chapter four

MEREDITH

On Friday night, forty-five minutes before Nolan and I are leaving for dinner with friends, our babysitter cancels via text. So sorry I’m sick and can’t watch Harper tonight. I have food poisoning.

“Liar,” I say before slamming my phone onto the bathroom counter, hard enough so that I check to make sure I haven’t cracked the screen. Even if I believed she were sick, which I do not, her flippant “so sorry” along with those three emojis would still have pushed me over the edge.

“Who’re you calling a liar?” Nolan calls out from our closet, where he is getting dressed.

“The sitter,” I answer. “She just canceled.”

“Who is she?” Nolan asks, emerging in boxers, socks, and a new light blue linen shirt. One of the many luxuries of being the husband, at least in our household, is that Nolan does not concern himself with domestic logistics like hiring sitters. All he has to do is pick out his own shirt.

“The middle Tropper girl,” I say. “I bet she’s canceling because of a boy.”

“She could have food poisoning,” Nolan says. “People do get food poisoning, ya know.”

“No way. Who gets food poisoning at six-forty-five on a Friday night? And by the way—if you truly do have food poisoning, then lie and say it’s anything other than food poisoning. Because food poisoning always sounds like a lie when you’re canceling.”

“It really does,” Nolan says with a laugh. “Why is that, anyway?”

“Because it usually is….I should call her out on it. Tell her to go ahead and come anyway, since it’s not contagious.”

“You can’t babysit with food poisoning,” Nolan says, missing the point. I watch him unbutton his shirt, then put it back on one of the padded hangers from my end of the closet.

“What are you doing? Put that back on,” I say. “I’ll see if my mother or Josie can come watch Harper.”

“Really?” he says, looking disappointed.

“Don’t you want to go out?” I say, thinking that I’ve been looking forward to our plans with the Grahams all week.

“I guess,” he says. “But I’m just as happy to stay in. We could order Chinese and watch Homeland. We have three episodes left.”

I cross my arms and glare at him. “We hardly ever go out,” I say.

“That’s not true,” he says. “We just went out to dinner last Saturday.”

“Yes, but that was with work people. That doesn’t count,” I say, knowing that if we stay in, Nolan will watch TV while I put Harper to bed, an arduous, frustrating task that can take hours. I stop short of telling him that I’m desperate to have a few drinks and a grown-up evening without our daughter, in no particular order, and instead say again that I’m going to try my mother and Josie, maybe one of them is free.

“You know Josie’s going to be busy. When has she ever not had plans on a Friday night?” Nolan says, in shirtless limbo. Always in good shape, he’s even more fit than usual, gearing up for his next triathlon, his morning training conveniently conflicting with getting Harper ready for school and out the door.

I text them both just in case, but just as Nolan predicted, Josie types back immediately that she is otherwise engaged. My mom writes that she would love to, but already has plans to go to the movies with Kay, her friend from church.

“Dammit,” I grumble to myself.

“We could call the Grahams and ask them to come hang out here instead?” Nolan says.

I shake my head, feeling annoyed by the suggestion. “The house is a mess, and we have nothing to eat here.”

“So what?” he says. “We can order a pizza.”

“I don’t want to do that,” I say, thinking that I will still be the one stuck putting Harper to bed. “Besides, the Grahams don’t want to pay for a sitter for their children only so they can spend the evening with ours.”

“All right,” he says. “Well, I’m sure we can think of something else fun to do.” He gives me his little double-finger gun and wink, and although I know he’s trying to be funny, it’s also a serious suggestion on his part.

I give him a little noncommittal grunt, wondering where I’d rank sex with my husband these days—before or after putting our daughter to bed.

I KNOW HOW I sound. I sound like a shitty mother and wife. Or at the very least an inadequate wife and ungrateful mother—which is in stark contrast to the image I try to portray on Instagram. Hashtag happy life. Hashtag beautiful family. Hashtag blessed. Sometimes, like tonight, I find myself wondering which is more egregious, to pretend to be happy when you’re not, or to feel so consistently dissatisfied when you should be happy. My therapist, Amy, tells me not to be so hard on myself—which probably has a lot to do with why I keep going back to her. She says that everyone creates a version of her life that she wishes were true and tries to believe. In other words, everyone lies on social media, or at least puts her best foot—and photos—forward. Amy also points out that although I have a lot to be thankful for, I did lose my brother in a tragic accident that rocked my family to the core, either directly or indirectly caused my parents to divorce, and left me with a sole sibling who is some combination of selfish and self-destructive. In other words, I’m entitled to my frustration and deep-seated sadness, regardless of how many positive things have happened to me since that horrific day.

