The Thirteenth Plate

I prepared the table to Mara on the twelfth of each month.

It isn’t a sentimental thing. Not anymore. It is muscle memory--as closing the door, as switching off the stove. My hands do it and my head is still deluding itself that I am normal.

Two plates. Two forks. Two glasses. Use cloth napkins since it makes me feel like I am telling something with paper.

6:13 p.m., always. That was when she typed me the night she killed herself:

Home in twenty. Put water on for tea.

I boiled the kettle. I cut lemon. I put her green mug out--the one that was chipped, and she said that perfect things were suspicious.

Twenty minutes passed. Then thirty. Then the call.

Then the house fell still in that peculiar manner that makes you think the world is observing to know what you will do next.

I set the table for two anyway.

The first month, I cried. The second month, I stared. After the third month, I got to know how to listen.

At 6:14, I heard a fork hitting a plate because, on the third thirteenth, I heard it.

Clink.

Pause.

Clink.

I was standing in the kitchen with her mug in my hands and letting the sound pass through my cold hand.

By the time I entered the dining room, the candles had been lit.

I hadn’t lit them.

Both fires were erect and composed, as though they had been long waiting longer than myself.

A lemon twist was on the plate of Mara, fresh and shiny and dripping wet at the cut.

The issue was straightforward I had not sliced the lemon yet.

I took it up, though, because at a time of change of reality you attempt to set it by customs. That smell was of citrus and warm skin and the back of Mara’s ear where I kiss her when she is not acting like she is delighted.

I turned toward the kitchen.

As I turned back the lemon twist had disappeared.

And the chair of Mara was drawn out a little, as though someone had sat down and thought it well to be nice.

That night I didn’t sleep. I was sitting in the living room with the lights on. The empty kettle whistled once, sharp and brief, as a warning of something one would have been glad to have avoided.

The following month I did not set the table.

By 6:14, the smoke alarm twittered and shut down.

The kitchen light was flickering at 6:15.

The odor of lemon passed along the passage at 6:16, slim and conscious.

And in my coffee table there was one white flower. Placed, not dropped. The stem was damp, freshly cut.

And then I realized: it did not need my faith to perform the ritual.

It involved my own involvement.

So I set the table again.

Not because I was brave. Because I was tired. Since grief is a door which is always swinging, and this--whatever it was--as though one had a hand to it.

My sister Leah arrived on the sixth month.

I had been cajoling her to quit being a museum in her life but when she looked at the table she did not say this. She just swallowed.

“Oh,” she said softly. “You’re still doing it.”

At 6:14, the air changed. Not colder. Not warmer. Just… wrong. The room, like it had in its mouth taken something.

Leah frowned. “Do you smell—”

Clink.

The blade of the knife in the side of Mara rotated, like a needle of a compass, slowly.

Leah so hurried that she swung her chair across the floor screaming.

“No,” she said. Too loud. Already backing away. “Nope. Absolutely not.”

It is her, I thought, and it sounded, tiny, pathetic, in the way she said it, and I despised myself.

Leah looked at the chair where he was to sit, and then at me.

“You’re feeding it,” she said. “Whatever it is.”

“It’s Mara.”

Or it is something that was taught what you want.

She dropped her casserole upon my counter, and did not even speak to me weeks afterwards.

Something that learnt what thou desirest.

That sentence had got under my skin, as it said too much and at the same time not enough.

The eighth month I had forgotten the middle name of Leah.

Not in a funny way. In a blank-wall way. As I came to the memory and touched smooth plaster.

The ninth month my shots of Mara were eating up. Her crooked smiles softened. Her eyes looked more posed. More generic. As an artist had attempted to have her fixed without coming to know that the crookedness was the point.

And that was the point at which I began a notebook.

First page, in block letters:

MARA WAS REAL.

Facts. Details. Proof.

She laughed hiccupping at the end when shocked.

She hated cilantro.

She did kiss my knuckles when I supposedly slept.

Her middle name was—

My pen stopped.

I couldn’t remember.

It was written in her paperwork. Read it. Wrote it down. And yet it was not a connection to her. It resembled the name of some stranger in familiar clothes.

On the tenth thirteenth I placed the notebook next to her plate.

I asked her to take these pages instead of my memories, but I was trembling.

The powder had left a wet fingerprint on the cover.

Pressed.

Dragged.

And the ink at MARA WAS REAL stained gray, not removed--lost just enough, at least, to give me the sense that I was not writing myself.

It was the first time I thought: It is not just bringing her back.

It’s also making room.

During the twelfth month, I heard the knock on the bathroom-door.

Tap-tap.

That was an old joke of Mara, as she was saying whether I was still alive in there or not.

It was a hole within the wall of the hallway.

My eyes flooded instantly.

“I’m here,” I whispered. “I’m still me.”

Tap-tap.

Then it rushed, like the house itself was a kind of clown, and tried all the rooms simultaneously.

Tap-tap-tap—

It went round the back of the dining room wall behind Maras seat, and became a knock.

Not playful.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

As if he were attempting to escape.

Or in.

“Stop,” I said.

Silence. Immediate, obedient silence.

The candles steadied. The air normalized. The room was being a fake that it had just threatened me.

At 6:13 afterward, as I was litting the candles with trembling fingers, the space behind me seemed to swell--as though somebody had moved in close enough to share the warmth.

And there in my mind a voice not a voice, not mine, whispering:

You are continuing to set the table as I can eat.

My throat closed.

“Mara?” I was asking, since hope is humiliating, inexorable.

A pause.

Then: I can. Just not what you think.

“What do you want?” I managed.

To be remembered.

“I’m trying,” I said. “God, I’m trying.”

Not like that.

The knife scratched a warning without an angry sound against the plate.

You continue to feed me the size of me that fits in your hands.

I shook my head, crying. I do not know how I can do it differently.

The whisper softened. I felt my chest pained at a moment when it was almost as like her.

Neither did I.

The air over the plate of Mara was glittering--as heat on asphalt.

I caught a glimpse of her hands once in a heartbeat. Her hands, only, and lying on the table in the manner they were when she listened.

Her ring was on her finger.

She tapped twice.

Tap-tap.

And then she indicated the place setting.

Then at me.

then she made a little circle with her hand.

A loop.

A ritual.

And her hands disappeared as a person blowing out a flame which I could not see.

I touched the chair of Mara when I finally moved.

The cushion was warm.

Body-warm.

My notebook was open and blank in the kitchen.

My handwriting had wrote a new line--clean, certain, indisputable.

SET THREE NEXT TIME.

The ink was still damp.

The following morning I was calling Leah.

She replied too fast, as though she had been stifling a scream.

I do not think, I said, looking at the doorway to the dining room, that I am the only one at the table.

Silence.

Then care Leah: “How many plates?

My mouth went dry.

“Three,” I said.

Another pause. I could hear her swallowing.

“Who’s the third for?” she asked.

I examined the table in my imagination the regularity, the candles, the chair that was constantly being heated by a non-existent person.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

And that was the worst part.

Because love is repetition.

But so is appetite.

On the thirteen I shall set the table.

At 6:13, I’ll light the candles.

and when the tapping arrives,--tap-tap--in the wall of the corridor, inquiring of me what Mara inquired as a jest, like the old woman...

I do not know what I will be able to answer.

Are you still you?