The Good Widow(18)

He returns my smile. “It’s okay. This is all really hard.”

Nick pours me a glass of water and sets it in front of me. “If it helps, remember she didn’t live here. She rented a room in the condo downstairs with a couple of roommates.”

I can see the deep circles under his eyes. “You aren’t sleeping,” I say.

“And you are?” He raises his eyebrow.

I shake my head. “No, not well. Even when I take a pill, which most nights I have to.”

“Every time I lay my head down on my pillow, I think of the crash. I see horrific car accidents every day in my line of work. To think that Dylan went through that . . .” He trails off.

“I know. Me too.” It’s the worst part, the movie I’ve made in my head of what I think the Jeep looked like when it exploded. “I go back and forth between being pissed off at James and worried that he suffered. I hate it.”

“That’s something I’ve thought a lot about. That going to Maui could help us not be so damn pissed off anymore. Because there’s nothing worse, right, than trying to grieve a death when you are so mad at the person. You know I smashed a picture she bought for me? Flung it against the wall and watched as shards of glass sprayed everywhere. It took me forever to clean up. I’m still cutting myself on the pieces I missed.” He looks over to the corner of the living room where it must have happened.

“I got irrationally mad at the creators of sympathy cards,” I offer, shaking my head at the memory. “I didn’t even tell my sister, Beth, this, but I actually burned some of them on the flame from the gas stove. I set off the smoke detector.”

We laugh quietly.

I take a drink of my water, trying to imagine a day when I’m not pissed off at James. For dying. For dying with a woman other than me. For fighting with me before he left. For taking the board shorts from our honeymoon on their clandestine vacation. For not knowing how to drive better on a dangerous road. For driving on a dangerous road in the first place. For marrying me. For cheating on me. So many things. And sure, there’s a possibility that if I go to Maui with Nick, I could stand on a beach and close my eyes and meditate and try to let go of that anger. But there’s one thing I worry about: that I’ll never stop being mad at myself.

“I read a lot about grieving when I’m up in the middle of the night,” he says, and I tell him I’ve done the same thing. That I’m an obsessive Googler—particularly between the hours of one and three in the morning.

“There was an article about a man who lost his wife when she was traveling abroad with her friend. Their hotel had a terrible fire . . .” He shakes his head. “And this guy, he went there. To Spain, I think it was. To the place where the hotel had burned down. And it helped him say good-bye.”

“What are you saying? That you want to go to where they crashed?”

Nick walks over to the window, turning his back to me. “No, I’m not sure I could do that—it would be so hard.” His voice breaks. “I think I would go to Maui and follow my instincts. See where my heart takes me. Where she takes me.”

I try to imagine myself standing at the place where the accident happened, looking over the edge. I found Google images of the road to Hana. I saw the winding roads, the sharp edges of the cliffs, the lava rocks jutting out from the ocean. But I could click the little x in the upper-right corner of my computer screen whenever I’d seen enough. Could I go there in person? I’m not sure.

Nick continues. “I think that man being able to go to the location of the hotel takes a strength I’m not sure I have. Going to the crash site would be something I’d want to decide once I was there. If it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go.”

“Is this something people actually get over?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. But don’t you think we should at least try?”

“I don’t know.” Forget the accident scene; I’m suddenly not sure I have the strength to step foot on Maui soil.

Nick walks around me, grabbing a stack of papers out of a drawer. “I think these will help.” He turns them toward me, and I can make out James’s email address at the top.

“Are those the emails they wrote to each other?”

He nods.

“You think reading emails between my husband and his lover is going to help me?”

“No. I think you’ll feel worse at first. I think they could crush you all over again. But I think that’s a good thing.”

I start to interrupt him.

“Please, Jacks, just hear me out.”

I close my mouth.

“I think you’ll have the same reaction I did. You’ll read these, and it will be like opening Pandora’s box. Because they’re like a teaser. They seem to be from the beginning of whatever it was they were doing. And then they just stop. And you’re left wanting more. And also hopeful.”

“Hopeful?”

“This is going to sound pathetic. But based on these, it could have just been a fling. They never say love. They never get deep. So maybe it wasn’t serious at all. And maybe that’s what I’ll find out if I go. If we go.”

“But what if the opposite happens—if you find out they were in love?”

“That’s exactly why I need you there with me, Jacks. Because I’m not sure I could go through that realization alone.” He stops and holds my gaze. “I was hoping that was why you came here today. Because you’d decided to go.”