The Color of Heaven

“We need to clean this room out.” He wouldn’t look at me. “We can give all her toys and clothes away to the Salvation Army. She would have wanted that. She was always generous.”

  I swallowed uneasily and took a few steps closer. “Yes, she was, but I’m not ready for that yet. I like to come in here sometimes. It makes me feel close to her.”

  He gave me that look – the one that made me feel foolish and weak. “She’s gone, Sophie. You’re going to have to accept that sooner or later.”

  A flash of anger sparked within me. “It’s only been six months.”

  “Yes. Six excruciating months. You do nothing but sit around and cry, and this room is like a tomb. It’s depressing to come home at night. I think it would be best if we had someone come over and collect her things. The furniture too.” He took a step closer and spoke in a gentler, more encouraging tone. “We could get you a new desk and a computer. Turn this into an office. You should go back to your writing.”

  I frowned. “I can’t write. Not now. I need time to grieve.”

  “But you can’t just wallow in it, Sophie. What you need to do is try harder to get over it. We both need to get on with our lives.”

  I shook my head. “No! Maybe you’re ready to move on, but I’m not. I’m still in agony. I can’t just forget about her, or pretend she never existed.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Then what are you saying, exactly?”

  He turned his gaze to the window. For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

  “Just forget it,” he said as he brushed by me, heading for the door. “I need to get back to work. I’ll probably be late getting home. Why don’t you get a movie for yourself.”

  As I watched him leave, the floor seemed to shift under my feet. I felt like I was standing in a teetering rowboat, struggling to keep my balance while the waves splashed against my hull.

  My father called that night. It was the first time he had called since the funeral.

  His lifelong remoteness hit me particularly hard after my argument with Michael. I began to feel as if I would always be disappointed by the men in my life. My husband didn’t seem to understand a single thing I was feeling, and quite frankly, I didn’t understand him either. How could he be ready to move on? Had he not loved Megan as much as I did? Or was he burying himself in denial? If you push it away, it won’t hurt you. Is that what he thought?

  “Hi Dad,” I said, as I sat down at the kitchen table and cupped my forehead in a hand. “How are you?”

  And what do you want? What could you possibly say to me now, after a lifetime of disapproval and indifference? I suppose, like Michael, you’re going to tell me to stop crying and get over it.

  “I’m fine,” he replied. “How are things with you?”

  Great. Just what I needed. Light conversation.

  I checked my watch and wondered how long this would take.

  “I’ve been better.” My voice broke on the last word, however, and hot tears flooded my eyes. I slapped my hand over my mouth in a desperate attempt to crush the threat of a complete emotional breakdown. I couldn’t do that in front of my father. Not him.

  “Sounds like you’re having a rough day.”

  I swallowed over the urge to let out a gut-wrenching sob. “Yeah.”

  I wiped at the tears, stood up, and filled the kettle at the sink while I clenched the phone between my shoulder and ear.

  “We all loved Megan,” he softly said. “She was a special girl. I’m so sorry, Sophie.”

  That was it. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I shut off the water, set the kettle down on the granite countertop and wept into the phone.

  “Thank you, Daddy. That means a lot to me. I’m taking it pretty hard.”

  “Of course you are. She was your daughter.”

  I tried again to stop crying, but it was no use. The tears were gushing out of my eyes.

  My father was quiet on the other end of the line, and when he finally spoke, his voice quavered. “It’s never easy to lose someone you love.”

  Though he didn’t say it, I knew he was talking about Mom. Nothing was ever the same after she left us that day back in 1984. I was fourteen years old, and I remember watching her go through security at the airport. I waved goodbye, but I hated her for leaving us. I hated her.

  I hated her most for leaving me with Dad.

  Oh, how I had willed her to come back. If you love me, you won’t leave us. I shut my eyes and whispered out loud, “Turn around, don’t go.”

  But she left anyway.

