How Do I Write the Next Line?

Welcome back, gentle reader. This is another tale borne of long drives and not much to keep my brain occupied. Per my normal approach, this one is a slow burn to get to the exciting bits.

I didn't have an editor this time, so all mistakes are mine and I apologize advance for those. As always, I welcome any feedback (whether good, bad, or indifferent). Thanks for reading!

#

I opened the car door and shivered as cool Pacific air swirled inside. Sounds of distant surf mingled with the low hum of the car's heater. I closed the door without shutting off the engine.

Gravel crunched under my shoes and the breeze tickled my hair. I glanced at the overcast sky, thinking that appropriate for the moment. A few paces brought me from the car to the guard rail. I stepped over it and approached the cliff. The cliffs here near Heceta Head weren't tall, though there was some drop-off to the surf below.

I smiled sadly. Carolyn had loved the coast near Florence. Half the time we came to see the kids at school in Eugene, I thought it was just an excuse for her to book us overnight near the coast. She would sit in silence and overlook the ocean for hours. I often wondered what she was thinking during those times.

Now, I really didn't want to know.

I glanced at the waves slapping into the rocks. Anything tossed to that tempest was likely lost forever. Objects, people ... memories ...

The weight of my thoughts elicited one final sigh. There was no point in wasting time.

#

I won't spend too much time talking about how Carolyn and I got together. We were freshmen in college at the University of Oregon when I met her, through friends. She was pretty without being gorgeous, with a slender figure, shoulder-length light brown hair she wore most often in a ponytail, bright blue eyes, and an incredible smile. It wasn't love at first sight or anything like that, but we got along well, and over time, that grew. We dated off and on for the whole four years we were in school, sometimes seeing other people when we were "off."

But I think that by the time we graduated, we both decided that the other was "the one." We got married when I was twenty-three, and her twenty-two. Kids followed: Josie, David, and Clarissa. They all had the requisite ten fingers and ten toes, and they were all good kids.

Carolyn and I both advanced our careers--me in financial consulting, her in sales. At our eight-year mark, Carolyn asked me what I thought about her starting her own business. She'd harbored a dream of owning her own boutique. Financially, we were stable, so I told her to go for it. I knew she was capable but her store was more successful than I dreamed possible. I guess I underestimated the power of trendy-retro-style clothing with the hipster set inhabiting Portland. I was also a little worried that the business would take Carolyn away from the family too much but she balanced her time well and hired capable, trustworthy people, and ended up spending as much or more time with us than before. The extra money allowed us to landscape, fully fund all the kids' college accounts, and enclose part of our back deck and put in a hot tub. Carolyn was happy with it all, so I was too.

Carolyn was warm and bubbly, and well-liked by most people that knew her. She was a good mom and attentive wife. Our sex life was varied and consistent and we both made sure over the years to show our affection to each other. I knew she'd been with other people during our times off--as had I--but she never showed any hint of dissatisfaction with our intimacy. She initiated as much as I did and was willing to experiment and adventure. In fact, I think Clarissa, our youngest, was conceived when we had sex in the middle of a hedge maze after I dared her, with the voices of other tourists drifting near and close. But I digress.

One thing I will highlight. When we got married, Carolyn came to me with a leather-bound book. She told me she wanted to keep a song of our life together. I was amused by the idea but it was important to her, so we wrote lyrics together--usually a verse or two--at every major high point of our lives together: our first anniversary, the births of our kids, the opening of her business, our thirtieth and fortieth birthdays, and so on. She called those milestones, "writing the next line of our song."

The cadence of the tune was simple--something on the difficulty of "Happy Birthday" and it got so long that anyone who actually tried to sing it would have been at it for hours. But it made her happy. Every now and again, she'd take the book, snuggle against me, and flip through the pages, whispering or humming the verses to herself. She'd usually want to make gentle love on the nights she did and I was always happy to oblige her.

So things were good. Life upheavals happened, as they do. Kids grew up, Carolyn and I just got older and more attached. Recessions put us in financial pinches. Josie got pregnant by accident and married her then-boyfriend Lucas. It worked out and they were happy, though the stress about put me in the ground. But I had few real complaints. I was happy. I thought we all were.

