The Marriage Lie(14)

When I come downstairs next, it’s close to ten in the morning. My family is scattered around the kitchen, drinking coffee and listening to James read news of the crash aloud from a website on his iPad. From where he’s seated at the table, Dad coughs into a fist. James stops mid-sentence, and they look at me with a combination of guilt and concern, like four kids I caught stealing from my cookie jar.

“They found the black box?” I say without preamble.

Mom drops the spatula into a skillet of half-cooked eggs and whirls around, looking like she didn’t fare much better than I did in the sleeping department. Dark circles spread under her eyes like bruises, and her hair, normally an inspired work of hot-roller wizardry, hangs listless around her puffy face. “Oh, sweetheart.” She rushes across the kitchen tile, snatching me into a ferocious hug. “My heart is just breaking for you. Is there anything I can do? Anything you need?”

There are a million things I need. I need to know what made Will board that plane. I need to know what happened to make it fall from the sky. I need to know what his last moments were like, if he went down screaming or without warning, if one moment he was debating peanuts versus pretzels and the next he was dust. I need to know where he is—literally and exactly. Will there be a body to bury?

But most of all, I need Will to be where he said he was going to be. In Orlando.

I untangle myself from Mom’s arms. I look to James, since he was the one reading the news. “Do they know why it crashed?”

“It’ll be months before they say for sure,” James says, his voice careful. He takes me in with his blue-eyed doctor’s gaze, methodical and thorough, like he’s trying to take my pulse from the other side of the kitchen counter. “How did you sleep?”

I shake my head. I didn’t miss the way everyone exchanged looks at my question about the crash, and I sure as hell don’t want to talk about my lack of sleep. “Just tell me, James.”

He hauls a breath, his gaze sliding over my right shoulder to Dave, as if asking for permission. Dave must have nodded, because James’s gaze returns to mine. “Keep in mind this is just a theory at this point, but the media is speculating a mechanical problem followed by pilot error.”

“Pilot error.” The words come out sluggish, like my tongue is coated in molasses.

James nods.

“Pilot error. As in, somebody fucked up, and now my husband is dead.”

James grimaces. “I’m sorry, Iris, but it sure sounds that way.”

Bile rises in my throat, and the room sways—or maybe it’s just me.

James hops off his stool and rushes around the counter, steadying me with a palm around my elbow. “Would you like me to give you something? I can’t medicate your grief away, but a pill can help take the edge off, at least for the next few days.”

I shake my head. My grief, as spiky as it is, feels like the only thing binding me to Will. The thought of losing that connection, even the rawest, sharpest edges of it, fills me with panic.

“I wouldn’t say no to a Xanax,” Dave says.

James gives me a look, one like your crazy brother, then pats my arm. “Think about it, okay? I can write you a prescription for whatever you need.”

I give him my best attempt at a smile.

“Come.” My mother steers me to the kitchen island, overflowing with food. A platter of scrambled eggs, a mini mountain of bacon and sausage swimming in grease, an entire loaf of toasted bread. For Mom, there’s no better way of demonstrating her love than with heavy, hearty food, and this morning, her love is big enough to feed an army. “What would you like?”

I take in the food and the smell hits me, buttery eggs and fried pork grease, doing somersaults in my stomach. “Nothing.”

“You can’t not eat. How about I whip up some pancakes? I’ll make the Dutch kind and load them up with apple and bacon, just the way you like.”

Dave looks over from the coffeepot, where he’s measuring out the grounds. “Ma, leave her alone. She’ll eat when she’s hungry.”

“C’mere, Squirt,” Dad calls out from his seat at the table, patting the chair beside him. “I saved you a spot.”

My father is a former marine and a brilliant engineer with an easy smile and a halfway decent jump shot, but his greatest talent is running interference between my brother and me and our mother.

I sink onto the chair and lean into him, and he slings a beefy arm around my shoulders. My family is not a demonstrative clan. Hugs happen only at hellos and goodbyes. Kisses are rare, and they usually stop just short of skin. So far today I’ve held my brother’s hand, collapsed in my mother’s arms and snuggled up to my father. This is what death does. It forces intimacy at the same time it snatches it away.

My gaze falls on the legal pad, covered in Dad’s block-letter scribbles. Pages and pages of bullet points, grouped into categories and ranked by level of importance. If Will were here, he and my father would bond over the beauty of this list, a masterpiece of left-brained brilliance. I push aside Dad’s reading glasses and scan the papers, a string of knots working their way across my shoulder blades. It seems unfair there are so many tasks to tackle, when all I really want to do is go back to bed and forget yesterday ever happened.

And then I notice a grouping of four or five bullets at the bottom.

“Compensation?” I say, and there’s venom in my tone.