  We moved two months later. Dad couldn’t bear to go on living in the house that reminded us all of her…

  He was a lot like Michael.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this,” I said to him on the telephone, as I wiped my nose with the back of my hand.

  “You will,” he replied. “You just need to take it slow, one day at a time. Don’t rush yourself. It’s okay to be sad. Just know that…” He paused, then began again. “I want you to know that I’m here for you. I wasn’t always the best father. I didn’t always make the right decisions, and I’m sorry for that, but if there’s anything I can do, just say the word.”

  After I recovered from my astonishment, I thanked him and hung up the phone – and experienced a muted warmth that felt something like comfort.

  Perhaps there was hope for happiness as well, some day in the future. Perhaps I wouldn’t always feel so disappointed.

  I set the kettle on the burner to boil and tore the plastic off a new box of tea.

  Chapter Eighteen

  A few days after our argument in Megan’s bedroom, I cooked a special dinner for Michael. His favorite: maple-glazed salmon with garlic mashed potatoes, and fresh sautéed vegetables.

  I showered and put on a skirt (he always told me I looked good in skirts), set the table with the fine china we received as a wedding gift, and set out some candles.

  I wanted to explain to him that I needed time. That was all.

  Our conversation in the hospital – the one about having another child – kept bouncing around in my brain. I wanted to ask him to be patient with me. I was not in a good place right now, but maybe one day I would feel ready for something more.

  Just not now. Not yet.

  He called at six and told me he would be home at seven, so I prepared everything, poured myself a glass of wine, lit the candles, and sat down at the table to wait.

  He walked in the door at midnight.

  I had already given up waiting, had put the food in plastic containers in the fridge, changed into my pajamas, and gone to bed to watch television.

  I listened to him putter around in the kitchen downstairs. I heard the buttons on the microwave as he reheated the salmon. A short while later he shuffled heavily up the stairs.

  I quickly shut off the TV and slid under the covers. I just couldn’t face him. I didn’t want to talk. I certainly didn’t want to ask why he was so late, and risk getting into an argument.

  He slipped into bed a few minutes later, and I pretended to be asleep.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Nine months after the death of our child, Michael came home from work, sat me down on the leather sofa in the living room, and told me he was leaving me.

  He explained that he couldn’t bear the tears anymore, that I wasn’t the same woman he had married, and that he deserved a brighter future.

  As I sat there staring at his impossibly handsome face – he only got better looking with age – my brain stopped working. I didn’t burst into tears. I suppose I didn’t have any tears left to shed.

  I was speechless, however. Not that I was surprised. I wasn’t. We had been soul mates once – madly, passionately in love – but all that seemed so far away now. It was another lifetime. I was thirty-six now, and so much had happened since those early days of dining out and making love on the living room carpet.

  He was right. I was no longer the woman he married. I wasn’t a rising st
ar in the New York publishing world anymore. I didn’t wear skirts and heels. Instead, I was an emotionally battered, grief-stricken, stay-at-home mother who wasn’t even a mother anymore, because I’d just buried my daughter in the ground.

  We both knew we were no longer connected. We didn’t share the same feelings, and our ideas about the future were vastly different.

  We were no longer in love.

  “Maybe we just need a little more time,” I dutifully suggested, making one last attempt to save our marriage, for I had never been a quitter, and quite frankly the notion of any more loss in my life made me want to throw up. “It’s only been nine months.”

  He shook his head. “Things were off kilter before that, and you know it as well as I do. I don’t think there’s any way to fix this.”

  “But I don’t want to just give up,” I argued. “Do you really believe that you’d be happier on your own? We were a team once. Maybe we can be like that again.”

  He was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees. He gazed down at his hands, rubbed the pad of his thumb over his palm.

  “I’m not going to be on my own,” he explained. For a long time he was quiet, then at last he looked up and met my stricken eyes. “I’m in love with someone else, Sophie, and she’s pregnant.”

