Page 72 of The Midnight Hour
“No.” My eyes fill with tears and resolutely I blink them back. “You were. I just acted like…like a bitch.” My voice wobbles with recrimination.
He laughs again and reaches for my hand, pressing it against his cheek. “No, you didn’t. You’re strong, Alex. Stronger than you realize. You always have been.” He pauses, still holding my hand against his cheek. “Promise me you won’t forget that.”
What can I do but promise? “I won’t,” I say, but Daniel must sense my hesitation because he continues more fiercely,
“I mean it. You’re a doer, Alex, a leader. You’ve never thought you are, but I’ve seen it, time and time again. You rise to the challenge. You get things done. After I’m gone…” He holds my unhappy gaze. “You know we need to talk about this. After I’m gone, I don’t think you should stay here, hiding away. This is a good place, a safe one, but it’s not the end for you.” He smiles faintly as he adds, “Never mind Michael Duart,youcan be part of the rebuilding of the world. You have it in you. I know you do, and I want you to be part of whatever’s next…for my sake. For our children’s.”
“Daniel…” I shake my head helplessly, because how can I promise such a thing? Daniel is full of fine words, but do I believe them? Can I?
“Do you promise?” he demands, and, unable to speak, I nod again, because I know I’d promise him anything now, andmaybe he’s right. Maybe I do have it in me, even if I feel so far from that in this moment.
“I promise,” I whisper. Then I continue, feeling like I have to say it because my chances to are slipping away with every passing day. “The whole thing with the house back in Connecticut, from before…” I begin stiltedly. “Your job…” It feels so long ago, and it’s basically become irrelevant to our lives now, and yet…it’s still there. It’s always been there, between us in one way or another, because I’ve made it so. “I shouldn’t have been so angry,” I say quietly. “I’m sorry. So sorry.”
Daniel shakes his head, still holding my hand. “Alex…I basically lied to you for six months. I would have been angry if you’d done that to me. I would have been furious.”
And yet I don’t think he would have been. He would have been sad, and maybe disappointed, and he would have tried to understand why I’d done what I did…an understanding I never even tried to afford him. “Why did you lie?” I ask, without an iota of the bitterness and resentment I carried self-righteously for so long. “It’s so unlike you. You’re the most honest person I know.”
Daniel is quiet for a moment, considering. “It started out not so much as a lie as a prevarication,” he explains finally. “I was going to tell you when I had another job. I didn’t think it would take that long. I’d tide us over by using our savings and moving assets around…I kept telling myself it would work out, and then I’d be able to explain everything, not even eventually, but soon. Really soon. And I told myself it was because I didn’t want you to worry, but really it was because I didn’t want you to look at me like I’d failed, which, of course, I had.”
He speaks matter-of-factly but with deep sorrow, and it tears at me. “Daniel?—”
“But I should have trusted you with that,” he continues, cutting me off with determination. “What’s a marriage if we can’t share our failures as well as our successes? If we can’t beareach other’s burdens all along the way? I know,” he adds, his voice choking a little now, “that it was the lying that was the hardest part for you. Not the loss of money, or even of the house, hard as all that was. And I’m sorry for that, because choosing to lie, to live in that lie, was the worst failure of all.”
I shake my head, cupping his gaunt cheek with my hand. “We don’t need to be sorry anymore,” I whisper. “For anything.” He smiles at me in response, his eyes filling with tears, and for a moment neither of us speaks.
A thousand memories are tumbling through my mind in a kaleidoscope of poignant fragments—our wedding day, when he choked up during the ceremony. Getting the keys to our first apartment in New York and eating pizza on the floor because we had no furniture. My labor with Sam, when Daniel kept telling me to breathe until I screamed at him, and then he didn’t speak for an hour. When Mattie had pneumonia, and he sat up with her all night. My dad’s funeral, when we held each other and cried. Laughing so hard over a joke nobody else would understand, until my stomach ached and tears streamed down my face.
Tears are streaming down my face now, as well as Daniel’s, as we simply sit there and bask in each other’s presence, as twenty-two years of marriage slip by in the blink of an eye.
TWENTY-SEVEN
In January, when the snow is three feet deep and Red Cedar Lake has frozen hard, when the weather is so breathtakingly cold I don’t move an inch at night lest I encounter the icy bed sheet, when darkness descends on the camp before five o’clock, Daniel dies.
Death, I have found, always comes as a shock. My dad had terminal cancer for months and yet, when he actually died, it jolted me as if he’d been perfectly healthy all along. That’s how it is with Daniel.
He continues to ebb away, sleeping more and more, and being less alert and present when he’s awake. We take turns sitting with him, coaxing him to eat, but by early January he starts refusing all food and that’s when I know the end is looming. Even then it feels like a shock, an insult, because death isn’t natural, I’ve found. It’s wrong. At least, it feels wrong, something to rail against even as you have no choice but to accept it, however you can.
I’m sitting next to Daniel when he dies. For the last few hours, his breathing has become more labored and sporadic, the deep, even breaths of sleep now sudden, gasping breaths, withlonger and longer spaces between each one. I’m holding his hand, which feels limp but still has the warmth of life in it—his heart is beating, blood is coursing through his veins, he isalive.
And then he isn’t. It takes me about a minute to realize he’s already taken his last breath. And then just a minute later, he feels very much dead; his body is completely still, immovable, the warmth already stealing away from it. I slip my hand from his and I kiss his cool forehead and then I walk quickly from the room because I know I don’t want to sit with my dead husband.
I want to remember him as he was—alive, funny, thoughtful, giving, warm.
I don’t cry. Some things, I suppose, are too deep for tears, and in any case I know they will come later. For now, I focus on practicalities. I head toward the main cabin, where a handful of people are sitting by the fire—Mattie, Ruby, Sheryl, and Patti. The boys are fishing, and everyone else is somewhere around the camp. I draw a breath, and Mattie gives me a sharp, knowing look.
“He’s gone?” she says, not quite a question.
I nod. I feel my composure start to crack and I have to take another breath, this one more of a shudder, to keep it in check. “I’m sorry.” I come over to my girls and put an arm around each of them, and for a few minutes we simply sit there, clinging together, no one able to say a word.
This is the beginning, I realize distantly, of a new life, alackof life, a life I didn’t want, and yet here we are.
The next few days pass in a blur of activity, a haze of grief. The ground is too frozen for a burial, but then Kyle remembers how we buried Darlene, just over a year ago, by burning the ground and loosening the soil. He and Sam do it together, and I watch from the main cabin, their solitary figures silhouetted against awintry sky.
We have a funeral out by the lake, and Stewart, the minister I haven’t yet gotten to know, reads a Bible verse while I stare straight ahead and try not to break down in front of everyone.
“Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines…”
My head jerks up as I stare at him in shock. That verse? Now? Then I realize that Daniel must have read the index card stuck in the sun visor too, and it must have resonated with him just as it had with me. He must have told Stewart about it and planned to have it read here. It’s something we never shared with each other, as there are now so many things we won’t share, and that realization is enough to have me doubling over as grief finally forces me to break.
