“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”
You’re still not here for me.
But that wasn’t fair, either. Chris couldn’t abandon his patients. And if he seemed the teensiest bit detached, well, he was a doctor. He was used to compartmentalizing. He couldn’t do his job if he lost it over every tragic death.
“How was the service?” he asked.
I mopped my streaming eyes. “Well, I didn’t throw myself on top of Dad’s casket, begging to be buried with him. So that was good.”
There was silence.
“Probably because Dad didn’t have a casket. He was cremated.”Shut up, shut up.“Did I tell you that already?”
“You mentioned it, yes.”
Right. Oversharing was my thing, not his. I took a deep breath, forcing myself to edit my thoughts, to give him only the best parts of myself, to distill my day into short, curated sentences like status updates, the way I did when we went out together with his friends.The light from the stained glass windows in colored splinters on the floor. The lilacs trembling in the shadow of the pines. Joe’s hard arm around my shoulders, pulling me into the comforting warmth of his body…
I crumpled a tissue in my fist. “We had a bagpiper.”
“Sounds very picturesque,” Chris said indulgently.
I thought of the tourists’ cell phones flashing in the sun. Chris’s family used to rent a vacation home on Mackinac. We might have been childhood sweethearts, like Anne Shirleyand Gilbert Blythe. Not that I’d spent much time with the flatlander kids—the trolls, we called them, since they came from under the bridge.
“It was.” I pulled the old flannel shirt closer, taking comfort in its warmth. “Dad would have loved it.”
“How’s your mother?”
“Okay.” I settled against the wooden headboard, trying not to feel like I was on a psychiatrist’s couch. “She won’t really say. Oh, and I colored my hair. Battle-ready red. The bathroom looked like the set of the Red Wedding.”
“You colored your hair,” Chris repeated, ignoring theGame of Thronesreference. I’d watched the series without him, bingeing on my couch while he stemmed the real tide of death at the hospital.
All that red…I sucked in my breath. Was there blood when Dad fell? Was that why Mom was upset? But he died from a heart attack.
I batted the intrusive thought away.
“Do you want to see?” I shifted again, the shirt falling open as I curled my legs under me, switching the call to video. Chris’s face popped up on the screen. I angled my phone so he could see me. And the rainbow mountain of plush animals behind me on the bed. My open suitcase was in the background. My clothes were scattered on the floor.
“Very bright,” Chris said.
I made a face. “Is that like ‘picturesque’?”
He smiled. “Your students will love it.” Which didn’t answer my question.
“Did you get my flight info?” I asked.
“Yeah. Tell you what, why don’t you Uber to my apartment? You can let yourself in, and I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
He wasn’t coming to the airport. Disappointment needled my heart. Still…Home, he’d said. As if I belonged, as if we belonged together. “Sure.”
“I might be late.”
I understood. If something came up, if someone needed him at the hospital, my feelings couldn’t be allowed to matter. “The thing is…” I heard myself say, “I might stay a couple more days.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine,” I lied. “It’s only…This could be my chance to make things right with Mom.” A reset. A fresh start. I was good at those. At starting, not following through.
“Anne, you can’t fix your father’s death.”
