“This is just my face,” she said.
He sat on the edge of her bed and asked her a few more questions about her acting classes and whether she liked anyone. As in a boy. She hesitated, very nearly telling him how lonely she’d lately felt, but decided against it. So he gave up and went to take his shower. After he left, she felt guilty that she hadn’t said anything about Sophie, how much she liked her. She would do that tomorrow. She would be nicer to everyone tomorrow, she told herself, closing her eyes and listening to Macy Gray singing, “I believe that fate has brought us here.”
About an hour later, after his shower, Daniel reemerged in the kitchen, his mother still busy putting ribbons on the tins of homemade cheese straws she always delivered to their neighbors.
“I’m running out for a quick burger,” he announced.
She glanced up at him and frowned. “With a wet head? You’ll catch a cold.”
He grabbed his Yale baseball cap and green plaid scarf from a hook by the door, put both on. Satisfied, she nodded, then returned her gaze to a big red bow.
“Be right back,” he told her as he opened the door.
“All righty,” she said, this time not looking up, not knowing that it would be the last thing she’d ever say to her son.
—
AT DANIEL’S FUNERAL, Rob talked about those final days, what a good son he had been, how much he had loved his family and friends and Sophie. He talked about how proud he and his wife were of all that Daniel had accomplished, but how that paled in comparison to their pride in his character and compassion.
“He never once, in twenty-five years, let us down,” Rob said, his voice shaking, his pauses painfully long as he tried to keep it together. “Not once.”
Later, Elaine would wonder how many in that church thought her husband was exaggerating. Of course a father is going to speak in superlatives about his dead son. Of course he’s going to paint his child as extraordinary. Yet Daniel really was extraordinary, and sometimes it actually, illogically, seemed to her that being so special had made him more susceptible to tragedy. That if Daniel had been deeply flawed, or simply a more typical, aimless, inconsiderate twenty-something, off getting drunk or having meaningless sex with forgettable girls, then maybe he’d still be alive. But he was a golden child, too good for the world.
Sometimes she even asked herself if she’d make that trade—one of the endless variations of the pointless and cruel what-if game. What if Daniel hadn’t gone out to get that burger? What if she had insisted that she scramble him eggs instead? What if she had stalled him just long enough to tie the plaid olive-green scarf dangling around his neck, one side longer than the other? What if she had simply gone to him, kissed his unshaven cheek, said something, anything, more than all righty?
She knows the answers. She knows that’s all it would have taken for Daniel to miss the Denali sliding on a patch of ice at the intersection of Moores Mill and Northside, less than two miles from home. And that she would never have laid eyes on that soft-spoken, gray-haired officer who appeared in their doorway some thirty minutes later, his patrol lights casting eerie red and blue flashes across the front lawn. She wouldn’t have called Rob, frantically hitting redial, redial, redial until he finally answered from the airport in Memphis. She wouldn’t have had to say those words aloud to him, or to awaken Meredith moments later, repeating the news for the second time. She wouldn’t have tried in vain to track down Josie, before she drove to Grady Hospital with one of her three children, selfishly praying for a case of mistaken identity, hoping that it was anyone but Daniel. She wouldn’t have the horrifying memory of watching her now ex-husband, when he arrived later that night, clinging to their dead son, sobbing his name, again and again and again.
Instead, in an alternate universe, the one they all futilely imagined, Daniel would be happily married to Sophie, the father of two or three children. He would be practicing medicine somewhere, likely right here in Atlanta, making a real difference, saving lives. He would be turning forty at the end of this year, an older, wiser version of the young man he had been. The kind of person who understands that nothing is as important as family. That love comes first.
They tried to remind themselves of this—of what Daniel stood for and what he would have wanted for them. Sometimes they even made choices in his memory or imagined him watching from above. But that was just something they did, and it never really eased their pain. Instead, nearly fifteen years later, he would remain gone, and they were still right there where they’d always been. Still reeling, regretting, wondering what if.
chapter one
JOSIE