Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(62)

“I like that you didn’t volunteer to do the dirty work yourself.”

Paul smiled. “It appears your violent streak is genetic.”



We paid the bill and returned to the hotel. While Paul called Charlie and the boys, I took out my contacts, scrubbed my face, and split Tom’s last sleeping pill in two, half of which I gave to Paul after he hung up the phone.

He popped the pill in his mouth and swallowed it without water. “Tomorrow,” he said.

The stiff mattress groaned beneath my weight as I climbed into my bed. “Tomorrow,” I repeated, and pulled a pillow over my head.



Of course we’d chosen the coldest day in November to visit the cemetery. I woke shivering, and a hot shower, a cup of coffee, and the thick sweater I put on made not a lick of difference. When we got in the car, I turned the heat on high and pointed the hot-air vents at my body.

“Don’t bother. It’s your nerves,” Paul said from beside me. “I shake like a wet chihuahua when I have to give bad news to a major client.”

“You, nervous? I don’t believe it.”

“Sock it away, because you won’t hear me admit it again.”

“I’m not nervous. Just . . .”

“Apprehensive,” Paul supplied.

“That,” I said. That and so many other confusing, unnameable emotions. My teeth were still clanking against one another like cheap china when we pulled into the cemetery. The iron gate and small sign had not changed, nor had the evergreens circling the perimeter. Yet, as I got out of the car, the field of graves before us appeared so much smaller than when I’d last visited.

Paul reached for my hand, and together we walked down the winding path through the center of the cemetery. I’d always thought of cemeteries as eerie, but on that morning I saw what some part of me already knew when I made my father drive out to my mother’s grave so many times: they were a place of comfort, too. I wasn’t sure why I’d been so set on ending up in an urn, but as we walked through the graveyard that day, I decided I would request that whatever was left of me be buried. Maybe even near my mother.

My breath caught as we came upon her grave site. Paul released my hand and knelt before the headstone, running his fingers over the etching in the granite.

I let him be alone for a few minutes, then walked over and sat next to him, cross-legged on the frozen grass in front of the large stone. I closed my eyes and began to speak to my mother in my mind—more like a prayer than an actual conversation, knowing that if she was listening, she would piece together the fragmented bits. I told her everything: about Tom, about Vieques and Milagros and Shiloh, and about my diagnosis. I told her I loved her and wished she were there. Then I opened my eyes and looked at the headstone again.

CHARLOTTE ROSS—1954–1989—BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER

Beloved wife and mother: true, yet wretchedly insufficient.

Sometimes, when I was feeling especially blue, I would imagine what it would have been like if I’d been a different age when my mother died. At ten, I was old enough to understand the terrible thing that had happened to us, but too young to have soaked up so many of the details that I, as an adult, longed to know about her and her life. Now the little I did remember was fading with time. My mother’s hair, for example, was straight and chestnut brown, her eyes the same dark hazel as Paul’s. But what about her laugh? Was it the jingle of loose change I heard in my head, or was that something I’d imagined? Was she as fun loving and unfailingly kind as I recalled, or was that a fairy tale of my own creation? What had she thought of Paul and me? What did she dream for our futures—and her own? I would never know.

I would never know.

As that reality again set in, I put my head to the ground and cried for my family and all that we had lost. Beside me, Paul saw my shoulders shaking, took me in his arms, and cried with me, reminding me again that I was not alone.



That evening, I stared at the drab landscape print hung in our hotel room, thinking about Shiloh. I wanted to call him, to tell him about my day, but I worried that one call would lead to a cascade of correspondence that would make me question whether I should have asked him to come with me to Chicago, or if I should have stayed there and tried to get treatment in Puerto Rico, or—or, or, or. So many possibilities, and not a single one was right. I switched off the lamp and pulled the covers up to my neck.

Paul was sitting on the other bed, his face lit by the glow of his laptop. “I should have saved the last sleeping pill,” I told him. “Do you have any?”

“Nope.”

“Don’t they give you downers with your uppers?”

He finished typing, then turned to me. “I’m off the junk.”

“Really?”

“Yep. I haven’t touched a stimulant since a few months before the boys were born.”

“Hard to believe your energy owes nothing to a pharmacy.”

“Can’t argue with my God-given gifts.” He shut his laptop, switched off the lamp, and got in bed with me. “Will it help if I lie here?”

I closed my eyes. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Libs?” he said after a few minutes. “Remember when we were little?”

I opened my eyes, even though the hotel’s blackout shades had obscured all light, save the red digits of the alarm clock. “You mean how you used to trick me into doing things?” I said. “Like allowing you to lower me out of a second-story window using nothing but a sheet and your nonexistent manpower?”