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I put all that in my eyes as I fail to find words.
“I’m glad you’re here, Rem. Eve is outside.” Bets gestures past me, to where the twilight has draped the night in hues of deep purple. Eve is an outline on the family picnic table. Bets squeezes my arm. “Danny liked you.”
I think that’s a lie, but I’m not man enough to argue with Bets.
I pick up another soda on the way out.
The air is warm and rich with the ebullience of summer as it lifts off the lake. It stirs memories of skinny dipping, sailing and all the early days with Eve, when fun and games were the only items on the agenda.
I stop at the table.
Eve has changed into a pair of jeans and a white tee shirt, her auburn hair loosened and wild in spirals around her face. I mentally twirl my finger through one of those corkscrews, but hold myself back.
My Eve wouldn’t mind, and this one so resembles the woman I know that for a moment I believe in fresh starts and happy endings.
Then she looks over at me. Weariness is etched in the lines around her eyes. She’s been crying, and she plays with the tiny heart charm on her gold necklace, the one her father gave her for her sixteenth birthday.
I did this. Art is right—something I did derailed us into this terrible vortex of grief. Right now, I should be tucking my daughter into her bed, singing her a terrible version of You are My Sunshine.
But this is the reality I’m in, and I’m going to leave it better than I found it. So, “Can I join you?” I hold out the soda.
Eve wipes her cheeks and nods, the sadness in her eyes so deep it punches a hole through me.
I slide up beside her. She smells vaguely of the perfume I tried to ignore today. Now, I let it sift into my pores, let it devour me.
“Pretty sunset.” I’m referring to the last simmer of mage
nta along the lip of the lake.
“Mmmhmm.” She opens the can.
“Good turnout.” I inwardly groan. I’m a writer. I can do better than this. We’ve been married for nearly ten years. I know Eve. I know how she thinks, and how to make this better, so, “The point of reopening cold cases is to use new technology to solve old crimes. The only reason we couldn’t nail Danny and Asher’s killers is that we never got a good look at them. They drove by too fast to see the footage in the convenience store camera. But maybe we pull the tapes, digitize them, slow them down, let the computer fill in the variables…?”
She doesn’t respond for a full ten seconds. Finally she takes a sip of the Diet Coke then says, “The only reason we didn’t get them is because they weren’t the ones who pulled the trigger.” She gives me a quick glance. “The real murderer is Hassan Abdilhali, head of the Brotherhood, but no one will give him up.”
Hassan now runs one of the biggest Somali gangs in the city while under the disguise as a legitimate businessman who owns a string of laundromats. He sits on the council board of an outlying northern suburb.
“There are men serving nickels and dimes right now, that were members of the Brotherhood in ‘97. How many wood panel station wagons could there be in 1997? I could take another crack at them—”
Her hand slips onto my wrist. It’s warm and firm and she squeezes. “There’s nothing we can do about it, Rem. Some things we just need to learn to accept.”
I don’t want to ask, but does that include the destruction of our marriage?
Staring out at the lake, I fall to quiet. The dark waves ripple against the sandy beach, make a thumping noise against an overturned canoe.
“Ash loved the lake,” I say, not sure why, but I’m caught in a memory. “Remember that time she raced down the dock without stopping and flew right into the water? She dropped like a rock—”
“She was two. If you hadn’t been there to grab her…” Eve looks over at me and she’s wearing a ghost of a smile. I want to reach up and wipe away the glistening on her cheek.
“She wasn’t the least scared of water, not even after that. Last summer, she swam all the way out to the floating dock—”
I feel her body go stiff. “What?” Her breathing catches.
I pull in my own quick breath. “I mean, the last summer, she was…um…” And there’s no getting out of this because I don’t remember Ashley’s last summer.
She’s still alive, to me.
“Are you okay?” Eve frowns and I draw in another breath.
