All the Time in the World (40 page)

“I had a thought,” I say.

“What?” says Jane.

“Patrick's shoe size?” says Claudia, and she sounds farther away.

“Shut up; she's serious,” says Jane. “Charlotte?”

“Yeah. Part of it is a thought, and the rest of it is writing. Songs, I mean.”

“Okay,” says Jane.

“I thought I wasn't writing at all for the last few years. I never really had the desire. Then Scotty said something to me, and I didn't give much significance to it at the time. But now that I'm thinking about it, I realize I have been. I have been writing for the boys, and
with
the boys. I have all these songs stuck in my head that I only thought of when I was with them, out of necessity for some reason or another.”

“You need to write them down,” says Jane.

“Put it on the list,” says Claudia.

July, five months after

I arrive at the McLeans' apartment later than promised that afternoon because I have gotten used to moving at a slower pace these days. I let myself in without knocking, then wonder if that was the right thing to do, or if it will freak the boys out. I don't find either of the boys there, though, or anyone for that matter. The apartment is without motion, and the sight of its silent, empty, kid-less state is unnerving.

“Hello?” I call out. No answer, so I move back toward the left wing. “Marco,” I say, and then I think I hear something, so I walk back further. “Marcoooo—”

“Polo,” comes Scotty's voice, and I walk back into his room to find him kneeling on the floor at the entrance to Gretchen's closet, surrounded by newspapers, wrapping up everything within reach and putting it in a box.

“I sent the boys out to a diner with Patrick,” he says, as I stand there, not able to judge his state of mind, “because Matthew was kicking boxes around and acting like a maniac. I swear, I've had such a hard time recognizing that kid lately. I know what Dr. O'Neill says, but I keep wondering how long it will actually be. Or if this is just him being six years old and me missing the part where he got there.” Scotty reaches for a pair of ballet flats and holds them up, as if he isn't sure that one matches the other. “Plus, I thought I might be a mess while I did this. So far I'm okay, I think.”

“Is this her—what are you doing with all of this stuff?” I ask.

“I'm not sure,” says Scotty. “Right now I'm just packing it up. I was thinking I should give most of it away. Maybe to a church?”

The thought of him giving a box full of Prada shoes to a church is concerning; I'm not sure they'd know what to do with them. “Lila doesn't want any of it?” I ask.

“She said she didn't,” he says. “But, oh shit, Charlotte, I didn't even ask you. If you did. Do you? Want any of it?”

“No, thank you,” I say. “It would be too weird. Also, she was six or eight sizes smaller than I am.”

“I have all these newspapers,” says Scotty, continuing his methodical wrapping of objects both fragile and non-fragile. “This great, huge pile of newspapers. I haven't read one since, since Gretchen died. I've been staring at them without reading, then piling them up in here. I always think I'll read them later. And all of a sudden, I have this pile.” He pushes the box he's filled away from him and starts assembling an empty one. “I must look like a hoarder. I kept thinking I would get to it.”

“I know what you mean,” I say.

“And now, as I'm wrapping up her things, I'm looking at the headlines and stopping every few minutes to read pieces of articles. Catching up on things that went on in the last five months that I only half knew about.” He finishes with the box and grabs another empty one. “All these things happened. I wasn't really aware of any of them. Like I've been living in a vacuum.”

“Well, you sort of have been,” I say.

“I don't think I know how to get myself out of it,” he says. “Even as I acknowledge that I've been doing this, I still have no desire to sit down and read today's paper from front to back. It seems—I don't know—left over. From before.”

I kneel down on the floor next to him and start separating each sheet of newsprint from the rest of its section. “I think I understand,” I say. He takes each sheet that I hold out to him, wraps up part of Gretchen's existence, and puts it in the box. He does it again, and again, and again.

“You know what? I want to tell you something,” says Scotty. “I haven't seen you in a long time—it feels like a long time to me—and things will be crazy around here for the next few weeks or who knows how long, and I just want to tell you while I'm thinking about it.”

On the inside, I go still, like I'm bracing myself, but I continue to separate newspaper.

“You were—you
are
—you're my best friend,” says Scotty. “Through all of this. I should have leaned on someone else, but I leaned on you, and you've been my best friend. And you've been
their
best friend. We're—well, really me, I suppose—I'm so far from over this. I have a long way to go before I'll feel any kind of relief. My therapist says there will be a time, in the days to come, when I won't want to get out of bed in the morning, and even the daily business of our life will exhaust me.” I envy his ability to keep his tears in his eyes, making them look watery and tragic instead of messy. “Nothing I've done so far has felt like the right thing,” he says. “Except you. It was right that you were here. At least, for us.”

His hands are on his knees, maybe wedging him up for support, and I put mine over his. “You're right. It was right that I was here. And I'm still here,” I say. “I mean, if you want me here. I will be. But you know. I don't think you should employ me. I don't think that's where we are anymore. You know?”

He grips my hands briefly, then reaches for another sheet of newspaper.

“Scotty,” I say, “what are you going to do when you get to her bathrobe, her jewelry? What are you going to do with her wedding dress? You can't give that stuff to a church.”

He sits back again on his heels. “Do you know what I should do with it?”

“I think we can figure something out,” I say.

We sit there together for a long time, putting things in boxes and stacking them up, like a melancholy game of Tetris. Occasionally, the headline of a newspaper will cause us to comment, the Boston Marathon bombing, the antics of the tea party, the occasional op-ed. “The geniuses at the
Times
put the words
Buddhist
and
extremism
in the same headline,” I say, and he laughs, and eventually we finish up. The closet floor is empty.

“I have something for you,” I say. “Well, really it's for the boys. But it won't mean anything to them for a while, probably until they start reading. So for now, it's yours.”

