Christine was ecstatic when Cassidy was born. So was Phil. Life was wonderful for a time, right up to Christmas Eve fifteen years ago, the night everything changed. Phil and Cassidy had been on their way home from a last-minute Christmas-shopping trip to Tucson. Between Patagonia and Sonoita, a drunk driver came across the double line into their lane. Somehow Phil managed to avoid being hit, but he lost control of the car. It rolled. Cassidy died.
The original accident wasn’t Phil’s fault, but Cassidy’s death was. Her mother always made sure Cass was properly belted in. Insisted on it. That day when they started home, Cassidy, who was seven, said she was tired. She wanted to lie down in the backseat to sleep, and Phil let her. When the car rolled, Cassidy was ejected, and the car landed on top of her. She died instantly. Sometimes Phil wished he had died then, too.
When he gave Christine the news, she didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. Instead, she leveled an accusatory look that shriveled his heart. He had known right then that she would never forgive him, and she had not.
Cassidy’s funeral was two days after Christmas. When they came home from the funeral, the decorated Christmas tree and all the wrapped presents were there in the living room, taunting them and showing them how much they had lost. Phil’s first instinct had been to take it down and get rid of it, but Christine had stopped him. She told him that if he touched even so much as one decoration on the tree, she’d kill him, and he had believed her. The tree stayed up. Later, when they were still speaking occasionally, he’d managed to extract the agreement that the tree would stay up until the last light burned out. Fifteen years later, it was still there, and a few of the bedraggled lights continued to burn.
But that Christmas and Cassidy’s death had been the beginning of Christine’s long retreat into herself. She stopped going out. For anything. She wouldn’t go to the grocery store or to the gas station or to the doctor or dentist. Friends tried stopping by to see her or calling on the phone. She wouldn’t open the door. She wouldn’t answer the phone. She stayed in the house day after day, year after year. If it hadn’t been for Phil’s job delivering mail, he suspected he would have gone nuts, too.
Phil and Christine lived in the same house, but they slept in different bedrooms and existed on different timetables. When Phil left for work, Christine was usually asleep. Sometimes she prowled the house late at night, when he heard her pacing back and forth in her room. During the day, as far as he could tell, she spent most of her time sitting in the living room, watching the tree. He didn’t know what she thought about all that time. She didn’t seem to watch TV, had zero interest in current events. As far as he knew, she didn’t read books.
With the house quiet and, except for the tree, mostly dark, he worried early on that someone might mistakenly think the house was empty and break in with her sitting right there in her chair. When he mentioned his concern to Christine, she gave him one of her scathing looks. Then she stood up, walked over to the Christmas tree, and picked up one of Cassidy’s wrapped presents.
“I’ll use this,” she said, tearing the wrapping paper off the softball bat, a present Cassidy had never opened.
For months after that, Christine sat with the bat either in her lap or next to her chair. One day, though, for reasons Christine never explained, she stuck the bat in the trash. Rather than ask her about it, Phil rescued the bat, took it out to the garage, and left it there. By then he was at the point of wishing someone would break into the house. Maybe whoever it was would fix Phil’s life for him. Give him back his freedom. After all, hadn’t he earned it?
That, of course, was a pipe dream. Obviously, since he had brought this tragedy down on them both, Phil had no choice but to stand by his wife. He was resigned to that. He would take care of her until the day she died or until he did, but that was what made this new bit of brilliance in his life so miraculous. And who could blame him? After years of living with Christine’s stony silence, no one would have thought twice about him having an outside interest—a side dish, as it were—a discreet side dish.
On the one hand, it was amazing after all this time to have someone who was actually interested in him, someone who laughed at his lame jokes and seemed to enjoy his company for those few minutes a day when it was possible for them to be together—on the side of the road, parked next to a bank of mailboxes, with cars going past, but together. She was often waiting for him when he stopped to deliver the mail. Sometimes she brought him treats—a plate of freshly baked cookies; a cup of coffee; a ham sandwich. No matter what she brought him, Phil was always pleasantly surprised and grateful. Their brief conversations were carried on in a kind of verbal shorthand that can happen only through shared experience, and they were a balm to Phil Tewksbury’s wounded soul.
That was the most amazing part of all. In Ollie, Phil had found a soul mate, someone who understood exactly what he was going through. He didn’t have to explain to her that he could never leave Christine to fend for herself, because she was dealing with the same situation. Not entirely the same, but close enough.
Having a husband wandering off into the world of early-onset Alzheimer’s was slightly different from Christine’s self-imposed and willful silence, but in other respects, Ollie’s situation was very similar to Phil’s—the isolation, the hopelessness, and the loneliness of being married to someone who was no longer there. Like Phil, Ollie wouldn’t leave her husband, but she refused to betray him. In thought, maybe, but not in deed. What Phil and Ollie had together was a friendship—a circumspect friendship, one without phoning or texting, which would have felt more like cheating. They exchanged little notes from time to time, and Phil saved them all, reading them over and over sometimes in the privacy of his truck.
Rereading them gave Phil comfort. He could see that their connection had grown out of shared experience and came with the promise that someday, far in the future, when they were both free, there might be so much more.
That week in particular, Phil was grateful for the bit of misfortune that had left Ollie’s little four-by-four with a flat tire. He had noticed it while they were chatting and had changed it for her. The culprit had been a stray roofing nail that had wormed its way through the balding tread of her tires. But the nail, the resulting flat, and the process of changing the tire had been a blessing in disguise because it had given the two of them twenty minutes or so of uninterrupted and utterly blameless conversation. No one was going to gossip about Phil being an everyday hero and changing some poor stranded lady’s flat tire.
Finished with the trim on the living room window, Phil moved on to the kitchen window. With Christine’s grim visage no longer staring accusingly at him through the clean glass, his spirits improved. His whistle returned.
Yes, for the first time in years, Phil Tewksbury felt that life was good. He’d finish painting the trim on the house today. Tomorrow he’d do the same to the garage. After that, he had plans to tackle the kitchen and the bathroom. Only after everything else was done would he bring up the Christmas tree. Now that people could see in as much as they could see out, it was probably time to bring up that troublesome issue and do something about it.
It was time.
13
12:00 P.M., Saturday, April 10
Sedona, Arizona
With more spare time on her hands that she’d ever had, Ali Reynolds had been making a conscious effort to read some of the classics she had previously only sampled or skimmed. After sending the note to Teresa Reyes, Ali tried turning her attention to her current read,
The brightest spot in Ali’s quiet afternoon was a phone call from B. just before he boarded his plane in Phoenix, heading for D.C. As she ended that call, her phone rang again. This time she recognized Donnatelle’s number.
“I wanted you to know that I made it. I’m here at the hospital,” Donnatelle said.
“How are things?”
“Not so good. Jose is still in the ICU. Teresa can go in to see him once an hour for five minutes at a time, but the girls can’t. I brought them down to the cafeteria with me to give her a break, and to give the girls a break, too. They’re lost. Lucy keeps asking why her daddy is so sick and why can’t she go see him.”
