TITLE: my husband was a carpenter
FIRST PUBLISHED: August 14, 2023
SUMMARY: Mrs. Selvig shows Mark the blueprints she keeps in her purse. It's not any weirder than the rest of their relationship.
oOo
The funny thing was that he didn’t even like Mrs. Selvig. Not really. She was nosy, grating, and always moved his bins no matter how many times he called her trying to explain, patiently, the difference between recycling and trash day. She was an old lady who half the time seemed like she was losing her mind, and he tried to give her some grace for it, really—but it didn’t change the fact that whenever he was near her Mark always felt awake.
Was that weird? Maybe that was weird. Maybe it was just something to do with the fact that they were the only two people living on that empty street in that blue line of delft houses, or the fact that she had never known Gemma—that was it, right? You meet the person you want to live the rest of your life with, she’s kind, and funny, and shares the same hobbies as you do, and before you know it you have the same friends. Mark had transitioned into Mark-and-Gemma without any second thoughts, without anything but a kind of encompassing wonder, like every day they were both alive was another day he could observe something incredible in the sheer fact of his wife’s existence. After she died, what was he supposed to do? Everyone who had known them both dragged their ghosts along with them. The breath that already laced itself through his throat with the subtle delicacy of mustard gas seemed impossible to draw. He didn’t want to forget Gemma, but he couldn’t bear it—the looks, the empty lulls where her voice should have been, the way he knew everyone was comparing him to before, to that better version of Mark who only drank in moderation, who had a promising job as a professor instead of being a suit in an unethical company, who knew how to smile. But he’d lost his light the day he lost Gemma and he didn’t want it back. This was his life to ruin. A miserable half-life cloaked in radioactive decay, sure. But the alternative wasn’t the better version of Mark. The alternative was Mark driving off a bridge, and how are you supposed to say that? When, exactly, is the best time to bring that up?
“Still waiting for that third bulb to revive itself?” Mrs. Selvig called from the hallway as Mark hurried to clear off his counter space.
“Oh, yeah,” he answered. “Keep forgetting to change that.”
She walked in, sat down on the other side of the countertop, smiled at him teasingly. “My, you smell nice. Were you on a date?”
“Sort of,” Mark explained, getting the carton of milk from the fridge that he only really kept around for visits like these, and pouring her a cup. Mrs. Selvig ran one of those health-food stores where people paid as much for the meditative experience and the idea of them being conscientious consumers as the actual food. So she used Mark as her guinea pig for new recipes. It was a small thing, but it felt a little bit like being needed, like he wasn’t just someone’s charity case. “My sister set me up with, like, her doula—” he went back over to the fridge to put away the milk, corrected himself, “or, midwife. Didn’t really feel like anything.”
He’d tried mostly for Devon’s sake. She was the only person he didn’t want to hurt, had never wanted to, but seeing her worry about him felt like he was falling down on the job of being the big brother. It had always been Devon who had the caring gene, but caring just hurt unless your patient actually listened to advice. Mark—although invariably incapable of listening to advice—had somewhere along the way learned how to go through the motions. Gingerly, he picked up one of the dark cookies that Mrs. Selvig had brought over. Still warm; crisp enough but with a perfect buttery texture. “Well, let’s see here. I’ll…” he bit down. Surprised—he’d never been a fan of chamomile. But, nodding his head in her direction, he admitted, “wow. This i… these are magic.”
She seemed charmed. “My late husband was a carpenter,” Mrs. Selvig proclaimed, in that rolling way she had when she was going to make some kind of completely off-the-wall point he’d have to pretend to understand. “And before he passed, he said he would start building us a house in the hereafter.” The look in her eyes had gone gentle and faraway, but there was an obsession underneath that gave him a momentary discomfort. He’d never been able to get into religion. Never really understood any system that required you stop asking questions in favor of belief. Mrs. Selvig had never tried to proselytize to him, so he was left in the uneasy place of feeling like he was doing her a disservice, like either he should agree with her or tell her straight out he thought she was comforting herself with a load of bullshit.
“And there would be a small guest apartment in the back,” Mrs. Selvig added with a mischievous smile, “in case I found a new man before I got there.”
“That’s… so sweet,” Mark said. He wasn’t sure there was a right way to respond to a story like that.
“Yes,” Mrs. Selvig agreed. “He even drew blueprints, which I keep in my purse.” She reached into the purse beside her, drew out from a zipped pocket a piece of paper, much-folded, the edges worn smooth, and with a kind of delicate ceremony, she unfolded the blueprint on his kitchen counter and looked at him expectantly.
Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that her husband had been as batty as she was.
“Uh, that’s very… detailed,” Mark said. “I suppose I should be thanking him every time I go to work.”
“What?” Mrs. Selvig asked, wide-eyed, and Mark felt like he’d made some misstep he didn’t know about.
He reminded her, “I mean, he must’ve made the blueprints? For the Lumon building?” She’d told him ages ago her husband had worked there; it was why she’d been able to get into Lumon housing after he died.
“Oh!” Mrs. Selvig laughed fakely. “Oh, of course! No, he was only a carpenter, not an architect—he’d never have made the blueprints for something like that! A corporate building—imagine!”
“Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right…” Mark said.
“No, he just made sure all the joists were at right angles,” Mrs. Selvig said. “But to think, his boot-print might still be there in the concrete floor, where you do all your important archival work. You might step into it and never even know… in fact, I think your feet might even be the same size…”
“Uh…” Mark said. He gave her a deadpan look. “Are you flirting with me, Mrs. Selvig?”
“Why, Mark! Whyever would you get that idea?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that comparing me with your dead husband’s foot size makes a man start to wonder.”
That startled a real laugh out of her. Less controlled, sharper and uglier than her social laugh. The corner of his mouth tilted up, vaguely proud.
“You have a dirty mind, Mark. Have a cookie.” She picked up another one, holding it between the tips of her fingers, and leaned a little closer over the counter, until the edge of the cookie brushed against his lips.
Her eyes were sharp and blue, like ice against a wound. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I don’t know what came over me…”
“Mark,” her voice had grown quiet and controlled, “take the cookie.”
He bit down. Crumbs falling onto the counter between them. This cookie was as good as the last; still magic. She held the baked good until the very last piece slipped between his lips, her fingers grazing his open mouth.
Then she leaned back, and Mark glanced back down at the blueprint, where a few buttery crumbs had dropped and left dotted stains on the old paper. “Oh, I’m so sorry, your blueprint…” He brushed them away.
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Selvig said. “It’s fine. A few cookie crumbs won’t hurt. And I have the whole thing memorized, anyway.”
Mark looked at that precisely-drawn house on the paper, all right angles from above, and the guest apartment behind the master bedroom. “Jack and Jill bathroom, cute.”
“It’s effective.”
“But it looks like he forgot the other door?” There was no exit in that room; not into the rest of the house or even onto the outside. It looked like whoever was unlucky enough to live there would have to traipse through the master bedroom anytime he wanted to leave.
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Selvig said. She pointed to a square box drawn in the corner of the guest apartment. “It’s built over the garage, so you can go in and out just like that, through the elevator.”