Sitting alone in the half-light of her empty house, Kat wondered at how close she had allowed herself to come to it before regaining her senses. She blamed the studio and its attendant vapors. That familiar light-headedness. Maybe it had all been a kind of delirium, even all those years ago. An intoxication brought about by the fumes. She thought about the way it had been in Paris. The two of them, alone in that small airless room for hours, for days. Seeing no one but each other. She shook her head. It had passed now.
On the phone later that afternoon, she asked if he had made a decision.
“You know what the absurd thing is? It’s not mine anymore. Any of it. The decision, the company—it belongs to the board. To the shareholders.”
“You knew that.” Kat said it quietly.
“I did. I knew it so clearly when we did the IPO. But you forget. You live with something every day and it just feels like it’s yours. Although, apparently I am not the only one to have made that mistake. According to the Mail, not only was I the lone savior of the British tech industry, I am now also solely responsible for its demise.” The anger was gone from his voice. Replaced by an uncharacteristic weariness.
Before she could respond, he continued. “Listen, I want to say I am sorry. I’ve not been there for you.”
“It’s okay. I understand.”
“I know you do. But I don’t want you to have to. This whole thing … everything … has made me realize what matters and it is not the company and it is not the deal.”
“So, you’re coming home?”
“Yes.”
“When?” She took note of her quickening pulse and the overwhelming disorientation about what answer she was hoping for.
“Soon.” A brief pause elongated into something else altogether, prompting him to speak again. “You’re so quiet. Are you still there?”
“I’m still here.”
“We can keep the house. We’ll be in London, most likely, for some of the year.”
It would become another place where she half belonged. She thought of all the places that she belonged more than she belonged here. She belonged to the cold, hard edges of New York; the soft, bruised Paris mornings; the salt air on her tongue and the tickle of sand on her skin. She belonged with her mother. She belonged pressed up against Will’s back, feeling the sweet swell of his breath. But where did she belong now?
Kat put the phone down and glanced at the clock, amazed to find that it was late afternoon. The black-tie fund-raiser for the British Cancer Foundation was tonight.
On her way out of the kitchen to get dressed upstairs, her eye caught on the bright spot provided by a colorful drawing of Will’s taped to the kitchen wall, and she smiled. A rare decorative touch, it provided a sharp contrast to the expanse of empty walls, punctuated only by the four squares of dried paint in the drawing room, their differences indistinguishable in the low light of morning. Underneath it on the counter was a thick green file folder. Her smile disappeared.
A reminder. A relic. She picked it up and carried it upstairs, determined to find a place for it. To put it away somewhere that she did not have to see it. It was all in there. The test results, MRIs, blood work, prescriptions, and chemo schedules traced the arc of her mother’s illness from shock to hope to despair. From the first nagging symptoms and the resulting tests, to the diagnosis, delivered along with a heavy measure of hope—optimistic percentages and new drugs were cited. To the relief from the initial success of treatment, to the despair at its subsequent failure, to the more extreme treatment options—followed by the slow, creeping dawn of realization—heels dug firmly into the ground on the excruciating slide into the end. She knew how this story ended, although the ending itself was not in the file.
The obituary had made her angry. One hundred and fifty-three black words in eight-point type. The number of words, the size of the words, but mostly, the words themselves. Words that had little to do with her mother and the extraordinary woman she had been.
This was a woman who had learned how to ride a bicycle at the age of fifty, who had told bedtime stories so vividly that as a child Kat could still hear the wail of the wind in the trees and smell the yeasty smell of the forest floor while drifting to sleep. A woman whose face, in repose, had an expression that she had only ever seen on the tall porcelain statues in church alcoves. A new bride who had found herself widowed at the age of twenty-nine. Two weeks later, she had discovered that she was pregnant. A woman whose smile hid nothing and whose laughter was so clear to her now, but would fade, she knew.
It is a formula, Jonathan would say to her. There are rules for writing these things. No one expected an obituary to be the measure of a person. It was not even a eulogy. It was simply meant to report certain facts. It did not matter. But it did matter. The audacity of it—these marks on paper—trying to convey a lifetime, or even a moment.
She just wanted them to know all that had been lost on that cold December morning in the sun-filled room with the dark green wallpaper overlooking the park. In the big bed, next to the table filled with the framed photos. Her mother had died on December 21. The winter solstice. She knew from studying Latin that the literal translation of solstice was that the sun stood still. The sun had stood still on the day her mother died. Why hadn’t they said that in the obituary?