“Ugh, I am…crazy attracted to you, right now,” I blurted. Blood rushed to my face. Mortified, I stammered, “N-not that it’s a bad thing. Or that that’s why I’m here, that’s not why I’m here, I just—”
Gena laughed, again. I wanted to crawl inside that sound, smoke a bowl, and float in it.
Great. Now, I had a crush on Gena.
“Why would I be offended by that?” She crinkled her nose and said, “I know I’m hot.”
“Oh, I get it, now,” I said in a tone of mock-revelation. “That’s why I’m attracted to you. You’re as vain as I am.”
“Let the record show that I did not contact you because I thought that right now would be a good time for you and your grieving husband to double up on me.” Her lips closed, but her smile broke through, again. “I just think you’re really cool, and I had a feeling you needed someone outside of the scope of the tragedy to talk to. You can text me or Facebook message me any time you want, whenever you need to vent or just not talk about what everyone else wants to talk to you about.”
I tilted my head. “Thank you. That’s really nice. You’re a good person, Gena.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “I try.”
“The same goes for you, by the way,” I told her. “If you ever want to just get together like this, or go to a shooting range to express our feelings, you know how to find me.”
“For which I am grateful.” She sighed deeply, then lightly clapped her hands together. “So, now, the important stuff. Did you watch Hannibal all the way to the end?”
“Oh, my god, yes.” I leaned in low, like we were discussing a matter of national security. “That ending could not have been any gayer if there had been explicit anal.”
“I know!”
It was really amazing how the time flew, and how light my heart was once I could have a frivolous conversation with someone. Life had been divided pretty sharply and suddenly into B.E. and A.E., before Emma and after Emma. An hour with Gena was like having a time machine.
For the first time in months, I finally thought things might be okay.
CHAPTER EIGHT
All of the grief websites Dr. Harris had recommended said that during the first year, anniversaries were the hardest times to negotiate. After weeks of processing the event, a person in mourning would be plunged right back to square one.
Emma’s birthday was on April ninth.
“I think I know what I want to do,” Neil told me the week before, over dinner. We’d finally agreed upon a full-time nanny Neil trusted to not murder us in the night and kidnap the baby, so we’d carved out two evenings a week when we ate without Olivia, just the two of us. Tonight, Mariposa dealt with Olivia and her new favorite game of tossing her cup on the floor, and Neil and I got some much needed grownup time.
Much needed grownup time to discuss stuff like what we were going to do for his dead daughter’s birthday.
At least, he seemed weirdly upbeat about it. “Okay. What do you want to do?”
“I think I’d like to have Valerie over, and her boyfriend, and Rudy. We can all have dinner together.” Neil twirled some linguine onto his fork. “Perhaps we can share happy memories, lift each other’s spirits, that sort of thing.”
“That’s a nice idea,” I agreed, though I wasn’t sure how well it would go in practice. It hadn’t even been four full months, yet—that would happen a week after her birthday. The anniversary loomed every single month, like an inescapable countdown to further misery. It seemed like what he was proposing could easily turn into a second funeral.
An idea popped into my head and I said, “Oh!” before I could consider whether sharing it would be wise or not.
“Oh?” he asked, wiping his mouth with his napkin.
“I was just thinking…but it’s kind of silly.”
“No, no, I want to hear,” he promised.
“I was just thinking about Tangled.”
“The cartoon?” he aske
d, and I was sure he had no clue where I was going this.
“The animated film masterpiece,” I corrected haughtily. “Anyway, there’s this thing that the king and the queen do… They think their daughter—that’s Rapunzel—they think she’s gone forever. Every year, they have this huge festival on her birthday, and at the end, they light these paper lanterns and let them go over the sea. And the whole time, Rapunzel is in her tower, seeing these lights every year, not knowing they’re from her parents…” I stopped myself. He didn’t need to know the whole plot. “The point is, the lanterns are like, the way she’s connected to her parents, even though they’re not together, and even though she never knew them. Maybe we could do something like that for Olivia.”