A Final Resting Place

I sat on the edge of the bare mattress, feeling the friction of its scratchy surface tug ever so slightly on the fabric of my dress. This bed is where I first made love to my first and only love. On this bed, we laughed and sang, whispered and caressed, jumped and cried. It was the last piece of furniture that would be taken from our home, our sanctuary. We once stayed awake with our bodies entangled as we marveled at the hues of the sunrise, and spoke of this bed with its four posts and canopy as the center of our home and of our love. But now, it would be just a culmination of our memories – the last of which is an image of me, clinging to him, resting my head atop his chest as it fell for the last time.

I could hear the movers slowly ascend the wooden stairs…six more creaks, and they would be at the threshold leaving me with seconds to say a proper goodbye.

I still don’t know how he had gotten this bed up the curved staircase, since he insisted he didn’t want to break it apart just to put it back together. He only had the help of a few small framed friends. I had scoffed at his stubbornness, laughed when he said, “That part is quick, easy…the putting back together is near impossible.” Even then, I watched him struggle to balance the monstrous frame over the bannister with frustration and strength. I eyed his willpower, enchanted by his drive, forgetting his stubbornness. That evening, I rolled from end to end of our bed, pointing out every dent in the dark oak, teasing that the only item we purchased in our home was already ruined. He had just stood there, watching me, chuckling with indifference and pride knowing that I was happy – so very happy – and it was all because of him.

“Ma’am,” the mover called me as he stepped into the room. He had tattoos covering his arms and a barbed-wire inked on the crown of his head, yet he spoke gently as if I was an orphan who needed a home. “Are you ready for us?”

I nodded. It was all I could do. I used the bed post to hoist myself up. One of the chips from the beating it took three short years ago pressed into my fingers. The mattress clung to my dress, begging me to linger lest I lose every ounce of happiness stored in its fibers. He used to chase me around this room, and I would swing from the posts, picking up momentum and flying past him before he grabbed me by the waist and tossed me onto the bed, sending me crashing against the abundance of pillows I insisted we buy.

They were beginning to disassemble the bed. I suppose that made sense – no need for it to be back together; no home for it; no heartbeats to hold. If I could have kept one item, just one thing, it would have been this bed. But I had to give up everything. Anth’s mother had given me a two-month deadline to get my affairs in order since his passing. It would be enough time, she said, to clear out of the Beckford household. They had set up a private cottage, furnished and solar powered, amid the stretch of the servants’ homes. I would have a front yard and a porch swing. Anth would want that, and I would be happier there, she said.

Anth’s family was wealthy. He found me, as dirt poor as I am, at a bar near his university as he studied for his MBA to take over the family business. I wasn’t the girl dancing on the bar, though he fancied her at first, but I was behind it, fulfilling his countless orders of Amaretto sours until his $5 bills became $20 bills and so on – he was a generous drunk. “Keep it. You work hard; you deserve it,” he had said. I did keep it, under my bed in a battered shoe box. Seven months later, when we married, he found the shoe box as we packed my things to move into his family’s estate despite his mother’s insistence that I was unfit for her dynasty. He picked it up, not knowing the tape on one side had been rubbed down to nothing. The twenties, fifties, and hundreds he had tipped me in his drunken stupor fell like leaves on the dull carpet of my shared room. He looked at the money, littered on the floor, then at my room – the broken bed frame without a headboard, the lone computer chair tilted to the left where the wheel had fallen off, the closet door that was hanging off of its hinges. He had squinted his eyes at me, and I responded with a bright smile telling him that we should splurge on a bed, with the most beautiful frame and canopy, and we should pile it with pillows. I never asked if he knew where the money was from, but I’m sure he did. We bought the bed – the most perfect bed – and now I was to get rid of it.

“Where do these things go?” It came out like a statement, and I could tell that the man with the barb-wired forehead didn’t know I was talking to him. “Where are you taking all of this?” I rephrased.

“Oh, there’s a unit, ma’am. Most everything gets recycled or thrown away,” he said. He winced as he spoke, as though he was in an immense amount of pain; I think it was the best apologetic expression he could form. “We take it there.”

“This bed. What will happen to it? Recycled? Left in pieces? Trashed? Turned into fire wood? What will happen to it?” I realized then that it had been a while since I took a breath.

