Page 1 of When We Had Forever
THE END
When my marriage ended, I was in the bathtub.
Not that I realized it at the time. I only found out later, and for weeks afterward, I wondered. At what moment did I stop being a wife?
Months have passed, but the question still gnaws at me on rain-drenched nights as I lie awake, watching bleary red numbers mark time from the nightstand flanking the empty side of the bed. Or it blares through my brain without warning, like on the morning I dig through the kitchen cabinet and find my husband’s favorite mug in my hands.
I squeeze the cup until my palms ache. In my imagination, long fingers wrap around the mug’s familiar slogan—“The Difference between Your Opinion and Coffee Is That I Asked for Coffee.” Those same fingers once skimmed down my shoulder while I showered, or trailed against my neck as I wrote. Now they’ll never touch me again.
At what moment did I stop being a wife?
The floor tilts. My stomach shrinks as I stumble from the gleaming kitchen to the hallway, where I wrench open the storage closet door.
I should be careful and nestle the mug in among the other orphaned things that carve an endless hole through me. But with no one here to witness my lack of restraint, I just bang the cup down on a stack of architectural magazines and sag against the wall. Yet the closet’s relics seem to whisper, and the question only grows.
What the hell was I doing when my marriage ended? Running my razor up my legs? Letting the gathered gobs of shaving cream float away like little foamy icebergs? Leafing through the book that lives on the teak bench beside the tub?
At whatexactmoment did I become a widow?
I feel like I should know. I should’ve felt a pang in my chest, maybe, or a sympathetic gasp for air when my husband took his last breath in this world.
Instead, I felt nothing. Only later, during that nightmarish phone call I now recall in snatches—car accident...your husband...died on impact—did I understand the world had changed.
Afterward, when the police report followed, I piecedsomedetails together. I now know I became a widow on a Sunday afternoon, while in the bath. Maybe while shaving my legs. Or maybe...
There’s another possibility for what I might have been doing at 3:32 p.m. on February 18. I could’ve been thinking abouthim. My brother-in-law. The man who knocked my life off course without ever having met me, without even knowing my name.
Not that I think of him often. But I did that day.
Now I double over in the hallway, propping my hands on my knees. My husband’s gravelly concern seems to echo off the polished tile as though he’s standing right next to me.
You’d feel better if you went for a run, Mina.
My coffee is still steeping in the chrome-and-glass French press in the kitchen, but I leave it be and obey the ghostly suggestion. Funny how, when my husband was alive, those words used to lodge between my ribs and stick there. I even suspected him of deriving more relief from my runs than I did, because he always sent me off in those neon moments at the start of a fight, when everything in me began to glow white-hot.
Except he wasn’t wrong. Runningdidhelp. I can admit that—now that he’s dead. Now that him being right doesn’t feel like it robs me of anything.
By the front door, I yank my beat-up purple running shoes—two lonely daubs of color in this ocean of black and gray—from their designated cubbyhole and shove them onto my sockless feet. I don’t care that I’m only wearing rumpled pajama shorts and an oversize T-shirt I once got from volunteering at the animal shelter down the road. Any runner worth her salt always dresses for the second mile, anyway.
Outside, the forest blurs in the silver wetness. It’s a typical March morning in coastal Washington; the evergreen spires soar skyward while the tang of ocean piggybacks on the drifting mist. I inhale, hoping the gauzy air will file down my broken edges to the harmless contours of sea glass.
If only it were that easy. If only I could fill the hollow ache where so much has been torn out.
Not that it’s my husband’s quiet urgings to run that I miss. No, I yearn for the breathless, early moments we spent admiring star-strewn skies. And the years afterward, when the metronome of his heartbeat lulled me to sleep. I miss the hopeful way he searched my face whenever he came home with a just-because gift, as if never quite trusting thathewas the gift. That for me, material comforts paled in comparison to the way his hand felt in mine, or how, on the rare occasions we traveled together, the world came alive for us.
Those things are gone now, taken from me in a single moment I didn’t even notice passing me by.
I take off sprinting. Once upon a time, I ran light-footed, free, but now I let my whole body absorb the impact. It’s the only way to silence this horrible question.
What were you doing when the love of your life died? Thinking about his awful brother? A man you hate?
Inside of a mile, blisters bubble on my sockless feet, but I pause only long enough to scrape my chin-length hair into a messy topknot, then continue running. Five mindless miles whirl by. Six.
When the road ends, I stop in the empty cul-de-sac. The trees stare down, each piney knothole like a glowering eye, and I nose my shoes over the edge of the pavement. Maybe I should just keep going. Find a way to outrun this sucking grief.
But behind me, the road awaits. I hate the idea of turning around—of coming this far only to go backward again—but sometimes that’s the only choice.
Sometimes the past is all we have.
