Maisie points at something on the TV screen, laughing, tendrils of copper hair canopying her eyes. She’s completely content to watch talking bunnies on the television set for eight hours a day, eating bags full of microwave popcorn for breakfast, lunch and dinner—asking of me, Did you see that? and I nod my head lifelessly, but I didn’t see. I don’t see anything. Nick is dead. What’s there left to see?
But when I am not sad, I’m angry. Angry at Nick for leaving me. For being careless. For driving too fast with Maisie in the car. For driving too fast, period. For losing control and launching headfirst through the air and squarely into that tree, his body continuing to hurtle forward while the car suddenly stopped. I’m also mad at the tree. I hate the tree. The force of the impact wrapped the car around the old oak tree on Harvey Road, while Maisie sat in the back seat, on the opposite side, miraculously unharmed. She sat there as around her the duralumin of the car caved in like a mine collapse, trapping her inside, while in the front seat, Nick breathed his last self-sufficient breaths. The cause: Nick’s warp speed, the sun, the turn. This is what I’m told, a fact that is repeated ad nauseam in the papers and on the news. Crash on Harvey Road leaves one dead. Reckless driving to blame. There is no investigation. Were Nick still alive, he would be given multiple citations for excessive speeding and reckless driving, to name a few. In no uncertain terms, I’m told that this is Nick’s fault. Nick is to blame for his own death. He is the reason why I’ve been left alone with two young kids, a fragmented car and hospital bills. As it turns out, it’s quite expensive to die.
If only Nick had slowed down, he wouldn’t be dead.
But there are other things I’m mad about, too, besides Nick’s lead foot and recklessness. His supply of running shoes strewn behind the front door, for example. They enrage me. They’re still there, and in the mornings, tired and hazy from another sleepless night, I trip over them and feel livid that Nick didn’t have the courtesy to put his shoes away before he died. Damn it, Nick.
The same can be said of his coffee mug abandoned on the kitchen sink and the newspaper spread sloppily across the breakfast nook so that sections of newsprint cascade to the ground, piece by piece. I pick them up and slap them back on the wooden table, angry with Nick for this whole blasted mess.
This is Nick’s fault; it’s his fault he’s dead. The next morning Nick’s alarm clock screams at him at six o’clock, as it always does—a force of habit, as is Harriet who rises to her feet in the hopes of being walked. Today Harriet will not be walked; tomorrow Harriet will not be walked. Your husband, ma’am, that police officer had said, before he welcomed Felix and me into his patrol car and drove us to the hospital where I signed an authorization form, renouncing my husband’s eyes, his heart, his life, was driving too fast. Of course he was, I tell myself. Nick always drives too fast. The sun, he blamed, and again, He was driving too fast.
Was anyone hurt? I asked obtusely, expecting the officer to say no. No one. Oh, how stupid I’ve been. They don’t send officers to collect the next of kin when no one’s been hurt. And then I feel angry with myself for my own stupidity. Angry and embarrassed.
I let Maisie take to sleeping in my bedroom. My father warns me that this isn’t a good idea. And yet, I do. I let her sleep in my room because the bed is suddenly too big, and in it, I feel small and lost and alone. Maisie is a restive sleeper. She talks in her sleep, mumbling quietly for Daddy, and I stroke her hair, hoping she will mistake my touch for his. She kicks in her sleep. When she wakes in the morning, her head is where her feet should go and vice versa.
As we settle into bed at seven thirty in the evening, Felix cocooned in his bassinet by my side, Maisie asks me for the umpteenth time, “Where’s Daddy?” and I reply with the same vacuous response, “He’ll be home soon,” and I know that Nick wouldn’t do it this way. This isn’t how Nick would handle things, were I the one who was dead. Oh, how I wish I were the one who was dead. Nick is the better parent. He would use words, gentle words, euphemisms and colloquialisms, to explain. He would set her down on his lap, and swathe her in his benevolent arms. Resting in peace, he would say, or In a better place, so that Maisie would imagine me in Disney World, napping on a bed in the highest tower of King Stefan’s castle with the exquisite Sleeping Beauty, and there would be no sadness or incertitude over the fact that I was dead. Instead she would forever envision me lying on a luxurious bed in a beautiful evening gown, my hair framing my face, a crown set on my head. I would be elevated to status of princess. Princess Clara.
But not Nick.
“When will Daddy be home?” she asks me, and I run my hands through her hair, force a smile and issue my boilerplate response: “Soon,” turning quickly away, attending to a disgruntled Felix so she will not see me cry.
The day of Nick’s funeral, it rains, as if the sky itself is commiserating with me, crying along while I cry. The sun refuses to show its culpable face, hiding behind the safeguard of blubbery, gray rain clouds that fill the sky. In the distance, the clouds reach formidably into the sky, a Mount Saint Helens of clouds. Connor, Nick’s best friend, stands beside me, on the left, while my father is on the right, Maisie snuggled in between my father and me. As the priest commits Nick’s body to the ground, we scatter handfuls of earth on top of the casket.
Maisie holds my hand as our feet sink into mud. There are rain boots on her feet, teal rain boots with puppies on their shaft, to pair with the black A-line dress. She’s tired of asking where Nick is, and so she stands unsuspectingly as her father is lowered into the ground.
“What are we doing, Mommy?” she asks instead, wondering why all these mournful people have gathered under a canopy of black umbrellas, watching as a crate is buried in the ground, much in the same way that Harriet buries her bones in the backyard.
“This is unacceptable,” Nick’s mother says to me later as we drift away from the cemetery to our parked cars.
My father says, “You should tell her, Clarabelle,” which is his nickname for me, one I’ve grown to love, but once despised. In the distance, Maisie skips along with a younger cousin, only three years old, both oblivious to the obvious sadness that imbues the air along with the laden humidity. Outside it is hot and muggy, gnats and mosquitoes proliferating before our eyes. I push Felix in the baby carriage, plodding over the pitted lawn and around the granite headstones. Dead people. I wonder how they died.