I touch my face. My cheeks are damp. My eyes are tight and swollen, painful around the edges. I sit up in bed, fumbling for the lamp. In my dream-blurred state, I imagine the water everywhere. Soaking through my mattress, pooling on the floor, dripping steadily into my lungs.
how could you do that to me
In the bathroom, I examine my reflection. I’ve been crying. My eyelids are a stinging pink, my skin tight and sticky from dried tears. The evidence of crying renders my features unfamiliar. My nose is narrower than I remember; a pale brown freckle above my lip is jarring. I peel back my top lip to examine my teeth. The incisors are crooked. It’s as if someone reached into my mouth and nudged them askew.
It’s been so long since I cried. I never cried, right after it happened. I never let myself.
Back in bed, I make myself as small as I can, curling up and clutching my elbows. The tears have stopped; they don’t even feel like my tears, but like something dragged from inside my body by force. What disturbs me is the sensation that filled my brain during those first few moments after waking. The heavy knowledge that nobody would come looking for me.
Do you know what it’s like to lose somebody before they’re even dead?”
Beth Olsen’s voice holds a dogged resolve, as if she’s finally releasing words that have grown in the dark for too long.
“People have been so nice, since Amber died,” Ms. Olsen goes on. “I’ve had all the frozen meals and flowers and everything. I appreciate it. I do. But I almost want people to stop talking about her.” The quick glance at me, gauging my reaction. “Amber was exactly what people expected her to be. Her friends called her inspirational, or a fighter. Amber left the church when she was a teenager, but she’d started praying again. And anything that made her happier was fine by me.” She looks at her hands, pressed together on her lap. “It’s only now that she’s gone that I can admit how miserable it made me sometimes.”
Ms. Olsen has coarse auburn hair. Her serious face is lightened by freckles. In my favorite photo of her and Amber, they sit at the edge of a balcony during a party, the other guests hazy faces around them. I see the bend of Ms. Olsen’s head, as if she’s muting everyone else to focus on her girlfriend, and Amber’s sweet, secretive smile.
I shift in my chair. Patrick hasn’t scheduled a new encounter in three days. Since he first stepped across the threshold of Room 12, his presence has become the most consistent thing in my life. He’s the point I wait for. And though my clients can be unpredictable, scheduling encounters based on their own private patterns of pain and optimism, the suddenness of Patrick’s departure opens a deep pit inside my chest.
“We were outsiders together,” Ms. Olsen is saying. “In high school, we were always on the fringes.” She laughs under her breath. “We had a mean sense of humor, when you put us together. But that’s what was so addictive. Even the worst thought that went through my head, Amber wouldn’t just listen to it, she would understand it.”
Her eyes take on the fixedness of suppressed tears.
“I really miss that side of Amber,” she says. “It was her battle to fight. But God, I miss her, the way she used to be. That dark sense of humor. And the worst thing is when they keep telling me she’s in a better place. What was so wrong with being here?”
Her voice holds a naked plea. I reach for the tissue box, extending it vaguely, as if I’m offering it to someone else and she just happens to be nearby. But Ms. Olsen smiles and shakes her head, holding up one palm.
“Listen, I’d give anything to spend an hour with her, being assholes again,” she says. “It’s like I lost time with her before she even died. I was cheated. Do you know what I mean?”
For the first time in years, the distance I’ve maintained between my clients’ lives and my own has snapped shut, leaving us uncomfortably close, breathing the same suffocating air.
“Let’s begin, Ms. Olsen,” I say.
Patrick hasn’t returned to the Elysian Society for over a week.
Everything in my life has become an attempt at distraction. Evenings after work are the hardest. I remove the battery from my clock. I start drinking, burning swallows of whiskey, acrid glassfuls of wine. When I’ve been drinking, my brain is safer, as if someone has padded it with cotton. I can handle my thoughts more directly. Even the volatile ones.
I chased Patrick Braddock away. I was too greedy, reaching out to him too openly. Our last discussion must have clarified an ugly truth for him.
And Sylvia. Sylvia.