Which made it all the more jarring to have it all come crashing down in flames.

Those life-defining moments persist in memory. I've heard people describe it as the brain locking those important moments in stasis, to always be remembered, even when lesser memories, like what you had for lunch Tuesday last week, fade into obscurity.

I think that understates the mental violence of such an event. It's more akin to the shadows of the victims of Hiroshima, etched in stone forever at the instant of exposure to something so terrible.

February twenty-seventh. It was a Wednesday evening. Five-fifty-six, to be precise. Carolyn was due home at any moment. I'd been home about an hour and was, as per my normal, assembling things for dinner. We normally prepared things together, especially since Clarissa had left for school the previous fall, leaving us empty nesters.

I smiled at the thought. We'd both fought the depression of our youngest leaving home ... but at the same time, we'd reveled in having the place to ourselves. For a few weeks, the sex had been off the charts. I knew with us being left alone, it was a bonding mechanism, but I wasn't complaining. And with Josie graduated, living across town with her husband and kid--and a second one on the way--not to mention David and Clarissa still coming home on breaks and weekends--life had not left the house.

A wider smile crossed my lips. Our twenty-fifth anniversary was coming up later that summer. I had almost convinced her to go to an adults-only resort in the Bahamas--not for swingers or anything, but just someplace catering to couples rather than families. We'd both put on a few pounds over the years but Carolyn still looked excellent in a bikini, and out of one. I'd been eyeing a honeymoon suite at one resort for us.

I'd even written two sets of lyrics about our twenty-fifth, for our book, so that Carolyn could choose which one she wanted to incorporate into our song. If she didn't like either, I'd be happy to write something else with her but I thought she'd appreciate the effort.

The doorbell roused me from my daydreams. I wiped my hands and answered. I expected one of my neighbors.

Instead, I was greeted by two Portland city police officers. I raised an eyebrow. "Can I help you?"

"Are you Mr. Theodore Kellogg?"

"Yes."

The leftmost officer took a deep breath. "Sir, I hate to tell you this ..."

Clutching fingers of fear brushed my heart. "What's this about?"

"It's about your wife."

#

They said it happened so fast she never felt a thing. To this day, I hope that's true.

Some trust fund college kid, high on life and cocaine, had been fleeing the cops, over a moving violation. He ran the red light right just as Carolyn made her left turn in front of him. They estimate he was doing one-twenty when his SUV hit her Camry.

Seeing her car, I believed it. Only the back half gave it any semblance of having once been a vehicle. The rest was twisted metal and rubber, with no piece bigger than my head. He'd struck right on her driver-side door. She'd been pronounced dead at the scene. When I questioned whether I would need to identify her, the officer kindly told me that I couldn't, that she was unidentifiable, and that they would do it through dental records.

I wanted to be enraged at the teenager but there was little point; he'd been ejected from the car and smeared his fool head on the pavement. I wanted to be mad at the universe but as I gazed at the stars with tears on my face, the cosmos looked back at me, uncaring and indifferent. Instead of anger, I gave in to numbness.

The calls to the kids were hard. Josie and Clarissa bawled. David seemed struck silent, though he mumbled that he would get Clarissa and drive them home. I was able to tell him to work through the school and get all their classes cleared. He said he would, and I knew he would. He was a paragon of responsibility.

Like Carolyn.

Josie, her husband Lucas, and their little girl Chelsea came over and we had a good cry together. Lucas eventually took Chelsea home. Josie and I cried some more on the couch and fell asleep together, with her hugging me. I woke around ten and nudged her. "Hey, kid. I should get you home."

Her bleary eyes opened. Her voice was hoarse with tears and emotion. "Dad ... I can't believe she's gone."

"Me either." I took a deep breath, wiped my eyes, and stared at the wall. Aside from the staggering reality that my wife was gone forever, a mountain of tasks stared me in the face. I turned Josie's tear-streaked face toward mine. "I'll drive you home. We'll talk tomorrow, okay?"

She nodded, and I did. She was worried about leaving me alone. She was right to do so because for the first time in twenty-five years, I felt truly alone. The silence in the home was oppressive in a way it had never been when I was there by myself, with Carolyn only out for a few hours. I tried to sleep in our bed and couldn't; her scent was on everything, and everywhere. I tossed and turned in a recliner until the sun peeked over the horizon.

