Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 31



Hi Jamie,



Yes . . . actually, my mother did find a digital recorder recently—in an overnight bag of Gretchen’s. She didn’t know what it was at first, so when I told her what you’d been asking about, the mystery was solved. I’ve listened to a little bit of it, and you’re right—she used it for her recent interviews for her book. I’ll FedEx it to you this week.

Please don’t work too hard on this. My mother keeps telling me to tell you that. Take your time. There is really no rush. We are not in a hurry to resolve the issue of Gretchen’s book soon—she just wanted to put it into good hands. We know you have a lot going on right now.



Sincerely,

Nathan

Nathan’s e-mail took me by surprise. I’d thought Gretchen’s voice recorder was long gone, probably in her purse. I also thought it might be a good item to hand over to the police. In spite of myself, I made no such suggestion to Nathan. I wanted to get my hands on it first. But I promised myself I’d give it to the police if I heard anything I thought they should hear.

I tore into the FedEx package when I got home from work a couple of nights later. It was after eleven, but I was eager to start listening.

I brought it up to the baby’s room and sat in the rocking chair. It wasn’t much of a nursery yet. There was a crib, a changing table, my grandmother’s rocking chair, and a ton of shopping bags full of boxed baby gear. I hadn’t looked at the stuff since the shower.

Now I thought I might sort through some of the gifts while listening. I pulled one of the shopping bags onto my lap, then clicked play. On the recording, there was a little bit of a clunk, then a man’s voice.

“So where were we?” he said.

“You were talking about Linda and Shelly’s dad,” said a soft female voice.

“Your grandfather, yes,” replied the man.

“I never knew him,” said the female voice. It was Gretchen.

I pushed the shopping bag off my lap and hit pause.

I hadn’t anticipated what it would feel like to hear her voice again. I rocked silently in the chair for a moment, shaking. The words I’d hear come out of this machine were the last ones I’d ever hear her say.

The baby gave a couple of kicks, which was both sad and comforting.

“You’ll never meet her,” I whispered. I wondered if Gretchen would’ve been into being “Aunt Gretchen.” Probably not. She’d have tried, though, like she always did.

The kicking stopped and I started to cry: loud, gulping sobs that woke Sam up.

“What time is it? What’s wrong?” He was squinting as he came into the nursery, blowing his overgrown bangs out of his eyes.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Sam sat on the carpet and looked into the bag I’d dropped onto the floor. He pulled out a box, and out of that a mobile with stuffed clouds and a bear dressed in baby blue, hugging a stuffed moon.

“Oh, good,” he said. “I was hoping someone would buy this.”

He pulled the cord and it started to tinkle out Brahms’ lullaby.

“I don’t remember putting that on the registry,” I said.

“I think I put it on,” Sam admitted.

I nodded and snuffled back my last tears as the mobile slowed and plinked out a few last gasping notes.

“Lots of nice stuff,” Sam said, looking around. “We’re lucky.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

I gazed over to the corner of the room, where the changing table was. There were five tiny onesies there, all washed and folded and placed carefully on the shelf beneath the changing area. I’d done that the week before Gretchen died. I couldn’t remember now what had been going through my head then. I think I was wondering how long my son would wear those tiny clothes, and once he graduated to the next size up, if it would seem like the time had gone by quickly. But I couldn’t remember if I’d felt serene and maternal at that moment. Had I ever? Would I ever?

Now nothing seemed to matter but Gretchen and the soft kicking in my stomach. They seemed strangely linked somehow—Gretchen gone, and this new person arriving. To think of them together was painful, but lately, that was the only way I thought of them. And there was nothing serene about it.

Everything else felt insignificant, and far away. I wasn’t sure how to explain this to Sam—that I loved the baby already, and that my disinterest in this baby-blue fabric and tinkling music took nothing from that. And I loved Gretchen. And I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.

“Gretchen’s recorder,” I said. “Her brother FedEx’d it.”

“I saw,” Sam said. “It was by the side door when I got home.”

“I had forgotten what her voice sounded like.”

Sam put the mobile back in the box. Then he leaned his head against my knee and put his hand over my stomach.

“I wonder how it is for him. You being so involved in this sad thing right now.”

“For who? For Charlie?”

“Oh. Are we still considering that?”

We’d already had several discussions about the name “Charlie.” I thought it was a charming old-fashioned name for a good honest fellow. Are you sure you aren’t just thinking of Charlie Bucket? Sam always asked, referring to the character in the Roald Dahl books. Sam, for his part, couldn’t shake his strong association of the name with Charlie Chaplin.

“He’ll be okay,” I said. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Have you thought more about Andy? That’s a lot like Charlie.”

“It’s really not much like Charlie. It’s not as gentlemanly. And I don’t like that it rhymes with ‘candy.’ ”

Sam nodded uncertainly. “Are you going to listen to this for a little while? Should I join you?”

Sam and I stared at each other for a few moments. I could tell he was trying to find something recognizable in my expression—some happy sense of camaraderie we had a few months ago. I, meanwhile, was looking for something else entirely in his black eyes—a certain cleverness, a certain almost mean mischievousness that had been the first thing about him I’d fallen in love with. It seemed to have dissipated as I’d ticked off the weeks to my due date. I knew it was in there somewhere, but he seemed to save it, now, for other people, or for times when I wasn’t around. It had been part of a desperate strategy, perhaps, to protect himself from my deepening prenatal crazy. Or to cure me of it.

“I’ll try again tomorrow,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got one more thing I’ve got to do, but I’ll come to bed in a few minutes.”

After he returned to the bedroom, I took out Gretchen’s computer and opened up her e-mail. I searched for the words Jamie and shower.

Oddly, after hearing Gretchen’s voice, I wanted to see Abby’s invitation and Gretchen’s response. In Gretchen’s box, I found the invitation but no reply. I wondered if Abby had lied to me about Gretchen’s enthusiasm—another instance of coddling to protect the poor pregnant woman’s feelings?

I took out shower and searched just Jamie. The most recent message that came up was the one she’d sent me two weeks before she died. After that was a message in her draft folder—not to Abby, about a shower, but to me. There was no greeting or salutation, but Gretchen had written it to my address:



It seems to me there are things we should have talked about. Like, what happens if you think you’ve found the love of your life, but you notice, whenever you go into the city together, that he walks ahead of you in the subway station, and doesn’t look behind for you until after he’s gotten on the subway? And what if you find yourself wishing you did not have to tell him to wait for you? What if being with him starts to mean having to say those things . . . “Honey, wait for me?” And you start to resent him making you do that in order to keep him walking by your side?

If I never wanted to think about these things, and still don’t, why in the world did I think I wanted to be a wife?

And how come you and I never talked about that? How come we still don’t? Does Sam ever walk ahead of you in the subway station? Would you ever admit it to me if he did? Or that you cared?

She’d written this a couple of weeks before the message she’d actually sent. It wasn’t much, but it was more than she’d ever actually said to me about her divorce. I wondered if there had been a great deal more she’d wanted to say about it. And I remembered Jeremy at the memorial service, saying, I’d like to talk to you a little more. Just about Gretchen. About Gretchen and me.

Jeremy. He hadn’t answered any of my e-mails yet. I’d actually written him again just yesterday. But he was still grieving, too. Probably I should give him a few days before badgering him again.

I closed Gretchen’s e-mail and followed Sam to bed.