As an aside, I also appreciate Amy’s forty-something perspective that the thirties are a grind for many, and motherhood isn’t the constantly blissful journey everyone thinks it will be when they attend their pink or blue or yellow baby shower. She swears that things get easier as your kids get older and become more self-sufficient, but she also maintains that no matter what their age or yours, motherhood is hard. Really hard. Stay-at-home mothers have it rough; working mothers have it rough; and part-time working mothers, like myself, have it rough, even though the first two camps annoyingly insist that we have the best of both worlds when I think we actually have the worst of each. There. I just did it again. Bitch, bitch, bitch. And I mean that as a noun and a verb.

To be clear, I love my daughter more than anything or anyone in the world. She is the best thing I have ever done or will ever do with my life. It’s just that taking care of a small child often feels tedious to me, a fact I can admit only to Amy, the person I pay to give me one-hour increments of complete honesty. I can’t tell my husband, who labeled me unmaternal in a recent argument. I can’t tell my friends, because it would undermine my perfect Facebook façade. I can’t tell my sister, who desperately wants a child of her own. And I can’t tell my mother, because I know she’d do anything to get back a few moments with her firstborn, even the kind of miserable, exhausting moments that I routinely gripe about. Besides, my mother needs me to be okay. The child she doesn’t have to worry about. The only one who hasn’t fucked up or died.

The more pressing issue, and even more closely guarded secret, is the way I feel about Nolan, my husband of nearly seven years. I’m not sure where to begin, other than at the beginning, with the answer to that question So, how did you two meet? Every couple has their canned answer, their story that’s told again and again. Sometimes the husband will take the lead in the retelling; sometimes the wife will. Sometimes it’s a tandem effort, scripted down to the smallest one-liner, suspenseful beat, wistful glance, fond chuckle, serendipitous plot twist. And then he said this. And then I did that. And now here we are. Happily ever after.

Sometimes I wonder if part of my problem with Nolan isn’t our story itself, the how and why we got together. Because even if I stick to the abridged, upbeat, dinner-party version, and avoid maudlin details such as “Nolan was a pallbearer at my brother’s funeral,” we always return to Daniel.

Growing up and for as long as I can remember, Nolan was my brother’s best friend, although with a four-and-a-half-year age gap, I actually didn’t pay much attention to either of them, at least when I was really little. He was just a fixture, like the tweed sectional in our family room or my father’s workbench in the garage, part of the backdrop of my childhood, one of the many older boys who came to trade baseball cards or throw a football in the backyard or spend the night, sleeping in the trundle pulled out from under Daniel’s twin bed.

By the time I reached middle school, it was harder to ignore Daniel and his friends, if only because Josie was paying such close attention to them. I remember her carrying on about Nolan in particular, and I had to agree that he was easy on the eyes. With wavy blond hair, bright blue eyes, and the kind of skin that easily tanned, he had such obvious Malibu lifeguard good looks that Daniel teasingly called him Baywatch. He also happened to be Daniel’s most athletic friend, a natural at every sport he played, though he didn’t have Daniel’s drive or work ethic, which evened things out for them on the playing fields. But what stood out to me the most was Nolan’s sense of humor, the laid-back way he approached everything, in stark contrast to my type A brother. In many ways, they really were opposites, their differences becoming more pronounced over the years, as Daniel graduated as Lovett’s valedictorian, then headed north for Harvard, while Nolan focused on girls and parties at Ole Miss, barely eking out a 2.0 GPA (all he needed to return to Atlanta to work at his family’s printing business). Yet despite their divergent paths, the two stayed close, always picking up right where they left off. In fact, just a few days before Daniel died, I overheard him telling Sophie that Nolan would one day be his best man.

So it was both fitting and gut-wrenching when we returned home from the hospital the morning after the accident to find Nolan leaning against his black Tahoe parked haphazardly in our driveway, his front door open. As my parents and I got out of our car and neared him, he must have been able to tell that something was wrong—very wrong—yet he calmly asked, “Where’ve y’all been? Where’s Danny? We’re supposed to shoot hoops at ten.” He was eating a glazed donut and licked his thumb, waiting for a reply.

I held my breath, and looked at my father, still wearing the crumpled suit from his business trip, his red tie stuffed into his pocket. He started to answer, but then put his head down and hurried into the house, my mother clutching his arm. Nolan stepped out of his truck, his smile fading.

“Meredith?” he said with a questioning look. “What’s going on?”

I was only twenty, not even old enough for a legal drink, yet it was clear that I would be the one to tell Daniel’s best friend that he was gone.

“Daniel was in a car accident last night,” I said, somehow finding my voice, though my throat was constricting, my heart pounding in my ears.

