You Were There Too

by Colleen Oakley

  He was too shocked to say it back. But he wishes he had. He wishes he could tell her now. “I love you, too.” But he’s tired and just wants to sleep. When he wakes up, he’ll say it. How he’d do anything for her. Give her anything she wanted. He thinks of his Ita when he was a boy and would ask for a pastelito, and she’d sneak several onto his plate when his mother wasn’t looking. That’s what he’ll say to Mia: You want a baby? I’ll give you ten!

  But for now he smiles at her—the Mia from today with the wind-whipped cheeks—one last time, and hopes that she knows.

  Chapter 30

  I am sitting on a hard chair in the ER waiting room. Waiting. Caroline and her large belly wait beside me and we are holding hands, but we’re not speaking. The electronic doors keep sliding open, as people enter and leave, allowing gusts of cold air in. I hear snippets of conversation from other people milling around, clutching foam coffee cups, as I play a weird mind game trying to line up the number of gunshots I counted to their destinations.

  One to Whitney.

  One to Oliver.

  Three to Harrison.

  There are three unaccounted for but I don’t care because three to Harrison.

  We’ve been there for hours, beneath the fluorescent lights, watching the night fall outside. I try to think of the last words Harrison said to me and I can’t, and that’s how I know he’ll be OK. Every time someone talks about a loved one dying, they repeat the last words that person said to them, and I can’t do that, so they weren’t the last words.

  A woman in a police uniform approaches us, asking for a statement about what happened, and it’s the same question I’ve been asking over and over. What happened? Why didn’t I grab Harrison as soon as I saw the carousel? I could have said any number of things—I’m sleepy, I don’t feel good, I want to go home. We could be home, right now. Watching Wheel of Fortune and eating ice cream out of the carton.

  Finally, a doctor in mint-green scrubs walks up to us and I know his name is Leong and I know someone is dead because Leong’s face is long and I think this is funny until I think it might be Harrison and then God help me I hope with everything in me that it’s Caroline who will be getting the bad news.

  And I know she’s thinking the same about me, because she drops my hand. Leong comes to a stop in front of me.

  “Harrison sustained gunshot wounds to the upper thigh, right arm and chest,” he says. His mouth keeps moving, but I cannot hear the words coming out of it. I can’t hear anything. And I wonder if I’m having a stroke.

  Or no—maybe I’ve been shot.

  Maybe that’s where the last three bullets went. I must have been shot, but for some reason I couldn’t feel it until just now. I open my mouth to tell Leong, to tell someone, but no words come out. And then I do hear something. One sentence. And then another.

  We did everything we could. I’m sorry to tell you, he died.

  And that’s when I know the weapon that has attacked me is not a gun.

  It’s a cleaver, and it has split me wide open.

  I am butterflied.

  And everything goes silent once again.

  * * *

  I always thought grief was a loud, noisy affair of keening and wailing and sobbing. The way I rocked in the fetal position every time I lost a baby. But it’s not. At least not always.

  It’s an empty stillness.

  My memories of the moments, hours, days after that evening are a silent movie reel. I remember faces in the hospital, Caroline, Leong, Gabriel. But they were alive. Harrison’s looked like a mannequin spackled to the dimensions of himself.

  I kissed it anyway. And then I put my hand gingerly on his shoulder and realized he was cold, even though he had a blanket pulled up to his armpits. So I crawled up on the metal tray that held his body and wrapped him up, as I’d done so many times in our life together, lending him my body heat. I tucked my head under his chin, feeling the bristles of his beard on my forehead, and closed my eyes. I slipped my hand in his and lay beside him and I wouldn’t leave. Not even when my sister showed up. I don’t remember vomiting, but I remember the putrid scent of it filling my nose, clinging to my shirt.

  And I thought of the first time I told Harrison I loved him. And I vomited again.

  * * *

  I remember sitting on a pew of a church I’d never been inside. The air smelled a little bit musty like a retirement home and there were men in elaborate robes and I realized it was a Catholic church, even though Harrison wasn’t even Catholic anymore.

  I remember seeing Oliver, his arm glued to his body by a white and navy sling. As he walked toward me outside, I thought vaguely I should say something to him for saving my life, but when he got close, all the fury I’d been saving up at myself, the world, came rushing forward and I lunged at him, screaming: “Why me? Why didn’t you save him?” I may have punched him, or tried to. Somebody grabbed my arm.

  * * *

  But mostly I remember the silence. As if when Harrison left this world, he packed sound in a suitcase and took it with him, tucked under his arm. And I wish he had packed me instead.

  I sleep all day and lie awake all night, and though I know there are people in my house, none of the people are Harrison and I can’t be bothered to care. It occurs to me that after my outburst at the church I am probably on some kind of suicide watch and I want to tell them all it’s OK. I may want to die, but I don’t have the energy to kill myself.

  One day I wake up, and I hear something. The pots and pans banging in the kitchen. Voices whisper-arguing. The television tuned to Daniel Tiger. And it’s too much. I need everything to be quiet again, but I’m not sure my voice will work.

