Evidence of Life. Barbara Sissel Taylor
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aren’t answering your cell.”
“She keeps pressing me about having a memorial service.” Abby let her fingertips fall onto the pages of her notebook open on the desktop, where she sometimes wrote her to-do list, or her thoughts, or perhaps a bit of silly poetry. There was a line written there from last month: The first bluebonnets have opened, she had jotted. The ground under the oak trees in back is saturated in blue. A pool of blue.
“Abby?”
“She thinks I’m not handling the situation properly, that I’m not facing facts.” Abby closed the notebook.
“You need time, that’s all. Listen, I had to tell her you were on your way home.”
“Well, she was bound to know sooner or later.”
“Just so you know, she told me if you don’t answer her calls pretty soon, she’s coming there.”
Abby closed her eyes and thought how calamity changed everything, how it shifted an entire landscape, a whole solar system that had once been orderly and well-loved, into something that was dark and cold and even sinister. And she realized she was angry about this, and the anger was foreign to her and it filled her with foreboding.
“Abby? I’m here if you need me. You call me day or night. I don’t care what time it is.”
“Okay,” Abby said. “Thank you,” she added and clenched her jaw to stop the wretched tears.
“Remember to eat.”
“I will.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“I don’t want to let you go, chickie.” Kate sounded forlorn.
“Well, you have to. I have mildewy jeans in the washer and I’m going to pass out from the smell.”
“Vinegar,” Kate said. “Wash them in vinegar and then hang them in the sun to dry.”
The sun, Abby thought. She hated the sun almost as much as she hated the rain.
But she washed the jeans using vinegar as Kate instructed and hung them outside to dry. She called Charlie next door and thanked him for tending the horses and mowing the grass. She checked on her mother. There was more of everything she could have done, but she couldn’t focus, couldn’t organize herself, couldn’t think of anything other than Nick and Lindsey. That they weren’t home, with her. How could it be? Her bones, her teeth, the sockets of her eyes ached with her need for them, her need to know they were safe.
The following afternoon she went upstairs intending to tidy up, gather the rest of the laundry, but then she didn’t get any farther than the doorway of Lindsey’s bedroom. Her pink-and-white eyelet bedroom. Too pink, Lindsey had said not long ago. She had wanted to paint it. Yellow? Abby seemed to recall something about yellow. And sunflowers; Lindsey had mentioned sunflowers, but when she’d asked her dad, he had said they didn’t have money to redecorate a room she’d be leaving in just a couple of years when she went off to college. Abby had been surprised. Nick almost never said no to Lindsey. He was easier on her than on Jake. Abby had worried about it. It had been a sore subject between her and Nick, one they had argued about on a regular basis.
It seemed to Abby now, in retrospect, that they had argued more frequently in the weeks leading up to the flood. There had been that night in March or maybe early April...he’d had a dinner meeting in Houston with a client and he’d come home late, been wound up and irritable. She’d been in the laundry room folding a load of clothes from the dryer, and he’d come to the doorway to greet her. She saw him there in her mind’s eye, staring in at her, gripping his briefcase, looking rumpled and worn out in his suit, tie hanging askew.
“What’s wrong?” It had been the first thing out of her mouth. But what other question do you ask when your husband comes home from work looking wrecked?
“Nothing,” he’d said. Abby remembered his kiss, dry as an afterthought.
She should have let it go; instead she’d made the mistake of saying it was the third night in a week he’d missed dinner. She hadn’t meant anything other than she missed him, missed sitting down to dinner together, but he’d treated it like an attack.
“Do you think I like working my ass off?” he’d demanded. “How else do you think we’re going to pay for all of this?” He’d gone on, enumerating their expenses, lumping in the prospect of Lindsey’s college tuition.
“She could get a scholarship to play basketball somewhere. Everyone seems to think she’ll only get better,” Abby had said, following him into their bathroom.
He had yanked off his tie.
Abby leaned against the door frame of Lindsey’s bedroom now, seeing it, the way Nick had yanked his tie as if it were a noose around his neck. She remembered the sinking feeling it had given her. He’d looked so tired that night. So—defeated. The word rose in her mind. The way he’d looked had made her want to go to him and say, Please, can we drop this? Can we just go to bed? Just lie down and hold each other? But she hadn’t said anything. She didn’t know why. She remembered that she’d finished cleaning her face, gone to the wastebasket, dropped in the used cotton pad and paused there, hardly listening to the rest of Nick’s rant, somehow losing herself in a dream of smoothing the soft skin beneath his eyes, trailing her fingertips over his lips, watching his mouth curl in that slow, sweet smile.
She’d been thinking of the dimple in his left cheek when he’d said her name—
“Abby!”
She’d turned to meet his gaze in the mirror.
“Did you hear me?” He’d sounded so annoyed.
No, she’d wanted to say.
“I said you can’t count on Lindsey getting a scholarship. They’re not even out of preseason this year and she’s already sprained her ankle.”
“Slightly. It’s not a bad injury.”
“This time. But the rest of those girls are gorillas compared to her. Look at Samantha.” Nick had brought up Lindsey’s best friend. “Twenty pounds overweight, at least. She’s a hog.”
“Nicholas! That’s a terrible thing to say.”
He’d brushed his teeth, wiped his face with a towel.
“What is it with you?” she’d asked, and when he’d answered, “Nothing,” when he’d said, “Work,” or whatever excuse he’d offered, Abby had accepted it and his apology. Because he had apologized, she remembered that now, too. He’d embraced her and balanced his chin on the crown of her head. She was just the right height for it. She used to tease him that she wasn’t a chin rest. But not that night. That night he’d been in a mood.
“It’s my job to take care of this family,” he had said and stopped. Even his heart beneath Abby’s ear had seemed to stop, and when she’d looked up at him, when she’d asked, “What is it?” he’d said he didn’t know how to explain it. He’d said, “I’ve made mistakes.”
“Everyone has,” she’d said.
“Yeah, but— Look, there’s this woman, a sort of client, former client, I should say. She thinks I mishandled her interests in some real-estate dealings. She’s made some threats.”
“Threats?”
He’d shaken his head, looking chagrined. “Never mind. I don’t know why I brought it up. She’s just some nutcase. It’s nothing.”
“Are you sure? You sound worried.”
“Nah.” He’d bent to kiss her, then pulling her close, he’d rested his chin atop her head again. “I mean, yeah, I do worry sometimes. What if I’m not around when you or Lindsey or Jake needs something?”
Abby had been unnerved by that. There’d been an underscore