Michelle

“Jesus fucking Christ, Michelle.”

Scott’s voice cuts through the gloom of the bungalow. The air is cold after the oppressive heat outside and her skin prickles and tightens as though with a fever. Small mews come from under the cot against the opposite wall—the kittens the mother cat hid there last night. Michelle flexes her hand; it still stings, feels swollen and foreign. Her rings are too tight, and she wrenches at them, scraping at her fingers. But they won’t budge.

Scott clutches at his hair, paces the concrete floor, the shape of him huge in the small space. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“I didn’t…” she stammers and lets her words drop away. What can she possibly say? She struggles with her rings, her swollen knuckles ache.

It wasn’t supposed to go like this. She tries to remember why she needed to come here. She was going to find—what? Peace? The idea is absurd, laughable. Magical thinking.

Outside a rooster crows. Always a rooster crowing here, no matter the hour.

Scott turns on her. “Don’t you think he’s been hurt enough? That we all have been?”

The cold leaves her in a rush. Her hands are in fists and she spits back at him, “Where were you?”

Scott goes still, a backlit shadow against the single square of window, grasping the concrete ledge. His head drops, then his shoulders. The rooster outside falls quiet. Michelle stares at those shoulders and then at her hands, remembers them holding on to him. Her hands are so empty.

It used to be so easy to reach out and touch them, her husband, her children. Now she finds it almost impossible. When was the last time she touched Zach? She holds Astrid after her nightmares, but Zach? It has been months, and now when her hand does reach out to him, it’s to strike him. Who is she? She collapses to the cot, which sags beneath her.

If her son were in front of her now she would clutch Zach to her and hold him as long as possible. Because he’ll be gone soon—off to university, a career, a life of his own, the way children are meant to. She wants to rise and go to him, but the grief swallows her as she remembers all the things that Dylan will never have, will never be.

And the future drops away from her, even while the rest of her family is setting out into it. She is being left behind.

Scott has turned back to her, stares down at her expectantly, waiting for her to answer a question she has not heard. His face shifts, from pleading to anger.

“Right,” he says. “I wasn’t there. You think I don’t know that? You think I haven’t relived every moment of that day? What I could have changed? But I can’t! I wasn’t there when Dylan needed me. I’ll live with that every day for the rest of my life.” His voice drops to a whisper as though he is no longer talking to her. “Where was I? What was I doing? Don’t answer the phone. Don’t go inside. Just stand in the doorway and watch him, watch your son by the pool.” A small smile plays across his face, like a quick dash of sunlight, and she can see Dylan there in front of them, they are standing at the door together watching their son, his limbs too long for his body, all angles and silly walks. Then Scott’s face darkens again. He straightens up, pushes his shoulders back. “But I was there. I pulled our son out of the pool. I held him. I tried . . .” His voice catches, and his hands twitch slightly; she imagines them pumping on Dylan’s chest. He closes them to fists. “And I’m here now, Michelle. Where the hell are you?”

Her mouth moves, but she isn’t making any sound. How dare he?

He holds up his hand to silence what she isn’t saying. “No. Not just today. We both fucked up today.” He begins to pace again, returns to the louvred window, the world outside nothing but blurred shapes, and stares at it. The rooster starts up again. “Jesus, what was I thinking?” She can barely hear him. “If something happened to him…” He shakes the vision from his head, but she can’t—she sees the vision he has conjured, of Zach, broken, floating in the sea.

“It’s not my fault,” she says, her own voice barely audible. She needs him to agree. She needs him to say it isn’t her fault. Please.

“No? Of course not. Nothing is ever your fault. But it must be somebody’s, right? So, whose fault is it? Say it. It must be mine. Or Zach’s? He was there too, you know. He was the one who had to call the goddamned ambulance. There’s enough blame to go around. Why not blame Astrid. Just anyone but you.”

“I’m sorry,” she manages at last. It is all she can say. She stares pleadingly at Scott, hoping he knows that she means it. “I’m sorry,” she repeats.

“But are you really? You keep saying it. But what the fuck does it even mean? You act like you’re the only one hurting here, and we all have to tiptoe around you, let you have your grief your way.” He’s examining her like she’s a stranger, and his voice quiets. “Your face changes when someone brings him up, you know that? You disappear. And it’s terrifying. What do you think that does to them? To me? Astrid’s having nightmares, Zach is sneaking out at all hours—”

“You knew,” she says, and the energy shifts in the room, like the tide has changed. “You knew that Zach was sneaking out. And you just let him keep doing it? How dare you blame me for this when you didn’t do anything to stop him.”

“Neither did you.” He scoffs. “This is the problem. This…” He waves his hands back and forth between them. “We aren’t even talking to each other, Michelle. I feel like I can’t count on you.”

“He could have died today!”

“Yes,” Scott says, and he seems to have decided something. “He could have. Because you won’t talk to him. Because we don’t talk to each other. You have to stop punishing us. You can stay trapped in your grief, but I won’t let you do that to them anymore.” He looks around the room as if seeing it for the first time. “What are we even doing here?” he asks. “Seriously, Michelle. Why are we here?”

