Chapter 3

On the ride home, Elizabeth kept thinking about the strange meeting. The odd things the old man had told her. How the spirits of the dead remained where they died. How he spoke to his wife, the connection he felt at, what were they called? Descansos. Resting places. Of course, it was all utter nonsense. Even a little creepy, what she imagined a séance being like. What unnerved her most, perhaps, was how he’d known she had lost someone. She supposed it could have been just a lucky guess, but it felt as if he knew her son had died. How weird was that? Despite all this, some part of her had responded to the old man, had felt a genuine sympathy for him. Here he was visiting his wife on the anniversary of her death. Kneeling there in the pouring rain. Bringing her roses. Talking to her as if she were still among the living. Though weird, it was also touching.

Elizabeth then thought of what he’d said about cemeteries. How he didn’t feel any connection to his wife’s grave. It made her think of the cemetery where her son was buried. They’d had to do so much in those Valium-filled days following the accident—buying a cemetery plot, making funeral arrangements, a thousand other trivial details. It was Zack who had flown out to New Mexico to take care of returning Luke’s remains (there was that word again), while Elizabeth had stayed behind and arranged the funeral and took sympathy calls from friends. She’d had to pick out a coffin, write an obituary for the local paper, even buy a suit (Luke hadn’t owned one). She had to go into a men’s store in New Haven and pick one out. For some reason she hadn’t told the salesman it was for her dead son. At one point he’d said to her, “It might be easier if your son just came in to be measured.” In the past year, she had gone to the cemetery three, maybe four times, dutifully carrying flowers, as well as her dual burdens of sadness and guilt. She would kneel at the grave site, staring at the letters carved into the cold granite as if they were some strange hieroglyphic whose meaning she couldn’t decipher: Luke James Gerlacher, July 16, 1992–August 12, 2013. The stone and the grave site seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with her son. Even less with herself. She was never quite sure what she was supposed to feel there, but she certainly didn’t feel anything as tangible as Luke’s spirit, didn’t feel the slightest “connection” to him. Mostly what she felt was a generalized numbness, an odd distance, almost as if she’d left her body and was hovering a few feet above watching this other woman go through the motions of grief. She would hear her say, Hi, Sweetheart. It’s Mommy. Or, I miss you so much. Or, Are you all right, dear?

Regrets—she recalled the old man saying that to her. What was he implying? Had it just been one of those general statements one offered to a person who’d suffered a great loss, something as vague and applicable and ultimately meaningless as a fortune cookie saying “You will receive good news soon”? Still, his comment had struck a nerve and even now seemed to reverberate in her mind.

Despite having the heat on full blast, Elizabeth still felt chilled to the core. She reached across and picked up the pint and took another sip. She sometimes didn’t know how she would get through each day without a few drinks. A glass of wine or two with a client over lunch. After an appearance in court, pulling over to the side of the road and taking a quick nip from the bottle. Another glass of wine with dinner followed by a few more, when Zack’s eagle eye wasn’t watching. Otherwise how could she sleep? She didn’t see it as a problem, no more so than a life jacket was a problem to a drowning person: something to keep her from going under. Zack, however, thought it was an issue. He’d stare disapprovingly when she poured a third or fourth or fifth glass of wine. She could recall the Fourth of July party they’d gone to at the house of one of Zack’s colleagues. She hadn’t wanted to go in the first place, but Zack insisted; he said they needed to get back into “living their life,” making it sound as if they were bronco riders who’d been bucked off their mount and had to get back on. At one point when she’d refilled her glass with scotch, Zack had leaned over to her and whispered, “You might want to go a little easy on that, honey.” She turned on him viciously and said, loud enough to draw the attention of several others standing nearby, “No, I don’t want to go easy.”

