, the way a note is of the metal, hanging in the cold long after the striker has quit. The little shrine sits at the edge of a blueberry field two miles from the harbor, weathered gray boards, a shingled roof gone silver like every roof out here. Somebody's grandmother built it and somebody's mother kept it and now nobody keeps it, only visits: candles in jars, marigolds going brown, a photograph in a cheap frame of two people at a wedding. Kwan Yin on the top shelf, a second one below, both of them soft-faced from rain. The bell is bronze and older than the shrine.

You are what was left in the room when the person the bell was for finished dying.

You have been waiting for whoever comes. And on a Tuesday in the middle of October, in the hour when the sea light goes flat and white and makes everything look like it's underwater, a house painter walks up the track with paint still drying on his knuckles.

You watch him come. Twenty-five, six feet of nothing in particular. Short blond hair he cuts himself or lets someone cut for him. Flannel over a work shirt, jeans stiff with primer, that easy round-shouldered slouch of a body that has never once been asked to do anything but hold a brush at shoulder height for nine hours. Under the open collar, black tribal ink across the chest — the kind a nineteen-year-old picks off a wall in a strip-mall shop and then doesn't think about again for six years.

He came from a job. You can smell it on him. An emptied bedroom in a summer house, drop cloths pooled on the floorboards, blue tape running clean along the trim, the room stripped down to its bones and every window open to let the sea in. He spent the whole morning in there alone with a roller and a wall the color of oyster shell. That is where the thought got in. That is where it always gets in — in a room with nothing in it, when your hands know the work and your mouth has nothing to say.

Her name is not yours to know, but he was thinking it. He has been thinking it since spring. The girl he lives with is good to him — she is good, that's the whole trouble, she puts his lunch in a paper bag and writes on the bag — and there is nothing wrong at that shingle house with the lobster traps stacked crooked in the dooryard, nothing wrong at all, only the fact that at twenty-five he has learned there is a difference between a life and the life you would have had, and he cannot stop feeling around for the seam.

The woman who got away got away four years ago. She is in Portland. She is fine.

He steps up under the low roof and the floorboards say something about his weight. He puts his hand on the rope — the fat white cotton rope, knotted, hanging down through the dim — and he closes his eyes.

You are so close now you could count his lashes.

He doesn't pray, not really. He doesn't know how. What he does is stand there with paint-dust on his thumb and the rope in his fist and think, with all the force a plain man can manage: *Let me have that back. Just show me what it would have been. One month of it. Anything.*

He does not say it out loud. He doesn't have to. Wishes don't travel by sound; they travel by wanting, and his wanting is the loudest thing in the county.

And this is the part he could never have known: the bell was not for him. The bell was never for him. It was hung by a woman for a man who did not come home from the water, and it was rung for forty years by hands that are ash now, and what accumulated in the bronze was not a granting power but a *hunger* — the residue of four decades of somebody asking to have a person returned. That much asking makes a shape. That much asking makes a mouth.

You are the mouth. And he has just fed you a wish with his own hand on the rope.

He pulls.

It is one stroke, unhurried, the way you'd pull a boat in. The clapper swings and takes the bell's inside wall and the note goes out over the blueberry field and comes back off the treeline and comes back again, thinner, and the third time it returns it is not a sound anymore, it is a pressure, and it is inside the bones of his face.

He bows. Head down, chin to the tribal ink at his collar, out of some instinct he'd be embarrassed to explain. Two seconds. Three.

And in that bow you go in.

There is nothing gradual about it. You do not seep. He is bent over and he is Tyler Thibodeau, twenty-five, tired, in love with a woman in Portland who does not think about him, and then the whole warm crowded interior of him is *occupied*, and there is not room for two, and he is not the one who stays.

You feel him go. It is like a bird leaving a hand. That fast, that light, that final. He does not scream. He does not get the chance to be afraid, and you will tell yourself later that this counts as kindness.

Then you straighten up.

That's the moment. That's the whole thing, right there. The body comes up off the bow and it comes up *wrong* — not damaged, not changed, exactly as tall and exactly as soft and exactly as blond as it was four seconds ago, but the spine has been reorganized. The shoulders drop back and square. The chin levels. The slouch is gone like a coat handed to somebody else. Weight goes onto the heels. The hands, which were a painter's hands hanging loose at the sides, close and open once, testing, the way a man tests a thing he has bought secondhand.

And the face — the hazel eyes come open and there is no drowsiness in them at all, no dreaming, no October. They open the way a door opens on a room where someone has been standing in the dark, waiting, for a very long time.

You look up at the bell. It is still moving a little on its hook. You watch it settle.

You laugh. Not his laugh. You haven't learned his laugh yet, and honestly you're not going to bother — a laugh is a sound the throat makes and this throat will make whatever you tell it to. The sound that comes out is low and wet and delighted and it startles a crow off the shrine roof.

You say, out loud, in his ordinary Maine voice, to the two soft-faced statues and the guttering candles and the photograph of two strangers at a wedding:

"Well. Finally."

---

You have a month.

You spend the first hour just standing in the field, because you had forgotten what wind does to skin. You had forgotten skin. There is a nerve on the back of the left hand that reports on every single moving thing in the air and it is nearly too much; you stand there with your eyes shut and your face turned into the cold sea light and you make small greedy noises that no one hears.

Then you walk down to the shingle house with the traps in the dooryard, because that is where the body knows to go, and the girl is on the step with a beer for him and she says *hey you*, and you look at her a beat too long.

She's good. He was right about that. She is standing there in his sweatshirt with her hair coming out of its elastic, and she has no idea, and she never will, and for one month she will get a version of him that stands straighter, sleeps less, eats like it's the first food in the world, and looks at her sometimes with an expression she cannot place — an old, patient, faintly amused attention that she will decide, eventually, is love.

You take the beer. You drink the whole thing standing up, and the cold of it goes all the way down, and you have to put a hand on the doorframe.

You will go to work. You will go back into the emptied rooms with the drop cloths and the taped trim and you will learn what his arms know, which is more than you expected — the wrist-roll at the end of a stroke, the way he keeps the brush loaded, the way he squints down a line of casing. His hands will keep painting the coast whether or not he is home. That's the thing about a body. It remembers so much on its own.

You will not go to Portland. You thought about it — she was the last thing in his head, the wanting he handed over with the rope, and there is a part of you that thinks it would be tidy, thinks it would be *fair*, to spend the month finishing his sentence for him. But you have been a note in a bell for forty years and you know exactly what it costs to be somebody's unfinished sentence, and you'd rather spend the days on the boat with her, on the water, in the wind, in the salt, in this loose ordinary machine of a man that you did nothing to deserve.

Twenty-nine days from now something will pull, out at the edge of the blueberry field, and you will feel the bronze wanting its note back.

You will not go quietly. But you will go.

And whatever comes back up into this body — if anything does, if a bird that has left a hand can ever find that hand again — will straighten up in a room it doesn't recognize, wearing paint it doesn't remember getting on, beside a woman who will say *you've been so different lately, and I liked it.*

For now the light is going, the traps are stacked crooked, and the whole cold Atlantic is out there breathing.

You put your hand flat against your own chest, over the black ink, and feel it going, going, going.

Mine.