I wasn’t afraid of dying, but I was afraid of being alone when I did. It seemed both were inevitable.
When I was pregnant with Elise, I spoke a vow so solemn that it was unbreakable. I had been sitting in bed, awake with acid reflux and Braxton-Hicks contractions, unable to sleep. Holding my fat belly in my arms, I promised my unborn baby that I would be there for every important moment. The first word. The first step. The first boyfriend. Graduation. Wedding. Grandchildren. I would somehow conquer death, as if I had that power, to be there whenever my child needed me.
Oh, how naive I was back then. Back in a time of ignorant bliss, when the world was pure and simple and filled with hope. I never expected the crushing blow as life’s hammer swung down and smashed my perfect little dreams into perfect little pieces. I had never anticipated crouching in those shards, waiting for another blow. That’s all I seemed to do these days—wait for it.
Back then, every image I envisioned included me, Ben, and our children. I never fathomed life without him. Why would I? In my mind, I could singlehandedly defy death and divorce, with Ben by my side. It turns out I couldn’t. And it turns out he wouldn’t. Some days, single motherhood felt damn near close to death.
Single mothers are plainclothes heroes. Anyone who, after an exhausting day of work, can multitask helping the kids with their homework while figuring out what to cook for dinner that the kids won’t grouch about, followed by kitchen cleanup, then an hour-long bedtime routine—all of this on her own—deserves a friggin’ medal. Or at least a spa day. If you thought being a police officer or a firefighter or a doctor was hard, think about the single mothers out there. They are the toughest of them all. And I was now cursed to be one of them.
I tried my best, I always did, but there’s a tipping point where no amount of effort seemed enough. I’d spent the past hour coercing Jackson to do his spelling homework, while Elise grumbled through her math problems. There were only a few more days left in the school year, but the kids were already mentally on vacation. It was an uphill battle to get them to do anything.
“Ew, what smells?” Elise whined from the kitchen island where she doodled in the margins of her homework. “Tell me that’s not dinner.”
“It smells like rotten eggs,” Jackson chimed in with an opinion I hadn’t asked for.
“Guys, knock it off. I haven’t even started cooking yet. That’s Candace’s lunch you smell.”
The fresh salmon I had purchased for tonight’s meal had mysteriously gone missing, though the empty packaging sat on the counter next to Candace’s empty lunch plate. Another dish to pick up, not in the sink where it belonged. As I rummaged in the freezer for something else to cook, rage hit me with the force of a Black Friday shopping mob. I envisioned slapping that sneer right off her face, marking her perfect skin with my perfect handprint.
The chicken and rice casserole I threw together for dinner ended up a disaster. With Lane working late and Candace tucked away in her bedroom bingeing on Cheetos and Netflix—and probably her salmon lunch leftovers—no one was there to help ease the mood that hung over the dining room.
Elise grimaced as I spooned the casserole onto her plate. “It looks like puke.”
Jackson gagged as he pushed his food around with his fork. “It tastes like puke.”
“You haven’t even tried it yet,” I said. I pleaded. I begged. I gave up.
For the second night in a row, Jackson had refused to eat a single bite of anything. The boy was already a child-sized Gumby, all knobby knees and elbows, but lately he looked even skinnier, like he’d been stretched into nonexistence. As if that wasn’t enough to heap on my already huge pile of worry, Elise fought with me through the entire meal over not having any personal space, begging to move back home.
Home. What was home these days? Because nothing felt like home without Ben.
Jackson sits up and watches me all night, Elise complained. He makes weird scratching sounds while I sleep, she whined. No matter how much I tried to understand Jackson, what he was going through, he simply wouldn’t tell me what thoughts rattled around in his head. I was almost afraid to find out.
I wanted to believe these were typical kid problems, but the truth was that all sense of normal had died along with their father. I had no clue how to help them or return to the place we couldn’t return to—our old life. Our happy life. A life that only existed in my mind.
Because what husband killed himself unless things weren’t what they seemed?
I sent the kids to the living room to watch television while I finished cleaning up. Just one more hour to go before I fell into my bed and into a book that would hopefully seduce me into its pages and release my chains to this world. If only I could stay within the chapters, in a story I loved instead of the reality that I hated. These days, I counted down the minutes to my nightly solitude. All day I pushed the feelings down, just below the surface, but at night, alone in my bedroom, I could let them rise and feel them all. The sadness, the loneliness, the heartbreak, the anger, the questions I wanted answers to: Why? Why? Why?
