Carol knew how to show up.
And now here I am, hiding in her closet in her absence. How did I not inherit any of her capability? The only person who would know how to handle her death is gone.
I feel the paper crinkle between my fingers. I am gripping it.
I couldn’t. There’s no way. I have a job. And a grieving father. And a husband.
From downstairs I hear a clattering of pans. The loud sounds of unfamiliarity with appliances, cabinets, the choreography of the kitchen.
We are missing our center.
What I know: She is not in this house, where she died. She is not downstairs, in the kitchen she loved. She is not in the family room, folding the blankets and rehanging the wedding photos. She is not in the garden, gloves on, clipping the tomato vines. She is not in this closet that still smells like her.
She is not here, and therefore, I cannot be here, either.
Flight 363.
I want to see what she saw, what she loved before she loved me. I want to see where it was she always wanted to return, this magical place that showed up so strongly in her memories.
I curl my knees to my chest. I sink my head down into them. I feel the outline of something in my back pocket. I pull it out, and the cigarette, now warm and mangled, disintegrates in my hands.
Please, please, I say aloud, waiting for her, for this closet full of her clothes, to tell me what to do next.
Chapter Two
“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you?” Eric asks.
I’m standing in the entryway to our house, the one I have no idea if I’ll be returning to, with my suitcases at the door like an attentive child.
Eric is wearing a salmon-colored polo T-shirt and jeans, and his hair is still too long on the sides. I haven’t said anything about it, and neither has he. I wonder if he notices, if he realizes he needs a cut, too. I’ve made all those appointments for him. Suddenly his inability to get his hair cut feels hostile, an intentioned attack.
“No, Uber’s on the way.” I hold up my phone. “See, three minutes.”
Eric smiles, but it’s small, sad. “Okay.”
When I told Eric I wanted to go to Italy, to take the mother-daughter trip alone, he told me it was a great idea. He thought I needed a break—I’d been caring for my mother around the clock. Months earlier I’d taken a leave of absence from my job as an in-house copywriter for an ad agency in Santa Monica. I’d left when she first came home for treatment, and I didn’t know when I’d go back. Not that anyone had asked. At this point I’m not even sure the job will still be waiting for me.
“This will be good for you,” Eric said. “You’ll come back feeling so much better.”
We sat at our kitchen counter, a box of pizza between us. I hadn’t bothered to take out plates or utensils. All that was next to the box was a pile of napkins. We had given up caring.
“This is not a vacation,” I said.
I resented the idea that what was standing in the way of a new outlook on life was a few sun-soaked weeks on the Italian coast.
“That’s not what I said.”
I could see his frustration and his want to control it, too. I felt a bolt of compassion for him.
“I know.”
“We still haven’t talked about us.”
“I know,” I said again.
I had come home a few days earlier. We slept in the same bed and made coffee in the morning and did laundry and put away plates. Eric went back to his job, and I made lists of people to reach out to—thank-you notes that had to be written, phone calls that needed to be returned, my father’s dry cleaner.
It only resembled our old routine. We were skirting around one another like strangers in a restaurant, pausing to acknowledge if we bumped into each other.
“You came home. Does that mean you’re staying?”
In college, before a big test, Eric would bring over a sandwich from this deli called Three Pickles. It had Swiss cheese and arugula and raspberry jam, and it was delicious. He had taken me there on one of our first dates, and insisted on ordering for me. We took the sandwiches outside, found a curb, and unwrapped them. Mine looked like melted, colored wax, but the tang of the Swiss with the peppery greens and tart raspberry was sublime.
“You can trust me,” Eric had said then.
I knew he was right.
I trusted him on our move to New York, on the purchase of our first home. I trusted him through my mother’s treatment, even. The plans the four of us made, where her care would be best, the medications, the trials.
But now. Now how could I trust anyone? We had all betrayed her.