Perhaps it was the old man’s comments about regrets or the sheriff blowing her off again about Luke’s diary, or maybe it was the second nip of booze. Then again, it could have been anything. Her thoughts were so easily drawn to that night. That night. It sat in her mind as a moment insulated, hermetically sealed as a snow globe. Elizabeth had gone down to Washington for a legal conference. Mostly, though, the conference was just a subterfuge to be with Peter, her lover. The affair had started out innocently enough, as affairs go—a few drinks, a stray touch, a lingering glance, a double entendre that proved to be not so double. One minute she’d have told herself she was happily married, and the next she was in bed with a man she’d not even known a few days before. It had been so out of character for Elizabeth, too. In twenty-six years of marriage she’d never cheated on Zack, not once. She loved her husband, she told herself. If not with the passion they’d once had at least with a sense of loyalty and the intimacy that came with time and shared memories.

But their life together had become not only boring and predictable, it had grown cold. She often felt as if Zack didn’t appreciate her, didn’t find her attractive or desirable. Over the past few years, they seldom made love, or if they did the perfunctory nature of it was in some ways even worse than celibacy. They seldom spoke of anything beyond the prosaic concerns of daily life. They seldom surprised the other with gifts or impromptu kisses or expressions of affection, beyond the most mundane and obvious (“I love you, goodnight”). When Elizabeth gazed across the breakfast table at Zack eating his yogurt with granola and checking his emails on his phone, she was struck by the absolute certainty that she knew everything there was to know about this man, that she had already plumbed the depths of his soul and theirs, and there was no territory left to be discovered. Still, she preferred to consider the affair merely a hiatus from her real life, a momentary and completely irrational diversion from what was, and from what assuredly would be, her life. After all, she wasn’t in love with Peter. It was . . . what? A distraction? A temporary bout of insanity? She even told herself a short affair might do their marriage good, though couldn’t have said how. By the time they went to Washington, she and Peter had been lovers for several months. Already, however, she was tiring of it, regretting having allowed herself to become enmeshed in it; the excitement, the heady exhilaration of illicit love had begun to wane while her own guilt had grown proportionately. Each time she returned home to Zack she felt her shame as a burning along her cheeks. She was certain Zack could see her infidelity in her countenance, her eyes. How could she do this to the man she loved, the father of her child, her best friend? Whenever the affair came to an end, she felt she’d return, gladly and with due contrition, to her “real” life, to her husband, to her family, to her other self, and continue on as if nothing had ever happened. And she knew that it had to end.

That day, they’d skipped out of a tedious session on “Mediation,” and strolled along the Washington Mall. Peter appeared animated and boyishly handsome, and for a moment she could see why she had been originally so charmed by him. As they passed the Lincoln Memorial, she’d wanted to tell him right then and there that she thought they should end it. She was afraid that if they went back to their room, she wouldn’t be able to do it. Yet he suddenly took hold of her hand and led her up the steps and recited from memory the Gettysburg Address, something he told her he’d had to do in fifth grade. Several other times that day she felt on the verge of saying something, but each time the right moment never seemed to present itself. She liked Peter, didn’t want to hurt him needlessly. That evening they were tired and decided to stay in and order room service. Peter had opened a bottle of champagne and poured them a glass.

“To us,” he offered as a toast.

“Peter,” she began, determined to get it over with. “We should talk.”

Instead, he interrupted to say, “I’m falling in love with you, Beth.”

The comment not only took the wind out of her sails, it startled her. “You mustn’t say that, Peter.”

“What do you mean, ‘I mustn’t’? It’s true.”

“You can’t fall in love with me.”

“And you can’t tell me how I feel.”

“But too many people will be hurt,” she’d said.

Peter, a few years younger than Elizabeth, was married with two little kids. Once when he happened to leave his cell phone on the nightstand of some motel at which they had rendezvoused, she was startled to see a picture of his family. A pretty wife, two blonde adorable daughters. Before, she’d only had to deal with the guilt she felt regarding her own family. Now she had to deal with hurting his family, too.

That’s when her phone rang on the bureau across the room. She assumed it was Zack calling to “check in” with her, as he liked to put it. She felt a fresh wave of remorse strike her face, stinging like a hot wind filled with bits of sand. She started to get up.

