He gawked at me. “And that gives him the right to break your fucking nose?”
I groaned and rolled my eyes. “My nose isn’t broken.”
“Oh, so that makes it okay for him to beat your face in. Sure, I gotcha.”
“Can we get out of here?” I pulled out my cell phone to check the time. “I have shit to do today. Laundry. Cleaning. Gotta go back to work tomorrow—"
“Work?”
I looked at him like he’d sprouted two extra heads. “Yeah. Work. You know, that thing I do to make money?”
Sid looked off in the direction of the gravesite, where some stragglers still lingered. He looked helpless and confused as he blinked and opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, multiple times, before finally saying, “Max, you just …”
“I just what?”
He lifted a hand and gestured out toward the small gathering of mourners. Maybe I should’ve been one of them. Maybe that would’ve been more socially acceptable, more normal. But what the fuck was normal anyway?
“You just buried your wife and baby, man,” he said, his voice strangled, like he might cry. “They’re … they’re not even in the ground yet, and you’re talking about work. It’s okay if you want to—"
“Take some time?” I asked, and he nodded. “You know what that looks like for me? That looks like hours and hours of being stuck in here.” I tapped my temple. “Hours and days andyearsof beating myself up over and over and over again, doing way more damage than weak-ass Brett couldeverdo to me.”
He lowered his gaze to the frozen ground and nodded. “I know it feels like that now, but—"
“Don’t tell me it’ll get better, okay? Don’t do that. I’m alone, Sidney. I have nobody, I have nothing. And before you go and tell me that I have you, I have Ricky, I have Grace and Lucy … I know. I fuckingknow. But at the end of the day, at the end of all of this shit—fucking life and whatever—I’malone. So, whether I go to work today or tomorrow or three fucking weeks from now, it’s not going to make a fucking difference. I’malone. I’d just rather get paid in the meantime.”
He looked helpless, like he wanted to help me in some way, tosaveme, but there was no more salvation left for me. Maybe he understood that now—I didn’t know—but he nodded and muttered, “Yeah, um … let me find Grace, and we’ll get out of here.”
***
I did go to work that night and every night for several weeks. I went about life on autopilot. Eating when I had to eat. Sleeping when I had to sleep. Showering, cleaning, driving to work and back. I kept my mind on everything but what I’d lost. I read the books Laura and I had already read, and I filled crossword puzzle books. I pretendedeverything was fine, normal even, until the one-month anniversary of Laura’s death. And then, as if a cloth had been lifted from off my eyes, I could hardly function.
Couldn’t crawl out of bed. Couldn’t stomach food. Couldn’t bring myself to do anything but hold on to her pillow and clothes and cry because I knew—Iknew—that scent couldn’t hold on forever. It would fade. It would disappear. Another piece of evidence that she had once existed, but was now gone.
From the bedroom window, I could see the lighthouse, blinking and beckoning. I thought about the bridge. I thought about the rocks and their jagged edges. I could fall now, crack my skull, and go the same way she had. They’d say it was poetic, tragic. A terrible ending to a terrible love story.
Why couldn’t she have just stayed? Why couldn’t we have lasted forever?
“You’re always just passing through,”I remembered her saying long ago, and I thought,So were you, babe.
“How am I supposed to do this?” I asked that beacon of light as it appeared, then disappeared again. “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
The doorbell rang, and I pinched my eyes shut. It was probably the mailman or something. I reminded myself to breathe and then …
Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!
“Fucking hell,” I growled angrily, rolling out of bed, every bone in my body screaming in agony. Wanting to give up. Wanting to die.
In nothing but my underwear, I stomped angrily through the house toward the door, and without checking to see who it was, I threw it open to find Sid with a bag of something in hand.
He looked down at my nearly naked form. “Getting soft there, Sergeant.”
“The fuck are you talking about?”
He poked my abs. “Maybe you should drop and give me thirty sit-ups.”
“Why the hell are you here?”
“Because I know what day it is,” he said and pushed past me into the house. “Wow.”
