Finding Grace

by Loretta Rothschild

He no longer cared what time it was. It was as if he knew that from now on, there was just before and after.

He held my diary in his hands. It felt so much like me, yet there wasn’t a trace.

All it did was force him through a kaleidoscope of memories: when he tried to teach me to ski, our first date at the River Cafe by the bright pink pizza oven, my empty coffee cups left in every room of the house.

Tom didn’t know how long he sat huddled on the bathroom floor, gripping the lid of my perfume, alternating between thoughts of murder or suicide, wishing that he’d been standing beside us and that the last thing he’d seen on this earth were my eyes and Chloe’s button nose. The only thing worse than surviving our death was living with it.

The days are long, but the years are short”—which used to annoy him. But now he’d learned the hard way just how true that was. Everything was just a click away from the past tense.

Grief’s iron grip never weakens. You just become accustomed to its hand around your throat, moving forward but never moving on.

I seemed so sure of myself as I recited these same verses, pretending not to notice him. Now here Grace was, repeating verbatim the last loving thing I ever said to him before I was killed.

He wasn’t sure if it was real or a dream, but looking at Grace in that small room full of stars and seeing her face reflected millions, no, trillions of times, was like a window into a universe where wives don’t suddenly die. A universe where children go down to hotel lobbies for crêpes and get to eat them. A universe of second dates and second chances.

You can’t boycott grief, unless you want to boycott happiness with it. You don’t get the meat without the bones.”

What was he supposed to say? That poem was one of the last things Honor ever said to me before she died. The idea of hearing it made him want to weep.

But all I knew was that my dad was dead, and my mother had turned as cold as a corpse. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”

Just as it had never occurred to me that my mother could have been ill, she’d never foreseen a future where she’d outlive me. Had her ability to mother been stolen from her like mine had?

This lie had legs, and it was running in unexpected directions. This lie had consequences. It involved Henry. It was a matter of life and death.

He knew he should have prepped them about the upcoming announcement, but how would that have gone exactly? Please don’t mention my dead wife’s ring on the finger of my new fiancée?

Hearing the poem of his life, it was as if Tom could no longer discern the speaker. Was it Grace or me? Was this Paris or London? Was that fireworks or smoke? He saw a bride in her long white veil, confetti, and a funeral procession, dirt landing on the lid of a child’s coffin. Henry screaming in the delivery room, or was that Chloe in the hotel? Was that Grace’s scar on my face? Henry in the morning eating porridge in the kitchen, or was that Chloe with her crêpes? He heard his feet hitting the risers as he ran down the stairs to search for us in the lobby of the Ritz. Was that a violin screeching or me screaming? Tom felt the heat against his face, the thick smoke, choking him, the obliteration of his world as he knew it. It isn’t your life that flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die. It’s the life you thought you were going to have, just before it’s snatched away from you forever.

“I didn’t kiss Chloe goodbye,” Tom said. “I didn’t even tuck her in the night before. When I close my eyes, I don’t see Chloe dancing on the bed or bossing us all around. I don’t see her wearing one of her tiaras or having a tantrum. She’s just standing there, waiting for me, wondering why I didn’t save her. Wondering why I’m not there.” Tom wept without regard, the tears coming thick and fast down his face.

“Chloe doesn’t need books in heaven,” she said. “She has her mother.”

“Will I go to heaven?” she said. “Yes, we all go to heaven eventually, but not for a very, very, very long time.” “When? A thousand years?” “Oh, even longer than that.” I glanced at the geranium plant on the windowsill, its leaves velvety and green. Chloe was quiet for a moment. “Will you be there, Mumma?” she said, looking straight at me, her chin resting in her hands now. The question hit the back of my throat. “Yes, my darling. Of course I’ll be there.”

But love wasn’t measured by its ending. It was every cup of coffee, broken boiler, empty crisp packet, and train ride. It was every hangover, stubbed toe, high temperature, nasty splinter, and burned tongue. Every eye roll, private joke, and piece of burned toast. Every morning cuddle and blunt pencil.