by Harper Bliss
* * *
Ian,
I’ve decided to move back home. It’s been more than four months now. Four months… can you even believe it? The world has been without you for four entire months. I don’t even know how that is possible. Death is just so cruel and final. One second you’re there, drawing breath, the next you’re gone. It can all be over in an instant. Maybe that’s why I’ve been clinging to Dolores so hard. First, it made me feel less dead inside, like I actually wanted to continue living without you. And now, while I’m scribbling this in Jeremy’s guest room, it makes me realize that life is so precious. What if I walk out of here tomorrow and it’s my turn? My number is up and I get mowed down by one of those SUVs that don’t belong in the city center—your words. What will I have to show for my life?
Granted, I lost my way, and I surely haven’t found it yet. But I did lose myself a little in the affair with your mother, and I get what she was trying to say when we had that fight. That was another gift Dolores gave me. The gift of showing me what I was doing to myself, how I was stifling me, and us—her and me. It’s funny that us no longer means you and me, Ian. I belong to another us now. Well, not really. I guess we broke up, if that’s even a thing. I’m not sleeping with your mother anymore. If you weren’t dead, I’d say you could resume breathing normally again. (Did I just make a joke about you dying? That’s a first.)
The fact is that you’re gone and I remain. I need to pull myself together and I know how I’m going to do it. It could be that I need to stop writing you these letters, but I’ve grown quite fond of writing them. It doesn’t hurt me so much anymore that you will never read them. In fact, after some of the things I’ve written, I’m glad you never will.
I’m moving home and I’m going back to work. I’m returning to my old self. Well, I’ll never be my old self again—you changed me forever. Not only because you died. But you had already changed me so much while you were alive. Those six years we had together, though surely too short, improved my personality vastly. I’m not so bitter anymore. Not so angry all the time. I don’t feel like such a victim, anymore. Though for a while, after the accident, I did feel like the greatest martyr on the planet. ‘Why me’ is a pretty automatic thought under the circumstances, I’d like to think so, but I’m not certain because Dolores never seemed to suffer from it. That was one of the things that really drew me to her. Dolores is not a victim. Not after Angela’s death and not after yours.
I miss her. Maybe I shouldn’t write that in this letter to you, but I miss her. Her proximity gave me something extra, the edge I needed to make it through the day in the beginning, and so much more afterwards. We brought each other joy in a dark, hopeless time. For that, I will always be grateful to her. She saved me, of that I’m sure. She saved me once and then she saved me again.
I’ve been strong. I haven’t contacted her. I’ve been here for four days now and I’ve resisted the urge, because every time I picture Dolores reading a needy message from me, I imagine her rolling her eyes at a person I don’t want to be. At this moment, I don’t really know what person exactly I want to be to her. But I will start by being someone who will, with her, face the guy whose truck made you lose your balance that day. We’ve taken some big steps together already, and I feel, in my heart of hearts, though I can’t really put it into words, that I need to do this with her as well. It’s part of our journey together.
But I have no idea what I’m going to say to that man. Most certainly, in my head, it is his fault, even though my rational mind knows that it’s not. He was perfectly within his rights to back into the street—he was about to make a delivery to Origino, where you stopped sometimes after work to pick up organic kale. Can I really be angry at a man who delivers organic produce for a living?
I think my lack of sleep is making me a little delirious. Does anything that I’ve written here make sense at all, babe? I miss calling someone babe. It’s just a stupid word, but I miss calling you that. I can’t sleep, Ian. Not yet. I doze and have these crazy dreams about everything all together and then when I wake up I’m convinced for a second that they were real, and there’s no one in my bed to tell me that they’re not.
I miss you.
Sophie
Chapter Thirty
The day I move back home is the first really hot one of the summer. Sweat runs down my back as I haul my computer back into my office. Everything in the apartment feels like it belongs to a former life. Jeremy offered to help me move, but I told him it was something I needed to do on my own.