All the stages of grief were coming back in a single hit: isolation, anger, asking every what-if, giving up. Everything but acceptance. I wasn’t there yet; how could I accept that he took his own life? Especially when he knew how hard I worked to break through the grief before. Damn you, Ben! As my hands slid up and down the casserole dish—sudsing, sudsing, sudsing—my mind wandered and slipped into a dark place. I needed a cigarette.
I didn’t smoke. I never had, not other than the occasional cigarette over drinks with friends, and definitely not since I fell for Ben and he told me he’d never date a girl who smoked. But Ben wasn’t here, and I needed a hit of something, anything, to numb me. I didn’t know where Lane kept the hard liquor, so the pack of cigarettes I had bought the day after Ben died would have to do.
I slipped outside into the cool night air, the cigarette smoke contaminating the fragrance of roses that hung by the back porch. Every puff coursed through my lungs and into my bloodstream, my own little act of rebellion against the traumas of death and single motherhood. How did women do it? A woman was like calm water on the surface, but underneath the water’s edge she was a gliding, hunting shark. I wanted to be a shark, but I was a jellyfish that lazily floated along, ready to be someone’s dinner.
An eddy of smoke, with an undertone of burning leaves, clung to the fibers of my shirt. I’d need to remember to change clothes when I got inside.
The swimming pool glistened under a full moon. I looked up and met its hollow gaze, remembering how fascinated four-year-old Jackson had been with the man who lived in one of its many craters. I never had the heart to tell him the truth, that the stories were lies we told our children as we patted ourselves on the back for parenting well done. Yet those lies cultivated their imagination. If only all my lies had such a silver lining.
I traced Ursa Major with my eyes; my need for dark solitude was as insistent as the stars.
In the alcoves of my thoughts I heard the back door slide open, then closed. I didn’t turn to look; I could sense my brother when he was near because he possessed a kind of calm that was almost tangible. I imagined it was like being in the presence of one of the Twelve Apostles. You just knew he was goodness. Lane must have sensed my dark mood and come to find me.
“Hey, Harp. You okay?” Lane sat beside me, blood speckling his scrubs, and held his hand out for a drag.
I passed the cigarette over to him, nodding at the bloodstains dotting his clothes. “Tough day at work?”
Lane took a drag and coughed. “Mm, smooth.”
I chuckled. “Shut up. I should have warned you that they’re an old pack.”
“No, Betty White is old. This is archaic.” He handed the cig back to me.
I gestured to his clothes. “You kill someone?”
He glanced down at his shirt, as if only just now noticing it. “I didn’t have a change of clothes in my work locker. I need to catch up on laundry.”
“Isn’t that Candace’s job? You know, since she’s home all day doing nothing.”
“It’s not a big deal for me to do it.”
“You know how I feel about that. Anyway, I washed your clothes so you don’t need to. What happened at work?”
“Eh, same old, same old. One of my patients fell and cracked her skull on the floor. Lost a lot of blood, but she’s okay. I’m more concerned about you, though. You don’t smoke.”
“I do today. I don’t know what to do with myself anymore, Lane. I feel so alone.”
Wrapping an arm around me, he hugged me into his side. “You’re not alone. I’m always here for you.”
I straightened and pulled away from him. “Not anymore, Lane. We both know it. You’ve got your wife who needs you. There’s not enough of you for the both of us.”
He nudged me with his shoulder. “That’s ridiculous. You and I are a package deal. Our lives will always twist around each other; we’re twins separated by a year. Besides, I can be a husband and a brother at the same time. Millions of people do it every day.”
“Not really, Lane. Not the kind of brother who shows up to help his sister frame her husband’s suicide as a murder.” I sucked in a long draw and exhaled a puff of smoke. “But I’m done asking for favors. I’m going to find my own apartment, something small and affordable, get a job, and get out of your hair.”
“No, you’re not. You’ve only been here for a little over a week. You’re going to stay as long as you need to, Harp. Give yourself time to heal. The baby isn’t due for months. There’s no rush for you to leave.”
We both knew it was time, though Lane would never admit it.
“I do have one last favor to ask, though.”
“Anything,” he said.
“I just need a hug from my brother.”
Lane took the cigarette from my fingers and put it out on the patio floor. Lifting me up with him, he hugged me, a hug so enveloping and warm that it wrapped me in love. It was the hug of two little children who couldn’t bear to be separated by even a sliver of space. It felt safe to be a child for once and not always the adult. I closed my eyes to relish it to the fullest. When I opened them, there stood Candace, jaw clenched and eyes narrowly watching us from the kitchen window.
I jolted and stepped back. Candace slowly drifted out of sight.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you. Have you been taking your meds?” Lane asked.
Not this again. “I don’t need them anymore.”
“You know that’s not how it works. You have to keep taking them consistently.”
