“Dear God,” he said aloud. “We got it all wrong.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Merritt lay on her bed, fully clothed. Her hair was wet once more from the rain, and her hands were chilled, and she thought she really might die. She felt as though a twister had entered her bloodstream and turned her entire body into a disaster zone. Her thoughts were a mangled mess, making vast jumps from subject to subject and feeling to feeling. She was happy for Whit, because he had found something meaningful; she was frustrated with Helen, for not mentioning the existence of the journals when she was alive; she was perplexed by Whit, who had somehow not known that his wife kept writing notebooks for years. And oh, oh, she was worried about what this could mean for the thing she had dedicated her working hours and her resting thoughts to for weeks upon weeks. Writing this fifth installment of the series had been the most difficult and rewarding thing she’d ever done. Doing it with Whit had meant something wonderful, yes, but she had also proven so much to herself. Until Annie (sweet, darling Annie) had pulled the rug out from under them.
Merritt was fairly certain that she knew what this meant. It was the end of her hard work. How could it be anything else? How could they keep up this sham effort when Helen’s own wishes had been discovered in black and white?
“I feel sick,” she said out loud to herself.
She also felt generally damp, which was not pleasant. Slowly, she roused herself. She took a warming shower, put on her pajamas, and returned to the high bed with her laptop. She’d decided in the bathroom, under the pulsing rhythm of steaming water,that she would read through what she and Whit had written. She owed the work that much at least. She owed herself that much.
She read for a long, long time.
Whit held it together through the night. He took two melatonin and listened to a podcast about the Supreme Court and its failings until he fell asleep. And he held it together the next morning on the way to the Foothills School, driving through the endless rain and listening to Annie’s hopes and dreams for her school’s upcoming holiday party (apple cider, the Rankin/BassRudolphmovie, Liza’s mom’s homemade chocolate fudge). He made it through the drop-off line and pretty far down the storm-slicked road, but when his initial turn came at thethickly settledsign, he passed the bowered lane to his house and drove, aimlessly at first, then with a destination in mind: the sea. Notintothe sea, though he did make a private joke to himself about how What’s-Her-Name at the end ofThe Awakeningprobably would have liked to have a Range Rover to speed things along. But no. He wasn’t suicidal, had never been suicidal. He was just—and this should not have come as the shock it did—extraordinarily sad.
His wife was dead. Time had betrayed him, and he was unable to fulfill her final wishes, and in spite of everything, he was suddenly very much alone.
For over a year, the stress of Helen’s final task had filled every space, like the gases Whit learned about in science class, except that this gas had left room for nothing else, and the liquid feeling of grief had mostly trickled away. Then, the book was actually happening; the crushing worry had begun to retreat, and there was Merritt, who had cracked the seal on the cryogenic vault where he kept his feelings imprisoned, and all of it had begun to thaw. But now...
Whit was feeling now, all on his own. He drove to the pier and parked. He turned off his headlights and watched the rain hit the misty gray waves. He sat for a moment, a man on autopilot staring at the sea, and then he dropped his head to his steering wheel.
People say that grief is something that gnaws, but this wasn’t like that. This grief had teeth, and those teeth had latched onto Whit from the inside. The feeling was sharp and deep at once, and it gripped all of Whit, he felt it everywhere, it was all there was. A sob jumped from his throat, and Whit realized this was what people meant when they talked about weeping. He shook, he gasped for air, he felt his eyes grow sore and tired, and he did all of it in the Range Rover P615, which he’d never wanted but which Helen had convinced him would be safer than his old jeep. It had been an easy sacrifice to make for Helen. She had, after all, started putting the silverware upright when she loaded the dishwasher. For him. And he had folded clothes the way she liked, and they had bought the couch he wanted, and they had sent Annie to the school Helen liked. They had pleased each other like this, in small and big ways in the beginning, offering little gifts, surrendering their preferences when they could. Whit had gone to bed earlier than he would have liked, just because Helen liked for him to be in bed with her, and Helen had gone to see more than one post-punk revival band with him in concert. The house was Helen’s idea, and he’d ended up loving that house.
And here was the truth: Just before she died, they were fine. They were not unhappy. They did not often argue. But they had stopped giving these gifts to each other. Things had changed, and some days they hardly spoke. Life was all Annie and their careers, and what made Whit feel ill now was that he had been okay with that. He had been okay just existing in his wife’s proximity, and with her in his, never thinking that one day that would be impossible, and that she would leave him with an impossible task thathe had been stupid to believe would ever grow less impossible. He had tried to bring in someone else to fix his problem for him, a choice he now felt had only ever been a slap in the face to Helen—how could it have been anything else? And he had thought he was somehow making it all up to her, as though, by finishing her life’s work, he was undoing those last months or years of accepting that things were onlyfine, but he wasn’t. He simply could not do it. It would never be done.
And now Helen was gone, and he had failed her, and he felt it everywhere.
“Well,” Merritt said later that day, “what do they say?”
They were standing at the kitchen table, Whit having skipped his writing group for the journal emergency. Whit had them arranged on the table when Merritt arrived, and she tried not to read into what she saw as a less cozy, more clinical setting than their usual armchairs and blankets.
Whit tapped his fingers on the table before selecting a plum-colored journal from the stack.
“This one,” he said, holding it up like a preacher might hold a Bible, “has a full outline. All of book5 just laid out for us.”
“Oh my God,” Merritt said in disbelief. All this time.
“Yeah.”
Whit dropped his eyes. He had hardly looked at her since she arrived. The previous day’s downpour had abated into a drizzle, but the clouds were as dark and heavy as ever, and the temperature was just above freezing. When Merritt had peeked into the living room, she noticed that Whit had forgotten to start the fire.
“So,” she said, slowly, feeling her heart dribble more quickly against her ribs.
Whit leaned on a chairback and looked to his side.
“So.”
“Seriously, Whit,” she said, in an attempt at lightness, “you’re scaring me a little. What do we do?”
Now he looked at her. His eyes held pure astonishment.
“What do you mean? What else can we do?”
Merritt’s neck was hot, her throat was pounding, her eyes felt shadowy.
“What do you mean?” she said, feeling dumb for repeating the phrase back to Whit.
He narrowed his eyes at her, really and truly in disbelief.
