Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [14]
“Don’t worry about him. All you do is worry sometimes. I’d like to be home once and not have to be surrounded by this…this drama,” Hut said.
And then, the dream evaporated, and when she awoke, in her bed, she thought for just a minute that nothing bad had happened to him, that he would be home later that night, that all of it had just been a dream.
But the yellow padded envelope lay next to her pillow.
7
She opened the yellow envelope and poured the watch and the keys out on her bedspread. The watch was from her, on their first anniversary. It had cost too much money—just under four hundred dollars at Saks, but she felt he needed a really good watch for his work. She wondered if she were still paying on her Visa for it. He had loved the watch, and told her that it was the best gift he’d ever received next to Livy, who had arrived a scant six months after they married. His gargantuan key set—for the house, the clinic, his car, and even keys he’d told her he’d had since he was a kid. She’d joked with him sometimes, asking him if those were keys in his pocket or if he was just happy to see her. His wallet had the normal things she knew would be in there: his credit cards, his social security card, the pictures of the kids, the pictures of her, seventy dollars cash, and a few wadded up receipts.
All I have left of you, Hut. This is it.
She switched on the little color TV above the dresser, clicking the remote to surf channels, and was afraid for a moment that the news would come on detailing the murder. But no matter what channel she went to, no one mentioned Hut’s murder. We’re not the news. We’re not what people want to hear about.
A gentle tapping at her bedroom door. The door slid open slightly. Mel. Her sister’s face was ashen, but brightened a bit as if she had just remembered some piece of good news. “You’re awake.” Her voice was smooth and soft.
Julie nodded, stretching. No headache. It would be back, but not just yet. She swung her feet over the edge of the bed, but was not ready to stand up.
“Can I get you some tea? Maybe some decaf chai?”
“I’m fine. Really,” Julie said. She glanced over at the wide mirror that she and Hut had picked out at Pottery Barn two years before. Her face was all in brambles, to her. Not her face at all, just as the dead man on the table had not had Hut’s face. “I’m fine,” she repeated.
8
She managed a shower, and while the steamy water cascaded over her, she didn’t close her eyes. Didn’t want to see inside her own head. Behind the opaque shower curtain, she could see the shadow coming into the bathroom.
Hut. It would be Hut. He would grin as he pulled back the curtain. Naked and happy as a puppy. In their first days. His grin infectious, his way of touching her so new and so right. Alive. Alive and fresh and younger than he should’ve been in his mid-thirties then. Not in a house with a mortgage too high for an in-debt doctor to the poor and an ER nurse. But in her little apartment in the city, her crappy little place where they’d made a nest, briefly, before her pregnancy, where they’d made love too many times and for too many hours to count. How was she to know that making love was something more than pleasure? More than making a baby? It had been a bonding between them, a clasping of hands that reminded her not of sex, but of absolute love, and how he had been everything to her. Everything.
The shower beating down on her face washed the tears from her.
When she emerged from the shower, and dressed, she wasn’t sure why she even cared if she was clean. She wanted to go to Livy, and to Matt, she wanted her children. She wanted them in her arms and she wanted them now.
9