For the last time.
And it hurts to know I wasted those last few hours with him. Bitching about preschool, about Nini, about how his life was so easy compared to mine. I feel cold inside, as if someone is taking an ice pick to my heart, carving out the places reserved for my husband, the father of my only child. And to think that Shell lost her only son . . .
“Not the natural order of things,” Shell says. “A son shouldn’t go before his parents.”
They say sharing grief helps, but I can’t believe anything helps now. As a mother, I see Micah’s death as doubly unfair. Take a father from his daughter. Take a husband from his wife. But how must it feel to have a child taken from his mother? How would I feel to have Elizabella taken from me?
“I’m . . . God, Shell, I’m lost. I can’t believe it.”
“The service will help.”
“I suppose.” My only experience with memorials—my mother’s—didn’t provide closure, and the prospect of holding one for Micah feels as if I’m spiraling down into nothingness.
“We’ll do it right,” she says. “Something special to honor him.”
No anniversary parties are on the horizon. No graduations. No giving Bella away with her father on her wedding day.
Will anything be special enough?
“When will it be?” Shell asks. “The memorial.”
“The crematorium is supposed to call when he arrives. But I thought I’d wait for you,” I say, although I haven’t wanted to think about anything of the sort. “To plan the memorial. To find the right time.”
“Our flight is tomorrow. I can’t get on an earlier flight, with the holiday next week, but, honey, come to the lake. We’ll plan the memorial together.”
At first, the prospect of being with Shell is like a warm blanket on a cold night. But a heartbeat later, the chill seeps back into my skin. “Is Mick all right with that?”
“He’ll have to be. I’ll talk with him. We should be getting there sometime Saturday.”
We cry together and talk for a while. But eventually, she has to go. She has to tell Mick that their only son, with whom he hadn’t spoken in years, is dead.
“Love you,” she says.
“Love you, too.”
Maybe I will find closure if I plan a memorial. Micah and I had planned for this sort of thing, only we’d figured we would be in our seventies or eighties or even nineties when it happened.
I’m an island, drifting in a horrific sea.
Thanksgivings of my youth flit in and out of my mind. Mama and me. Just the two of us, alone. I never wanted to repeat that pattern. Would Mick object to two more for Thanksgiving at the lake? Might he learn to consider us family even if he couldn’t mend fences with his son? If this year goes well, I hope we can count on holidays with Shell and Mick from here on. I can’t bear the thought of celebrating at a table for two.
I look to Elizabella, who’s struggling with the zipper on her coat. I wanted so much more for her. I wanted a big family, so we’d have each other when tragedy struck. I never wanted to leave my daughter alone, never wanted her to endure the hell that I went through.
“Where are we going?” Bella attempts again to zip her coat.
I take over and zip it up for her. “Warm and cozy?”
“Nini doesn’t want to go to school.”
I haven’t sent her to the Westlake School since it all happened. I don’t know why she’d assume I’d send her now. Come to think of it, preschool was Micah’s idea, and it made sense because we assumed I’d need some Bella-free time once IVF worked its magic and I was pregnant again. Now that another baby isn’t in the plan, and now that Micah isn’t here to persuade me otherwise, there’s no reason to rush Bella out the door to a school she obviously hates.
“We’re not going to the school, Ellie-Belle.”
“Yay! To the park?”
“We’re going to the bank.”
She frowns a little. “Oh.”
“They have lollipops.”
She softens a little. “Pink ones?”
“We’ll have to see.” Micah and I have an emergency stash of cash in our safe-deposit box. It isn’t much—a few thousand, maybe five, assuming he hasn’t spent all of it—but it’ll carry us until the death certificate arrives and the insurance comes through. And in order to file for the insurance, I have to find the policy numbers. I’m hoping the paperwork is still in the safe-deposit box, where we stashed it when we moved here from the city.
I hold my daughter a little too closely.
“Mommy? Do you miss Daddy?” She’s staring me right in the eyes. Sometimes, I think she’s too little to comprehend what’s happening, but other times, like now, it’s apparent she knows the permanence of our predicament.
“Yes.” I kiss her baby cheeks. “I will always miss Daddy.”
The ride to the bank is a blur—almost everything is cloudy since Micah left—and the walk to the vault and safe-deposit box isn’t crystal clear, either. But I must’ve turned the key in the lock when the bank manager turned hers because Elizabella and I are now staring into the box.
“Ooooh, pretty,” she coos when I hold up a ring I’ve never seen before. It’s white gold, or platinum maybe, with a pretty bluish-green stone—a fairly large princess-cut set amid a diamond halo.
I don’t know where the ring came from or why Micah would’ve been hiding it in this vault. Unless . . .
A space in my chest warms with a thought: Maybe it’s a final gift from my husband. One he never had the chance to give me.
I pull the ring from its velvet bed and slip it onto my finger, but it’s too small, even for my pinkie. Micah knows my size. If it were a gift, he’d surely have purchased a larger band. Then again, my fingers have been swollen, and I’ve gained a fair amount of weight—upward of twenty pounds at the height of IVF treatment. Maybe he was going to have the ring sized, once my hormones leveled out.
Or maybe he never intended for me to wear it.
Gabrielle.
I stuff the ring back into the cushion, snap the box closed, and drop it into my purse. When I’m up at the lake with Shell, I’ll ask about her friend, Gabrielle. I’ll find out why, if what Claudette says is true, my husband would be talking to Gabrielle in the middle of the night.
But I can’t ponder possibilities now.
Just get what you came for and get out of here.
A few manila envelopes sit at the bottom of the box. I peek into the first, and relief rushes through me. Insurance policies.
The cash is there, too, just as it’s always been, just as it was in our box in the city before we moved here, bound with yellow paper straps. I count them as I place them, too, into my shoulder bag. One, two, three, four, five bundles of tens.
But then I notice something.
The bundles . . . their straps are more mustard than yellow. They aren’t bundles of tens but hundreds. Which means . . .
I’m dizzy for a good half minute.
I have $50,000 in my bag, when I came expecting five.
Fifty thousand dollars.
“Micah,” I whisper. “What were you thinking?”
He may as well have shoved the money under the floorboards! Who, in this day and age, keeps this much cash at the ready? Why wouldn’t he have kept it in a savings account, where it would accrue interest? Or, better yet, in stocks and bonds?
“Mommy.”
“Just a minute, baby.”
And why wouldn’t he have told me how much was here? When we rented the box in the city, we put a few thousand in it, and even then I hadn’t understood the purpose. Micah said it was a good idea to have cash on hand. For emergencies. But $50,000?
Have we always stashed this much away? Or . . . is this the money Micah stole from his father? The money that caused the rift between them?
“Mommy, Nini’s hungry.”
“I’ll get her a lollipop in a second.”