I hand him what I've constructed, a book of all the songs I made up for the kids. I've devoted much of the past month to excavating the memories attached to each of them, where we were, what we were doing, why they needed distraction, comfort, or entertainment. Some of them needed more lyrics or verses, or other forms of completion, and all of them needed to be translated out of my head and onto paper, and that's what I've done.

“This is beautiful, the way you've put it together,” he says, turning the pages, and I see him pause to smile at one of the titles, the one I've decided to call “Rhymes by George McLean.” “I don't read music. I would love it—only if you wouldn't mind—I would love if you would play through this for me.”

We sit on the floor of Gretchen's closet, me and Scotty and my ukulele, and I play the songs. We get close to the end, and I tell him that this section is meant to be played on the piano.

“As soon as they get back,” he says.

“Okay.” I stand, anticipating all the noises and normalcy that the kids will bring back to this house with them, waiting for their faces, and wondering what will happen when they see mine.

June, two weeks earlier

Everett comes over to help me with that list of Jane and Claudia's. I'm surprised that he comes, after the way we left things at the armory, but he comes. The first thing he does is comment on the business card I have from Jess's contact, the one I met at Carnegie Hall.

“Jess is so great. Of course she knows this guy. Of
course
she does. This is perfect,” says Everett, smacking the kitchen island to emphasize Jess's greatness.

“I have to tell you something,” I say. “But you can't touch me while I do.”

“
Dirty
.”

“I mean it. You can't be near me. You can't be touching me.”

Everett walks to the other side of the counter so that there is a physical barrier between us. This is as respectful as he gets. While I have his full curiosity, I tell him the story of Jess and me. It is no longer the most important story of my life. Its power diminishes a little bit every time I tell it.

When I'm finished with the story, Everett reaches for the business card Jess gave me. “I have a better idea,” he says. He pulls Jillian's husband's business card out of his wallet and hands it to me, tossing the other into the trash can under the sink. “He's a nice guy. I bet he'd have some good ideas for you. And that way, Jess is not involved at all.”

I tape the card to the list. I don't kiss Everett. It's the closest I have ever felt to him. Everett leaves, and I sit down at the piano to play.

That night, I have a dream that I'm pregnant with my third child. I can picture the face of my husband very clearly, and it is no one I know. My brain has drawn him in great detail, down to the buttons on the side of his expensive Italian shoes.

I'm making eggs for Matt and George. They are my first two children with this man that I have conjured, and their younger sibling will be here in less than a month. The width of my stomach causes me to have to recalculate the distance I stand from the stove, and my arm aches as I stretch it out to stir the eggs. George will not eat them if they burn. I rotate my body so that I am standing sideways.

“Where's Daddy?” Matt asks, and I don't want to answer him. I'm not sure who he means, this dream-man or Scotty. And I don't want to make excuses for their father, whoever he is.

I sit down at the table with them to eat eggs, and Matt will not stop talking. I don't want to take my bad mood out on him, because my feelings are not his fault, but more than once I feel my jaw tense as I struggle against the urge to tell him to shut up and eat his breakfast.

We finish, and Matt takes his plate to the sink. “I need a lollipop,” he says.

“Are you kidding me?” I push the eggs around on my plate. My tone is not nice.

He laughs, in kind of a nasty way. He probably learned to laugh like that from me. He runs away to some other part of our house, which has also been designed in my imagination. George is struggling in his chair, unable to figure out how to get down out of it, and I watch him struggle, taking great satisfaction in it, refusing to come to his aid until he decides he needs to ask me for help. Maybe I'll get up and leave him on his own, take away the option of help, teach him that there isn't always someone there to make it easier for you.

Matt comes running back into the kitchen, like he's finishing a lap around the house. “Daddy's here!” He makes the announcement smugly, like he knows where his father has been and fully condones it. The husband of my design walks in and takes my plate from me as if nothing is wrong. He eats my breakfast, as if it's perfectly normal to waltz in at this hour of the morning and do so. As if it's completely acceptable that he spent the night, away from me and our children, with Jess.

Each time I wake up, my stomach muscles sore from clenching all night long, the only conscious sense I can make of these dreams is that this is what grief looks like, my own grief, a grief I have deferred.

Jess hurt me, and the fall of my own expectations hurt me even more. But the situation is this: This space is not empty. (This “pace” is not empty, Georgie would say.)

I made a buffer for myself, and I crawled underneath and hid there, letting the space protect me. There wasn't supposed to be anything inside of it, but as it turns out, an empty space is an impossible thing to maintain. I have filled it with things that need to be thought of, contemplated, sorted, written—though instead of taking those actions, I pretended that the space was empty. Now there are boxes that need to be gone through, memorabilia in a childhood closet, winter clothes in spring. Objects that I put in to dodge and crouch behind, like the world's most elaborate game of hide-and-seek. But the limit has been reached. The space is at capacity.

You have to be able to say her name, I said to Scotty, and it's time for me to swallow the pill that I prescribed.

I sit at the piano each day, and I write out the songs, as Jane and Claudia suggested. I write the song I played for Scotty, the one from the doctor's office. I write the song from the museum on Matt's fifth birthday. I write the playground rhymes, the bored-in-the-stroller songs, the bathtub blues, the narrative songs I used to pull Matt out of grumpy moods. I write the songs that the kids laughed at and played to and then sang for their mother when she got home from work or errands.

Music is insidious, like sorrow, like genetics. It sneaks into the corners. It pushes open the doors that you worked so hard to keep shut. It has been there, waiting to be defined, just like everything else in the not-empty space.

I tried to squeeze them all in, the boys and Scotty and all of the rest of their world, to make myself full of them so that I wouldn't have to be full of me. But everything amplified on the day we lost her, and there isn't enough room. Things are spilling. I have to fit them in around what's already there, and I won't know what that is until I go through it.