Sarah watched her mother walk down the drive, get into her car, and back out. She stood in the doorway until the red glow of the tail lights faded away at the end of the block.
And then she shuddered and went inside, locking the door behind her.
She smelled flowers. Most of them would still be set out under the tree, but the funeral director and his crew had carried the indoor arrangements and plants into the house.
Deepest Sympathies.
In Remembrance of Sam.
We love you, Sarah. You can count on us.
You’re not alone.
She had never seen so many flowers. Everyone had loved Sam, everyone knew him. He’d been a light in the town, someone who did well at everything but who brought everyone else with him in his triumphs.
Including her.
Everyone had loved Sam.
She’d heard variations on the same theme from her friends and neighbours: as they put casseroles and baked goods into her fridge and her freezer; as they hugged her and wept; as they stood in the kitchen after the funeral and told stories about Sam and how wonderful he had been.
For those short hours while the house was full, while people lingered, she’d thought, “I’ll be able to get through this.”
But in the vacant rooms, the emptiness echoed. Sam was gone - he whom she had loved since the eighth grade - and this was her new life. She wanted to peek in on the boys. She wanted to cling to them. But Jim was twelve, almost as tall as Sam. Mike was ten, and already taller than her. Growing boys, soon to be grown. She had a few more years with them, and then they would move on to their own lives. She had friends; she had family. But she didn’t have Sam.
She wished, when the drunk’s car jumped the median and came at him, that she had been in the driver’s seat. She could have been. She’d been going to pick up the boys from school and, at the last minute, he’d said he needed to run an errand so he would pick them up instead.
He never made it to the school.
She braved the living room and the flowers and plants, held her breath against the unwelcome sweetness in the air, and took Sam’s urn from the mantel.
When darkness fell, when family and friends went home, when the boys went to sleep, the truth was that she was alone. But before she let herself sink back into the endless recrimination of how it could have been her and should have been her, she had a promise to keep.
Sarah walked out of the back door, carrying Sam’s urn in her arms. She locked the door behind her, then walked through the tree-shadowed backyard, her arms dappled by the faint moonlight.
She crossed over the stream that bisected the yard on the little wooden bridge Sam had built for her, and stepped onto their island. The tiny island in the tiny stream had been the reason the two of them had bought this piece of land and eventually built their house on it. The north point of the island was covered with the rest of the flowers from the funeral.
On the island grew the tree under which they had first met, on an eighth-grade end-of-the-year picnic. It had to be 200 years old, a beautiful live oak with enormous spreading branches. Both had climbed the tree unaware of the other -they’d met in the upper branches.
They’d known they were supposed to be together the moment they met. When after getting their bachelors’ degrees they got engaged, they bought the land and planned their future home there. They got married and moved into a tiny apartment, and Sam went on to graduate school in architecture. Sarah got a job as a draftsman for a local firm and supported the two of them.
Built into those branches was the tree house Sam had designed and built for her as a belated wedding present (“because you never had one and you always wanted one”). It was his first solo architecture project. He modelled it on the small but exquisite cabins you find on yachts. He’d had friends help him build it on evenings and weekends, but he’d done all the woodwork himself. The result was art.
They’d spent countless summer nights sleeping up there together, feeling the faint sway of the branches, hearing the rustle of the leaves. They’d played there, fought there, made love there. Mike and Jim had been conceived there, as well as the baby they’d lost.
If she’d been forced to choose between living in the house they’d built together later or living in the tree house he’d created for her, she’d have picked the tree house. They’d promised each other that when one of them died, the survivor would place the other’s ashes beneath that tree. They’d thought they had another forty years before either of them would have to keep that promise.
She put the urn on the ground and leaned against the oak’s rough bark. She’d cried when she identified him in the morgue, she’d cried when she met with the funeral director and she’d cried herself to sleep every night since his death. She had thought herself cried out.
But she hadn’t been to the tree. Not until just that moment.
The weight of everything they’d been to each other since the eighth grade hit her with full force; her knees gave way, and she collapsed. Sam’s death and her loss suddenly became terribly real. She sobbed and hugged herself. He was gone someplace where she couldn’t reach him, couldn’t find him, couldn’t hold him, and all she had left was ashes.
“Oh, Sam,” she whispered. “Oh, Sam, I still need you.”
“Oh, Sarah,” she heard Sam’s voice ask, as if from the other side of the tree, “how could you leave me?”
She froze. A fog had come up and somehow she hadn’t noticed. She rose on shaky legs and picked up the urn with Sam’s ashes in it. Had she actually heard anything? Was she wishing Sam’s voice into the air around her, or was her mind playing tricks on her? Or was someone there?