Wish You Were Gone(54)
“What did he say?” Lizzie asked.
“Actually, he said James made some recent changes to his will,” Emma told her, widening her eyes like can you believe it? “He made additional specific bequests, was the way he put it. He scheduled a formal reading for after the memorial.”
“Wow.” Lizzie had no idea what to say to that. Her mind raced, looking for the appropriate response to land on. But what? Why would James have done that? How recent was recent? It was almost as if, somehow, he’d known he was going to die. Then, a thought hit her so fast it tumbled right through her brain and out her mouth. “What if he named names?”
“What do you mean?” Emma asked.
“Sorry.” Lizzie shook her head, blushing. “I mean, what if he named the mistress—JM—in the will? What if he left her something specifically? Then you’d know who she is.”
Emma crumpled a napkin in her palm. “Why would he do that? He’d have to know I’d be the first person to be made aware. He’d be caught.”
“Yes, but he’d also be dead.”
Emma made an odd laughing/choking sort of sound.
“Sorry. Sorry. God, I’m bad at this.” Lizzie sucked down some more wine and let out a breath. “What I mean is, maybe he figured that if you were looking at the will, that would mean he was gone, so what does he care if he’s caught?”
Emma frowned, mulling this over, and sat heavily on a stool across from Lizzie. “Shit. What if he did name her? Oh my God, I’m never going to make it. I’m going to die of curiosity first.”
“When is this happening, exactly?” Lizzie asked.
“Next Friday,” Emma replied.
“Do you think he’ll call her?”
“Who?” Emma said.
“The lawyer. Do you think he’ll call JM? I mean, if she’s named. She’d have to be there, right? Isn’t that how it works? Whoever’s named in the will is there for the reading?”
Emma doubled over in her chair and Lizzie jumped up, afraid her friend was going to pass out. What was the matter with her? Why couldn’t she keep her inane and highly inappropriate thoughts to herself?
“Are you okay?” Lizzie placed her hand on Emma’s back.
“I’m fine. Just the thought of that.” Emma covered her mouth with one hand and stood up. “I was going to bring the kids. Maybe I shouldn’t. They can’t handle having some random woman thrown in their faces.”
She leaned back against the refrigerator as if it were a life raft and the only thing standing between her and the abyss. “Is that really how it works?” she said, her eyes desperate as she looked at Lizzie.
“I don’t know. It’s how it works in the movies.” Lizzie went to the sink, wet a towel with cool water, and handed it to Emma, who immediately placed it on her forehead. “But who knows if that’s how it happens in real life?” She hugged herself for half a second and then the timer went off, indicating the ziti was ready. Upstairs, the kids cheered and hollered over some moment well-played.
“You should call Gray,” Lizzie told Emma, as much as it pained her to say it. “If anyone has the answers, Gray does.”
GRAY
Gray hadn’t sat on a bench in Central Park since she was in her twenties. Once they’d moved out of the city, they’d never come back to the park for leisure activities. It was just a place to cut through, an obstacle when traveling from Darnell’s office to the ballet at Lincoln Center or to the West Side Highway and the quickest route home. But on that Thursday, after meeting with Dr. Patel, Gray and Darnell simply sat, hand in hand, staring at the leaves as they drifted down from the trees. A little girl in a bumblebee costume was having professional Halloween pictures taken, posing on a nearby rock.
“We’ll get a second opinion. A third,” Gray said. “And I’ll do research myself.”
Darnell took a breath. She thought, for one dreadful beat of her heart, that he was going to disagree with her. But his chest deflated and he said, “Okay.”
“I just wish you’d told me sooner. We could have gotten ahead of this. We could have—”
“There’s no getting ahead of it. Not really. You heard what the doctor said. CTE is progressive. There’s no cure.”
Yes, Gray had heard what the doctor said. She’d heard that the headaches Darnell had been getting for the past year weren’t caused by stress, but by traumatic brain injury. She’d heard that, yes, these sorts of concussion-based injuries were slightly more common in running backs and receivers—people who got tackled and not the people who did the tackling—but that it wasn’t so far out of the ordinary as to be a shock. She’d heard that Darnell would go through periods where he was completely normal—the kind, patient Darnell she and her boys had always known and loved. But that there would also be random lashing out, like thrown casserole dishes, and impulsive decisions, like letting half their clientele go. Short-term memory loss was common. And depression. And suicidal thoughts.
“We may have found the one thing you can’t fix, my love.”
Darnell said it as a joke, but it caused a gag reflex so strong inside of Gray that she was barely able to keep herself from vomiting on his shoes. Gray’s grip on her husband’s hand tightened. It didn’t matter what he said, or what the doctor believed, or what the research claimed. She would fix this. She would gather him up in their marriage and be his tether to the world.