There was a hand on my shoulder, voices nearby, but my whole world was simply the unreal sight in front of me, Gus’s terrible accompanying howl.
“Does she know him? Is that his . . . ?” Did you see it? Call an ambulance.”
I don’t remember moving toward Dan until my knees scratched on the tarmac, my palms sticky as I knelt by his head.
Someone was asking me questions, kneeling on the other side of him, but I couldn’t hear them. I stared at my husband’s face. His eyes weren’t meeting mine, like a weird game he was playing, something childish he’d do to make me laugh. This wasn’t funny.
“Look at me, Dan. Please, please look at me . . .”
The eyes were his, still brown, but I couldn’t see the tiny amber streaks that brought them to life. His expression was strange, unfamiliar. His face slack, cheek crushed against the hard ground, two tiny cuts on his chin.
There was nothing there of Dan.
When I looked up, the narrow dark street had filled with people; outside security lights blinked on as figures in raincoats over tracksuit bottoms, pajamas, peered out, some moving a few steps down their path.
Gus had inched toward me, his damp, springy curls in my lap as I reached to touch Dan’s face.
“This wasn’t what he wanted,” I whispered. “He wanted to die in his bed. He told me.”
It had been months ago, a conversation after a weepy movie.
“Don’t be so morbid,” he’d said, drawing me toward him.
I’d wanted to know.
He’d finally relented with a sigh. “With you,” he’d told me. I’d called him a psycho and he’d laughed, one of the rumbling loud ones that always made my own mouth turn up at the corners. “No, when we’ve really lived. In our bed.”
He hadn’t wanted this.
I was crying, wanting his eyes to look like his eyes again. What had they last seen?
I hoped Gus had been the last thing he’d seen. The adoring face of his loyal, lovable friend. The dog who’d never failed to make my husband smile and soften and spoil. I hoped it had been Gus. Not this scene, not this carnage.
I stumbled to my feet, hands helping me up as I spoke. “I left the kids. I need to go to them. But I’ll come back . . .” I reached for a man nearby. “Stay with him, please. Someone needs to stay with him.”
The man was nodding quickly, his own eyes filling with tears, his voice gruff in response.
“Yes, love. Of course. Do you need . . . Are you OK?”
Bending down, I ignored him, bundling Gus into my arms. He was so impossibly heavy, fur wet and matted. I staggered under his weight, needing him near me, needing to take him home.
A woman stepped forward. “I’ll help, please.”
She returned with me to the house, Gus held between us. “He should see a vet. We can tell the police what we saw . . . your dog . . .”
I mumbled thank yous as I closed the door on her worried face. The moment it shut I sank on crouched knees to the floor, my face plunged into Gus’s fur. “Good boy, good boy.”
“Mum.”
Miles was at the bottom of the stairs. It was too late to stop it. I saw his eyes travel down me and I followed his gaze. My top dotted with sleet, hands smeared red, Gus coated too. When I looked up, he was pale in the stark hallway light, the whites of his eyes completely round.
“What’s happened? Mum?”
It was his frightened shout that broke something in me.
And I didn’t mean to scare him, I didn’t mean to make the terrible, awful noise I made but I couldn’t stop. I was making my son cry and I couldn’t stop.
“Mum. Where’s Dad? Mum?”
My name almost shouted forced me to blink, to try to explain. “He was hit. He’s . . . he’s . . . there was a car and . . . oh, my darling. He died.”
My words hit him like they were real things, his face shocked, tiny body crumpling where he stood on the bottom stair. We stared at each other, time still for those seconds, entirely alone in our anguish. Suddenly Poppy appeared, drawn by the noise. She stared past Miles clutching the banister to me with Dan’s blood on my hands and started screaming. Which made Miles sob harder, Gus cowering in my lap, shuddering next to my body at the swell of grief. Then they were all in my arms, pressed against me, all of us huddled together, the doormat prickles beneath me.
I tried to reach them all, to crush them both so close I could swallow their pain. How would I do this? How could I do anything without Dan with me? I thought of his body out there in the road, squeezed my eyes closed, but the image didn’t leave. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been there when the door knocker rattled above our heads, making us scramble backward.
The policeman had sandy hair and eyes filled with pity as he took in our scene.
I couldn’t think of the questions I needed to ask. Somehow we’d moved into the kitchen, someone had given me a glass of water. The children were close, reminding me of the toddler years, needing the solidity of their mother, that safety. I couldn’t protect them from this night, from anything.
Dan had been pronounced dead at the scene. They’d taken him to the mortuary at the hospital. The driver had been taken to the station.
At that I’d looked up.
Oh my God, the driver, the fucking driver. The policeman’s mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear him, a hot rage erupting inside me. How fast had they been driving in a narrow residential road? Badly enough they managed to veer into a grown man?
“Can someone be with you all? Is there anyone we can call?”
Numbly I shook my head. I felt the strange, fleeting shame of not knowing where my parents were—Spain? Their Brighton flat? They rarely updated me. And then the blow of telling Dan’s dad. The man was already bent double as a widow, and they were suggesting that I wake him in the middle of the night with this?
I couldn’t.
“I will, thank you,” I said, voice scratchy as though I’d not spoken in years. He needed to leave. I said other things: The children, I need to be with them. Yes, we have people we can ring. Yes, we’ll wait for the Community Support officer first thing. Somehow, he left and with his absence a strange silence descended on all of us.
I settled Gus in his basket, his curls still stuck together. The sight making my throat close up. “I can’t . . .” I whispered to his solemn face. “Gus, I can’t do it.” He licked my hand and I let out another sob.
The children didn’t want to leave me, and I didn’t want them to. We moved through the kitchen. The envelope, with his letter to me inside, still unopened on the table. I stared at it, the small heart swimming.
I never read it.
Where is he? He should be here. He should be walking back into the house. He should be holding his children, holding me, telling us we’re OK, not to be scared, it’s OK.
He’d never be here again.
Poppy wordlessly got into bed with Miles, both their heads on the pillow, their hair tangled, the same shade of mid-brown. Dan’s hair. I stroked their faces, wiped a black smudge from under Poppy’s red eyes, feeling a surreal calm as I whispered over and over, “It’s OK, I love you. I love you.”
Ten and eight.
They finally fell asleep and I wished they’d wake up again as the thoughts crowded in. As I thought of the last things I’d said to Dan. How I’d lied to him, downplayed the day. It was our day, it was important, so important. And I had ruined it. And the last thing he’d known was me dismissing a day that had once meant everything to us.
I couldn’t stay in this room, my body shivering as I stood and slid my hands along the walls to the door, made it into the corridor to cry. I knew I would regret those things until my very last day.
Hours later, still crouched in the hallway, numb and cold, the darkness gave way to a strange gray calm. My head pounded as I groggily got to my feet, stood in the doorway to our bedroom. Dan’s work shirt was crumpled half-in and half-out of the laundry basket. Casual. Like he’d shove it in fully later.
I sat down on our bed; the curtains not yet closed. The whole of London was asleep and I was the only one up in the world. It was moments before the birds would shift, flutter awake. The Day After. The Community Support Officer. The day I had to call Dan’s dad. Had to call Hattie. Oh my God, poor Hattie.
His pillow was still sunk in the middle; that toothpaste mark I moaned about two (or was it three?) nights ago was still there. I inched across the bed to rest my head on it. It smelled of Dan, of us. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I squeezed my eyes closed, willing this day to be over, willing this day to never end. Wanting my husband back. Wanting Dan.