Reliquary

4.

dead

Elias died on a Tuesday. It was easy to remember for the very reason it felt so surreal—Tuesdays were nothing days, too close to the end of one weekend and too far from the beginning of the next, a day when you never had plans but couldn’t really complain because at least it wasn’t Monday.

If you saw something ridiculous, you’d say, Oh, just a normal Tuesday, and everyone would laugh because Tuesdays were so utterly bland.

But Elias died on a Tuesday, and it wasn’t bland at all.

Her ring twisted around her finger, the diamond turned toward her palm and digging in as she drove. A new car, his, Mercedes something or other, and she guessed she’d have to figure out how to transfer it into her name. Transfer everything.

Claire’s mind was a white void, no thought or feeling, only the immediacy of her stunned-still body and her jackknifing heart and the steering wheel beneath her hand, smooth leather that she scored with her thumbnail.

Beside her, a cracked iPhone, screen dark.

Elias had bugged her to upgrade it, said she was an idiot for keeping it.

But she couldn’t afford a new one, and Elias would only pay for it if she swapped over to his phone plan, and she didn’t want to deal with changing her number.

It’d lit up with the call from the hospital half an hour ago.

Hello, may I speak to Claire Sutherland? I’m so sorry, Miss Sutherland, there’s been…

They’d stopped there, leaving a gap in the conversation’s rhythm that was traditionally filled with the word accident. But that didn’t work here, not really.

An aneurysm wasn’t an accident. An aneurysm was a ticking bomb, a mine buried in the folds of your brain, waiting for the opportunity to explode. It would’ve been there forever, biding its time.

A honk; Claire swore and swerved out of the oncoming lane, a pickup truck whizzing by with another long press of the horn and a middle-finger salute.

Usually Claire would return it, but only timidly and once they’d passed.

Her fiancé had just died, so she didn’t.

She only had enough energy to drive the car, as if Elias’s death had sucked the vitality out of her, too.

You’re welcome to come by at your earliest convenience, if you’d like to see him… The neurologist had some questions… Did your fiancé have any brain issues you were aware of, Miss Sutherland? Any disease, any injury?

“Tuesday,” Claire murmured as she pulled into a parking spot. The hospital lot was nearly deserted; she managed to park right next to the emergency room door. The car shuddered to a stop, and she sat there, still and slumped. “We get takeout on Tuesdays. I work late. Elias won’t cook.”

She didn’t know why she said it out loud.

Maybe to see if it would shake the world back into order.

Claire wasn’t someone who spent a lot of time thinking on esoteric subjects, but right now, she desperately believed in parallel universes.

She desperately wanted to somehow phase herself into the one where Elias wasn’t dead, where he was calling in their usual order to that sushi place he liked, where he would leave his sneakers on the floor instead of the shoe rack.

Where she would sigh, and pick them up, and put them where they were supposed to go, because she had learned that telling him off didn’t do anything but make him annoyed, and she didn’t want to deal with his annoyance.

Claire closed her eyes. Opened them. Same universe.

She opened the door and climbed out of her car.

Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead; an antiseptic burn scoured her nostrils.

There were two other people in the waiting room.

One an older white woman wearing Tinker Bell pajama bottoms and in bad need of a hairbrush.

The other a young man with dreads and a trellis of dark bruises blooming across his nose, a bloody tissue protruding from one nostril.

The nurse at the reception desk was playing on her phone, some matching game complete with tinny explosion sound effects.

Her scrubs had rainbows on them. The desk had visible wipe marks from the last time someone had Lysoled it.

“Hi.” Claire shifted her weight on her feet.

She still wore house slippers, UGG boots with a flimsy sole that Elias had given her for Christmas last year.

Claire worked from home and spent most days in leggings and band T-shirts, despite the closetful of clothes he’d bought her.

Her freelance social media management clients didn’t care what she wore.

It was a miracle she’d remembered a bra. “I’m Claire Sutherland.”

The nurse swiped a combo (“Boom!” said an excited cartoon voice from her phone) before looking up with an expression on the fraying edge of polite. Blue eyeshadow streaked across her pale lids; her eyebrows were barely there. “And?”

She guessed calling the emergency contacts of dead men wasn’t something emergency reception took care of.

