His Voice, Still Saved

His voicemail is still on my phone. I have not played it yet. It sits there the way a door sits — present, specific, offering something I am not sure I can walk through.

It is three in the afternoon. The funeral was at eleven. Between those two facts there is a drive on the 401 that I do not remember making, a coat I hung on a hook I cannot picture, and now this: the couch, the grey Toronto light coming flat through the window, the city below making its ordinary sounds as though nothing has shifted in the arrangement of the world. A bus. Someone's horn. The specific hiss of tires on wet pavement that means the temperature is sitting right at zero, not committing.

I am still in the dress. Crepe wool, structured, the kind that holds its shape through everything. It held its shape through the eulogy. Through the handshakes and the casserole offers and the drive I don't remember. It is holding its shape now, the hem across my thighs, the fabric warm from four hours of my body living inside it — my heat held there, pressed back against me, waiting for me to notice.

I notice.

I don't know what I am doing when I reach for the wand on the side table. That is not quite true. I know exactly what I am doing. I am doing the only thing that has ever made the body feel like it belongs to me instead of to everything that is happening to it. He would have understood this. He understood most things about me that I never said out loud, which is part of why the voicemail is still saved, why I cannot delete it, why it is sitting on the coffee table right now next to the wand I have just picked up.

The wand is cold. My hands are still cold from outside. I hold it without turning it on and I feel the weight of it — solid, deliberate — and something in my stomach contracts one full second before I do anything else. My thighs are pressed together under the dress. I can feel the specific pressure of the fabric across the back of my knees, the slight give when I shift my weight, the warmth that has been building there since the church without my permission.

I set the wand against my thigh, still off, still cold through the crepe wool. My left hand is pressed flat against the couch cushion beside me. I am looking at his name on my phone screen.

I exhale. It comes out longer than I meant to give it — longer and lower, unfolding into the grey quiet of the room before I have decided to let it go.

The wand is in my right hand. The voicemail is there. My knees are still together, the dress still holding everything in, and I am aware — with a precision that feels almost cruel — of exactly how much warmth is waiting just inside the fabric, just past the threshold of what I have allowed myself yet.

I press play. I turn the wand on.