Page 2 of From This Moment (After We Fall 4)
What little peace I’d made with my life was too fragile to risk.
On my way home, I picked up a pizza and small salad for dinner, since I hadn’t bought any groceries. I also stopped at the liquor store, since tonight was my night to host the grief support group I was in. Wine with Widows, my mother liked to call it.
“Doesn’t it get depressing?” she’d ask. “Week after week of talking about nothing but losing your husbands?”
“We talk about other things,” I told her, although we really didn’t. Every part of our day, every interaction we had, every emotion we felt, was colored by grief and loss and injustice. We weren’t the same women we’d been before, and we felt like no one but us could understand that. Our old friends were painful reminders of our previous lives, and our new friends had no idea what we’d been through. I could be myself around them without worrying they’d judge me for the things I said or thought or did or felt.
Abby and her sitter were drawing on the sidewalk with chalk when I pulled into the driveway, and my heart lightened as soon as I saw her curly blond hair bent over her work. She was everything to me, and now I had to be everything for her. I blocked out the white picket fence that had sold Drew and I on this cottage-style house close to the lake, refused to look at the front porch where two big rocking chairs and one small one perched, ignored the giant rock at the foot of the driveway on which Drew had painted our address in thick white numbers, focusing solely on my daughter.
“Mommy!” She came running over to me as soon as I emerged from the garage. I scooped her up and she wrapped her arms and legs around me, burying her face in my neck. She always greeted my like this at the end of a work day, and it broke my heart to think it was because she’d been worried I might not come home. Her therapist assured me she felt safe and loved, which I supposed was all I could ask for, but could she ever really feel secure in a world where her daddy was here one moment and gone the next? Where he said be right back, dropped a kiss on her head, went out for a run, and never came back? How could she? How could anyone?
I paid the sitter, fed Abby, bathed her, read to her, and tucked her into bed. Every night, I answered a question or told her something about her daddy, in an effort to keep him alive in her memory. She’d been so young when he died. The injustice of it broke my heart—that she might forget the man who’d loved her so much, who’d cried when he held her for the first time, who’d never see all the milestones of her life. I’d grown up without a father too, and it crushed me that she would always have that same empty space in her life.
“What was Daddy like when he was five?” she asked me tonight.
“I’m not sure, sweetheart. I didn’t know Daddy when he was five.” Why didn’t I ask more questions about his childhood?
“What did he look like?”
“We could ask Nana for a picture,” I suggested.
“Okay,” she said.
“What song do you want?”
“Lullaby of Birdland.”
It was a tune I’d told her Drew had liked hearing me sing to her when she was in my belly, and she requested it often. I sang it to her, and kissed her sweet-smelling cheek. “Night.”
“Night.”
After she closed her eyes, I sat there a moment, stroking her damp hair back from her forehead. She looked more like Drew every day, although her hair was lighter and her skin more fair. No trace of my Italian ancestry at all, which my mother-in-law often pointed out. Not that she was openly rude, but I’d always had the impression she didn’t think I was good enough for her son.
I thought about Wes, and what it would do to Abby to see him. Would it confuse her? There was a picture of Drew holding her as a baby on the nightstand, and I picked it up. If only they weren’t so identical. But other than a few lines around his eyes and coloring deepened by the African sun, the man I’d seen at Foley’s today looked exactly like the man in this photo.
Sighing, I set it back on the nightstand and went downstairs. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror hanging near the front door, and was taken aback at how pale I looked, especially for August—my olive complexion was sallow, my brown eyes dull, my hair a drab shade somewhere between tree bark and dog shit. I leaned closer and saw the gray that was beginning to grow in at my hairline. Yikes. For a second, I wondered what Wes had thought when he saw me. Certainly I must have borne little resemblance to the girl he’d first met.
Not that she existed anymore.
I frowned as I took in my appearance. I’d aged ten years in the last eighteen months. Sorrow had etched permanent lines on my forehead and dark circles beneath my eyes. I considered it a good day if I remembered to brush my hair before throwing it in a ponytail. I’d finally lost the ten extra pounds I’d carried around after Abby was born, but then I’d lost ten more and all my curves.
What did it matter? Who would ever care again whether I had curves or not?
In the kitchen, I ate some salad and picked at Abby’s pizza crusts, then I did the dishes and straightened up the living room. At first, I’d wanted every rug, lamp, and stick of furniture to remain exactly as they were when Drew was alive, as if the entire house was some kind of memorial to him, or at least to the life we were living. Six months later, I’d moved all the furniture around in a vain attempt to feel in control of my life. I’d bought a new bed, repainted the kitchen walls, planted new shrubs in front of the house, and donated his car, his clothes, and his books. None of it alleviated my grief or my fear that nothing in life is actually within our control, and we’re all just flying blind in a vast, empty space full of uncertainty. God laughs at man’s plans and all that.
I wasn’t always this pessimistic. Once upon a time, I had hopes and dreams, and life stretched out ahead of me, full of possibilities. After all, I had love, and love conquered all, didn’t it? Love could solve any problem, heal any wound, move mountains, build bridges, tear down walls.
But it couldn’t save my husband. It couldn’t give my daughter back her father. And it couldn’t fool me again.
Give yourself time, friends said. And I had. I was doing much better day to day. I liked my new job at Valentini Farms Bed and Breakfast, enjoyed the company of people I worked with, had good friends, and was Mommy to an adorable, remarkably well-adjusted little girl. But I no longer harbored any little-girl illusions of my own.
Some problems were insurmountable. Some rivers too wide.
Love didn’t always win.
“I fucked the tree guy,” said Tess, a forty-year-old mother of three who’d lost her husband to a brain tumor ten months ago after a decade of marriage.
We all gaped at her. Everyone had only just sat down. I hadn’t even poured the wine yet.
