“I never know how to answer that question.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because I don’t know when she died.”
“Oh shit. Right.”
“I can’t even tell you how long it took before I stopped expecting a call from her. At some point, not even all that long ago, I realized I wasn’t waiting for the phone to ring anymore. And I wasn’t getting that double hit of terror and hope every time it did. You only realize you’ve passed those kinds of milestones in hindsight.”
“Oh God, yeah, the phone ringing! That’s the absolute worst when you’re waiting for news. I once got to the point, when my older sister was ill, that my phone was triggering little panic attacks whenever it rang—even after she’d died.” Alice planted her hand on her chest. “Kimberly made me change the ringtone, which helped, but even now, if I’m out and about and I hear that particular tone on someone else’s phone, it’s like a dagger to the heart.”
Carter looked over at her for a few seconds longer than she was comfortable with, considering he was driving. He had that look as ifhewas trying to figureherout.
“Carter? The road?”
“Sorry,” he said, turning back. “You know, I have the same thing, with the ringtone. Like I hear it somewhere, and I feel it, right here.” He lightly punched his sternum with one hand. “And I get the same rush of feelings I did when I was waiting to hear—like hope, but a dark hope that felt like someone was punching into your gut and twisting your insides. I remember at one point wishing that I’d just get the call—thecall—and it would be all over. I mean, shit, that sounds…”
“No, I get it,” Alice whispered. “I mean, different circumstances, of course, but…”
“I really think you do,” he said, almost to himself, a note of wonder in his voice. “So many people claim to know what you’re going through…”
“What kind of closure have you had?”
“Her brother and sister held a memorial service but I didn’t go. I wasn’t ready. With a regular death, I guess you all accept it at the same time, more or less. Not with this. You just can’t silence the ‘what ifs.’ It’s like there’s a line in your book:The question of where she lay was always present. In the absence of certainty, his mind threw up gruesome images, all with one thing in common—she lay alone, unmarked, forgotten.Except that sometimes even now I picture her alive, getting on with a regular existence somewhere else. There’s an infinite number of parallel lives she could be living. Man, your sister would have a field day with me.”
Alice didn’t want to break it to him that Kimberly already had.
“I mean, I’ve accepted she’s gone. I just… Sometimes I also expect her to walk through the door. It’s messed up, but that’s what it is. Like the book said, I’ve gotta learn to live with a question that doesn’t have an answer. That’s been going around in my head since I read it.”
Alice murmured in sympathy.
“I remember Nika saying once that she never moved on from her fiancé’s death,” he continued, “though she did finally grow out of her death wish and become attached to life again. In her case, there was a funeral, of course, a body in a casket—she watched it go into the ground, from a distance—but she never found out for sure who killed him.”
“So you were both living in limbo?”
“Isn’t life a state of limbo?”
“Ooh, deep.”
Carter laughed. “This isalla bit deep, right? I don’t know why we keep ending up here.”
Alice pointed to her head. “Morbid-story magnet, remember?”
He laid a hand on her thigh and gave her a grim smile. And though it began as a gesture of comfort, he left it there as they drove, long after the moment had passed. She liked it—the warmth, the connection. An anchor.
“You really are exactly as you appear, aren’t you?” he said as they joined the highway.
“What do you mean? Where didthatcome from?”
“No surprises. No hidden agenda. Straight up.”
“Dull and predictable, that’s me.”
“You’re hardly dull. And I like it when things are predictable—when the things that happen in a day are the things I expect to happen. You may be the most genuine and authentic person I’ve ever met.”
“Seriously?”
“I haven’t experienced much of that in my adult life, where no one is what they pretend to be. Hell, when I’ve spent a lot of the last decade literally pretending to be someone I’m not.”
