No Regrets This Time

Chapter 6

I stood in that front hall for what felt like a long time after the officers' car pulled away, though it was probably closer to a minute, maybe two. The porch light was still on, throwing a yellow rectangle across the driveway where their car had been. I remember noticing, with the strange, useless precision grief sometimes hands you, that I hadn't turned off the stove, that the rice was probably scorched to the bottom of the pot by now, and some small, absurd part of me wanted to go check on it before I did anything else, as if a burned pot of rice were still a problem worth solving.

I didn't check on it. I stood there instead, one hand still flat against the closed door, running through the short list of people I was supposed to call in a moment like this, a list I hadn't known I'd already built until I needed it. My mother. Nathan. Someone from Obama's office, eventually, though that could wait. I picked up my phone with hands that didn't feel entirely like mine and called Nathan first, because some instinct in me understood, even before I could have explained it, that he was the only other person alive who was about to lose exactly what I'd just lost.

The hospital called it "both occupants," which is a phrase I will hate for the rest of my life, clinical and careful, designed by someone who has said it too many times to feel it anymore. Obama Asta and Melody Eleanor, my husband and my sister, in a two-door sedan on the Palmetto going seventy in rain that had come out of nowhere the way Florida rain does, one minute clear sky and the next a wall of it, wipers useless, taillights smeared into long red ribbons.

I know what the report said, later. Distracted driving, it said, delicately, and I have spent longer than I'd like to admit doing the math the officers wouldn't do for me — what does distracted mean, in a car with two people who are not married to each other, going seventy in a storm, with a phone on the dashboard mount showing a text neither of them had opened.

I didn't know any of that yet, standing in the front hall. What I knew was: I had to call Nathan.

He picked up on the second ring, still in his site-visit voice, easy, half-distracted, some construction noise in the background, a drill or a saw. "Hey, Cass, what's—"

"Nathan." My voice didn't sound like mine. It sounded like someone doing an impression of calm. "You need to come to Baptist. Now. Not — don't drive fast, just come."

Silence on the line, the kind that has a texture to it, the background noise dropping away like he'd stepped outside, and then: "What happened."

"It's Obama. And Melody." I made myself say it in that order, though I don't know why, some instinct about which loss belonged to which of us first. "There's been an accident."

I have never heard a sound like the one Nathan made next. Not a scream. Something smaller and worse, a kind of collapsing exhale, like a building coming down two floors at a time instead of all at once.

He was at the hospital in eleven minutes. I know because I watched the clock the entire time, standing in a hallway that smelled like hand sanitizer and burnt coffee, Sofia's hand gripped so hard in mine that I left marks I didn't notice until the next morning. I hadn't told her yet. I'd said only, "We have to go to the hospital, something happened to Daddy," and let her fill in the rest with whatever an eleven-year-old fills silence with, which is always worse and also, somehow, never as bad as the truth.

The waiting room had a television bolted to the wall playing a rerun of some game show, sound muted, closed captions running a half-second behind the host's mouth, and I remember staring at that mismatch — words arriving late, always a beat behind what had already happened — and thinking it was the truest thing in the room.

Nathan came through the double doors with his shirt still half untucked from the site visit, dust on his shoes, and for a second, before either of us said anything, we just stood there. His face had the specific wrongness of a person receiving news they already know is true, hoping the messenger will take it back.

"Where," he said.

I pointed. I couldn't make my mouth work.

A doctor came and used more careful words, the same architecture as the officers — impact, trauma, unable to be revived — and I watched Nathan's face do something I will carry for the rest of my life. Not the collapse I expected. Something quieter. His eyes went to a spot on the wall past the doctor's shoulder and stayed there, and his hand found the back of a plastic chair and gripped it so hard his knuckles went pale, and he said, very evenly, "Okay," like a man accepting terms he has no power to renegotiate.

Then he looked at me, and I understood, in that look, that we were now the only two people left who had loved both of them, and that whatever came next, we were going to have to carry it standing next to each other, whether either of us wanted to or not.

They asked if we wanted to see them. Nathan said yes before I could answer, and then looked at me, checking, and I nodded, though every part of my body was telling me to run in the other direction.

Before they took us back, a young nurse with tired eyes and a kind voice knelt down slightly to Sofia's height — she'd insisted on coming that far, refused to stay in the waiting room alone — and asked if she wanted to sit with a volunteer in the family room instead. Sofia looked at me, some silent question passing between us, and I nodded, and she went, small and stiff-backed, following a stranger down a hallway because her mother had asked her to, and I remember thinking, watching her go, that I was making a hundred small decisions that night with no way of knowing yet which ones would matter later.

I won't describe what that room looked like. I've decided that much, at least, is mine to keep. What I'll say is that Obama's hand was still warm when I held it, which didn't make sense, which the nurse gently explained wasn't unusual, and that Nathan stood at Melody's side of the room with his back to me for a long time, shoulders shaking in total silence, and neither of us reached for the other, because grief that size doesn't share well, not even between two people who are about to need each other more than they know yet.

