Chapter 5
Audrey
The alarm goes off at five-forty, and I turn it off before it finishes the first note.
I've been awake for a while, just lying in bed and pretending otherwise until the phone told me it's time.
The house is dark and quiet. I move through it the way I used to, without turning on the overhead lights, by the glow of the under-cabinet strip in the kitchen and the gray seeping in around the curtains.
I start the coffee. I put bread in the toaster for Eli and prep the vanilla yogurt for Sophie, setting strawberries and a bag of granola next to the bowl.
Then I go upstairs to my bathroom and turn on the light over the mirror to see what I have to work with.
Not much this morning. The skin under my eyes is the color of a day-old bruise. I press a cool cloth there for a minute, then pat in the concealer. Next is the tinted moisturizer, a little blush so I don't look like a corpse, and mascara. The whole thing takes nine minutes.
When I'm done, I step back from the counter and see a woman who's figured it out.
Whatever it is.
I get the kids up. I stand at the counter and watch them eat while I drink my coffee. I make the lunches, and I sign the field-trip slip that's been on the fridge for a week.
Then I drive them to school.
"You don't have to," Nora said the first morning, still in her robe at the top of the stairs. "I can do drop-off. You should sleep."
"I've got it," I told her.
And I do. That's the whole project now. I have got it.
It goes like this for three days.
I get up before the alarm, put on the face, and press whatever needs pressing.
I drive the kids to school and wave at the other mothers in the pickup line, then run the errands that have piled up while I was busy falling apart.
I buy groceries. I return the library books that are overdue.
I help Eli with the worksheet about the water cycle, drawing little arrows for evaporation, and I quiz Sophie on her spelling words while I brown the meat for tacos.
I cook dinner and force myself to eat it. It makes me feel sick, but I force the food down anyway.
Nora watches me do it.
She doesn't say anything. She's good that way. She just sits at the table with her tea and her phone, and she watches me move around my kitchen like she's checking my work. Like she's waiting for the moment this all breaks.
On the fourth day, I make her breakfast.
I set it down in front of her—eggs the way she likes them, toast with the good jam—and I sit across from her with my coffee and deliver the lines I've rehearsed.
"You should go home, Nor." I keep my voice even, saying it like it's nothing.
She looks up from her breakfast. "I'm fine here."
"I know you are." I wrap both hands around my mug. "But you've got your own bed. And who knows if Wanda is okay. That cat probably thinks you abandoned her."
"I feed her when I can. She still looks fine," she says, unworried. "Wanda's a survivor."
"Nora."
She sets her fork down. Studies me the way she's been studying me for three days, and I let her. I keep my face open and my hands steady, and I don't look away. I think, please, please, please believe it, and underneath that, a smaller, please don't.
"You're sure?" she says.
"I'm sure. I'm good."
It's the cleanest lie I've told in a while. It comes out smooth.
She waits another two days anyway, just to be certain. Then on a Saturday she packs the duffel that's been lying open on the floor of the guest room for half a year and hugs me too long in the entryway. She makes me promise to call. About anything. About nothing.
"I promise," I say into her shoulder.
I watch her car back out of the driveway and turn onto the road toward Harlow.
The house settles into silence.
I stand in the entryway for a moment after she's gone. The kids are in the backyard. I can hear Eli shrieking about something, a joyful scream. The afternoon stretches out ahead of me, empty and mine.
I go fold the laundry. Think about what else needs to be done.
Sunday morning, I iron the kid’s church clothes.
I do it at the board in the corner of my bedroom, with the news on low, and I spread the finished pieces across the foot of my bed the way I used to.
Eli's good pants and the blue shirt that's already getting short in the sleeves.
Sophie's dress with the little buttons, the one she picked herself last spring and refuses to grow out of.
There’s a pair of slacks and a dress shirt missing. I try not to focus on the spot where Thomas’s clothes should be. He gave us this life. The insurance payment is keeping it running. I won’t let myself slide back and make Nora hold it together again.
I clear the knot forming in my throat.
"Clothes are on my bed," I call down the stairs. "All pressed. Come grab them."
Eli hits the stairs like a stampede.
