“Morning, baby,” Mom said.
“Grams is dead,” I told her. I didn’t have the energy to filter it. I didn’t have the energy to soften the blow. It hadn’t been softened for me. My grandmother had left us. Left me.
“What?” she gasped.
“She’s gone. She died in her sleep. I…I just found her.”
The tears came harder, choking me. Mom’s strangled sobs on the other end only increased my own. I watched from within a layer of fog as the fire truck parked in front of the house, and two firefighters jumped out, coming toward me with their medical kits.
“The firemen are here,” I told her.
“What? Why? Is the house burning?” she cried.
“No, they’re EMTs,” I said.
She didn’t reply. I heard my father’s voice in the background, heard her telling my dad. I hung up. I didn’t know what else to do.
“Ma’am,” the fireman said, one of the few locals in this small town who I didn’t know.
“She’s upstairs. She’s already dead,” I told them through the tears.
His eyes were full of pity as were the man’s behind him. They went in, and I didn’t follow. I couldn’t go back in there yet. I sank onto the porch steps, arms crossed over myself, hugging myself tightly, rocking.
I picked up the phone again.
“Hey,” Stacy said with the laughter of the kids in the background filling the space. Hannah with her best friends Kiran and Jalissa. Joy. Joy that had been ripped out of my heart. That would be ripped from my daughter once she knew.
“Gra—” I couldn’t get it out, just croaked anguish into the phone.
“Tristan?”
“Grams…”
“Oh, honey,” Stacy said. “Jay’s here with the kids. I’m on my way.”
I let the phone fall to the ground. It was ringing. My mom’s ringtone. Her face on the screen. I couldn’t pick it up.
The firemen came down the stairs with somber faces.
“We’ve called the coroner,” the first one said. “We’re so sorry.”
“Do you have someone we can call?” the second one asked.
Stacy was running into the yard. She was at the steps and pulling me against her, and I was crying. Tears for me. Tears for my daughter who’d already lost so much. Tears for the worse moments that I knew would come later. After. When there was no one coming to hold you up. When the night was dark and long and the ache for the missing person filled every part of you.
???
The rain was driving down in almost torrential waves. It felt like it hadn’t stopped in three days. I stood, leaning against the porch rail, staring out at it and wondering if?like all the books and songs said?raindrops were tears from heaven.
Grams wouldn’t want tears. She’d want laughter. There was plenty of it in the house right now. I could hear it through the windows and doors. The crowd at the house was smaller than the one at the church had been. The entire town had come out to say goodbye to Grams, but only the family and closest friends had followed us back here.
The door opened, and Nash came out, dressed in a black suit instead of his Navy uniform. The last time we’d buried someone, he’d been in dress blues. Medals on his chest. Hand raw from pounding the trident into my husband’s coffin.
Today, he looked like someone else. Not the Nash from Darren’s funeral who’d been full of guilt. This Nash was just full of sadness. For me.
He put his arms around me, and I let him. A comfort I’d rarely allowed him to give me in the past. Not when I was fighting anger at him for coming home with Darren’s body in pieces—so many pieces that they hadn’t allowed me to see him.
I rested my head on his shoulder.
