Part Nine: The Anniversary
On the first anniversary of Samuel’s death, she went to Maplewood.
She went in the morning, before the day’s work, while the November light was still low and pale. She brought flowers — the kind Samuel would have found excessive in a good-natured way, the kind she had always liked and he had always pretended to be baffled by. She brought Elias in the carrier against her chest, because he was one year old now and had opinions about being left at home and she was not in the habit of overriding his opinions when she could accommodate them.
She stood at Samuel’s grave and looked at the stone and felt the full weight of it — did not manage it or portion it, just stood in it. The cemetery was quieter than it had been a year ago. No rain, or not yet — the November sky was the flat, holding gray of impending weather, but the weather had not yet arrived. It was cold. Elias was warm against her chest, and she could feel him breathing in the specific way she had come to know over a year of listening to him breathe, the rhythm of a person who is looking at the world with great interest and is not yet old enough to have opinions about how cold it is.
She talked to Samuel. She did this sometimes, and she had decided not to have any particular feelings about whether it was sensible or what it meant about her beliefs — it was something she did and it helped her, and those were sufficient qualifications.
She told him about Elias. About the feet-discovery and the first word, which had been neither mama nor dada but had been da in the direction of the dog belonging to her neighbor, which Samuel would have found extraordinarily funny. She told him about the consultant’s report and the Q3 implementation and the internal controls that were now substantially better than they had been and that would prevent anyone from doing what Derek had done. She told him that his name was clear, that the company was strong, that the trust was intact and was being managed with the care he had intended when he set it up.
She told him about the rain last November. Not to reopen it — it was not closed, it was integrated, and integration is not the same as closure, which is a fiction. She told him about the taxi driver who had said I’ve got you. She told him about 2:17 in the morning and Samuel’s dark hair on a new head and the lungs that had announced themselves with such conviction.
“I kept him safe,” she said. “You asked me to, in the way you always asked me to do things — not out loud, not directly, but by trusting me with the things that mattered. I kept him safe.”
Elias made a sound — the small, conversational sound of a baby who has been listening and has something to contribute. She looked down at him. He was looking up at her with the focused, serious regard he brought to faces, the investigation of the specific face that was his most important thing.
“I know,” she said to him. “I know.”
She put the flowers against the stone and stood for a few minutes more and let the morning be what it was — cold, gray, quiet, hers. Then she shifted Elias in the carrier and turned and walked back toward the gate.
The weather arrived as she reached the car — soft rain, November rain, the kind that accumulates. She sat in the driver’s seat with Elias making his conversational sounds and listened to the rain on the roof.
It did not sound like the rain from a year ago. It did not sound like grief or like the specific cold weight of standing at a graveside in wet shoes while the contractions came and the world arranged itself into its new shape without asking her.
It sounded like something continuing. Like the particular sound of a thing that is still going, that has not stopped, that will not stop — the quiet, persistent sound of a life that has survived what it had to survive and is still, in the November rain, going forward.
She started the car.
She drove home.
End
