Chapter Thirty
Less than two years ago
Helen was barely going through the motions at work. She heard one coworker say it to another in the women’s restroom. “Helen
is barely going through the motions,” one of them said. Helen didn’t exit the stall until they were both gone.
They were right. The world was spinning fine without her. She sat in her office and forwarded emails from one member of her
team to another, and soon the emails slowed, and Helen realized the employees were bypassing her. She wondered how long her
boss, Darius, planned to let this go on. She knew she’d built up karma she’d never cashed in after the drama of managing the
Boom Now account. For at least a little while longer, she could get away with this charade in which she pretended to work
and everyone pretended to believe her.
When the clock in her office showed the end of the workday, her despair only intensified. She was back at the apartment sleeping on the living room couch. She hated the apartment. If she’d just bought a house with Tyler, they wouldn’t have been living there at all, and he’d be alive today.
It was all her fault.
Her landlord had replaced the bloodstained carpet in the bedroom, but Helen avoided that room as much as she could. She’d
boxed up her now incomplete encyclopedia collection and shoved it into the back of the bedroom closet. In her childhood, those
books had transported her to past times and faraway lands, but in her time of need they’d failed her. The police had volumes
A, M, P, and S in evidence because Tyler’s blood was on them. It didn’t matter, because she never wanted to read them again.
She kept some of her clothes folded on the living room armchair and hanging in the entryway’s coat closet. The loaded Glock
was stored in the drawer of the entertainment center. When she went to sleep, she set the gun on the coffee table beside her.
The quiet that Tyler left behind was so loud because all of the spaces that used to be filled with him were now crushed with
other people’s noise. Another person’s laughter in the hallway was the absence of his. A television show through the apartment
wall was a show Helen couldn’t watch with him anymore. The sound of a blender in the apartment below was a protein shake he
would never again drink. It began to feel as though the city were a competition to see who could make the most noise.
All evening she heard the clatter and the clamor, but she was really listening for one particular sound: the click of a lock
being picked and the twist of her doorknob. Helen thought if she wished for it hard enough, her thoughts would lure the masked
man back to the scene of the crime.
And then she’d shoot him in the stomach, same place he’d stabbed Tyler, and watch him bleed out.
In the very beginning, Helen liked the hallucinations of Tyler because it reinforced the possibility that maybe he was alive.
Some people thought Elvis had faked his own death, so why couldn’t Tyler have done that?
He was in the Secret Service, he was a Russian spy, he was in Witness Protection!
He was just waiting for the right moment to let her in on the ruse.
Tyler, Tyler, Tyler.
But deep down, Helen knew he was gone, and the hallucinations started to feel like torture. She panicked once when the city
bus drove past and she was sure Tyler was sitting inside at a window seat. She ran after the bus for two whole blocks, then
broke down crying when it got on the freeway. A stranger put his hand on her shoulder—“Are you okay, Miss?”—but she wasn’t
okay and she wasn’t a Miss. She was a Mrs. She was a man’s wife! Had been, at least. Helen had countless stories like this, but she wasn’t telling them to anyone.
Even crazy people don’t like being called crazy.
Two months after Tyler’s death, she went to a psychiatrist who said she was experiencing “bereavement hallucinations.”
Helen said, “I know,” because she had Google. And then she asked, “How do we make them go away?”
“Time will help, as you process the grief and move through different stages of acceptance.”
As if Helen would ever accept that Tyler was gone. “What about pills?”
The psychiatrist hesitated before saying, “Antipsychotic medication can help people experiencing delusions or hallucinations,
but typically, in the case of grief, we like to wait and see if they naturally resolve.”
Helen didn’t want to wait.
She booked an appointment with another doctor who told her the same thing.
But the third shrink gave her pills.
If it weren’t for Genessa’s cancer, Helen would not have gone to meet her at the bar for drinks. The murder of one’s husband makes it remarkably easy to reject all social invitations, but when a cousin calls and says “I miss you”—a cousin who just beat breast cancer—there is a sense of obligation.
Helen had a feeling her mother had put Genessa up to it though. Helen and Genessa’s relationship was side conversations on
Christmas Eve and croquet competitions on the Fourth of July, but it was not pale ales at the local pub.