“I don’t like how they make me feel. Like the walking dead.”
“Then the dosage needs to be adjusted. But don’t just stop taking them. I’ll go with you, if you want. We can talk to the doctor together. I’m very familiar with this stuff, you know. It’s what I do for a living.”
I nodded, wordlessly following him into the house where, like a good girl, I would take my medicine to silence the wailing inside my head. I checked the time. Bedtime at last! I found Jackson coloring at the coffee table while Elise watched reruns of Scooby-Doo. I remembered fondly watching the show as a kid myself on Saturday mornings. How times had changed. Kids these days had instant access to everything they wanted, while us old folks had to wait until the weekend for our favorite shows. And God forbid a child sit through a commercial!
Glancing over Jackson’s shoulder, I expected to find an explosion of creativity the way Before Jackson used to be. Before Jackson would create a flurry of scribbles and scissor cuts as he turned an elephant into an elf. Instead, I found the entire page colored black with red squiggles. I thought of death and blood. What else would have crossed a mother’s mind at such an image?
“Hey, buddy, whatcha drawing?” I asked warily.
“It’s dirt.”
Oh, that wasn’t so bad.
“What are these?” I pointed to a red squiggle.
“The worms.”
“Worms?”
“Yeah, like the ones eating Daddy in the ground.”
My chest tightened and I moved to hug Jackson from behind. But my arms wouldn’t obey. I couldn’t touch my own son. What child considered the worms ravaging his father’s corpse? He scared me; the child I had borne—part me, part Ben—was untouchable. Every maternal bone in my body yearned to wrap myself around my tiny boy, but my muscles tensed and grew defiant and rigid. Instead, I placed my hand on his shoulder. Yes, I could handle that.
“Jackson, why would you want to draw that?”
“I dunno.” He shrugged, as if I had asked what he wanted for a snack.
“Do you think about this kind of stuff a lot?”
He nodded, shifting away from me. He always shuffled out of reach. Away from physical contact. It was becoming as worrisome as my inability to touch him. The mother in me yearned to close the gap between me and my son; but the mother in me also couldn’t because of what he had done. The one thing I couldn’t forgive him for.
“Sweetie, why won’t you let me touch you?”
“I dunno.”
The same two words he used to answer every question. I knelt down, meeting him eye-to-eye. “Please talk to me. I don’t know how to fix it if I don’t know what you’re thinking. Are you upset with me?”
He peered at me with eyes that had seen too much, robbed of all innocence. “I guess.”
“Why, bud? I’m trying my best.”
“Because you’re the reason Daddy’s dead.” His voice was thin, like a strand of silk choking me.
“Why do you say that? I loved your father.”
And I did. More than anything.
“No, you didn’t. Or else Daddy would still be alive.”
I felt the pierce of grief all over again.
“You think I killed Daddy?”
“Yeah. It’s why the policeman keeps coming to talk to you, isn’t it?”
I hadn’t realized Jackson had been paying such close attention. How could I explain a murder investigation in a way a six-year-old child would understand?
“No, bud, the policeman is just trying to figure out who did it.”
“Will the person who killed Daddy come after me next? Is that why we have to live here, to hide?”
Oh no. The conversation was unraveling faster than I knew how to handle. I couldn’t tell Jackson that his father had committed suicide. But thinking his father was murdered wasn’t any better. How long had my son been fearing for his life?
“No, sweetie, it wasn’t like that. No one is after us.”
“Then why did you force us to live here? I hate it here. I miss Daddy. I wanna go home!” Throwing down the black crayon that had been clutched between his stubby little fingers, Jackson jumped up and ran upstairs, leaving me alone with my heartbreak.
I wanted to chase after him, squeeze him until he giggled like we used to. I love you the size of a peanut, I used to say, and he’d laugh. I love you the size of the ocean, I’d amend, but he’d shake his head and say, Bigger! Tickling him, I’d compare my love to the moon, the earth, the sun . . . and at last to the ever-expanding universe, because that was our love. Ever expanding. Endless. Our whispers would float through the night-lighted bedroom while his spider legs wrapped around my waist.
I missed my boy who wore superhero underwear, who chewed his bottom lip in concentration, who moved in a whirlwind of motion, who laughed endlessly at his own fart jokes. Where did my son go, and what sad creature had taken over his body? His flame had been extinguished too soon, his passion and zest for adventure and color gone before it had fully arrived.
After several breaths, I headed upstairs, readying myself for a conversation with the son who blamed me for his father’s death, who thought a killer was after us. I needed to set things right with him before he recklessly pieced more faulty bits together. His bedroom door was shut when I got there, and when I jiggled the handle it was locked.