From then on, it was the paperwork dance everyone expects but is never really ready for. Getting bank accounts, titles to deeds and cars squared away, etc. Work was great, basically giving me the time off I needed without question. We arranged for a funeral. I approached it all with robotic aplomb. I still had a hard time grasping that I would never speak to my wife again.

Josie, fortunately, ended up being a rock and helped me through everything. She also took over running Carolyn's store, which made sense, since she had been intermittently working with her mom since high school. That was fine for the short term. I figured I'd take care of the business down the road if Josie didn't want it.

A few days after the accident, investigators concluded that it was indeed Carolyn driving the car, from her dental records, and that the driver of the other vehicle had one-hundred percent been at fault. They returned her effects from the car, like her laptop and purse, which had been in the rear seat and had, miraculously, survived in one piece. I also received a written letter from a law firm offering me a hundred-thousand-dollar check from the family of the driver as compensation, with a stern warning that it was an expiring offer. When Josie heard about that, she blew her top and went to Carolyn's corporate lawyer, who referred us to a rather nasty tort attorney. I left it in their hands. At first, I didn't want the other family's blood money but on learning that the driver had a history of bad--read "bad" as "illegal"--behavior that his family had repeatedly bailed him out on, a little financial pain felt like the right answer.

We had Carolyn cremated and interred her ashes at the same cemetery where all four of our parents were laid. The funeral director presented me with a small vial of ash. I wasn't sure I wanted it but I couldn't let it go either.

It was all I had left of her.

I was pleased on the day of the funeral, just by the number of people who showed up. It filled my heart with sad pride to know Carolyn had so many friends and supporters in the community. A number of people, some of whom I didn't know, got up during the service to praise my wife, including a once-homeless woman who Carolyn had hired and helped clean up her life. The woman's voice broke when she described Carolyn's impact on her life. All three of the kids smiled through their tears and I was gladdened that they had their mother shepherd them into adulthood before she left.

We didn't have a graveside service, but instead a small reception at Josie's house. As I greeted people and accepted their condolences and well-wishes, the melancholy returned. When I had an opening, I excused myself and made my way to the back porch for several moments. The low-key hum of chattering voices inside contrasted with the peaceful quiet of Josie and Lucas's backyard. It was a big yard, backing up to a strand of woods. Birds tweeted in the treetops and the setting was idyllic. Despite their awkward start, with her unexpected pregnancy, they had done quite well for themselves.

So much like Carolyn and me, I thought.

The door opened behind me and closed again. I sighed and opened my mouth to tell Josie I'd be back inside in a few minutes.

"Hello, Ted."

I blinked and turned around. I hadn't heard that voice in a while or seen her in even longer. "Hey, Vi. Long time, no see."

She shrugged. "Well, you know how it is."

I didn't know how it was.

Violet Bianchi was Carolyn's oldest friend. They had grown up together, double-dated in high school, roomed together at university, and been godmothers to each others' kids. She hated her full first name and I got told on my first meeting to call her Vi, or else. She and I got along well. I liked her and over time, she became as dear a friend to me as she was to Carolyn.

Unfortunately, both Carolyn and I had always gotten a bad vibe from Vi's ex-husband Owen. We tried to get along with him for her sake. In the end, we'd been correct. He left her for another woman when their son Adam, who was the same age as Josie, was eleven. Owen vanished and her only contact with him since had been child-support checks until Adam turned eighteen. She'd been heartbroken but with our help, she'd gotten through. Adam had gone to school, gotten his commission in the Navy, and was stationed in Honolulu. In the twelve years she'd been single, Vi had dated some but never seriously and seemed content with her job and friends, especially us. She'd been a fixture at the house several times a week. Aside from being easy on the eyes, she and Carolyn seemed to feed off each other's energy, becoming more and more happy the longer they were together.

