That September I was still in my post-Violet fog, but life was starting to enter a sustainable groove. She was sleeping through the night, finally, and we’d spent the last week of August as a family in a rented house in Westhampton Beach. Violet loved the pool, so we slathered her with sunscreen, dropped her in a little inner tube contraption that had an attached hood to block her from the sun, and let her bob around like a tiny buoy while we floated in the pool ourselves. It felt like a small slice of heaven.
“You like it out here,” Darren said later, as Violet bobbed and splashed and the two of us sat on the steps in the shallow end of the pool with cold glasses of Chardonnay.
“You like it out here, too,” I answered, leaning my head on his shoulder.
“I do,” he said. “We should buy a place.”
“Maybe one day,” I told him. “But for now, renting for a week or two each summer sounds pretty ideal to me.”
He nodded. “One day. It’s on my bucket list, remember?”
I hadn’t. “Of course,” I said. “We’ve been bucket-list remiss as of late, I’m afraid.”
He shook his head. “No, we haven’t,” he said. “This year we became parents. That was on our lists.”
I laughed. “That’s right,” I said. “I take it back. We are awesome at bucket lists.”
“We are,” he said, kissing me, while Violet splashed us both.
That’s what I was thinking about that morning on the subway—the week in Westhampton, the pool, how relaxing it was. And then I looked up. The man across from me was holding a copy of the New York Times. The article facing me said: More Bodies Pulled from Hotel Rubble in Pakistan. My mind went straight to you. Were you in Pakistan? Last I’d seen you were in Baghdad, but could you have moved? Or been covering something in Islamabad? Could you have been staying at that hotel?
I couldn’t breathe properly until I’d gotten to work, logged into Facebook and seen the Associated Press article you posted about the hotel. You knew people who had been killed in the explosion, but you hadn’t been. You were still in Iraq.
“Oh, thank God,” I whispered. Then I scrolled down your page, curious to see what you’d been up to. A little broken heart icon jumped out at me. You and Alina had broken up. I wondered what had happened, and truly, I felt bad. I wanted you to be happy. I thought for a moment about reaching out to you, but I didn’t.
My day went on, my week, my month, but you were in my thoughts more than you had been since Violet was born. I kept my eye out for your photographs. I wondered if you were going to make it back to New York any time soon, and if you did, if you’d let me know.