THE WIFE THEY TRIED TO ERASE

Chapter 2: Happy Death-Day

ZOE ♠️

I want to tell you about Jay before I tell you what happened to him.

Not because I need you to feel sorry for me, I do not need that. But because what I am about to describe will only make sense if you first understand what was being lost while I lay on the lawn and couldn’t get up.

Jay Hunter laughed with his whole body. Shoulders first, then chest, then the rest of him followed like the laughter was a wave that started somewhere deep and moved outward until there was no part of him not involved in it.

He had opinions about everything, the correct way to cut toast, the superior merits of the window seat versus the aisle on airplanes, the deeply unfair reality that Claire was seven minutes older and used it against him strategically. He was curious and loud and certain that the world was interested in what he had to say.

He was right. The world was interested.

He would have been extraordinary.

Saturday arrived the way the twins’ birthdays always arrived, too fast and too loud and exactly right.

By two in the afternoon the garden was full of children with strong feelings about the balloon colors and the estate’s lawn had become the site of a musical chairs competition governed by rules that shifted every three minutes and were disputed constantly.

I had hired a small band at Claire’s request and they set up near the oak trees and played with the good-natured patience of musicians who have played a hundred children’s parties and found something to love about each one.

I was happy.

I want to be clear about that. Whatever came afterward, that afternoon I was genuinely, uncomplicated, happy in the way that only my children could make me. I stood on my own lawn in the late afternoon gold light and I watched Jay drag Claire into a spinning contest that neither of them could win and I thought: this. This exact thing. This is what everything is for.

I didn’t notice the way Iris took over the drinks table at six o’clock.

I should have. But I didn’t, because Iris had been managing small domestic logistics for four months and it was simply what she did, part of the texture of having her in the house, and when she waved away the catering staff with a pleasant “I’ve got this, go enjoy the party” I registered it the way you register background details, noted and filed and immediately overtaken by something more urgent, which in this case was Jay blowing out his birthday candles.

He missed two.

He looked at Claire’s already-extinguished candles with an outrage so pure and so six-years-old that the entire garden laughed, including me, including Randy who was standing beside me with his hand on my shoulder and his face arranged into the picture of a father at his son’s birthday party.

Iris appeared at my elbow with a glass.

“Champagne,” she said. “To the birthday twins.”

I took it. I was happy. I was celebrating. I drank.

The taste was almost right, yes champagne doesn’t have the same taste, but this particular champagne I have tasted before.

There was something underneath the sweetness, faint, chemical, gone before I could name it. I noticed it the way you notice a sound that stops before you’re sure you heard it. I took one more sip. I told myself it was the brand, maybe they added another flavor. Told myself I was imagining things.

I was not imagining things.

But I didn’t know that yet.

I don’t remember the garden lights coming on.

I know they did, they were on a timer, set for dusk, and I had activated that timer myself two days earlier while planning the party, but I have no memory of the moment the amber lights spread across the lawn and the party moved from afternoon into evening. That memory is simply not there.

Nor is Randy refilling my glass sometime after.

Nor is whatever happened between that moment and the lawn.

I was on the grass, I found myself on the grass.

That is where awareness returns, flat on my back on the wet lawn with the night sky above me and something wrong in my body, a heaviness, a disconnection, my limbs not responding with the speed the situation required. My brain was sending signals and something between the signal and the response was muffled and slow, like trying to move through water.

But I could see.

I could see the pool from where I lay and I could see the lights under the water and I could see the shape in the water and my brain processed it before my body could and I was screaming before I was fully upright, before I had fully found my feet.

Jay!!!

I tried to run. But my legs were not working correctly, the drug, though I didn’t know that yet, was still in my system, still pressing down on the signals, still putting a wall between my intention and my body.

I stumbled. I went to one knee on the lawn. I pushed up. I lurched toward the pool with the desperate, grinding effort of someone fighting through something invisible, and I was screaming his name, screaming it in the way that mothers scream when the sound comes from somewhere below language.

I reached the pool edge and went to my knees on the tile and reached for him and…

Voices. Footsteps. People were already there.

Not Randy. Not Iris. Staff, two of the estate’s household staff members were already at the pool edge, and one of them had her phone to her ear, and from the entrance of the estate I heard the gate opening, the sound of vehicles, the unmistakable organized noise of emergency services arriving.

I didn’t understand how they were already coming then.

But I understand now.

But at the time I was on my knees at the edge of my pool with the weight of the drug still pressing down on me and my son in the water and the only thought available to me was get him out get him out get him out,

Two paramedics reached the pool. Professional hands replaced mine. Someone took my arm and I fought them, briefly, instinctively, the way you fight anything that stands between you and your child, and then my legs made their final decision about the evening and I went down and someone caught me and the estate lawn became a place of organized emergency response and terrible efficiency.

Randy appeared.

I don’t know from which direction. He was simply there, the way he was always simply anywhere, crouching in front of me where I had been lowered to sit on the lawn,

his hands on my arms, his face the correct arrangement of shock and fear.

“Zoe. Zoe, look at me.”

I looked at him.

“They’re working on him,” he said. “Let them work.”

“He was in the water,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my voice. “I don’t …Randy, I was on the lawn, I don’t know how long I was on the lawn, I don’t know how he got in the water…”

“Shh.” He pulled me against him. He held me. The embrace of a man comforting his wife. “It’s okay. They’re here. They’re working.”

I let him hold me because my body had no objection left in it.

And over his shoulder, through the controlled chaos of the estate grounds, I saw a face that registered and didn’t register at the same time, a lot was happening, it was too much to process.

Iris. Standing at the garden entrance with Claire in her arms. Claire who had been asleep upstairs. Claire who was now awake and being held by Randy’s cousin with a security that looked like love.

Claire’s face was over Iris’s shoulder.

Her eyes were open. Dry. Looking at the pool.

Looking at the pool with an expression that was not the expression of a child who had just woken up to chaos.

It was the expression of a child who had already known what happened.

Jay was pronounced dead at the hospital at 11:52 p.m.

I know this because I looked at the clock on the wall when the doctor came out of the room and I needed something concrete to hold onto and the time was the only concrete thing available. 11:52. I have never forgotten it.

Randy was beside me. He held my hand through the doctor’s words and when I stopped hearing words and started hearing only noise he pulled me into his chest and I let him, again, because there was nowhere else to go.

In the corridor Claire sat in a chair with Jay’s stuffed elephant on her lap and her hands folded and her eyes looking at a point on the floor three feet in front of her. Iris sat beside her, close but not touching, present and quiet and exactly correct in her management of the moment.

I went to Claire. I crouched in front of her. I took her face and she looked at me and I looked at her and something passed between us that I couldn’t name, not the ordinary grief of a child who has lost her twin, something underneath that, something more deliberate and more private.

“I’ve got you,” I said. “I’m right here.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she leaned forward and put her forehead against mine and closed her eyes.

She still didn’t speak.

But her hand came up and found my wrist and held it, and the grip was stronger than a six-year-old’s grip should have been.

Like she was making sure I was real.

Like she was making sure I was still there.