Then, three years earlier, it had all come to a halt. Carolyn had come home in tears and told me she and Vi had a fight--that Vi had crossed a line and stormed out. I waited for them to mend fences, but when it didn't happen, I reached out to Vi, to no avail. She'd blocked me on all forms of social media. Her phone number had been disconnected. When I went to her job, I was told I wouldn't be able to see her. She didn't answer the door at her home. I wrote her a letter that was returned unopened. Carolyn sadly told me to let it go, that Vi had made her choice. I was distressed by the loss of such a close friend but at Carolyn's insistence, I did let it go, as much as I missed her.

It took Carolyn a long time to get over the loss of her best buddy. I'm not sure she ever did, since there were times she'd stare into space and when I asked her what was wrong, she'd tell me she missed Vi. She refused to talk about what had happened, which I should have taken as a warning sign, but I trusted Carolyn's judgment. I waited for some sort of thawing in this cold war but it never came.

Now, here she was, standing in front of me, in a simple black dress.

Vi had that gift that some women have, of seeming almost timeless. I could have pulled up a picture of her in her early thirties and she would have looked largely the same. Blessed with Italian beauty, she had thick curly black hair that fell past her shoulders, which--along with her deep brown eyes--contrasted nicely with her slightly olive complexion. A single lock just off center in the front of her head had gone silvery-gray but rather than a detraction, it added allure and mystery to her look. I thought Vi had always been the living embodiment of the Yiddish word zaftig, with a heavy bust, narrow waist, and sturdy hips that no modest dress could conceal... and the years had only done her form more justice.

I voiced my first thought. "I know how it is? No, I don't. I haven't seen you in three years."

She lowered her eyes. "I know and I'm sorry. How are you doing?"

"Peachy."

"Ted--"

"No, I mean it. I'm fine. It's hard but you know me. Have to keep a stiff upper lip. Can't wallow forever, can't ..." The words sounded hollow, no matter how much cheer I tried to force into my voice. I turned away.

Vi stepped closer and put her hand on my arm. "I really am sorry, Ted. I know how much you two loved each other."

" 'Love,' Vi, not 'loved.' I won't stop until I die."

She bit her lip, then nodded. She opened her purse, pulled a card, and handed it to me. I took it with numb fingers. She said, "I won't keep you, Ted. Call me sometime, okay?"

"Last time I did, it said your number was out of service."

"I know." Tears shone in her eyes. "That was a mistake. I know you have a lot on your plate but when you have a chance ... I'd like to talk."

Without another word, she returned to the house and never looked back.

#

It feels trite to say, "Life goes on," but that's kind of what happens. Life assumed its new normal. I went to work, exercised, came home, and stared at the television or computer screen. For a while, our friends came around a lot. But over time, they had to get on with their own lives.

I didn't call Vi. I think I just felt too awkward after being apart for so long.

David and Clarissa came home for the summer and it was great having them back but then they had to get back to school. Josie gave birth to her second child--a boy they named Joshua--and while it was great to see the new addition to the family, between his work and her tending the store, and Chelsea and a newborn, I knew she and Lucas were exhausted ... so aside from doing some babysitting, I tried to give them space and not burden them with an old man's gloomy thoughts.

That nasty lawyer I mentioned finally negotiated a five-hundred thousand-dollar settlement from the family. After the shyster took his cut, I socked away half for a rainy day and gave the rest to a charity that helped victims of drunk drivers. On one level, I felt bad for the parents, since they lost their son ... but on the other, if they had reigned in their little bastard earlier, Carolyn would have still been alive, so my sympathy was fleeting.

The weekends that fall, after the kids went back to school, were the hardest. At work, at least I kept busy and kept around people and was only alone in the evenings. But after two full days, I started to get cabin fever. I found myself going out and walking around places like Sportsman's Warehouse and Home Depot, just to be around folks.

Carolyn came to me in my dreams. Sometimes, it was simply pleasant recollections of our times together. I fought my mind to stay asleep, to stay in that realm. At other times, I found myself visualizing the accident and seeing Carolyn's horrible last moments. Those, I actively fought to wake up from.

Oddly, the worst ones only came once in a blue moon. In those, Carolyn moved away when I tried to hug her, said incredibly cruel things, and told me she was leaving me. Those were worse than those with the accidents. I'd wake up in a cold sweat and even vomited after a few. I figured my mind was subconsciously resenting her for dying and was struggling with my feelings. None of those dreams made sense but the brain is a complex organ.