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My throat has turned to chalk. I crack my knuckles and glance around the room. The students are perched on stools at slanted desks with their pencils and drawing pads. They murmur amongst themselves ignoring me. Engrossed in their art or secretly thumbing through their phone screens thinking I don’t see. It’s the end of the year. If they turned everything in, I don’t ‘see’ a thing. And neither do they. I’m a widow. The childish rumors say I killed my husband on vacation and buried him at the bottom of the ocean.
I wish I never saw his body. But I did. That memory will haunt me until I take my last breath.
Facebook. Focus. I need to make the post before the bell rings. Before my peers wander in and notice my sweat and pallor has nothing to do with the weather. My pinky hoovers over the ENTER key. The URL is typed into the bar, cursor blinking. Waiting. I’m a junkie, wanting a hit—to see a picture of him. Just one more even though it’ll end with my heart in pieces and my cheeks covered in tears. Regrets surge through me. I hate the way things ended with us. I feel like an angry ghost. Robbed of what could have been. We were on the brink of disaster, divorce imminent. Or we were on the precious of something new. I’ll never now. That last fight was left unfinished. Unresolved.
It leaves me feeling agitates because I’m stuck walking a fence for the rest of my life. Was he going to leave me? I never thought we’d fall apart. No one did. It was the type of thing that started the size of a grain of sand. It got in there and grew, festered. Too many things unsaid and too many tears avoided. When we laughed, we laughed. But toward the end, when we fought, it was ugly. I didn’t recognize him anymore. At the time I blamed him, and still do to some extent—but I wasn’t me anymore either. I became this placating version of me. Docile, whining, and filterless. I said everything I thought, good and bad. Most of it complaining. Yet, I linger here hoping to see an old picture of him because there are none at home. The past was erased every photo of us destroyed. So, I perch on this stool, shoulders forward, wringing my fingers hoping for a glimpse of him. Like when we first met.
My stomach sinks and I straighten in my seat. Click away. Leave the page, but I can’t. I click on private message with a blue dot indicating that it’s new. When the screen loads, my face falls when I see who it’s from. That little blue dot is perched directly next to Zach’s face. It’s a message from him. And it’s unread.
The way my heart slams into my chest physically aches. This has happened before. More than once. Both were glitches. Cruel technological fails. The steel cage I built around my heart—the same cage that saved me and let me soul wither—cracks. In that split-second hope fills my body and my grief falls away. Forgotten. I slap the key, clicking the private message only to realize it is old. The note was written before he died.
LET’S TRY TO WORK THINGS OUT. ME & YOU IN THE CAYMANS. JUST US. NO DISTRACTIONS. WHAT DO YOU SAY?
The steel cage slams shut, metal torques, eyes shining. I want to scream, but I swallow it and manage to keep that plastic smile on my face.
CHAPTER 2
I stiffen in my seat as a student nears my desk at the front of the classroom. Large windows frame the young woman. She’s my little prodigy, Aleigha Thamas. Her dark eyes meet mine as rosy lips pull into a shy smile. She’s clutching her drawing pad to her chest. I told the class to draw clouds today. Partly because grades are due, partly because I need their backs turned in case I get emotionally impaled on a Facebook picture when I send their parents invitations to the spring program.
“Ms. Abby?” In a southern school, there would be no issue with the students calling me this. It shows respect, but in the north, it’s super weird. I can’t remember when I changed it, when I asked the first student to stop calling me Ms. Sabba and use my first name instead. The months have blurred into years, but a bleeding heart doesn’t recognize time. The only way I know it’s passing is when report cards are due or summer is looming, like now. I dread those months of nothing to do, of being assaulted by memories that I can’t control.
I glance up at Aleigha, glad to look away from the laptop for a moment. I tuck a strand of dark hair behind my ear. It wasn’t out of place. “Yes, what can I help you with?”
“I was wondering what you thought of this—” Her gaze cuts to the side mid-sentence and I know she’s nervous about whatever is on her sketchpad.
I reach out for her drawing pad and when I look down at the creamy paper, I’m surprised. There’s a page of clouds, but instead of pencil lines and strokes, each ball of mist is made of a string of zeros and ones. It looks like computer coding, all strings of numbers that mean something to techies, but not me.
I take a wild guess, “Is this binary?”
She ducks her head, hiding her face behind a wall of hair. “Not really. Well, maybe a little. I was thinking about how cool it would be if the clouds could be drawn as molecules, but I didn’t have my science textbook with me, so I switched to coding. Is it dumb?” Her face scrunches as uncertainty floods her features.
The one thing the girl lacks is confidence. No one ever told her that she was any good, so she’s the last person to see it when she succeeds.