The first thing I do after finding a spot for my stuff, which is easy because I just put everything back where it came from, is give the place a good scrub. Neither Ian nor I were very big on housework and soon after moving in together we decided it was of vital importance to our relationship to hire someone to come and clean a few times a week. I refused to pick up his haphazardly discarded socks and he wasn’t going to do the same for me.
Though I fully intend to get our cleaner to come back, I somehow feel I need to be the one to remove the dust that has gathered since his death. It’s some sort of symbolic gesture—wiping away old dirt before I can start messing up the place again on my own.
This particular activity takes me throughout the entire flat. I run my fingers over every last object. The model of the Sydney Opera House he made in Lego. The Rubik’s cube he never managed to solve because he refused to look up how to do it on the internet. A stack of Architectural Digest magazines he insisted on keeping. His laptop. A frame with a picture of him, Angela, and Dolores.
I remember when, on our first date, he told me he had an absent father in England, and he had two mothers. I thought I hid my initial shock well by acting all enlightened about it, but he later told me it was very visible on my face. Oh, the irony, I think now, as I clean off this particular picture frame with extra zeal.
Of course, I can’t sleep, but lying in our bed, in some ways, is more bearable than tossing and turning in Jeremy’s spare bed. It’s something that I need to do, whereas staying at Jeremy’s meant postponing this even longer, felt like marking time.
The first few days and nights are long, and I make sure I’m out of the apartment as much as possible during the day. I set up a meeting with Jackie O’Brien and get myself set up to start work soon. I visit Alex who is on bed rest for a few days and is going mad, but whose gaze softens when it lands on me. All the while, I try not to think about Dolores and her email. I don’t reply, fearing that if I do, I won’t be able to stop myself from saying something I don’t want to. I don’t know what I want. I miss her. There’s no doubt about that, but I need to figure out which parts of her I miss. Do I miss comforting, strong Dolores? Or do I really miss her, elegant, successful, gorgeous Dolores? The two are so intertwined that I can’t come to a conclusion.
Was my affair with her solely a means of getting through those first four months?
Does she miss me?
All these questions run through my head on repeat as I lie awake in the bed I used to share with Ian. Every morning I hope to find the answer, to get a sign from somewhere, but my brain is muddled by lack of sleep, and missing Dolores’ arms around me. I want so many things to be different that I don’t know where one desire begins and the other ends anymore.
Every day, I stand with my phone in my hand, ready to call her. But I can’t bring myself to do it because there is no going back. No going back to the me of three, or even two months ago, when I was so much more devastated than I am now. And a part of me is afraid. What if I were to be with her again, but the comfort she provides, the warmth, the love, what if they’re still there but I don’t feel them anymore? “At least I had that,” I mutter to myself. At least, underneath all the rage and the sadness and the pointlessness, she made me feel things. What if I see her and it’s all gone and it’s all revealed for exactly what it was: a sham. A means to forget. A drug I was temporarily addicted to. A cheap thrill. A perversion I lost myself in so readily—and what wo
uld that say about me now? Then our time together would lose its luster.
All the while, Ian is still dead, never to return, and I have a life to get back to. An existence to build without Ian. A hole in my heart to fill—as opposed to merely stopping the bleed with the temporary fix of Dolores’ affection.
But sometimes, in my most unguarded moments, a smile wells in my chest when I think of Dolores entering the bedroom in her tank top and shorts, of how she hummed along to the Grace & Frankie theme tune. I watched a couple of episodes in the middle of the night two days ago because I couldn’t sleep and it made me feel closer to her.
And so, on Saturday morning, when I wake from the light slumber I usually drift into in the early hours, groggy and tears at the ready, I know what I’m going to do. How will I ever find out what we really have between us if I keep ignoring Dolores?
