Chapter 20
Life as a House
Kate
“Did you see this?” Andrea asked, pushing her iPad under Kate’s nose later that morning as she was trying to cut up the twins’ bananas into even circles. It was cold out, closer to winter than fall, and there was frost on the windows.
“I’m not sure. What is it?”
“It’s about that woman. You know, the one they took that photo of? In Chicago? That blonde one who looks a bit like the woman who dated Ellen. The one who went crazy?”
“Anne Heche?”
“Right. She was on Another World, the soap opera, wasn’t she?”
“I think so.”
“Can you believe it?”
“That Anne Heche went crazy?”
“No. About the Chicago woman . . . Cecily . . .”
“Grayson?”
“Yes, her. She was this picture-perfect widow, and now she’s all over the place, kissing some other guy.”
Kate put the knife down and scooped the banana circles into a bowl.
“Boys! Breakfast.”
Kate watched Andrea as she put the boys’ breakfast in place. Her face was flushed as she stabbed at her iPad, scrolling from one news story to the next. She was dressed for a session with her trainer. A man who was good-looking enough to cause all kinds of trouble with the stay-at-home moms of Westmount. But Andrea seemed sexless, almost. Androgynous despite the long blonde curls and fake semipermanent eyelashes.
“Who cares who she’s dating?” Kate asked. “Her husband’s been dead for a year.”
“It takes two years to mourn properly.”
“Really?”
“I had to read all this research once on the stages of grief. It takes two years to go through them.”
“Okay, but still—”
Willie and Steven tottered into the kitchen. Kate helped them into their seats and fastened them tight. She put the bowl of bananas in front of them, admonishing them to share. Steven reached into the bowl and took out three circles, placing them in front of his brother.
“These are yours.”
Willie gave him a thumbs-up.
“Just because she kissed a man doesn’t mean she’s through grieving,” Kate said, unsure of why she was arguing this point. “Besides, maybe it doesn’t take that long for everyone. Maybe it’s just an average? Or maybe he wasn’t a very good husband.”
Andrea’s head rose. “Do you know something I don’t?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, then. It isn’t right.”
“Why do you care?”
Kate immediately regretted her tone. But who was Andrea to judge? She didn’t know anything about grief. Sure, she had a husband who wasn’t around much. She was bored and wished she could go back to work without actually having to do so. But she didn’t know. She didn’t know how it cut you in half. How even when you were past it, you were never over it. You were always in it. Always.
“It’s just . . . wrong.”
Andrea was clearly daring Kate to defy her. To give her an excuse to direct her anger somewhere. Kate turned away and went to the coffee machine. Maybe she needed to switch out Andrea’s coffee for decaf.
Kate’s own grief had hit her for real when she woke twenty-four hours after crashing out in her seedy hotel room, not sure where she was. Not sure who she was. Lying in a lumpy bed in clothes she’d worn for too long in a city where she knew no one after having run away from her life (her kids!)—that wasn’t like her. The her she’d worked hard to become. She’d spent twenty years as one kind of person. Someone who did what was expected. Who showed up. Who had nothing mysterious about her. A good-enough mother. A good-enough wife and friend. And now she was another kind of person. A sneak. A thief. Someone who lied and deceived.
She’d risen and pulled back the curtain. It was dark outside. The dirt-smudged window revealed only the broken bricks of the building next door. She craned her neck. The sky was black. The cheap clock radio on the rickety table next to the bed said it was five o’clock. It must be the morning, which meant she’d slept through an entire day.
Another day gone. Another day done.
She’d relieved her too-full bladder in the dingy bathroom down the hall. If there was anyone else staying in this place, she neither saw nor heard any sign of them. Back in her room, she ate some of the food she’d purchased at the corner store, then turned on the small TV that hung from the wall. Left over from the early nineties, it reminded her of her first television, its screen smaller than the computer screen at the office that was no more. Bulky in the back to account for the nodes or tubes or . . . Oh, who cared. It was a television. But easier to think about than what she’d left behind.
A few clicks of the dial brought her to CTV News, a Canadian equivalent of CNN, but with a drier, newsier approach that she’d come to characterize later as Canadian. They were just as interested in the explosion as America was, but there was a certain remove. The empathy was there, but the . . . That was it. The fear was missing.
The funerals were starting that day. Or maybe they’d been going on for days, and she’d missed them. If past was prologue, she knew they wouldn’t cover all of them. Only those of the people who’d become famous in their deaths. The public would feel invested for a time, as if it were their own loss. When everyone was buried, they’d move on to other things. The coverage would slow. The ticker would fill with other headlines. The only people who’d remember her would be those who knew her best.
Her children. They’d remember. And though they’d receded on her journey, they were front and center now. But no, they never went away. Not from the moment they’d been born. Even though she’d never felt as attached as she thought she would. As she thought she should. She loved her children. She was proud and happy and scared and nervous for them. Wanted the best for them, wanted their happiness. But she’d felt, for a long time, maybe from the beginning, as if she wasn’t the person who was best equipped to give them that. It was hard to describe it other than that maybe it resembled the feeling you had when you gave a child up for adoption.
That they’d be better off without her.
Kate had pulled the picture from the pouch of the sweatshirt she still hadn’t changed out of. A great weight was tugging at her chest. Trying to pull her back to what she’d fled. But she was on a path she couldn’t turn back from. She did her best to push those feelings down. To concentrate on the television screen and its inferior picture quality. It worked after a while. When she returned from the quick shower she took under a lukewarm spray, she’d developed a morbid curiosity about whether her own funeral would rate a televised appearance.
She’d watched three before a familiar church appeared. Gray stone, a high steeple, a few brilliant maples surrounding it. It was the church she spent every Sunday in, bored, because that’s what they did on Sundays. It’s what they’d always done on Sundays. From time immemorial. That’s what her husband always said, anyway. And then he’d laugh because everything was funny to him, even the mundane things, and JJ would shush him because JJ was the serious one of the bunch.
Kate felt sick at the thought of Em and JJ being in church without her. Even if this funeral wasn’t hers, this was where it would take place. And they’d probably be attending other funerals there, too. The dead they knew who worked in the building. Tom Grayson and Margo, his assistant. Or were they too young for that? Kate didn’t know. Another thing to add to her list of motherhood failures. A long, long list.
Tom was dead. Kate had trouble absorbing that information. Because there was something about Tom. He’d seemed invincible, somehow. But as she watched the screen, she didn’t have any choice but to accept it. There was Cecily, dressed in black, holding Cassie’s and Henry’s hands as they left a limousine and climbed the steps together.
And that’s when she’d felt it for the first time. That wrench in her works. Watching a scene from her own life on a crappy television. There but not. Knowing she could never go back, no matter what happened.
“Did you hear what I said?” Andrea asked.
“Huh?”
Andrea looked exasperated. “The boys were asking for milk.”
“Oh, sorry. Daydreaming.”
Andrea frowned. Once again, Kate could read the thoughts in her head. Something was off. Kate was becoming . . . unreliable.
Kate took the milk from the fridge and filled the boys’ cups. Because Andrea was watching, she added milk to the food diary next to the fridge, where she still had to record how often they pooped and peed each day as if they were babies.
“Wow,” Andrea said. She was back to flicking through her iPad, her manicured fingers clicking against the glass.
“What’s that?”
“Cecily lost both her husband and her best friend in the tragedy.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah. And here’s something funny. Her best friend’s name was Kaitlyn. Just like you.”