Chapter 08
Now
amy
I knock back the warm glass of cheap white wine sweating on the kitchen table – all I can afford these days – and pull the document towards me.
Jean Amy Gray vs. MacGill William Smith.
My vision swims, and not just because that was my third glass of wine.
I once read that ninety per cent of couples divorce after the loss of their child.
Even before I became a mother, it always struck me as an especially heartbreaking statistic: surely the only person on the planet who could understand the depth of your pain – the loss of your child, your particular child – would be their other parent?
How could anyone else, even those similarly bereaved, understand the appalling, jagged hole your child had left?
Iris is the only person who knows precisely what I’m going through, but we haven’t spoken since the accident fifteen months ago. I can’t talk to her: I can’t even be in the same room with her.
Mac and I tried to be among that grief-stricken ten per cent of parents who make it through.
We saw counsellors, alone and together. We travelled out of state to attend a support group somewhere we wouldn’t be recognised, where our grief would be just as valid as anyone else’s.
But even without knowing the truth about us, the parents of other dead children were too trapped in their own unbearable misery to find it within themselves to empathise with ours.
It’s like being starving in a room full of other ravenous people: their hunger doesn’t make you any less famished.
None of it worked. Every time Mac and I looked at each other, we saw Nicky’s face: aged two, at ten, at twelve, at fifteen. The pain was – is – so intense we sealed ourselves off from each other, emotionally and physically, because it was the only way to survive.
And of course there’s the guilt.
His.
Mine.
I reach for the document and flip to the last page, my heart breaking as I stare at Mac’s familiar signature above the empty line waiting for mine.
We’ve been married for twenty-two years, and together for almost thirty.
All those years of hope and happiness and compromises and Christmases and birthdays and anniversaries and inside jokes and forgiveness and fresh starts and anger and apologies and more forgiveness, more fresh starts.
I suddenly shove back my kitchen chair and walk down the hall to my son’s bedroom.
Nicky’s never slept a night here. Our house – the beloved house Mac and I built together, the home where we raised our boy – was sold to pay the lawyers.
My parents’ old house was taken to pay Kate’s attorneys, because we’d put it in my name to save on taxes when my mother moved in with us, never dreaming – even in our worst nightmares – something like this could happen.
After the lawsuits had finished with us, there were no marital assets left for us to divide.
My son will never step foot in this squat, ugly rental in the rundown outskirts of Stowebury, all I can afford on minimum wage.
But he has a room here, even though it means I have to sleep on a back-breaking pull-out sofa in the living room because my mother, indestructible and unforgiving, has the only other bedroom.
Nicky’s posters and clothes and gaming consoles and his collection of pristine boxed superheroes are here. A shrine to the boy I’ve lost.
I sink onto his bed, and pull the pillow into my lap, pressing my face into it. I haven’t washed the sheets since he last slept in them at the old house, but the pillow doesn’t smell of Nicky anymore. It smells musty and damp, like the rest of this apartment.
When I leave for my afternoon shift at Al’s Burgers, the divorce papers are still sitting on the kitchen table, unsigned.
Outside, Kate is sitting in her car, as always, watching my house.
Without acknowledging her, I cross the street to the ugly gas-guzzling Chevy with 168,000 miles on the clock that replaced my beloved Toyota hybrid.
Someone – probably Kate – has smeared dog shit on the windscreen.
I know from experience using the wipers will only make it worse.
When Kate first started sitting outside our house, in the days after the accident, I tried to reason with her. I begged. I pleaded. After a week, I went to the police and asked them to talk to her. They didn’t even pretend to take down the details of my complaint. The following day Kate was back.
Al greets me with a terse nod when I enter the back of the burger bar.
It’s right on the intersection with I-89, the main interstate highway leading south to Concord and Boston.
Most of our clientele are just passing through.
Al doesn’t need repeat customers, which is just as well given the quality of the food.
It also means it doesn’t hurt his business to employ me, because no one who comes in here knows who I am.
He took me on not out of the goodness of his heart, but because no one else would do the job: it’s gruelling, tedious and criminally underpaid.
I could leave Stowebury. I could move to a different town, or better yet, another state on the other side of the country, somewhere nobody knows me or my story.
A big, anonymous city where I would never have to hide from the media behind a dumpster, or be hounded from a grocery store by a grieving father throwing eggs.
Somewhere I wouldn’t be trailed to the cemetery by a camera crew wanting a high-definition close-up of my grief.
I could leave it all behind and start again.
Except that for every bad memory, another good one anchors me here.
The pond where Mac and I used to skate every winter when we were kids.
The mountain trail we all climbed together each summer, until Nicky decided he was too old to hike with his parents.
The café where Mac proposed. The tiny hospital where my boy was born.
I glance at the thin gold band on my left hand. The engagement ring has long gone, sold to put food on the table when I couldn’t even get a job at Al’s, but I can’t bear to take off my wedding ring. Even now, against all reason, I hold out hope.
The afternoon at the café gets busy: September heralds the start of leaf-peeping season, and tourists come from all over the country to take pictures of Insta-ready flaming hillsides.
Al has left me to manage the café alone, and I’m run off my feet slinging burgers and frying onions and cutting buns.
My skin is simultaneously greasy and dry from being bent over a hot stove much of the day.
I push my lank hair out of my eyes with the inside of my wrist. I smell of hot oil and sweat.
The door opens again behind me. ‘I’ll be right there,’ I say, dropping the fryer basket into the boiling oil.
I turn to greet my next customer, and the smile dies on my lips.