Page 9 of The Children of Eve (Charlie Parker #22)

CHAPTER IX

Macy didn’t come home with me that night. She had an early start the following day, but she also liked her space as much as I enjoyed mine. It came with getting older and growing comfortable in your own skin and with your own company. Once you got used to negotiating the territory you’d carved out for yourself, sharing it could be complicated. Macy and I were still trying to find a way to make that work.

Sitting at my desk, I was tempted to perform a cursory internet search on Wyatt Riggins, but I had other matters to occupy me, some of which would even help pay my bills. This was becoming an increasingly pressing concern because my daughter, Sam, would soon be starting college. Her mom’s parents had offered to help with the fees, but Rachel and I were determined to cover the cost ourselves. To be fair, the impetus came more from me than Rachel, but she understood and accepted it. Since our separation, Rachel had raised Sam in a house adjacent to her parents’ place in Vermont. The grandparents had been an integral, positive part of Sam’s development, and Rachel’s father and I had even reached our own form of détente after years of discord, but they would have been happier had I excised myself entirely from the lives of their only daughter and grandchild. Rightly or wrongly, I believed that accepting college money from them would give them a further claim on Sam, aside from any question of personal pride.

I turned off the office light, leaving just the lamp burning, and stared out at the blackness of the marsh, with its slivers of fragmented moonlight. I thought of the dream I’d had and how I’d woken to the certainty that Jennifer was in the house with me. She still felt close now. She was out there, somewhere. I used to fear that she was lost, wandering, until I came to accept that it was I who was lost.

Grief and loss are not the same. Loss has a fixed point: a date, a place, a moment. I know when and where my wife and daughter were killed, and that is the locus of my loss. As the days passed in the aftermath, some of them now recalled with more clarity than others, I found myself seeking the cessation of time. I did not want to depart from that locus. In doing so, I would leave them further behind—or rather, I would be loosed from the instant before they ceased to be, when they were still in the world.

But the current of time is too strong. Whatever contrary speculations scientists may offer on the intermingling of past, present, and future, by our perception the clock moves inexorably forward and will, without fail, carry us away from those we love. As much as the dead withdraw from us, so also do we withdraw from the dead.

Grief—real grief, the kind that never heals—is an expanding orbit. Each circuit, which lasts a year, brings us to within sight of that original nucleus of bereavement, but at a greater remove. The distance, ever increasing, lessens the pain, even as we never lose sight of that hub, however tiny it may appear, flickering like the light from an ancient star. Ultimately, that light may even bring a trace element of comfort. It is never utterly cold, unless we make it so by forgetting.

“Good night,” I said to the dark, to my daughter. “Good night.”