Genesis (9 page)

S
ARA WOKE WITH A START. SHE HAD A MOMENT OF
disorientation
before she realized that she was in the ICU, sitting in a chair
beside Anna's bed. There were no windows in the room. The plastic
curtain that acted as a door blocked out all the light from the hallway.
Sara leaned forward, looking at her watch in the glow of monitors,
and saw that it was eight in the morning. She had worked a double
shift yesterday so that she could take off today and catch up on her
life: the refrigerator was empty, bills needed to be paid and the dirty
laundry was piled so high on the floor of her closet that she could no
longer close the door.

And yet, here she was.

Sara sat up in her chair, wincing as her spine adjusted to a position
that did not resemble a C. She pressed her fingers to Anna's wrist,
though the rhythmic beat of her heart, along with every in and out
of breath, was announced by the machines. Sara had no idea if Anna
could feel her touch or even knew that Sara was there, but it made
her feel better to have the contact.

Maybe it was for the best that Anna was not awake. Her body was
fighting against a raging infection that had sent her white blood cell
count into the dangerous area. Her arm was in an open splint, her
right breast removed. Her leg was in traction, metal pins holding together
what the car had ripped apart. A plaster cast kept her hips in a
fixed position so that the bones would stay aligned as they healed.
The pain would be unimaginable, though considering what torture
the poor woman had been through, it might not even matter anymore.

What Sara could not get past was the fact that, even in her current
state, Anna was an attractive woman—probably one of the qualities
that had first caught her abductor's eye. She wasn't movie-star beautiful,
but there was something striking about her features that must
have garnered a fair share of attention. Probably Sara had watched
too many sensational cases on the news, but it didn't make sense that
someone as noticeable as Anna would go missing without another
person in the world noticing. Whether it was Laci Peterson or
Natalee Holloway, the world seemed to pay more attention when a
beautiful woman disappeared.

Sara didn't know why she was thinking about such things.
Figuring out what happened was Faith Mitchell's job. Sara wasn't involved
in the case, and there really had been no reason for her to stay
at the hospital last night. Anna was in good hands. The nurses and
doctors were down the hallway. Two cops stood guard by the door.
Sara should have gone home and climbed into bed, listening to the
soft rain, waiting for sleep to come. The problem was that sleep seldom
came peacefully, or—worse still—sometimes it came too
deeply, and Sara would find herself caught up in a dream, living back
in the before time when Jeffrey was alive and her life was everything
she had wanted it to be.

Three and a half years had passed since her husband was killed,
and Sara could not recall a minute since that some thought of him,
some piece of him, did not linger in her mind. In the days after he
was gone, Sara had been terrified she would forget something important
about Jeffrey. She had made endless lists of everything she had
loved about him—the way he smelled when he got out of the
shower. The way he liked to sit behind her and brush her hair. The
way he tasted when she kissed him. He always carried a handkerchief
in his back pocket. He used oatmeal-scented lotion to keep his hands
soft. He was a good dancer. He was a good cop. He took care of his
mother. He loved Sara.

He
had
loved Sara.

The lists became exhaustive, and turned at times into endless
itemizations: songs she could no longer listen to, movies she could
no longer see, places she could no longer go. There was page after
page of books they had read and holidays they had taken and long
weekends spent in bed and fifteen years of a life she knew she would
never get back.

Sara had no idea what happened to the lists. Maybe her mother
had put them in a box and taken them to her father's storage unit, or
maybe Sara had never really made them at all. Maybe in those days after
Jeffrey's death, when she had been so distraught that she had welcomed
sedation, Sara had simply dreamed up the lists, dreamed up
sitting in her dark kitchen for hours on end, recording for posterity
all of the wonderful things about her beloved husband.

Xanax, Valium, Ambien, Zoloft. She had nearly poisoned herself
trying to make it through each day. Sometimes she would lie in bed,
half conscious, and conjure Jeffrey's hands, his mouth, on her body.
She would dream of the last time they were together, the way he had
stared into her eyes, so sure of himself as he slowly brought her to the
edge. Sara would wake to find herself writhing, fighting against the
urge to rouse in hopes of a few more moments in that other time.

She wasted hours dwelling on memories of sex with him, recalling
every sensation, every inch of his body, in lurid detail. For
weeks, she could think only about the first time they made love—not
the first time they'd had sex, which was a frenzied, wanton act of passion
that had caused Sara to sneak out of her own house in shame the
next morning—but the first time they had really held each other,
had caressed and touched and cherished each other's bodies the way
that lovers do.

He was gentle. He was tender. He always listened to her. He
opened the door for her. He trusted her judgment. He built his life
around her. He was always there when she needed him.

He used to be there.

After a few months, she remembered stupid things: a fight they
had had over which way the toilet paper roll should go on the holder.
A disagreement about the time they were supposed to meet at a
restaurant. Their second anniversary, when he'd thought driving to
Auburn to see a football game was a romantic weekend. A beach trip
where she had gotten jealous over the attention a woman at the bar
was giving him.

He knew how to fix the radio in the bathroom. He loved reading
to her on long trips. He put up with her cat, who urinated in his shoe
the first night he officially moved into her house. He was getting
laugh lines around his eyes, and she used to kiss them and think about
how wonderful it was to be growing older with this man.

And now, when she looked in the mirror and saw a new line on
her own face, a new wrinkle, all she could think was that she was
growing old without him.

Sara still wasn't sure how long she had grieved—or if, in fact, she
had ever stopped at all. Her mother had always been the strong one,
never stronger than when her daughters needed her. Tessa, Sara's sister,
had sat with her for days, sometimes holding her, rocking Sara
back and forth as if she were a child who needed soothing. Her father
fixed things around the house. He took out the trash and walked the
dogs and went to the post office to get her mail. Once, she found him
sobbing in the kitchen, whispering, "My child . . . .My own child . . ."
Not for Sara, but for Jeffrey, because he had been the son that her father
never had.

