4.
men
“Hey, Claire.”
It was the same way he’d greeted her every evening for the entire five years of their relationship.
Never baby, never honey, always just Claire, just her name, and she’d taken it as a sign of respect, almost. She sensed it was something to be analyzed, a facet that could be revealing if held to the right light.
She never brought it up to Dr. Lark. She never thought much about it.
Except now, because Elias was dead, and that meant he shouldn’t be greeting her at all.
Claire rolled over in bed. She had no clock but her phone, and didn’t bother bopping the screen to make it light up, but the darkness outside her window told her it was still deep night.
The neighborhood had streetlights, but the five acres the house sat on made them little more than yellowish blurs out in the far black.
It’d been around eight when the hospital called.
Elias had been working late again. He did that, even though he technically didn’t have to work at all. She’d admired it.
He was standing in the middle of their bedroom.
Logically, Claire knew this was not the case.
Logically, she knew that Elias’s body was in the hospital morgue, cold and blue gray and probably already scored with the slices of an autopsy, the broken cross shape she’d seen in so many crime TV shows.
Maybe they’d cut into his head, too, wanting a closer look at that shouldn’t-have-been-alive brain with its lightning-bolt lesions.
In any case, the Elias standing in the middle of their bedroom—right next to a pile of his own laundry, because the housekeeper didn’t come until Thursday and he didn’t like Claire doing his—looked the same as the Elias who’d left this morning without a word.
So she was dreaming. Had to be. And that meant it wasn’t insane to interact.
“Hey,” she said back.
The light in the room was dim, nothing but the glow from the hallway through the cracked door. It made Elias hard to see, more a shadow than a person. Which made sense for a dream, right? No need for alarm there.
He moved forward. Not a step—his legs didn’t move, but he was suddenly closer, in a shimmer of air like a static pop across a screen. He was ahead of the laundry pile now, and Claire noticed that his feet hovered barely an inch off the floor. Like bait on the end of a hook.
“It’s gonna be a lot,” he said. It sounded like he was coaching her for a social interaction.
He had to do that, sometimes. Not that they went out with other people that much, but when they did, Claire got overwhelmed quickly.
Easy friendship wasn’t a skill she’d learned, so she kept her circles purposefully small, encroaching on nonexistent.
“But you’re the right person for it, OK?
I’ve never doubted that. I kept you away as long as I could, and tried for longer. Look where that got me.”
Something was different in his face. His eyes. Elias had the most beautiful blue eyes, but now, in the muted hallway light, they looked almost yellow, and too big.
Elias didn’t get any closer. But his face seemed to grow larger, in that uncanny way of dreams, to somehow loom nearer and nearer in a slow creep.
Claire wanted to move away from him, to lean back, but she couldn’t.
She was paralyzed in her bed, in the sweaty tangle of sheets that were meant for two.
The light grew in the window, but it wasn’t the faraway streetlamps. It was harsher, the contrast greater to the dark. It carved out hollows in his face, made it look like a mask for something else to wear.
“Just go with it,” he said, and his voice sounded distant, heard through water. “You’re good at that.”
○ ○ 2. ○ ○
The letter was classy. She guessed she should’ve expected that.
Claire didn’t know much about Elias’s parents, but she knew they came from money, the old and seemingly endless kind, and knew they did some sort of work with science and the sea floor.
Elias always said that was why he didn’t like the beach. He’d had enough of the ocean at home.
She’d never met them once over the course of their entire relationship. According to Elias, she wasn’t missing much, but Claire felt like she was. Even a shitty family was better than none at all, she thought. Aunt Margo hardly counted.
Once they were married, she planned to try her damnedest to heal the rift between the Ashburys, bring them together again. Because then they’d be her family, too. That plan was the only secret she’d ever kept from Elias.
The paper felt like the expensive sheets Elias bought online, some extravagantly high thread count you couldn’t find in stores. It was almost enough to distract her from the fact that she was receiving an invitation to a funeral she hadn’t yet planned.