  My vision blurred for a few seconds, and the whole world went white, then slowly came back into focus.

  Sitting back against the leather seat cushions, I inhaled a deep breath and let it out, while I tried to comprehend the fact that there was nothing I could say or do to save my marriage. It was too late. It was dead. Michael was having a baby with someone else. He had moved on after Megan, while my heart was still cloaked in black.

  So much for being a fighter. I had no more fight left in me. At least not when it came to holding onto my husband.

  The divorce, however, was another matter entirely.

  I sat forward, too, rested my elbows on my knees and looked him square in the eye. “You better not try to screw me over, Michael. If you do, I swear I’ll wipe the floor with you.”

  He considered that for a moment, then stood up and nodded at me. “I don’t doubt it. And I’m sorry, Sophie. I really am.”

  With nothing more to say, he walked out.

  In the end, Michael proved himself to be very generous and highly accommodating in the divorce. Not only did he give me our house in Washington Square, but he also awarded me a large cash settlement, which I used to buy a new car (because he kept the BMW), as well as a monthly alimony check for as long as I remained unmarried.

  I suppose he felt guilty for cheating on me while I was taking care of our dying daughter.

  I didn’t bother to appease him. I let him keep his guilt.

  I was driving in my new car, running errands one bright sunny morning, when I saw them together – Michael and his lovely young fiancée, strolling along Seventh Avenue. They were holding hands and looking abominably happy.

  Her name was Lucy Wright. She was a young associate at the law firm. She had bouncy blonde hair and wore a knee-length sundress with yellow splashes of brown-eyed Susans printed on the skirt, and high wedge sandals.

  She was exceptionally attractive. There was no denying it. She had that certain spark. It was the same spark I once had myself, before the exhausting, debilitating collapse of my world. It’s what attracted Michael to me in the first place.

  As I drove past them, her round belly registered in my brain, and I was suddenly overcome by a firestorm of jealousy. Not because she had taken my husband from me and was now sharing his bed. It had nothing to do with Michael, and I knew in that moment that I was over him.

  What I envied was her optimism. She was looking forward to all the joys of motherhood without any of the dread or fear that I would feel if I were in her place.

  In that moment, I became conscious of the fact that I would never experience that blissful optimism again. I would not be courageous enough to have another child.

  I wasn’t even sure I would ever be brave enough to love someone –and that thought made me pull over onto the side of the road and sit in silence for a long, long time.

  Chapter Twenty

  February 12, 2007

  As the first anniversary of Megan’s death approached, I had a terrible nightmare. I was back in the ICU, and the doctors and nurses were rushing around her bed in a panic, shooting drugs into her IV tubes, performing CPR – all in a last minute, hopeless attempt to save her life.

  Then suddenly her eyes flew open, she reached out to me and said, “Don’t leave me, Mommy. I’m scared!”

  My eyes flew open as well, and for the next hour, I lay in bed, tossing and turning, sinking deeper and deeper into a painful well of memories as I replayed those horrors in my mind. I knew I had to stop thinking about her death, stop worrying about where she was now – if she was anywhere at all – and focus instead on the joy she had brought to my life.

  I forced myself to recall those special years during remission, when I began to see the world with new eyes. For a while, I had understood and cherished the extraordinary gift of my existence on this planet, and I relished each new day with my daughter.

  I wondered what she would think if she could see me now, wallowing in my grief. Alone.

  I imagined she would grieve for me in return.

  That single thought prompted me to climb out of bed. I boiled an egg for breakfast, took a long shower, then called my sister and asked if I could come and visit for a few days. I wanted to talk about the possibility of going back to work. I had no interest in writing – at least not yet – but I thought I might be able to do some freelance editing.

  “That sounds like a great idea,” Jen said. “Joe and I were just talking about you yesterday. And Megan, of course. We miss you. Please come. How soon can you be here?”

  “Just give me an hour to pack.”

