“That Mr. Abadi didn’t try to brake.”
“The police ... the other officers who came to my door on the night Ali died ... said he crashed into a tree.”
“That’s correct.” He regarded me expectantly. Like a teacher waiting for a prize student to come up with the right answer.
“And?” I prompted, wishing he’d just spit out whatever he was trying to say. I could barely put one foot in front of the other. This was no time to test my analytical skills.
“Was your husband depressed?” His measured gaze focused on me. “Was he having trouble at work? Were you two, maybe, having issues in your marriage?”
I gave him a blank stare. “Like what kind of issues?”
“Did you fight a lot? Did you have any money troubles? Anything that might have caused him to become mentally unstable?”
“Ali wasn’t depressed. He was the most stable, even-tempered person on the planet.” My husband’s quiet, easy smile flashed in my mind. My heart felt like it was cracking. “Why would you think otherwise?”
“It appears he drove straight into the tree and didn’t brake or swerve to avoid crashing.”
The implication of his words finally hit me. “What are you saying?” My voice rose. “You think Ali drove straight into a tree on purpose?”
The compassion that filled his dark eyes made me irrationally angry. “We have considered that your husband’s crash was the result of suicide.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” I shot back. “Ali wouldn’t kill himself. We’re Muslim. We don’t kill ourselves. It’s a sin.”
“And was your husband very religious?”
“No.” Neither of us was. “But that’s not the point. I’m telling you that my husband didn’t kill himself. He had no reason to. We had a loving marriage, our kids are in college and thriving. We both had good jobs.” My voice cracked. To think of Ali as in the past was more than I could process. “Is that all?” I asked, suddenly exhausted. I couldn’t wait for them to leave so I could bury myself under the bedcovers.
“Yes.” He rose. “For now.”
“Can’t an accident just be an accident?” I asked.
“Sure. Itwaslate at night. Your husband had worked all day. It’s possible he fell asleep on the road.”
That didn’t sound like Ali either. He was too conscientious a driver to doze off behind the wheel. “What if he had a medical incident?”
“We’re waiting for the toxicology report,” the officer said. “Maybe that’ll shed some light on things.”
I led them out to the foyer. “Ali wasn’t a drinker. He hadn’t touched alcohol since college.”
“The tox screen is standard procedure,” the officer reassured me. “It’ll be several weeks before the results come back.”
“Ali didn’t use drugs either. The man hated to even take Tylenol.”
I showed them to the door. Officer Torres smiled and said goodbye, but I registered the skeptical slant of his mouth. The idea that Ali killed himself was as ridiculous as discovering the earth was flat.
Call it instinct, intuition, or whatever it was, but I knew with everything in me that Ali hadn’t taken his own life.
Chapter Four
The weeks following the funeral were a fog.
I fought the urge to retreat and sleep for a month because I didn’t want the children to feel like they’d lost their mother too. I forced myself to get out of bed every morning and go through the motions. Mostly I was still numb. Like a boat that was adrift with the shore in the hazy distance.
“It’s your brain protecting you from unbearable pain. I looked it up,” Lulu said authoritatively. My sister always searched for answers online. She believed Professor Google solved pretty much everything. “The numbness can last a long time.”
I worried about what that meant. How much more nightmarish could life get once the numbness wore off?
The last days of August approached, and the children departed for the fall semester of college, Ayla for her junior year and Adam as a sophomore. They seemed eager to go: Adam finally emerged from the basement, and Ayla hurriedly packed and left as early as she could, a full week before classes started. As if escaping the house would distance her from reality. Maybe it was for the best. I hoped returning to school would breathe some life back into her.