“Is he okay?” Nolan nodded, as if cuing me for the right answer. “He’s going to be okay. Right, Meredith?” He nodded again, his eyes wide.

I took a deep breath, then made myself say it aloud for the first time: Daniel died.

Nolan stared back at me, his face blank, as if he hadn’t heard what I said or simply couldn’t process the meaning of my words.

“A truck hit his car at the corner of Moores Mill and Northside,” I numbly reported, still in shock. “He was wearing his seatbelt, but his internal injuries were too great. They said it happened fast….He didn’t suffer at all.”

I repeated the words exactly as I’d heard my mother tell my grandparents: He didn’t suffer at all. I wanted so desperately to believe it was true, but would always doubt it, always wonder about Daniel’s final thought and whether he knew what was happening to him.

Nolan collapsed sideways onto his front seat, his long legs hanging out the door, his untied high-tops planted in the driveway. I held my breath in horror, as he let out a string of obscenities, his voice a low, guttural moan: My God, no. Jesus fucking Christ. Oh fffuckkk. Christ, no.

My instinct was to flee, escape the sound and sight of Nolan. But I couldn’t leave him. So I finally walked around the front of his car, opened the passenger door, and climbed in beside him. Only then did I register how cold I was, and that I had left my coat at the hospital.

“Can you turn on the heat?” I asked quietly.

Nolan shifted in his seat, pulled his door shut, and turned the key still dangling in the ignition. The radio came blaring on before he silenced it with his fist, then followed that up with a hard punch to his dash, splitting open his knuckle. I reached into my purse and handed him a tissue, but he didn’t take it. Blood trickled down his hand and wrist as he announced that he was going to take off.

“You’re leaving?” I said, suddenly panicking, dreading going into my house, literally afraid of seeing Josie, knowing that we no longer had a brother. That it was just the two of us.

“I think I should,” he said. “Right?”

I shook my head, staring at the bag of donuts on the seat between us. “No. Please come in.”

“Are you sure? Shouldn’t it just be…family?” Nolan’s voice cracked as tears began to stream down his face.

“You are family,” I said. “Daniel would want you to come in.”

ALMOST EVERYONE DESCRIBES the immediate aftermath of death the same way—as a surreal blur, at least for those in the inner circle, in charge of the details. I watched people come and go—close friends, neighbors, and relatives, including some I barely knew. They dropped off food, offered condolences, cried. Mom and Dad picked out a coffin and a cemetery plot with the lady from the funeral home and planned Daniel’s service with John Simmons, our longtime pastor. Dad sat in his office and wrote the eulogy, a glass of whiskey on his desk.

Meanwhile, I can’t remember Nolan ever leaving, though he must have gone home to sleep and shower. At my parents’ request, he sat in the living room with Daniel’s computer, going through all of his contacts, emailing and calling his college and medical school friends, one by one. He even phoned Sophie, within hours of her plane landing, and I listened to his conversation, marveling at how he said all the right things, how much Daniel loved her, how special she was to him. He pored through our family photo albums, putting together a collage that would be displayed at the wake. And when there was nothing left to do, he simply sat with me in stunned silence, the forever of it all just starting to sink in.

It was hard to call him a comfort exactly, because nothing could console any of us at that point, but there was something about his presence that was reassuring. He was nothing like my brother, but he was still a strong and powerful connection to him, and I could see so clearly why Daniel had loved him.

ABOUT A WEEK after the funeral, and the day before I returned to Syracuse to finish my junior year of college, Nolan stopped by to say hello and, in his words, “check in on everyone.” Standing in our foyer, he glanced up the staircase as I told him my mom was already in bed with a migraine and my dad was at the office, working late.

“And Josie?” he asked. “Is she back at school?”

“Not yet. She leaves next week….I don’t know where she is tonight,” I said, thinking it was par for the course, before the accident and especially since. I wasn’t sure where she’d been going or who she’d been hanging out with, but I had barely seen her for days. We had yet to talk about that night, where she had been or how she’d found out, and I was starting to get the feeling we never would. That Daniel’s death was going to push us further apart than we already were.

Nolan shoved his hands in his pockets, looked at me for a few seconds, then asked if I wanted to get a bite to eat. Feeling both surprised and strangely flattered by the invitation, I said yes. For the next hour, we drove around Buckhead, trying to decide where to go, vetoing restaurant after restaurant before we finally settled on the OK Cafe, a brightly lit Southern comfort–food diner. Choosing a booth in the back, we ate barbecue and macaroni and cheese, drank sweet tea, and talked about everything but Daniel. Instead Nolan asked me questions—basic ones—as if he hadn’t known me my whole life, which in some ways I guess he hadn’t.

