The cold hard truth was that I wasn’t enough. I had never been enough. My marriage was a partnership built on mutual love and shared responsibility. The house had run as smoothly as the chaos of four little ones would allow, but we ran it together.
Grady had always been a doting father. He would get up early with the kids, make holidays, important days at school and birthdays so unbelievably special for them, and most of all, he met me halfway with discipline. He wasn’t a perfect man, and our marriage had been anything but.
I knew that. I told myself that often because it was too easy to idealize our relationship into utopic perfection. And imagining our life as perfect was a straight spiral into the dismal abyss of despair. But life had been good-really, really good, and easier and happy.
And now we were just barely surviving.
“So what happened with Abby?” Emma prompted.
“I couldn’t get her out of the pool. She was being difficult like usual. Finally the guy next door found us and lured her out with a Pop-tart. By then, we were late for school. I had to walk all the children inside and stop in the office to sign them in. I was so mad at her. Mad because she left the house without telling me, mad because she went swimming by herself and I can’t even think about the worst case scenario there, and mad because she made yet another morning difficult for me. I was so angry when I dropped her off in her classroom that I didn’t even hug her or tell her I loved her.” I was helpless to stop the tears that flowed freely down my flushed cheeks and dripped off my stubborn chin. “Now I have to wait until after school to see her. She has to go all day thinking I’m so mad at her that I don’t love her anymore. And I’m making myself sick over it.”
Emma’s blue-gray gaze held mine, her own tears brimming at the corners. With equal parts conviction and concern, she promised, “Liz, you will see Abby again. You will get to hug her and tell her you love her. She’s going to be alright. She knows you love her. There’s not a doubt in her pretty red head.”
I nodded, with my chin trembling and more tears falling. These were things I’d been trying to convince myself of all morning, but it helped when they came from someone else. Just because I lost one of the people I loved most in life, didn’t mean I was going to lose them all.
At least I wanted to believe that. The hole in my chest argued differently.
“Liz.” My sister stood up from the barstool and walked behind the long, tiled island to give me a tight hug. “You’re going to get through this. I know this is hard, but you are the strongest person I know. Grady would not have left you if he didn’t think you could handle this.”
I hiccupped a big, ugly sob and bent my face into her neck. She smelled like lilac and vanilla and like my sister. We’d been sharing hugs like this since she was born.
“Em,” was all I could sniffle. The pain was too acute, too shattering right now. I looked around the kitchen with watery eyes taking in all the careful details Grady had done himself with his own, rough hands.
Before cancer, he had been a strong, smart, capable man that started his own construction company and built it into somewhat of a local empire. He went from working every job himself to having multiple crews and foremen. He built our house, brick by loving brick and designed the entire inside himself when we finally had enough money and enough good credit to leave the cracker box of an apartment we shared for the first years of our marriage.
We had lived here for a little more than six years. Other than Blake, all of our kids were born into this home. We had gotten to know our neighbors as they each built around us and we had gotten our dream home, our forever home, when we were only twenty-six. We felt unbelievably blessed here when Grady was still healthy.
Now I felt drowned in memories of him. His ghost haunted me from every room, and lingered over each piece of furniture and hand-touched detail. This place by the island was where he would kiss me each morning and take his travel cup of coffee from me on his way to work. The long, weathered sectional couch in the living room was where we would cuddle up each night and fight over my reality shows vs. Sports Center. Our backyard was devastated by memories of him grilling, teaching the kids to play catch and enjoying nice evening nights as a family around the fire pit.
A consuming ache gripped at the center of my being and fractured my soul right down the middle. I felt the cracking intensely as it fissured out to each and every part of me, shattering my already broken spirit to pieces. Again.
“What am I going to do?” I whispered, ignoring the concerned look from Lucy. “How am I going to survive this, Em?”
Emma was bawling too by now. My hair was damp and matted from where her messy tears had fallen. But at my questions she straightened and cleared her throat. Using her mature voice again, she said, “First, you’re going to go take your run. I have to be back at the coffee shop by twelve to meet my study group so I don’t have a lot of time. And then… we will figure this out together, Lizbeth. You are not doing this alone.”
“Okay,” I agreed with a pathetic nod. I could do that. I could run. It would help me feel better anyway. I could use the time alone and the time to focus on at least one coherent thought.
“Mommy are you sad about daddy again?” Lucy asked, na?ve, as any four-year-old would be.
I nodded, unable and unwilling to show her exactly how deep the sorrow was rooted.
“It’s okay to be sad, Mommy,” Lucy promised on a know-it-all whisper. “But don’t be sad all day. He only went on vacation. He wouldn’t leave us forever. He loves us too much.”
The tears immediately started again and in that moment I instinctively knew this day was only going to get worse.
Emma took that moment to ask, “Where’s Jace?”
I listened for a second and heard only silence.