“Let me get you situated and then make a few phone calls. I need to go by and give my statement to the police and then go and see Roger. Gotta make sure I still have a job. Hey, look, Regina beat us here. And Kendal and Roger are here too! Looks like the cleaning brigade decided to arrive early! Goodness, what a great boss Roger is—after all he’s done for me—for us—I won’t be able to ask for a raise for years.”
“That’s my girl—acknowledging her blessings. God takes care of his children, even the ones who’ve wandered from the fold. Our Heavenly Father doesn’t stop loving us even when we walk away from Him. Parents are like that, you know.”
I smiled at my mother’s gentle urging to go back to church and start my relationship with the Lord again. She was right, though I didn’t like admitting it. Jack and I both lost our footing when we started walking our own paths, away from the solid ground of faith. Once he was home, that would change.
I pulled into the driveway with a smile on my face, grateful that Regina decided to come early and that Kendal and Roger were here as well. Regina didn’t have a job to call in sick to since she was divorcee-wealthy, but Kendal did. And Roger had a large law firm to run, and was doing so without his paralegal. I tried to mentally review his calendar, wondering if he had court today. I came up blank.
God, I’ll be glad when all this is over and I can actually concentrate on things again. Jack will be home soon and we can work on restoring our marriage. It’ll be a tough climb, but we can do it.
It was sweet of Kendal to blow off work on a sunny Friday afternoon to come help me, rather than smacking around a few golf balls like he often did when he played hooky. It was above and beyond the call of duty for Roger to show up. I couldn’t imagine my wealthy boss helping clean my police-ransacked house. Since I paid his monthly bills, I knew he didn’t clean his own place in town, or the cabin. He paid a service to come and perform the boring, mundane household chores that he did not have time for. I almost laughed out loud trying to envision him scrubbing a toilet. Maybe he’d just come to supervise our clean-up efforts, ready to record any permanent damage that the CSI team might have done to my house. All of them must have known that I would be devastated when I walked inside my house for the first time.
Thank you, Lord, for surrounding me with such good friends and a wonderful boss.
The heat hit me like a wrecking ball when I opened the car door and stepped outside. Thunder rumbled in the distance as dark, ominous storm clouds loomed overhead. Mom was terrified of storms ever since she’d experienced two tornadoes in her youth. One destroyed the farmhouse she grew up in while she cowered in the storm shelter with her parents. The other was almost thirty years ago when she and Dad were on vacation in Missouri. That monster twister roared through the town and leveled it. I needed to hurry up and get her, and our luggage, inside before the inevitable torrent of rainfall hit.
“Hey, guys! Thanks for…wait, what’s wrong?” I asked, stopping short when I saw the looks on all their faces. My stomach rolled as a wave of fear overtook my body. Gut instincts told me something was wrong.
And the thunder rolls, the lightning strikes…
Tears were streaming down Regina’s face and she wasn’t trying to hide them. Other than the last few days, I’d only seen her cry twice—when A.J. broke her heart and when her father died eight years ago. Her eyes were swollen, the rims beet red, like she’d been crying for quite a while. The tissues in her hand shook as she hurried to wipe the wetness off her face before I saw her tears. I glanced over at Kendal, who wouldn’t look at me, his hands shoved deep inside his pockets, his head staring down at his feet. I saw tears drip off his face and land on his shoes and started shaking as I backed away from them.
I looked at Roger and time seemed to stop. He was pale, his eyes unreadable covered with sunglasses, his jaw clenched shut like a steel trap. He stood in the middle of Regina and Kendal, a supportive arm draped over each of their shoulders. With a pat on both their backs he moved away, unwilling to look my direction as he headed for the passenger side of my car.
“Mel, honey, let’s go inside,” Regina choked out as she nodded toward the door, “come on, Roger can help your Mom and Kendal can get Simba.”
Ice filled my veins as fear travelled through me at a sickening pace. Kendal raised his head and looked at me, and I saw the devastation in his eyes.