"She's just come undone," her mother had whispered on the
phone to her Aunt Bella. It was an old colloquialism, the sort of
thing you didn't think people still said. The phrase fit Sara so completely
that she had found herself surrendering to it, imaging her
arms, her legs, detaching from her body. What did it matter? What
did she need arms or legs or hands or feet for if she could not run to
him, if she could not hold him and touch him anymore? Sara had
never thought of herself as the type of woman who needed a man to
complete her life, but somehow, Jeffrey had come to define her, so
that without him, she felt untethered.

Who was she without him, then? Who was this woman who did
not want to live without her husband, who just gave up? Maybe that
was the real genesis of the grief she felt—not just that she had lost
Jeffrey, but that she had lost her self.

Every day, Sara told herself she would stop taking the pills, stop
trying to sleep away every painful minute that passed so slowly she
was sure weeks had gone by when it was only hours. When she managed
to stop taking the pills, she stopped eating. This wasn't a choice.
Food tasted rotten in her mouth. Bile would rise in her throat no
matter what her mother brought her. Sara stopped leaving the house,
stopped taking care of herself. She wanted to stop existing, but she
didn't know how to make it happen without compromising everything
that she had once believed in.

Finally, her mother had come to her and begged, "Make up your
mind. Either live or die, but don't force us to watch you waste away
like this."

With a cold eye, Sara had considered her alternatives. Pills. Rope.
A gun. A knife. None of them would bring back Jeffrey, and none of
them would change what had happened.

More time passed, the clock ticking forward when she longed for
it to go back. Sara was coming up on the year anniversary when she
had realized that if she were gone, then her memories of Jeffrey
would be gone, too. They had no children together. They had no
lasting monument to their married life. There was just Sara, and the
memories that were locked in Sara's mind.

And so she had had no choice but to pull herself back together, to
turn back the process of coming undone. Slowly, a lesser shadow of
Sara started to go through the motions. She was getting up in the
morning, going for a run, working part-time, trying to live the life
she had before, but without Jeffrey. She had valiantly tried to trudge
through this semblance of her earlier life, but she simply couldn't do
it. She couldn't be in the house where they had loved each other, the
town where they had lived together. She couldn't even attend a typical
Sunday dinner at her parents' because there would always be that
empty chair beside her, that vacancy that would never be filled.

The job notice at Grady Hospital had been emailed to her by a fellow Emory
grad who had no idea what had happened to Sara. He had
sent it as a joke, as if to say, "Who would go back to this hellhole?"
but Sara had called the hospital administrator the next day. She had
interned at Grady in the ER. She knew the great, creaking beast that
was the public health system. She knew that working in an emergency
room took over your life, your soul. She had rented out her
house, sold her pediatric practice, given away most of her furniture,
and moved to Atlanta a month later.

And here she was. Two more years had passed and Sara was still
stagnating. She didn't have many friends outside of work, but then
she'd never been a social person. Her life had always revolved around
her family. Her sister Tessa had always been her best friend, her
mother her closest confidant. Jeffrey was the chief of police for
Grant County. Sara was the coroner. They had worked together
more often than not, and she wondered now if their relationship
would have been as close if they had each gone their separate ways
every day and only glimpsed one another over the dinner table.

Love, like water, always flowed down the path of least resistance.

Sara had grown up in a small town. The last time she had seriously
dated, girls were not allowed to call boys on the telephone and boys
were required to ask the girl's father for permission to date his daughter.
Those practices were quaint now, almost laughable, but Sara
found herself wishing for them. She didn't understand the nuances of
adult dating, but she had forced herself to try, to see if that part of
her had died with Jeffrey, too.

There had been two men since she moved to Atlanta, both fixed
up through nurses at the hospital and both exhaustingly unremarkable.
The first man had been handsome and smart and successful, but
there was nothing else behind his perfect smile and good manners,
and he hadn't called back after Sara had burst into tears the first time
they'd kissed. The second man had been three months ago. The experience
was a little better, or maybe she was fooling herself. She had
slept with him once, but only after four glasses of wine. Sara had gritted
her teeth the entire time as if the act was a test she was determined
to pass. The man had broken it off with her the next day, which Sara
had not realized until she checked her voicemail at home a week later.

If she had only one regret about her life with Jeffrey, it would be
this one: Why hadn't she kissed him more? Like most married couples,
they had developed a secret language of intimacy. A long kiss
usually signaled the desire for sex, not simple affection. There were
the odd pecks on the cheek and the quick smacks before they went to
work, but nothing like when they had first started seeing each
other—when passionate kisses were titillating and exotic gifts that
didn't always lead to ripping off each other's clothes.

Sara wanted to be back at that beginning, to enjoy those long
hours on the couch with Jeffrey's head in her lap, kissing him deeply,
her fingers running through his soft hair. She longed for those stolen
moments in parked cars and in hallways and movie theaters when
Sara thought she would stop breathing if she didn't feel his mouth
pressed to hers. She wanted that surprise of seeing him at work, that
thump in her heart when she caught sight of him walking down the
street. She wanted that thrill in her stomach when the phone rang
and she heard his voice on the line. She wanted that rush of blood to
her center when she was driving alone in her car or walking down
the aisle at the drugstore and smelled him on her skin.

She wanted her lover.

The vinyl curtain slid back, squeaking on the rail. Jill Marino, one
of the ICU nurses, flashed Sara a smile as she put Anna's chart on the
bed.

"Have a good night?" Jill asked. She bustled around the room,
checking the leads, making sure the IV was running. "Blood gases
came back."