The drive to Georgetown was silent. A May storm had blown in and rain sprinkled the windshield. The wipers beat back and forth, entrancing them all. He thought about the previous two weeks. It was hard enough navigating the well-meaning, stupid efforts to console. The intrusive calls, e-mails, and texts. Visits to the house. The Serrats were the type of family that would tightly bandage their gaping chest wound, not keep it exposed to the elements. He’d also had to figure out the formalities of death. The cold paperwork. The details about cremation. Picking an urn. He felt a moment of empathy for his father, who’d made the arrangements after Sean’s mother’s death. When his father died, the military had taken care of everything.
He glanced at his sons in the rearview mirror. Ryan sat quietly, his iPod buds in his ears as always. Jack pressed his nose to the window. Sean reached for Emily’s hand, but she kept it just out of grasp.
Why were they doing this? Abby’s classmates and friends needed some closure, but his family hadn’t even said their own good-byes. A pillow-shaped biodegradable urn for a water burial still sat unceremoniously in the back of the SUV. His daughter’s remains tucked in a Bloomingdale’s sack. Sean sat at a red light on Sixteenth Street. When the light hit green, he spun into a U-turn.
“Fuck this,” he said.
“What are you doing?” Emily said, her brow sprouting lines.
An hour later they inched along in traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The strobe of police lights glowed ahead—an accident that had left them stuck on the four-mile bridge over the Chesapeake Bay.
“Traffic should start moving soon,” Sean said.
Emily gave an icy shake of the head and gazed wearily out the rain-spattered window.
Sean said, “Look, you didn’t want to go to the vigil and neither did I, so I thought we could say good-bye to Abby at one of her favorite places.”
Emily continued her stare into the gloom. Sean could read her thoughts: Rehoboth Beach in Delaware wasn’t exactly a hot spot in May, they didn’t have beach clothes, they didn’t have their toothbrushes, and they weren’t ready for some getaway. The days of spontaneous outings to the Delaware shore were over. It was one of Abby’s favorite places as a kid, but that was just going to make them feel worse.
“Is the water going to be too cold to swim, Daddy?” Jack asked from the backseat.
Emily gave Sean a hard look.
“I don’t think we’ll be going in the water,” Sean said, “but we can go to the boardwalk.”
“Can we go on that ride that takes us into the sky?”
“If it’s open,” Emily clipped.
“I hope it’s open,” Jack said.
And it was. By nine o’clock the four of them were on the boardwalk riding The Sea Dragon, a giant pendulum that swung back and forth into the cloudy night sky. Emily and Ryan on one side, Sean and Jack on the other. When they swung up, Jack laughed and thrust his arms in the air. When the pendulum swung back down, Sean gazed up at Emily and Ryan, both with blank stares, Emily hugging herself from the chill in the air.
After the Monster, Sean took Jack into the Haunted Mansion, which had a sign that read AWARD-WINNING RIDE, undoubtedly an award issued in the 1970s given the state of the thing. After some fairground games, the family walked on the beach toward the hotel. All of them carried their shoes, and the boys, Sean included, had rolled up their trousers. Emily clutched at her cardigan. Sean had envisioned them releasing Abby’s ashes that night, perhaps reminiscing about the great times they had spent on this shoreline since she was a little girl. But instead, they ate cardboard pizza from a vendor and went to their room at the Boardwalk Plaza Hotel.
Emily had barely said a word to Sean since he’d turned the SUV around and abandoned the vigil. Late that night, with the sound of the boys snoring in the double bed next to theirs, he and Emily lay in the darkness.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For some reason, I thought it would help.”
“It’s fine,” Emily said.
“We need to talk. We can’t go through this alone.”
Silence.
“Did I do something? Did I not do something?” Sean said. “I can’t get through this without you, Em. Please, talk to me.”
She did speak to him. Just when he thought he couldn’t feel any more of the peculiar hollowness in his chest or the weight in his arms—when he thought he couldn’t feel any more alone—she uttered six words: “Why didn’t you take her call?”
CHAPTER 19
Sean didn’t sleep that night. Every hour or so he’d turn to the red glow of the hotel alarm clock. At six a.m., he slipped out of bed and pushed aside the curtain of the sliding glass door of the tiny suite. He opened the door a crack. The salt in the air filled his lungs. The rain clouds had disappeared, and there was a burst of orange from the horizon. He stepped quietly into his pants and padded barefoot to the door.
A voice whispered in the darkness: “Are you going to watch the sunrise like you and Abby used to do?” It was Ryan.
“I was thinking about it,” Sean said. He waited, then said, “Wanna come?”
“That was you and Abby’s thing. I couldn’t…”