The bride screamed. A protracted just-found-a-dead-body-in-the-bath scream.
Zia dropped a wineglass. Darlene’s microphone squealed. Henry, Gorman, and Liv all said “What?” as Zach said, “Bloody hell. Oh, that looks bad.”
The bride’s bottom lip had swollen to the size of an overripe raspberry. “Thomething bit my thip.”
“Bees,” whispered Gorman.
“Beeth?” The bride’s false eyelashes widened. “Beeth? I’m allergic to beeth!”
Liv’s phone buzzed. Eliot Goldenhorn (Huz) calling. Finally: a life raft.
“Eliot! I’m dying here! Where the hell are you?”
But it wasn’t Eliot on the other end of the line. It was a girl. Her voice had a light Southern lilt. She was completely hysterical. “I’m sorry, they just found him like this—I got your number from his phone, I know we haven’t met—I didn’t know who else to call!”
Everything—the boathouse, the bride, the beeth—disappeared. A new kind of horror broke in Liv’s chest.
“Who is this?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”
The girl took a shuddering breath. “It’s Eliot,” she wailed. “He’s dead.”
* * *
Eliot was dead.
Impossible. And yet, not.
Myocardial infarction: heart attack. Eliot was forty-nine. The same age as Liv. Eliot was in perfect health. Eliot was in a closed casket. Liv touched the side of it. The wood was smooth and very cold.
It was an icy day at Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn. The sky was the color of dryer lint.
Ben had Velcroed himself to her hip. She could only see the top of her son’s small head. He should be wearing a scarf. Liv couldn’t remember if he’d worn one. She couldn’t remember getting ready.
Liv understood she should mingle with the mourners gathered on the stumpy grass. She told her feet to move toward them. Her feet didn’t. She couldn’t leave the casket. And so the people started moving toward her. They were speaking to her. She recognized some of them; she was replying to them. But Liv couldn’t hear a thing. She was suspended behind a barrier, as transparent and tough as bulletproof glass. From behind the glass, she had a sense of what these people thought they saw. Liv Goldenhorn: someone resilient and impressive, the sort of person you wanted to sit next to at a dinner party. She’d stripped her own floors, gotten her son into the good public school, and once fought off a mugger by bashing him with her New Yorker tote bag and screaming she had syphilis (a lie). Even her own cheating husband’s funeral was something Liv Goldenhorn had been determined to get through.
But standing by Eliot’s casket, she was realizing that Liv Goldenhorn was just an idea of a person. And ideas about people could change.
More words were said. The casket was lowered. Handfuls of soil were tossed on the polished wood. And just like that, it was over. The mourners started drifting toward the street. There was a lightness in their voices and shoulders. Their brush with mortality was over; life was back to normal. Liv’s entire world had been obliterated in just one week—her routine, her sense of safety, her livelihood, all snatched away. There was no more normal.
She wrapped both arms around her son, holding him as he finally broke down and cried. Ben was eight but looked younger. His features were fine and expensive-looking, like a porcelain dinner set viewed behind glass.
“I’m here, baby,” she whispered over and over again. “I’m here. I’ll always be here.”
It was the sort of lie done out of kindness.
She held her only child until he quieted, smoothing his dark hair off his fevered face. Her miracle baby. The baby who defied all odds. Conceiving Ben was supposed to have been the great challenge of her life. The absolute hardest thing. And then Eliot died, and four years of IVF seemed like a relaxing holiday.
Liv’s mother must’ve seen something off in her face because she took her grandson’s hand and said something about meeting them by the car—C’mon Benny, let’s give Mom a moment—then they were gone.
Liv stood at the cemetery gates, wondering if she was going to cry but instead feeling an endless absence of everything. A feeling without a horizon.
She didn’t know where to put her hands. What time it was. What had just happened.
A week ago, she was married.
A week ago, everything was predictable.
For better, or for worse.
* * *
Eight days later, Liv was hauling a bag of mindlessly purchased groceries from the trunk of her car when someone behind her tentatively spoke her name.
Liv’s instinct was to ignore them. She did not need yet another pity lasagna.