Chapter Four
The weeks following the funeral were a fog.
I fought the urge to retreat and sleep for a month because I didn’t want the children to feel like they’d lost their mother too. I forced myself to get out of bed every morning and go through the motions. Mostly I was still numb. Like a boat that was adrift with the shore in the hazy distance.
“It’s your brain protecting you from unbearable pain. I looked it up,” Lulu said authoritatively. My sister always searched for answers online. She believed Professor Google solved pretty much everything. “The numbness can last a long time.”
I worried about what that meant. How much more nightmarish could life get once the numbness wore off?
The last days of August approached, and the children departed for the fall semester of college, Ayla for her junior year and Adam as a sophomore.
They seemed eager to go: Adam finally emerged from the basement, and Ayla hurriedly packed and left as early as she could, a full week before classes started.
As if escaping the house would distance her from reality.
Maybe it was for the best. I hoped returning to school would breathe some life back into her.
But once my children left for college, the full force of how alone I was hit me.
The house felt too quiet. Empty and cavernous.
For the first time in my life, I lived alone, which left me feeling vulnerable and exposed.
How many people—from neighbors to the kids’ friends and acquaintances—were aware that I was on my own in this spacious house?
My anxiety was most intense at night, in the dark. Before Ali died, I preferred sleeping in a pitch-black room. Ali had even hung blackout curtains for me. But now I kept the hallway lights on overnight. Awakening in the dark, blinking my eyes open and not seeing anything, felt like death.
I detested the idea of being a wimp, a grown woman behaving like a scared little girl.
Sometimes, at night when I felt jumpy, I’d try to call my best friend Nicki but usually got her voicemail because she went to bed early.
Nicki and I had met as college interns at the Smithsonian and talked almost every day.
It occurred to me that we hadn’t spoken much in the weeks since Ali died. Why was that?
I didn’t dwell on it. I was too busy sleeping during the day. The morning I picked up copies of Ali’s death certificate, I came home before noon, slid under the covers, and stayed there until the following morning. Death is a tiring business.
There was plenty to do when I wasn’t sleeping.
A swirl of documents arrived from Ali’s accounting firm, involving pension payments, life insurance, and reimbursement for the earned vacation time he never got to take.
Suddenly, it was only me responsible for everything.
Ali was an accountant who took care of all the finances.
I had only a vague idea of how much money we had saved or invested.
I deferred to Ali in almost all financial decisions, not because he insisted but because finances bored me. The only investment I ever suggested, on a whim, was holding on to our town house after we moved farther out into the suburbs, but the idea had made Ali nervous.
“Money is going to be tighter with all of the expenses that come with the new house,” he said. “I don’t want to carry two mortgages.”
My instinct turned out to be right. Our new house would be paid off if we’d held on to the town house for just a few more years. It never occurred to me that I might have a knack for making sound investment choices. That was Ali’s department.
My focus was on the kids and my contracted work with museums. I specialized in researching and writing explanatory introduction panels and title cards for exhibits. Ali cooked sometimes on weekends and always helped clean the kitchen, except during tax season, when he worked late every night.
For the most part, though, we naturally fell into traditional roles, a separation of duties that lasted our entire marriage.
“How is it possible for the mortgage to be overdue?” I stared at the letter from the bank postmarked two weeks earlier.
“Did you say your house payment is late?” Lulu asked as she walked into my kitchen and set her overstuffed purse on the table.
My sister carried her life in that worn leather tote.
She found me sitting at the kitchen island, staring at stacks of official-looking correspondence littering the counter. “That’s not good.”
“No kidding.” I was surprised to see her. “You didn’t say you were coming by.”
“Just checking in on you.” She eyed the piles of envelopes laid out before me. “That’s a lot of mail.”
“I’ve kind of been avoiding dealing.” I set the bank notice down. “But I started to stress that I might be missing something important.”
“You think?” Unlike me, Lulu was the chief money manager in her household.
“Just be happy that I finally have the energy to go through this junk.” A lot of the correspondence was addressed to Ali, which made sorting through it even more depressing.
“You have at least been paying the bills, I hope?”
