No Regrets This Time

Chapter 5

The morning it happened was ordinary in the specific, insulting way that mornings always are right before everything changes. I remember that with a clarity that scares me a little — the ordinariness. If the day had felt different, maybe I could believe there'd been some warning I missed. Instead it was just a Tuesday.

I made coffee; I let it go cold on the counter. Sofia couldn't find her left shoe, which turned out to be under the couch, where it always was, and we were seven minutes late to school because of it, and I remember being irritated about seven minutes in a way that now seems almost obscene, how much room irritation used to have in my life.

Obama left at seven for a work thing in Fort Lauderdale, a client dinner that had gotten moved up, he said, and could he swing by Melody's after to pick up the extension cords he'd left there from the Fourth of July. I said sure, of course, the way I said sure to most things by then, and I kissed him at the door the way I'd kissed him every morning for nine years, an ordinary kiss that I did not know was the last one.

He'd forgotten his sunglasses on the counter, and I remember calling after him to grab them, and him jogging back up the walkway to get them, laughing at himself, saying something about how he'd lose his own head if it weren't attached. That's the last full memory I have of him moving through our house — sunglasses in hand, laughing at his own forgetfulness, completely unaware, completely ordinary, and I've turned that memory over so many times since that I worry I've worn some of the truth off it, smoothed it into something softer than it actually was.

Nathan had a site visit in Boca and wouldn't be home till late. Melody texted me a photo of Theo in a dinosaur costume for no reason at all, just because, the way she did four or five times a week, little proof-of-life flares. I texted back a laughing emoji and went on with my day, folding laundry, answering emails from a client who wanted her entire kitchen redone in a marble she couldn't actually afford, and none of it felt like the last ordinary day of my life, because that is never how it feels while it's happening.

Sofia had a project due — a diorama, a rainforest, green tissue paper glued in clumps to look like canopy — and she was anxious about it in the particular, physical way she got anxious, picking at her cuticles, chewing the inside of her cheek. I sat with her at the kitchen table after school, glueing tiny plastic frogs onto popsicle-stick branches.

"It looks bad," she said.

"It looks like a rainforest that survived something."

"That's not a compliment."

"Sure it is. Rainforests that survive things are the interesting ones."

She almost smiled. She was eleven, at the age where a joke from your mother has to clear a certain bar before it earns the smile, and I felt a small, stupid pride at clearing it. We worked in comfortable quiet for a while after that, the glue gun ticking as it cooled between uses, the late afternoon light going gold and slow across the table the way it does in Florida in early fall, when the heat finally starts loosening its grip an hour or two before dark. She hummed something under her breath, off-key, some song from school I didn't recognise, and I remember thinking, watching her small hands carefully position a plastic frog exactly where she wanted it, that this was a good ordinary afternoon, one of a thousand I assumed we had ahead of us.

Around six, she called her father. I remember because she asked me for my phone — hers was dead, charging in her room — and I handed it over without thinking twice, the most ordinary transfer of an object in the world.

I don't know exactly what they talked about. I've pieced together fragments since, from things Sofia has said in the year after, half-sentences she doesn't finish. Something about the diorama. Something about whether he'd be home for dinner. I know she was on the phone with him for maybe four minutes, standing by the sliding door with one foot up against the frame the way she does when she's talking to someone she loves, and I know that somewhere in those four minutes, or shortly after, my sister got in the passenger seat of my husband's car.

I know that because of what came after. I didn't know it then. Then, it was just a phone call and a diorama and me starting rice for dinner, the pot clicking against the burner as I set it down, no idea yet that the last ordinary hour of my life was already ending, was already behind me before I'd noticed it passing.

Sofia handed the phone back. "He said he'll be home by eight."

"Good. Tell him to bring the frogs I left in the car; there's more in there."

She didn't. There wasn't time.

