American Gods

He knew her. He would have known her in a crowd of a thousand, or of a hundred thousand. She sat straight on the side of his bed. She was still wearing the navy-blue suit they had buried her in.

Her voice was a whisper, but a familiar one. “I guess,” said Laura, “you’re going to ask what I’m doing here.”

Shadow said nothing.

He sat down on the room’s only chair, and, finally, asked, “Babe? Is that you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m cold, puppy.”

“You’re dead, babe.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I am.” She patted the bed next to her. “Come and sit by me,” she said.

“No,” said Shadow. “I think I’ll stay right here for now. We have some unresolved issues to address.”

“Like me being dead?”

“Possibly, but I was thinking more of how you died. You and Robbie.”

“Oh,” she said. “That.”

Shadow could smell—or perhaps, he thought, he simply imagined that he smelled—an odor of rot, of flowers and preservatives. His wife—his ex-wife…no, he corrected himself, his late wife…sat on the bed and stared at him, unblinking.

“Puppy,” she said. “Could you—do you think you could possibly get me—a cigarette?”

“I thought you gave them up.”

“I did,” she said. “But I’m no longer concerned about the health risks. And I think it would calm my nerves. There’s a machine in the lobby.”

Shadow pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and went, barefoot, into the lobby. The night clerk was a middle-aged man, reading a book by John Grisham. Shadow bought a pack of Virginia Slims from the machine. He asked the night clerk for a book of matches.

The man stared at him, asked for his room number. Shadow told him. The man nodded. “You’re in a non-smoking room,” he said. “You make sure you open the window, now.” He passed Shadow a book of matches and a plastic ashtray with the Motel America logo on it.

“Got it,” said Shadow.

He went back into his bedroom. He did not turn the light on. His wife was still on the bed. She had stretched out now, on top of his rumpled covers. Shadow opened the window and then passed her the cigarettes and the matches. Her fingers were cold. She lit a match and he saw that her nails, usually pristine, were battered and chewed, and there was mud under them.

Laura lit the cigarette, inhaled, blew out the match. She took another puff. “I can’t taste it,” she said. “I don’t think this is doing anything.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Me too,” said Laura.

When she inhaled the cigarette tip glowed, and he was able to see her face.

“So,” she said. “They let you out.”

“Yes.”

“How was prison?”

“Could have been worse.”

“Yes.” The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. “I’m still grateful. I should never have got you mixed up in it.”

“Well,” he said, “I agreed to do it. I could have said no.” He wondered why he wasn’t scared of her: why a dream of a museum could leave him terrified, while he seemed to be coping with a walking corpse without fear.

“Yes,” she said. “You could have. You big galoot.” Smoke wreathed her face. She was very beautiful in the dim light. “You want to know about me and Robbie?”

“Yes.” It was Laura, he realized. Living or dead, he couldn’t fear her.

She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You were in prison,” she said. “And I needed someone to talk to. I needed a shoulder to cry on. You weren’t there. I was upset.”

“I’m sorry.” Shadow realized something was different about her voice, and he tried to figure out what it was.

“I know. So we’d meet for coffee. Talk about what we’d do when you got out of prison. How good it would be to see you again. He really liked you, you know. He was looking forward to giving you back your old job.”

“Yes.”

“And then Audrey went to visit her sister for a week. This was, oh, a year, thirteen months after you’d gone away.” Her voice lacked expression; each word was flat and dull, like pebbles dropped, one by one, into a deep well. “Robbie came over. We got drunk together. We did it on the floor of the bedroom. It was good. It was really good.”

“I didn’t need to hear that.”

“No? I’m sorry. It’s harder to pick and choose when you’re dead. It’s like a photograph, you know. It doesn’t matter as much.”

“It matters to me.”

Laura lit a second cigarette. Her movements were fluid and competent, not stiff. Shadow wondered, for a moment, if she was dead at all. Perhaps this was some kind of elaborate trick. “Yes,” she said. “I see that. Well, we carried on our affair—although we didn’t call it that, we did not call it anything—for most of the last two years.”

“Were you going to leave me for him?”

“Why would I do that? You’re my big bear. You’re my puppy. You did what you did for me. I waited three years for you to come back to me. I love you.”

He stopped himself from saying I love you, too. He wasn’t going to say that. Not any more. “So what happened the other night?”

“The night I was killed?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Robbie and I went out to talk about your welcome-back surprise party. It would have been so good. And I told him that we were done. Finished. That now that you were back that was the way it had to be.”

“Mm. Thank you, babe.”