Between Octobers

The Ever After

Evan—The Ever After

The book was Lily's idea. She'd probably been kicking it around for a while before she brought it to me. The first time she brought it up was about three months after.

I was having trouble with Ethan. He'd been up the previous night, crying and squirming. And no matter what I did, he wouldn't stop. Finally around five in the morning, he passed out.

The next day was busy and I barely got a nap in before the crying started, again, around ten. Ethan developed a small rash, so I'd taken him to the doctor. Then he started shitting through everything and I kept having to change him, re-apply the cream, wash his clothes and sheets. I was exhausted and he wasn't getting better. 

We were both having a proper fit by the time Noah got up. He asked to help and I was out of ideas. He tried everything he could think—which took all of five minutes—before dashing next door to wake his aunt.

I swear, the second Lily put her hands on Ethan, he stopped. It was magic. He just kept staring, sweet and quiet, as she cooed at him.

"Babies sense your stress, Evan. They don't like it." She'd kept her eyes on him, used the same whispery manner. 

"You're going to be a great mother, Lily."

"I can't have kids. No, I can't," she smiled, shaking her head, still staring down at Ethan, who smiled widely back. All gums. "Ah, he's teething." She finally looked at me and pressed a finger to Ethan's mouth. "See how his gums are swollen? In a few days, you'll be able to see little white lines, the tops of the teeth." She looked back to Ethan, "That's why you're so grumpy, isn't it? Why didn't you say something, Ethan?" She blew a raspberry on his tummy and his smile widened. "That's your culprit, the crying and diarrhea, he's teething. He might even get a low-grade fever, but he'll be fine. The doctor probably didn't notice because he's a little young."

She started lecturing Ethan on the trials of trying to grow up too quickly on her way to the nursery.

Grace painted it for him. He hasn't slept in there yet. I keep him in the room with Caleb and me so I can watch them sleep. Ethan's got a very active mind and makes funny faces when he's dreaming. Caleb just can't sleep alone.

"Grace never told me." I often wondered about her vicarious mothering. "Neither did Marcus."

"It's not something I advertise." Lily pulled a tube from a drawer at the bottom of the changing table. I don't use that, either.

"Open this." She handed me the tube.

I obediently opened it and waited for instructions. She chuckled, telling me how to lightly apply the numbing agent to Ethan's gums. We both laughed at the face he made and I noticed the tip of my pinky finger was also a little numb. Lily told me to be careful to follow the instructions and only give it to him if he needed it, then handed Ethan back before heading to the kitchen to make coffee.

She decided to stay and watch him so I could get some sleep. She didn't ask, but assumed, it's what's best for all of us. Just like she assumed—and rightly so—I was going to move back in with the boys and help care for them. We never discussed it, it was simply the way things were going to happen. I was going to be part of their lives and she let me, even though she didn't have to and I didn't deserve it.

She and Marcus will marry next fall. I'm sure once I'm able to handle more than the moment I'm living in, I'll have something to look forward to.

I cry all the time, like a little bitch, at everything. Over the kids, mostly, when they do something that reminds me of Grace. Anytime they do something good. The day Ethan found his hand.

I started again, then—sleep-deprived, appreciative, and suffocatingly lonely—as Lily passed me a cup of tea with milk and sugar.

"You know what might help? If we do something for her."

"What do ya mean?"

She sighed, lowering into the chair opposite me. "Marcus and I were talking and we both think you need to get some things out of your system."

I didn't know what she meant. Rather than repeating myself, which I hate doing, I waited.

"Evan, you had a whole life mapped out for you two. And none of us got to say goodbye." Her eyes watered. "She was there and then . . . it was so abrupt. To me, that makes it harder. I feel like she's hovering over us, like she's saying that it's not finished yet."

"In my head, I had this whole fairy tale planned. But we probably would've had a fight."

Lily cracked a smile and she sipped her coffee. "What about a book?"

"I'm not letting anyone tell the gory details. Fuck that."

"No, no," she waved a hand. "We'd use her journals. Tell her story, from her point of view. Everything through her eyes."

"I'm not that guy, Lily. I'm not . . ."

"She loved you, Evan, and neither of us are the saints she made us out to be. That was part of her draw. People either loved or hated her for it."

"I loved her for it." God help me, I do.

That very moment it hit me—how much I needed to express, how much I need my wife. It was the first time I felt like I could breathe and the first time we really talked about her. And we started talking as if we were really going to do it, though I wasn't convinced. Lily pointed out most of her last year would be easy to write, because Grace wrote it herself and Lily almost always knew what she would do, though she could hardly figure out why, and I could never tell you what Grace might do, but I could tell her motives after.

Lily and I agreed that someone as rare as Grace deserved to be known, but I didn't want me—my shadow, as Grace liked to say—to dominate the story.

The hardest part would be telling what Sheri did and we still only know what forensics could tell us. Science is a wonderful and terrible tool. I love and hate what it tells about her final moments.

 "Truth. The way she saw it."

"Warts and all?" I asked, knowing Grace would never tolerate anything less than absolute honesty.

Ethan stirred, rescuing me with a whimper. Lily took him to the nursery, laid him in his crib, and took off his nappy. To let his skin breathe, she said. Something I never would've thought of. She rubbed his belly until he fell asleep, giving helpful hints the doctor forgot to mention.

I made my way to the bedroom, hoping to find rest.

My insomnia came back with a vengeance since her funeral. Those first few nights were spent reading through her letters to me, one painful line after another. She was angry with me there towards the end, but I try to take comfort in the fact that Marcus told her I wanted her and that I was waiting. I wished he'd told her how much I missed her, too.

When I was done with the letters, I still couldn't sleep, so I started on her journals. I read them consecutively, just as she wrote them. I walked through the year she lost Sol, felt her pain, heard her cries—they are my own. And the year that followed, the one she was supposed to spend with me. From then on, I couldn't think of anything but what she went through, what that must've felt like. It keeps me up at night.

It's a form of punishment, this need to know everything. But writing's not really my medium and I couldn't consider myself properly informed nor punished unless I went through everything she did and I wasn't ready.