“No, ma’am. We would probably give it away. The mattress, too. It’s still in good condition. And the frame…still sturdy. We would keep this, refurbish it, see where it will find a home.”

“I guess this isn’t much of a home anymore now is it.” I hadn’t asked it as a question. I knew the truth.

“I’m sorry ma’am.” He bowed his head, and placed the screw gun he was holding on the thick ledge of the frame. There was a tattoo on his wrist that looked similar to one on Anth’s, but my curiosity was stifled by my grief. As he picked up the screw gun, he said, “Maybe this could be the start of a new beginning.”

His words fell on deaf ears, and I walked to the window, staring out at the koi pond in the back yard. I wondered what would happen to those fish. Here, they were captive, yes, but they were still alive. They had each other. They had a home.

I don’t recall them leaving. I don’t recall Barbed-wire saying good bye or offering his condolences once more. I know it happened, but I couldn’t be sure of when or if I even acknowledged him. The moment I turned around from staring outside of the window, everyone was gone… our bed was gone. I had imagined this moment before, sure that I would have erupted in a fit of sobs, scraping at the stamps of our bedframe where it dug into the carpet. But my tears fell silently, as I noticed that there was one item in the room.

A little black book was pressed against the wall. It was on Anth’s side of the bed, and it looked as though it had been wedged between the wall and the post. I had to all but peel it from its place, and little chips of the baby blue paint came off with it. I opened the book, and there was an address written on the first page of a house in a neighborhood we dreamed of living in. On the second page, there was a carefully drawn picture of a potted fern near a grand doorway; the mat under the pot was colored red in stark contrast to the black-and-white of the penciled shading. I could tell it was his handiwork, and I took it in before turning the page where I read:

I loved you even before I knew you saved it all.

You deserve so much, my love.

I love you always,

Your Anth.

The address was two towns and four hours over, in the neighborhood we drove around after our many date nights. One day, we had said, we would leave the estate and live together to be free of his parents’ reign. We would’ve made it, too, had it not been for his diagnosis of giant cell myocarditis. It snuck up on us, made him suffer, took him away.

In his last days, through his scattered breaths and fits of pain, he often asked me to pretend, and I would. We laid next to each other, propped up and surrounded by our many pillows, and we pretended to weave through the streets of our dream neighborhood, with his hand in mine or on my thigh, with the radio playing though drowned out by our laughter and coos of sweet nothings. He always pulled in front of a home, situated in the middle of a cul-de-sac of spacious homes. He told me we would live there one day. The night before he passed, through whispers of love he reminded me of our dream home. It’s ours, he had said.

At the break of dawn, I fled from my curled position where our bed used to be. I took the keys to the estate home and left them in the mail box. I got into his car, the only thing he could bargain to leave in my name, and punched the address into the GPS. As I drove, it seemed familiar. The sun was beginning to beam down, and the brightness blurred my vision, ever worsening my sight from the steady stream of tears. I knew the area. I knew the route. I knew where I was headed.

I pulled up to the very home he parked in front of night after wonderful night. I steadied myself as I got out of the car, comprehending that this home was somehow mine and feeling as though I were strolling up the drawn-out walkway with my husband, with my love. I walked past the bushes of blue hydrangeas, up to the porch, where his drawing in that little black book came to life…the grand door way, the fern, the red carpet. One corner of the mat was marked with my initials AEB. I picked it up, and there was a golden key. I opened the door, but before I could behold the high ceilings, I noticed a battered shoe box in the center of the foyer. It was the exact one in which I had stashed my tips from Anth – the one I thought he had thrown away. It was held together by layers of tape, but I still knelt down to open it gently. There were bank statements in my name indicating investments and an account of which I never knew. Under all of the papers of which I couldn’t make sense, was a check book with the phrase I loved you even before I knew you saved it all engraved in his penmanship. The first check was written by Anth’s hand, made out to an Owen Marc. What I read in the notes section of the check sent me upstairs in a rush of excitement, confusion, and anticipation.

I don’t know how I got there. I don’t know how I knew where it would be. But I ran to the master bedroom and right there in the middle was our bed, fully assembled, fully made, piled high with pillows.