Around seven-forty, the doorbell rang, and it wasn't the kind of ring that means a delivery. I've thought about this since — how you can tell, sometimes, from a doorbell alone, that something in your life has already ended and you're just about to find out about it. I remember the rice was still on the stove, half-boiled, and I remember thinking, absurdly, that I needed to turn it off, some domestic reflex firing even as I crossed the hall toward the door.

Two officers. A woman with kind eyes and a folder she held against her chest as it might otherwise fall open on its own, and a younger man behind her who wouldn't quite meet my eyes, the way you don't meet the eyes of someone you know you're about to hurt.

Sofia was upstairs. I remember being grateful for that, in the strange, useless way you're grateful for small mercies inside a catastrophe — that she wasn't standing next to me when the woman said the words car accident, said the words I-95, said the words both occupants, said, finally, so gently it was almost unbearable, I'm so sorry, ma'am.

I didn't cry. I want to put that down plainly, because I think it matters. After all, it's the kind of detail people leave out when they tell this story afterwards, smoothing themselves into something more sympathetic. I did not cry. I said thank you to the officers, like they'd delivered a package. I closed the door. I stood in the front hall with my hand flat against the wood, and the house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, could hear the rice starting to scorch on the stove, a smell I would associate with this exact moment for the rest of my life, and I thought, with a strange, detached clarity: I have to go tell my daughter that her father is dead, and I don't know if I'm going to say the word "aunt" in the same sentence, and I don't know which one will break her faster.

I went and turned off the stove first. I don't know why that felt like the thing to do before I climbed the stairs. Maybe some part of me needed one more minute of a world where the worst thing happening was a pot of rice going to ruin.

The stairs seemed longer than they'd ever been. I counted them, actually counted, thirteen steps I'd climbed thousands of times without noticing a single one, and on step nine I heard Sofia's voice through her door, singing along to something on her tablet, off-key and happy and utterly unaware that the floor of her life was about to open up beneath her.

I stood outside that door for what felt like a very long time and was probably no more than thirty seconds. I thought about all the ways I could say it. I thought about softening it, building up to it, the way people do in movies: sit down honey, I need to tell you something. I thought about just saying the word dead and letting the rest fall where it fell. In the end I didn't get to choose, not really — she saw my face before I said a single word, turned from her tablet and looked at me, and her own face changed instantly, some animal instinct in an eleven-year-old already understanding, before I'd spoken, that the world had tilted.

"Mom?"

"Baby, I need you to come sit with me."

She didn't ask why. That was its own kind of terrible, how fast she went quiet, how completely she trusted that whatever I was about to tell her was going to be the worst thing she'd ever heard, before I'd given her a single reason to think so.

We sat on the edge of her bed, her tablet still glowing faintly beside her, some cartoon frozen mid-scene, and I held both her hands in mine because I didn't trust my own voice to carry the words alone without something to hold onto.

"There was an accident tonight," I said. "On the highway. Your dad and Aunt Melody were in the car together, and — " I felt the sentence catch in my throat the exact way Nathan's had caught on the phone, some family of grief that ran the same current through all of us. "They didn't make it, baby. Both of them. I'm so sorry. I am so, so sorry."

I watched her face do something I will never be able to fully describe, a kind of silent collapsing, her whole small body curling forward like she could fold herself around the news and contain it that way, and then the sound came, finally, a sound I'd never heard her make before and have only heard twice since, and I pulled her into my lap the way I hadn't done since she was small enough to fit there properly, and we stayed like that a long time, the tablet still glowing its frozen cartoon scene beside us, neither of us reaching over to turn it off.

At some point in that first terrible hour, she asked me if Theo knew yet. I told her Uncle Nathan was with him. She asked if Theo would remember his mom, being so little, and I didn't have an answer for that, not one I trusted myself to give without breaking further, so I just held her tighter and let the question sit unanswered in the dark room, the way so many questions in this story would end up sitting, unanswered, for far longer than any of us wanted.