I swing my legs out of bed and stand up. I go over to the dresser and dig to the bottom of the middle drawer for my old athletic pants. I don’t even know what I’m doing until I’m walking through my kitchen, ignoring the sympathetic gapes of my sister, my mother. I stop briefly when I see her. Mom? I knew she came for the funeral, but I assumed she left.
Outside, I walk past the garden and keep going, until I’m standing at the start of the dirt path in the woods, my feet tucked in a pair of Toms—the closest thing I have to athletic shoes. I peer into the canopy of naked trees, not sure what I’m looking for. And then I know.
I’m looking for my husband.
The Harrison whose feet pounded this same path over and over, running for miles but never getting anywhere.
I take off running, slowing to a trot within minutes. My foot catches on a protruding tree root and I go sprawling in the dirt, a lightning rod of pain shooting up my ankle.
I lie there for a minute, belly in the brush, trying to catch my breath. I look back at the offending tree, then up at the blue between the branches.
This is why I don’t run. I want to say it out loud. To somebody. To Harrison. I want to hear him laugh the way he used to, so loud and deep that I swear I could feel the vibration of it in my bones.
I scream into the forest, at the trees, startling the squirrels and a few birds. And I pretend he can hear me. But I know he can’t.
My husband is gone.
* * *
I bang in the back door, hobbling on my left foot, gritting my teeth in pain.
“Mia? Oh my god. Are you OK?”
“Let me get you some ice.”
“Are you hungry? Someone named Rebecca dropped off a hummingbird cake.”
“A few people have called for you. I’ve been taking messages.”
I hear all of these words and wish I had the silence back. I limp to my room and into my closet and I stare at Harrison’s clothes. And then I start to put them on. I stuff my arms into Harrison’s blue dress shirt, my legs into his trousers, and ankle still throbbing, I sink to the ground, burying my head in the stiff fabric of the shirt, soaking it with my tears.
“Heard you could use this,” a familiar voice says from the doorway. I lift my head to see Raya holding a bag of frozen peas. She walks over and lowers herself down beside me, gently pressing the cold against my foot.
“Wrong one.” I take the bag and lay it on my injured ankle and then I lay my head down in her lap and she strokes my hair. I notice my phone in her other hand and a piece of paper and I realize it was her voice that said I had messages.
My eyes are drawn back to my cell phone again and my heart thumps an extra beat. I grab it from Raya and sit up, the drumbeat in my chest picking up its pace. I thumb through the screen, ignoring all my missed calls and text messages and going straight to my voice mails. I scroll through, my eyes intently searching for Harrison’s name. When it doesn’t appear, I click on the deleted messages. He rarely called—we communicated either in person or via text—but surely, surely I have an old voice mail in here somewhere. Telling me to grab more granola bars at the store or that he’ll be three hours late coming home or even a Saw that you called; trying you back. All I want in that moment is to hear his voice, saying something banal, something to keep him here. With me. In one last halfhearted attempt, I call his number. It rings four times and, clutching the phone to my ear, I listen, holding my breath in the empty beat before the familiar robotic intonation states: Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice message system.
I resist the urge to chuck it across the room, and thrust it back at Raya instead. She palms it, and as if by magic, the phone comes alive in her hand. For half a second, I allow myself to believe the impossible—that it’s Harrison calling me back. I glance at the screen and see a number I don’t recognize.
“Do you want me to get it?” she asks.
“Please,” I say, closing my eyes, swallowing the bile creeping up my throat at the realization that Harrison’s voice is gone. As gone as he is. “Just pretend to be me.”
So she does. I hold Harrison’s sleeve up to my nose again, only realizing now that it smells too much like detergent and I should have picked one from the dirty clothes basket. I sit up in a panic—what if someone did the laundry? I crawl over to the hamper in the corner of the room on my knees, leaving the ice pack behind, my right ankle throbbing with each movement. When I reach it, I turn the entire thing upside down, dumping all the contents out. The first few articles of clothing I paw through are mine, and my panic ratchets up to a ten.
“Mia?” Raya says.
“Yeah?” I’m throwing clothes over my shoulder.
“Did you give blood at the hospital?”
“Huh?” And then I spy it, a white undershirt with dark stains at the armpits from him wearing it so much. Relief floods my limbs as I hold it up to my nose and inhale my husband. I consider Raya’s question. “Yeah, I guess I did.” I remember it was Caroline’s idea. That we should do something while we waited. Something to help. But then, she couldn’t even give blood and it was just me, with a futile needle in my arm, not helping anything.
“That was the blood bank.”
“Mm-hm,” I say, and I lie down on the hardwood floor and ball up the shirt so I can tuck it under my head and pretend I’m lying on his chest.
“Apparently they run some tests to make sure your blood is safe to use.”
“’K,” I say. I’m too tired to say I don’t care if they use it or not because it can’t save Harrison, so what’s it matter? I just want her to leave, and then think maybe if I ask her a question, it will speed up the conversation and she will do just that. And then it occurs to me, belatedly, that they must have found something in the blood, or they wouldn’t be calling. “What—do I have AIDS or something? Hepatitis?” And I laugh a little, when I realize that I wouldn’t care even a little bit if I did.
She’s silent for a few beats.
“You’re pregnant.”
Chapter 31
Everyone makes a fuss about the pregnancy.
Vivian comes up for the first appointment and watches the grainy heartbeat on the screen when I cannot.
“Don’t get attached,” I say. “It’s not going to stay.”
One afternoon, Del shows up on my front stoop, though I can’t remember agreeing to her visit, and she spends three days cooking and filling my freezer with ropa vieja and picadillo and a lentil stew that was Harrison’s favorite. “You don’t have to do this,” I repeat for the third time, as she stands at the stove, wooden spoon in one hand, the other on her hip. She cuts her eyes to me and raises one eyebrow. “What’s this baby going to eat? You going to cook?”