Sarah stood up with him at the ceremony, holding one of the poles of the chuppah, beaming her approval as he slipped the ring on Julie’s finger. “Mazel tov!” Marcus yelled, after Connor carefully placed a napkin-wrapped lightbulb under his heel, and Sam had stomped down, hard.
Julie’s typically tremulous, worried face was wreathed in smiles for the entire night, except for the few minutes when she’d cried, during their vows. Sam and Julie had danced until two in the morning, and spent the night in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Promise you’ll never leave me,” Julie had whispered, holding his shoulders with a panicky force, pressing her body against his, so tightly it felt to Sam like she was trying to push herself through his skin.
“I’ll never leave,” Sam had whispered back. The next morning, Sarah brought Connor to the hotel. His sister and stepson and parents had joined them for brunch, then Sam and Julie and Connor had left for a family honeymoon in Maui, at a resort that offered a kids’ camp, so the newlyweds had plenty of time to be alone.
Sam found that he liked cooking. He’d FaceTime with his sister every morning while he made Connor’s lunch, filling bento boxes with radish rosebuds and edamame and neatly portioned servings of grilled chicken and rice. He would make Connor’s bed, after a few bad run-ins with Legos taught him to wear shoes before entering the boy’s bedroom, and when Connor came home from school, Sam would prepare a snack, and together they’d watch a half hour of anime on TV. On weekends, Sam would take Connor to visit dogs at the pound, in hopes of getting their own pet, at some unspecified date, when Grandpa Saul, who hated animals as much as he hated most people, had gone on to his reward. They started reading James and the Giant Peach together at night. Connor was enchanted with the idea of a giant, inhabitable fruit. “Do you think something like that could really happen?” he’d asked, and Sam said, “I don’t think so,” but he still caught Connor looking wistfully into the backyard, where apricots and avocados and oranges grew. Julie was reluctant to leave her father for any length of time, but Sam coaxed her to spend a weekend camping at Big Sur, and a week of skiing in Jackson Hole during spring break, where they’d shared a house with Sarah and Eli and Dexter and Miles. In June, Sam’s parents hosted them and Sarah and Eli and Ruby and the boys for a week on the Cape, and Sam and Julie and Connor visited Sarah and Eli in New York City right before Christmas, where they saw two Broadway shows, and took Connor to see the store’s holiday displays, and went skating in Rockefeller Center one cold, starry night.
For the duration of the marriage, Sam and Julie and Connor were a merry little band of three. They did their best to ignore the malevolent, shouting presence in the living room, a thing that sometimes seemed more dead than alive. Each night in bed, instead of I love you, Julie would say, It won’t be much longer, and Sam would say it back: It won’t be much longer.
One afternoon in May of 2019, just over a year after he and Julie were married, Sam had been home, prepping salmon fillets for dinner, when the doorbell had rung.
“Tell them we don’t want any!” Saul had yelled from his bed in the living room. “Tell them we gave at the office!”
Sam wiped his hands on a dish towel and went to answer the door. Two police officers were standing there.
“Mr. Barringer?” the first one, a woman with a close-cropped Afro, said.
Sam’s heart gave a great thumping kick in his chest. “No, that’s my father-in-law. I’m Sam Levy-Weinberg.” Terrible thoughts were running through his mind, all involving Connor, who’d gone to a birthday party at the La Brea Tar Pits that afternoon. “Did something happen? What’s wrong?”
The second officer, a tall man with tanned white skin and curly reddish-brown hair, said, “Maybe we should talk inside.”
Sam led them to the kitchen. “Who’s there?” his father-in-law was yelling. “What’s going on?” Ignoring him, Sam said, “Would you like coffee? Water? Something to drink?”
“Does Julie Barringer live here?” the female officer asked.
Sam was still holding the dish towel, twisting it in his hands. “I’m her husband. She—she kept her last name.”
The male officer bent his head. “I’m sorry, sir. We have bad news.”
They told him that there’d been a bad accident on the 405. Julie’s Prius had been rear-ended, shoved into the guardrail at the median by kids joyriding in one of their daddys’ Range Rovers. The driver of the Rover had a concussion. Julie had been killed.