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Cheryl decides to buy the flowers herself.
“But someone at HHM will handle that, won’t they?”
She is not sure who asks this. Perhaps her sister.
“I’m sure someone would’ve—”
The slam of the front door as she leaves cuts off the rest.
She drives. First without purpose, just to be alone and in motion. She drives to quell the anger. She drives to quell the chatter, hushed as it had been, echoing in her ears. She imagines everyone she left in the living room still studiously avoiding saying anything of substance. She circles the block, passing again and again the wrought iron gates of their house—no, her house, she realises with a start— and then, because it is not in her nature to be without purpose, she drives into town.
The bell tinkles over the door, and the florist greets Cheryl with the first cheery smile she’s had in days. That brief interlude of normalcy vanishes as soon as she asks about memorial arrangements.
“For a colleague,” she says, words slipping out of her without thought or hesitation. “I didn’t know him well.” She relays this with a touch of regret at the lost opportunity to get to know this colleague better. The florist offers her condolences regardless, and they are easier to receive as the office errand girl than as the widow.
She is given a portfolio of arrangements. A catalogue of designs and styles, prices discreetly written in a tasteful cursive as if to mitigate the shock of expense. Cheryl purses her lips, just as discreetly mentions the budget her imaginary office has authorised, and is directed to a choice of two arrangements that fall within it— all the cash she has on her. She wants to avoid showing the florist the name on her credit card.
“Has the family indicated a preference for any particular flowers?”
There had been flowers in her marriage. Anniversaries, birthdays, Valentine’s, dates. Flowers he had bought for her, flowers she had bought for him. More flowers at the beginning then at the end, but such a detail, while poignant, probably isn’t all that remarkable. Had he ever stated a preference for particular flowers? She tries to remember, recalls only blurs of green and red, yellow, orange, white. The bouquets tasteful, beautiful, always.
She snaps the portfolio shut after making her choice.
When the arrangement—a sheaf of calla lilies— arrives at HHM the day of his memorial, it causes an anxious ripple of confusion amongst the secretaries. There’s no record of it on any of their receipts, no one can remember visiting that particular florist, and despite assurances that there’s no outstanding payment due, had he been alive they know this is exactly the kind of discrepancy he would have them spend hours getting to the bottom of. They are relieved (guiltily so, but relieved all the same) that he is not there to notice.
~
There were calla lilies in the kitchen the day after the last of the Abramson Foundation fundraisers they attended together. White petals unfurled in the morning light like flags of surrender and in the decaf latte he handed her, a fleur-de-lys.
“I think we both said some things we regret last night,” he said.
She stared into the foam, half furious at this pronouncement on her behalf, half furious at the effort he had put into the perfectly poured design in her coffee. She had hoped, after last night, things would change. She had hoped, this morning, that the rift between them was beginning to close. Instead, in her coffee was an attempt to reinstate the status quo. Who knew one could feel such anger at latte art. She wanted to throw it, but instead she said, “I didn’t say anything I regret.”
He raised his hand to stop her, but she carried on.
“And I don’t think you did either. Not really.”
He shook his head. “I can’t. Not now. Not with— I owe it to Chuck. To Dad.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t.”
But he had already turned away, fussing with the coffee machine. She waited, waited for a long time, drink cooling in her hand. Finally, she put it down, undrunk.
“I’m going to spend the weekend with my sister,” she said, deciding in that moment to go. His shoulders tensed and stilled. “You’ll have the house to yourself, and when I come back, maybe then you can tell me what it is you really want.”
Retreat in order to draw him out. That had been her thinking at the time, but on Sunday she returned to find he’d moved his suits into the guest house.
~
Cheryl decides to box up his suits.
Her sister offers to help, tells her she can always outsource the sad task to friends and family. She declines and calls it closure, but in truth, she can’t have anyone other than her stumbling upon the drugs they all say he must have been taking. Anyone else finding them would be a violation. Of him, his privacy, his memory— no. She’s failed him so utterly but she won’t fail him in this.
She’s done the research, learned just how resourceful an addict can be. She’s impressed despite herself, lurking in the webforms for parents of teen meth heads and dope fiends. Feckless sons and daughters who can’t pass shop but manage to engineer secret panels into wardrobes and closets; who fashion false bottomed toy chests; who hollow out the legs of their beds. There’s something darkly admirable about their ingenuity and she readies herself for the challenge of finding his stash, whatever, wherever it may be.
