by Carol Lee
“Why’d you want to go to the city? Ever since I moved here, I’ve had no desire to live in a concrete jungle.”
“I wanted some excitement. I thought I’d meet someone famous, live an exciting, fast paced life and have fun. But then it was expensive, smelly, and everyone was rude. When the time came, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. But I didn’t want to come back here to a group of people who had never left, who hadn’t experienced the world. I felt like I’d be held back by surrounding myself by the people I’d lost touch with during college. So I found the equivalent and moved there.”
“And now that Sarah’s. . .gone. . .you have no reason to visit here again,” I said, knowing that I wanted to stay in touch with Marissa, but also knowing that we had one night of being friends so the chances of many visits were slim.
“We’ll see. Life has been surprising me lately, so who knows what the future holds,” she said, looking me right in the eyes.
***
Monday morning was a world of difference from Sunday morning. I woke up ready for work. Sarah’s autopsy report had been delayed because of a family emergency for Dr. Liddell, and we were all anxious to see the results that should be finalized today.
Marissa had left after breakfast the day before and I already felt her absence. I chastised myself for feeling anything for her. She had enough to deal with after Sarah’s death, and I promised myself not to be pushy or take advantage of her while she recovered. She was heading home for a week, then she was going to take the opportunity of her sabbatical to do some work in Ottawa, not far from her home.
“Morning Sam,” Allen said when I reached the office.
“Morning Allen. You have a good rest of the weekend? How’s Krista doing?”
“She’s back to taking it easy after Saturday. We stayed home yesterday. Saw Marissa on her way out, she stopped by.”
“Oh good. How was she?” I asked. He just knew we’d gone to dinner on Saturday, he didn’t know how much fun it was or that we got together the next morning.
“You should know, sounds like she’d just been with you,” he said, smirking.
“We met for breakfast. It’d been really easy to have dinner with her and she had to eat before she drove!” I said defensively.
“Mmhmm.”
“You get a copy of the autopsy report yet?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Yeah, here’s one for you,” he said, handing me a copy. “Looks like she was pregnant again. Could have been the surviving one.”
“Oh man. Do Krista and Judy know this? Or Jack?” I asked.
“Don’t know. She wasn’t far along, just about six weeks.”
“What about these old bruises?” I asked, scanning the report.
“Kickboxing. She took classes in college and kept it up until the first time she got pregnant,” Allen explained. “Krista and Judy were going through old photos last week and came across some. Otherwise I would have had the same question you just did.”
“Cause of death?”
“Blunt trauma to the head. Hit it hard on the way down. Broke her neck, but she was already dead.”
“That’s quite the fall. I’m going to give Marissa a call about this. She should know. You give Jack a call, let him know.”
“You sure you don’t want to call Jack instead? I could call Marissa,” he said with the same smirk.
“Just call him,” I said, smiling back and walking to my desk. It was a work call, so I’d keep it work related.
“Good morning, Marissa. This is Sam,” I said when she picked up after the second ring.
“Good morning. How’s it going? Wake up feeling better than yesterday?”
“Sure did. How was the drive back?”
“Uneventful, the way it should be,” she said.
“I’m actually calling because we got the autopsy report for Sarah and I thought you should know a couple things. She was six weeks pregnant. She might not have even known. I don’t think any of her friends did.”
“Oh no. I didn’t think she was still trying,” Marissa said, her mood changing drastically.
“The other thing is the cause of death. Do you want to know that?”
“No. It won’t change anything. It won’t bring her back.”
“OK. I thought you should know about the pregnancy, though. You gonna be OK?” I asked stupidly.
“I’ll be fine. I have a lot to do before going to Ottawa. Plenty of distractions. But thanks for calling.”
“No problem. Have a great week. Bye,” I said and hung up. I felt empty without her on the other end, so I quickly put the phone down and turned back to work.
Marissa – October 2009
I’d been in Ottawa for over a month, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah’s pregnancy. It didn’t seem right. She would have told Judy. They seemed to know everything about each other.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Sam either. We’d talked almost daily since Sarah’s funeral and emailed even more frequently. It seemed like we could talk about nothing for hours. Not that we weren’t talking, but that we could talk about anything, no matter how inconsequential.
One time I called because I couldn’t get over how clean Ottawa was. I then learned that it was ranked in the top ten cleanest cities in the world and I felt the need to share that fact. From there, our conversation had turned into talking about the giant floating trash island in the Pacific ocean, to scuba diving and how pollution is affecting the reefs, to deep sea drilling and finally to electric cars. All because Ottawa is clean. And the conversation lasted over an hour.
