Wish You Were Gone(9)
“Okay, well, we should go.” Kelsey lifted her backpack onto her shoulder.
“What about your lacrosse bag? Tryouts are this week, right?” Emma asked, feeling proud that she’d remembered as she followed her kids to the front door. Their house, large as it was, had a circular drive and parking area out front, separate from the three-car garage off the kitchen. No one had left through the garage since the accident. The game room was filled to near bursting with condolence gifts—flower arrangements, fruit baskets, boxes of nonperishable artisan food from overpriced delis around the country. Gray had gone through it all the other day and thrown out what was rotting, but still, the gifts kept coming.
“I decided not to try out,” Kelsey said, and took a sip of her juice.
Emma blinked. Kelsey had spent the last three weeks doing nothing but work out and practice with the other freshman hopefuls. She’d been carbo-loading and going to bed early. She’d been borderline obsessed. “You’re not? Why?”
Kelsey’s eyes flashed, and the resemblance to her father in her expression was so stark it momentarily took Emma’s breath away. This was not new, this spark of temper in Kelsey, but Emma had never told her daughter how much she reminded her of James in these moments. Kelsey would have never forgiven her for it. Seeing it now made Emma want to reach through time and space and strangle her husband. The very idea that her sweet, lovely, talented daughter had inherited that ugliness, of all things—it made her loathe him.
The Walsh temper was what he’d called it, pinning his viciousness on generations of angry Irishmen. And he’d always shrugged as if to say, What’re you gonna do?
“I’m just not that into it.” Emma could see her daughter measuring her words—trying not to snap. “I’m going to try out for the fall musical instead.”
Hunter made a dismissive noise, blowing air through his lips. “Good luck with that. Freshmen never make the fall musical.”
Kelsey hauled off and punched him in the arm.
“Hey! We don’t hit!” Emma said, appalled.
“What is this, kindergarten? It’s fine, Mom.” Hunter rolled his eyes as if it hadn’t hurt, even though it must have stung at least a little.
“Sorry,” Kelsey muttered.
“Whatever,” Hunter said. “Just don’t come running to me when you get cast as Farm Girl Number Three.” Then he opened the door to the bright, bright day. The sound of chain saws buzzed in the near distance, a wood-chipper screeching as it chewed through branches. This had been the constant soundtrack of their lives since the storm—that and the hum of generators, which had died down day by day as power returned to one neighborhood after another.
“?’Bye, Ma.” Hunter gave her a sort of pitying look, then kissed her cheek, which was new. “It’s good to see you… you know… up.”
She forced a smile. “Have a good day, hon.”
Emma closed the door behind them. She waited for the beep of the alarm system, the pop of two car doors, the engine revving, then moving, then fading away.
And then she was alone. She was always alone when the kids were at school, but suddenly the aloneness felt like a living, breathing thing.
James was never coming home. How many times in the last five years had she wished he would never come home? Idly thought, What if today’s the day he stumbles in front of a cab? Or What if tonight’s the night he swerves off the road? How many times had she daydreamed about how that would feel? Having the agency taken away from her? The pressure. The fear. The guilt. The anger. The uncertainty. If he drank himself to death, then she would be free. She would no longer have to constantly obsess about whether to divorce him. About what that would look like. About how she’d survive. It would no longer be her fault that they lived the way they did because they wouldn’t be living that way anymore. His death would be the end of her life sentence. Hers and her kids’.
Yes, in her darker moments, she’d daydreamed about it, but she’d never really meant it. The other dream, the more socially acceptable dream, the one where he checked himself into rehab, did two months as an inpatient, and then came home a new man—that was the dream she’d really wanted to come true. But if she was being honest, really and truly honest with herself, it was the dark dream she’d conjured most often.
When had she become this horrible morbid person—a person who could dream her husband dead? At the doorway to the game room, her eyes trailed slowly over the cellophane and cardboard, the silky ribbons and wilting petals. What if she had willed this to happen? James had been an asshole. He’d been a drunk and a bastard and an angry, raging fiend. She’d wanted him gone.
But he’d also, at one point, been her James. The love of her life. The boy she’d fallen for on a rain-streaked boardwalk in October of her junior year in high school, and who had proposed seven years later the second he’d gotten together enough money for a ring. They’d been only twenty-three. Just babies. And so full of the future that they could taste it on the back of their tongues.
She could still remember vividly the look of total awe and pride and hope on his face when he’d gotten down on one knee inside the capsule on the London Eye. The way he’d looked at her, it had made her feel like she was perfect. Maybe not perfectly gorgeous or perfectly smart or perfectly talented in a way that women around the world would measure themselves against, but perfect for him.