“This is amazing.” I grasp her notepad between my hands and stare at it. The composition and flow are perfect. The fact that she did it with numbers and shading is even more entrancing. I tip the sketchpad sideways and tilt my head, admiring her work. “I don’t know that much about coding. Do you?” I glance up at her.
Aleigha shakes her head. “Not really. I saw my brother messing around with something yesterday and I thought it might look cool. Robot clouds.” She offers me an uncertain lopsided grin.
I hand her back her sketchpad. “You are amazing at conceptual execution. You remained true to the subject matter while infusing it with something different.” Smiling softly, I add, “It feels like geo warning.”
Her face lights up. “It does?”
“Yes, is that what you were hoping to achieve?” Aleigha nods fervently. “Well, go finish it up before the bell rings. You’re onto something.” She represses a grin as she crosses the room to peer out the window once more.
When she’s settled on her stool once more with her back toward me and eyes fixed on the clouds, I return to gathering my guts to make the Facebook parent post. It’s now or never. All eyes are on the sky and nowhere near me.
Ignore the pictures. Don’t click around. Go to the page. Post, and get out.
I go straight to the school’s page this time, click events, and start typing, entering the information for the High School Spring Art Program. Time, directions, dates, awards, and a little graphic. I close the event window, revealing my feed from a lifetime ago. Since there’s nothing new, old images and posts fill my cyber wall.
The page is filled with ancient heartaches—Zara’s smiling face looks out at me with her sun-kissed arm draped over my shoulder. The photograph was taken nearly fourteen years ago. She was closer than any friend could be and was a sister in every way, even before Zach and I got married. She was my maid of honor at our wedding. She should have been laughing, walking up and down these hallways with me now.
I scroll down. I can’t help it. I’ve been sucked into the black hole. Pictures I’ve seen before fill the frame and I drink them in greedily. The emotion of past moments, the echoes of laughter long silenced fill my mind.
I should stop. No one ever walked forward while constantly looking back. It’s the reason I can’t seem to move on with my life. The reason for the unending nightmares and a general lack of sleep. Maybe so. Or maybe I’m just angry. Zach said we’d work it out, that he wouldn’t leave me—but he left me. It’s not the same, but it is. Either way, I didn’t want things to go this way. I’m a forty-year-old New Yorker, living on Long Island, alone. Empty house. Empty heart. Empty life.
I sigh and rest my finger on the down button, watching the promises of a former lifetime of happiness scroll by in a blur. When I blink, the page refreshes, and a new image is at the top. I’m staring at the screen
, thinking I’m seeing a picture from a long time ago. There’s nothing new on this account. I abandoned it when Zach died. No new pictures have been posted since. No new posts on my personal wall. Nothing.
But in this picture, Zach stands there on the beach. His beautifully ripped chest coupled with chiseled abs has more definition than I recall. He’s wearing nothing but faded floral boardshorts and a crooked grin. That long, lean body stand in the sandy surf on Grand Cayman Island on the East End somewhere, Cayman Kai, maybe? There are no tourists traps around. Just tons of turquoise water and a sandy shore leading to an old dock with a little boat.
I stare at the image. What is this? A picture from our second honeymoon? Every inch of his shirtless body is sun-kissed. A bronzed god. When he hit forty, the man began working harder to maintain his health. He started running, lifting weights, but the alcohol thickened his mid-section. I’ve never seen him so trim, so sculpted as he is in this photo. This picture had to be from then. Maybe I’m not remembering right? But the man had love-handles, and this guy doesn’t have an inch of fat on him. His dark hair ruffles in the wind, obscuring his face as he bends forward and ties a boat to the dock. That pose defines every muscle in his body. I can see each place I used to touch gently and trace with my fingertips. Kiss with my lips.
The dread is hollowing the center of my chest fades as curiosity rises. Where were we? I must have taken this picture, but I don’t remember. We were supposed to go out on a dive boat that day, but that’s not the vessel. And that’s not that dock we went to that day. The long wooden wharf in this picture is weather-worn and old. Splintering in patches and sun-bleached. The place on Seven Mile Beach where we were supposed to depart to go diving had silver-colored aluminum planks, almost blinding in the sun. This image was taken elsewhere.
I click on the picture and make it larger. Zach is bent forward, his face hidden slightly by the tips of his dark hair as he bends over to grab the rope. That’s when I see it. The shiny spot on his torso. I double click, enlarging the image as big as it can go, thinking its sunscreen—assuming I took this picture but can’t remember—or anything that is remotely logical and describes what I’m seeing because this is wrong. As my eyes sweep the light patch of skin, I instinctively know.
Hands shaking, I jerk away from the computer, toppling it to the floor. Eyes wide, my skin flushes as I stagger backward, reaching for the wall, the counter, anything so my body doesn’t crash to the floor. Gaping, my mouth opens wide trying to suck in air but it feels as if my face were covered in plastic wrap. I can’t breathe. It’s not possible.