She’s not surprised when she finds nothing after the first day, nor the second. She’s methodical, patient. By the fifth day of searching, she’s desperate. When on the sixth day she finds herself on his bedroom floor in a sea of navy pinstripe suits, checking each individual button to see if it is actually cocaine compressed into the shape and texture of a button, she has to concede that it is unlikely that she will find any drugs at all. He must have gotten rid of it all before walking into the ocean.
Considerate as always, right until the end.
On the seventh day she rehangs his clothes and puts the room back to how it had looked before, just as he had left it. She lies down on the mattress that still holds the shape of him and discovers for herself just how lumpy and uncomfortable it is. How had he slept on it, month after month? Had it been the mattress equivalent of a hair shirt or just something he lacked the motivation to change? Perhaps he’d collapsed into bed each night too high to register discomfort. At this point, each option seems as likely as the last.
As she lies there, she stares at the neat rows of suits on their hangers and wonders if she ever truly knew him at all.
It’s a year before she finally parts with his clothes. Each jacket, shirt, and blazer dry cleaned and pressed until it no longer bears any trace of the shape of him. She donates them to an organisation which outfits the indigent for court appearances and job interviews. Repeat offenders sport his crisp white collars and cuffs. His knitted ties drape around the necks of awkward young men interviewing at fast food joints. The Bernalillo County Courthouse becomes a haunt for fine blue shirts. His former colleagues catch glimpses of him everywhere and, unsettled, say nothing to one another; a fact that makes his absence all the more acute.
~
When he finally made good on his promise to take some time off work, Cheryl made good on her promise to take him to Hong Kong. Never mind that two weeks with her extended family was not her (or his) idea of a vacation, and never mind that it was the height of typhoon season; she wanted him as far from the firm as geographically possible. So, Hong Kong it was.
Whatever reticence either of them felt was dispelled when the plane banked on the approach to Kai Tak airport. She was long inured to the thrill of the descent, having made it every other summer throughout her childhood and teen years, but a long, slow grin lit up his face at the sight of the buildings looming up in the window, thrilled at the danger, and she couldn’t help but grin back, finally glimpsing a part of him that had been too long hidden.
Perhaps it was a case of prolonged jetlag, but the wild giddiness that struck them both as they landed never truly dissipated. He approached each day with wide-eyed curiosity, charmed by everything, and she, usually cynical and aloof, found herself charmed right alongside him. She dragged him around her old haunts, claimed she was rediscovering the city through him, when in truth, she was using the city to rediscover him.
It was less than a year before the handover and she was not oblivious to the anxious tension permeating the rhythms of daily life. So many of her friends and family had already left for London, Vancouver, Melbourne. But he smiled more. He slept. His laughter was genuine. His bouts of pensive silence no longer worried her. More importantly, she could see he was aware of the change in himself.
The days passed and they found themselves sharing a look with greater frequency.
She knew that the romance of vacation would not be their life. The future was uncertain. It was also full of potential. Optometrists and lawyers were needed everywhere, after all.
He extended his trip. She maxed out her accrued vacation days. They explored their options. Lunch with the wife of a cousin’s friend who was looking for an experienced partner. Dinner with the uncle of an old classmate who was looking to open his own practice. After every meal, the little seed of possibility that had lodged in their minds proved difficult to uproot. Instead, it grew, and unfurled, and bloomed.
They arranged to meet at the ferry terminal in TST after her follow-up lunch with the uncle she was already beginning to think of as a business partner. He was easy to spot in the crowd, tall as he was, blonde as he was, new bespoke shirts he’d gone to pick up slung over his shoulder in their protective cover. He leaned against the railing, staring across the harbour and she, happily beer-addled and sun-struck and full of tenderness, watched from a distance as he was approached by a man in orange robes. Words were exchanged, followed by smiles, followed by money, followed by bows, followed by a swift parting.
He— beaming, beatific— turned to her as she approached, and she— sighing— held his face between her hands. She found his gullibility, his impulsive, trusting kindness endearing. How vulnerable it made him seem then, and how in need of her protection.
“That wasn’t a monk.” She kissed him. “It was a scam.”
He hadn’t given the fake monk much, but any amount given under false pretences was a betrayal. He made light of it on the ferry back to Central and she did not tease him, sensing a deeper level of embarrassment than he let on. By the time they returned to her aunt’s house in Stanley, the incident had been forgotten, swept into the back of her mind by the noise and bustle of the cousins’ conversation and sunset drinks and a four-hour dinner.
At 3am, a fax came through from Chuck with bad news. He was already packing when she woke up.
“It’s a client.” He kissed her. “Chuck needs me back.”
