Gray like death.
I cupped his unshaved cheek, only to find it cold. The husband I had snuggled up against in bed to keep me warm, the father whose arms wrapped effortlessly around our children, now rigid. That’s when the wave hit me – this was real. I screamed. I searched for life. Ben was dead.
Holding myself upright against the porch railing where honeysuckle vines wrung around the posts like leafy fingers, I used the breathing technique my therapist had left me with. Smell a flower – in. Blow out a candle – out. In, out. In, out. Eventually, a calm mellowed the panic after about forty in-outs, forty flowers and candles. My fingers brushed against the Christmas lights we had never taken down. A classy white LED string that took Ben four hours to individually wrap around the railings and up the Corinthian pillars. Removing them would have been an all-day project, which Ben had never made time for. And never again would.
My stare settled on the lit window across the street and two doors down, half hidden by an azalea bush in full bloom. A sweet but sad elderly woman lived there, the neighborhood night watch. Miss Michelle, I called her, because I could never remember her last name, even though I knew it was something simple with an H. Hall? Hill? I didn’t remember much these days, as each one blended into the next in a hurried blur. Miss Michelle had often kept late hours since her husband passed from cancer. I can’t sleep with the emptiness next to me, she once told me.
Would I ever sleep again?
A breeze ruffled my hair, sticking curly tendrils to my lips. After wiping the bile from the corners of my mouth, I returned inside, petrified to look at him. Tears mixed with mascara stung my eyes. I pressed my palms against my face to stop them falling, but it only made it worse as yesterday’s makeup scraped against my eyeball.
I needed to call someone. But where was my phone? In the kitchen? I couldn’t remember.
I headed into the kitchen, fumbling in the dark for the light switch as my fingers, wet with blood, slipped across the wall. When I finally turned on the light, the room glowed eerily. The mahogany cabinets soaked up most of the brightness. My obsessive-compulsive brain gave me two orders: wash the blood off my hands, then make the call. I turned on the faucet and watched the pink swirl of blood circle the drain while I scrubbed the smear of guilt from my hands.
My palms were clean but my shirt – and my soul along with it – were not. I wanted to change clothes, but I knew better. No wife reeling from the unexpected death of her husband should have time for a wardrobe change. I searched for my purse, where my phone was tucked inside. As I passed through the kitchen, clinging to the mottled granite counter to hold me upright, a flutter of paper crinkled under my hand, then tumbled over the edge of the countertop. A single, yellow, lined page floated down to the polished oak floor, the kind of paper Ben used for scribbling notes during investor meetings and money management seminars. It had been ripped from his legal pad. I picked it up, immediately noticing the salutation: My darling Harper.
A letter. Of course Ben would leave a letter. Anything to heap the guilt on me as his corpse decayed on our Ethan Allen sofa. It was his final hurrah. Ben always got the last word, and up until this moment I never minded. It’s what made our marriage work – I was always right, but he always got the final say. We’d often laugh about that.
My fingers trembled as I squinted away the sooty tears and read through the haze:
My darling Harper,
You saw this coming, didn’t you? You knew one day you’d walk into our home and find me like this, taken by my own hand. You had to, after all the suffering. All the secrets. All the pain.
You can’t blame me for this. You put me here, after all. It was only a matter of time before I escaped the pain of this world, because it was all that was left to do. I couldn’t carry on anymore … not after what happened. What you did. What I could never forgive. I tried. I really did. But in the end, trying isn’t enough. It’s not enough to erase the past. It’s not enough to blur the memories.
You’ve spent the last year hating me, and I’ve spent the last year missing you. We’re not who we used to be, and I realize now we’ll never find ourselves again. When you lose too much of yourself, there’s no way to rebuild. Moving on without you wasn’t an option, but this was.
I loved you, Harper, but love isn’t enough to vanquish the cruelty of life. Death is, though.
Your ghost for eternity,
Ben
My lips mouthed those final words – your ghost for eternity – but no sound came out. Our love couldn’t vanquish the cruelty of life? Waxing poetic wasn’t Ben’s style; football was. Golf was. Beer brats on the grill was. These words didn’t sound like the man I knew. But it could only be him, because only Ben knew all of our secrets … well, all but one. The biggest one. The one I’ll take to my own grave.
The scrawl seemed to match the handwriting I’d seen on hundreds of permission slips and to-do lists and meeting notes. A businessman’s neat print, the letters capitalized. It had to be Ben, but a version of Ben I’d never glimpsed until now. I actually liked this broody, raw,
