telling him it was a leftover wedding card previously misplaced. When he pulled out the card, which had a baby rattle and “Congratulations” printed on its front, at first he looked confused. Then I handed him the pregnancy test stick, with a bright pink plus sign, and he burst into tears. He grabbed me and spun me around, laughing and hollering with joy, until I couldn’t see straight. There is nothing like being able to give your husband, the man you’ve loved since the day you laid eyes on him, a dream come true.
We met at Northwestern in our first year, during frosh week. My dorm was having an unsanctioned floor crawl. Gabe, who had been invited by a friend who lived in my dorm, had backed into me coming out of the Purple Jesus room, his giant Slurpee-sized cup of grape Kool-Aid mixed with high-proof vodka spilling all over both of us. Shocked at the cold, rubbing-alcohol-scented drink sopping into my white T-shirt and shorts, I simply stared at him, my mouth open. But then we burst out laughing, and he offered to help clean me up in the women’s washroom, which also happened to be the orgasm shooter room for the night.
“How apropos,” Gabe said, wiggling his eyebrows at me and handing me a shot glass. I laughed again, tossing back the sickly sweet shooter.
“Thanks,” I said. “That was the best one I’ve ever had.”
While we’d been together for so many years after that, our lives intertwined, the day we were married was the day it all really began. If only we’d had more time to bask in that happiness. There was a carton of orange juice in our fridge that had lasted nearly as long.
I stack the photos back together, not bothering to wipe away my tears.
“Teg, please don’t cry.” Gabe shifts closer to me, but I can barely feel his touch. I’m so numb.
“Do you think I’ll ever be happy again?” I close the lid on the box of photos. Saving them for the same time tomorrow night. “I mean, really happy?”
“I know it,” he says. “You’re just not ready yet, love.”
I touch my necklace, still trying to get used to it. It’s a white-gold, round pendant, about the size of a quarter and a half-inch thick. It hangs from a delicate chain. And while the pendant was hollow when the necklace arrived, via a white-and-orange FedEx box nowhere near special enough for its cargo, it’s now filled with the ashes of a broken dream.
I chose the necklace off the internet shortly after I was released from the hospital, one late night when sleep was impossible. I considered an urn, but somehow it felt wrong. That’s how my grandma had kept Gramps’s ashes, in an ornate brass urn on her kitchen windowsill. “Where we can still kiss him every day, the sun and me,” she liked to say.
In truth, twenty-six felt too young to keep—or need, for that matter—an urn of any kind. I casually mentioned the idea of something a little more intimate to Anna, hoping she’d tell me wearing a necklace filled with ashes wasn’t at all weird, but her frown and pinched look suggested otherwise. Gabe hadn’t been much help, either. None of us wanted to deal with the horror, but I didn’t have that luxury because it was my body that was now hollow. Empty, like my gold necklace used to be.
Gabe glances at the pendant. “You don’t have to wear it all the time, you know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Does it...make you feel better?” he asks, shifting sideways so he can face me straight on.
I pause for a moment. “No.” Then I turn my head and look at him before quickly turning away. I don’t like his look. It’s a complex mix of concern, sorrow and frustration.
“I’m worried it’s making things worse, Tegan.”
Anger burns in my belly. The last thing I should have to do is explain myself. Especially after what he’s done to us, to me. “How could anything make this worse?” My voice is low, unsteady.
“You know what I mean,” he says.
“Obviously I don’t.” I slam the box of photos on the coffee table and stand up so quickly I feel woozy.
“Hey, hey, Tegan,” he soothes, and I know if I were still on the couch he’d reach for me. But I’m just out of his grasp, and neither of us tries to close the distance. “I want to understand. I’m just trying to help.”
How do you explain that if you could, you’d cut your chest open and pour the ashes right inside so they could forever lie next to your heart? Like a blanket to smother the chill of sorrow. You can’t, so you don’t.
Gabe and I are the only ones who know exactly what’s in the necklace. Well, us and the funeral director, who filled it at my request. Close to my heart. It’s the only way I can keep breathing.
“I’m going to bed,” I say. My muscles ache as I walk slowly to the bedroom, making the space between us even greater. I’m so fragile these days, paper-thin. Even though I’m only halfway through my twenties, I feel more like a ninety-year-old. Probably because for the past couple of months I’ve done little aside from move in a daze from couch, to bed and back.
I barely remember what it feels like to get up and get ready for work. To enjoy takeout during one of the nature shows Gabe loves to watch, to shop for shoes or bags or the very short dresses Anna likes to fill her closet with, hopeful for date nights. I forget what it’s like to have a purpose that gets me up each morning.
These days I care little about what’s happening beyond my four apartment walls. I don’t remember what fresh air smells like, except for when Mom opens one of the apartment windows, touting fresh air as effective an elixir as anything else. The late winter chill that tickles my senses always feels good, but I don’t want to feel good. Not yet. It has only been seventy-nine days. So I ask her to shut the window and she sighs, but she always does it. That’s the thing about going through something like this. People will do anything to try and make you happy again; they’ll give you whatever you want. Except that the thing you really want you can never have again, and no one can bring it back.
“I’ll come with you,” Gabe says, from behind me.
“You don’t have to,” I reply, although I don’t mean it. As much as I am still so angry with Gabe, still full of rage and blame, I don’t like to sleep alone.
“I want to.”
“Fine,” I say, pushing the door to our bedroom open. As I do, I glance into the guest room to my right. The door is supposed to be closed—I’ve been quite clear about that—but it’s wide-open. Beckoning me.
The pile of baby blankets rests on the dresser, which would have doubled as a change table to save precious space in our not-so-spacious apartment. My mom must have forgotten to close the door when she left. Casting my eyes around the dim room, the bile rises in the back of my throat. Pushed up against one wall, the crib is still covered by a white sheet, with the mobile—plush baseballs and baseball bats, which Gabe had picked out as soon as we found out it was a boy—creating a peak in the sheet’s middle like a circus tent. In another corner I see the cradle, which Gabe had restored beautifully, waiting for a final coat of stain. Even though we still had months to go, we had been ready for our boy’s arrival.
Feeling sick, I turn away and shut the door firmly. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll agree to the crib being taken apart. It will have been eighty days, nearly three months, and I know I’ll soon have to accept no baby will ever sleep here, gazing with wide, curious eyes as the mobile circles soothingly overhead.
