by Nicole Baart
“Tomorrow,” he said, taking off across the grass.
When he was sheltered beneath the shade of their shared apple trees, she called out to him. “Why haven’t you ever talked about him before? God, I mean. We’ve lived by each other for years, and you’ve never so much as mentioned his name.”
Benjamin turned toward her for just a moment. “I have,” he said, his eyes bright and burnished by the faintest of smiles. “In lots of different ways.”
And then he was gone.
Dani pulled the paper from her pocket and flattened it against the kitchen table with her palms. She was poised on the very edge of one of the chairs, back pin-straight and toes pointed against the floor as if she was about to change her mind. As if she might flee at any moment. But the phone was on the table beside her, and before she could lose her nerve, she grabbed it and punched in the numbers.
Samantha answered on the first ring. “Hello?”
“Sam?” Dani asked, breathless. She swallowed, tried again. “Hi, Sam, it’s Danica Greene.”
“Oh.”
“Please don’t hang up.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
It was an impossible conversation, and they both knew it. Danica could tell by the way Sam’s voice echoed high and taut, stretched like a tightrope about to snap.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Dani admitted after an awkward moment. “This is much harder than I thought it would be.”
Sam didn’t say anything.
“It’s just . . . I know that he’s gone, that he’s not coming back,” Dani said, haltingly. “I’ve accepted it, I guess. And, honestly, I can hardly stand the thought of you, but if there’s a part of him that is still . . . I mean . . . I just want to do the right thing.”
“That’s why I came to Blackhawk,” Sam broke in. “I was trying to do the right thing. God knows I’ve done enough things wrong.”
Dani almost smiled. Almost.
“My brother flies for United. It was easy enough to hop on standby. . . . But it was stupid.” Sam sighed on the other end of the line. “I thought that maybe, if you knew, you would—”
Would what? Dani wondered. Adopt her husband’s baby? A child that wasn’t hers? And yet, somehow she knew that this would never be over—that she would never be able to leave Ell behind—if she didn’t let Sam go too.
“I’m glad I know.” Even though Dani said it, the statement surprised her. But she lingered in it for a second, came to the conclusion that she meant it. “I am. It changes everything, but I can’t wish it away.”
Silence.
Dani gathered herself, mustering the courage to ask what was plaguing her. Her blood pounded in her ears as she struggled to form the words. “You said you couldn’t keep the baby. Is there . . . ? I mean, did you . . . ?”
But Sam didn’t answer. Instead, she said, “If you want to pretend that nothing ever happened, I’m fine with that. We can hang up the phone and just let it all go. . . .”
Pretend that nothing ever happened. It was a tempting thought, an idea as thick and comforting as wool, the sort of daydream that Dani longed to wrap around herself. She’d close her eyes, tuck those secret hopes in tight, and make believe that everything was as it should be. That Ell was home. That he hadn’t failed and fallen short and broken her heart. That she hadn’t done the same. Or maybe she didn’t have to construct so lofty a facade. Maybe it was enough simply to forget what she already knew.
But as she clutched the telephone that suddenly felt agonizingly heavy, Dani knew that pretending was exactly the problem. It was where everything began to unravel. In the white lies they told each other. The big ones they told themselves. Promises they didn’t plan to keep, differences that they made valiant attempts to dull, to push aside as they shifted and tried and then tried again. It was too much. It wasn’t enough.
“No,” Dani told Sam. “I don’t want to live like nothing ever happened. I want to live because everything has.”
Danica
The day of Etsell’s memorial dawned clear and bright. The air was sharp with cold, and a thick layer of frost robed the earth in a gown of shimmering white. Each blade of grass, each twisted tree branch was finely wrought, fragments of handmade lace that shone against a landscape of blown glass.
