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Harold wandered through a field of daisies—or graves. He couldn’t tell. All he knew was that he’d been searching for a long time.
In the distance, among the white clusters, a single sunflower sprouted up, tall and proud. He ran to it, found a hollow beneath it, where daisies sank under the weight of what he’d been searching for.
“Maude,” he said. “What—what are you doing here?”
Maude lay perfectly still, her hands folded in her lap like a body in a casket. “I’ve always been here. I didn’t go anywhere.” Her lips didn’t part when she spoke—they only bowed into a smile. “And I’ll always be here. Come and find me. Whenever you need me.”
“Promise?” He yearned to lie down beside her in the daisies, but he didn’t want to crush them.
“Of course. Promise.” Her hands didn’t move, but Harold could see her crossing her fingers.
Harold knelt gingerly beside her. The daisies made space for his knees. But as he leaned down to kiss her, a voice, harsh and unfamiliar, disrupted the scene. “Mr. Chasen?” came the intruder’s voice. The sky darkened. “Mr. Chasen? Sir?”
The golden-hour light dimmed away until nothing remained but black emptiness. Then, a fluorescent glow filled Harold’s vision. His eyelids fluttered open. “She’s awake,” the doctor said.
Harold sat in a hard plastic chair. Maude’s hospital room was no field of daisies, but at least she was there, awake and alive.
He stared at the familiar figure in the hospital bed. Maude’s eyes were open but heavy-lidded, her mouth set in a tight line, her hands folded in her lap. She was very still, like she’d been beneath the sunflower. Only the daisies were missing.
Harold’s jaw tightened until his teeth ached. Stillness didn’t suit Maude—not in the dream, and not here. “Why didn’t you say it back?” he blurted out. It felt wrong to be angry at someone so fragile. Cruel, even. His cheeks flushed, hot with shame, that these were the first words she’d hear upon awakening.
Maude’s blank expression betrayed nothing. After a moment, she turned her head and furrowed her brow, her wrinkles deepening. “Say what back?”
“When I—when I said I loved you… why didn’t you…” He couldn’t finish the sentence, not while her gaze was fixed on him, all soft and placid. He wilted in on himself, a lone daisy with a severed stem.
“Oh, Harold. Come here.” She reached out toward him. In her hospital gown and her hospital bed, her arms looked thinner, her numbered tattoo darker, than they had in her wispy nightgown and her warm bed, the night of the fireworks—the night they’d made love.
At first, he’d been afraid. But, Maude had assured him, it wasn’t unlike the tactile sculpture he’d already enjoyed, her gentle curves not unlike the rounded edges of the polished wood. So, with her guidance, he touched, and caressed, and felt—felt better, felt more. It felt more real than any funeral, any demolition, or any of his performed suicides. All his life had been a performance, until then. Until Maude.
“I just lost my virginity, didn’t I,” he’d said to the ceiling afterward, tugging the sheets up to his neck.
Maude had laughed. And then Harold had turned to her and seen her tangled in her half of the sweat-dampened sheets, naked and shameless. She’d grinned impishly, her eyes twinkling as she asked, “Do you feel like you lost something?”
“No.” He’d smiled, sat up, and let the sheets slip down, uncovering himself. Maude had wrapped her arms around him.
And now, she reached for him again. Harold rose up from the cold, hard chair and grasped Maude’s hands in his, trembling from the electric jolt of that heady memory. He’d already turned it over in his mind so many times that it frayed at the edges, well-worn. She was impossibly soft, then, her skin endless and vast and giving. And now, she looked—and felt—so small.
“Of course I love you, Harold,” Maude murmured. “But I didn’t want to weigh you down.”
“Weigh—weigh me down?” Harold let go of Maude’s hands, let them fall into the clean white blankets gathered in her lap. “You don’t understand. I was drowning, I was dead—until you came around. You lifted me up. You saved me.”
Maude sat up in bed, a searching look in her small, dark eyes. “But wasn’t that enough? I thought my work was finished. That’s what I meant, when I said it was wonderful that you loved me.”
Harold climbed over the railing on the side of her bed and lay down, facing her. He thought of that dying tree they’d planted in the forest. Did it survive, after everything? And did Maude ever think of that tree, once its roots touched soil?
Maude rested her hand on top of his, her palm warm—thank God—over his bony knuckles. “I taught you how to love. And I was proud of that—doing one last good thing for the world before my big, beautiful farewell.”
“But Maude, I—I don’t want to love anyone else. Not now, not ever.” He swallowed hard. “I told my mother I was going to marry you.”
