“If you just communicate with me, I can help,” Eric says. “But you have to talk to me.”
“I have to,” I repeat.
“Yes,” Eric says.
“Why?” I realize how petulant this sounds, but I am feeling childish.
“Because I’m your husband,” he says. “Hey, it’s me. That’s what I’m here for. That’s the point. I can help.”
I am overcome with a sudden, familiar anger and the boldface, pulsating words:Unfortunately, you can’t.
For thirty years I have been tied to the best person alive, the best mother, the best friend, the best wife—the best one. The best one was mine, and now she’s gone. The string that tethered us has been snipped, and I am overcome with how little I have left, how second-best every single other thing is.
I nod, because I cannot think what else to do. Eric hands me a stack of envelopes.
“You should look at the one on top,” he says.
I glance down. It’s markedUnited Airlines. I feel my fingers curl.
“Thanks.”
“Do you want me to leave?” Eric asks. “I can go pick up sandwiches or something…”
I look at him standing in his oxford shirt and khaki shorts. He shifts his body weight from one foot to the other. His brown hair hangs too long in the back; his sideburns, too. He needs a haircut. He has on his glasses.Dorky handsome, my mother said when she met him.
“No,” I say. “It’s fine.”
He calls my parents by their first names. He takes his shoes off at the door and puts his feet, in socks, up on the coffee table. He helps himself to the refrigerator and puts more soap in the dispenser when it’s empty. This is his home, too.
“I’m going to go lie down,” I say.
I turn to leave, and Eric reaches out and takes my free hand. I feel his fingertips, cold, press into my palm. They seem to be Morse coding the one wordPlease.
“Later,” I say. “Okay?”
He lets me go.
I walk up the stairs. I travel down the wood-paneled hallway, past the room that used to be mine, the one that my mother andI redecorated during my second year of college, and then again when I was twenty-seven. It has striped wallpaper and white bedding and a closet full of sweatshirts and sundresses. All of my skin-care products sit, expired, in the medicine cabinet.
“You’re fully stocked here,” my mother would say. She loved that I could sleep over if it got late, and I didn’t even have to pack a toothbrush.
I stop at the entrance to her room.
How long does it take for someone’s smell to fade? When she was here, at the end. When the hospice nurses came and went like apparitions, the room smelled like illness, like a hospital, like plastic and vegetable broth and soured dairy. But now, all trace of sickness gone, her scent has come back, like a spring bloom. It lingers in the blankets, the carpet, the curtains. When I open the doors to her closet, it’s almost as if she were crouched inside.
I flick the light switch on and sit down among her dresses and blazers, jeans ironed, folded, and hung. I breathe her in. And then I turn my attention back to the envelopes in my hand. I let them slip down to the floor until I’m just holding the one on top. I slide my pinkie in the seam and wiggle it open. It gives easily.
Inside, as I expect, are two plane tickets. Carol Almea Silver was not a woman who handed her phone to the gate agent to scan. She was a woman who demanded a proper ticket for a proper trip.
Positano. June 5. Six days from now. The mother-daughter trip we had talked about for years, made manifest.
Italy had always been special to my mother. She went to the Amalfi Coast the summer before she met my father. She loved to describe Positano, a tiny seaside town, as “pure heaven.”God’s country. She loved the clothes and the food and the light. “And the gelato is a meal itself,” she said.
Eric and I considered going for our honeymoon—taking the train down from Rome and hitting Capri—but we were young and saving for a house, and the whole thing felt too extravagant. We ended up finding a cheap flight to Hawaii and spending three nights at the Grand Wailea Maui.
I look at the tickets.
My mother had always talked about going back to Positano. First with my father, but then as time went on she began to suggest the two of us go together. She was adamant about it—she wanted to show me this place that had always lingered in her memory. This special mecca that she played in right before she became a woman and a wife and then a mother.
