While Marina and Lena order large Styrofoam bowls of pho thick with fish sauce and shrimp, Dylan sits in our front yard on the grass that has started to brown for lack of attention. He sits next to the memorial stone and the compartment he jimmied open with a flathead screwdriver. While I continue to weep, he unfolds my pages of notebook paper, rippled with moist air and starting to yellow at the edges, and he sits and reads. I wonder if he can hear my sorrow through the words.
When he’s finished, he goes into the house and calls Denica. I can’t read my son now. I don’t know what his calm means. He tells Denica our story. Our true story.
“Now I know why it’s always seemed like Mom was right here,” he says.
“Everyone I know who’s lost their mom feels the same way,” Denica says. “The feeling doesn’t go away, it just takes new shapes.”
“She didn’t abandon us—Dad did. I feel like everything I believed about my parents was wrong.”
“Was it wrong, or was it just a limited view?”
He thinks about it. “Is there a difference?”
“You don’t really think your dad abandoned you, do you?”
Dylan doesn’t answer.
The night Misty died, the neighboring rental property was empty. Still, I shut off the outdoor lights and worked by the moon. The crashing surf masked the scraping noise of my digging. I cleaned the wounds on her head and arm. The ground was wet and cold. I slipped her pretty shoes back onto her perfect feet. I wrapped her shoulders in one of Dylan’s soft blankets. I kissed her wedding ring and promised to always wear my own. And I buried my wife in that shallow grave where we would never be apart, where no one would misunderstand our story. Because people who don’t understand will judge.
This is the truth: we all tell the stories that we want to believe. We tell them for so long that we forget what we really know. Occasionally we convince others to believe them too.
In the end, Misty’s psychotic delusions were more lucid than my sense of reality. She knew I would kill her. She knew I would turn to Sara.
I leaned the shovel against the house.
I tamped the ground.
I righted and cleaned the fallen table. I packed up our children in Misty’s sedan and drove them to Sara’s apartment, where I knew they would be loved while I was recreating their future. Because a father who then drives their mother’s car to a place where he can invent her suicide is not truly loving them, though that’s what he thinks he’s doing.
Sam Raglan and the concrete company sealed the truth at sunrise while I was away, and when I returned, I had a new story to tell. An amalgam of truth and deception. And I told it over and over and over and over, turning it like a concrete mixer, until it became a blend that I could call 100 percent pure.
I told it to Misty’s parents—Please don’t drive down today. She’s run off. Wait and see if she comes to you. I’ll look south.
I told it to the sheriff—We had a fight. She cut herself with that fork. She sped off without the kids. I took them to Sara’s and then went looking for her. But she’s unstable. She has this illness. I’m so worried. Look, she wrote a note on the back of this picture.
I told it to Sara—She found out about us. She couldn’t cope. Her history with you was too long.
I told it to my children—Your mother loved you. If she’d been in her right mind she would have stayed. She never meant to hurt you.
My will instructs my children to reduce me to ashes and cast me out to sea. It’s a common request that shouldn’t raise any eyebrows, coming from a man born and raised on sand. That’s all I considered when I first put this wish in writing and handed it to my attorney, Jamie Blythe.
But now the truth is out: I don’t want to hear the sounds of a shovel’s blade cutting the earth even at my own funeral.
Deputy Wasson reads my pages too, and this is less shameful to me than when Dylan and Marina and Sara and Lena and even Ian and Denica eventually take their turns poring over my car-rattled writing. I expect the sheriff to judge. I don’t hope she’ll understand, or forgive. Her frowning scrutiny is only the beginning of what I deserve.
She releases Sara and orders a GPR survey of our porch. Ground-penetrating radar is effective through tile and concrete. They find Misty in a matter of minutes. They free her a few days later with a violence that insults the care I gave in burying her. A jackhammer, a demolition saw, a breaking chisel. The bougainvillea trellis has to come down. Marina and her grandmother watch from the living room window in shock that might never wear off. Dylan stands on the lawn as close as the crews will allow, imagining me stooped where that crime scene investigator is bent over now. My son glares, arms crossed. Sara’s hand on his shoulder. Shattered red tiles and hot-pink petals littering the grass at their feet.
In the theater built for me by powers I can’t understand, I collapse in my seat. I curl my head down to rest between my knees and grab the back of my head with both hands.
“How could I forget? How dare I forget?”
“You didn’t forget. You decided to believe something else.”
Hide me. Take me. End this pain.