In an Instant(66)

“I think Oz is dead is what I think,” Bob hisses. “He’s dead. Gone. What happened, happened, and it’s over. And no, I don’t think you should organize another one of your fucking crusades to try and find him. Where the fuck is the nurse?”

Karen falls away from him, then stumbles through the curtain to find the nurse. She nearly crashes into Captain Burns, who is walking toward their room.

“Mrs. Gold,” Burns says, “just the person I was coming to see.”





78

My mom throws back the covers and paces through the house. Ten minutes later, she is in the kitchen, a cup of coffee and her laptop in front of her. She finds the news stream from the press conference at the hospital and watches Bob’s performance—his lies, then his genuine plea for help.

She perches on the edge of her stool, her attention rapt on Bob, then narrowed beyond him to Natalie in the background. She does not cry or rage. Expressionless, she watches as the hand not holding her coffee absently opens and closes, and I realize she is wondering the same thing I wondered about earlier. How much is Bob to blame for his weakness and his betrayal, and is what he did any less forgivable than what she did?

It’s strange how I know these are her thoughts. I do not read minds or have psychic powers, but this perspective does give me heightened awareness that allows me to see things I never saw when I was alive. When I was alive, I never really looked at my family. We existed around each other in our own worlds, like those screen saver balls that intermittently touch before ricocheting and bouncing off each other, affecting each other’s momentum but never really paying attention to one another. Now, if I look hard enough and long enough, I see it all. The cast of my mom’s eyes, the curve of her shoulders, the intensity with which she watches Bob on the screen, the softening when she looks at Natalie. Manifested in small, almost imperceptible details is everything she does not say: her hurt and disappointment, her guilt and regret. When she looks at Bob, she does not hate him, but I feel the hate she feels for herself for thinking she loved him and the immense burden she bears because of his betrayal.

I realize now that my mom has an astounding talent for concealing her thoughts and disclosing nothing with either her expression or her words. It makes her a fantastic lawyer, but it is also what makes her seem like a bitch. Only now, when I really see her, do I realize how mistaken that perception is.

A soft knock on the patio door startles her. It’s three in the morning. She looks through the glass to see Bob. He wears jeans and an old USC sweatshirt that is too tight around the middle, from twenty years of either his belly growing or the sweatshirt shrinking or both. His face is flush from alcohol, and his hair is wild and sticking out in all directions, his forearm wrapped in gauze.

It doesn’t surprise me that he is awake. Like my dad, he rarely sleeps, and after what happened today, I doubt he will sleep for days. Karen spilled her guts to Burns before Bob walked from the room and saw them. Burns stood before Bob reached them, tipped an imaginary hat, pivoted, and walked away, leaving Bob staring after him and wondering what Karen had said and what was to come.

With a deep sigh, my mom opens the door.

“Ann—” he starts, but she cuts him off.

“Sit,” she says. “I’ll get you some coffee.”

He slumps on a stool, and she takes her time getting a mug from the cabinet, filling it with coffee, and adding cream the way he likes it. It’s quiet. Night noises come through the window—crickets, the tide, wind chimes from the house next door.

My mom places the mug in front of him, then takes the stool beside him and curls her feet beneath her. Her toenails are a freshly pedicured pale shade of pink, and I watch him notice them and then look away.

Her right hand rests on the counter beside her own steaming mug, and as she looks at the steam rising from it, I know she is thinking of Oz and gloves and fingers and warmth.

Bob lifts his eyes to look at her. “What Burns is saying isn’t right,” he says, his head shaking with either denial or disbelief.

“What part does he have wrong?” she says, her tone cool and lawyerly, and I try to decipher it. There’s no anger, but is it possible there is ulterior motive? Does she want Bob to confess so she can then use it against him, or does she honestly want to hear his side?

“I didn’t . . . I wouldn’t . . . the only reason it happened was the accident.”

“You took his gloves,” she says flatly.

“He gave them to me. You know me, Ann.”

“Do I?”

He startles. “Of course you do. You know me better than anyone.”

But my mom knows now, as I know now, that none of us really know each other. We don’t even really know ourselves. She looks at him for a long minute, her face revealing nothing, and finally she says, “Bob, you should go. Go home to Karen and Natalie.”

“But . . . ,” he stammers, his bloodshot eyes looking up at her. “But what about us?”

She stands and steps close to him, her hips brushing his knees. Then she takes his hand and twines his fingers through hers, and I watch as relief floods his face. “There is no us,” she says plainly. “There’s you. There’s me. There’s Karen, Natalie, Chloe. But if nothing else was proved that day, it’s that there is no us.”

Bob’s head bobs between his shoulders. “Ann, please, I can’t lose you. He gave them to me, I swear.”