“Don’t answer it.” Peter leaned into her and tried to kiss her but she turned away.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“We need to talk.”

The phone rang again but she didn’t want to interrupt what she’d started, afraid that if she did she couldn’t say what she needed to. She was able to summon up the courage to tell Peter that it was over, that she liked him but that she loved her husband, was committed to making her marriage work. He stared at her, shocked and hurt.

“I’m sorry, Peter. It was a mistake.”

“That’s all I am to you, a mistake?” he cried.

“I didn’t mean it like that. I only meant that I can’t keep doing this. Sneaking around. I don’t feel right about it.”

“But you felt right when we started.”

“I know. But it was wrong then, too.”

“I love you, Beth,” he blurted out.

“I’m sorry, Peter. I really am.”

When it finally sunk in that she wasn’t going to change her mind, he angrily began throwing his things into his suitcase.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Well, I’m sure the hell not going to stay here.”

Then he stormed out of the room. She couldn’t blame him for being angry. She felt horrible for how things had turned out, but what could she expect? As a lawyer, she handled divorces. She knew how affairs almost always ended badly, with all parties feeling broken, damaged. At the same time though, she felt as if this terrible burden had been lifted off her shoulders. She was ready to try harder to make things work with Zack. She also felt suddenly very lonely, and she wanted now to talk to her husband, the way they used to back when they were first dating and they’d chat well into the night. She considered whether or not she should confess to Zack, make a clean breast of things, tell him she loved him and ask for his forgiveness. Or would her betrayal only push them further apart, ruin any chance of their marriage surviving?

When she picked up her phone, though, it came as something of a surprise to see the two calls weren’t from her Zack, but rather from her son. That summer Luke had driven cross country. He’d told them he was heading out to visit some friends in San Francisco, and then they were going to drive down the coast together. The mere fact that he’d called surprised her. While on his month-long trip, he hardly ever called, despite her constant reminders. If he called once a week they were lucky. He was, Elizabeth felt, in his own little world, testing out the heady waters of adulthood, pulling away from his parents—especially from her—as fast as he could. She hadn’t been in favor of this trip, didn’t like the fact that he was driving across country all by himself. But now that he was twenty-one, they couldn’t really stop him anyway. Of course, she could have cut his purse-strings—the credit cards, the cell phone—but she didn’t want to resort to such hardball tactics and alienate her son any more than he already was. For her part, Elizabeth called him daily, leaving him doting messages, little maternal texts: Hey, Lukey. Where are you? Are you eating enough? Be safe. Please call when you get a chance. Of course, she worried about him. How could she not? He was her son, her only son, all alone out there, an entire continent separating them.

Lately more than a continent seemed to have come between them. She missed how things had once been, the closeness, the easy intimacies they shared. Giving him a bath when he was little. Later, lying in bed and reading a story to him. When he was twelve, a movie and pizza on a Friday night, just the two of them. Even when he was in his early teens, he used to share everything with her: his fears, his joys, questions about growing up, about dating, girls. Unlike most teenage boys, he even used to talk to her about sex. What does it feel like, Mom? he’d once asked her, smiling awkwardly. But all that had changed. Luke had changed. He’d become this moody stranger, sometimes silently distant, other times in-her-face confrontational. Home for the summer after his junior year at college, Luke no longer wanted her opinions on anything. He communicated curtly with her in passing, as he was rushing somewhere far more important than being in her company, often in one-word answers (uh-huh, sure, whatever). Or in business-like text messages: Mom, could u wash my white shirt? Or, Won’t be home tonight. Sometimes he’d snap at her, lose his temper. Where the hell is my iPad, Mom? he’d once screamed at her from the top of the stairs. To which she yelled back, Watch your mouth, mister. And I didn’t touch your damn iPad.