He looks like…a man who just lost his best friend. Oh, God, no…
My face crumpled as I shifted my gaze between the two of them, my own tears springing forth and clouding my vision with a wet haze. My body sagged against the doorframe while I shook my head violently back and forth. “No, no, no, no! Please, go away! Don’t say another word. I can’t hear this…oh, God…”
“Melody, honey, what’s wrong?”
I heard my mother ask the question and it registered somewhere inside me that Roger had helped her out of the car. Roger’s deep baritone voice was whispering to her, but I couldn’t make out a word he said. I was lost inside my own world, trying desperately to escape the real one barreling down on me with more intensity than the storm that surrounded us. I clung to the door frame of my car and closed my eyes, willing this to all be a dream. The horror hit me that I was truly awake when I heard my mother’s weak voice say, “Oh no. Oh, Jack. Dear Jesus.”
I sensed Kendal’s body near me, his pain a living entity that seeped over and wrapped itself around my heart, cloaking my soul with the dark news. I opened my eyes and whispered, “No, please. Jack’s okay, right?”
“Oh, Mel, he’s gone. I’m so sorry,” he whispered back and pulled me close, his sobs of grief indecipherable from my own.
CHAPTER ELEVEN - TUESDAY AFTERNOON
When I die don’t cry for me
In my father’s arms I’ll be
The wounds this world left on my soul
Will all be healed and I’ll be whole
It don’t matter where you bury me
I’ll be home and I’ll be free
Our small gathering of close family and friends listened to the soothing voice of the pastor sing the haunting lyrics of Jack’s favorite hymn, All My Tears. Regina sat on my left, my mother on my right, each one holding my hand in gentle clasps as the pastor began the service. My husband’s funeral service—a place no woman ever wants to be sitting in the front row as the last goodbyes are said.
Ever.
I couldn’t get the words to register right in my head. I understood the meaning, but not the application to my life. Widow. My new life, alone as a widow at forty-three. It made no sense. My eyes settled on the small slab of concrete, where some unknown hand had carved the name Jackson Tyler “Jack” Dickinson followed by his birth date and the day he’d died in the gray stone. The intricate lettering was no different than the other headstones that stood alone, erect pillars aged by the weather and time, a last monument to the once living bodies now forever entombed underground.
Jack’s headstone lay on the ground, waiting for the service to finish so the gravediggers could set it up and end their day. Once we left and the final touches were completed, Jack’s final resting place under the watchful eye of the weeping willow trees would be quiet. And alone.
Just like the grave.
The drone of the preacher sounded like a bee buzzing around my ear. I heard it but didn’t pay attention. My mind wandered over to the events of the last four days after the news broke that I was now a widow.
I’d cried out all the tears my eyes could possibly produce, mourning the sudden loss of my soul mate. The first few days, my thoughts ran amok, my mind close to snapping. One minute I blamed God for Jack’s allergies, and the next, I blamed the jail for allowing him to be injured, then waiting too long to provide adequate treatment, until the wound had festered and required antibiotics. Then I shifted and blamed Jack for not knowing he was allergic to penicillin and for starting this whole sordid mess in motion by stepping out of our marriage bed. I blamed the det
ectives for arresting an innocent man. I even blamed the medical examiner, who told me in his most solemn, practiced voice when I questioned what happened that “anyone, anytime, can become allergic to any given item”.
While bouncing from one end of the blame spectrum to the other, I discovered my tears wouldn’t stop. Mom, Regina and Kendal tried to comfort me, but their attempts were hopelessly lost on me. That first day was a blur. I had collapsed into the arms of Kendal, practically catatonic, my heart frozen as Regina and Kendal drove me to the coroner’s office to identify Jack’s cold, lifeless body. When the coroner pulled the sheet back and I stared at the swollen, almost unrecognizable face of the man I loved, a huge part of me died. The last image I would take with me, the most recent, fresh one, was his dead body. I acknowledged that it was Jack with a solemn nod of my head and a cavalcade of tears shed on Kendal’s strong shoulder. On the drive home, none of us spoke a single word, each lost inside our grief.
