Page 1

Chapter 1

In the creative writing classes I used to teach, I never assigned the topic of grief. Not because college kids haven’t experienced loss—you’d be surprised how many of them haul around shattered hearts behind their young ribs—but because I know how hard it is to portray your pain in a way that works on the page. Inevitably, though, I’d have students who insisted on dredging up their saddest stories, in which case I’d impose one rule: Don’t start with a phone call. While the call that broke the news of a grandmother’s passing or a brother’s overdose or a friend’s suicide may well have been the shocking moment when everything changed for the writer, as an opening scene, I’d explain, the phone call falls flat because the reader has no sense, yet, of what’s been lost.

Begin instead, I’d tell them, with a significant remembered moment. Return to the church bazaar where your grandmother sold her handmade sweaters and taught you to knit. Go back to that time in grade school when your brother defended you from bullies on the playground. Revisit the day your cross-country team won the state championship and your friend seemed so happy. By showing the reader what you once had and now have to live without, you allow them to feel its absence. That’s how to write about grief, I’d say, shuffling through their papers and moving on to the next critique.

When the phone call comes telling me my husband has died, I think of that stupid rule and wish I could take it back. Don’t listen to me, I’d say to my students. Who am I to dictate how your story unfolds? Because there is no other place to start mine than with a phone call. That phone call is all I have.

I’m on the couch under a mound of blankets. Crumpled tissues and cold cups of tea and capsules of Tylenol clutter the coffee table. My cell phone is beside me, the ringer on its loudest setting. Each earsplitting notification triggers a sickening surge of stress hormones, but I don’t dare silence unknown callers. I’ve hung up on friends and fraudsters alike, cursing each call that isn’t about David.

It’s close to midnight when it comes. The phone rings, vibrates, glows like a searchlight in the dark apartment. I answer with shaking hands slicked by sweat.

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice, deep and deeply tired. “Is this Mrs. O’Shea?”

“That’s not my—I mean, yes, I’m David O’Shea’s wife, Audrey Beacon. How is he?”

“Sorry, it’s right here. ‘Audrey Beacon, spouse.’” The caller identifies herself as a nurse, gives her name, names the hospital. She pauses before saying, “I’m very sorry to inform you your husband died tonight.”

“Died?” This makes no sense. David’s a vigorous thirty-three-year-old who grew up hale and hearty on his family’s farm in Ireland. He’s too young to drop dead from some random virus, even one bad enough to send him to the hospital. This is obviously a mistake, I think. There must be a hundred older, weaker men in New York City named David O’Shea. The nurse must be talking about one of them. “Are you sure?”

“I am, yes.” Her words sound muffled by a mask but she makes their meaning clear. “I was in the room with him when he was pronounced. We did everything we could, but his lungs were too damaged by the time we had an available ventilator. We weren’t able to get his blood oxygen back up. I’m very sorry.”

I shake my head as if she can see me. “No, I mean, are you sure it was my David?”

The nurse repeats his name, spells out our address, confirms David’s birth date. There’s a catch in her voice as she adds, “The number I’m calling you at is written on his arm.”

I flash back to the sidewalk outside the emergency room. David could barely breathe by then, let alone talk. The triage nurse handling his intake pulled up his sleeve, gave me a permanent marker, told me to write my phone number on the pale skin of my husband’s forearm.

There’s no mistake, then. It really is him.

Refusing to accept this reality, my mind freeze-frames the awful news, rewinding instead to Friday night last week. We were in our apartment, a dingy Hell’s Kitchen walk-up that’s all my assistant professor salary affords us in Manhattan. I was at the table with a glass of wine and a stack of student papers. David came out of the bedroom wearing black jeans with a corduroy jacket over a Mountain Goats band tee. His beard was closely trimmed, his ginger hair swept back from his high forehead. He held up Chelsea boots in one hand, a pair of Jordans in the other. His brows lifted over eyes big and blue as bits of sky. “Which do you think?”

“Definitely the boots.” His indecision was endearing. It meant a lot to him that his former bandmates, who’d flown in from Dublin that morning, had invited him to play fiddle with them for old times’ sake. Despite being a natural performer, David had been doing so much session work for the studio lately he was nervous about getting back up onstage. I was nervous, too, for a different reason. Reports of a virus that was so new it had “novel” in its name were all over the news, but David thought it’d be stupid to skip the gig just because a cluster of cases had popped up in the suburbs.

After stepping into the boots, David pulled back his hair, revealing the gold barbell of an industrial ear piercing. His broad chest, the birthright of a rural lad, angled down to a trim waist honed in the gym—not out of vanity, exactly, but because he knew a musician’s allure depended on looking the part. Tonight, when he rested his instrument on his shoulder and lifted his bow, his shirt would lift, too, exposing an inch or two of flat abdomen. It would seem accidental, as if the audience were getting a peek at something he intended to hide. They’d never know David got his T-shirts hemmed to ensure the effect.

“You look great, babe,” I said. “You’re going to be great.”

“Thanks, love.” He packed his violin into its specialty rucksack, then crossed the room to kiss me goodbye. “Won’t you change your mind about coming? It’s sure to be a grand night.”

I shook my head, tracing the curve of his pierced ear with an ink-smudged fingertip. “Midterm grades are due next week. I’ve got to finish critiquing these papers.”

“You work too hard, Audrey, darling.” He caught my fingers in his. “Live a little for once, why don’t you?”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I muttered.

“And what might you mean by that remark?” he asked, pulling away.

What I meant was that, while he was the one who insisted we live in New York, it was my job that paid the bills in this overpriced, overcrowded city where I never intended to settle. Not that I was supporting him, exactly. David happily filled the fridge with groceries and surprised me with gifts whenever he had cash in his pocket. Most of his earnings, though, went toward visa fees and immigration lawyers and the endless expenses of being a professional musician. The elite college where I taught had a bad reputation for churning through assistant professors who never got tenure. I’d have been happier at some rural state school, but since this job was where my husband wanted to be, I was doing my damnedest to keep it.

“Don’t mind me, babe.” I forced a smile. “I’m just stressed about work. You have a great time, okay?”

“It won’t be the same without you, love,” he said, giving me a last kiss goodbye.

David stumbled home in the wee hours reeking of whiskey and cigarette smoke and fried fish, his rucksack sticky from someone’s spilled drink. I woke to the sound of the shower before he fell naked into bed. Rolling toward him, I sniffed for the lingering scent of sweat beneath the smell of his peppermint soap.

“How was it?” I mumbled. He stroked my hair and said the gig was fantastic, the band fired up, the crowd singing and cheering and dancing past midnight. Closing my eyes, I let the cadence of his story lull me back to sleep.