The ceiling blurred, and I angrily swiped at the tears beginning to fall down my cheeks.
“You ready to talk yet, Serg?” Sid asked quietly, and I remembered he was there.
I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure I ever would be. But I didn’t want to be alone in my head. I didn’t want to be left with these thoughts that I knew were only driving me closer and closer to throwing myself off that bridge.
So, I talked, and then I talked to my sisters and Ricky. No, I didn’t feel better for having told them all. But it at least felt better to not be so alone.
Anything was better than being alone.
Even if that was exactly what I was.
***
Life at that point seemed to speed up while simultaneously standing still.
With the help of my sisters, I went through the motions of informing Laura’s family and friends of her passing.
Her parents blamed me for their daughter’s death without once asking how I was doing, and I didn’t mind, nor did I disagree.
Her friends—including Molly, our old friend from school and her old roommate—cried and gave their condolences.
Brett sent my calls to voicemail.
As far as my parents were concerned, my sisters handled them. And what their reaction was to the news, neither Grace nor Lucy would tell me, which I assumed was ultimately for the better … even though my imagination did a decent job of filling in the blanks.
Laura’s parents had insisted on handling her funeral. I struggled with the idea of giving them that type of control when I was her fucking husband—awidower—but her father made sure to remind me that he’d never had a good feeling about me, not even when we had been kids. But as he put it, she had made her choice in marrying me against all their better judgment—whatever that meant—and I thought the least I could do was pass over the reins in handling her final arrangements.
Honestly, I just didn’t want to go through planning it myself. Not alone, not ever.
Then I somehow got through the services as nothing more than a zombie. Most of her family members avoided me, pretending I didn’t exist as they consoled her grieving parents and left me to sit in a wingback chair, staring at the two matching caskets—Laura’s, which they’d insisted on leaving open during the wake, though I wished they hadn’t, and the much, much smaller one beside it.
My son is in there.
I never got the chance to hold him, and now I have to bury him.
“How far along was she?”
“I can’t believe they couldn’t save the baby.”
“So horrible. So unthinkably tragic.”
“Can you believe one careless, stupid mistake led to all of this?”
“Is that the husband?”
“That’s the deaf one, right?”
“It was his fault, wasn’t it?”
His fault, his fault, his fault.
My fault.
Mine.
They wouldn’t talk to me, but they had no issue talkingaboutme, all of them, in hushed tones that they probably thought I couldn’t hear, but I did.
After a while, I decided to lock myself alone in my own mental prison and took my hearing aids out altogether.