If Patrick leaves, I don’t know what will happen to his wife. After it’s clear that he’s not coming back, she still might stay inside me, metastasizing through my organs until nobody can tell us apart, or she might leave. A parasite deserting a starving host; a stowaway swimming from a sinking ship.
Sylvia’s presence in my life is both intimate and unknowable. Even as I feel her stirring beneath my skin, there’s a disconnection. I don’t know whether she’s drawn to me or whether her presence here is as inextricably attached to her husband as a shadow cast by his body.
And I’m not sure which fate I prefer, if it comes to it. To let Sylvia devour me or to be entirely alone again, abandoned inside my skin.
My outfit borrows the anonymity of my Elysian Society dress and merges it with bland respectability. Gray linen, boxy jacket. Paired with my colorless complexion, the clothes wash me out. I rub Sylvia’s lipstick on my fingertip and then over my lips, seeing my face come alive.
The Damsons live in an area I don’t recognize. A domesticated breed of wealth, hiding its privilege in a show of quaintness. Older houses, small flower gardens out front. A few colorful riding toys are posed on lawns, beneath gingerbread trim and ivy trellises. Tied to someone’s front porch railings, a bouquet of Mylar birthday balloons stir and sway, just starting to droop.
Viv Damson opens her door a few dragging minutes after I ring the bell. She’s wearing a baggy shirt with one button done wrong, leaving a buckling gap. Yellow-blond hair gathered in a topknot, her cheeks shimmering with a dusting of powder. “Lucy, right?” she asks. “Come in, come in, please. Sorry for the mess.”
She leads me into their dining room, an open floor plan that spreads into the kitchen. Viv has to shift aside a sliding stack of magazines and chunky board books to clear a space on the table; I arrange a blank notebook on the table while she gets me a drink. It’s a cheerfully untidy house, the air saturated with the lingering scents of old milk and hand soap and baby wipes. A doll lies on the floor, one eye cocked shut to show a stiff spray of lashes. A swift jealousy, something like homesickness, moves through me.
“Thank you for agreeing to be part of this study, Mrs. Damson,” I say, when Viv returns with a diet soda.
“Oh God, I’m happy to do it,” Viv says, waving her hand: mint-colored nail polish, a delicate shard of diamond in her ring. “This is happening at the perfect time. For some reason, I’ve been thinking about her these days. So it’s super lucky that you”—she gestures at me, as if otherwise I won’t know myself—“popped up when you did, Lucy.” A pause. “It’s fine to call you Lucy, right?”
“Of course.” I hurry past the ache the name opens inside my chest. “It’s been about a year and a half since your loss?”
“Well, more than that now. Um, a year and a half?” Viv crosses her arms over her chest, unwinds them and places her hands on her knees. Catching my gaze, she laughs. “It’s hard to know what to do with my hands when the baby’s down for a nap.”
It’s later in the day, half past four. I’d been wondering where the baby is, where Mr. Damson is. I’m hungry to meet Henry in the flesh. This colleague of Patrick’s. Someone who must greet him every day, know a more consistent version of him than I do.
“When we lost Sylvia, I’d just found out I was pregnant,” Viv says. She’s hushed now, a purposefully somber tone. “It was weird. Something so good happening and then, a few weeks later, something so terrible. I was over the moon about the baby.” Viv’s hand flutters to her stomach as if a version of the child remains there permanently. “Then we ran into Sylvia that weekend. You know, she was the first person other than Henry to even know about the baby?”
“Is that so?”
“I asked her to be the baby’s godmother,” Viv says. Her eyes gleam, the familiar glazing of tears. All my clients have a different way of managing tears: banishing them, indulging them. Viv is the indulging type. Dewiness builds on her lashes. “I just wanted her to be part of Ben’s life. Sylvia didn’t have kids yet, but I saw the way other people’s kids would gravitate to her.”
“Being a godmother is an honor,” I say.
Viv gazes at the ceiling. “God, I’m rambling. You need to tell me what to say.”
“Could you share more about Sylvia, if it’s not too painful? What she was like, her home life?” Seeing Viv’s expression shift into confusion, I hedge: “It would give me a clearer image of your recovery process to know more about your loved one.”
