Chapter 3
Nina woke up on the wrong side of the bed. David’s side, to be exact.
She had once again rolled over there in her sleep, the way she did at least a couple of times a week, reaching for the warmth she wanted that was no longer there.
She would always wake up with her face pressed into his pillow that had long since stopped smelling like him. She had kept the pillow anyway. She had kept everything.
His terry cloth robe was still on the hook behind the bathroom door, even though she hated it because it was so poofy and heavy that it made the door hard to open. No matter how many times she’d complained about it, somehow it would end up there again and again.
His reading glasses were still on the nightstand, even though she hated those too. The round ones never looked great on his face, but he said he liked them.
It was funny how all the little things that made a marriage interesting, and the things you may not love about your spouse’s fashion or decor choices, became so important when they were gone.
She tried not to think too hard about all the times they had fought over the pettiest of things, although they did not fight much in their marriage.
He would get a kick out of the fact that she was still annoyed by his huge bathrobe and circular glasses.
His boots were by the back door, still flecked with the marsh mud he had tracked in the last time he walked through it, a Tuesday in April, eighteen months ago.
She knew it was a Tuesday because that was the day he died, and she had memorized every detail of it, the way that you memorize the most traumatic moment of your life.
Like a movie playing in your mind that you can’t stop.
Like a remote control that doesn’t work, and you can’t leave the room.
You’re stuck there, reliving it over and over for eternity.
She lay there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling. The fan turned in a slow, lazy circle. It needed to be dusted. She would get to it at some point. Dust was the least of her problems.
David had installed it during their first summer on Edisto because the August heat was so thick you could practically eat it with a spoon. There was nothing like Lowcountry heat.
He had gotten the wiring wrong twice before finally getting it right, and he refused to call an electrician because he was stubborn.
She had stood at the bottom of the ladder, handing him the tools and trying not to laugh every time he swore in Spanish, which his mother had taught him was the only acceptable language for profanity.
The fan worked perfectly. It had outlasted him by a year and a half, which seemed like a cruel joke that the universe specialized in lately.
She hoped she never had to replace it.
Who knew that a ceiling fan would mean so much when someone was gone?
She got up and made the bed because she always made the bed every morning.
She tucked David’s side in tight the way he liked it and then smoothed the quilt Elena had given them as a wedding gift, the one with the pattern Elena’s mother had brought from Oaxaca sixty years ago.
She went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and looked at herself in the mirror. Now she saw a woman who was fifty years old and tired in a way that sleep just couldn’t fix.
She went to the kitchen and made one cup of coffee. She used to make two cups. For months after David died, she kept making two cups out of habit.
The second one would just sit on the counter and get cold until she poured it down the sink at noon, feeling like she was pouring her husband down the sink.
Now she just made one cup.
Elena said it was progress, but Nina just called it math. Why waste money making coffee for someone who couldn’t drink it anymore?
She had enjoyed her dinner with Harper and Claire the night before. And there was a part of her that was even the tiniest bit excited about their pact.
Although they did not all share the same birthday, they had decided to celebrate together because they would all be turning fifty within just a few months of each other.
The three of them had shared all of life’s biggest events, good and bad, since they met in college. She realized what an extreme blessing and privilege it was to have strong women in her life who had supported her every step of the way, including the day that David had died.
They had been there in the aftermath, like two steady guards standing on either side of her, bringing food, helping to organize the funeral, talking Lucia through the loss of her dad, trying to keep Elena, David’s mother, at bay in the moments when Nina just needed to be alone.
But there was only so much friends could do.
Grief wasn’t something you could really share with other people.
It was something you had to carry alone.
It was love with nowhere to go, after all.
And although Harper and Claire loved David, they couldn’t share in the immense grief Nina felt at losing her soulmate.
She looked out the window in the kitchen over the marsh. David had fallen in love with the view the first time the realtor had brought them here twelve years ago.
He had stood at the window with his hands in his pockets and watched an egret lift off from the grass.
“This is it. This is where we should live, Nina. Forever.”
Just like that.
