He left me that day, and I broke into a million pieces.
Chapter 22
Darkness was a force that had started as a trickle, had steadily spread to every corner of my being, and then proceeded to tear my soul asunder.
The service was held shortly after my world fell apart. My family and his family rushed around me, trying to organize the funeral in haste and just get through it, all the while I was stuck like a frozen tree, brittle and barely conscious of the chaos around me.
Everyone flocked to Rockwood. Most were able to make it to the service, others showed up afterward. Zach and Riley left Lyla with her grandparents and attended the funeral. They stayed for a week in Rockwood, checking on me every day. Cambria and Jamie had already been staying in Rockwood for the past several days, ever since River’s condition had worsened. The day of the funeral, Cambria brought her suitcase over to my house and slept on the sofa in my house every night.
Chloe came as soon as she could. She had scrambled to get shifts covered at work, to get Ariel out of school, and to get the next available flight over from Connecticut to Washington. She arrived two days after the funeral, seven-year-old Ariel accompanying her.
Tears ran down my face, onto Chloe’s shirt, as we embraced in my house, and Chloe didn’t say anything, which was exactly what I wanted. Ariel—tall and skinny and a natural beauty like her mother—was cautious to approach me after Chloe and I had released each other. It was clear that Chloe had talked to Ariel before they arrived, had explained to her in the softest words possible what had happened. The girl kept her hands behind her back and put one foot in front of the other with her eyes glued on mine. Before she could close in the distance herself, I threw my arms out and brought her to me. She said, “I’m sorry, Drewsy Moosey,” and I squeezed her and I wanted the pain to stop.
I slept in the guestroom. My father and River’s father had returned our mattress from the living room back to its original place, in our bedroom upstairs. They had done it without having to ask me first if it was what I wanted. Of course it was what I wanted. I couldn’t bear to see that bed situated in the living room, an empty relic of all the darkness that had transpired. But I also couldn’t bear to sleep in that bed. I couldn’t bear to even step foot in that bedroom that had been ours. I didn’t want to see the furniture, the windows, the wall we had painted green.
I slipped into a numbness. I started sleeping throughout most of the day and all through the nights. In my dreams, I found him. Sometimes he was young—we were young—and we were running in the backyard of my parents’ house or eating watermelon or showing each other the presents we’d gotten for Christmas. Sometimes we were teenagers, sitting under the apple tree, River running his fingers through my hair or grazing my hand with his. I saw him as a young adult in a Seattle rainstorm, leaning over me to ask if I were all right. And I saw him as an aged man with permanent wrinkles in his forehead from furrowing his eyebrows so often. I saw him with graying hair, the same youthful gleam in his eyes, sitting in the swinging bench he built on our front porch, and I would wake up, alone and empty and broken.
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There was a moment at the funeral that stuck with me. Something the eulogist had said.
He was quoting the Bible—Genesis. He said, “‘For dust you are, and to dust you will return.’”
The words issued from his mouth, reverberating around the walls of the church, as though they were meant to be comforting. As though they would evoke images of peace and reassurance. I recognized the truth of those words. I understood their meaning. But as I sat there in the front-row pew and the eulogist continued on with his message that never stood a chance of being comforting, I thought about those words from Genesis, and I thought to myself: no.
From dust to dust. That isn’t right—not exactly. There is more to it than just that. We are made from dust; we will return to dust. But what about in between? What about that span of time in between the dust?
Between the dust, we are more. In between, there are sparks within us. We are more than powder, more than flesh and bone. We are profoundly alive, and so we live. In between, we are not merely dust—we matter. Sitting in the church, amidst the stained-glass windows, I thought about this, and I knew it with as much certainty as one can possess. I knew it more than anything else I had ever known. Between the dust, before we return to the ground, we matter.
River mattered.
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Weeks passed, people returned to their homes—Cambria and Jamie, Zach and Riley, Chloe and Ariel, even River’s father—and I started eating again. It was not something I consciously chose to do, but something like a primitive force that arose within me and reminded me how to sit at a table and move a fork and chew and swallow in order to nourish my withering, deadened body.
My mom became overly encouraged by this news. She went out and bought me bags and bags of groceries—extravagant holiday foods, as though this would allure me back into a normal appetite: ham and smoked cheeses and specialty bread from the bakery and a large fruit basket.
She called me down to my kitchen once she had unpacked everything onto the counters, and in all the expensive display, what caught my eye first was the fruit basket. I walked over to it and examined it up-close.
There were five of them: deep red, shiny apples. I seized them all from their wicker cradle, carried them into the dining room. I opened the French doors, and I hurled all five of the perfect fruits out into the distant fields.
Afterward, I returned to the kitchen counter, sat down on a stool, and robotically began unpeeling and taking bites out of a banana, my mom staring at me, eyes wide, shocked and confused.
River’s mother sold her large house and moved into a simple, two-bedroom rancher in the same Rockwood neighborhood. Once she heard that I was eating again, she had me over for dinners every Friday night in the simple home that actually seemed to suit her. We didn’t talk much during our weekly meals together. Neither one of us seemed to know what to say to the other person: one, a young widowed wife—the other, a mother who had lost both sons before her sixtieth birthday.
At home, I fed and stroked Milo—who had been with me through everything—whenever he meowed or gave me a lingered, intent look with those bright, green eyes. I ate, whenever my body drove me into the kitchen and toward the pantry or fridge. I slept, whenever my mind clicked off as I lay in the guest bed, but I no longer dreamt of him. The darkness was thick and clouded over everything, and I had no desires, only those primitive needs that propelled me physically into the future, but only physically, and nothing more.
◈ ◈ ◈
One day, something was different. It had been six weeks since the day I lost him, the day everything went black. Since then, I had been crawling along, dragging myself through the long days and nights, never expecting to find even the tiniest speck of light along the way.
But then, on this day, I opened my eyes, and something was different. I got out of the guest bed and, instead of hurrying past our bedroom door to the stairs, I paused when I got to it. I could not remember the last time I had seen beyond the door, into our bedroom. I turned to face it, placed my hand on the cold, crystal doorknob. I pushed it open. A musky smell wafted out into the hall, and I peered inside. It looked the same as it always had: our bed with the cream duvet, the wooden nightstands and dresser, the sheer curtains that fell over the windows. I took one small step past the threshold, my bare feet on the frigid floor, and I turned my head to view the green wall.