So for a long weekend, I decided to visit Sam—partly for Sam, but mostly for myself. I wanted to see Jack, to find out if he knew about Sarah’s pregnancy and to see how he was coping. Things just were sitting well with me.
***
“It’s so good to see you!” Sam said when I arrived at his house late on Thursday night. I was taking Friday off for a mental health day.
“You too!” I hugged him, and for the first time since Sarah’s death, life felt like it made sense. It’d been years since I’d let myself depend on another person for anything, so I released him and turned back to my car to get my bag.
“Let me help you,” he said, coming to take the bag.
“I’m OK. Just get the door for me,” I said stubbornly. There was only so much support I could accept. “How’s Judy doing?”
“She’s OK. She’s thinking of starting classes again in January. But going to UVM instead of doing online classes. I think with Sarah gone she’s having a hard time focusing on anything here, so she’s away again, back to her old traveling self. We’ll see what she decides to do when January rolls around.”
I’d assumed Judy would be staying at Sam’s still.
“Do you still see Jack much?” I asked, following Sam up the stairs to the second bedroom.
“I didn’t see him much before. Sarah, Krista and Judy were all close, but Jack had his own group of friends. Allen saw him once in a while, but mostly it was just the girls getting together. So now they don’t see him much either.”
That was news to me. I thought he’d been a much better match socially for Sarah than I learned now. Maybe they hadn’t been the perfect couple I’d always thought they were. We left my bag on the bed and walked back downstairs to the living room. It was too cold now to sit outside and it was getting dark already.
“And Krista and Allen—how are they?” I asked when I took a seat on the couch. Sam sat across from me on La-Z-boy. I’d never even met them until the funeral, but from all of our conversations, I knew Sam was close with them, so I knew I should ask.
“Krista is on bed rest now. Not self imposed anymore. She’d taken it extra easy from the get-go because of the challenges she’d seen with Sarah’s pregnancies, but with twins, and her tiny frame, she’s officially been on bed rest for the last week. She still has three months until her due date, so they’re hoping she can make it at least another two months. I guess
twins always come early.”
“That’s what I’ve heard. Twins run in our family. My mom was surprised she never had any,” I said. I was exhausted and starving, so changed the topic suddenly. “Want to head to Tandoor for dinner? I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
“That’d be great! A repeat of last time?” he asked and laughed.
“Maybe just one bottle this time. Judy’s not there to drive us home,” I joked. But the real reason was that we would be sleeping under the same roof and I didn’t want to make any foolish decisions.
***
“Good morning,” Sam said when I walked into the kitchen. I had smelled coffee and it got me up.
“Morning,” I said, helping myself to a mug and pouring the coffee. “Definitely a better morning than after the last time we ate dinner together.”
“Agreed. Can I get you something to eat?”
“I’ll help myself, if that’s OK.”
“Yup. My house is your house. Eat whatever you like.”
“Thanks.” We enjoyed an easy silence as we both read our preferred news sources on our phones.
“I was thinking of going to Jack’s today,” I said when I’d read everything in the New York Times that interested me.
“Yeah?” he asked, looking up.
“Yeah. I want to know if he knew Sarah was pregnant. And I feel like I should at least try to keep in touch with him. He’s all the extended family I really have left.”
“OK. Do you want me to come with you?”
“No. I should be back by lunch, though. I don’t plan to stay long.”
“Anything you want to eat?”
“Whatever there is. I’m easy,” I said, not meaning to imply anything, and hoping he didn’t take it the wrong way.
He just smiled.
***
I knocked on the door to Jack’s house.
No one answered.
And no dog barked. I wondered what had become of Casino since Sarah had died. I made a mental note to ask Sam about him when I got back if Jack wasn’t home, but I didn’t really think he’d know.
I knocked again.
Still no response from inside, so I tried the doorknob.
It was locked.
I checked under the mat, but no luck for a key.
No flower pots to look under, but I remembered the back deck being littered with them. I walked out back to check. Lucky enough I found a key under the third pot I checked. I let myself in the front door.
“Hello?” I called. Maybe Jack was in the shower and hadn’t heard me knock. “It’s Marissa,” I added, realizing that I’d just trespassed. No one answered, so I went up to the room I’d stayed in to remember what it was like to be here with Sarah.
I lay down on the bed and let myself wallow in the past. The first time I’d come here, I’d overheard an argument between Sarah and Jack. It had seemed insignificant at the time, but what if that had been the normal for their relationship rather than the exception? It had been about money.