  I swing my legs out of bed and stand up. I go over to the dresser and dig to the bottom of the middle drawer for my old athletic pants. I don’t even know what I’m doing until I’m walking through my kitchen, ignoring the sympathetic gapes of my sister, my mother. I stop briefly when I see her. Mom? I knew she came for the funeral, but I assumed she left.

  Outside, I walk past the garden and keep going, until I’m standing at the start of the dirt path in the woods, my feet tucked in a pair of Toms—the closest thing I have to athletic shoes. I peer into the canopy of naked trees, not sure what I’m looking for. And then I know.

  I’m looking for my husband.

  The Harrison whose feet pounded this same path over and over, running for miles but never getting anywhere.

  I take off running, slowing to a trot within minutes. My foot catches on a protruding tree root and I go sprawling in the dirt, a lightning rod of pain shooting up my ankle.

  I lie there for a minute, belly in the brush, trying to catch my breath. I look back at the offending tree, then up at the blue between the branches.

  This is why I don’t run. I want to say it out loud. To somebody. To Harrison. I want to hear him laugh the way he used to, so loud and deep that I swear I could feel the vibration of it in my bones.

  I scream into the forest, at the trees, startling the squirrels and a few birds. And I pretend he can hear me. But I know he can’t.

  My husband is gone.

  * * *

  I bang in the back door, hobbling on my left foot, gritting my teeth in pain.

  “Mia? Oh my god. Are you OK?”

  “Let me get you some ice.”

  “Are you hungry? Someone named Rebecca dropped off a hummingbird cake.”

  “A few people have called for you. I’ve been taking messages.”

  I hear all of these words and wish I had the silence back. I limp to my room and into my closet and I stare at Harrison’s clothes. And then I start to put them on. I stuff my arms into Harrison’s blue dress shirt, my legs into his trousers, and ankle still throbbing, I sink to the ground, burying my head in the stiff fabric of the shirt, soaking it with my tears.

  “Heard you could use this,” a famili
ar voice says from the doorway. I lift my head to see Raya holding a bag of frozen peas. She walks over and lowers herself down beside me, gently pressing the cold against my foot.

  “Wrong one.” I take the bag and lay it on my injured ankle and then I lay my head down in her lap and she strokes my hair. I notice my phone in her other hand and a piece of paper and I realize it was her voice that said I had messages.

  My eyes are drawn back to my cell phone again and my heart thumps an extra beat. I grab it from Raya and sit up, the drumbeat in my chest picking up its pace. I thumb through the screen, ignoring all my missed calls and text messages and going straight to my voice mails. I scroll through, my eyes intently searching for Harrison’s name. When it doesn’t appear, I click on the deleted messages. He rarely called—we communicated either in person or via text—but surely, surely I have an old voice mail in here somewhere. Telling me to grab more granola bars at the store or that he’ll be three hours late coming home or even a Saw that you called; trying you back. All I want in that moment is to hear his voice, saying something banal, something to keep him here. With me. In one last halfhearted attempt, I call his number. It rings four times and, clutching the phone to my ear, I listen, holding my breath in the empty beat before the familiar robotic intonation states: Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice message system.

  I resist the urge to chuck it across the room, and thrust it back at Raya instead. She palms it, and as if by magic, the phone comes alive in her hand. For half a second, I allow myself to believe the impossible—that it’s Harrison calling me back. I glance at the screen and see a number I don’t recognize.

  “Do you want me to get it?” she asks.

  “Please,” I say, closing my eyes, swallowing the bile creeping up my throat at the realization that Harrison’s voice is gone. As gone as he is. “Just pretend to be me.”

  So she does. I hold Harrison’s sleeve up to my nose again, only realizing now that it smells too much like detergent and I should have picked one from the dirty clothes basket. I sit up in a panic—what if someone did the laundry? I crawl over to the hamper in the corner of the room on my knees, leaving the ice pack behind, my right ankle throbbing with each movement. When I reach it, I turn the entire thing upside down, dumping all the contents out. The first few articles of clothing I paw through are mine, and my panic ratchets up to a ten.

  “Mia?” Raya says.

  “Yeah?” I’m throwing clothes over my shoulder.

  “Did you give blood at the hospital?”

  “Huh?” And then I spy it, a white undershirt with dark stains at the armpits from him wearing it so much. Relief floods my limbs as I hold it up to my nose and inhale my husband. I consider Raya’s question. “Yeah, I guess I did.” I remember it was Caroline’s idea. That we should do something while we waited. Something to help. But then, she couldn’t even give blood and it was just me, with a futile needle in my arm, not helping anything.

  “That was the blood bank.”

  “Mm-hm,” I say, and I lie down on the hardwood floor and ball up the shirt so I can tuck it under my head and pretend I’m lying on his chest.

  “Apparently they run some tests to make sure your blood is safe to use.”