A social worker came by afterward with a clipboard of practical questions I could barely process — funeral homes, next of kin, whether we wanted a chaplain — and I answered on autopilot, some competent stranger inhabiting my body while the actual me stood several feet back, watching the whole scene like it belonged to someone else's life. Nathan handled his own version of that same clipboard a few feet away, and at one point our eyes met across the small distance between us, both of us recognizing, without saying anything, the specific dissociation of being asked to make funeral arrangements before the day had even finished happening.

Sofia asked, in the car on the way home, so quietly I almost missed it under the sound of the tires on wet road, "Was Daddy talking on the phone when it happened?"

"I don't know, baby."

"Because I called him." Her voice was very small. "Right before. I called him about the frogs."

"That has nothing to do with this."

She didn't answer. She looked out the window at the wet streetlights blurring past, and I understood, with a dread that sat in my stomach like something swallowed wrong, that she had already started building the story she would tell herself, and that no amount of true things I said to her that night was going to be louder than the false thing she'd decided to believe.

I didn't sleep. I sat on the edge of her bed until three in the morning, listening to her breathe, and somewhere in that stretch of dark I thought about eleven minutes and ice, about a laugh that had an accent, about a courtyard fountain and a hammock nobody ever took down, and I understood that grief and suspicion had arrived at my door at exactly the same moment, wearing the same black coat, and I did not yet have any idea how to tell them apart.

Sometime around four, I finally left her doorway and went down to the kitchen, because staying in that room any longer felt like it might crack something open in me that I wasn't ready to have open. The rice sat scorched and ruined in the pot, black at the bottom, a smell that had settled into the whole downstairs by then, sweetish and burnt, and I stood at the sink scraping at it with a wooden spoon for no reason at all, some part of me needing a task small enough to actually finish.

Before we left the hospital that night, a nurse handed me a plastic bag with Obama's things in it — his watch, his wallet, his wedding ring sealed in a small ziplock with a printed label, and I stood in that hallway holding a bag of my husband's whole life reduced to objects, and I remember the specific weight of it, lighter than I expected, like it should have weighed more, should have had to work harder to be carried.

I opened his wallet later that night, alone, sitting on the closed toilet lid because it was the only door in the house I could fully shut. Cash, a few receipts, a photo of Sofia at four years old tucked behind his license, worn soft at the corners from years of being handled. I sat there a long time with that photo in my palm, and I thought about how a wallet holds the specific, curated proof of who a person wants to be — the pictures they choose to carry, the version of themselves they've decided to keep closest — and how none of that had prepared me for what I'd eventually find on a phone that told an entirely different story.

Nathan got a similar bag for Melody. We stood next to each other in that hallway, each holding a bag of someone we loved, not looking at each other, both of us staring straight ahead at the double doors like if we looked at each other the whole thing would become real in a way neither of us was ready to survive yet.

"I don't know how to drive home from here," he said, quietly, not really to me, more to the air. "I've driven this route a hundred times. I don't know how I'm supposed to do it tonight."

"You don't have to figure that out right now. Just get in the car. The rest comes later."

He nodded, like that was useful advice, though I'm not sure it was, I think I just needed to say something that sounded like wisdom instead of admitting I had no idea how either of us was supposed to drive anywhere ever again.

My phone had thirty-one missed calls and texts by morning — aunts, cousins, a coworker of Obama's who must have heard secondhand, Melody's book club friend who clearly hadn't yet understood there wasn't going to be a book club anymore. I didn't answer any of them that night. I sat at the kitchen table with the phone face-down in front of me, the way Obama used to leave his, and I thought there was something almost funny about that, in the darkest possible way — that I'd finally learned the habit that used to make my stomach drop, and it had taken exactly this to teach it to me.

I texted Nathan once, around five in the morning, unable to sleep, unsure why I needed to reach him specifically and not anyone else. *Are you awake,* I wrote, and he answered within seconds, like he'd been sitting with the phone in his hand the same way I had.

*Yeah. Theo's finally asleep. You?*

*Sofia's asleep. I'm just sitting here.*

*Me too.*

We didn't write anything else after that, just those short exchanges, two people confirming the other one was still upright somewhere in the dark, and there was a strange comfort in it, in not needing to say anything more than that, in understanding that some nights the only thing worth confirming is that you're both still there.

I finally slept a little past six, sitting up at the kitchen table with my head on my folded arms, and woke to the sound of Sofia's feet on the stairs, small and hesitant, checking to see if the night before had been real. It had. I lifted my head, and she stood in the doorway in her pajamas, and neither of us said anything for a moment, just looked at each other across a kitchen that was never again going to feel like it had the day before, and then she crossed the room and climbed into my lap the way she hadn't done in years, too big for it now, both of us folding awkwardly into the same chair anyway, because some mornings the only thing that matters is fitting.