The change in Luke had seemed to start after he went away to college, but accelerated the last year of his life. He had become, to Elizabeth’s mind, too thin, almost gaunt. Yet he hardly touched anything the few times the three would sit down for dinner. Like a lot of parents, Elizabeth blamed it on the usual suspects: drugs, psychological problems, the new kids he’d started hanging around with in college, girlfriend issues. The latter, Luke’s sudden and inexplicable break-up during his junior year in college from his long-time girlfriend TJ, was Elizabeth’s prime suspect. Luke and TJ had gone out since sophomore year in high school. They’d seemed inseparable, joined at the hip. In fact, Elizabeth, perhaps foolishly, she later realized, thought they’d eventually get married. Such a sweet girl, someone who seemed perfect for her introverted son. It was after their break-up that Luke really seemed to act differently, to become withdrawn, distant. Yet he wouldn’t even talk about the break-up, except to say that TJ didn’t want to see him any more that she wanted to date other people.

Elizabeth took the phone and lay down on the bed. Still upset from the business with Peter, she hadn’t noticed at first that her son had left a message.

“Mom, you there?” came Luke’s voice, slightly annoyed, but filled, too, with an almost childlike need that immediately set off some red flags in Elizabeth. There followed a long pause, scratchy, as if he’d had the window open and air was rushing past the phone. “I’m in New Mexico.” New Mexico? she wondered. What on earth was he doing there? He’d told them he was headed out to San Francisco to stay with friends. “There’s something I really need to talk to you about, Mom.” Yet his voice trailed off once more, a long, brooding silence that segued into that scratchy sound again. Finally he said, “Whatever. I guess it’ll have to wait till morning.”

She played the message again, Luke’s words leaving her even more uneasy the second time. There’s something I really need to talk to you about, Mom. And: I guess it’ll have to wait till morning. It, she thought. What was the it he needed to speak to her about? What had made his voice so insistent, so needy? Lately her son had expressed little need for her.

She immediately called him back. Glancing at the bedside clock, she saw that it almost midnight. Which meant it would have been near ten o’clock in New Mexico, and that it was two hours after he’d first called. The phone rang until Luke’s voice message kicked in: I’m not here but you probably guessed that by now. Leave a message, etc. Luke. Where was he, especially after his message which seemed so urgent? Maybe he’d stopped to get some food. Maybe he’d forgotten to charge his cell phone. Maybe he was tired and had pulled over to the side of the road for the night. She’d warned him such a practice was dangerous, that you never knew who you might run into. But he wasn’t about to listen to her. He was a big boy now and big boys didn’t listen to their mothers. She thought again of the message he’d left: There’s something I really needed to talk to you about, Mom.

So she left a message of her own.

“Hi, Sweetie. It’s Mom. Sorry I missed your call earlier. Is everything okay? You sounded a little, I don’t know . . . funny. I’m here if you need to talk.”

She got under the covers and tried to sleep. Yet her mind was abuzz with all that had happened: the business with Peter, the issue of whether or not she should confess the affair to Zack, the odd phone call from Luke. The funny thing was that Luke had grown so distant lately, so unknowable, she couldn’t even venture a guess about what he needed to talk about. Then something occurred to her that made the breath catch in her chest: what if he had known? About the affair, that is. Of course, she and Peter had been careful, discreet, had only met at out-of-the-way places. Still, what if someone had seen them together? Kissing as they left a motel room, holding hands in a darkened corner of some restaurant. One of Luke’s friends, say? It was possible. She recalled a time once at the beginning of that summer, right after Luke had gotten home from college. Elizabeth had just returned home one evening after being with Peter. Zack was working late at the office. She happened to bump into Luke in the kitchen, who was looking for something in the refrigerator.

“Oh, hi,” she said, startled to see him home. He was usually out, with his friends, she’d assumed, and didn’t get home until late. “Where have you been?”

He looked up at her and smiled conspiratorially.

“Where have you been?” he challenged.

“Out,” she managed to say.

“Out?”

“Yes. Out.”

She told herself he meant nothing by it, that he was just being his usual contrary self with her, but his question seemed to imply something, some intimate knowledge. Could he have known? Could that have been what he wanted to talk to her about?