I knew from my own litany of failed relationships that money could drive a couple apart better than any other difference. My blasé view of spending—spend what I have, and go without something if I can’t afford it—didn’t seem to mesh with anyone else I met. I didn’t spend extraordinary amounts on anything, I more often than not went without material items, but I would never skip out on the required. And if I was going to buy something, I would buy the best quality possible.
But when I’d heard Jack and Sarah arguing about money, they seemed to be coming from incredibly different points of view.
“We don’t need a TV,” Sarah had said.
“What about the Travel Channel? You love that one,” Jack countered.
“I’d rather save and see those places in person instead of from our living room.”
“But you can’t just go gallivanting all over the globe all the time. We have to work. We have to be here more often than not, so why not enjoy it while we’re here too? You see how Judy turns her back on everyone and lives just for herself, and you complain about that. But it sounds like that’s what you want.”
“It’s not the same. You just don’t get it. We don’t need a TV. We don’t need half of what we have. We could have saved and gone to Japan already, like we’ve talked about for over a year. But you need your new La-Z-Boy and your motorcycle and your three snowboards and your two bikes—”
Sarah had stopped talking suddenly. I’d gone up to bed an hour earlier so they must have thought I was asleep. They were trying to keep their voices down but the noise traveled in the old house.
“Jack, don’t you dare!” Sarah had said.
I didn’t know what she was trying to stop him from doing. I’d thought at the time maybe he was making an online purchase for the TV in question when she wanted to keep talking about it first. But now, lying on the same bed, remembering the moment, maybe that wasn’t it at all.
I stopped my reverie and got up. I didn’t know what I needed to do here without Jack to talk to, but I knew I was supposed to be here. I couldn’t shake Sarah’s death as an accident. She was always so cautious with everything she did, she would have checked the weather and seen a storm coming in. She wouldn’t have gone out if she knew the weather was going to turn bad. She wouldn’t have gone hiking if she was pregnant. She had been determined to have kids, and after the first two miscarriages, she would have been extra careful to make sure she took it easy from day one.
I needed to feel Sarah closer to me. I needed to smell her old clothes, touch the same things she’d touch so many times. I walked down the hall to the master bedroom and opened the closet.
What I found shocked me.
Jack had nothing in the closet. Everything inside belonged to Sarah. Jack had disappeared from the bedroom. Because he couldn’t stand to live in the past, so he’d moved to a different room in the house? Because he was creating a shrine for Sarah?
Sarah’s clothes hung in the closet collecting dust. It had been less than two months since her death, but her absence could be felt. Maybe more than her presence ever was for me. I’d ignored her growing up, and as adults we always lived so far apart that we made excuses not to keep in touch.
There were boxes at either end of the closet. I picked a box and brought it out. I sat on the floor and opened it.
Inside were more notebooks and journals than my students have in a year.
I’d never known Sarah to keep journals, and it felt like trespassing to open them. Even to open the box and find them. But Jack’s disappearance from the bedroom had made me more uncertain about the truth of Sarah’s death. So I took the top notebook out and opened it to the middle of the book.
January 24, 2000
I did the math in my head, Sarah was 16 and a junior in high school. This was the year she’d told me she first had sex with Jack.
Judy is so jealous. She keeps telling me to break up with Jack. But I love him. She does too, I think. Otherwise she wouldn’t be so adamant about me breaking up.
Today, when Jack and I were talking between classes—he’s so great, he walks me to every class!—Judy wouldn’t even talk to me. She sat with Lindsey at lunch. She ALWAYS sits with me and Jack.
But, whatever. She’ll get over it. This isn’t the first time she’s tried to convince me to break up with him.
I closed the book and took out a new one.
October 29, 1997
I can’t wait for tomorrow. Today at lunch, Jack asked me to go to the Halloween dance with him! Judy kept telling me he liked me, but I didn’t believe her. He had a girlfriend until last week. But we have math together and I do catch him watching me sometimes.
We haven’t decided on our costumes yet. I think we should go as dancers from the 20s—we just learned about flappers in history, and the costume would be so fun!—but he wants to go as bacon and eggs. I guess that would be OK too.
He’s so cute. I just can’t believe he asked me to the dance!
That must hav
e been when they started out as boyfriend and girlfriend back in middle school. That felt so long ago now. A whole lifetime.
I decided I wanted to keep the box of journals. Not because I wanted to pry into my sister’s past, but because I needed something to feel like she was still with me. I didn’t even know if I’d read anymore of them, but I needed them to be with me—not with Jack or anyone else.
