“How are you holding up?” they asked. “How are you feeling?”
Disembodied.
That was the word that best described Claire’s feelings. She had looked up the definition on her iPad last night to make sure she had it right.
Existing without or separated from the body.
Lacking any obvious physical source.
Again, the second definition fit best, because Paul had been her physical source. He had given weight to her life, tied her down to the world when her natural inclination had always been to float above everything as if it were happening to someone else.
She had felt this intense disembodiment for the last four days, really from the moment the Snake Man had told them to turn around. And then the police, the undertaker, asking if she wanted to see the body one last time and Claire blanching at the word “body” and sobbing like a child because she had spent every single second since they had taken Paul from her arms trying to remove the image of her lifeless, murdered husband from her mind.
Claire Scott wanted to see her husband again.
She did not want to see his body.
She stared out the window. They were inching forward in dense Atlanta traffic. The funeral procession had been truncated two lights back. Only their limo stayed out ahead. This wasn’t like the country, where strangers respectfully pulled over to the side of the road to let mourners pass. They ignored the police officers riding ahead on their motorcycles. They ignored the yellow FUNERAL flags that people had stuck on their cars. They ignored everyone but Claire, who felt like the world was staring into the back of the car trying to catch a glimpse of her grief.
She struggled to remember the last time she’d ridden in a stretch limousine. Certainly decades had passed since she rode in any type of car with both her mother and grandmother. That last limo ride must have been a trip to the airport with Paul. The car service had given them an upgrade from the usual sedan.
“Are we going to the prom?” Paul had asked.
They had been on their way to Munich for an architectural conference. Paul had booked them into the Kempinski. For six blissful days, Claire swam laps in the pool, had massages and facials, ordered room service, and shopped alongside wealthy Middle Eastern wives whose husbands were in Germany for healthcare. Paul would join her in the evenings for dinners and late-night strolls along the Maximilianstrasse.
If she thought about it hard enough, she could remember what it felt like to hold his hand as they passed the darkened windows of all the closed shops.
She would never hold his hand again. She would never roll over in bed and rest her head on his chest. She would never see him come down for breakfast wearing those God-awful velour shorts she hated. She would never spend her Saturdays on the couch with him, reading while he watched football games, or go to another corporate dinner party or wine tasting or golf tournament, and even if she did, what would be the point if Paul wasn’t there to laugh with her about it?
Claire opened her mouth for air. She felt as though she was suffocating in the closed limo. She rolled down the window and took great gulps of cold air.
“We’ll be there soon,” her mother said. She was sitting across from Claire. Her hand was wrapped around the liquor decanters in the side console because the sound of the rattling glass was the proverbial fingernails on a blackboard.
Her grandmother, Ginny, buttoned up her coat, but said nothing about the cold.
Claire rolled up the window. She was sweating. Her lungs felt shaky. She couldn’t think beyond the next few hours. There were going to be over one hundred people at the house. Paul’s partner at the firm, Adam Quinn, had turned the guest list for the wake into a corporate event for Quinn + Scott. A US Congressman; several captains of industry and their trophy wives; a handful of hedge fund managers, bankers, restaurateurs and real estate developers, and countless blowhards Claire had never met before and, frankly, had never wanted to, would soon be tracking through the house.
Their house.
They lived in Dunwoody, a suburb just outside of Atlanta. The lot had a gentle slope; at its crest had been a small cottage with a tire swing in the back yard that the bulldozers had razed the first day of construction. Paul had designed their home from the ground up. He knew where every nail and screw was. He could tell you where every single wire led and what it was supposed to control.
Claire’s contribution to the infrastructure had been to give Paul a label maker because he loved labeling things. He’d been like Harold with his purple crayon. The modem said MODEM, the router said ROUTER. The cut-off for the water supply had a giant, labeled tag. Every appliance had a label telling the date it had been installed. There were laminated checklists for everything, from winterizing the outdoor spigots to troubleshooting the a/v system, which more closely resembled a NASA control board.
Managing the house was arguably a part-time job. Every January, Paul gave Claire a list of contractors so she could set up the annual appointments for maintenance on the generator, the geothermal units, the garage doors, the copper gutters, the composite roof, the irrigation system, the well for the irrigation system, the outdoor lighting, the elevator, the gym equipment, the pool equipment, and the security system.
And those were just the tasks she could recite off the top of her head. January was less than two months away. Who was she supposed to call? Claire always threw away the list after the last workman left. Did Paul have the file somewhere? Would she even know how to find it?
Her hands started shaking. Tears filled her eyes. She was overwhelmed by all the things she did not know she needed to do.
Her mother asked, “Claire?”
Claire wiped away her tears. She tried to logic down the panic. January was next year. The wake was right now. Claire didn’t have to be told how to throw a get-together. The caterers would’ve arrived an hour ago. The wine and liquor had been delivered this morning. As Claire had gotten dressed for the funeral, the gardeners were already out in the yard with their leaf blowers. The pool had been cleaned yesterday evening while the tables and chairs were being unloaded. There were two bartenders and six servers. Black-eyed pea cakes with shrimp. Zucchini and corn fritters. Coriander-spiced beef fritters. Burgundy beet risotto tarts. Lemon-spiced chicken with dilled cucumbers. Pigs in a blanket with mustard, which Claire always threw in as a joke but was invariably the first thing the caterers ran out of because everyone loved tiny hotdogs.
Her empty stomach soured at the thought of all that food. She stared blankly at the liquor decanters in the limo. Her mother’s hand rested lightly on the stoppers. Her yellow sapphire ring was a gift from her second husband, an affable man who had quietly died of a heart attack two days after retiring from his dental practice. Helen Reid was sixty-two years old, but she looked closer to Claire’s age than her own. Helen claimed her good skin came from being a librarian for forty years, which had kept her out of the sun. The fact that they were often mistaken for sisters had been the bane of Claire’s younger existence.
“Did you want a drink?” Helen asked.
Claire’s mouth formed a reflexive no, but she said, “Yes.”
Helen pulled out the Scotch. “Ginny?”
Claire’s grandmother smiled. “No thank you, dear.”
Helen poured a generous double. Claire’s hand shook as she took the glass. She’d taken a Valium this morning, and when that hadn’t seemed to work, she’d taken some Tramadol left over from a root canal. She probably shouldn’t put alcohol on top of the pills, but Claire probably shouldn’t have done a lot of things this week.