Genessa was late, stuck in traffic.
Helen sat down on a stool at the bar to wait, vaguely aware of the man in the Carhartt jacket seated next to her. She rested
a hand on the bar and felt her palm stick to the wood. A bartender with a goatee glanced up and said, “What can I get you?”
“Whatever,” Helen said flatly.
The bartender raised an eyebrow, and Helen straightened up, deciding to try to make a partial effort. She gestured at the
man next to her. “What’s he having?”
The bartender said, “A Rusty Nail.”
“Is that strong?”
“Pretty strong.”
The man nudged his glass a few inches toward her. “Try it.”
She waved her hand. “Oh, no. Thanks, but . . .” She nodded at the bartender. “Rusty Nail.”
“Any particular Scotch?”
“Oh, it’s Scotch?”
The man next to her smiled and nudged the glass another inch toward her.
“Oh, fine.” Helen took a sip and crinkled her nose. “Shit, never mind. Just give me a Rum and Coke.”
The bartender went to make the drink, and Helen slid the glass back toward the man. “Thanks.”
He told her his name was Wade, and she explained she was waiting for her cousin so he wouldn’t think they were starting up
something. But by the time Genessa arrived twenty minutes later, it was starting to feel like they were starting up something.
It was so unexpected. Helen smiled several times, genuinely, during her conversation with Wade. And because she thought she was just passing a few minutes of meaningless time, she told
him things she didn’t normally tell anyone. She told him that Tyler had been murdered three months ago and that she had to
go to three doctors to get some pills because she thought the Uber Eats delivery guy had Tyler’s face.
Wade seemed unfazed by it all: the murder, the hallucinations, Helen’s blunt admissions. At the time, she took it as a sign
of an open-minded man, someone who was understanding and complex. Only much later would she wonder if it was actually apathy.
When Genessa arrived, Wade asked for Helen’s number.
The conversation had been the first enjoyable thing that had happened to Helen since Tyler’s death, so she thought, Why not? and gave it to him.
Helen carried an armful of her clothes from the living room to the bedroom. Wade was picking her up at the apartment at six
o’clock for their date, and her place looked like a dorm room. She was surprised to realize that she cared what he would think
of her place. She did, but only a little.
Back in the living room, she picked up the strange little journal that sat on her coffee table and opened it to a random page.
The journal was over half full with frantic, heartbroken ink scribbles across the pages. Most of it was unreadable. It was
some version of shorthand that no one, not even Helen, knew. In all of the pain, she needed to journal, but her thoughts were
always coming faster than her hands could ever move. Most of the words were represented by one or two letters only. When she
looked at the pages now, she couldn’t read them. But she could still feel every ounce of them.
It wasn’t a journal so much as it was a downpour.
She tucked it in the entertainment center drawer, next to her Glock 9mm.
Wade took Helen to a restaurant where they ate fish and chips and talked.
He didn’t ask her if she’d rather be a housecat or a lion, and they didn’t banter about the different colors of olives.
But he pulled her chair out for her at the table, and he told her about running the family farm, and she noticed his lips were well moisturized, as if he’d just put balm on them.
He explained that he’d been in Seattle for about a month, temporarily working for a construction company while he planned for his dream of living off the grid with the money he’d made from selling the farm.
There were lulls in their conversation where neither of them spoke for several minutes, and maybe in a different lifetime
Helen would have found those silent interludes awkward, but there was something nice about it now. She would simply scan the
restaurant or look out the window at the people on the sidewalk, and then her eyes would return to Wade’s. She saw the way
he was gazing at her, like she was sweet and pretty. She wasn’t sure she was either of those things anymore, but she liked
that he seemed to think so. Something about him made her feel deeply feminine and a little less tired. Toward the end of the
evening, he said, “You’re easy to hang out with.”
When he kissed her good night at her front door, she confirmed that, yes, his lips were soft. It had been almost nine years
since her first night with Tyler. Almost nine years of kissing her favorite lips in the world and only those favorite lips, and suddenly here were brand-new lips. Surprisingly, the kiss with Wade felt nice. The unfamiliarity
of it was exciting.
She wondered what Tyler would think of her kissing another man so soon after his death, but she immediately knew the answer.