American Gods

Something rustled behind him. He thought for a moment it was the cat, but then he smelled perfume, and under the perfume, the scent of something rotten.

“Please don’t look at me,” she said, from behind him.

“Hello, Laura,” said Shadow.

Her voice was hesitant, perhaps, he thought, even a little scared. She said, “Hello, puppy.”

He broke off some pasty. “Would you like some?” he asked.

She was standing immediately behind him, now. “No,” she said. “You eat it. I don’t eat food any more.”

He ate his pasty. It was good. “I want to look at you,” he said.

“You won’t like it,” she told him.

“Please?”

She stepped around the stone angel. Shadow looked at her, in the daylight. Some things were different and some things were the same. Her eyes had not changed, nor had the crooked hopefulness of her smile. And she was, very obviously, very dead. Shadow finished his pasty. He stood up and tipped the crumbs out of the paper bag, then folded it up and put it back into his pocket.

The time he had spent in the funeral home in Cairo made it easier somehow for him to be in her presence. He did not know what to say to her.

Her cold hand sought his, and he squeezed it gently. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. He was scared, and what scared him was the normality of the moment. He felt so comfortable with her at his side that he would have been willing to stand there forever.

“I miss you,” he admitted.

“I’m here,” she said.

“That’s when I miss you most. When you’re here. When you aren’t here, when you’re just a ghost from the past or a dream from another life, it’s easier then.”

She squeezed his fingers.

“So,” he asked. “How’s death?”

“Hard,” she said. “It just keeps going.”

She rested her head on his shoulder, and it almost undid him. He said, “You want to walk for a bit?”

“Sure.” She smiled up at him, a nervous, crooked smile in a dead face.

They walked out of the little graveyard, and made their way back down the road, toward the town, hand in hand. “Where have you been?” she asked.

“Here,” he said. “Mostly.”

“Since Christmas,” she said, “I kind of lost you. Sometimes I would know where you were, for a few hours, for a few days. You’d be all over. Then you’d fade away again.”

“I was in this town,” he said. “Lakeside. It’s a good little town.”

“Oh,” she said.

She no longer wore the blue dress in which she had been buried. Now she wore several sweaters, a long, dark, skirt, and burgundy boots. Shadow commented on them.

Laura ducked her head. She smiled. “Aren’t they great boots? I found them in this great shoe store in Chicago.”

“So what made you decide to come up from Chicago?”

“Oh, I’ve not been in Chicago for a while, puppy. I was heading south. The cold was bothering me. You’d think I’d welcome it. But it’s something to do with being dead, I guess. You don’t feel it as cold. You feel it as a sort of nothing, and when you’re dead I guess the only thing that you’re scared of is nothing. I was going to go to Texas. I planned to spend the winter in Galveston. I think I used to winter in Galveston, when I was a kid.”

“I don’t think you did,” said Shadow. “You’ve never mentioned it before.”

“No? Maybe it was someone else, then. I don’t know. I remember seagulls—throwing bread in the air for seagulls, hundreds of them, the whole sky becoming nothing but seagulls as they flapped their wings and snatched the bread from the air.” She paused. “If I didn’t see it, I guess someone else did.”

A car came around the corner. The driver waved them hello. Shadow waved back. It felt wonderfully normal to walk with his wife.

“This feels good,” said Laura, as if she was reading his mind.

“Yes,” said Shadow.

“I’m pleased it feels good for you, too. When the call came I had to hurry back. I was barely into Texas.”

“Call?”

She looked up at him. Around her neck the gold coin glinted. “It felt like a call,” she said. “I started to think about you, about how much more fun I would have with you than down in Galveston. About how much I needed to see you. It was like a hunger.”

“You knew I was here, then?”

“Yes.” She stopped. She frowned, and her upper teeth pressed into her blue lower lip, biting it gently. She put her head on one side and said, “I did. Suddenly, I did. I thought you were calling me, but it wasn’t you, was it?”

“No.”

“You didn’t want to see me.”

“It wasn’t that.” He hesitated. “No. I didn’t want to see you. It hurts too much.”

The snow crunched beneath their feet and it glittered diamonds as the sunlight caught it.

“It must be hard,” said Laura, “not being alive.”

“You mean it’s hard for you to be dead? Look, I’m still going to figure out how to bring you back, properly. I think I’m on the right track—”

“No,” she said. “I mean, I’m grateful. And I hope you really can do it. I did a lot of bad stuff…” She shook her head. “But I was talking about you.”

“I’m alive,” said Shadow. “I’m not dead. Remember?”

“You’re not dead,” she said. “But I’m not sure that you’re alive, either. Not really.”