“Why’d you pick Syracuse?” he asked. “I’ve never known a single person from Atlanta to go to Syracuse. Except you.”

“Isn’t that a good enough reason?” I deadpanned.

“Seriously?” he said with a smile, both dimples firing.

“Yeah, actually. Kind of,” I said, smiling a little myself. “Plus they have a really good drama school.”

“Oh, that’s right,” he said. “You’re a theater girl. You were in a lot of plays at Pace, weren’t you?”

I nodded and said that was my thing—one of the reasons I had chosen to go to a different high school from my brother and sister.

“Daniel was proud of you.”

I stared down at my plate, trying not to cry, as Nolan distracted me with more rapid-fire questions. “So you want to be an actress?”

I nodded again.

“But you’re so shy,” he said, something people often said to me when I told them what I was studying.

“I’m not really shy. I’m an introvert.” I went on to explain the difference—the fact that being around people didn’t make me uneasy, I just preferred to be alone most of the time. “Daniel was an introvert, too. He was selective about who he spent time with….He loved hanging out with you.”

Nolan smiled, as it occurred to me that maybe he wasn’t just being nice by inviting me to dinner. Maybe I was a comfort to him, too, his closest connection to Daniel.

“How else are you alike?” he asked.

I hesitated, unsure of what tense to use, the present for me, or the past for him. “I have his OCD. And his GPA.” I smiled. “Though you can’t really compare neurosurgery and Shakespearean theater…I’m smart, but he was way smarter.”

“What you study has nothing to do with your IQ.”

“True,” I said, though I was still sure Daniel’s had been higher than mine—higher than anyone’s in our family.

“You two are more alike than you and Josie, aren’t you?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, she’s a straight extrovert. Party girl. But it’s weird….I’m more like Daniel, but he was closer to her.” I felt a stab of jealousy, then guilt for feeling jealous. “Daniel was drawn to people like you…and her.”

“Fuckups?” He smiled.

“Happy people,” I said, wrapping my hands around my warm mug, having switched to coffee. “Fun people. You could always make him laugh.”

Nolan’s lower lip quivered.

“I heard him tell Sophie that you were going to be his best man. One day.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I guess I did,” he said. “But he was the best man. The best friend you could have. God. All the times he had my back…the messes he got me out of…”

I mustered a smile, recalling some of the funny stories in Nolan’s eulogy, how he had so perfectly captured Daniel’s loyal, solid essence while painting himself as the foolhardy sidekick.

“I still can’t believe it was him—and not me,” Nolan said. “God, I wish it had been me.”

I shook my head, although I’d had the same wish about myself. If only it had been me, I’d thought more than once, then my parents would still have a daughter to spare.

LATER THAT NIGHT, when Nolan dropped me back at the house, he asked if he could see Daniel’s room. I hesitated, feeling uneasy. I had yet to set foot in his room and knew that my parents had only been in there once, and that was only out of necessity, to get Daniel’s burial clothes. But I said yes and the two of us walked silently into the house, then upstairs and down the hall to my brother’s closed bedroom door. My heart raced as I turned the knob and peered inside. The room was dark, the shades drawn, and for a second, I actually found myself praying that we would find a miracle: Daniel asleep in his bed, the whole thing a bad dream. But the sight of his creaseless comforter and tight hospital corners confirmed our nightmare.

“Jesus,” Nolan whispered, as we took a few tentative steps into the room, our eyes adjusting to the dark. I tried to speak but couldn’t begin to think of what to say. There was nothing to say.

But Nolan found something. “I don’t think I’ve been up here since high school. It looks exactly the same.”

I nodded, grateful that my parents hadn’t redecorated our rooms the way a lot of parents did when their kids left for school—and wondered if they ever would now. Nolan and I looked around, taking visual inventory of Daniel’s bookshelf lined with paperback novels and tennis trophies and signed baseballs and his snow globe collection. We studied the framed baseball jerseys hanging on his walls and the collage of photos tacked to the bulletin board and the stack of medical books on his desk. His suitcase was open and neatly arranged on an ottoman in the corner, and I could see the pajamas Josie had given him for Christmas, the tags still on them. I stared at the jar of Carmex on his nightstand, sitting on top of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, an index card slipped inside, somewhere around the midway point. I had a sudden urge to read the page he had last read, but didn’t dare touch anything. I could tell Nolan felt the same, as if we were standing before a roped-off room in a museum, staring back into history, the end of a young man’s life, a moment frozen in time. We looked and looked until there was nothing left to observe, and then Nolan took my hand in his, pulled me to his chest, and wrapped his arms around me. “I love you, Meredith,” he whispered in my ear.

