You Were Always Mine

by Nicole Baart

“No,” Henry sighed, softening. “No, you don’t.”

  Jessica realized for the first time that though he was starched and seemingly flawless, her father had a hint of five o’clock shadow peppering the length of his jaw. His tortoiseshell glasses were slipping down the bridge of his nose, and while she watched, he stifled a yawn by grinding his teeth until a vein in his neck popped. This wasn’t easy for him, either.

  Henry and Anna, Jessica’s stepmother—though she rarely thought of her father’s recent bride as such—had raced over after Jess’s frantic phone call. Anna was already in a pair of yoga pants and a flowing sweater with multicolored tassels, clearly ready for a weekend night at home and maybe a bottle of wine. Henry, on the other hand, had dressed intentionally in one of his “casual drinks with a client” outfits that Jess remembered from her youth. He looked professional but tired, and she felt guilty for judging him so harshly.

  “Let’s do it together,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything, and Jessica took it as a good sign. A sign that he would let her have her way without much of a fight. How could he not?

  The parking lot of the medical center was drawn with stark shadows from the cold, practical lamps that lined the curbs. They were ugly, bulbous things, and as Jessica stepped out of the car she realized they hummed. It was an unkind sound, electrical and somehow menacing, and when her father crossed in front of the car and took her by the elbow, she did not shrug him off.

  “Can I offer you a bottle of water?” Deputy Mullen asked as he watched them approach the sidewalk where he stood. He had arrived only moments before they pulled up, and he waited for them now with his hands tucked deep inside his pockets. His jeans bulged around his fists, and his shoulders were rounded against the chilly Minnesota breeze. “It’s a long drive. Coffee? Tea?”

  “No,” Jess said, but she didn’t sound very convincing. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I’m not thirsty.”

  The truth was, she wasn’t anything. Not hot or cold or anxious or calm. Her legs should have been stiff from the drive, her right knee (the one that she had injured playing volleyball in high school) aching from inactivity. But Jessica was numb. Head to toe unfeeling. Her father could sense it and moved his arm to wrap around her shoulders.

  “We’re fine,” Henry said for both of them. “We’d like to get this over with.”

  The deputy led them inside the building, past the reception desk and down a long hallway into a waiting room that seemed poised for bad news. Four chairs in a circle, a small round table with pamphlets about the effects of chemotherapy and the importance of a living will and heart disease in women. A kaleidoscope of diagnoses that seemed distant and impossible to Jess. The kinds of things that happened to people in movies. But her reality was even more incomprehensible.

  “Don’t we get to—”

  Henry squeezed Jessica’s shoulder to cut her off and eased her into one of the waiting-room chairs with the weight of his hand. She didn’t have it in her to fight back. Instead, she perched on the end of the slippery gray seat obediently. Waiting.

  “How confident are you that we’re about to identify my son-in-law?” Henry stood over Jess, his fingers light at the base of her neck as he surveyed Deputy Mullen.

  The deputy paused for just a moment. “Confident. He’d be a John Doe without the number we found in his pocket. But there were ten digits, and calling them was our first step.”

  “I told you this morning that Evan doesn’t match your description.” Jessica laced her fingers together in her lap and squeezed. “The numbers could be a combination or an IP address.”

  “We have to follow every lead,” Deputy Mullen explained patiently. “We ran fingerprints, of course, but nothing popped. So we found your husband on social media, and when we realized the resemblance was strong in spite of your skepticism, we pulled as much information as we could on Evan Chamberlain. Cell phone location records and credit card activity place him in the area recently. And repeatedly over the course of the last six months.”

  “But those are private records.”

  Henry shook his head, a wrinkle deepening between his eyes, and said to Jessica: “They’re not.”

  “When you said that you were estranged,” Deputy Mullen addressed Jess, “we also called Auburn Family Medicine. Evan hasn’t been at work all week.”

  “He hasn’t?”

  “Look, Mr. Lancaster, Mrs. Chamberlain, you wouldn’t be here if we didn’t believe that we’ve positively identified our accident victim.” Deputy Mullen spread his hands in front of him. In apology or supplication, Jessica couldn’t tell.

