MY HUSBAND JUST died two days ago, and I didn’t even know him, I thought. The first time I had smiled at him wasn’t because he was handsome, funny, popular and smart, but because I felt like I’d known him my whole brief life. And from that first fleeting smile we shared in a hallway in high school, I felt like he was part of me, and I part of him. Who was my husband? And, since I had spent eighteen years in love with his smile and with the smile he evoked from me, who was I? Hi, my name is Alice Williams, I’m thirty-three years old, and I’m sitting in the hallway of the Monahan Drabble Sherman Funeral Home listening to Dire Straits on the PA.
A PA? Seriously? In a funeral home? Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits, the first CD Chris ever bought, at a yard sale, when he was a kid. His favorite. How did they know? “So Far Away” was playing. How appropriate, how macabre. How ridiculous. But who had told the funeral home? Suddenly I realized it had been me. Is there any particular music you’d like to have played during the viewing? You can personalize the selection, the kindly woman in charge of making our loss more bearable had said. I don’t remember how I’d answered, but it was obvious that if this was playing, it was because I had requested it. Though it could easily have been Tricia, Chris’s sister. I was having problems with my memory. And when I say problems, I mean I was forgetting everything except what I really wanted to forget: that I was a widow.
Everyone was there. My parents, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, Chris’s parents, his sister and other family members, acquaintances, the friends we had in common and the ones we kept to ourselves. My entire little universe, controlled and orderly, until now. My bubble. A bubble that exploded with that call in the middle of the night, waking me to a hostile world I didn’t recognize, didn’t want to live in. And so, in just two days, I had built a new temporary bubble, where I kept myself relatively alive, in a state similar to hibernation, being there without being there. Even when people were in front of me, I didn’t see or hear them. I didn’t want them to talk to me or touch me. I couldn’t comprehend why I took no comfort in their words of consolation and their gentle, sincere embraces.
I didn’t tell anyone about Chris, about how he hadn’t been where he was supposed to be. I was ashamed to.
Olivia came over when “Walk of Life” started playing. She was the only one with a key to get in and out of my emergency bubble. Her and Dire Straits.
“Mommy.”
“What, honey?”
“Where’s my present?”
“What present?”
“The one from Daddy that he always brings when he goes on a trip.”
“I don’t know, love.”
“Did you look to see if it was in the car?”
“No, babe, I didn’t look.”
“Do you think it was my fault that he died?”
“Why do you say that, sweetie?” Sweetie, babe, love, honey. I didn’t know what to call her to soften the blow.
“Maybe he was going to buy my present and he died. On the way.”
“No, Oli, I’m sure he had bought it and I’m sure it’s in the car. I’ll look tomorrow and I’ll get it for you.”
“If it’s not my fault, whose fault is it?”
“No one’s. It’s no one’s fault.”
“So it’s not a bad thing, then?”
I looked at her without understanding. “Daddy says if something bad happens, it’s always someone’s fault.”
After reassuring her that it also wasn’t any of her grandparents’ fault, or her great-grandparents’—one at a time, the living and the dead—or Tricia’s, or mine, or anyone she knew or didn’t know, she said to me:
“So if it wasn’t anyone’s fault, was it Daddy’s fault?”
“No, honey, it wasn’t Daddy’s fault either.”
“Why is Daddy’s box closed? I want to see him.”
The coffin was closed. It had been my decision in order to protect Olivia, to keep alive the image she had of her father.
“No, Oli, like this it’s better.”
“When I close my eyes, I see him. I see Daddy.”
“That’s good, so you remember him.”
“I see him dead in the car. Pieces of his face are gone. An eye and a bunch of teeth and other stuff. And he’s bleeding a lot. It makes me really scared to close my eyes, Mommy.”
I didn’t think my soul could break any further. Olivia was six and had never expressed obsessive thoughts, at least not such palpable ones, just little hang-ups, nothing important. I stroked her hair. That was something that calmed her down a lot. Her and me both. I liked to run my fingers through her fine blond hair, which was just like Chris’s. Along with her father’s hair, she had inherited his mouth and smile, and my green eyes, nose and freckled cheeks.
