On Second Thought

It occurred to me that Dad had gone through this, too, when my mother died. I remembered when the police came to tell us. One of them gave me a little toy, a cat whose head bobbled, how I had loved it and hadn’t wanted to stop playing with it as my father tried to get my attention. He’d been crying and said Mommy had gone to heaven.

Was Nathan there yet? Did it happen that fast? Or was he lingering, here still, or with Kate?

I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

“I’m gonna call my folks,” Eric said. His eyes were red. He squeezed my shoulder and went outside.

My feet were throbbing. Right, I was still wearing those slutty red shoes. And the white dress.

I left our “quiet room”; it hadn’t been quiet, not with the sound of poor Brooke wailing, and Mrs. Coburn’s sobs, and Mr. Coburn breaking down, saying, “My boy, my boy.” Oh, God, this was unbearably sad! The main waiting room of the ER was filled with the usual suspects—someone holding a bloody towel to her hand; a teenager slumped next to his mother, a little green around the gills; an older lady in a wheelchair with an aide, who was checking her phone.

And Jonathan. I’d almost forgotten about him. He stood up as I came over.

I swallowed, my throat aching. “He didn’t make it,” I whispered.

“No, I...I assumed. From all the... From their faces.” He put his hands in his pockets.

“Thank you for trying.” Tears sliced a hot path down my cheeks, and my face spasmed.

A normal person would’ve hugged me then. A family tragedy had just occurred, for the love of God, and no one knew it better than the giver of the unsuccessful CPR.

But Jonathan was not normal. He looked like an alien’s take on what a human should look like. Not enough emotion flowing through to really pass.

Instead of a hug, he looked at me, his pale blue eyes unblinking, and offered his hand, as if we’d just been introduced.

I sighed and shook it.

Then he brought up his other hand and held mine in both of his. For a long minute, he just looked at my hand. Human hand: warm, smooth. Interesting.

“I’m very sorry,” he said without looking up. He did have a nice voice.

“Thank you.”

He let go. “See you Monday.”

“Jonathan. My brother-in-law just died. I won’t be in.”

“Oh. Right.” Human wants time off. Fascinating. “Call Rachelle and let her know your schedule.”

“I will,” I said through gritted teeth.

He left—finally—and Eric came back in. His thick lashes were starred from crying, and my heart pulled hard. He was such a softy. “I just can’t believe all this,” he said, his voice rough.

“I know.”

“I can’t believe it.” He hugged me for a long minute, and my tears dampened his shirt. “I love you,” he said, his voice rough.

I started to cry in earnest.

My poor sister. Nathan was so nice! How could he be dead, just like that?

Eric’s arms tightened around me. “I can’t believe this happened to me.”

I jerked back and looked at him.

“To us, I mean,” he corrected. “Tonight of all nights. You know?”

Right. The ring. The party. It seemed like a hundred years ago.

“Let’s go home,” I said, acutely aware of just how lucky I was to be able to say that, to have someone to go home with. Kate didn’t have that anymore. Gone in an instant.

She was supposed to be a newlywed, not a widow. Nathan had died at Eric’s “To Life” party. He was gone. Forever. How could that be?

One image kept coming back to me, over and over.

Jonathan, his hair flopping over his forehead as he did compressions, his face tight and grim.

He’d known, too—Nathan was dead. All the other stuff had just been for the living.

For my sister.

Chapter Five (#ulink_edf93239-1d2e-5db4-9080-102dc62bcfa1)

Kate

It didn’t surprise me to be widowed.

I mean, it surprised the shit out of me. Who the hell dies like that? What the hell had happened?

But what I meant was, Nathan always did seem a little too...serendipitous? Too good to be true? Just what the doctor ordered?

All of the above.

You have to understand. I was single for twenty years. Meeting the man of my dreams...well, come on. The phrase becomes ridiculous after you pass twenty-six or so.

I dated in high school and college, casual, mostly happy relationships that never ended horribly. After college, I dated nice men, though there was always a sense that maybe someone better would come along, someone I hadn’t yet met, my soul mate. There was never that gobsmacked thunk, oh, God, he’s it, as my sister had described when she met Eric at the age of twenty-one. My parents were hardly role models.

So if it happened, it happened.

It didn’t happen.

In my two decades as an adult, I had three serious relationships. First was Keith, a fellow grad from NYU. He was terrifyingly handsome, the kind of guy who made people walk into lampposts. Beautiful smooth skin, green eyes, dreadlocks, six foot three, hypnotically perfect body. That relationship was tumultuous and spicy, lots of fights and making up and storming out (mostly on his part). I finally broke things off for good, unable to picture a future full of that kind of drama. He went on to become a model, and I got great pleasure out of pointing him out in magazines and telling friends that, no, seriously, I had seen him naked.

My next boyfriend, Jason, was the opposite. We started dating in our late twenties, which is still infantile by New York standards. He was a very nice guy. Things were steady and reliable...and bland. After a year and change, we just ran out of things to talk about and spent lots of time watching TV in a pleasant boredom until he finally euthanized the relationship by moving to Minnesota.

And last, there was Louis. We met at a gallery opening, just as cheesy as it sounds, when I was thirty-two. We enjoyed each other’s company. Moved in together after a year, laughed a lot, felt comfortable enough that he knew that my eating popcorn drizzled with Nutella meant my period was nigh, and I knew that if he ate cabbage, he’d be in the bathroom six hours later. It felt real, and happy. Louis was smart, a psych nurse with a lot of compassion for his patients and great stories from work.

Then he got a tattoo. And another. And a third and fourth. And then, just after he got a Chinese character depicting commitment, he dumped me for his tattoo artist.