American Gods

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 suit in which she had been buried. Now she wore several sweaters, a long, dark, skirt, and high, 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.

“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 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.”

This isn’t the way this conversation goes, thought Shadow. This isn’t the way anything goes.

“I love you,” she said, dispassionately. “You’re my puppy. But when you’re really dead you get to see things clearer. It’s like there isn’t anyone there. You know? You’re like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world.” She frowned. “Even when we were together. I loved being with you. You adored me, and you would do anything for me. But sometimes I’d go into a room and I wouldn’t think there was anybody in there. And I’d turn the light on, or I’d turn the light off, and I’d realize that you were in there, sitting on your own, not reading, not watching TV, not doing anything.”

She hugged him then, as if to take the sting from her words, and she said, “The best thing about Robbie was that he was somebody. He was a jerk sometimes, and he could be a joke, and he loved to have mirrors around when we made love so he could watch himself fucking me, but he was alive, puppy. He wanted things. He filled the space.” She stopped, looked up at him, tipped her head a little to one side. “I’m sorry. Did I hurt your feelings?”

He did not trust his voice not to betray him, so he simply shook his head.

“Good,” she said. “That’s good.”

They were approaching the rest area where he had parked his car. Shadow felt that he needed to say something: I love you, or please don’t go, or I’m sorry. The kind of words you use to patch a conversation that had lurched, without warning, into the dark places. Instead he said, “I’m not dead.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “But are you sure you’re alive?”

“Look at me,” he said.

“That’s not an answer,” said his dead wife. “You’ll know it, when you are.”

“What now?” he said.