Her Hands

Her fingers were resumes, spread into the number of rejections she received that day. There were wood chips on the floor of our studio apartment and the walls were painted turquoise, lilac, sunflower. We didn’t own much; she cleaned our four plates and two mugs by hand and we fought over the price of rubber gloves. I said to her, “Your hands are too important.” She said the soap didn’t bother her, when I could see the speckling of eczema creeping up her wrists, her arms. When I brought home a pair of rubber gloves, $1.67, she cried and told me I didn’t have to do that. I saw the painting on her easel: her brother, dead for four years.

There were times when I wondered what she did that day while I was gone. Did she dust between the floorboards, or get high on turpentine? Did she fix the door that never locked properly, or carve a flower into a block of wood? I would take her hands in mine at night. The valleys of each knuckle, I traced with my hands as she rolled in her sleep. Funny how love makes a fool blind to failure. What did she hide in the cracks of the wrinkles in her palms, the circling of her fingertips along my back? What did she hide in those hours when I was gone?

When she got sick, I could feel the plates in the earth shift, deep in my core. My legs went numb and my chest was beating beyond my ribs. Sleeping became a pastime, and so I would get home from work, lay on the futon, and fall asleep. For hours, mostly. I lost more weight than she had lost from the chemo. She had to have her head shaved, and I saw the packet of disposable blades left on the counter. I cleaned her body in the bathtub and then shaved off all thirteen inches of her beautiful hair. She had cherry brown hair, but I can hardly remember her being anything but bald.

Then the nightmares started and I had to lull her to sleep every night, leaving me exhausted and moody in the mornings. My supervisor started to notice and told me to “get with the program.” My pay was docked and I calculated the amount of medication we then couldn’t afford. She kept telling me I would leave her, and I had to try to convince her otherwise. I sat in the futon one evening and looked at the walls, now crimson, periwinkle, navy. I asked her why they were so dark, and she said that it reflected her “inner turmoil.” She laughed and I couldn’t tell if she was joking or just sad.

We began couples therapy in winter, when the snow fell on the windowsills and my leather shoes had to be cleaned daily because of the salt on the streets. One week was so cold my car wouldn’t start and I had to take a taxi. I was welcomed with three warnings that week, for lateness due to taxi. The first meeting, we laughed afterward and said to each other how much better of a couple than them we were, how much smarter and more attractive than them. But week after week, we started to realize our dire situation. They were healthy, wealthy. We were dying, poor.

She relapsed and I held her hands to my chest. They were so thin now, the fingers knobby and spindly. I felt like I would break her any time I held her in my arms, and so I avoided it like the plague. She begged me to stop being so gentle, but I didn’t know what else to be - she was sick, and I was scared. The last time we made love, she thanked me for the privilege of knowing me. I think she knew it would be our last time, but I looked down at her, puzzled, and kissed her neck, her shoulders, to cover my face and not look into her eyes.

She died the next week.

I lost my job the week after. A no-show, they recorded in my file.

On every wall are paintings. Each one unfinished, and none signed. She said to me that she would only sign a painting when it was finished, when it was complete. In her letter to me that I found a year later, tucked away in our scrapbook of our life together, she signed her name at the bottom, and wrote, “I love you, and I will always love you.” I don’t want to think about why she signed the doodle in the letter, a picture of a child holding a balloon. I don’t want to think about where she is now.

I fold my hands together, pretending it’s hers and mine, always like this.