There was no deliberation, no weighing pros and cons. David made decisions with his whole soul. He walked into a room and knew.
He had looked at Nina across a crowded lecture hall during their junior year at the College of Charleston, and he knew.
And he stood at this very window and knew.
Nina had loved that about him. Sometimes, she also found it maddening because she was a thinker. She needed to weigh things and turn them over in her mind fifteen times before committing.
David used to make fun of her about it.
“You’re going to think yourself out of your own life, mi amor.”
He had been right about that, too.
She sipped on her coffee and watched the marsh. The tide was coming in, so the water was creeping up over the mud in a slow, inevitable way, turning the flat brown landscape into something alive.
A heron stood on one leg near the dock, patient as a saint. Fiddler crabs scuttled around the waterline.
Edisto was beautiful. Nina knew it was beautiful, but right now she couldn’t feel it. The only thing she ever felt was sadness, like a heavy weight around her shoulders, pulling her down ever so slowly.
That was the thing about grief that nobody explained to you. It did not just take the person. It took the ability to experience the world as you used to.
All the colors of the rainbow were dimmer. Food tasted like nothing. Music was just background noise.
Their beloved marsh was just water, mud, and birds when it had been the most beautiful place she had ever seen.
Now it was just the place where David was not.
“Mom?”
Nina turned, a bit startled out of her memories.
Lucia was standing in the kitchen doorway, wearing an oversized Mickey Mouse T-shirt and shorts, her dark hair in the kind of knot that suggested she had slept on it wet and was not planning to fix it.
Young people could get away with things like that.
If she’d done it as a fifty-year-old woman, she’d look like a bridge troll.
She had David’s eyes. She had his dark brown, almost black eyes with lashes so thick they looked fake. Sometimes it made Nina feel jealous. Oh, to be young again.
Every time she looked at her daughter, she saw his face, and it was both the greatest comfort and the worst pain of her life.
“Morning, baby. There’s coffee.”
“I don’t drink coffee. I’m sixteen.” Lucia stared at her like she’d lost her mind.
“Oh. Well, I was drinking coffee at fourteen.”
“Grandma says you were drinking milk with a splash of coffee in it at twelve.”
“Yeah, well, Grandma exaggerates.”
“Grandma says that you say that every single time.”
Nina rarely saw her mother these days, since her mother now lived in Washington State with her new husband, Jerry.
They liked to travel the country in their motorhome, but they rarely made time to come see Nina and Lucia.
Maybe it was because Nina was too much now, with all her grief and sadness. Too much of a downer, she supposed.
Lucia opened the refrigerator and stood in front of it the way all teenagers do, like staring at it long enough might cause something more desirable to materialize. Maybe a pizza or a dozen doughnuts.
She finally shut it, holding a cup of yogurt and a look of resignation, like she was going to eat it as her last meal.
“We need groceries,” she said.
“I know,” Nina said.
“No, like we actually need them. Not, ‘oh, we’re just low on a few things.’ The freezer is literally full of ice and three frozen waffles. That’s it. That’s all we have.”
“Okay, I’ll go today.”
“Well, you said that on Thursday.”
Nina took a breath.
She knew Lucia was not being mean. She was just being sixteen, which meant she was being honest in the way that only somebody with no filter and lots of feelings could be.
Lucia had spent the last eighteen months watching her mom move through the house like a ghost. She was probably very tired of it, and she had every right to be. Nina was tired of it, but she still could not seem to change it.
She had one parent who wasn’t there and one who was barely hanging on.
“I’ll go after you leave for school,” Nina said. “Make me a list.”
“There’s a list on the fridge. It’s been there since last week.”
Nina looked over at the refrigerator, and there was, in fact, a list written in Lucia’s sharp handwriting, which looked nothing like David’s and nothing like Nina’s, and was entirely and fiercely her own.
Below the list, held by a magnet shaped like a palm tree that David had bought at a gas station because he loved collecting tacky magnets the way some people collected art, was a picture that Claire had taken and sent in the group chat three days ago.
The napkin.
The pact.
Three signatures in different handwriting.