Chapter 28 （Interlude） The Emptiness Inside
The Emptiness Inside
Red Mountain, Washington
I was absolutely shattered. There is nothing worse than losing a child.
Nothing.
It’s often only when you lose someone you love that you realize exactly what matters in life.
I think everyone who came for Camden’s funeral shared the same feeling: that no matter their differences, they had to look past them and remember that life is fragile and often far too short, and that they needed to love those around them with all they had.
We called Michael’s friend Marcus and asked him to drive Michael home, as we didn’t want him driving over those mountain roads right after he’d learned the news.
Turned out Mike was the strongest of us, taking charge.
Telling people what to do. Helping with funeral arrangements, getting organized, and making sure we notified everyone.
When I set eyes on Jed, as he rolled his chair around the corner to baggage claim at the Tri-Cities airport, all I felt was love.
There was no harboring of blame, no guilt, no room for grievances.
I smiled and ran to him, and he wheeled to me just as fast. I threw my arms around him, and an apology fell from his mouth.
My parents, both struggling with mobility issues by then, joined us, and we embraced and cried together, right there in the middle of the airport.
We held the service in the grass in front of the tasting room.
Cam had been cremated, and the box with his ashes rested on a table below a cross.
Our friends from Sonoma came up. Wine people from all over the country flew in.
Cam’s friends flew in. It was the biggest funeral I’d ever attended, and though I barely had anything left, I felt proud to have such great people in our life.
Afterward, Otis and I took Cam’s ashes to Colorado and spread them in Boulder Creek, where he’d loved to fish since he’d first gone to college. Otis offered to take me to the Blue River, but I simply shook my head. I couldn’t see where my son had breathed his last breaths.
Back home, we both looked brittle. I would peek into the mirror and see a woman who looked thirty years older. Otis was the same. We cried and cried and cried, holding each other on the couch, unsure of where to go from there.
Kind of like Otis now.
I’ve never seen him so brittle.
I watch him set down the pen after writing about the loss of our son, and I see him fading away. He walks into the living room and collapses onto his knees. He cries like the loss is fresh. Amigo sits on his haunches and looks up at Otis with bewildered eyes.
His toes curling on the hardwood floor, Otis looks down at him. “Why couldn’t I have been the one to go? What did he do to deserve that?” Otis wipes the saliva that has dripped down his chin. “I don’t know if I can go on. I don’t know that I have what it takes.”
Otis finally stands, and I watch from my place so close yet so far away, wishing I could comfort him. I wonder whether giving him that journal years ago, then urging it on him these last few weeks, was the right thing to do.
Perhaps I’ve meddled more than I should.
Otis enters our bedroom and pulls open the closet door. I know what he’s doing, and I scramble to figure out how to stop him. He pulls a shoebox from the top shelf and removes the gun that we bought back in Sonoma years ago, one that Otis fired only to scare away bobcats and other predators.
“No,” I say, but no words actually rise into the air. Otis doesn’t hear me.
He sits down on the bed and stares at the gun. Amigo has followed him and looks at him quizzically. Otis pushes a bullet into the chamber, then closes it. He places his finger on the trigger and explores the feel, twisting the gun as if to examine it.
His face is dry. No more tears. His eyes are shallow.
I swipe my hands through the air, trying to slap him, to wake him up, but my hands pass through his flesh, drawing nothing more than a slight stir in the air.
I am not of this earth. I don’t have a body, though I can feel.
I can feel my worry and pain, and in this moment I can feel how desperately I want him to keep fighting, to keep living.
He raises the gun to his head, sticks the barrel against his temple. He stares down at the rug. He doesn’t see Amigo. Or he’s chosen to ignore him.
I swipe at the air again, but nothing happens. I go for the gun. Nothing.
I get the sense that this is not my business, not my fight.
Pulling back, I find some modicum of relief in washing my hands of it. Only from this place where I am now could I know any sort of peace while I watch the love of my life hold a gun to his head.
He moves the gun about, sticking it in his mouth, then under his chin. I can’t look away; I must stay with him until the end.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and I brace myself for a gunshot.
The following silence is like none I’ve ever known.
Otis closes his eyes.
I have always been there for him. This doesn’t change now.
All the while, Amigo wags his tail. He thinks Otis has a toy for him.
I can’t know what Otis is thinking. I can only imagine the loss that has overwhelmed him, not only since Mikey and I perished, but since that day on the river with Cam. He’d fought so hard. We had fought so hard to overcome, only to be pulled right back into the mire.
Otis pulled the gun away from under his chin, exposing a mark from where the steel had pressed into flesh. His bottom lip fell open, and he set the gun down and clutched his chest.
Then he scooped up Amigo and brought him onto his lap. He did not speak, he barely breathed, as he ran his fingers over the coyote’s fur.
Ten minutes later he removed the bullet and returned the gun to its place, then walked into the kitchen and made himself a tuna salad sandwich. He gave Amigo the remains of tuna in the can, then ate in his recliner while he watched the news. From a gun to his head to a tuna fish sandwich.
Once he polished off the sandwich, he went to the bar and started to pour a scotch, but then stopped.
Instead, he hiked up to the winery, the first time he’d entered since losing them, and he descended into the cellar and went straight for his older vintages.
He found a 2005, Cam’s year, and returned to the house to pull the cork.
The wine was just starting to find its stride, still a long way from having any proper age on it, but as he took the first sips, he found some sort of peace in the memories of how things lay out after Cam’s passing.
With a fresh glass poured, he returned to his desk and picked up the pen. Without much hesitation, he began to write.
This journal. I should have known it would come into my life.
I remember the day you handed it to me, assuring me it’s the process, not the finished product.
When I rolled my eyes at the idea, you said, “Don’t call it a journal then.
Call it a memoir. Or a grocery list. I don’t care.
Quit taking yourself so seriously and just write.
” You told me that you’d be okay, that we both had to find our own way back.
Well, here I am, Bec, focused on the process, ripping my heart out as I lose my oldest son for the second time. The gun is back in the closet, and I’m here, writing, because it’s all that I know to do, the only way that I can keep you all alive, to write you back to life.