“Jack, please,” I whispered. I was going to liquidate Amélie-style or lose my breakfast.
“You should stay, Keri Ann,” Audrey purred. “You may be interested in this, too.”
She walked toward Jack and ran a traitorous hand along his cheek. My cheek. He was mine. She took a deep breath and smiled a huge, winning, Oscar-worthy smile. “I’m pregnant, Jack. Pregnant with your baby.”
A tidal wave crashing through the plate glass picture window bringing a man-eating shark to flop around on the tile floor couldn’t have caused more shock. I wasn’t sure I’d heard the words right. But Jack’s hand on mine went slack. His face turned chalk white.
Audrey smiled gently, running her hand down Jack’s arm, disengaging his hand from mine and placing it on her belly. “I know how you’ve always wanted a family. A family like you never had growing up.”
I stumbled back, eyes darting between them like I was in a ridiculous daytime soap opera. I waited for Jack to look at me or get mad at her, or say there was no way it could be true. I thought it was only contractual. But he had mentioned a time when it was real. I just didn’t know it was … recent.
The moment stretched out, and I wobbled slightly before I turned and stumbled to the front door.
This time, Jack didn’t try and stop me.
T H I R T Y
Having been through grief several times before, I could honestly say the first stage of this traumatic loss was to be severely and violently sick.
I did manage to make it back to the truck despite the roaring in my ears and sudden lack of muscle tone in my legs, and I drove as far as the intersection of Palmetto and Atlantic before opening the door and heaving my guts onto the sidewalk. Great.
I wanted to blame the water leaking out of my eyes on the vomiting, but I could feel the traitorous sting. After retching nothing a few more times, the kind where it felt like my eyeballs were going to bug out of my head, I finally rose up in time to see a blurry vision of Brenda running toward me from the grill, holding a bucket and a glass of water.
“Oh my God, Keri Ann, are you okay?”
I gratefully took the water as she put an arm around my back, rubbing my arm soothingly. “Fine ... must be something I ate,” I croaked, swallowing and squeezing my eyes shut.
“Honey, are you pregnant?” she whispered, concern lacing her words.
“God, no!” I was about to make some quip about an immaculate conception, but bit my tongue, as I no longer qualified for that status. “Not me.” Not me, anyway.
A fresh wave of anguish lurched through my belly, leaving me breathless. “Shit. I need to get home.”
I eyed the bucket of water. At least I could clean up this mess. Brenda stayed my arm. “I’ll take care of it honey, you get on home. I’ll take your shift tonight.”
I nodded, grateful, and climbed back in the truck, making the last few minutes of the trip in a daze.
At home, I wandered through my empty house before heading to my room. I tried lying down, but just as I turned to curl onto my side, the smell of Jack wafted from a pillow.
Oh, God.
For a moment, I lay motionless. Then I buried my face in the pillow and inhaled deeply before hurling it across the room. The crash of upended pictures and trinkets and the sound of breaking glass was loud in the silence.
*
The thing I remembered most about the night my parents died was the terrible silence. We hadn’t needed to go to the hospital, there was no one to visit. Mrs. Weaton had come over while Nana left to identify the bodies. No one spoke, and no one said I should go back to bed and get some sleep. I mean who could do that anyway? The quiet in the house, as one would expect in the middle of the night, was that night, heavy and deafening.
Eventually, at about four in the morning or so, without saying a word to Joey or Mrs. Weaton, I walked up to my parents’ bedroom, crawled under the floral quilt on my mom’s side, and slowly breathed her scent in and out.
I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up, Joey was asleep in the bed next to me on dad’s side, and Nana was sitting in the chair by the window.
She smiled at me sadly.
To say there was a gaping hole inside me where my heart had been savagely and painfully ripped out was an understatement. It was a crushing and physically painful emptiness that gave way to a sense of sheer panic as I realized I couldn’t smell my mother anymore.
I sat up gulping for a fresh breath, and then threw my face back to her pillow, trying to catch the scent again. I tried this several times with increasing hysteria.
Joey woke and tried to hold me and I lashed out, pushing him away, realizing the awful broken howl I could hear was coming from me.
Eventually, both Nana and Joey had me, and we were all hugging and crying and rocking.
I slept in my parent’s bed for the whole summer and didn’t speak to Nana for eight days when she finally washed the sheets a few weeks later.
*