Now, before you start pointing fingers, I deserve to tell you my side of the story. My side of the true story, that is. Let me start at the beginning. Well, one beginning. When I look back on my forty-five （almost forty-six!） years of life, I subconsciously divide it into two sections: before Gus died and after Gus died. After Gus died was a second beginning, and the more significant genesis in Burke’s and my story.
It was June 1990 in Langs Valley. Burke and I never officially established that we were back together, but we didn’t need to. The day Gus died and Burke showed up to the hospital, I was in the midst of a long, dangerous fall, and I let him catch me. There was simply no other way I could have gone on.
The rest of that awful summer was a pit of darkness. I don’t remember much about the days that followed Gus’s death. I couldn’t fathom making any arrangements, so Burke stepped in. Burke called the funeral home and chose the tiny teak coffin. Burke found a burial plot near our house, next to the meadow where Gus loved to chase crickets and butterflies. Burke organized the small service at the Episcopal church in town, and Burke gave the eulogy. I was too numb to speak, and my father wasn’t there. No one had been able to track him down since Gus’s death, and for all I knew he was dead, too.
The only thing I remember being adamant about was that Libby and Peter not attend the funeral. Libby called endlessly, and when I wouldn’t answer the phone, she showed up at the house. Per my directions, Burke told her to get lost. Well, I’m sure he said some polite version of that. Burke has always had annoyingly good manners––Grams raised him well in that arena.
Bottom line, I couldn’t see Libby. I knew she cared, but I also knew that what she wanted, above all, was my absolution. She wanted to hear me say that it was a terrible accident, but I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of agreeing that Gus’s death was blameless, because it wasn’t. We both knew that if Libby hadn’t been drunk that day in Bermuda, she would’ve remembered me telling her I’d never learned to swim. We both knew that if it weren’t for her carelessness—her selfishness—Gus would still be breathing.
When Burke wasn’t there to ward off Libby, I locked the door and stayed in bed, ignoring the sunshine and intermittent knocking. She left notes and baked goods and fruit baskets on the front stoop. I threw her letters away without reading them and left the food for Burke.
One night at the end of June, Burke sat down at the edge of the bed, a crumpled letter in hand. I recognized the handwriting on the envelope––it was one of Libby’s I’d tossed in the trash. The narrow slit at the top told me Burke had opened it.
“What are you doing?” I sat up in bed. “Throw that out. I don’t want to see it.”
“You want to see this one, Bones.” Burke’s voice was soft, but serious.
“No, I don’t. Why’d you open it? Have you been opening her letters?”
Burke sighed, his blue eyes landing on mine. “I—don’t be mad, Bones. I wanted to check and make sure … I sort of expected there might be something like this.” He handed me the envelope.
I knew what it was, then, because subconsciously I’d been expecting it, too. It was part of the reason I hadn’t opened a single one of Libby’s letters. I knew the sight of it would make me sick.
When I didn’t remove the contents of the envelope, Burke did it for me, and there it was, a big fat check, alongside a small white card with the initials LRF in a pink monogram at the top. My stomach churned.
H,
Perhaps it will give you some relief to know that we leave Langs Valley tomorrow. There is nothing I can do to make this right, not now, not ever. I know that. But please take this. You deserve it, and it comes from a place of nothing but love.
Libby
Burke watched me carefully. I stared at the check, a block at the base of my gut.
“It’s a shit ton of money, Bones,” he said finally.
I nodded because it was. It was a comical amount of money. It was the kind of money that flips your world on its head overnight, like winning the jackpot. The check was made out to me, Heather Price, for $500,000.
But it was Gus’s life. Some things you just know in your soul, things you do because there’s no other choice, because to do otherwise would be to go against your life force, to poison the marrow of your bones.
Burke winced as I ripped up the check. I walked to the bathroom and threw the pieces into the toilet. I pressed down on the handle and watched them swirl, the little green specks of Gus’s blood money, then disappear.
I walked back into the bedroom and found Burke’s gaze, daring him to say something, to object. But he nodded silently—just once—and something in his eyes looked a whole lot like pride.
The rest of the summer was a blur, a vacuum of grief. My heart was shattered, and along with it the world. The hopeful, carefree days preceding the accident felt far away, almost as if they’d never existed at all. I spent the long, light-filled days of July and August underneath the covers with the shades drawn, Gus’s absence a searing hole in my life. Burke was working part-time at the Mobil station, but whenever he wasn’t, he’d come home to be with me. Sometimes he’d crawl into the bed and hold me; other times he’d sit in the chair by the nightstand and read comics. In that unspoken way that Burke had always known what I needed, he knew just to stay near me.
The week before Labor Day, a few days before Burke’s birthday, he finally got me to put on some real clothes and get out of the house. We walked into town to get burgers at the diner. I’d lost so much weight that my clothes hung from me like a potato sack, my jean shorts sliding off my hips.
At that time of year the edges of the leaves start to brown and curl, and the end of summer feels tangible in a way that permeates the air with a sense of looming desolation. I had always found these final, transitional weeks of the season to be tough, but this summer, from within my interminable ocean of grief, I barely noticed the shift.
Burke sat across from me at the diner and watched to make sure I ate everything on my plate. My burger tasted like nothing—soggy, chewed-up mulch that I struggled to swallow. The vanilla milkshake Burke insisted I order was thick, flavorless air. I sobbed silently into my plate, tears melting into my greasy meal at the memory of how much Gus loved the diner’s cheeseburgers. I thought of his little bites revealing the tiniest teeth marks in the bun, of how long it always took him to finish eating and how impatient the waitress used to get when the diner was crowded.
Across from me, Burke slid out of his seat and into my side of the booth. He covered my hands with both of his and squeezed.
“Bones, I know you’re sad. I am, too. But we need to talk about some things. Some important things.”
I watched Burke’s mouth move as he continued to speak. He was as handsome as ever, but the contours of his face had changed. Sorrow was there, an edge of gloom in his smile that I didn’t recognize. I’d been so absorbed in my own grief that I’d barely noticed his, and I saw then that losing Gus had changed Burke, too. But it was more than that; I suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen him with a drink in his hand since we’d been back together, since the day I’d called him from the hospital.