  “So what now?” she whispered.

  “I’m going to bring in Sarah Ellens, our grief counselor. She’ll explain how the identification takes place.”

  They fit perfectly around the coffee table, the four of them. Jessica was hemmed in by her father on one side and Deputy Mullen on the other, though he referred to himself as Mike and asked that they call the young woman who joined them Sarah. She seemed too innocent for the job, barely out of high school with long brown hair that fell in a curtain down her narrow back, and lipstick in a ripe shade of plum. But Jessica had become a poor judge of age, and when Sarah spoke, it was with a still maturity that turned a key inside Jessica’s heart. Something opened and a piece of her fell loose.

  “I’m going to pass you a clipboard,” Sarah was saying. “There is a photograph facedown on it. You may turn over the picture whenever you feel ready, but let me first tell you what you’re going to see. It’s a photo of a face. The eyes are closed and the head is resting on a blue sheet. I want you to know that you’ll see a wound above his left eye. It’s about two inches long. It did not cause his death.”

  Jessica’s eyes blurred with stars and she realized that she had stopped breathing. She tried to swallow a little gulp of air, a furtive, secret breath that wouldn’t alert everyone to the fact that she was suffocating.

  “Take a moment,” Sarah said, reaching across the coffee table. She wrapped her small hand around Jessica’s and held it. “Take all the time that you need.”

  But Jessica was already pulling away. “I’m ready.”

  The clipboard was wooden with a silver clasp that looked like it was original to the hospital. Jessica studied it and the back of the eight-by-ten Kodak photo paper until her father reached to take it from her. “Jessica, please.”

  “No,” she said, and carefully slid the sheet from under the clip. She turned it over.

  The man in the picture had wiry gray hair and thick brown eyebrows that didn’t match. A straight, slender nose. A neatly trimmed goatee that was brown shot through with gray—though this gray was lighter, whiter, than the color of his gunmetal hair. He was a study in contradictions: harsh cheekbones but a starburst of laugh lines. Tiny, happy wrinkles around a mouth that was tight-lipped. Smooth forehead torn by a jagged cut. It would have required stitches if warm blood still pumped in his veins.

  Jessica wanted to say: “It’s not him.” She could feel the words on her tongue, lavish and warm, hopeful.

  But there was a silver pleat in the skin by his ear, a tiny zipper that only Jessica would notice. She had caused the scar herself in their first year of marriage when school debt was piling up and Evan insisted that she should learn how to cut his hair so they could cross that one expense off their budget. Unfortunately, Jess proved to be incompetent with scissors, and the clippers they borrowed from a friend was more of a weapon than a tool. She caught the tender fold of skin in front of his ear in the serrated teeth of the personal clipper, and the blood that beaded there caused her to burst into tears. Evan laughed.

  “I’ll survive,” he told her, leaning in to kiss her even as he pressed a tissue to the blood that pearled on his cheek. “A flesh wound, nothing more.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jessica whispered. Then and now.

  * * *

  June 2015

  Dear LaShonna,

  Three is joy. And mess and noise
and utter chaos. Gabe never stops moving—except when gripped with the sudden, often inexplicably timed need to sleep. He has landed face-first in his macaroni and cheese, and Jessica once found him suspended between the coffee table and the couch. He was out cold. How is that possible? Of course, if we try to move him to his crib (he hasn’t made the switch to a toddler bed yet—we’d like to contain him a little longer for obvious reasons), he wakes up instantly. Gabe doesn’t believe in naps, eating his vegetables, or hugs and kisses. “I big boy,” he tells us. But when we can catch him, he forgets that he’s newly autonomous and snuggles into our arms like a battery recharging. Then he wiggles and squirms until we set him down. And he’s off. Again.

  Gabe lights up our home. He’s bright and beautiful and I can’t imagine our world without him in it. That’s why it feels increasingly wrong to me that you don’t know all that he is and all he is becoming.