  “’K,” I say. I’m too tired to say I don’t care if they use it or not because it can’t save Harrison, so what’s it matter? I just want her to leave, and then think maybe if I ask her a question, it will speed up the conversation and she will do just that. And then it occurs to me, belatedly, that they must have found something in the blood, or they wouldn’t be calling. “What—do I have AIDS or something? Hepatitis?” And I laugh a little, when I realize that I wouldn’t care even a little bit if I did.

  She’s silent for a few beats.

  “You’re pregnant.”

  Chapter 31

  Everyone makes a fuss about the pregnancy.

  Vivian comes up for the first appointment and watches the grainy heartbeat on the screen when I cannot.

  “Don’t get attached,” I say. “It’s not going to stay.”

  One afternoon, Del shows up on my front stoop, though I can’t remember agreeing to her visit, and she spends three days cooking and filling my freezer with ropa vieja and picadillo and a lentil stew that was Harrison’s favorite. “You don’t have to do this,” I repeat for the third time, as she stands at the stove, wooden spoon in one hand, the other on her hip. She cuts her eyes to me and raises one eyebrow. “What’s this baby going to eat? You going to cook?”

  I don’t have the heart to tell her what I told Vivian.

  Then, in February, two people show up at once—a man in a florist van with a spray of hydrangeas and Rebecca, Foster’s wife, carrying a cardboard box of Harrison’s things from his office. “I thought you’d want these,” she says. She puts the flowers on the kitchen island and makes a pot of tea—I didn’t even know I had tea—and we sit on the teal barstools while she talks. I don’t think I say one word, but she doesn’t let that stop her. She tells me about her grandbaby’s first tooth and about Foster retiring soon and about the fashion show she’s helping produce for the Junior League.

  “Caroline had her baby,” she says.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize you knew her.”

  “Small town.” She shrugs. I realize even if she didn’t know Caroline before, she’d know her now. Everyone probably knows of us all by virtue of what happened.

  I know I should reach out to her. To Oliver. I still haven’t apologized. Or thanked him.

  “Do you know if her brother—”

  “He stayed on for a little bit. To help. And then left. Somewhere out of the country, I think?”

  “Oh,” I say.

  When Rebecca stands up later, she puts her hand over mine. “I do hope you’ll come back to teach the class soon,” she says. “The substitute has us painting a bowl of fruit.”

  I look at her, considering. “I’ll be there on Wednesday,” I say. Not because of the fruit, but because I need to get out of my house.

  When Rebecca leaves, I take the box to the den and start pulling things from it: Harrison’s Gollum bobblehead; the coffee mug I bought him for his birthday one year that says IT’S GOING TIBIA GREAT DAY; the Eagles Super Bowl Champs helmet paperweight he won in a bet against a colleague, a lifelong Patriots fan. I take my time, holding each item in my palm as if weighing its worth. And then—then—I spy it. Tucked in the bottom of the box, against the side, the slim beige rectangular device that was sometimes tossed along with his keys and wallet on the upturned cardboard box in the entryway or on the kitchen island or tucked in the side pocket of his laptop bag.

  Harrison’s Dictaphone.

  I stare at it, my breath catching in my throat. It’s a gift worth more than all of the others combined. Hurriedly, I gather the bobblehead and the cup and the paperweight and I go lie on our bed and curl around all of my husband’s belongings. I take a deep breath and press play. Harrison’s deep voice fills the room. December third, two thousand eighteen. Carotid endarterectomy. A mix of joy, grief and relief well up, pricking the corners of my eyes. I close them and listen to my husband methodically describe every step of his final surgery. And then I listen to it again.

  And again.

  And again.

  And at some point, I fall asleep wrapped in the cocoon of Harrison’s steady voice.

  * * *

  The next day, I read the card that came with the flowers and learn they’re from Whitney.

  He saved my son. I will forever be in debt.

  I stare at it, trying not to be alarmed at my brief but fervent wish that Gabriel had died instead of my husband.

  I go out to my studio. Instead of painting, I draw. On the floor. Next to the tiny hand, I add a big hand and then a face and then another one. And then another one. Every face is Harrison’s.

  * * *

  I think abo
ut moving. Back to Philadelphia. Maybe to Maryland, to be near Vivian and my dad. But then I’m back teaching my class every Wednesday and Rebecca starts showing up every week for tea and Raya drives up on her days off and Vivian keeps booking the next doctor appointments and coming in for them. In March, when the ground begins to thaw, I plant more greens in the garden. Swiss chard, this time, and broccoli, along with the spinach and lettuce.

  And I tell myself it just feels like too much to change everything, but really, this is the last place I lived with Harrison and, ironically, it’s now the only place that feels like home. And so I stay.

  In April, I feel the baby kick, like the faint flapping of a wing, but it was there and I sit, stunned. But still, I hold my breath.

  * * *

  One day, the sun is a ball of fire in the sky, scorching the earth. My class has been out of session for weeks; the start of fall semester is closer than the end of spring. I can’t get down on the floor in my studio anymore because my belly is too big, so I’m half perched on a stool—standing every few minutes to stretch my aching back—drawing on a sketchpad propped on an easel.