She laughed softly. “I’m sure you gave her a good scare.”
If there was anything Maude had taught him, that would’ve stayed with him even if she’d died, it was that not all rules needed following. God didn’t look down in judgment when Maude used her magic keys to liberate a car, or her friend’s shovel to liberate a tree. God didn’t choke them to death on their organic booze. And the ground didn’t swallow them whole and drop them into Hell when they made love, unmarried, for pleasure and nothing more. It was okay to do what felt good, he’d learned—what felt right.
“I didn’t say it to scare her. I was telling the truth.” His voice wavered. It had been the first honest thing he’d said to his mother in a long time. Since he was a child. “That’s what I want. You and me, for as long as we have.”
Maude sighed, not meeting Harold’s eyes. Even on what could have been her deathbed, she remained elusive, quick and slippery. She reached up for her braids, which hung askew, having slipped out of their pins while she slept. Her features creased with the effort. Still, she couldn’t grasp the pins; she dropped her hands and groaned.
“I can fix them,” Harold said flatly. “For you.” He reached toward her slowly.
She didn’t resist, stayed still as he gently pinned her braids back into place. “See, this is exactly what I didn’t want—to be weak and frail and…” As her voice trailed off, she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they shimmered with hurt. Harold thought of Frederick, and old Vienna, and Maude, the umbrella-wielding crusader for all things right and just…
And there was that anger, flaring up again. Stubborn, like an itch. “You knew all along, didn’t you.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Maude frowned. “That it would all be over after my birthday?”
Harold shrugged. Maybe she had told him, in her own little way. And maybe, in his way, he’d failed to hear it. Of course, he could see it in hindsight, sharp and clear. All the times he spotted her at funerals, she never belonged, not in churches or graveyards, not like he did. Eating fruit noisily, toting her yellow umbrella. As if she were incapable of being somber. But he could imagine how, as she contemplated her own end, in her desperation, she’d tried death on like an oversized dress. “Well, maybe,” he admitted. “But it wasn’t very nice. Letting me become your friend when you were about to—leave.”
Maude sat silent for a long time. “I never thought of it that way.” A tear dripped down her cheek. “I thought you’d understand it—really, I did.”
Harold curled an arm around her shoulders, holding her close yet not too tightly—she was fragile still, he knew. And he believed her. Who might even begin to understand the desire to cut one’s own life short, for any reason? A young man who drives a hearse to the funerals of strangers, who comes home afterward and rehearses his own death for his mother. “I wasn’t who you thought I was,” he whispered into her soft hair. “And you weren’t who I thought you were, either.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered back.
“It’s okay. I love you, Maude.”
She planted a kiss on his cheek. “I love you too. Oh, hell, I’ll say it as many times as you want me to—I love you, I love you, I—”
“Will you marry me?” he interrupted. He had no ring for his proposal, but maybe it was better that way. Better not to give her something, only for her to toss it in the water for fear of losing it. Instead, he caressed her cheek and gazed into her warm, dark eyes.
“Oh, Harold. I’ve had many suitors over the years, but none as persistent as you.” She pinched his cheek, making him smile and squirm. “All right, then. Who will be our witness?”
“Not my mother. I think she’d drop dead if she saw us.” Harold chuckled, then gasped as he realized they knew just the right person. “Glaucus? He could carve an ice sculpture of us, too.”
Maude tightened her arms around Harold and beamed. Judging by the renewed vigor in her embrace, her strength was returning to her. She was a sunflower, turning toward the light. “Oh, that’s a lovely idea. Yes, I think that will do quite nicely. When?”
“Well, as soon as you’re all better.” He’d spent that slow, eternal evening of waiting picturing it, every detail easing into focus. They would have a church wedding on a gray morning. The priest would read their vows without emotion. There would be strangers in the pews.
“All right, you’ve convinced me. I have just one condition.” Maude’s smile looked more mischievous than ever. “If ever I become incompetent, incontinent, illiterate… you’ll cut me loose.” She made a motion as though she were slitting her throat, grinning. “Quick, like that.”
Harold winced at the gesture. He couldn’t bear to imagine her eventual death—not so soon after nearly losing her. But he swallowed his fear and his pain, and he nodded. “And… you would do the same for me?” he asked.
“Of course, dear. In a heartbeat.”
“Good.” Harold buried his face in Maude’s shoulder, and finally, he let his own tears flow. Tears of relief and of sorrow. He cried wedding tears and funeral tears, blending together as they trickled down his face, indistinguishable.
She wasn’t going anywhere—not this time, not yet.