Chapter 12 #3
It wasn’t the controlled crying she’d done at Senora Morales’s stove.
It wasn’t the quiet tears she normally let fall on the porch.
These were full, uncontained, animal-grief tears she’d been holding back behind that wall for two years.
Sounds came out of her that she didn’t recognize, guttural sounds below language, below thought, just the raw noise of her body finally releasing what it had been carrying for far too long.
She bent forward in the folding chair. Claire and Harper held onto her. The room held onto her. These twelve strangers, two friends, and a facilitator who knew the most important thing that she could do right now was just let it happen.
It lasted a long time, longer than Nina thought possible. And when she was done, she felt like her insides had been emptied out and scrubbed clean.
Susie brought her some water, and George handed her tissues. Diana, who had barely spoken to Nina, came and sat on the floor next to her and held her hand without saying a word.
Nina now understood this was what grief communities were for. They weren’t there to fix each other. They weren’t even there to make it better. They were just there to sit on the floor and hold hands and say, I know, I know, I’ve been there, and you’re not alone in this.
They drove home in the pitch dark. Claire drove, Harper sat in the passenger seat, and Nina lay in the back with her head against the window, watching the darkened trees slide by.
She felt lighter than she had in two years.
She wasn’t happy. She wasn’t healed. She just felt lighter, as if she’d been carrying a really heavy suitcase she didn’t know she could set down, and someone had finally said to her, “You can set that down now. It’ll still be there when you need it. ”
Nobody said a word for a long time. The road unwound through the dark, past small towns with gas stations and church steeples, past fields that were invisible at night, but Nina could feel.
“Thank you,” Nina said. Her voice was hoarse at this point. She sounded like she’d been crying for an hour, which, of course, she had. “For coming and being there for me. For all of it.”
“You don’t need to thank us,” Harper said.
Harper had cried in that room and had not fully recovered from the indignity, which Nina found both touching and hilarious.
“Harper cried,” Claire said, because Claire was not going to let that go without being noticed.
“I had an allergic reaction.”
“To what?”
“Emotions. I’m allergic to emotions. It’s a confirmed medical condition.”
Nina laughed. It was the best laugh she’d had in months, even better than the one at Hank’s, because this one came from a place that had been emptied out.
It could hold this, too. She’d proven that the emptiness could hold more than grief.
It could also hold laughter and love and the particular joy of being in a car at ten o’clock at night with two women who had sat on a floor and held her while she fell apart, but were now making jokes about it because that was what thirty years of friendship had earned you.
The right to laugh at each other during the worst moments. And no, the laughter wasn’t a betrayal.
Claire dropped Harper at her building in Charleston. Through the car window, Nina could see Harper’s light in the condo. She could hear music playing faintly through the open balcony door.
“Jordan’s up there,” Claire said as they pulled away.
“How do you know?”
“The music. Harper doesn’t play music when she’s alone or not at home.”
They drove to Edisto. The bridge was dark, the marsh invisible, headlights carving the road out of nothing.
Nina’s house appeared at the end of the drive with the porch light on, which meant Elena had left it on because Elena always left the porch light on when Nina was gone, the same way she’d left it on for David.
Nina got out of the car. She stood in the driveway, breathing in the marsh air. This was the smell of her life, the life she had shared with David, and now the new life she was learning to live without him.
She went inside. The house was quiet, but it felt less empty, as if a room had been cleared out to make space for something new.
She walked past David’s boots by the back door.
She didn’t move them. She wasn’t ready. But she looked at them and thought, I told you I’d leave the door open. I meant it.
And then she picked up her phone and texted Sam.
I’d like to have dinner sometime, not just coffee. Dinner, if you’re interested.
His response came within three minutes.
I’m very interested. You pick the place.
Nina put her phone on the counter. She looked at the marsh out the kitchen window, the place that David had fallen in love with years ago. She couldn’t see it at night, but she could feel it.
She made a cup of coffee, even though it was ten-thirty at night, and she would never go to sleep. She sat at the kitchen table and drank it slowly, looking out the dark window, and she didn’t turn on the television.
The house was very quiet, but for the first time, quiet didn’t hurt.