  I don’t think I can do this anymore. A sealed letter once a year is not enough to contain all that I have to say. All that I think you should know. Gabe is perfect to us, but he hasn’t met several of his three-year-old milestones. Of course, he’s newly three. And strong willed. Gabe gave us a fresh perspective on the concept of the “terrible twos,” and he has shown no signs of leaving that particular stage behind now that he is officially a year older.

  We’re not concerned, not really, but Gabe’s language has been slow to develop, and he is indifferent to learning things like colors and numbers and even animals. We don’t have a dog, but our neighbors do, and Gabe insists it’s a cat. (In his defense, it’s the most pathetic excuse for a dog I’ve ever seen.)

  Do you want to know these things? Should I whitewash the hard stuff? Like the fact that Gabe broke his arm last fall when he tumbled from the top of the slide in our backyard. We’ve had that swing set since Max was a toddler, but it was ascribed a different threat level when Gabe learned to climb the ladder. He was fine, of course. I gave him a red cast because Marshall is his favorite puppy on PAW PATROL. And Jessica watches him even more closely now than she always has. Sometimes I think her life consists of tracking his every move.

  I don’t know what else to write. I suppose I could keep a journal for you, a daily record of what Gabe did and ate, what he said or didn’t say. Or we could put more letters in the file. Once a month, maybe, instead of this strange, annual pattern we’ve developed. If you’re ready, so am I. You won’t get this letter for months (more?), but when you do, and if you want to, you know how to find me.

  Evan

  Emery V.D.

  20, Caucasian, HS diploma

  Light brown hair, strawberry highlights, green eyes. Homecoming queen.

  Disowned.

  CAG, 26m, 11m pp

  CHAPTER 5

  THE DAY WAS too beautiful for a funeral, and somehow the way the sun warmed the top of her head made Jessica want to rend her clothes. She knew exactly what it would feel like to snag the fabric of her charcoal dress between her fingers and rip. The satisfying sound as the seams tore, threads snapping and popping as she ruined the knock-off cashmere. And what would she do then? Stand there in her black slip in front of her friends and family? Would she sob, beat her chest, scream? Jess wanted to, and it was those wicked thoughts, those wild, unmanageable urges that kept her eyes dry and her feet stepping surely forward. Down the sidewalk in front of the church and past the parking lot to the place where the hearse marked Evan’s grave. Jessica held herself together because she was terrified of what would happen if she let go, even for a moment.

  Gabriel’s hand was impossibly tiny and cold in her own, and Jessica gave it a little squeeze. He didn’t squeeze back, but she didn’t expect him to. Gabe didn’t really understand what was going on. And she was grateful for that one small grace. On any other Saturday, her son would be reveling in this picture-perfect October day, this brilliant afternoon that seemed staged for a Thanksgiving commercial. He would be wearing short sleeves, careening through the backyard with the neighbor kids as their noses began to water and their cheeks blushed pink. The warmth of the sun was deceptive, the fact that Jessica could just make out the mist of her breath in the bright autumn air evidence that it was barely fifty degrees. Lovely, still. And crisp with the scent of fallen leaves and the hint of woodsmoke.

  Entirely inappropriate for the task at hand.

  “You okay?” Jessica whispered to Max. He flanked her other side but refused to hold her hand. The suit was new, bought by Anna because Jess couldn’t bring herself to shop for her son’s funeral outfit. It fit him well and made his shoulders look startlingly broad, as if slipping on the coat had transformed him from a boy into a man. An instant, irreversible metamorphosis. In some ways Jessica supposed it was. Max would never be the same. None of them would.

  “Max?” she glanced at him in profile, slowing her steps so that she wouldn’t stick the willowy heels of her shoes into a sidewalk crack. It wouldn’t take much. The pumps had been a ridiculous choice and she wondered what had possessed her to put them on in the first place. Shock, probably. The detached feeling that made it seem as if she were looking at the world from behind frosted glass. “You okay, hon?”

  He didn’t flinch or nod or acknowledge her in any way. It was like Jessica didn’t exist.