Chapter Thirty-One
When I see her, I know I made the right decision to come. I’m at the Starbucks thirty minutes early, but Dolores is already there. I look at her from the door, again wondering why we’re doing this at a Starbucks of all places. Maybe the driver suggested it and Dolores went along with it because she’s an easy-going person. Or perhaps she’s expecting me to come and thought a Starbucks on a Saturday afternoon in this part of town—a very public place—would curb any too dramatic outbursts from me.
I didn’t tell her I was coming. I wanted to give myself every opportunity to back out at the last minute without disappointing her with a late cancellation. Now I’m here, and I look at her perched at the table, reading something on her iPad—probably The Chicago Morning Post—and I’m glad I came. If only to see her. Because my heart does that silly pitter-patter of excitement already.
As though she senses my presence, Dolores looks up and our gazes cross. And it’s like something out of a movie. All the other patrons freeze, cease to exist entirely, and Dolores is my only focus. I’m frozen in time too, in that perfect moment when she spots me, before any words can spoil this reunion, before the driver turns up and adds a bunch of emotions I’m pretty sure I won’t know how to deal with. I see her, and I know.
She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and the world slips into focus again. I don’t go to her immediately; I want to savor this moment of anticipation, these few minutes during which everything is still possible. I order a cappuccino which will be vastly inferior to anything Dolores’ state-of-the-art coffee machine produces, wait for it at the counter, then join her.
Then I don’t know what to say. I’m brimming with emotions already. I should have met with her privately first. But I couldn’t foresee it was going to be like this, that just seeing her again would turn my voice into a stammer, would turn my entire body into a stuttering mess. That is not what today is about. But it feels as though, since I left Dolores’ house last week, and took the first small steps to getting my life back on track, I’ve kept a lid on my feelings for her—and now they just want to burst out.
“Sophie.” Dolores rises, squeezes my shoulder with all the tenderness in the world, and presses a kiss on my cheek. “You came.”
I nod and sit next to her, turning my body so I can look at her. I ignore the coffee. My stomach won’t agree with it anyway. Who needs coffee when you have Dolores Flemming sitting next to you?
“I’m glad,” she says. “I think it’s important.” She clears her throat. “When you didn’t reply to my email, I wasn’t sure what to expect.”
I can’t tell her that sending even the shortest reply would have put me in jeopardy of saying too much, of pouring my heart out to her with words instead of deeds, in a way we’re not accustomed to. “It was kind of a last-minute decision.”
“How are you feeling?” She peers at me over her glasses.
“You know.” I have so much to say to her, but there’s no time, and this is not the place. “You?”
“I understand your initial reluctance to this better now that the moment is here.” She gives me a small smile. “Look, Sophie, I said some things…”
I hold up my hand. “It’s okay. You said some things I needed to hear.”
Can she tell that all I want to do is kiss her? Should we just get out of here, forget the truck driver, and go to her house?
“I also said some things I didn’t mean. I need you to know that. I was upset. That phone call had upset me. It…” The door opens and we both look up. A young man walks in with skateboard in hand.
“How will we know it’s him?” I’m hit by a bout of nerves, making me inappropriately giggly about this situation.
“Officer Bale will be joining us. She knows who we are.” Dolores’ voice trembles.
“I’m nervous.”
“It’s normal.” Under the table, Dolores’ hand comes to rest on my thigh. “It’s last-minute jitters. It’ll pass once he’s here.” Her hand travels down and she gives my knee a squeeze.
The door opens again and a man walks in with two women by his side. Although she’s not in uniform, I recognize Officer Bale. She spots us and they walk over.
Dolores’ hand slips off my leg. She rises and I follow her example. Am I really meant to shake that man’s hand? Will it achieve anything if I refuse?
Officer Bale makes the introductions and offers to get coffee for everyone. The second woman is Albert’s wife Ginny. Albert is skinny, pale, with dark circles underneath his eyes. He looks so regular, so like every other man in his age bracket you’d see walking down the street. But he also looks like a man suffering greatly from having put his truck in reverse one fatal day.