"We're going to church? Are Ethan and Brody gonna be there?" He's already pulling the shirt over his head before he's all the way into the room, arms tangling. "Brody said his cousin's visiting, and he can do a backflip off the couch, a whole backflip, and—"
"Probably. If their families are going." I free his arm from the wrong hole. "Socks that match this time."
"The white ones?"
"White ones are fine."
He grabs his pants, and he's gone, thundering down the hall, hollering something about backflips at his sister on the way past.
The noise trails off through the rooms, and the house settles around it.
I go down to finish making my coffee. I pour the fresh brew into the mug, add the milk, and I'm reaching for the spoon when I feel her.
Sophie. In the doorway behind me, not saying anything.
I stir the coffee, and the spoon clinks against the side of the mug. Out the window, the yard is bright and ordinary, the grass too long, the swing set Thomas put up listing a little to the left the way it has for over two years.
She's still there. I can feel her looking at me, the careful, weighing way she's been looking at me for months.
"Mom," she says.
"Mm." I don't turn around. I tap the spoon on the rim of the mug and set it in the sink.
"We don't have to go." Her voice is small and even. "If you don't want to. We can just stay home."
I still for a moment. I set the mug down then turn around.
She's standing in her pressed dress with the little buttons, her hair just brushed. Nine years old. Watching my face the way I watch hers when she has a fever, looking for the number under the skin.
I cross the kitchen and pull her in.
She's stiff for half a second, surprised, and then she folds into me, her arms going around my middle, her cheek against my chest. She smells like strawberry shampoo and sunshine. I put my hand on the back of her head, holding her there and trying to breathe.
"I want to go," I say into her hair. "I do. I promise."
"Okay." Muffled, against my shirt. Then, quieter, she says, "But we can leave if you change your mind. We can leave if it's too much, and it's okay."
Something goes through me, sharp enough that I have to wait a beat before I trust my voice.
"Thank you, baby." I press my lips to the top of her head. "Go finish getting ready."
She pulls back and looks at me, checking one more time. Whatever she finds in my face must pass because she nods and lets go, heading for the stairs.
I watch her climb them, one hand on the rail, the hem of her dress swinging.
She is nine.
She should be thinking about Brody's cousin and the backflip. She should be fighting with her brother and excited to see her friends. She shouldn't know how to read a room before she's even hit puberty. She shouldn't be standing in a doorway calculating whether her mother’s okay.
I pick up my coffee. It's gone lukewarm.
I drink it anyway, all of it, standing at the counter where she found me. And I make myself a promise that has nothing to do with God and everything to do with the girl on the stairs.
She does not need to do this. She does not need to mother me.
I'll be better at the performance. Good enough that she stops checking.
The fluorescents at Millbrook First find the place behind my left eye within ninety seconds of the doors closing.
By the time the pastor steps up to the pulpit, I'm pressing two fingers to my temple under the cover of bowing my head, and I keep them there through the first song.
Eli is three kids down the pew, wedged between Ethan and Brody, all of them whispering. Sophie is beside me, close. She doesn't say anything, but she stays angled toward me, and I make my shoulders loose and my face soft so there's nothing for her to find.
Melinda is across the aisle and two rows up.
I see the back of her head before the service starts—the silver bob, the navy cardigan—and my stomach bottoms out. She turns during the greeting, the way you do, hand out to the people around her. Then her eyes find me over the rows, and her whole face opens.
She lifts her hand, a small wave full of so much hope it's hard to look at.
I lift mine back.
Thomas is in her face the way he always is.
Especially the eyes. That exact pale blue, set the same way under the brow, so that looking at her has been, for nine months, like looking at the last photograph of him through frosted glass.
The first time I saw her after the funeral, I had to leave the room.
I barely made it to my bedroom before I came apart.
I wait for it now. The buckling.
It comes. Of course it comes—the ache, sharp and immediate—his eyes in her face and the space beside me where he should be.
It crests. It holds.
But it doesn't take me under.
I sit in it, my hands folded, the lights screaming behind my eye, Sophie warm against my arm. I feel the grief move through me like the weather—and then I feel it pass.
I can manage this. The realization is so quiet I almost miss it.