  Apparently grief and anger were secret lovers, because Jess tipped into blind rage so quickly it left her teetering. Gabe tugged her hand, pulling her gently toward him even as she longed to break away. She wanted to take Max by the chin and force him to look at her. To see the misery that was written there so clearly and know that they shared this ache. It was too heavy to bear, the weight of the whole messed-up world against her chest, and Max’s rejection only made it worse.

  “Me too,” she whispered harshly, because it was all she could bring herself to say. I feel this too. He wasn’t just your dad; he was my husband. My lover. My best friend. But of course she didn’t say those things. Her oldest son flicked his eyes in her direction and looked quickly away. Instead of wiping the tear that had suddenly spilled down his cheek, he lifted his shoulder and erased the evidence with the sleeve of his new coat.

  Sweet man-child. She adored him even when she was furious with him. Sometimes she wished that she could set aside this soul-deep affection, this love that bordered on worship. But he was her flesh and blood, even when he ignored her or refused to listen. Even when he intentionally hurt her. It would be easier to stay angry at him, but nothing was ever easy where her children were concerned. Jessica waged war every day: for their safety and well-being, for their hearts and minds.

  Jess brushed away her own unwelcome tears and reached for Max’s arm, holding it just above the elbow as if he had offered it to her like a gentleman. He didn’t pull away.

  They had discussed what the pastor would say. In meetings over the last few days Jessica had sat in the deep leather sofa in his office, her arm rubbing against her father’s because the cushions sagged and she had no choice. And because she was drowning beneath the implications of all that had happened, and swallowed by the couch that seemed intent on consuming her whole, Jess let her father make all the decisions. No open casket. Memorial service followed by internment instead of the other way around. Pastor William would read Psalm 23.

  She remembered little to nothing about the memorial service, though the waxy fragrance of the candles still lingered in her hair. And now here she was, standing on a square of artificial turf with the sleek, black casket laid out before her. There was an enormous spray of roses arranged on the lid, and as she watched, her gaze hazy and uncertain, Jess saw Max reach out and take one. Yes, they were supposed to have a rose each, but she couldn’t recall why.

  “Mama?” Gabe asked. So she nodded and he leaned forward to pluck a rose in each hand. He offered one to her.

  They were thornless flowers, denuded of their barbs, and Jessica ran her thumb along the smooth stem as people filled the space behind her. Everyone had walked from the church, through the parking lot and between the g
ates of the cemetery that were forever open. If she would have turned around, she would have seen her father and Anna close enough to touch, and beside them, Evan’s father in his wheelchair. Bradford Chamberlain had lost himself to Alzheimer’s years ago, and he didn’t know why he was here, even though they had told him no less than a dozen times. He was sad without knowing why, his heart remembering the gravity and significance of a funeral, even as his mind refused to understand.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Jessica had whispered when Bradford arrived at the memorial hours before. He was flanked by an aide, a young man with a tender half smile and teddy-bear-brown hair that was an inch or two too long. It gave him the appearance of a mournful puppy, and Jess had to resist the urge to comfort them both. “Evan loved you so much.”

  “Who?” Bradford said. It was an innocent question, and her father-in-law patted her hand and smiled sweetly as he asked it. Her heart splintered.

  But now Jess was tightly buttoned, each shattered piece pulled tight and held close so she could manage her brokenness with the same efficiency she employed in every other aspect of her life. Jessica didn’t have the luxury of weeping over her father-in-law or quietly fuming about the distance between herself and Max. She couldn’t even cry the way that she wanted to, loud and keening, wracked with sobs that were dragged from her very core. Her grief had to be muzzled, maintained.

  Pastor William took his place on the other side of the polished casket and gave Jess a little nod. It was sympathetic but firm. A question. Now?

  No, not now. Not ever. But Jessica didn’t have a choice in the matter. She nodded back.

  He didn’t say much. There was a Bible passage and a prayer, but Jessica couldn’t focus because her heart kept time with the countdown clock. Five minutes? Four? Soon Pastor William would say “amen” and then it would all be over. Her life as she knew it arrested before she had a chance to make everything right. To put the pieces back together.