But if Nick wasn’t having an affair with Ms. Grey, then who?
And if they weren’t having an affair, then why was he mixed up with this woman? Did it have something to do with drugs? Was Nick using?
In an instant it makes sense. Nick being out of sorts in the weeks leading up to Felix’s birth. His moodiness and despondency. The fact that he cashed in his life insurance funds for quick and easy money with which to purchase drugs.
Melinda Grey isn’t Nick’s lover, I decide. She’s his dealer.
Nick has been using drugs. Was he using drugs at the time of the crash? Was he high? Certainly the police would have tested for drugs or alcohol at the hospital after the crash, but maybe not. I have half a mind to ask Detective Kaufman about this, but then again, I don’t want to put any suspicion into his mind. He’s already convinced Nick is to blame.
I take a moment to gather myself and then scurry off to find the collection of personal effects that came to me from the morgue days ago—the car keys and his wallet, and Nick’s cell phone.
But there are other things mixed up with Nick’s personal effects, other things I didn’t notice at the time but now I do. There in the bottom of the plastic sack I find a lime-green cap from a bottle of soda and a molded green army man, no more than two inches tall. It isn’t the bottle cap but rather the army man that catches my eye, the kind of toy that is sold by the bucketful, each container filled with a hundred army men or more. I pluck the army man between my fingers and look the soldier in the eye. “Where’d you come from?” I ask, but the army man doesn’t reply.
I call to Maisie and, holding the figure out for her to see, ask if it’s hers. She crinkles her nose in disgust, and shakes her head an obdurate no, pulling away from the toy. “That’s for boys,” she says as if the toy might be tainted with cooties or worse. She goes back to watching TV.
Why would Nick have a toy army guy? Maybe it’s a mistake, I reason. Maybe some other body at the morgue came equipped with a molded green army man in the pocket of his or her jeans, and an inept mortician only thought that it belonged to Nick.
Maybe somewhere out there, a little boy is missing both his father and his toy.
I put the toy back in the bag. But there’s more. Two blue oval pills in a pill package, each one less than a centimeter long. Not your typical ibuprofen or allergy medication, but something different. Nick didn’t take any prescription medication, none of which I was aware. But maybe he did. Maybe he did and he just didn’t tell me. Or maybe these are the drugs he was getting from Melinda Grey, prescription medication not meant for Nick to consume. I hold the pills to my eye and read the wording inscribed on each tablet, Halcion, and a dosage. A quick Google search informs me that Halcion is generally used to treat insomnia—which makes sense, we’d all stopped sleeping in those weeks before Felix was born—and yet the side effects are immense: aggressive behavior, depression, thoughts of suicide. My eyes linger on those words on the computer screen. Thoughts of suicide. Are these pills to blame for my husband’s death? I access Nick’s MyChart account, an online database where physicians keep medical records for patient use. The log-in is Nick’s email address, and when I click the button for a forgotten password, it emails it to Nick, which I access easily, knowing the password to Nick’s email account. I search his medical records and the listing of prescription medication. The last thing his doctor prescribed was amoxicillin to treat a sinus infection the previous winter. There’s no listing for Halcion anywhere.
The pills didn’t come from Nick’s doctor. They came from somewhere else.
I set the medication aside for the time being.
The battery to the cell phone is dead and the screen fractured beyond repair. I dig a charger out of the junk drawer. It takes time to charge the phone well enough to power back on, though from the sad state of the screen, I’m surprised it turns on at all. The lock screen appears, a photo of Nick and me together, the shattered lines of the LCD screen splintering our faces. But still, Nick is handsome as ever, a youthful face immune to age. In the photograph, his smile is sublime, and I remind myself that Nick would never hurt a fly. Never. Memories of the restraining order flood me then, as I stare into Nick’s kind, gentle eyes, knowing his hands never touched me in a way that wasn’t compassionate or warm, that his words were never cruel or mean.
It must be a mistake; it has to be a mistake.
Drugs, restraining orders, affairs. This is not Nick.