I can manage this.
I'm not sure how to feel about that.
After the service, Melinda finds us at the end of the pew. For one awful moment, I'm afraid that she'll see it, that I'm not grieving her son the same way I was just months ago. That I'm forgetting him and becoming someone else.
But she doesn't. She holds my hands in both of hers, papery and cool, and tells me how big the kids look. Asks how Sophie likes school and whether there's anything, anything at all, that I need.
"You'll let me take them some Saturday," she says, not quite a question. "Give you a morning to yourself. I'd love it. The kids would love it."
A month ago I'd have said the soft no I've been saying for nine months. We're managing. Soon.
"Maybe," I hear myself say. "Maybe one of these Saturdays. I might take you up on that."
Her face does something then. Her eyes—his eyes—go bright and wet, and she squeezes my hands hard.
"Any Saturday," she says. "You just name the date."
I get the kids to the car before the lights finish splitting my skull in two.
I drive home with the visor down, sunglasses on, and the radio off, because sound is a knife now, and the light through the windshield is worse.
Eli narrates the backflip for the third time from the back seat.
I make the right noises. Sophie goes back and forth between watching the road and watching me, and I keep my hands at ten and two and my jaw unclenched until I get us home.
The pills haven't worked. Three of them, in rotation, the names a little poem of failure. The injections haven't worked. The neurologist in Harlow told me it could take months to find a combination that would work for me. Those months are quickly adding up to a year.
We break off to our respective rooms, impatient to trade the church clothes for anything more relaxing. I drop my dress into the bathroom hamper when my phone buzzes in my back pocket.
The pounding behind my eye has gone from a knife to a fist, slow and relentless. I pull out my phone.
Unknown number.
Hi Audrey. This is Declan from the BBQ. Got your number from Nate, hope that's okay. Just wanted to check in. I know it's been a few weeks. Hope you're doing alright.
I stand there and read it twice.
Declan, the built-in bar, the quiet voice that didn't ask me to perform anything. Two years ago, he'd said, about his wife and a baby he never got to meet.
This is Nate's work, this text. Nate with his big open face, nudging people toward each other like he was rearranging a room. The bridge he wanted to build between two widows.
I type something back. It takes a few tries.
Hi Declan. Of course it's okay. That's really kind of you. We're getting by over here. I hope you're doing alright too.
I check it for tone.
Sounds warm enough. Closed enough. Then I send it.
I move from the bathroom and sit on the edge of the bed.
The text has put me back there.
The smell of charcoal and somebody's sunscreen. The afternoon light moving across the Holts' yard, gold going long over the water. Declan's voice beside me, low and steady, both of us in the shade with our drinks. Two people with the worst commonality.
And across the yard, in the pool, in all that brightness—
Asher.
His white shirt soaked dark and clinging, Owen's water gun trained on his chest, the boys climbing him like he was playground equipment.
Throwing his head back. That laugh I could hear from the other side of the lawn, unguarded in a way I had forgotten people could be.
He'd turned and caught me watching, and he hadn't looked away.
He'd grinned, slow and crooked, like he'd been waiting for me to.
The bathroom.
I haven't let myself go there in daylight. I've kept it boxed, opened it only in the dark where I could close it fast. But my head is pounding, everything is too bright, and I let the lid come off.
The click of the lock.
His hips meeting mine and the heat of it through the dress.
The way he kept me quiet against the door with his mouth like he knew exactly how much sound I had in me and wasn't going to let any of it out.
And the thing I haven't looked at. The thing I've been sidestepping for weeks while I pressed clothes and timed my makeup and lied to my sister at the breakfast table.
I didn't have a migraine after that.
Not that afternoon.
Not the drive home.
Not even later that night, lying in bed with shame clawing through me while I searched his name in the dark.
Quiet.
My head had been quiet.
The realization comes slowly at first.
My body gets there before I do.
The lock under my thumb, his mouth, his hands lifting me—
Relief.
Real relief.
The kind no pill or injection or specialist has managed to give me in almost a year.
The migraine pulses once behind my eye, like my body answering its own question.
And suddenly the problem isn't that I slept with Asher Calloway.
The problem is that I want to do it again.