Chapter Three

Bill Rogers, state highway patrolman, was gone. Dane sat alone in the City Hospital waiting room, feeling stung, Rogers’s words echoing in his brain like some mantra: “dead at the scene, dead at the scene.” Dane laughed, bitter, and thought the words should be set to music. Rogers had tried—not too hard because it wasn’t working—to comfort him by saying that, when that drunk driver had swerved into Katy, causing her SUV to flip, she was “killed instantly.” It was like his wife had won the death lottery, the best way to go. Killed instantly. Woo-hoo.

How did Bill Rogers know, anyway? How did he know she didn’t feel terror, loss, and pain in mere seconds as her life rushed out of her like water swirling around a drain, faster and faster? No one knew, or could ever know, what Katy’s final moments might have been like. Had her life flashed before her eyes? Had she been happy with what she saw? Had she felt loved?

Was she now in some dark but warm corridor that Dane imagined as the interior of a softly beating heart, moving toward a welcoming light where she knew loved ones who had passed on before waited with open minds, hearts, and arms? Or was she hovering above this very waiting room, watching Dane as he waited for his kids to arrive?

Did she, watching, at last see her husband for who he really was? Did she finally see his secrets? Did death give her the capacity to still love him despite what she saw? Did she understand why he’d worn a mask all these years? Did she know, in her stilled heart, that in spite of everything, Dane had really loved her? That he had no regrets?

Or if she were here, floating somewhere near the ceiling, was she disappointed in what she saw in her husband?

Dane felt guilty he wasn’t a wreck. He wanted to pinch himself hard to perhaps start the flow of tears. Yet for all the stinging numbness within him—and there was a wall of it, rising—he couldn’t manage a single tear.

He felt, pardon the expression, dead. He wondered if he was in shock. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? When he got up that morning, preparing to head back to the school where he taught after the summer off, the world was normal. Now it had been spun around, turned upside down, changed so completely that nothing would ever be the same again.

This numbness, this lack of emotion, felt weird, like an alien presence had invaded his body and mind. As the minutes ticked by, Dane would remind himself where he was and what had happened. He would forget for whole minutes, staring, blinking at the sterile waiting room, uncomprehending. He would have to pull his location up in his head—City Hospital—and would have to grope for the reason he was there. Had he hurt himself? When a cursory check of his own body showed no wounds, the truth and the reason he was there would all rush back—cruelly.

His sport coat, the blue-and-black-checked one that looked so good with jeans, was on the chair beside him. Dane would stare at it in his worst moments, wondering to whom it belonged.

He tried to bring himself to the present, to feel something by remembering his last moments with Katy, that morning in their kitchen. She had made him a lunch—Tupperware filled with tomatoes and green onions from her garden, some feta cheese, olive oil, and a little red wine vinegar. To this she had added one of those pouches of tuna and a Granny Smith apple. Everything was packed neatly into a brown paper bag.

Dane had looked through it, rummaging through the bag, and then up at her, peering suspiciously into her brown eyes. “What is this? No chips? No little Hostess cupcake?” He cocked his head. “Are you saying I need to lose weight?”

In response she had patted his gut, which they both knew had been expanding little by little over the past decade, but Katy was too kind to tell Dane he was getting a bit of a beer belly. “Of course not, sweetie. I just think we need to eat healthier.” She had pressed the bag in, toward his chest. “You take this. I made the same for Clarissa and Joey too.”

“They’ll never eat it. Joey will want to get a cheeseburger in the cafeteria, and Clarissa will probably have, oh, I don’t know, a bottled water, and maybe a Tic Tac if she’s really famished.”

Katy shrugged, sat down at the table, and sipped her coffee. “All I can do is try with you guys.”

“Well, thanks, babe. But I think I’ll pass.” He’d left the lunch on the kitchen table, and the last thing he did, he remembered now, was to kiss her—not on the lips, but on the top of her head, as though she were a child rather than a wife. And the last thing he said to the woman who would be dead only a few hours later? He had looked down at the part in her auburn hair and remarked, “You need to touch up these roots. I can see gray.”

She had slapped his butt and told him to be on his way. “And take the lunch I made for you with you!”

But he hadn’t. And the image of the little brown paper bag sitting on the kitchen table was what finally caused him to lower his head and let out an anguished cry. Why hadn’t he taken it? Why hadn’t he said something nice to her? Why hadn’t he thanked her? Why hadn’t he given her a proper kiss?