Of course I knew what he meant—and in what way he loved me: a fond, surrogate-big-brother way. But the words still caught me off guard, along with the goosebumps that rose on my arms as I whispered it back. I love you, too, Nolan.

In that second, I could no longer deny what I had been trying to deny for weeks, maybe even years: I had a crush on Nolan. It was absurd on so many fronts. Even the word was flimsy, silly, and stupid amid our monumental loss. Beyond the fact that Nolan was too old and way too good-looking for me, he was my brother’s best friend, off-limits before, and certainly now. Besides, how could I be attracted to anyone so soon after my brother’s death? It was the kind of inappropriate thing that would happen to Josie, not me. And yet, there it was—as unmistakable as my clammy hands and racing, guilty heart.

I looked away, telling myself that the whole thing was probably in my head, some sort of delusional reaction to grief. Post-traumatic stress. It would pass. And even if it didn’t, nobody would ever know. I would never tell him. I would never tell anyone.

“We better go,” I said, backing away from him.

“Yeah,” he said, running his hand through his hair, looking rattled. “I better head out.”

A few seconds later, we were back downstairs in the foyer, saying an awkward good night.

“So you’re leaving for school tomorrow?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Tomorrow morning.”

“Okay,” Nolan said, giving me a quick hug followed by a peck on the cheek. “Take care of yourself, Mere.”

“You, too, Nolan,” I said.

“I’ll keep in touch, I promise,” he said as sincerely as you can say anything.

I nodded, believing that was his intention, but also doubting it would actually happen. Eventually we would lose touch, my family’s connection to Nolan becoming a secondary casualty of our tragedy.

“SO I HAVE a proposal for you,” I say to Harper when I find her in her bedroom (my childhood bedroom) after officially canceling our dinner plans and changing into my most comfortable pajamas.

She looks up from her collection of stuffed mice, which live in the bottom drawer of her nightstand, and says, “What is it?”

“Do you know what that means?” I ask, sitting on the edge of her bed. “It’s a deal. Do you want to make a deal?”

She gives me a suspicious look but nods, willing to at least hear me out.

“If you brush your teeth and get right in bed, I’ll read you two bedtime stories and…” I pause to build suspense. “I won’t go out.”

With a glimmer in her eye, she says, “No babysitter?”

“No babysitter,” I say.

She grins at me. Other than my mom, Nolan’s parents, and Josie, Harper hates having a sitter, especially at night, and even the fun, young ones send her into a tailspin of separation anxiety and grief.

“But you have to go straight to bed after that. Lights out. And you have to stay in bed. No shenanigans.”

She stares at me, and I can see the wheels turning in her head.

“Do we have a deal?” I say, knowing that I’m up against the single best negotiator in Atlanta.

Sure enough, she has a counteroffer. “Four books,” she says.

I try not to smile as I say, “Three.”

“No, five,” she says, holding up one fist, then opening it, flashing her fingers.

I shake my head, calmly explaining that it doesn’t work that way. Once she says four, she can’t go back up to five. But because I admire her moxie, I give in a little bit. “Let’s start with three and see how that goes. If it’s not too late, we’ll do a fourth. Now go on,” I say, gesturing toward her bookcase. “You choose, honey.”

Jubilant, she skips to her bookcase, strategically selecting three of her picture books with the most words per page. The girl is no dummy. Her first two selections are solid, but then she reaches for Horton Hears a Who! and I let out a little groan. Although I love the book’s strong moral message of tolerance and equality, I’m not in the mood for Dr. Seuss.

“Can I get one veto?” I say, thinking there are so many great books we’ve neglected for a while.

“No, Mommy,” she says, putting her hand on her hip. “You said I could choose. And I choose Horton Hears a Who!”

“Fair enough,” I say. “Now, c’mon. Go brush your teeth.”

She nods, then heads straight for the bathroom that my sister and I used to share, while I straighten up her toys, tuck in her mice, and settle into her twin bed to wait for her.

A few seconds later, she is back. I resist the urge to tell her she couldn’t possibly have brushed her teeth thoroughly in that amount of time, and instead just slide over, making room for her. She climbs into bed, smelling of bubble-gum toothpaste, and hands me Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. It is one of my favorites—and one I can remember my mother reading to Josie and me when we were kids. I tell Harper this because she loves hearing about “Mommy and Josie” when we were little. She smiles, her face lit with anticipation as she nestles into the crook of my arm. I open the book and start to read in my most animated voice, savoring the sweetness of the moment. Reminding myself to never take anything for granted.