It reminded me of our wedding somehow, the winter morning just a few days before Christmas when Etsell and I said, “I do.” We had planned to take outdoor pictures, but the temperature was well below freezing and my lips turned blue after just a couple of shots. In the end, the only photo worth salvaging from our icy adventure was the very last one. I was shaking from the cold, and rather than let me pick my way back to the car through the snow, Etsell wrapped his suit coat around my shoulders and swept me into his arms.
The photographer zoomed in and snapped a quick close-up, capturing the split second when I reached up and kissed Ell’s neck before tucking my chin into his heavy coat. In the photo, my lips are slightly parted, and they just graze the place where Etsell’s pulse throbbed steady and warm beneath his skin. Afterward, I didn’t remember kissing him, but when I flipped to the picture in our wedding album on the day of my husband’s memorial, I could feel the brush of the fine hairs on his neck. I could taste him. Tracing the photo with my fingertips, I told the girl in Ell’s arms to savor the moment. To press her face into the firm curve of his shoulder. But it was too late.
“You ready?” Kat popped her head into my bedroom and found me staring at the wedding picture. We both jumped a little and looked away, persuaded by the surprise of the moment that she had caught me in the act of doing something shamefully intimate. “Take your time,” Kat backtracked, forgoing her usual boldness. She ducked her head almost timidly. “I’ll be waiting in the kitchen.”
“No need. I’m coming.” I shut the photo album with definitive slap and bent to slide it under my bed. “I can’t be late. They’ll talk.”
“Who’ll talk?”
“They.”
“Ah,” Kat nodded. “The ubiquitous they. Bastards.”
I tucked my lip between my teeth, nibbling back the sort of dangerous smile that would undoubtedly be a prelude to tears. Although I thought I had progressed to the point where I could leave that sort of messy sentiment behind me, the fact that we were finally doing this—that I was saying good-bye in such a conclusive, permanent way—left me fragile. Off-balance. One unexpected memory away from losing my tenuous hold on the aura of cool composure I worked so hard to cultivate.
“Hey.” Kat caught me beneath the elbow and squeezed. “You all right?”
“Fine,” I lied.
Kat arched an eyebrow at me.
“Terrible,” I amended. “Is that what you want to hear? That I’m not okay?”
My sister studied me for a long moment, then bent toward me and touched her lips to my forehead. “You are okay,” she said, backing away. “You’ve made it this far, haven’t you?”
Six months. That’s what she meant. I had lived in this new life, this hollow, husbandless life for almost exactly six months. Twenty-six weeks. Half a year. A lifetime. And in many ways, Kat was right. I had made it this far. There were times I longed for Etsell with an intensity that still made me weak in the knees, but there were days when he was nothing more than a soft ache. Something familiar and bittersweet, the source of a manageable and not altogether unwelcome pain.
“I’m okay,” I said, as if saying it was enough to make it true.
“Hell yeah.” Kat winked at me. “You’ve got this memorial thing in the bag.” She sounded confident, but her voice wavered just a bit. Enough to assure me that she was having a hard time saying good-bye too.
I glanced at the clock on my bedside stand. “We’d better get going.”
“It takes what? Five minutes to get to the hangar? We need to hit the kitchen first. I have something for you.”
Although Kat was not the gift-giving type, I half expected some sort of memento to commemorate the day. A card at least. Som
ething that tried to express what my sister couldn’t bring herself to say. But what awaited me in the kitchen was a bottle of booze and a shot glass.
“You want to get me drunk before the memorial?” I choked.
“No! Of course not.” Kat clipped across the kitchen in her heels and took the delicate, faceted bottle in her hand. “It’s just . . . libations?” She tilted the bottle back and forth, a cheesy smile on her face. It faded. “Look, it’s something I do. At work. When people are sad or . . . you know. It’s stupid.” She hastily deposited the bottle on the counter and spun to face me with a look of false enthusiasm. But she seemed to realize that enthusiasm wasn’t quite the right note to hit. Kat bit her lower lip, crossed her arms, and then put her balled-up fists on her hips for an apparent lack of a better place to put them. She sighed. “Oh, forget it. Let’s just go.”
