Page 44 of Wham Line
“We should have stayed upstairs,” I said.“You could have slept on the couch—”
He put a hand on the wall and started toward the bedroom.
And all I could do was flutter around him in case he fell.
Somehow, tonight, the room felt even starker: the empty dresser, the stacks of plastic storage bins, the closet full of a dead woman’s extra clothes.Bobby lowered himself onto the mattress.He sat there for a moment, exhaustion swimming in his face.
“Lie down,” I said.
And when I touched his shoulder, he let me press him onto the bed.He closed his eyes and took slow, deep breaths.
I sat next to him.I rubbed his stomach.That was what I liked when my stomach hurt.And then nausea roiled up inside me, and a wave of heat followed.Because Bobby didn’t have an upset tummy; he’d been poisoned.Accidentally, sure.But poisoned nonetheless.The doctor had said we’d been lucky.The doctor said it could have been so much worse.
When I forced myself to speak, my voice was thick.“Let’s get you out of those clothes.”
He didn’t respond, so I shucked his sneakers.His joggers came off easily—beneath them were the boringest, boy-est boxers you can imagine.(Blue.That’s it.He liked to buy the twelve-pack that had only three colors: blue, black, and gray.) A little prodding and nudging got him to shift enough that I could strip him out of his hoodie.His skin pebbled; the basement was cool bordering on cold, which I hadn’t noticed until then.
“Under the covers.”
It took some more cajoling; he must have been exhausted, because it took him a couple of squirms up the mattress before his legs weren’t hanging off the end.I undressed quickly, slid in next to him, and pulled the covers over us.Usually, Bobby was like a mini space heater, but not tonight.Resisting the urge to wrap myself around him octopus-style, I fluffed pillows and wiggled around until I was stretched out against him so I could rub his stomach again.He made a soft, pleased sound.His lids were closed, but his eyes moved.
In the restaurant, it had all seemed so clear: Bobby had a hard time verbalizing his feelings, and so the obvious thing to do was to meet Bobby where he was at, with touches and proximity and spending time together—all patented Bobby Mai ways for communicating.Now, lying in a bed that wasn’t his, in a bedroom that was no longer his, in a house that wasn’t really his, it felt like so little.Even pressed up against him, touching in as many places as I could manage, it felt like nothing.I couldn’t even tell if he was awake.
“I love you,” I whispered.“I was so scared.And I’m so happy you’re okay.”
His chest rose and fell with his even breaths.
“I want to say this because I know—I know it’s not always easy for us to talk to each other.I know it hurts right now, Bobby.I wish I could make it better for you.I wish—” My throat closed.“I’m here.If you want to talk about it.If there’s anything I could do.”
I waited for—
I don’t know.
I waited, just in case, I guess.
But he was asleep, so, of course, there was nothing.My hand stopped moving on his stomach.And, after a while, I rolled onto my back.
For a while, I lay there, staring up at the ceiling.This will be impossible to believe, I’m sure, but I wasn’t ready to go to sleep.It was barely six o’clock, for one thing, but even if it had been two in the morning, I don’t think I could have closed my eyes.There was a lot happening inside me, stuff I couldn’t even put a name to, and it made me think of when they hot-wire a car in movies—the crackle of electricity, again and again as they cross the wires.
I got up and turned off the lamps.Back in bed, I propped myself up with pillows.Bobby was still sleeping soundly, so I got my phone.I hadn’t checkedCrime Catsin over twenty-four hours, but I told myself no—I hadn’t done any writing that day, and there was no reason for me not to do it now.
Then I took out my laptop.I did a few searches and found a chain florist who could get lotus flowers in a reasonable amount of time.With that done, I did what I’d been avoiding for the last day and a half: I updated my spreadsheet of agents.It shouldn’t have been so painful; after all, it was just the last in a string of rejections.But it was surprisingly soul crushing, and when I’d finished, I closed my laptop and set it next to the bed.
One of the things they tell you about writing—theybeing the melting pot of people on the internet who give advice, and most of the time, you have no idea who they are or why they’re qualified to give advice or if they’re crazy people living in their basements surrounded by dozens of glass cages with hamsters running on tiny wheels—is that the best thing to do when you get a rejection is to write something new.Okay, that’s not quite true.Thebestthing to do is to send the story out again, but since I’d exhausted my list of potential agents, that wasn’t an option.The other thing you were supposed to do was keep writing.Always be writing.
If someone wanted to be rude about it, they might have pointed out that this wasn’t my strong suit.
On the other hand, though, writing had always been a way for me to process my emotions.And telling stories about things—putting what happened to me into a narrative, giving it a beginning and ending, making sense of it—had always been a trick that got me through the bad times.
The word I kept coming back to wasgrief.
I didn’t have a lot of firsthand experience with grief.I’d been sad when my grandparents had died; I’d loved them, but I’d been much younger, and the memory of that loss was distant.It certainly wasn’t equivalent to losing a parent or a child.Breaking up with Hugo had been hard, but it had been the right thing to do.Even the anguish of all my ups and downs with Bobby, however intense it had been at the time, hadn’t been grief.It had been hurt and embarrassment and maybe even sorrow.A broken heart, for sure.But not grief.
And the more I thought about it, the less sure I was that mystery novels ever dealt with grief.Sure, there was often someone grieving—a relative of the victim, for example.There was loss.Mystery novels were full of bereaved parents and lovers and even, occasionally, children.But their pain was always external.And it usually didn’t occupy more than a chapter.
In some novels, true, the detective was the one grieving.Sometimes, this was a loss from a long time ago—a psychological wound that had never healed.Sometimes, it was directly related to the case at hand.The detective had a personal relationship with one of the victims, for example.Often, the so-called Dark Night of a mystery novel occurred when the detective failed to save someone he cared about.
So, it wouldn’t be true to say that mystery novels didn’tcontaingrief.But at the same time, most mystery novels didn’t deal with it.They didn’t dwell on it.They didn’t ponder it, or examine it, or even—I saw now—even understand it.Not really.Because in most mystery novels, grief was like the trigger of a gun: it was something you squeezed to fire off the next part of the plot.Grief, in a mystery novel, was nothing more than a stepping-stone toward justice—or revenge.
