Nick was dead. The memories of the morning he was buried aren’t strung together in my mind in one long continuous chain, but more like a patchwork quilt stitched together loosely. Strange details remain vivid, like the fact that the sleeves on the simple black dress I had chosen were too long. They came down almost to my knuckles and irritated me. I yanked at the sleeves all day long but the material was slippery and fell back down within seconds. And my nose kept running, partly as a result of my nonstop crying and partly because it was cold outside. I do remember the cold. It was only early September but the stiff Portland air came in off the bay and poked at my face like needles, making my long wool coat feel like nothing more than a sweater. I also remember the shiny surface of the casket. If I close my eyes and concentrate I can still see the grain of the cherry wood. I watched as they lowered that polished box into the hole with my husband inside. One white rose was visible amongst the dirt that had been scattered across the top. I stared at that rose and found that I couldn’t look away. People were leaving but I didn’t look up to watch them go. I sat there in my black dress, thin coat, and runny nose until a cold hand took my wrist.
“Mackenzie, are you ready to go now? Everyone’s gone back to the house.” I looked up, always surprised by how tall Samantha was. She stood nearly six feet even in flat boots. Her blonde hair was pulled back tight; tiny tendrils had broken free and danced in her face.
“He gave me white roses on my birthday last year, remember?” I asked. I continued to stare at the freshly dug hole. “I need a few minutes alone. To say good-bye.”
“Okay, I’ll wait in the car for you. Take your time.” Her words were soft as she turned and headed for the gate.
I squatted near the gravesite and stared at his coffin. I should have felt some emotion. Something. And although there were tears, I was numb. It was like that black hole that would caress my husband’s body forever was really in me. I was the black hole. Hollow, echoing and empty. That numbness followed me from the grave all the way to the car.
The gray roughness of the Casco Bay was a blur through the window on the slow drive back to the house. I lifted my head to get a better look at the water as we moved along. It was cold, dark, ugly. A ship hugged the harbor, fishermen dressed in various shades of rubber busied about the docks talking in huddles, loading, unloading crates of lobster and shrimp. Once this sight would have made me feel at home, alive, content. It was where I’d grown up, where I’d spent most of my thirty-one years, it was where I belonged. So much time, hours upon happy hours, I’d spent in Old Port as a child, eating, walking by those docks. Now, as the car sped by, the smell of raw seafood, the sounds of seagulls fighting over bits of rotten fish and garbage, nauseated me. The harbor looked bleak, industrial, unwelcoming. The city hadn’t changed much at all but over time everything inside me had.
I closed my eyes briefly and took a breath, determined to erase that fatal drive to Boston from my mind, the argument we were having when the white truck slammed into us, the impact. Nick flying forward and then sideways across me. My face hitting the airbag. Blinding light, grinding metal and blood. So much blood. It covered his face, splashed across the dashboard. It was on me. All over me. Days later I would sit up in bed from the deepest of sleeps, screaming, still wiping at my arms trying to get the feeling of his blood from my body. That feeling would never really leave me, I knew.
I glanced over at Samantha. She’d been quiet during the ride; her eyes were partially shut. She’d been my closest friend for as long as I could remember, kindergarten maybe, and had endured each blow in my life with me. This particular loss seemed to take a toll on her. She looked exhausted, spent.
“It’s going to be fine, Sam,” I murmured.
She rubbed her forehead and nodded. “I’m sure it will. But you can’t hold everything in like this. It makes me nervous.”
My silence and steadfast refusal to discuss the accident had upset her. I tried but I couldn’t. The graphic details were mine and mine alone and right now I had them mostly where I wanted them. Tucked carefully in the back of my head in an airtight compartment. Until I tried to sleep and then like Houdini they escaped captivity and danced provocatively before me making me weep and scream until my voice was a whisper. I could only control my conscious thoughts and I refused to give up that teeny pretense of power over my own mind. Not now.
Nick had extensive abdominal injuries as well as a crushed spine when he was finally extracted from the wreckage and rushed to the nearest hospital. A team of doctors with long serious faces told me they needed to try and stabilize him before they could take him into surgery.
Nick wasn’t going to live. I knew it when I looked at his misshapen form connected to tubes and hoses. I knew it when he started mumbling what seemed to be death bed confessions to me quickly, as if his time was about to run out. What began as fragmented lucid conversation twisted into morphine inspired cycles of self disclosure.
In the five years I had known him, he had been resolutely silent about his past. He told me both of his parents died when he was sixteen, within months of one another. Family friends took custody and moved him to Maine to finish high school. He said little more. It had been a strange uncomfortable void in our relationship but I never pressed him because I assumed it was all so painful.
I didn’t leave his side during those hours before he was finally rushed into surgery to repair the constant bleed from his pancreas. Each time he opened his mouth, I leaned in to listen to the whispers that escaped on exhaled breath. It was an elaborate maze of disjointed thoughts about a house in Philadelphia where he had grown up. Whenever he drifted off, he would wake and begin again to describe the stone structure, the woods that surrounded it, filled with twisted paths and a swimming hole. He told me he could never go back again because something terrible had happened there. In the end it was just a hash of stories without endings. This house had haunted him in some way, if only in his dreams.
The doctors told me not to pay too much attention; he had suffered severe internal injuries, and his concussion might have impaired his thought, speech and reasoning centers. But it was in these scattered moments that I felt closer to my husband than in all the moments that had come before.
“You have to go. Find the house. Just don’t trust them. None of them. No matter what, don’t trust them,” he’d said.
“Why? Where is this house?” I leaned down near his mouth to catch his words.
“Promise you’ll go. On your mother’s grave.” He was becoming visibly upset.
“Shhh.”
His face was unrecognizable, almost twice its normal size from impact against the dashboard. His eyes were two purple balloons. I could see only a hint of a pupil through one of the bloody slits. “I want you to bury me here, in Maine. Not Philadelphia.”
I choked back tears. “Nick you aren’t going to die.”
“No. This is important. After the funeral someone will contact you, to go to Philadelphia. It will all make sense. But when you get there, you have to go to the house. It’s the only way.”
“The only way to what?”
“If you don’t, as soon as they know I’m dead, they’ll come after you.”
“What are you talking about?” I squeezed his hand.
“They’ll come after you. Hurt or even kill you. The only way to end this is to get to them first. Stay there. Find James.” These last words floated off into the air as he was wheeled from the room.