The Marriage Lie(61)

I lift a hand. “Hi, Evan.”

His suit jacket is folded over the chair beside him, his sleeves rolled up to just under his elbows. It’s an attempt at looking relaxed, but it doesn’t work. His back is slumped, his shoulders hunched, and his face, when it spreads into a sorry excuse for a smile, looks bruised and battered. He unfolds his massive body from his chair and reaches a long arm across the table, shaking mine above a bucket of ice and a tray of every brand of bottled water imaginable.

“Good to see you again, Iris. I’d ask how you’re holding up, but I hate that question, and besides, I’m pretty sure I already know.”

Of course he knows. He knows that the hole Liberty Air blew into his life is permanent, as is that hollow place inside him. He knows how you can lose hours at a time staring into space and torturing yourself with an endless parade of what-if scenarios. What if she’d gotten stuck in traffic? What if she’d given up her seat for that five-hundred-dollar coupon airlines are always using as enticement for overbooked flights? What if what if what if? He knows these things, so no need to say them out loud.

“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice,” I say instead. “I know you had to shuffle some things around.”

He waves off my thanks. “You’re the psychologist. Is it weird that I wanted to see you?”

I sink into a chair diagonal from him, his blunt honesty loosening some of the knots across my shoulders. “Funny, I was just wondering how weird it would be if I hightailed it for the car.”

“Is it my quick wit and sparkling personality?” He pushes up a self-deprecating smile, gestures to his massive frame. “My Herman Munster build and he-man charm?”

“It’s your eyes, actually.” I brace and look at them full on, and they’re just as awful as I remembered. A beautiful mossy green, but they’re red around the rims, and the surrounding skin is puffy and crisscrossed with lines I happen to know are from despair. “Looking at them hurts my heart.”

He winces, but he doesn’t let go of my gaze. “No more than looking into yours hurts mine.”

“You must be a sucker for punishment, then.”

He puffs a laugh devoid of humor. “It’s all relative these days, isn’t it?”

There’s really nothing to say to that, so I don’t say anything at all. I stare out the window instead, watching a pair of hawks swoop and dive against fluffy white clouds. While Dave and I were chasing Will’s past around Seattle, a group of thirty or so people boarded a private Liberty Airlines jet and traveled to the crash site. I saw the images on Huffington Post, Evan’s profile standing taller than the blackened stalks, solemn figures holding hands and hugging in a charred field soaked with the essence of those they lost. I saw them and I thought, I can’t. What does it say about me—a psychologist, for crap’s sake—that they could and I can’t?

“One of the lessons I’ve learned this past week,” Evan says, his voice bringing me back, “is that nobody understands what you and I are going through. People think that they do, and a lot of them want to understand, but they don’t. Not really. Unless they’ve lost someone like you and I have, they can’t.”

Grief wells up like a sudden tide, intense and overwhelming. Evan has just hit on a big part of why grief groups are so popular. We’re strangers on the same boat, both trapped in a sinkhole of sorrow. At the very least, it helps to know you’re not going under alone.

“It’s not just losing Will, it’s...” I pause, searching for the right word.

But either Evan’s already thought this through, or his brain is much quicker than mine. “It’s the horror of how.”

My nod is immediate. “Exactly. It’s the horror of how. It’s where I go whenever I close my eyes. I see his tears. I hear his screams. His terror beats in my chest. It’s like I can’t stop replaying those awful last minutes, putting myself in his shoes while the plane flipped and swerved and fell from the sky.”

I say the words and boom—I’m crying. This is why I didn’t want to come, why no force on the planet could have made me step onto that cornfield. Whoever said God doesn’t give you more than you can handle was full of shit, because this—this grief that slams me over and over like a Mack truck, this weight of missing Will that presses down on all sides until I can’t breathe—is going to kill me.

Evan pushes a box of Kleenex across the table. “I keep forgetting this is my new life. I’ll be halfway through leaving a message on Susanna’s voice mail, or standing in my boxers in my daughter’s room in the middle of the night, her warm bottle in my hand, before I remember. The crib is empty. My wife and baby daughter are dead.”

“Jesus, Evan,” I say, my voice cracking. I pluck a tissue from the box and swipe it across my cheeks. “A couple days ago, I got a call from some journalist claiming the pilot was sleep-deprived and possibly hungover. Something about a—”

“Bachelor party, I know. I’ve got somebody in Miami right now, asking around. So far, though, nothing.”

“Has he talked to Tiffany Rivero?”

“Who?”

I give Evan a quick rundown of my conversations with Leslie Thomas, and he goes completely still. His expression doesn’t change. If it weren’t for the purple flush pushing up from under his shirt collar, I’d think he hadn’t heard me.