For the next two days, I stayed locked inside Jack’s office and went through the little remaining pieces of paper, shreds of clothing and files left behind by the police, just to smell him before his scent dwindled away with time. I threw back glass after glass of wine on an empty stomach while I looked at photographs of our life together until I couldn’t focus my eyes another moment and passed out. The next morning, I woke up and repeated the process.
On Monday morning the tears stopped. They dried up like the last remaining rain drop in the Sahara desert. Poof—gone. The blame game had its final contestant and the winner was chosen.
Me.
I’d let my own pride, my own pain, my own wants and needs come before Jack’s. Worse, I let my anger push me away from God. My heart had been embroiled in turmoil. I longed for a child and it consumed everything inside of me once the reality hit home that it wasn’t to be. Six months ago, I started experiencing the first symptoms of menopause, which sealed the coffin on the little hope I’d kept alive in the back of my mind.
Jack, noticing my moments of internal spontaneous combustion, tried to convince me to consider adoption. We had just started tackling the mounds of paperwork and background checks less than five months ago, after I gave in to his endless pleadings. It would satisfy his longing for a child and, in a way, mine too, but it wasn’t the same for me. I felt less than a woman—not whole, broken—for not being able to do what my body was created to do.
I lost myself in the agony of knowing I would never feel the excitement of watching the stick turn blue, find some creative way to tell Jack we were pregnant, or feel a part of us move inside my belly. Never would I experience the strange food cravings, watch my belly swell with our growing child. We would never get to lie in bed at night and whisper our hopes and dreams, worries and fears for our baby. No first step. No first words. No kissing boo-boos or wiping tears away. No first day of school, date, driving lesson, prom, graduation, marriage or grandchildren.
Nothing.
I was lost inside the empty shell of my womb, unable to find my way out of the darkness.
I’d watched Jack suffer but turned a blind eye, somehow convincing myself my pain was worse than his. I hadn’t just lost interest in sex, but intimacy. When Jack would come near me, even just to be close, I brushed him away. Not because I didn’t love him, but because I feared the sadness that, in recent years, followed intimate contact between the two of us. It was a reminder of my inability to conceive a child, and it was easier to deal with Jack’s annoyance than face my own pain.
Plus, being in Jack’s arms was a painful reminder that, after all, it was my fault that we couldn’t have children. It was a shameful, dirty little secret why my womb was a barren wasteland and one no one else knew about. For twenty-two years, I’d kept the secret, burying it deeper than what I was watching happen to Jack’s body.
But yesterday morning, in the midst of Jack’s papers and clothes, his scent already fading, I sat on the floor and felt the shame of my selfishness burn my tears away. Shame, for not standing by him when he needed me the most and for not believing him when I watched him beg for my forgiveness and vehemently bemoan his innocence. Devastating humiliation, for so callously turning my back on him when I should have granted him the same forgiveness for his mistakes as God granted to His children for their sins. The last words I ever said to the man who loved me were you bastard.
That realization filled me with renewed fervor amidst the pain. God had taken my husband home and left me here for a reason. And that day, on the messy floor of Jack’s office, I knew why God left me here. I knew it would be an incredibly difficult journey, fraught with stumbling blocks and self-doubt, but I made the commitment to stand strong.
As Pastor Trent spoke about Jack and his new home above, my mother and Regina gripped my hands tighter, trying to convey comfort, love and support through their squeezes.
But I felt none of it. It was like I was dead inside, no different than the corpse of my husband less than ten feet from me.
Jack was gone, only his hollow shell resting inside the sleek, black coffin. A tube covered with a huge spray of pink lilies—Jack’s favorite flower. His essence, his soul, were free of the bonds of the sinful flesh. For a split second, I envied him. I watched the beams of the late afternoon sun sparkle across the rounded top, mesmerized by the intensity of the light and heat waves that rolled off of it. Like a moth drawn to the flame, my eyes were transfixed on the casket that housed the earthly remains of Jack. It sat on top of the metal apparatus that would lower it into the ground, next to the grave of his parents. Forever entombed in the rocky ground of Ten Mile Cemetery in Sheridan.
