And what, Colin wondered, will my family be like? Will my baby grow up to be like me, like Meg? Neither? And after seven or eight decades of my own life, will I become like my mother, gentle during the daylight, confused and vitriolic after sunset?
The more time Colin spent ruminating about the past and fearing the future, the more he realized there wasn’t a damn thing tos be done about either of them. Why, then, waste so much energy dwelling on both?
Perhaps that was the real puzzle to solve. How to be in the now. The here. Maybe owning the present was really the key to happiness.
Later, months later, years later, Colin would remember this thought. He’d remember back to this specific moment, driving the streets of Whitefish Bay, two minutes from home, three minutes from his beer and couch. This thought about the dwelling on the past and the future he’d remember with equal doses of irony and pain. And then, when he was much, much older, with a sad and crushing acceptance. Only with this acceptance would he ever finally own the present.
His cell phone buzzed. The display on the dashboard showed Meg’s face, a picture he’d taken two years earlier on their trip to Bermuda. Meg had been standing in their hotel room, getting ready for dinner, putting her earrings in when Colin told her for the millionth time he loved her. When she’d turned and smiled, he’d taken her picture, capturing a look on her face that he wanted to always remember. The way she looked at him with such a subtle understanding that only he could see it.
He pressed the Answer button on the screen.
“Hi, baby. Almost home.”
The voice that came back wasn’t Meg’s. It was female, older, and carved with confusion.
“There’s been an…oh, just something horrible. An accident,” his mother said.
“Wait, what…Mom? What accident? Where’s Meg?”
His mother didn’t reply.
“Put her on the phone,” Colin said.
“Oh, dear. It’s just terrible. She can’t talk.”
Every nerve ending in Colin’s body burned. He’d had plenty of moments of pure adrenaline as a cop, but he never knew what it felt like when it was simultaneously steeped in dread. Now he did.
“Mom, where are you?”
“At the house. Oh, it’s so terrible. She was just helping me clean up.”
Colin hit the gas. “Listen to me. Don’t move. I’ll be right there. Tell her I’m coming. Just tell her I’ll be there in a minute. Less.” He didn’t wait for a reply. Colin disconnected and called into dispatch, requesting emergency medical services at his mother’s address. He didn’t even know what had happened, but all his mind could picture was Meg having gone into labor early. Maybe she tried to lift something too heavy. Damn it, he told her she shouldn’t be moving things around at his mother’s house. But Meg had insisted, saying she wouldn’t carry any big boxes. Saying she just wanted Jackie’s home a little more in order by the time the baby came, and she knew Jackie wasn’t going to clean anything herself.
Oh god, he thought. Oh please god. Let the baby be okay. Meg would never get over losing the baby.
Colin wasn’t sure he could, either, but he knew it would destroy his wife.
As he tore down his mother’s street and came to a skidding stop in front of her house, all Colin could picture was Meg in the bathroom, sobbing, blood on the floor.
Not the baby. Not the baby. Not the baby.
That was all he could ask.
Up the sidewalk. Hurdled the three steps to the porch. The door was unlocked and he burst through it.
And there was Meg.
Right at the bottom of the stairs, boxes spilled next to her body. Those fucking empty Tupperware containers, a plastic red lid next to her face.
Colin knew his wife was dead the moment he saw her face. Her contorted body. He’d seen a lot of death in his life, death that came in just about every form it could. He knew what a person looked like once all life had evaporated, and Meg was that person now.
Eyes half open, glazed. Hair spilled like cream cola on the hardwood floor. Chest down, right arm awkwardly splayed, lower torso at an angle that just shouldn’t be. Everything Colin had learned about death was on display right there, on the floor of his mother’s house, the house Colin had grown up in, embodied in the woman who had been his anchor, and now no one would be able to stop Colin from drifting out to sea.
Colin broke in that moment. Broke so much he couldn’t even comprehend how many pieces to him there were. He collapsed next to Meg on the floor, his blood pumping so violently within, thinking if he could only give his heat to her, bring her back, if only she could absorb him. Distantly aware of his mother, broken in her own way, saying how Meg had tripped and fallen, so sudden. Tripped on a silly box of empty Tupperware, a container holding more containers, and was that ironic or just stupid for such a thing to cause a fall. As she told Colin of his wife’s death, his mother picked up the Tupperware and placed the containers on a nearby heap of magazines, too late to do any good.
Colin was aware how cold Meg was, that she must have been dead for some time, and why didn’t his mother call for help earlier? He heard himself shouting the baby the baby and how maybe their child was still alive, kicking, gasping, and clutching to the death around it, like a young child suffocating inside a dry-cleaning bag. Colin saw his hand reach for Meg’s phone on the first riser of the staircase, and as that finger dialed 911, he heard the sirens outside.
Of all the times he’d responded to an emergency over his career,