It didn’t sit well on his conscience, jumping ship when there was a fire to put out. The client was one of their biggest, one the firm couldn’t afford to lose. He just needed to fix this one thing, and then he could broach leaving, guilt free.
Her first instinct was to take his face in her hands and not let go until he could see that this fire would be followed by more. On and on without end.
Instead, she got up and packed her suitcase alongside him.
~
Cheryl decides to see Rebecca.
Most of the people who knew him had stopped marking the anniversary of his disappearance after that first year, but Rebecca writes. A card for the second year. An email for the third. Each time, she tells Cheryl to reach out if she’s ever in L.A. It is not an invitation, Cheryl knows. It is simple politeness. She reaches out anyway, puts her on the spot with a call from the airport just as she’s due to depart. She hears Rebecca’s dismay behind the façade of apologies. The summer program is in full swing. She’s just too busy. Another time. Perhaps.
She persists. Rebecca caves.
On her last day in L.A, they met in a bistro for lunch. Rebecca arrives in black, as does Cheryl. The pair of them in enormous sunglasses and hats because it’s California and bright and sunny and they’re mindful of melanoma. Rebecca, kissing the air by her cheek, can’t stay long; she has to dash straight to the concert hall after, rehearsal for a benefit concert in aid of— here she stumbles, with a nervous apologetic smile— addiction recovery.
This is what they do, the people who knew him; they acknowledge him obliquely, manoeuvring around the absence of him in such a way to make his absence all the more acute. They only remember the worst parts. They don’t say his name.
She inhales sharply.
The waiter saves her from saying something stupid, bringing Rebecca her iced-tea, Cheryl her Chardonnay. She fingers the stem of her wine glass and imagines snapping it.
“It still doesn’t make sense,” she says at last.
Rebecca puts down her glass and pats her hand, mistaking her anger for some other more palatable emotion. She offers gentle platitudes Cheryl barely hears.
She thinks of the cocaine they found in the Jag’s upholstery. She thinks of Cliff Main’s hesitant confession during the HHM memorial. A baggie of coke falling from his locker after a round of golf. A prostitute ejected from his car. Behaviour so messy, so uncontrolled, so unlike him.
And then, they are no longer thoughts, but words aired. Rebecca’s soft smile falters. She sits back, withdraws her hand.
“My husband wasn’t a drug addict. He wasn’t.”
She says this more aggressively that she intends and Rebecca flinches. Neither of them speak, and the longer the silence last, the harder it is to break it. When the waiter returns, Rebecca doesn’t ask for the check as Cheryl expects; she orders a second iced-tea, this time one from Long Island.
When it comes, she takes a long and pensive sip.
“What do you want me to say?” she asks finally.
Cheryl slouches back in her seat. Her anger is far from spent, but it’s smoke now, lacking in heat, suffocating. It is exhausting being angry all the time.
“Nothing. Nothing, I— I think I needed someone new to hear me out.”
Rebecca almost smiles. “A fresh pair of ears?”
“Everyone in Albuquerque… they’ve heard this before.” And they’re tired of hearing it; they may not say so in so many words, but Cheryl knows. It’s evident, year on year, by the decreasing number of social engagements in her calendar.
Rebecca studies her across the table. “Don’t underestimate,” she says at last, “the lengths people go to to hide themselves.” She traces lines through the condensation in her glass. “Even from the people they say they love.”
“I knew my husband.”
Cheryl has forgotten who she is talking to. Rebecca exhales, looks at her with such forbearance, as if she is being terribly naïve.
“I’m not saying you didn’t know Chuck,” she says haltingly. “But—” They— their former husbands— are suddenly too much there at the table. Ghosts of previous lunches, of cocktail hours, of partners’ dinners press down on them. A sense their husbands have only gone to settle the bill; arguing no doubt, duelling with their credit cards for the privilege of paying. They’ll be back any second.
The second passes. As does the next. Cheryl’s heart beats. She inhales slowly, tries not to imagine what it must have felt like, the smoke filling Chuck’s lungs, the scorching heat.
She watches Rebecca scrutinise the water droplets on her finger, watches her face spasm into a brief, unsettled expression before drying her hand with her napkin.
“They made their decisions,” Rebecca says. She folds the napkin quickly, precisely, an indication Cheryl’s audience has come to an end. She raises a hand in the waiter’s direction and scribbles her signature in the air. “No one is to blame. Not us. Not even them.”