She finally dozed off. In the middle of the night she was awakened by another call. She naturally assumed it was Luke, that whatever it was he couldn’t wait till morning to talk about it.

“Luke!” she cried, expecting his voice.

Instead, her ear was assaulted by an unfamiliar male voice on the other end, a voice at once deferential and yet authoritarian, polite but bearing the full weight of nothing less than doom itself. Immediately the backs of her arms sprouted goose-bumps and she shivered. Something terrible had happened. She could feel in her bones.

“Is this Elizabeth Gerlacher?” the man asked formally.

“Why, yes,” she replied, trying to keep her heart from leaping into her mouth.

“I’m Sheriff Crowder. I’m calling from the Marrizozo Sheriff’s Department.”

“Where? Who are you?” she stuttered, her mind trying to take in the facts.

He repeated himself. Then he said, “Do you have a son named Luke, ma’am?”

Please, she thought. This was the middle-of-the-night call that was every parent’s nightmare, the conversation every parent dreaded yet had secretly rehearsed. She had a wild, irrational urge to deny she had a son named Luke, figuring that if she denied it then whoever this Sheriff Crowder was wouldn’t be able to tell her the rest.

“I do,” she conceded finally.

“Ma’am,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

In the split second before the officer spoke again, she found herself thinking back to that other time in Wales so long ago, the first time she’d lost Luke. But that time she’d gotten him back. She had prayed and been granted a second chance. A miracle. That’s what it was. Maybe this time it would work too. Please, she entreated again. She was ready to bargain, to give anything. I’ll go to church again. I’ll pray. I’ll do anything You want. Just make him be all right. Please, God.

And then that voice of authority told her, politely but unequivocally, that her son had been killed. Just like that. One minute Luke was alive, not only possessing a present, but a future, an expansive, yet-to-be-lived time that included a woman that he’d meet and marry, children he would father, Thanksgivings and Christmases for which he’d bring the grandkids to Zack and Elizabeth’s. Everything waited out in that golden future, brimming with potential. And in the next moment, her son, as well as the entire entourage of that future, was gone. Vanished. Whisked away. She didn’t recall much after that. Just miscellaneous bits and pieces, unconnected as beads from a broken necklace spilling on the floor. Later, picking those pieces up, she would remember things like thrown from the vehicle, cardiac arrest, air-lifted, things that seemed to have no connection to her son. To her Lukey.

“Ma’am?” the Sheriff said. “Are you there?”

“Yes,” she replied, waiting for him to say something that could still change things, undo what he’d just told her.

“Let me give you my number. In these situations, people usually have questions later on.” On the motel stationery, she mechanically copied his name and number. “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am.”

When she got off the phone she tried calling Zack but there was no answer. She tried again and again. She sat up in bed, asking questions that had no answers. What was he even doing in New Mexico? How could he be thrown from the vehicle? Luke was a careful driver. He always wore his seat belt. Maybe they had the wrong kid. Maybe it was some other Luke. Another mother’s son. Please, she pleaded, let it be some other mother’s son.

Finally she got dressed, took a taxi to Dulles, and decided to try to catch the first flight home. While waiting stand-by to board a plane, she was finally able to get hold of Zack.

“Where have you been?” she asked, almost a challenge, as if she had any right to question where he’d been.

She heard his yawn. “I was sleeping,” he explained. “What’s the matter?”

Then she told him.

On the flight back to Hartford, as a fiery sun burst through the ragged cloud-cover over the ocean, she remembered her son’s voice message. She picked up her phone and played it, again and again, hoping to find some hidden clue as to his intent: There’s something I really needed to talk to you about, Mom. What did that mean? What was the something he needed to talk to her about? Had his mind been preoccupied and he wasn’t paying attention to the road? If only she’d answered when he’d first called. If only she hadn’t been with her lover. Maybe her son would still be alive. And as she stared out the window at the clouds, she thought to herself, Damn You.