We shake hands—his is sweaty and limp—and sit.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me.” Surprisingly, Albert is able to look us both in the eyes. He looks at me first, then at Dolores. “It must be really difficult. I really appreciate it.”
Next to me, Dolores hums something inaudible. I just nod once.
“I want you to know that the accident has had a profound effect on my life as well. I haven’t been able to sleep properly, haven’t been eating. I feel responsible for what happened. I… saw him after he fell. I tried to help, but he was—”
His wife puts a hand on his arm. “We’re in no way comparing our grief to yours, but I guess we both wanted you to know that we live with what happened every day too. It haunts us. It’s not something you can shake off. You can’t pick yourself up and move on. Al hasn’t been driving. He hasn’t found the confidence to get back behind the wheel.”
Good, I think. Let Al suffer. Let him never set foot in a car again. Maybe he should get a bike and feel vulnerable in traffic for a change.
Officer Bale returns with a tray of coffee cups. She pulls up a chair, but doesn’t say anything.
“I’m so very sorry,” Albert says. “I’ve replayed the moment in my head so many times, thinking what I could possibly have done differently. I parked in that street every other day.”
“You didn’t hit him,” Dolores says. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” Dolores’ voice is icy.
“I know that technically and, according to the law, I didn’t.” Albert casts a glance at Officer Bale. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel like I’m to blame regardless.”
“What do you want us to say?” It’s my turn to speak. I keep my voice low out of respect for Dolores, because I know she would want me to. “That we absolve you of your guilt?”
Dolores clears her throat.
“No. Absolutely not,” Albert says. “I imagine that’s why you would think I asked to meet, but all I want to do is apologize and express my condolences for your loss in person. No matter how I twist or turn it, I had a hand in Ian’s accident. If I hadn’t been there at that time, it probably wouldn’t have happened. I wanted to look you in the eye and let you know that I don’t take that lightly.”
“We appreciate the gesture.” My tone is all sarcasm, though I do feel for him a little.
“It’s hard for all of us,” Albert’s wife says.
“I don’t t
hink there’s anything left to say.” Dolores shuffles noisily in her seat, as though she’s making to get up, but doesn’t.
“I understand. I just wanted to tell you, face-to-face, that I’m sorry. I felt I owed you that at least.” Albert’s hand is trembling as he reaches for his coffee cup.
He was the last person to see Ian. Maybe he saw him in his rearview mirror and Ian was still alive. Then the next time Albert saw him, Ian was dead.
“Thank you, Albert. It means, er…” I can hardly say it means a lot.
“We should probably go now.” His wife pushes her chair back.
No handshakes are exchanged. Only a few slight nods, a couple of averted glances, and Albert and his wife go out the door. Officer Bale sticks around for a few minutes, thanking us for our time and telling us to call her if we need anything at all.
“That was weird,” I say when it’s just Dolores and me.
Dolores sits there shaking her head. “It was. I can’t quite put it into words yet.” She scrunches her lips together.
Her complexion is paler than usual. Her eyes a bit watery.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask.
She shrugs. “It was near insignificant to meet that man. I was hoping for some cathartic moment, but it was the exact opposite.” She stares in front of her. “In the end, it still wasn’t his fault. And Ian is still dead.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
“I would really like to talk to you about something else. Not here. In private. We can go to my place, if you like.”
“Your place?” Dolores turns to me.
“I’ve moved back home. I’m no longer at Jeremy’s.”
She nods, remains silent for a couple of long seconds, then says, “I’d feel more comfortable going to my house.”
Five minutes later, we’re in her car. She turns on the radio. I’m guessing she needs some time without conversation to process the meeting with Albert. As for me, I’m frantically trying to arrange the jumble of words in my head. I’ve not planned for this. I know what I want to say but I have no idea how to make it plausible, how to translate what’s in my heart into acceptable sentences.