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By Root 261 0

woman found the perfect rug. I knew it was perfect because she told me so. Frankly, I didn’t give a shit what the rug looked like. All I wanted was something soft for my daughter to crawl on. But Liz would have spent weeks shopping for the perfect rug, making sure it matched the rest of the room. I couldn’t go quite that far, but I knew that she would be proud—and relieved—that I’d thought to bring photos in so someone with better taste could help me.

Chapter 22

i miss a lot of

things about the

woman i love,

but it’s her

voice that

i miss the most.

i know i can

still hear it

if i want

to, but right now,

i don’t think

i can handle it.

I have a video of Liz that I shot in the hospital when she was being wheeled away to the delivery room. Now it was October, and I still hadn’t watched it. It was still too soon for me to sit there and hear her voice, to see her smile, to listen to her talking and laughing. I wasn’t ready, and I didn’t know if I would ever be. But I had to save it for Madeline, because I was sure that she’d someday want to know what her mom’s voice sounded like. I missed that voice so much, but I was still actively avoiding it. I hadn’t cleared the messages from our answering machine, and I also once inadvertently hit the speed-dial key that connected me to her cell phone. When I figured out that the faint female voice in the room was coming from my phone, I held it to my ear, realized what I had done, and immediately disconnected.

But a few of Liz’s friends were in the habit of calling her cell phone and listening to her outgoing message again and again. This was unthinkable to me. I could not handle the familiar rise and fall of her voice, how her sentences began and ended, or the way she whispered over the vowel sounds. I was afraid that hearing her speak would make her seem alive again. And I would have lost my shit.

One afternoon her phone rang while I was in the middle of doing some laundry. I ran into the living room, hoping to silence it before the ringing woke Madeline. The number was blocked, and I paused, taking a deep breath before answering another call from another person who hadn’t yet heard the terrible news.

I cringed every time it rang; there had been too many instances since her death when I’d answered it and had to confirm what some distant friend thought was a horrendous rumor, or break the news to a professional contact who had heard nothing of the awful truth. Every time I had to tell someone else, it was like entering some kind of sadistic time machine, sending me back to that very moment in which I realized she was dead.

“Hello?”

“This is Detective Berryman from the LAPD. Are you missing a BlackBerry?”

“Uh, I don’t think so.”

“Well, the number I just dialed was at one point associated with the phone I’m holding in my hand.”

I told him I was on my way and hung up without saying good-bye. When our house had been robbed, there had been so much chaos—and so many more important things taken—that we had never even realized that Liz’s old BlackBerry had been stolen. The detective had called about a phone, but I was hoping there was more. I would have liked nothing better than to dig through a pile of unclaimed items and discover Liz’s missing jewelry.

I headed to the police station just a few miles from my house. When I arrived, I immediately started crying, fucking destroyed that Liz wouldn’t see the jewelry I was about to recover. I was not what a roomful of manly men in ties and suspenders needed or expected to see when they were busy doing their work in one of the worst parts of Los Angeles.

“I got a call about a stolen BlackBerry,” I said through my sobs.

A uniformed man behind the desk gave me a confused look and silently got up from his desk to escort me through the station. I thought for sure that he would call me something nasty under his breath, but I think—more than anything—that he was bewildered into silence.

I calmed myself down by concentrating on my breathing. In the back room, at the same evidence table where I had stood