I wasn’t used to seeing my sister so flustered. She didn’t know what to do with herself, and as I watched she raised a hand to her mouth and tucked a fingernail between her teeth. It was an unconscious move, something she hadn’t done in a very long time.
“What do you do when people are sad?” I asked gently.
“It’s stupid.”
I rolled my eyes. “Tell me. Please.”
“No, I—”
“Katrina.” I scowled at her. “We’re not leaving this house until you tell me.”
“Fine,” she huffed. “Sit down.”
I took a seat at the table and Kat lowered herself into a chair across from me, smoothing her wool skirt against the back of her legs so it wouldn’t wrinkle. She peeked up at me from beneath her eyelashes, and cleared her throat. I could tell she didn’t quite know how to start. “When someone comes into the bar,” she began haltingly, “and I can tell they’re really upset—not the ‘I just got a speeding ticket’ sort of upset, but really, bone-crushingly hurt—I take this bottle out from under the bar.” Kat patted the patterned glass as if it was an old and trusted friend.
“What’s in it?”
“My own concoction. Brandy and crazy-strong black tea, some lemon sour, and a few other things. The alcohol content is pretty low, but it doesn’t taste that way. It’s sharp, you know?”
I didn’t know, but I nodded anyway.
“People want to drown their sorrows, but I know from experience that doesn’t work. Everything is only harder, messier, when you sober up.” Kat fingered the drop pearl of her earring and cast a furtive look over her shoulder as if she half expected to find someone sneaking up behind her.
“Kat, I—”
“Let me finish.” She gave her head a clarifying toss and then took the shot glass in her hand. Pouring it three-quarters full of the murky liquid from her mysterious bottle, she placed it directly in front of me. “Here’s what I do: I tell them I’m going to pour them three drinks. Just three—no more, no less. And when those drinks are gone, they have to go out and face whatever it is that drove them to drinking in the first place.”
“Nothing drove me to drinking,” I argued.
But Kat acted as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Danica, I’m going to pour you three drinks, and when they’re gone, you have to go out and face this.”
“I am facing this.”
“Chin up, shoulders back, strong and confident and capable. You face this, and then you move on.”
“I don’t—”
“You move on, honey. No buts.”
“But—”
“No buts.” Kat tapped the rim of the shot glass with her fingernail. “One drink to get you through,” she said with an emphatic sense of ceremony.
I would have fought her, but Kat looked so earnest in that moment, so much like the responsible older sister instead of the flaky, would-be best friend that I obediently raised the glass to my lips and tipped it back in one, long swallow. It burned going down.
Kat poured again. “One drink to remember.” She nodded at me.
I drank.
“And”—Kat filled my glass a third time—“one drink to forget.”
The alcohol was cool-warm against my tongue, spicy and caustic just as Kat had promised. Her last words hit me in the second before I swallowed. One drink to forget. Everything in me rebelled against her proclamation, and I think I would have spit the drink out onto the table if I could, but it was too late. The liquid was seeping down my throat, and before I knew it, half of the elixir was gone.
But I coughed, and the rest of the draft swirled back into the shot glass. I slammed it onto the table half full, leaving the faintest mark that would forever bear witness to the place that I took my stand—that I refused to forget entirely about my husband. A few drops sloshed from the rim, staining my hands and rimming the table with a dark smear.
Kat smiled at me, nodded. “It’s enough,” she said. “I think it’s just enough.”
The memorial was a very casual affair. We congregated at the airport hangar outside Blackhawk and talked about Etsell as if he had merely stepped from the room and would be back at any moment. But we all knew that wasn’t true. He wasn’t coming back, and we didn’t need the black box from his airplane to prove it.
