I was dying, not in the slow slide I’d taken over the last few months but plummeting off the cliff into the unknown. My pulse echoed in my ears, beat by beat. I couldn’t draw breath. The man held me close, whispering that death was always difficult, but when I woke, I would be like him. And I would be strong and beautiful and fierce. And he would be there, taking pleasure in every new step I took.
When I woke at sunset, it wasn’t the blood but this man’s kiss I tasted on my lips. I could smell him, that expensive scent of amber, and feel his cool hands on my skin. I was left wanting with a bone-deep ache. For the first time in my life, I understood the word “yearning,” beyond mocking it in romance novels. Because for the first time, I felt like I was being denied something beautiful, something that was mine. Unfortunately, I was also pretty sure my brain had concocted that thing from a mix of sedatives and oxygen deprivation.
I wasn’t a fairy-tale sort of girl. I’d never been able to afford that sort of whimsy. There was no dream prince. There was no true love’s kiss. At the end of the story, the newly married princess went home to her husband’s castle to deal with dental bills, laundry arguments, and a dowager queen unwilling to give up her throne.
Sometimes I felt like I was too harsh with Rob, or at least his memory. Weren’t widows supposed to put their dead husbands up on a pedestal? Wasn’t I supposed to have some sort of little shrine on my nightstand devoted to him, with a big eight-by-ten photo and votive candles? It wasn’t that I disliked Rob. In fact, I liked him very much in the beginning. He wasn’t a bad husband. He just wasn’t a good one.
By the end, we were more roommates than anything else. Rob had a lot of hobbies—hunting, fishing, softball, basketball with his friends. When we were first married, I appreciated the space. Marriage was difficult for me. I was used to having quiet time for myself.
When we were first married, I bucked Stratton family tradition and continued working at a local accounting firm, Freegate and Swanson. But after Danny was born, I liked working from home, so I opened my own business. (To be honest, I poached a bunch of clients from Freegate and Swanson when I left. It wasn’t my fault that my bosses had so little faith in my “work-from-home mom” scheme that they didn’t make me sign a noncompete clause.) So my world slowly shrank down to Danny, Rob, e-mails from clients, and other moms. The freedom allowed me to make my own hours. I could stay home with Danny when he was sick. I could do a monthly payroll statement at two in the morning, which was sometimes the only time I had to think without a toddler crying in my ear or a baseball game blaring on the TV.
It was fortunate that I could tailor my schedule this way, because I was raising Danny alone long before Rob was gone. I was the one who got up with Danny in the middle of the night when he was throwing up. I was the one who went to parent-teacher conferences, doctor appointments, the meeting with the Sunday-school teacher when Danny walked out of the “Adam and Eve” lesson and told the congregation that they spent the whole morning talking about naked people. I thought that as Rob matured a little bit, got a little more comfortable with Danny, he would dial in, get more involved. He always said he would spend more time with “his boy” when Danny was old enough to throw a ball, shoot a gun, do something interesting. Until then, the dirty diapers, the two A.M. feedings, the teething cries—they were my problem.
I felt so disconnected from everything—except Danny. It was like a cocoon around my heart had opened up. I found my happiness in my son, his sweet, funny little soul, his crazy imagination. I found solace in volunteering at his school, taking him to story time at the library, making his Halloween costumes. I knew that one day he would grow up, marry, have a family of his own. But for the time being, I was enjoying motherhood and hoped that he would choose a spouse more wisely than his mother had. And when Rob died, I didn’t really mourn him so much as the life we could have had, the husband he could have been.
I did not discuss these singularly depressing thoughts, since Jane was a pretty talented mind-reader and probably already knew. Also, she kept mentioning how much she disliked my “unethical, shameless jackass” of a sire. Every night. I considered this a bad sign, since Jane seemed to have a pretty high tolerance for sketchy people. Jane herself had been mistaken for a deer by a drunk hunter, gotten shot, and been turned by a passing vampire to keep her from dying. All that, and she still found my story a little scandalous.
Jane clearly thought of Dick Cheney as like a brother, and I was pretty sure that before being turned, I would have hidden in the ladies’ room to avoid Dick at a rest stop.