He covered his face with his hands and wept, the tears coming at last like some sort of emotional tsunami. He had wanted the tears to be there when the ER doctor had spoken to him, saying words like fractured this, internal bleeding, ruptured that. Dane had tuned the doctor out. It. Was. Not. Real. He had wanted to weep when a nurse came by, in pink scrubs with a smock imprinted with balloons, to try to offer him comfort. But he didn’t need it then. He felt embarrassed and ashamed of his dry eyes and his bearing, which radiated the fact that he was doing A-OK.

What did it matter, anyway, who witnessed his grief? What did it matter that an image of a brown paper bag, stained a bit darker at the bottom with a little olive oil, abandoned on a kitchen table, just about tore his heart in two?

The only people he really cared about seeing him in this pitiable state were his children. For them he needed to be strong.

But it was too late. He heard Clarissa’s voice before he saw her.

“Dad?” She sounded scared. “Dad? What’s going on?”

And when he looked up, through his tear-blurred vision, he saw his baby girl and his little man. They’d taken two of the plastic seats on either side of him. He’d been crying so hard he hadn’t even heard them come in. He looked over Joey’s shoulder and saw a woman had also crept into the waiting room just behind his children. She was no one he knew, simply an old woman in a summer housedress, one his mom called a shift, sensible shoes, gray hair, and a handbag balanced on her knees beneath her folded, careworn hands. He wanted to ask her if she was here for her husband. Was it serious? Would he be all right? Did she spend much time in rooms like this?

He wanted to do anything except talk to his children. To do so would cement this moment in their young lives as one they would never forget, and not for a good reason. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Yeah, the natural order of things had parents dying first. But not like this, not when there was a young girl just trying on what it felt like to be a woman. Not when there was a kid who was just leaving being a little boy behind yet, damn it, needed his mother once in a while to tuck him in at night. Parents mostly did die first, but in Dane’s mind it was when they were old and gray, when they had held a grandbaby in their arms and looked up with pride and tears at the child who had carried on with the family legacy.

No one should lose a mother this young, Dane thought. It just wasn’t right.

He looked at Clarissa, who had the same auburn hair and brown eyes as her mother. Sixteen going on thirty, too thin for her own good but always looking in the mirror for errant fat, for a need to diet more and eat less. Now there was expectancy in those dark eyes, the anticipation of something heavy about to be lowered, the agony of waiting for something awful to come. Clarissa was like he had been when he had driven over here after getting the state highway patrolman’s call—wishing, hoping, praying for an alternate reality, a world where things were bad, yes, of course, but not too bad. Now, in this space between waiting and the big truth, there was safety, there was hope. How could Dane take that away?

He turned his head to look at his son. He was only twelve! That was far too tender an age for a boy to lose his mother! What would he do without her? Could Dane fill her shoes, even in small ways? Joey stared straight ahead, once in a while gnawing at a hangnail on the edge of his thumb. Joey looked more like Dane, big, raw-boned, already over six feet, towering over his classmates. His hair was coarse, the color of straw, his eyes the dark blue of a newborn. Despite his size, there was such innocence to that face. Joey’s jawline and nose, which Dane knew from his own countenance would one day be strong, angularly defined, were now softer, waiting for time to shape them.

He didn’t want to take that innocence away prematurely.

How to break it to them?

Clarissa, unwittingly, urged him on.

“Dad? Dad, what’s going on? Some cop picked us up at the bus stop outside of school and brought us here. He wouldn’t tell us anything. What’s happening? Is it Mom? Is she okay?”

With every word, every searching gaze, Clarissa said the same thing—lie to me. She knew as well as Dane had, driving to the hospital, that the game was over, the final bell had rung, but accepting that was another step, another progression in a journey neither her feet nor her mind and heart wanted to take.

Dane got it.

He grabbed Clarissa’s hand, clutched it tight, and swiveled to look at Joey, who wouldn’t look back but continued to simply stare ahead. Dane turned back to Clarissa and drew in a shuddering breath, wiping away tears he was just now aware dampened his face. He tried to sit up straighter.

He couldn’t say the words. Later he would think that what his tortured psyche allowed him to say was worse than uttering the simple truth. “She’ll want something simple.”

