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ONE

THIS IS HOW I lost David.

It started right here, on the trail near the bank of the Cotton River, late September, as we walked together, David in a shirt and tie, me in a dress but wearing David’s suit jacket. I didn’t need to tell him I was cold. He shrugged off his jacket the moment the wind whipped up, dropping it like an electric blanket over my shoulders. David always represented warmth to me, a human radiator; I usually had to roll away from him in bed at night.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

To our right, the Cotton River ribboned through our town. It was tranquil this time of year, especially with the unseasonable cold, below fifty, too chilly for even the most ardent Jet Skiers and boaters who refused to acknowledge the end of summer.

“You’re taking a walk with your husband on his birthday. Giving an old man his last wish.”

“Stop. Forty-two isn’t old.” I squeezed his arm. “And I have news for you, mate — you don’t look old, either.”

He laughed that off, but it was true. Old is the last word I would ever use to describe David — the picture of health, muscle-bound and trim, quick with that beaming smile.

“It’s the bald head,” he says. “Hides the receding hairline and the gray.”

Neither of which, as far as I could tell, was true. He’d always had that look, ever since the day I met him, thirteen years ago. Not many men can pull off a shaved head, but David could. The day I met him, my first take on him, in his tank top and shorts and running gear, was that he was a gym teacher, maybe a former football player who’d taken up marathon running after retirement.

“Here — stop,” he said.

“Right here on the path? Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” he said. “You said we could do whatever I wanted for my birthday.”

“Yeah, I did,” I said. “I figured it would involve me dressing up in a nurse costume or something. But whatever; it’s your call.”

David walked ten steps farther, then turned back to face me. Behind him, Anna’s Bridge, one of those creaky old truss bridges that always remind me of a carnival ride, though it looked majestic in the late afternoon, backed by a fluorescent orange sky, the river emblazoned with the sun’s reflection.

It was like a scene from a postcard.

“This is where we were standing,” he said. “The first time I saw you.”

I remembered. Of course I remembered. He’d stopped just in that spot, cooling off after a run, looking out over the river. I was jogging from the other direction, toward him, when I stopped right where I was now standing to adjust my music.

“You called out to me.”

He said to me then, What are you jamming on those headphones? Folk music? Polka? I laughed at the time. He was flirting with me, not particularly well, but I was drawn to his silliness, his confidence in being so playful, like he instantly knew for both of us that we were a match.

I remembered him two weeks later, when I ran into him at the start of a 10K race downtown. We ended up running the race together, clocking a slow time but talking and laughing all the while. It was some of the most enjoyable sixty-one minutes and twenty-eight seconds of my life. We were married within a year.

Now in his crisp dress shirt and purple silk tie, David walked up and touched his forehead to mine. “I knew right then, Marcie, the first time I laid eyes on you right here. I swear I did.”

This, this was what he wanted to do before our swanky dinner tonight. This was his birthday wish. Not a Bears game or a night in Chicago; not a trip to Vegas. Anything he wanted, I’d told him, just name it, and his choice was to return to the place we first met. That was David, my corny, romantic husband.

He kissed me softly, then whispered, “Now, what was that about a nurse’s costume?”

I laughed, bumping teeth with his. Then I looked over David’s shoulder as an SUV sped onto Anna’s Bridge, veering wildly, drawing a horn from an oncoming vehicle. The SUV broke sharply to the right, crashing into the truss’s side gate with a hideous crunch, the protective railings snapping free, the entire bridge rocking and swaying as the SUV’s nose broke free of the bridge and dangled over the edge for just a moment, as if aimed at the river below —

“Oh, no,” I whispered.

— before surrendering to gravity, the SUV hitting the water grille-first, bobbing and floating for a moment before sinking below the orange glow of the water.

David threw off his shoes and sprinted toward the bank of the river.

“David, no! No!”

“Find a tree branch or something we can grab!” he shouted as he bounded down the incline, through the tangled foliage by the river’s edge.

“You can’t go in there!”

“Stay on shore!” he shouted back at me. “You can pull us in! And call 911!”

The lifeguard rules buzzed through my head — Don’t bring victims ashore: keep them afloat until help arrives — as I called out to David again, pleading with him in vain: “David, don’t! David, don’t!”

I pulled out my phone as he swam furiously through the water toward the crash site.

Just like that, hardly more than a snap of a finger, and life would never be the same.