“Jackson,” I spoke against the wood, where curls of white paint flaked off. “Can we please talk?”
The doorknobs in the house were outdated glass, lacking modern safety features. Kids back in the day could lock themselves in and you’d have to bust the whole door down to get through.
I knocked lightly. “Please unlock the door, or I’m going to have to take it down.”
A moment later I heard the approach of footsteps, then the click of the lock. When he opened the door, I smelled the faint scent of smoke.
“What’s going on in here? Why do I smell smoke?”
I dashed past him into the room, as Jackson wrapped his short arms halfway around my waist, begging me to stop. I charged through his tiny bodily blockage.
“Please don’t be mad, Mommy!”
Behind his bed, in a cheap plastic—and meltable!—garbage can, I found the remnants of a photograph burning to ash.
“What is this?” I screeched, blowing it out. “You could have burned the whole house down! Was that you who set off the fire alarm last week?”
Jackson broke into tears, muttering something about ghosts visiting him in his dreams. I picked up what was left of the photograph; only half of our smiling faces were intact, but I recognized the image immediately. The day was still fresh in my mind. Taken a year and a half ago, it was one of the last pictures of our family whole and happy. In this perfect moment on a nature hike at the Cape Fear River Trail, we had no idea what horror was to come.
“Calm down, honey.” In a pile at the bottom of the garbage can were other pictures, some depicting people I didn’t recognize. “Why are you burning these?”
He caught his breath before speaking, his words quivering with his body. “The ghost told me to.”
“What ghost? The old lady who died here?”
He nodded. “She told me if I burned the pictures I wouldn’t have to remember Daddy anymore.”
“Why would you want to forget Daddy?”
“Because it makes me sad.”
“Oh, honey.” I pivoted him toward me, his body stiff and unwieldy, and held his hands. They were the only part of him I could hold. “It’s okay to be sad. You’ll always remember him, and you should. It’s good to remember the people we love. Daddy is just waiting on the other side for us, so you don’t need to be sad. We’ll see him again in heaven someday.”
We stood together in angsty solitude, his fingers locked in the grooves of my knuckles. Eventually he wilted onto the floor, and I lifted him into bed, pushing aside Elise’s notebook and Nancy Drew mystery she was in the middle of reading. My mother had lent Elise a copy she had grown up on, the cover cartoony and faded. After settling Jackson in, I kissed his forehead, my lips warm against his cool skin.
“It’s going to be okay, bud.” I clung to the promise that it would, fighting against the probability that it wouldn’t.
I grabbed Elise’s notebook and saw that the lined page that it was open to had two words on it. A username and password. More specifically, my Facebook username and password. How had she even found that? And more important, why?
“Do you know why Elise has my Facebook login information, Jackson?”
“She got it off your phone to talk to a boy she likes.”
“What boy?” My little girl was into boys already? When had I missed this? I was a worse mother than I thought, oblivious that my daughter was growing up and I couldn’t see it beyond my own self-importance.
“I dunno.”
Any boy on Facebook would be too old for her. We hadn’t even had the birds and the bees conversation yet. Was she even ready for that? Or was I?
I set the notebook down, tucking the bedspread around Jackson’s tiny frame. “Do you know if Elise ever posted anything?”
He chewed his bottom lip in thought. Ben used to do the same thing. “I know she let Miss Aubrey post something that day she was babysitting, ’cause they wouldn’t let me see.”
“Was that the day I went out shopping with Aunt Candace?”
He nodded. “Before you left. I remember ’cause it made Elise cry real bad but Miss Aubrey couldn’t delete it before you left.”
Shoot. I had been wrong. I had been so certain it was Candace, so quick to blame. I felt horrible about my accusation. Even worse that Elise knew and was afraid to tell me—about the post, about the boy crush, about everything going on in her life, apparently.
Once Jackson had drifted off, I remembered that Elise was still watching television, so I headed down the hallway toward the stairs, passing the bathroom. Behind the door I heard sobs—but not a child’s sobs. A grown woman’s.
“Candace?” I whispered to the closed door. “Are you okay?”
I knocked softly, unsure if I should intrude. It went quiet within, except for a gasp and the shuffle of feet. A moment later, the shower turned on and drowned out her weeping. A hard pass to my question.
“Mommy?”
I whipped around at the sound of a faint voice and found Jackson standing in his doorway. Hadn’t he just fallen asleep?
“Yes, sweetie?”
His gaze burned with intensity. “We’re not going to see Daddy in heaven. I don’t think God’ll let us in.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because I know you killed Daddy, just like I killed my sister.”
I couldn’t deny it, because I knew he was right. Some sins are unforgivable.