“What?” Clarissa asked.

“She’ll want it simple. Her funeral. Wildflowers and, uh, some classical music, something not sad. Bach? I don’t know!” He snorted. “What do I know about classical? I used to think Billy Joel was high class.”

“Dad?” Clarissa looked at him, blinking, her expression slack, expectant.

He reached out, desperately stroked her masses of reddish hair, his hand getting tangled up in it. He was trapped. He let his hand hang in her hair, feeling stupid. “She’s gone, honey.” He looked to Joey, who at last stared back. His eyes were filled with tears yet to spill.

To Joey he said, in an emotionless whisper as official as that patrolman’s, “Your mother was killed in an accident involving a drunk driver this afternoon. When paramedics arrived, she was already gone.” He turned back to Clarissa, managing to finally free his hand from her hair but clutching her with his other hand so hard that, when he looked down at their hands, they had both gone white, bloodless. “They said she was ‘dead at the scene’ and that—” His voice broke; he couldn’t help it. A sob escaped like a hiccup. “And that she didn’t suffer.” He said the words he’d thought so foolish and futile earlier. “She was, um, taken instantly.” He repeated, as much for his kids as for himself, “She didn’t feel any pain.”

And his kids, God bless them, became the parents for just a little while. Both Clarissa and Joey, as if born to it, knew to gather around their father. They knelt in front of him and at his side and wrapped their arms around him, holding him as he sobbed.

They cried too. There were no admonishments—wisely—from either child, telling him things would be okay (they wouldn’t, no, not ever) or that they would get through this together. None of them knew at this point, Dane thought, how the broken path of their lives would affect their futures as they moved forward uncertainly with grief and rage as their companions.

It seemed like they were frozen in this little fractured family tableau for much longer than the time that actually passed, which had to have been only a few minutes at most. But in that moment where time stood still, Dane felt both joy, horror, and shame. Joy because he had these children, these products of his and his Katy’s love, and it was more consolation, he thought, than he deserved.

The horror and shame came from the crashing and crushing realization that, with Katy gone, his secret self could finally emerge. He could lay down the shield and the sword, cast off the mask. And the thought of doing that terrified him.

He eased away from his daughter’s and son’s caresses and stood. “Come on. We need to get home. There are a lot of things to be done. Calls to make. Arrangements.”

He started from the waiting room, expecting Clarissa and Joey to follow, but they didn’t. He looked back to see two lumps in orange plastic chairs. Wet faces and open mouths, trying to breathe.

“Come on,” Dane urged gently.

Joey at last spoke, his voice a quiver, five years old again. “Are we just gonna leave Mommy here?” His voice went up, breaking on the word “Mommy.” He seemed panicked. “We can’t just leave her,” he whispered.

Dane walked back, knelt before his son. He brushed hair off his forehead, digging deep for some vestige of strength he must have somewhere—he had to—and said, “We’re not leaving her here.” Dane let his hand slide down to the boy’s cheek. “Because she’s not here. What’s here is a shell. You know? Your mom went to heaven when that car ran into her.” Dane, at this moment, wasn’t sure what he believed in as far as an afterlife. But he did believe that Joey was not too old for fairy tales, and if the idea of heaven was a small comfort to the boy, by God, he would believe in it, if only for the immediate present. “She’s in heaven, Joey. What will stay here is kind of like a husk.” He let his hand drop to his son’s sweaty hand and squeezed. “She’s with us right now, and she always will be. You can bet she’s looking down on us, expecting us to do the right thing. Do right by her.” He tugged at the boy’s hand. “Come on now. Let’s go home.”

Clarissa was standing now, and she neared them. “It’s what she would have wanted, Joey.”

Dane stood, too, and his eyes met his daughter’s in a kind of understanding. She had grown up a lot in these last few moments.

Dane drew both of his kids close, his arms draped over their shoulders as they headed toward the green Exit sign, toward a future that was as terrifying as it was uncertain.

Dane paused as they reached the corridor that would lead them outside and felt as Joey had— They were just leaving her there?

How could they? How could he?

He drew in a breath, shut his eyes, and thought of his wife as she was as a young girl, a teenager at Ohio State University. She was in front of a bulletin board in her dorm, and she was smiling at him as if she already knew him, already knew the future they would share, and asked, “You’re Dane, right?”