Cheryl had not come to L.A for answers, or closure, or redemption, but she leaves it as restless and unsatisfied as if she had. In the taxi to the airport, she changes her mind, has the driver drop her at Playa Del Rey. The setting sun lights the sea on fire. A wide bridge of orange and gold light runs from horizon to shore, seeming solid enough to cross.
Barefoot, dragging her suitcase over the sand, she walks towards it.
The Pacific is cold, but gentle, barely rippling as it laps against her toes. She fixes her gaze through the yellow haze on the sun, all her professional training be damned. It sinks lower and lower, an orange ball balanced on the edge of the world.
His car was discovered at daybreak by surfers. His body was never discovered at all. Credit to the coast guard, they had searched. They had trawled and scoured. They had studied charts that mapped the currents and tidal patterns, but the sea had revealed none of him.
She wonders if he had arrived at his beach in time for a final sunset. If he had stood as she was standing, shoeless, ankle deep in sand. If he had waited for the last flash of light, a silent starting pistol, to vanish below the horizon before setting out.
He would not have loosened his tie, but tightened it. He would not have shed his jacket, but buttoned it. He would have struck out striding, confident and self-assured. He would have held his head high.
He had been a strong swimmer. He would have swum for miles and hours before succumbing to the waves.
~
He looked made of sunlight that first time they woke up together. He lit up gold when the morning found his hair, burnished exposed bare skin. She saw sky when his eyes met hers and he smiled.
You’re sunshine, she thought, but did not say. She was not given to romantic excess, and at the time, she felt the intensity of the sentiment would have faded upon airing. Later, she would wish he had known how she had seen him. She would wish she had spoken.
He said, “Don’t get up.” He wanted to make her breakfast.
Her robe stretched tight across his shoulders and she watched from the bed as he manoeuvred around her tiny studio kitchen, as if he had made her breakfast a thousand times before, until suddenly— on his face, dismay.
“Where’s your coffee machine?”
“I use instant.”
He mimed being shot, fell groaning to his knees and she’d laughed.
“How do you feel about tea?”
The tea had been a gift from her sister who often made the mistake of thinking her tastes applied to everyone, but she didn’t tell him that. She felt a ferocious need to surprise him. She may not have been able to put her tenderness into words, but words were not always necessary.
The glass she gave him was transparent, and he had a clear view of the dry ball as it unfurled delicate leaves, a lily blooming into life in the water. He watched in wonder. He waited until every orange and yellow petal had revealed itself before he drank, handling the glass with as much care and solemnity as if it were her heart.
~
Cheryl decides to go lawyer shopping.
That’s what the lawyers tell themselves anyway, and she understands why. For weeks, she makes appointments with every top law firm in Albuquerque. She goes to Santa Fe. She goes to boutique practices in Las Cruces. She tracks down old HHM partners in Roswell, Kim Wexler’s affidavit in hand.
The lawyers tell her she has a case, no doubt about that. She thanks them and they wait for her call. Weeks pass then months. The lawyers talk amongst themselves in their careful way, wondering who she has hired. What shark she has put on retainer. Who will take Kim Wexler for all she is worth and more.
One of the last she sees is Erin McNamara, née Brill who sits behind her imposing desk practically glowing with the fires of Justice as she explains all the avenues available to her. She speaks frankly, reading the blank calm in Cheryl’s face as cold resolve.
“It was unconscionable, what they did to Howard. To his reputation.” She waits a beat, for dramatic effect, then clicks her pen, notebook at the ready. “How do you want to proceed?”
“I don’t.”
Erin’s neat penmanship wavers into a scribble. Like all the lawyers before her, she has assumed it’s revenge Cheryl seeks, when what she wants is vindication. She goes, affidavit in hand, to the lawyers who claimed to have known her husband and forces them to see how wrong they had been. They can no longer manoeuvre around him. He fills the rooms they occupy. They have to say his name.
Cheryl stands and takes the first deep breath in years that doesn’t catch in her chest. She thanks Erin for her time and takes her leave.
She pulls over on her way out of Santa Fe, turns her back on the city and looks out at the desert. It is too vast to take in all at once, but since knowing he had not wandered into the sea, she has taken to gazing at it for long stretches, wondering if her eyes are seeing any part of where he lays. She can’t know for certain where he had been buried and as much as this knowledge pains her, there is comfort in imagining all the desert as his gravesite.
Come spring, the land will be awash in colour. The roots of wildflowers will caress his body as her hands once did. They will draw their nourishment from his bones and the soil in which he lies. How brightly he will bloom, a sea of petals unfurling in the light.