Reading Her Favorite Book One Page a Night
I ration the chapters; finishing feels like losing her again.
There are 412 pages left of my wife.
I counted them the way other people count savings, or pills, or days until a verdict. The book is a fat, water-stained paperback called The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter, a novel I refused to read for eleven years of marriage because the cover has a woman standing dramatically on a cliff and I have a policy about cliffs.
Nisha read it every winter. Every single winter, the same book, the way other people get flu shots. She would light the stubby candle on her nightstand, an actual candle, in a flat with perfectly good electricity, because she said stories deserve fire, and she would disappear into it for two weeks while I lay next to her watching the light move on the ceiling and pretending to be above it all.
She died in October. Pancreatic. Four months from the scan to the end, which everyone assured me was fast, as though speed were the thing I would be grateful for.
In December, when winter came and the book did not open itself, I opened it.
I lit her candle. I felt like an idiot. I read page one, and it was, I am sorry to report... not a masterpiece. The prose was purple in places. The lighthouse was a metaphor within the first four paragraphs. I could hear Nisha laughing at my face, that specific laugh she saved for when I was being a snob, and that was the moment I understood I was not reading a novel. I was visiting.
So I made a rule. One page a night. No exceptions, no binges, no skipping ahead. At one page a night, 412 pages is more than a year. At one page a night, she is still here next winter. Grief makes accountants of us all; I had found a way to put her on installments.
You learn strange things reading this slowly. You learn that a single page can hold an entire afternoon, that a chapter break feels like a small death, that you can spend a whole day at work thinking about a fictional storm because your wife once thought about it too, probably in this same bed, with this same candle throwing this same restless light on the ceiling.
I started noticing her in the book's damage. A coffee ring on page 63 shaped like a comma. Page 148 crinkled stiff, dried after some long-ago bath. Sand, actual sand, in the gutter of chapter twelve. The book was a crime scene of her happiness and I was dusting every page for prints.
Then, in February, on page 214, the pencil marks stopped.
Page 214
I should explain the pencil. Nisha annotated like a woman arguing with a friend. Underlines, exclamation marks, tiny fights in the margins: oh COME ON, or he would never say this, or once, gloriously, next to a kiss scene, the single word finally. Eleven winters of rereading meant some pages had layers of pencil, older marks half-erased under newer ones, an archaeology of her.
And then page 214, and nothing. I flipped ahead, violating my own rule for the first time, panic doing the page-turning for me... Not one mark. Two hundred pristine pages. The last thing she ever wrote in that book, at the bottom of 214, in pencil gone soft with time, was: stop here. He is still alive if you stop here.
I sat with the candle burning down and did the math I did not want to do. Page 215 is where Aandhi, the lighthouse keeper's old dog, the one who limps through the whole first half, goes out into the storm. I have not read past it, but you do not need to. You know what storms in novels are for.
My wife read her favorite book eleven times and never once finished it. She loved a story enough to marry it and refused to attend its funeral. Everyone, including me, thought she reread it because she loved the ending.
There was no ending.
She had built a house on page 214 and lived in it, one winter at a time, keeping an old dog alive by the sheer stubborn refusal to turn a page.
She taught me the only grief trick that has ever worked: the story stops where you stop. Nobody dies on a page you never turn.
I did not read the next night... Or the next. My one-page ritual, the thing that had kept me breathing since December, sat on the nightstand like a dare. Because here was the problem: if I stopped at 214 forever, I would be honoring her. And if I stopped at 214 forever, I would also be doing the exact thing I had been doing since October, which is standing very still at the edge of an ending and calling my paralysis devotion.
I wrote about it, because by then I had started writing things down, clumsy fragments at 2 a.m. that were almost poems. I posted one on a community wall for poets, seven lines about a pencil that stops, and a stranger in another time zone replied with three words: turn the page. Easy for you to say, I typed back. Then I read her profile. She had lost two children. She had earned every syllable. I sat there ashamed and grateful in equal measure, which I have since learned is the natural resting state of the grieving.
The Storm
On the first of March, which would have been our anniversary, I lit the candle and read page 215.
I read it out loud. That was the deal I made with the empty side of the bed: if we are doing this, we are doing it together, and you do not get to skip it this time. My voice did embarrassing things during the storm chapter. The dog does go out into the rain. And then... and Nisha, my love, you absolute coward, you would have known this eleven years ago if you had ever once kept going: the dog comes back. Soaked, three legs working, carrying the keeper's glove like an apology.
He comes back.
He is there on the last page, asleep by the fire, old and alive.
She spent eleven winters protecting herself from a happy ending.
I laughed until the candle guttered. Then I cried, obviously... but the laugh came first, and I think the order matters. Somewhere in those months I had read that grieving people wear love and loss as one garment, that you cannot take one off without the other. Page 215 was me learning to leave the whole coat on and walk anyway.
I finished the book on a Tuesday in April. Forty pages over the ration, drunk on ending. Then I did the only reasonable thing a man married to Nisha for eleven years could do.
I turned back to page one. Winter will come again, and the candle is only half burned, and there is a coffee ring on page 63 waiting for me like a held hand. One page a night. She is not on installments anymore. She is on repeat.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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