I holed up in the garage to wait for news, checking my phone every fifteen minutes to make sure I hadn’t missed an email or call. I had run out of things to build, so was organizing my tools. I was hungry, but I didn’t dare venture back into the house. Libby was probably in the kitchen making dinner. It was almost five o’clock—we sat down as a family between five thirty and six. Libby was an excellent cook, and for that I was truly grateful. It would have been a really long year if she wasn’t.
Another two cycles of phone checking went by, then Margaux appeared in the doorway to collect me for dinner. Libby had made chicken Kiev, a favorite of the kids. She served the creamy stuffed chicken with a crisp garden salad. I knew from my memory that it was delicious, but all I could taste that night was disappointment.
The girls were chatty, but I was so lost in self-loathing I didn’t hear a word they said. I didn’t know how I would face the day tomorrow. Until tonight I had dared to hope.
Now I didn’t even have that.
HOLLY
Three months ago
The morgue called, asking what I wanted to do with my husband’s dead body.
It had been ten days, and they couldn’t keep it anymore, the morgue lady said as sweetly as a person can when they’re telling you your dead relative has overstayed his welcome. I tried to imagine what it was like for her, having to call people to tell them to come get their corpses. Who would want that job? In my job as a dentist’s bookkeeper, I occasionally had to call patients about an overdue bill, and I thought that was hard. I suddenly realized I’d had it easy.
I had been “home” for two days. It was the same apartment I’d lived in since Savannah was a baby, but without Gabe it didn’t feel like home at all. I was still in bed when the phone rang, with my leg propped up on pillows—Gabe’s pillows. Gabe always slept with two—one under his head, and one under his knees, so his back didn’t hurt when he woke up.
Gabe wasn’t the cuddliest bedmate, we didn’t spoon or anything, but not having him in bed was as jarring as losing a tooth—the hole next to me was gaping and bottomless and stung like salt on an open wound. Gabe didn’t snore, but he did sleep with his mouth open, and I had come to rely on the gentle haaaaaaa of him breathing to lull me to sleep. With him gone, I had to open the window to let in some traffic noise, because otherwise the silence made my ears ring.
I slid my leg off the pillow tower so I could sit up. “I’m sorry,” I told the morgue lady, easing my butt back to lean against the headboard. “But I’m not sure what to do about that?”
I rearranged the pillows, but I couldn’t get comfortable. I always liked our mattress, but without Gabe’s 165 compact pounds gently tilting it toward the center, it felt stiff and cold. It would have made more sense for me to sleep on his side now—it was closer to the door, and less steps on my aching knee to get to the bathroom. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I stayed on “my” side, and when I woke up in the night to pee, I took the long way around the foot of the bed, avoiding the empty space I held for no one.
It wasn’t just the nights that were hard. I knew how to work the coffee maker, of course, but I had grown accustomed to waking to a full pot. I broke down in tears when I couldn’t find the coffee filters. Savannah had to peel me away from the counter and make the coffee for me. I wondered if she’d made it before she went for her morning run today, because I couldn’t face making it myself and I really needed a cup.
“You should have gotten some forms in the mail,” Morgue Lady said. Savannah had collected the mail while I was in the hospital, and it was piled on the coffee table. Gabe always opened the mail. If there was anything for me, he would put it on the little secretary I used as my writing desk. I didn’t know what to do with his mail, so I just left it all sitting in a heap.
“Sorry,” I said again. “I’ll look for it,” I promised. I dreaded getting out of bed, because that meant facing a whole new set of unfamiliar circumstances. We had a rhythm to our mornings. Gabe would shower first, so the bathroom would be warm and steamy for me when it was my turn. He always hung his wet towel over the curtain rod because he thought the towels would get smelly if we didn’t spread them out to dry. The bristles on the electric toothbrush we shared would be damp when I reached for it, and he pretty much always left the cap off the toothpaste. But now the toothbrush was dry, the curtain rod was barren, and the bathroom felt chilly and hollow and strange.