Inglath Cooper - A Gift Of Grace

He hadn’t opened this door once since the week after her funeral when he’d hauled it all up here. Box after box until he’d collapsed, exhausted, in the bed they had shared. He had slept for three days straight.

He weaved his way into the room and knocked over a tall box, spilling two of her competition swimsuits and a pair of goggles. He put them back where they’d been.

Most of the boxes were sealed and unmarked. He moved to the far wall, pulled out a couple of smaller ones, using his pocketknife to slit the tape. Inside was a quilt her grandmother had made her for college graduation. A half-full bottle of Chanel No. 5. A set of electric hot curlers. The next box held books and a headset she’d used for running.

He opened a half dozen more, dumping their contents onto the floor, reaching for another when he didn’t find what he was looking for.

Finally. There.

A dozen or more framed photographs he’d pulled from their living-room walls three years before, pictures of them both as children, as high-school sweethearts, as husband and wife.

He lifted them out, one by one, each picture creating its own well of pain. He and Laney at junior-year homecoming, her hair long, blond and straight. He and Laney on the rocks at Badger Creek playing hooky from school. There were pictures of him as a boy, an elementary-school photo when he’d decided to give himself a crew cut with his dad’s horse clippers.

And there were pictures of Laney. Prom queen. Preening with Alice and Amy, her two best friends from high school.

At the bottom of the stack was the one he’d been looking for. Laney as a toddler standing next to her father.

Caleb flipped the frame. On the back she had written: Me and Daddy. Three years old. Me not him!

He turned it over again, stared at the little girl in the picture. If he’d needed proof of the resemblance to the child he’d met today, here it was. Same silky blond hair. Blue eyes with their long, dark lashes. Even the mouth was the same. Wide and full.

Caleb sat down on the wood floor, propped his head on one hand and stared at the picture.

How could this have happened?

His life had finally begun to even out, to settle into something he could accept as living. Now, all the old pain was back, rushing through his veins like injected poison.

He sat for a long time, his eyes closed, head against the wall behind him.

An extraordinary sense of calm slid over him, as it had the other times just before he sensed her presence.

He kept his eyes closed, knowing that if he opened them, she would slip away.

A single touch to the back of his hand, and he knew she was there. As she had been countless times in the past three years.

He wondered if these moments were the only thing that kept him going. Wondered if all this time he had been straddling the line between the sane and insane, if visits from a dead wife automatically put a person in that category.

He had told no one about it. Not his mom or dad. Not his doctor or pastor. As real as he knew her presence was, he could not bring himself to share it with anyone else for fear that maybe he really was going crazy.

He sat for a long time, the peace inside him the only proof he had that he wasn’t losing his mind. It had been like this when she’d been alive, as well, Laney’s ability to soothe, to bring reason and calm to the times in their lives completely void of either.

With the calm, the feel of her touch receded, and he was alone again. He opened his eyes then, stared up at the slow-twirling ceiling fan above him. Tears spilled down his cheeks and fell onto the glass covering her face.

CATHERINE TUCKER SAT in a striped lawn chair, enjoying the sun’s warmth.

The backyard of Betsy Marshall’s modest, but immaculate, North Carolina ranch-style home was full to overflowing. Jeb and his brother Saul were in charge of the grill. The smell of sizzling hamburgers and hot dogs threaded the late-spring breeze.

Jeb came from a large, extended family. The opposite of Catherine, who had been an only child. His sister Betsy was the third in a family of five children, and she was the most like Jeb’s mother in that she loved to get the whole family together, seemed happiest in the middle of so much talking and laughing.

Jeb stood by the grill now, smiling at something his brother had said. He looked more relaxed than she had seen him in a long time. Unfair though it might have been, a wave of resentment washed up through her, made her face too warm, like the hot flashes she’d had after she’d stopped the hormone-replacement therapy a couple of years ago.

In that moment, she saw the two of them on either side of a huge divide, she still immersed in grief, he ready to move on. He wanted her to go with him. Catherine knew this. And yet it was as if her feet were planted in concrete. No matter how desperately she tried to pull herself free, she couldn’t.

“You’re awfully quiet.”

Catherine glanced up. Betsy stood in front of her, holding two red cups. She handed one to Catherine. “Iced tea. Sweet like you like it.”

“Thanks,” Catherine said, taking the cup and lacing her fingers together around it.

“Could we talk?” Betsy asked, her voice candid.

Catherine had known the gesture was not of the freestanding variety. With Betsy, they never were. “Sure,” she said, waving a hand at the chair beside her.

Betsy sat down, took a sip of her tea, then sighed. “How are things with you and Jeb?”

Catherine looked up in surprise. “Fine. Why do you ask?”

“May I be honest?”

“By all means,” Catherine said, since to her knowledge, Betsy had never once refrained from speaking her mind, even when the other party did not want her opinion.

“I don’t remember ever seeing Jeb so unhappy.”

Catherine sat for a moment, too numb to respond. “Did he say something to you?” she finally said, her voice cracking a little.

Betsy took another sip of her tea, and then said, “He didn’t have to.”

“Oh. You can just see this in him?” Catherine asked, trying to keep her voice level.

Pity clouded Betsy’s eyes. “And you can’t?”

“Whatever problems Jeb and I have,” she said, anger fanning through her, “I’m sure we’ll work through them.”

“I know things haven’t been the same for any of you since Laney—”

“No, they haven’t,” Catherine interrupted. “But that’s hardly surprising, is it?”

“Of course not,” Betsy said quickly. “These things take their toll on everyone.”

“These things?” Catherine bit out. “My son lost his wife—” She broke off there, her voice cracking in half.

Betsy reached over and covered her hand with her own. “I know, Catherine. I’m not trying to belittle the enormity of it. I’m just saying maybe a worse tragedy would be for this terrible thing to ruin more lives than it already has. From what I’ve seen, Caleb has let it get the best of him.”

Fury tunneled up through Catherine’s chest. She pulled her hand away and pressed her lips together, glancing across the yard where Betsy’s son, Harris, stood with his arm around his very pregnant wife. Third grandchild on the way. “From your point of view, it must be so easy to judge. How could you possibly understand what Caleb has lost?”

“But there, Catherine,” Betsy said softly. “You just said it. What Caleb has lost. It’s his loss. But it’s destroying your marriage.”

She got up from the chair then, and walked back across the yard, leaving Catherine sitting at the edge of the gathering, alone.

GRACE BARELY SLEPT Friday night. She came into Sophie’s room three times to ask if it was time to get up yet. The last question was asked at 4:00 a.m., and Sophie finally folded back the covers and let the child climb in beside her.