“Join him, Melody. Join me. Join us. It’s easy. Just climb inside and close the lid. The darkness will give you comfort,” the voice of my grandmother beckoned, piercing through my mind. Her sweet, southern drawl flowed like warm sugar, coaxing my body to heed her words. “Come, unto me. I will give you the rest…the rest of the punishment you deserve. The eternal damnation we all deserve. Ha ha ha ha ha…”
A shudder of fear shot through me as the voice I recalled from my youth changed into a guttural hiss, mocking me. I closed my eyes and fought for strength and control of my own thoughts. Get thee behind me, Satan. You ruled my thoughts once—I won’t let you again. Jesus, give me strength.
“Don’t go gettin’ all righteous on me, girl. I didn’t abandon him in jail—you did. Called him a bastard and walked out. Broke his heart, yes, ma’am, you surely did. I heard him cryin’ in his cell for you, beggin’ God for forgiveness for his sins and another chance with you. I tried to reason with him, whispered in his ear that it was your fault for not bein’ a good enough wife. Not providin’ him an heir to his name, not carin’ for his manly needs. But he’s here, now, with me. So come on, join the party, honey. We have room…we’re waitin’…”
“Oh, Jesus, help me,” I whispered. Only my mother and Regina heard my desperate plea, and they answered by hugging me close for the duration of the service.
Less than twenty people had attended, which was by design. I refused to let the media feed off the grief of those who loved Jack. They’d already hounded me and my family and friends enough. The frenzied school of blood-thirsty sharks attacked without mercy when the news broke about Jack’s death.
My mother balked at the idea of a quiet graveside service at first; her southern traditions of viewings, services, and burials followed by food receptions were ingrained deeply in her psyche. I told her that very few people would be attending the service of a man accused of such a brutal crime, friends included.
She didn’t have a valid argument in response to that.
The temperature was near one hundred, which was normal for July, so the service was set to last less than twenty minutes. Under the thin green canopy erected by the funeral home, the thirty chairs situated in neat rows were all empty now, the service concluded, the words meant to comfort the living, spoken. I shook sweaty hands, received damp hugs and tried to listen to the murm
ured words of encouragement mumbled in hushed tones. I nodded my head at the empty condolences and prayers from Jack’s boss, a few of his co-workers, one college friend and a distant cousin on his mother’s side. A handful of people from my office came, including Roger, as well as a spattering of old high school friends I hadn’t seen in years.
But my core of strength didn’t let me weather the storm alone. Mom, Regina and Kendal surrounded me like a brick fortress, shielding me from the sensation of utter helplessness. They deflected nosy questions, scooting the spectators down the receiving line with kind words and smiles. In less than five minutes, the gravel parking lot was empty of the vehicles of the guests. The only cars left were the hearse, the family limousine that would take us back to the funeral home to retrieve our vehicles, and the beat up truck of the gravediggers. The two silent men waited next to the open hole for their cue to lower Jack’s casket.
I couldn’t move from my chair. I paid no attention to the sweat that ran down my face or the mosquitoes that swarmed. My focus was on the red and white roses that the guests left on top of Jack’s coffin. They were already starting to wilt under the hot sun, along with the funeral spray of the pink lilies.
“They are rotting, just like dear old Jack and I are, sweetie. All living things die, then rot away. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…Come now, dearie, I know you want to rot away too…”
Everyone was startled when I shot out of my chair. Right away Kendal’s protective hand braced my back, probably assuming I would faint or fall over. I shook him off and moved from under the cover of the canopy toward the gravediggers. “I need a few minutes. Alone. Kendal, will you please help my mother to the limo? I need to say goodbye.”
My mother stepped over and kissed my cheek, then led the small processional to the cool confines of the limo. The two gravediggers waddled across the grass, eager to sit inside their truck with the air conditioner on as the rain began falling, the droplets tinkling on the top of the casket. Alone at last, I bowed my head and said my peace as the cool water peppered my back.
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