A firefighter stops me before I reach the car. Older guy. Eyes that have seen this before. “Son. Don’t.”
“Is she?—”
“The coroner’s been called.”
The coroner.
My knees hit the wet asphalt.
I don’t decide to fall—my body just quits.
Gives up on standing like it’s finally gotten the memo that the structural foundation of everything I am has been ripped out from underneath it.
I’m on my knees in the rain on a Texas highway, and Shadow’s hand is on my back, and somewhere in the wreckage of a blue Honda Civic is the woman I was laughing with not even an hour ago.
Shadow doesn’t try to get me up.
Doesn’t say it’s going to be okay.
He just crouches beside me in the rain with his hand on my back and waits.
That’s the thing about Shadow—he knows when words are useless.
Knows that sometimes the only thing you can do for a dying man is stay close and let him bleed.
Four minutes.
That’s how long it takes to end a life. Not hers. Mine.
I don’t remember the hospital.
I don’t remember the sheriff’s office.
I don’t remember signing papers or identifying her or any of the bureaucratic machinery that grinds forward when someone dies, indifferent to the fact that you are dying too.
I remember the house.
Shadow drives me home because I still can’t operate my own hands.
He walks me inside.
Doesn’t say anything.
Just stands in the doorway while I stand in the living room and look at all the evidence of a life that no longer exists.
Her boots by the door.
The brown ones with the worn heels she kept meaning to get resoled.
Her coffee mug in the sink—half-full, lipstick on the rim, the same shade of pink she’s worn since high school.
A strand of blonde hair on the pillow I can see through the open bedroom door.
The quilt her grandmother made folded at the foot of the bed.
A grocery list on the counter in her handwriting: milk, eggs, that fancy mustard Lee likes.
That fancy mustard Lee likes.