“I’m Elias Ashbury’s fiancée.” Voice surprisingly even, surprisingly clear.

That would be a problem later. She could already feel tears gathering in the wide cavity of her chest, crowding her rib bones, calcifying.

Grief was sharp, she’d learned that before, and the longer you kept it trapped without release, the sharper its edges grew.

But she was good at hollowing herself to allow it room, a skill Dr. Lark kept trying to train out of her. “He’s dead.”

The nurse’s phone fell from her hand, still tinkling, cartoon avatar still thrilled.

Her arched brow slammed down, fixed itself in shame and then pity.

The lady in the Tinker Bell pajamas glanced up at Claire, face inscrutable, before looking down at the tile again.

Her foot bounced rapidly, the heel of her flip-flop slapping the floor like the bass in a frenetic metal song.

“Oh,” the nurse said. “Oh.” Her legs tensed like she would stand before she realized that she didn’t need to; turning from Claire, she grabbed the desk and pulled her rolling office chair to the black landline phone, fingers already flying over the numbers as she lifted the receiver.

“She’s here,” she murmured, then nodded and hung up, office chair squealing as she rolled back in front of the window.

Her face was composed now in what Claire thought of as Nurse Face.

Gentle with sympathy but firm, approachable but not a pushover.

Claire was very familiar with Nurse Face.

“Go through the double doors and to the left,” the nurse said, in a gentle-yet-firm voice to go along with her expression. “The neurologist will meet you.”

A subtle weight to the title, like she wanted Claire to know that this was a big deal, that the neurologist wouldn’t see just anyone. Claire bit the inside of her cheek to keep it from spasming.

“Thanks.” She walked toward the double doors. Unobtrusive cream, silver bar across the middle, standing out against the navy check of the tile. All hospitals must have the same interior decorators.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the nurse said as Claire pressed against the metal bar, the locks disengaging with a mechanical squall.

“Happy Tuesday,” Claire said back.

○ ○ 2. ○ ○

The neurologist—Dr. Henry Cummins, he told her, shaking her hand while his was still covered in blue latex, making their palms squeak together—wanted her to know there was nothing they could’ve done.

“He was lucky,” the doctor insisted, as if he was trying to convince himself, too.

“It was quick and painless, and he was at his desk, instead of driving. It could’ve been much worse. ”

Not for Elias, Claire thought. Seems like it was pretty much as bad as it can get for Elias.

They stood in silence for a moment, there in the sterile hallway under the buzzing lights.

Claire was wearing an embarrassingly apt T-shirt, which she hadn’t really clocked until now.

“Will Self-Destruct For Likes,” it read, with the little Facebook thumbs-up symbol beneath it.

Claire hated this shirt, and she hated Facebook.

Elias had bought it for her at a stall on Canal Street when he was in the city on business and buzzed from one too many cocktails, back when they had first started dating and the only things they really knew about each other were their jobs.

It was laundry day, or she would never have worn it.

It’d felt morbid in a funny downfall-of-society way when Elias bought it.

Now it was just regular run-of-the-mill morbid.

She pulled her cardigan around her middle. Cashmere. Another Christmas gift.

Dr. Cummins cleared his throat. If Elias were here—here and alive—he would make fun of the good doctor’s name. Claire couldn’t think of anything funny.

The doctor checked the clipboard in his hand, too quickly to actually read anything on it, a physical tic to move them out of the condolences part of the conversation and into the meat of it.

Claire didn’t know what the meat was supposed to be.

Her aunt had taken care of all this stuff when she’d been in a similar situation before, right after the accident.

Funeral arrangements, inheritances. She hadn’t really spoken to Aunt Margo in years, if you didn’t count cards.

Once she turned eighteen, they had gone their separate ways, and she’d never felt the need to pick up the phone.

“There were some… anomalies,” Dr. Cummins finally said.

He tucked the clipboard back under his arm, directing his gaze to the empty space over her shoulder instead of her face.

“In the CAT scans. Some strange scarring that we can’t quite make sense of.

Were you aware of any neurological conditions Mr. Ashbury may have dealt with?

In his childhood, maybe? The lesions look like they’ve been there awhile. ”