Why? It made some kind of sense to her, when she thought she saw Dylan in the backyard, when he said they should go. “I thought it would change things. Change me,” she says.

“You told me you had to do something, remember? That you had to be able to make something right. Well, we’re here now. What are you doing to make things right?”

“You didn’t have to come.”

He rears back. “I believed you. I would do anything to get you through this. I would have tried anything.” And then he tosses it like a spear: “But I don’t think I can do it anymore.”

They are both panting, as though they have run a race, swum the channel. They are silent a long time. When he speaks again, Scott sounds sad. “Everyone used to want to be us.”

She remembers that, remembers how smug she used to feel about their relationship. But now it feels like remembering someone else’s life. An old friend she doesn’t see anymore. “I know.”

“I loved that, that we were better than everyone else. I was sure we laughed together more than anyone else did too. It was you and me against the world, remember?” He sighs. “Maybe it was too perfect. Maybe we should have known better.”

“I can’t just forget him.”

“Do you think he’d be happy, if he could see us now?” Scott sits down across from her, on the other cot. “Dylan would hate knowing we’re like this.” He looks at her. “Maybe it’s time,” he says, hedging, “to think about trying something else—like selling the house, moving.”

She stares at him. His face is side-lit, split in two, half in shadow, half in the light, hers must be too. She turns her face away from the window.

“A change might be good,” he continues. “It would allow us to imagine a different future. It would be good for the kids. For us.”

“You want to leave him behind. And what?” She gives a strange laugh. “And start fresh?”

“Yes. No.” There is a choking sound from him and she glances sidelong at her husband, turned now towards the light of the window. He is crying, those shoulders shaking. She doesn’t reach out to him. She stares at the shadow under the cot he sits on, hears the soft mewls of kittens, the tiny scrabble of claws.

“Moving house, moving forward isn’t going to make either of us forget him. Nothing could do that.”

“No. No way. I can’t.”

“Just think about it? Please. Just say you’ll think about it. That you’ll think about us. I can’t do this alone anymore.”

He comes to sit beside her on the cot. It creaks under him. The mother cat pushes open the door and sunlight splits the room, cutting across the cot between them. The cat slinks under the bed. Even from here, Michelle can hear the mother cat purr as the kittens nuzzle into her.

“Please,” he says again. “Think about it.”

She watches him walk out into the bright light, leaving her alone in the shadows.

She leans back against the concrete wall, which is damp and cool. She casts her eyes over the fresh flowers on the round plastic table in front of her. The five of them used to be a lopsided group at their own kitchen table, she and Scott at either end, the head and the foot, Zach and Dylan on one side of her, Astrid on the other. Now, without Dylan, they form a proper foursome. She came home one day to find only four chairs at the kitchen table. It was neat and even and it crushed her. She found Dylan’s chair in the dining room they only ever use for special occasions, celebrations. She couldn’t imagine ever using the dining room again.

Now there is always the empty space of Dylan. No matter how much time passes the space remains, all razored corners and endless depths. Get through the first year, her mother told her, it will get easier. And at first, she desperately wanted that. She wanted not to feel the horror of a world without her son. She kept his name in her mind, on her tongue. And her mother was right, the edges of the pain softened with time. But she needed the pain to stay fresh, constant, not worn smooth with familiarity. If it became too familiar, surely she would accept the loss, maybe even forget it. So one day she stopped speaking his name.

If only there was a way to keep her family frozen in the past, in a single, perfect, eternal moment: the five of them at their dinner table, loud and chaotic, Dylan talking about hockey with Scott, his mouth full, Zach eyeing his phone under the table, Astrid chattering about her garden or the medicine kit she was going to make. She’d insist Astrid take one more bite of vegetables before they could all have dessert. They would laugh at Dylan dancing in his seat to urge her on. Zach would hold up his phone to capture it all.

But they keep moving. Astrid has grown out of all her clothes, and Zach has become ever more sullen. Scott wants them to move. Only Dylan is stuck in time, stuck at who he was. This part of the loss still surprises her. She has pictured him graduate, met his first girlfriend, imagined all the things he could have been. He could have been anything.

She was never prone to nostalgia. She was always looking ahead. She had her life all planned out: university, then a career, marriage, and family. Still, despite her confidence, her plans, she could not have imagined the life of happiness and ease she would have. What has she ever wanted that she didn’t get? She has a husband, a family, a successful career, and when it all happened for her it didn’t surprise her, it just seemed her due. And there was always more to look forward to. There was always a brighter day to come, another spark in the future. For so much of her life, the opportunities for happiness just kept growing.

Michelle never used to think of herself as lucky because she didn’t believe luck had anything to do with it. After all, she’d worked hard for everything she had. And yet she kept hearing it from people, from friends and acquaintances: You’re so lucky. And she knew what her life looked like from the outside. She and Scott were good-looking and fit, and still in love. They never used to argue, not really. They had three children who were as well-behaved, as good as anyone else’s and better than plenty; two boys and a girl, each their own person. A beautiful home where they hosted casual parties. Yearly vacations somewhere warm and safely adventurous.

She was lucky, she knows that now, and if she had thought about it more back then, it should have worried her. She should have known. Luck runs out.