Numbness overtook me, and I went through the days on autopilot. With Drew gone, the house resumed its hollow quality. Voices bounced off the walls like pool balls reverberating in the seemingly empty rooms. I grew impatient with the girls.
I noticed a change in Hannah’s behavior. She became selfish. Leah could no longer play with her toys. She would yell, “No, Leah. I said you can’t touch that!” And Leah would cry. I would bang my hand on the counter out of frustration. I blamed Greg’s absence, but my reactions were also damaging, and I didn’t know how to change them. The days just progressed with the conclusion of hours, and end to end, those hours comprised the days.
I tried to take the girls to the library, toddler gym, and the playground. I wrote a semi-sincere apology note to Miss Katie. But mostly, those first few lonely weeks were colored by anger, intense, unmitigated fury. I slammed pots and pans in the kitchen, as if the cacophony would summon Greg home, if only to display annoyance at the racket and my need to slam things. At night, what kept me awake were the memories, specifically the good ones. I reconstructed happy events in our lives, looking for clues that would reveal the current ending.
On our first New Jersey date, after Greg returned from Rochester, we went to a distant cousin’s wedding, where I met Greg’s entire extended family. Greg drank too much champagne, an unusual occurrence as I later discovered, and I had to drive his car home. His car was manual transmission, and I had no idea how to drive it. I think I stayed in third gear the entire time, with the engine rev drowning out any conversation, while we giggled like kids. Greg tried to show me how to shift, but I kept grinding the gears. When we got to his apartment, he invited me to stay. I hesitated because it was our first real date, but I didn’t have a car, and I wasn’t about to try to drive Greg’s without the aid of passenger seat instruction. He led me into his bedroom and gave me a stack of clean towels and a chaste kiss on the cheek good night.
When I asked him what he was doing, he looked shocked. “I’ll sleep on the couch.” He looked at the floor and rubbed the back of his neck.
I pulled him toward me by his tie and covered his mouth with mine. “I think you should reconsider.” I led him onto his bed.
Another memory flashed of Greg with newborn Hannah in the hospital, holding her and looking at her face. He traced her nose and mouth with his finger, making sure she was real.
“I can’t believe we made her,” he said with tears in his eyes. “How did I ever do anything so perfect?”
Everything you do is perfect. But somehow, you’re the only one who can’t see that.
And another: Greg had been in the delivery room, my cheerleader, my champion. When the nurses took Hannah to clean and weigh her, he whispered in my ear, “You are so amazing, Claire Barnes. And I will love you until the day I die.”
Lying in my empty marital bed, all I could think was, Is today that day? Was October first that day?
And another: Our first night in our new home, the one we bought together, we lay together on a mattress on the floor because we were too tired to put the bed together. We’d been married for two years, house shopping for one. Greg was particular; I was not. I considered any house we bought to be our starter home. Greg, fantastic with money, wanted to make sure the property had resale value. We talked for hours about all the improvements we could make, how we would make the house our home, fit for our family.
Greg confessed that he never believed he’d have anything in life. His father had died when he was five and his mother died shortly after we married. He had no brothers or sisters. He always believed he’d go through life alone, struggling the way his mother had. She had made ends meet, but not without worry and not with any joy, just fighting the demands and strain of everyday life. He confessed everything he’d ever feared: that he wouldn’t marry, and then when he did, that he would fail as a husband, as a provider. I came to understand that the need to provide for his family was his sole driving purpose, and so ingrained in him, it trumped all else. We talked for hours, like newlyweds, and I promised we wouldn’t fail, that together, failing wasn’t a possibility. I tried to make him understand that there was more than one meter stick to measure success—happiness, fulfillment, laughter, joy—and that simply making a mortgage payment every month shouldn’t be a life goal. To Greg, providing was all that mattered. Wherever Greg had gone, what was his meter stick? Did he think of himself as a failure? I couldn’t reconcile the image of Greg as I remembered him with Missing Greg, lounging on an island with another woman.