Page 10 of The Children of Eve

“Well, if it’s any help, Zetta will have another guy soon enough. Remember, it’s not your issue unless someone pays you to make it yours. Call it the Cynic’s Maxim. The corollary is that the issue stops being yours once the money runs out. You’d avoid a lot of heartache if you kept that in mind.”

It was an interesting philosophy. In his bleaker moments, Moxie might even have been convinced of its veracity, if only briefly. He glanced at his watch and pulled a piece of paper from his inside pocket.

“I have to get back inside. I promised to say a few words before dessert.”

“Be sure to bill for the full hour,” said Angel.

“Fuck you, the full hour. I’ve known the kid since she came out of the womb.” Moxie adjusted his tie. “She gets a discount.”

CHAPTERIX

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.”

CHAPTERX

Jennifer Parker watched the light go on in her father’s bedroom before she entered the marshes, following trails familiar to her from years of similar vigils. Before her lay the ocean, but she knew that she would never reach it. As she approached the water, the landscape would morph, and she would once again be by the lakeside, watching the dead lose whatever of themselves remained while she waited and waited…

Jennifer paused. Ahead of her, standing on the surface of a marsh pond, her feet not disrupting the surface tension, was a woman wearing a summer dress. Unlike Jennifer’s, her face was not a mask of ruination, only a blur. Dark ovals marked her eyes, and her mouth was the barest suggestion of a line. It had been a long time since she had shown herself.

mother, said Jennifer, although she was uncertain if this remained the case. Part-mother, perhaps. Echo. Revenant. But “mother” would suffice.

The line of her mother’s mouth widened, lips moving as they attempted to form a reply. Jennifer wondered when last she had spoken aloud. The effort it cost her was visible, her neck straining like that of Julie Krakowski, a girl in Jennifer’s first-grade class who used to struggle with a stammer. The two syllables that finally emerged were between a whisper and a cough.

daughter

is that all you have to say to me, mother, after so long?

Another effort at speaking, this one less stressful. Her mother had found her tongue now.

why do you continue to visit him?

for the same reason that i wait, Jennifer replied.

Her mother shimmered as a surge of unfamiliar emotions coursed through her. Jennifer picked up on all of them: hate, jealousy, grief, betrayal—and love. She thought it might be the last that caused her mother’s remnant the most confusion.

perhaps, Jennifer added,a reason we share

Her mother shook her head, but the word, when it came, lacked conviction.

no

Jennifer elected not to pursue the matter. It would serve no purpose beyond enraging. Then her mother might leave, and Jennifer was curious to discover why she had come. Jennifer was aware that her mother also sometimes circled her father. In the beginning, Jennifer feared she might have been trying to find a way to harm him, though this turned out not to be the case. Her mother blamed him for what had happened to them in a way Jennifer did not, but then her mother’s history with him was longer and more complex than Jennifer’s, with other hurts and failings to compound the final one. Eventually, Susan Parker, or this vestige of her, had grown tired of haunting the edges of her husband’s existence. Now she had returned, and must have had some cause. Jennifer would not let her go without revealing it. But it was also true that, whatever the incomplete nature of this manifestation, she remained, in part, Jennifer’s mother, and the child in Jennifer still loved her.

mother, why have you come?

because you grow careless

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