Benjamin facilitated everything, passing around the microphone that we had hooked up to remote speakers the morning before the actual ceremony took place. Having Pastor Miller there lent an undeniable weight to everything, but I was grateful for the laughter of Ell’s friends. For the stories they told and the irreverent way they chose to remember my husband. We laughed until we cried, and then we cried until the only thing we could possibly do was laugh at ourselves. At the depth of our emotion and at the way we could—after all this time—conjure the memory of Etsell Greene with the devotion and tenacity of those who had loved him best.
As I listened to each carefully chosen tribute, the moments that pieced together the life of a man that I believed I held as dear as my own breath, I realized that my husband was a soul in limbo. A man chained to this town, to a father who couldn’t love him the way that he deserved and a mother who had left too soon. Shackled to the earth when he wanted to fly. Bound to me. I had held him just like he now held me. But didn’t we all do that? Hold each other close when what we wanted was to be free?
When Benjamin finally decided to end the memorial with a time of prayer, I stiffened. We hadn’t rehearsed this, and I had no idea what he would say—or try to say—through an institution that I both secretly admired and couldn’t begin to comprehend. There was something inside me that gravitated toward Benjamin’s words like a compass points north, but the skeptic in me worried about what everyone else would think.
I needn’t have worried.
“Thank you,” someone said when our heads were bowed and our eyes were shut tight. Just that: “Thank you.” As if Etsell’s life was a gift. And, I suppose, it was. The most beautiful, undeserved gift.
“Be with Dani.”
“Be with us.”
“Help us understand.”
Oh, God. I wanted that more than anything. To understand why. Why did we allow ourselves to drift apart? Why did he leave? Why did he ruin everything by permitting himself to love her, if only for one lonely night? But in that moment of longing I knew that nothing was as simple as that. I would never know why. And it didn’t matter. Why meant nothing at all. What mattered. The one thing that counted for everything from this day forward was: What?
What now?
It was as if Benjamin could read my mind. “Grant us grace,” he prayed as he concluded the service. “The grace to know where to go from here.”
17
Right Here
Natalie came for the memorial, and for a few days Danica’s life was as neat and tidy as the four square corners of a well-sealed box. Char and Natalie and Kat and Hazel hemmed her in, pressing her inside their haphazard haven with the sort of attentiveness that they had somehow neglected in the days immediately following Etsell’s disappearance. It was as if everything finally made sense, the story had come full circle, and all at once the real
ity of what had happened echoed with a solemn finality.
But their story was no bleak tragedy. They played cards and dusted off old memories of Etsell, homespun treasures that they offered up one precious experience at a time. Dani tucked each anecdote carefully away, smoothing every layer of Ell’s life one on top of the other until his narrative was a complete, unbroken whole. A piece of handmade art that was both painfully beautiful and brilliantly flawed.
There was food from friends and neighbors, casseroles and soups and pot roasts, and this time, Danica ate it. In fact, they all ate it, gathered around the little round table in her kitchen. More often than not they simply grabbed a handful of random cutlery and dug in, twirling strings of gooey cheese from the tines of their forks and scraping the last few morsels from the pan with their fingertips. They licked off creams and bits of shredded chicken and hot gravies that made them feel warm and satiated. Dani gained five pounds in a week and her jeans stopped slipping off her narrow hips.
“You look fantastic,” Natalie said the day before she left for New York again.
“I do?” Dani smoothed her hands down her sides, shocked that she no longer had to stick her fingers in the waistband of her pants and hike them up. “I’m fat!” she gasped. “When did that happen?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, you’re not fat. You’re on your way to normal.” Natalie pinched Dani’s midriff through her shirt and flashed an uncharacteristically mischievous grin. “I told you: you look fantastic.”
Dani threw her arms around her sister and forced Natalie to endure a rare sisterly hug. “You look pretty great yourself.” She lowered her voice, whispered in Natalie’s ear: “Promise me you won’t make me wait so long to see your sweet face again.”
“I hardly have a sweet face,” Natalie complained, pushing out of Dani’s embrace and pursing her lips as if to affect an appropriately sour expression.
“It’s sweet to me.”