Page 21 of Tides That Bind

I didn’t know how deep and encompassing a child’s grief can be. It’s full of missing and longing and wondering andfear.

I stare at the shovel Lucas holds out, one that is normally caked in wet sand, and find it relatively clean. The bucket, usually overflowing with sea water, is dry.

Lucas fears water. Because at the end of it, the car accident didn’t kill Nate. He drowned.

I have to remind myself to breathe but I’m only able to take in air when Lucas's eyes round, pleading before his voice does. “Can you stay here and help me dig a hole?”

“Yeah. Sure,” I muster up. “Let’s dig.”

Even though something as simple as digging feels like too much, I do it. Because I don’t have a choice to sit back and cry and curse the universe for hurting my son like this. I’m all he has.

When the hole is one Lucas-leg deep, he announces, “I need to use the bathroom.”

I point to the public bathrooms. “Let’s go.”

“We could go to the Shack,” Lucas says and my heart spasms. “Do you think Riley’s there?”

I begin walking in the direction where I initially pointed. “I’m not sure.”

Lucas giggles when Tides halts mid-stride and shakes, freeing his coat of sand. And then he asks a question that should have a simple answer.

“WhereisRiley anyway?”

I shut my eyes. That was Lucas's question at the funeral as well.

Distance remains between us and the coffin. Tides pulls forward, but Lucas pulls back.

I give Tides’s leash a tug before I bend down. “Do you want to tell him something?”

Lucas shakes his head.

“Lucas.” I sink into a squat. I imagine what Nate would tell him.He’d tell him try to be brave. But this isn’t the first time we took the training wheels off his bike. It’s not the first day of school. This is his first introduction todeath. And it happens to be the death of the most important person in Lucas's world. How can I tell himnotto be afraid?

I try anyway.

“It’s okay if you’re scared.”

“I’m not,” Lucas says. “I don’t have anything to say.”

“Do you want to go sit with Nana? Or Caroline and Finn?”

Lucas peers around. “Where’s Riley?”

I swallow, remembering my own words that night when I woke up on the couch alone almost four hours after Nate had left when Silas showed up at my door with a distraught face and a police Chaplain.

Before I could even bring myself to accept what they were about to tell me, I asked, “But where’s Riley?”

Caroline must sense my unease, as she approaches. “Lucas, let’s sit so Mommy can have a moment.”

I drop the leash so Tides can follow, but he doesn’t. Instead, when Lucas sits down, I find myself following Tides’s tail to the coffin for a final goodbye.

But like Lucas, I don’t have much to say. And that’s not because I’m afraid of this goodbye. It’s that the love Nate and I have is so consuming, I’m certain he already knows everything.

He knows that even though it hurts to reach out and smooth a small crease free from the flag draped over his coffin, I do anyway.

He knows I’m not about to bury him—my husband—but what was our family too.

“I’ll take care of Lucas.”

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