If the medical engineering didn’t work out, he could become a tour guide, maybe. This other version of himself was quite talkative. Full of information.
On the phone with Rory, he didn’t have to be Josh in gray Rhode Island. He could be Josh who lived in Hawaii and went fishing and knew a sushi chef who’d make you a roll before the catch was even an hour old. He was outgoing, rather than socially awkward, this Josh who sat in the dark and lied. He sure as hell wasn’t Josh Whose Wife Died.
“Where do you live, Rory?” he asked.
“I live in Montana. Also really beautiful, but totally different, I’m sure.”
“Are you near the mountains?”
“Sure am.”
“Do you get to Yellowstone at all?”
“Oh, yeah, I love Yellowstone. Hayden Valley is my favorite part.”
Josh and Lauren had planned on going there. My God. They never would. They never would.
“My wife and I hope to get there,” he said around the tightness in his throat. “Maybe this summer.”
“Wait for September if you can. Fewer tourists.”
“Cool,” Josh said. “There are bison, right?”
“Absolutely. Big as a truck.” Josh could imagine it. Lauren would shriek if they came too close. Nah. She’d be brave. He wondered if they could see a wolf. She loved wolves.
The companionable silence stretched on.
“How are we doing with the download? Almost there?” Rory asked.
“Um . . . yes! Seems like everything’s back to normal.” Shit. Guess he’d have to hang up now, since he’d been on the phone for an hour and thirteen minutes. “Thanks so much, Rory.”
“You bet. You’ll get an email survey about how we did, and if you have any other issues . . .”
“No. I’m fine. Uh . . . thank you.”
Thank you for being a voice in the middle of the night. Thanks for letting me be someone else for a little while. Thanks for working the night shift. Thanks for never knowing how much I lost.
The survey came. He gave Rory top marks for everything.
11
Joshua
Month three
May 1
THE WHOLE WORLD stops when a young person dies. At least, the world you live in.
At first, everyone you know rallies around you, stunned and grieving, milling around. The solidarity of loss binds people together. No one can imagine moving forward. No one wants to. Stop all the clocks, as the poem instructs.
And time does seem to stop. No one in your world can ever see being happy again. It’s an impossibility. Nothing will be the same. Nothing ever should be the same. The world is ruined by her death.
There are the tasks immediately following. The phone calls. The arrangements. The assignments—you’ll go to the funeral home while her sister goes to the church, and this other one will order the flowers. There is so much to do, thank God, because your brain cannot accept what’s happened, and if you stood still for a second, you might spontaneously explode, like a wineglass shatters with a high note. Your feet are still moving and someone is pushing food and water on you, and another person is coming in now, and your phone is buzzing with texts and calls, and there’s another knock on the door.
You put together the photo collages, the PowerPoint that will show during the wake and reception. You’ll make the playlist she requested, pick out readings, order food. For a week or two, the world is filled with the details of death. Family huddles close. Her friends are devastated. Her coworkers can barely function. Her doctor calls to check on you. Her nurses come to the funeral.
For a short time, her death makes you the center of so many lives.
And then . . . it trickles off. There are children to be cared for, homes to be cleaned, food to be prepared. The coworkers still have jobs to do. The friends start getting on with their lives.
The stopped clocks start ticking once more.
Two months and one week after Lauren died, that first day came for Josh. The day when no one called, texted, emailed, dropped by. Not Jen, not Ben, not Donna, not Sarah, not his mother, not Darius, not Bruce the Mighty and Beneficent, not a random former classmate who’d just heard the news.
The first day of his life when his widowed state went unheralded by anyone.
It was obscene. Message received, loud and clear. The world was adjusting to Lauren’s absence. Oh, he knew Donna and Jen would never get over her, would think of her every day. But Jen had a husband and two kids. Donna had a living daughter and two grandchildren. They both worked. They had places to go. His own mother ran an entire hospital lab, viewed Sumi and Ben as her siblings, belonged to four book clubs and volunteered through her church. But you think she might have called her only child just to check in. A fucking text, maybe, Mom?
No. Nothing.
Josh waited all day in a state of furious, silent martyrdom, hating himself, hating everyone else. Took the dog for a run. Spoke to no one. Checked his phone every ten minutes, then every five, then restarted it in case it had a glitch.
Still nothing.
He could, of course, reach out to someone. Ben would go for a walk with him; all he had to do was ask, and they’d be at the Botanical Center or driving to Boston. It would be better than this ridiculous, pointless anger. But this was a test. A test of them, a test of him.
Everyone failed.
By 8:37 p.m., he hated them all.
Fury was creeping into his head like a disease. A red-out was coming.
The first time it happened, he was six, and the school bully—Sam, who was bigger and stronger than any kid in class—had thrown Caitlin’s eyeglasses across the cafeteria. Caitlin was a special needs girl and Josh’s friend. Joshua didn’t remember anything about what happened until he was in the principal’s office with his mother, being told that he’d tackled Sam. Josh asked why there was blood on his shirt and why his eye was hurting; it was because Sam had punched him in the face. Josh had hit back, splitting Sam’s lip. Both boys had been suspended for a week, but Stephanie took him out for ice cream that afternoon, and when he came back to school, Caitlin handed him a card with her painstaking printing: Thanks for sticking up for me.
Another time, when he was ten, his mother had a violently bad reaction to a pepper and had to be rushed away in the ambulance with anaphylaxis. The Kims had come over, but Josh had been like a feral animal, they told him later. It had taken Ben and another neighbor to carry him in the house and hold him down until he came back into himself.
A few days later, after talking to his pediatrician, Josh’s mother told him these incidents weren’t uncommon for people with Asperger’s, as they called it then. The trick was handling it. Distracting himself. She’d given him a sentence to chant when he was little—The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. “It has every letter in the alphabet,” she said. “Think about it, Josh. Count the letters.” It had become a mantra when the red started to flare. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.