“Well, sure,” Viv says. “Patrick and my big brother knew each other growing up. When Patrick and I ended up in the same area, my brother put me in touch. The Braddocks and I started getting together. Just casually. I clicked with Sylvia. And Henry, my husband? He works with Patrick. We met through the Braddocks. So, I really owe everything I have to them.”
“Have you kept in close touch with Patrick since—?”
Viv presses her lips together. Her face tightens briefly. “We haven’t seen him lately. Just the shock of everything. And the baby. It’s been hard.”
I make note of this. “That’s understandable. Sometimes grief can push apart surviving relationships. Would you say Patrick and Sylvia were a happy couple overall?”
Viv waits for a moment before starting to answer, words caught in the damp hollow of her lips. I lean forward, magnetized by this clue into the Braddocks’ lives. But there’s a sudden noise behind us. The slam of a door, heavy footsteps. The atmosphere shifts to make room for the new presence. Viv’s face brightens as if she’s released from a spell.
“Henry,” she says, tilting her head to look behind me. “This is Lucy, the woman who said she’d come by? Lucy, this is my husband.”
For a strange moment, I don’t want to turn my head. I don’t want to meet his eyes. Then I do, putting on a professionally distant smile. Mr. Damson is dark-haired and bearded, bulkier than Patrick. Good-looking in a brusque way.
“I apologize for barging in on you ladies like this,” he says.
We shake hands. His grip is firm and energetic.
“How’s it been going?” He’s addressing his wife, but Henry’s gaze loiters on my mouth. I remember that I blotted my lips with Sylvia’s lipstick. I shouldn’t have worn such a severe color; Viv didn’t seem to notice, but Henry’s questioning look turns me into someone suspicious.
“She was just asking about Patrick,” Viv supplies.
“You’ve worked with him for some time, Mr. Damson?” I ask, limply curious.
“Oh God, must be about four years,” Henry says. “Four years this summer.”
I imagine him scrawling his signature on a sympathy card passed throughout the office. A terse, inadequate message: So sorry for your loss.
“I was telling her, honey, that we haven’t been in touch with Patrick lately,” Viv says. She taps her nails on the tabletop. “Should we invite him for dinner?”
“Braddock? No.” Henry’s dismissal hurts for a second, as if it’s aimed at me. “He wouldn’t come. He keeps to himself these days. Barely talks to the rest of us.”
Viv darts a sheepish look at me. “Yes, but he needs his friends now more than ever.”
It feels like a belated show of compassion, mostly for my sake. Henry’s at the fridge, leaning down, the front of his body washed pale blue. “Yeah, well,” he says. “If you think it will help, invite him over. But I’d lay money he won’t show.”
Viv starts as if she’s received a shock: “I have to deal with that,” she says, and it’s only when she’s hurrying from the room and up the stairs that I hear the ragged cry of the baby.
Henry saunters back to the dining room table, standing nearby like a sentinel as I slip my notebook back into my bag. His presence turns me jumpy, aware of a slight charge in the air between us. I straighten to meet Henry’s eyes squarely: he’s shorter than Patrick, closer to my height.
“What did I hear you asking, anyway?” he asks. “When I came in.”
“Oh.” I trace back. “I believe I was asking whether the Braddocks were happy.”
His expression shifts, almost too rapid to catch. Like a dark shape beneath the surface of water, gone before I can be sure I even saw its outline. “Strange question,” he says.
“Understanding these dynamics illuminates the bigger picture of moving on from a loss.”
His eyes on mine are steady. “So are you going to ask me?”
I look at him mutely.
“Ask me if they were happy,” he clarifies.
I hear Viv and the baby in the upstairs room, Viv’s soothing coos and murmurs. The sunlight streams through the windows to highlight the faint stains on the chairs’ upholstery, a bowl of some gluey substance on the countertop. This monotonous image of ordinary life hurts. A throb of nostalgia that I haven’t felt in years.
At the door, I turn, intending to thank him for the visit. Henry’s watching me as if he’s trying to place me; it’s the type of intently open gaze that people usually try to hide once they’re caught. But Henry doesn’t falter.
The question pushes out before I can stop it. “Were they happy, Mr. Damson?” I ask.
“No,” he says, just before he shuts the door.