Dear Miss Sutherland,
We are terribly sorry for your loss. Please know that though we didn’t know each other, we count you as part of the family, and would love for you to join us at Harrow Point, our family home, from May 4 to May 7 as we gather to celebrate Elias’s life.
Please email me at audreyashbury@ to let me know if you can attend, and we will make proper arrangements.
A Hotmail address, in the year of our Lord 2024. Claire laughed at that, loud and long and inappropriate, right up until the laughter almost turned to tears. Then she shut it off, dammed back in her throat and turned to an ache.
May 4 was her birthday. Twenty-seven this year.
The missive was handwritten. There was no formal invitation to accompany it, though the paper and envelope both had gilded edges, as if Audrey Ashbury wrote grocery lists on what others would use for a wedding RSVP.
Either someone was fucking with her, or the funeral Elias’s parents were holding was an extremely small, intimate affair.
Claire wasn’t sure which one she hoped for.
After that weird dream, she didn’t feel up for planning much of anything. Since Elias died, she’d only left the house to get the mail.
Claire fingered the gold edges of the invitation as she walked back up the long driveway, then placed it carefully on her cluttered coffee table. She’d called Eva, the housekeeper, and told her not to come this week.
She sat down, slowly, and stared at the foiled envelope.
Some shipwrecked treasure, winking up from mud and bracken.
Then she grabbed her wineglass. She was a beer drinker, but all of it was gone, and she hadn’t mustered the energy to go get more—after the incident with the car following her from the hospital, the idea of driving anywhere was not appealing.
Elias had been the wine drinker, and was one of those people who actually knew things about it beyond this tastes good or this tastes bad.
She’d taken some of his stash from the cooler in the kitchen.
Claire was down to the last bottle, and knew there was more in the basement, but she wouldn’t be going down there.
Once all the alcohol within reach was gone, maybe she’d finally find it within herself to drive to the liquor store.
She took a long, bitter swallow of red. In the wall of the living room, the aquarium churned softly. She didn’t look at it.
Two days since he’d died. Claire had no experience planning funerals, but she assumed she was probably supposed to be in the throes of doing so right now, instead of skulking around the house in the dark with her hair unwashed and wine stains on her teeth.
Bodies went bad, didn’t they? You had to do something before the maggots set in.
But no one had contacted her about doing anything with Elias; maybe his family had taken care of that, too, with the same innate life-together knowledge that had made him add her to the house deed, the car titles, right in the nick of time.
Maybe she should be angry about that kind of overstepping, but her immediate emotion was relief.
Just go with it, her personal conjuring of Elias had said, yellow-eyed and floating. He was right. She was good at that. She’d been just going with it since she was thirteen, always taking the path of least resistance.
Another drink, this one longer. She had an appointment with Dr. Lark tomorrow.
She hadn’t told her yet that Elias was dead.
Hadn’t told anyone. There wasn’t really anyone to tell.
The friends they sometimes went to dinner with, maybe, but Claire didn’t even have their phone numbers.
They were more Elias’s friends than hers, and not very close ones.
Apparently the Ashburys were much better at things like planning funerals than she was.
The Ashburys, whom she’d never met. The Ashburys, whom Elias never, ever talked about, with their old money and their fancy stationery and their Hotmail email addresses.
Rich people didn’t have to bow to the tyranny of Google if they didn’t want to.
The world bent around rich people’s quirks, smoothed them over like waves on churned sand.
For a moment, she considered tearing the letter up, throwing it out into the well-maintained yard, the lilies just starting to peek out from the soil.
But instead of tearing the paper, she picked it up gently, rereading the elegant cursive. Tracing it lightly with her finger. She didn’t remember her mother’s handwriting.
Then she grabbed her laptop.
Her email was quick, efficient. Sure, she would love to attend. She was so sorry this was happening. She was thankful they’d thought of her.
She almost said she was glad they’d taken over the arrangements, but stopped right before typing it out. It felt like a confession, to say she was in over her head. To show them how she was always, always just trying to do what was easiest.
Claire sent the email without proofreading it. She shoved the laptop away and drained the rest of Elias’s wine.