Chapter 21
DEB
Two Days After the Fire
STEPPING INTO THE BACKYARD IS like stepping off the bullet train of time.
It’s still, with the night sky and distant croak of a frog.
My gin and tonic is in hand, ice tinkling.
Our Adirondack chairs are beneath the bistro lights, where Billy sits with his whiskey like a hundred times before. But all is not as it was.
Once, when my kids were young, a friend saw them after a long time and said, “Man, growth is like an acid trip.” I had to agree.
April’s new teeth and freckles, Josie’s thinned baby cheeks, and Cameron’s height.
It had all happened before my very eyes, a succession of sprouts and blooms in my garden of children.
I look now at Billy. He is still strong, still rides his bike regularly.
If I study his long, lean muscles, at times I still dizzy with desire.
His vision remains sharp, nearly six decades of life with no glasses.
But there are traces of time. His joints bother him.
His skin is dotted with sunspots. There’s a hairless orb on the back of his head, his brain beneath it, misfiring.
A museum of gray matter, its shelves being robbed and emptied with each passing hour.
I sit down beside him.
He takes my hand in his, leans his head back, and rests his eyes. Quietly, he hums “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” the song a sort of anchor for us.
I think of the day we spent four hours dragging the kids to furniture stores to find the perfect couch.
We argued and stopped for lunch. Josie spilled fruit punch on herself.
I ground my teeth. Hours were spent and used and lost, the way hours are.
I don’t regret that day; what I regret is rushing to the end of it.
I was spinning with checklists and children, trying to keep up, though I’m not sure with what.
I take a sip and feel the piney burn of gin in my throat, the stillness around me, the man beside me. It has only been six years since I stopped bleeding each month. There was a sadness with that, a sudden desire to get pregnant again. I remember thinking, Maybe we could adopt. We have time.
I join Billy in closing my eyes, and I flip through my catalog of memories, hoping to pull strength from somewhere in my past. I gave my mother medicine through a straw, then kept my father alive, then chose hymns for his funeral.
I married a man I barely knew and raised a baby I didn’t plan on, then two more I did.
I fed countless neighbors, listened to them cry over casseroles.
I became an orphan, a wife, and a mother, all at times I wouldn’t have chosen. And now—
The bullet train circles back and draws closer. Billy got lost today. Lost.
Now, I am becoming my husband’s caretaker.
A gulf is opening between us, a canyon where I have knowledge he doesn’t, a future he doesn’t, where I will make decisions he can’t.
It’s our last storm, and it’s all I can do not to throw myself on the ground in protest. I wanted to be the first to go.
And the anticipation of grief is a grief itself.
With energized sorrow, I open my eyes. “We need to tell the kids.”
Billy opens his too, and he nods. “I know.”
He knows. He knows. I could cry with relief, he knows. It’s the two of us together, pipe and joint, pier and beam.
I swallow another sip of gin. “Tomorrow?”
He hesitates. “Does April…”
I look at him, apologetic.
He says, “She already knows?”
I nod. “The others don’t.”
“Okay, then.” Swirling his whiskey, Billy stares down into it like tea leaves. “Tomorrow.”
He says it like a weather forecaster, powerless to reroute the storm.
“When it rains, it pours,” I offer.
A nostalgic smile tugs at his lips as he recites my line. “Couldn’t we get a little London drizzle for once? Some light Seattle mist?”
Soon, he might not know these lines. But in this moment, he does.
A moment is moving time, and if it’s the nature of time to move, then it’s my nature to keep up.
So, I stand. Glide toward our beautiful home, sorrow crackling in my chest, radiating out toward everything around me.
The bricks Billy power washed last summer.
The roof that was replaced after the tornado.
The couch we bought the day Josie’s shirt got stained red with punch.
I ask Billy to follow me.
In our bedroom, I turn the lock on the doorknob, and he raises his eyebrows.
I unbutton his shirt, expertly. Run fingertips up his skin, muscle, sinew, leisurely. Spread my fingers through the luxurious curls on his chest. I refuse to rush this. I’m not denying my sadness—I am looking it in the eye. If a storm is coming, let it come. Let it drench us.
When my husband is over me, inside me, mine entirely, my tears flow freely. He kisses them, and he thrusts harder, eyes open, looking at me through the rise and release of it. He is with me in body and mind, and my sadness is on his lips.
When he tries to roll away, I pull his full weight back onto me. “Stay.”
And he does. He always has.