“When we get home, I’ll print you the photos from when the three of us were on the cruise to Alaska last summer, OK?”
“It won’t work, Mommy. I need to see him. In the box.”
I looked at her and thought: How smart my daughter is. Maybe she’s gifted. I should buy her a piano or give her a chess set. But today, so when she becomes the first female world champion of chess or she’s playing at Carnegie Hall, she’ll say in the interviews: “The day we buried my father, my mother bought me a piano—or a chess set. That was my salvation. I want to dedicate this concert—or this world championship match—to my late father and to my mother, for turning my pain into art and passion. My daughter had some hidden talent, and my purpose in life was to discover it. The thought cheered me up a bit.
“It’s not called a box; it’s called a coffin, honey.”
That was all I managed to say. Then I took her hand and, despite my original plan, led her into the room where Chris’s coffin was.
It was cold, very cold. But that was normal. That’s how you have to store meat.
The first person who realized we were going in there was my mother. She was talking and crying with my aunt Sally. Mom walked over and rapped her knuckles on the glass door that separated us. I couldn’t hear her, but I could see her lips moving: What are you doing? You shouldn’t be in there. I walked up to the door. I looked at my mother for two or three seconds. She looked back at me, waiting for me to say something, but I just pulled the curtain on the door shut to get a little privacy for Olivia and me.
I took a metal wastebasket—what do the dead need a wastebasket for?—turned it upside down and stood Olivia on top of it, so she could peep inside the coffin.
“Are you sure, Oli?”
“Yeah, Mom, come on . . .”
I opened the lid. Olivia smiled immediately. It was a smile so full of life that I thought she was going to resuscitate Chris, that he would rise up and say: It’s freezing in here, let’s go home.
The autopsy had determined that Chris hadn’t died from the impact of the crash, as the police and the forensic investigator had suspected. He’d suffered a brain aneurysm that made him pass out at the wheel, and that caused the accident. He had an arteriovenous malformation. A time bomb nestled in his brain that had suddenly burst. Painful and clinical as the explanation was, it relieved me to hear it, because it ruled out the possibility that Chris had committed suicide. The absence of skid marks on the asphalt had raised the suspicions of the police and the investigator the insurance company had hired. I wasn’t worried about the claim not paying out; I was worried because even though I’d told the police in no uncertain terms that Chris was a cheerful person who always overcame anything in his way, in my heart I doubted; for the first time in my life, I doubted him. When they confirmed the cause of death, I couldn’t help but show my incredulity because Chris had lead a very healthy lifestyle. The coroner told me it had nothing to do with that; it was a congenital disorder. In many cases, hereditary. No one in his family, which I knew very well, had died under similar circumstances or had anything like that. And then I doubted a second time.
“Daddy’s so handsome.”
“Yes. Very.”
“And he smells good. He smells like Daddy.”
Betty, Chris’s mother, had come to our house beforehand to take a suit, tie, shirt and his favorite shoes from the closet, as well as his usual aftershave and deodorant.
“It’s like he’s sleeping.”
Olivia stroked Chris’s pink cheek. The undertaker had gone a little too far with the makeup, perhaps to conceal some cut or bruise.
“He’s really cold. Why is it so cold in here, Mommy?”
“So the body doesn’t go bad.”
“Like hamburgers in the refrigerator?”
“Yeah, more or less.”
“Is someone going to eat Daddy?”
“No, honey, of course not . . .”
“I always loved you more than Daddy. If you died, I would have been much sadder. Much more . . .” she said, caressing her father the whole time.
“Come on, sweetie, let’s go now . . .”
I tried to close the coffin lid, but Olivia stopped me.
“Wait . . .”
Olivia shut her eyes to be sure the image of her father she had in her head had changed. After a few moments, she opened them again. She seemed relieved.
“OK, we can go now.”
A piano, I thought, I’m going to give her a piano. An enormous grand piano, the best in the world. It would rise up in the air and fly whenever she played it, transporting the three of us right out of there.