  True to my word, exactly one hour later, I was buttoning up my sheepskin coat and tossing my suitcase into the back of my compact SUV.

  As I drove out of the city on that mild winter day, I could feel Megan’s presence in the back seat. Every so often, I glanced in the rearview mirror, and I could see her smiling at me.

  The only time she spoke was to remind me to turn north onto the 684.

  She stayed with me until I passed Hartford, then quietly departed and left me to find my own way to my sister’s house in Manchester.

  Not long after I crossed the border into New Hampshire, the temperature plummeted. If I had been out walking, I would have felt it on my cheeks. The chill would have entered my throat and lungs, but I was strapped tightly into the cozy confines of my vehicle with the heat blasting out of the dashboard vents, and was therefore shielded from the conditions outside.

  I will always wonder what brought that deer out onto the road just as the puddles from the melting snow turned to ice. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, galloping onto the pavement, and my whole body went rigid.

  Wrenching the steering wheel left to avoid her, I hit the brakes at the same time, which was, of course, the worst thing I could have done.

  The car whipped around 180 degrees, so I was now facing the oncoming headlights from the vehicles traveling behind me. My tires skimmed sideways across the pavement toward the shoulder of the road.

  I remember everything in excruciating detail, the noise especially, as my car rolled five times down the steep embankment. Glass shattered and smashed. Steel collapsed. The world spun in dizzying circles in front of my eyes, so I shut them and gripped the steering wheel hard, bracing my body against the jarring impact as the roof collapsed over the passenger side and the windows blew out.

  Down I went, tumbling and bouncing over the rocks like a stone skipping across water.

  Then all at once, it was over.

  There was only white noise in my ears, and the thunderous sound of my heartbeat.

  I opened my eyes to find myself hanging upside down in my seatbelt, with the side of my head wedged up agains
t the roof.

  The engine was still running. Other sounds emerged. Music blasted from the radio – an old favorite song of mine from the 80’s, The Killing Time, which was ironic, but in that heart-stopping moment, I was not that reflective. All I could think of was getting out of there.

  Panic hit me. Hard. I felt trapped, frantic to escape, and began to thrash about.

  I groped for the red button on the seatbelt buckle, but my hands were shaking so badly, I couldn’t push it.

  My breaths came faster and faster.

  I cried out, but no one heard.

  Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a whip cracked. The vehicle shuddered.

  I froze and tried to see past the smashed windshield in front of me. Everything outside the car was pure white, covered in snow.

  If only I knew where I was. If only I could see something beyond the broken glass.

  But it didn’t matter what I could, or could not, see. I knew what was happening...

  My car was sitting on its roof, resting on a frozen lake. The crack of the whip was the sound of the ice breaking.

  Creak… Groan…

  My SUV shifted and began to slowly tip sideways.

  Large chunks of ice and bone-numbing swells of water poured in through the blown-out windows as I sank into the frigid February water. The shock of the cold took my breath away.

  Frantically, I struggled with the belt buckle and managed, at last, to free myself, just as the last few pockets of air bubbled up to the surface.

  I was completely submerged.

  It was dark and murky down below. I couldn’t tell which way was up, nor could I swim through the window, for a large shard of ice had become wedged there. I shoved at it with my shoulder, but to no avail. Then it occurred to me to open the door.

  I groped for the handle and pushed it open against the weight of the water. Meanwhile, my body was going numb in the sub-zero temperature.

  I swam toward the light, but collided with a thick ceiling of ice. No matter how hard I pounded against it, I couldn’t break through, so I swam, searching for the hole through which I entered.

  At last, I broke the surface and sucked in a great, gasping gulp of air while I recklessly splashed about.

  I struggled to clamber up onto the frozen surface, but my body seemed made of lead. My teeth were clicking together. I began to shiver violently, and then, by some miracle, I stopped feeling the cold. My hands went numb as I made one last attempt to claw my way up onto the ice.