I nodded. “Most of them are still on whatever autopay system Ali set up. And I pay any bill that comes in the mail—water, gas, electric, property tax for the cars.”
“Time to put on your big-girl panties!” After weeks of coddling me, my sister had switched to more of a tough love approach. She studied the notice I’d placed on the island. “Didn’t you say the mortgage is paid automatically?”
“Yes. Ali set it up.”
“What day of the month is your mortgage due?”
“I’m not sure.” There was a lot I didn’t know. Without Ali, all the grown-up, real-life stuff felt overwhelming. We’d been like two sides of a house, holding everything up. How was one lone wall supposed to bear all of that weight on its own?
Lulu shot me an incredulous look. “You still don’t know what day your mortgage is due? It’s been almost two months since Ali died.”
“Forty-three days, to be exact,” I retorted.
The doorbell rang.
I popped up. “Saved by the bell.”
“Are you expecting someone?”
“Yeah, some guy from the accounting firm is coming by for Ali’s work laptop.”
“Why do you still have Ali’s work laptop?” She followed me into the foyer. “You’d think the firm would want it back quickly. There’s got to be sensitive financial information on it.”
“Beats me.” I wasn’t about to admit that I’d ignored emails from Ali’s accounting firm requesting that I mail his computer back. The laptop was such an integral part of Ali’s life. Returning it felt like losing another piece of him.
“I can’t believe the company sent someone to pick it up in person,” she said.
“They emailed a label for me to send the laptop back, but this colleague of Ali’s offered.” I neglected to mention that the firm probably sent the man over to force the issue, since it took me weeks to respond to their emails.
Lulu retreated back to the kitchen just before I answered the door.
It was my first time meeting Jake Barnes in person, but I felt like I knew him.
He was a work friend Ali had often mentioned, and they occasionally golfed together.
Jake’s kids were younger than ours, and, over the years, Ali enjoyed passing several of Adam and Ayla’s hand-me-down bikes, scooters, and skateboards to the Barnes children.
“You really didn’t have to come all the way out here.” I reluctantly handed him the laptop, swallowing against the ache in my throat, trying not to think of the transfer as another erasure.
“It’s no problem.” Jake was physically fit and balding on top, with a band of dark hair curving around the sides. His manner was pleasant, but his watery blue gaze was watchful in a way I found a little unnerving. “I live pretty close by.”
We chatted for a few minutes. “We really miss Ali around the office,” he told me. “He was always so kind, always asked after the kids.”
“I hope they’re enjoying the bikes.”
“Very much so.” He smiled, but I still felt scrutinized. Maybe he wanted to assess whether I seemed sad enough for a widow. Or Ali had talked about me over the years and now Jake was finally able to sync what he’d heard with the person standing before him.
“Well, I’d better get going,” he said after a brief pause. “Do you happen to have the mail label for the computer? The firm likes to check all that stuff back in.”
“Of course. I left it in Ali’s office.” I ran upstairs to retrieve the label. I could still feel Ali’s presence in the guest bedroom where he’d set up his desk. Going in there made me feel closer to him.
“Thanks,” Jake said when I handed over the label, his gaze briefly flitting to the staircase behind me in the foyer. He shifted Ali’s computer to the other hand. “Listen, if there’s anything else you need to facilitate through the firm, I’d be happy to be your liaison.”
I couldn’t imagine what business I had left with Ali’s firm. Right after the funeral, there’d been that swirl of documents and payouts from the company.
“I can give you my number,” Jake offered. “Only if you’d like.”
My first instinct was to say no. The information was obviously in Ali’s phone, which the police returned to me after the accident, along with his wallet, wristwatch, and wedding band.
It felt strange and surreal for all his personal effects to be here after he .
. . poof! . . . vanished off the face of the planet.
“It’s a good reminder that you take nothing from this world but your good deeds,” my sister-in-law Julia had reminded me.
Ali’s younger sister had surprised her family when she joined the Muslim Club in high school, becoming so devout that she took to wearing a headscarf, the only woman in her immediate family to do so.
Both of our families were more culturally Muslim, following many of the conservative social customs while not being very religious.
Julia was a year older than me and one of the best people I knew.