Nightwolf

I stare at him. “The casket? But she’s getting cremated.”

“She’ll be cremated in the casket,” he says.

What’s the point of that? I want to ask. But I know he’ll tell me they don’t just dump bodies in the incinerator.

He gets up and leads me across the office and down the hall to another room filled with caskets and urns.

I look around with wide eyes.

“I know,” Michael says. “It looks like a bunch of vampires live here.”

I scoff. “They don’t sleep in caskets.”

Michael’s groomed brow goes up.

I clear my throat. “So, which one is the cheapest?”

He shows me one that looks pretty bare bones. “Still has a pillow though,” I muse. “Don’t know if that’s necessary.”

He gives me a tight-lipped smile. “If you’d like this casket, then we can settle on the urn.”

Again, I go for the cheapest. I can practically hear my mother yelling at me, “Don’t you dare spend money you don’t have to! I don’t need all that.” Most of her life we were pinching pennies and that’s continued with me.

After I’ve made my choices, Michael says he’ll call me when it’s time for a viewing. Earlier he made me pick out clothes for her casket and that was so unbelievably hard. I broke down crying in my mother’s closet and Lenore had to choose her clothes in the end, put them in a garbage bag. I gave the bag to Michael, not wanting to look at what’s inside. I just can’t do it.

I pay the outrageous bill and then I step outside of the funeral home, taking in the deepest breath of air, even though it’s all cold mist here in Outer Richmond.

I did it. I survived the funeral home. I didn’t think I would.

I walk around the corner and see Wolf’s Audi e-tron waiting for me, the car humming in that quiet way that electric cars do. He had asked if I wanted him to accompany me during the meeting but he’s been weird lately, so I decided it was best I go on my own, in case I’ve been asking for too much.

I know. What a thing to say: he’s been weird lately. We’ve all been weird lately. We’re all grieving. I’m not just being weird, I’m this whole new person. Not fully formed, more like an amoeba if anything, but I’m new, starting a new life, like my older life splintered off into another branch the moment my mother took her last breath. I can see my old life from here, I’m still in the same body, in the same clothes, sleeping in the same room. But everything else in the world has changed, altered me cell by cell.

So yeah, I’m weird. But so is Wolf. Because when I say I’ve been sleeping in the same room, I mean it. My room. I’ve been sleeping alone. It’s not that I’m at all thinking of sex or anything like that right now. There’s a time when it’s a wonderful distraction and there’s a time where it’s not even on my mind. All that’s on my mind is the loss of my mother and how awful my new existence is.

But I still thought he would sleep with me. Hold me.

And he hasn’t been there. My mother died four days ago, and he’s been pulling away and I don’t know why. I mean, I have my theories but I don’t want them to be true. He’s stopped touching me, he’s stopped looking at me. He’s there for me in all the supportive ways, like he’s helping with every detail of my mother’s death, like calling lawyers about the will and the banks and the hospital and making the arrangements with the funeral home for the meeting, all this fucking shit that’s been piling up because of her death. He’s physically there.

He’s just not there emotionally.

I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. The loss of my mother has been hard on him, maybe harder than he realized it would be. I know what she meant to him, and I know he’s having a hard time processing it. I also know that I am not well, I am a million miles from being okay, and that I might be looking into things that aren’t there because right now I’m operating purely on fear.

That’s one thing I didn’t expect when she died.

The fear.

There’s so much grief and sadness but there’s this fear that’s come from nowhere. It’s almost like I’m seeing the Mara again, or whatever the fuck that nightmare demon was. I lie in bed at night in the dark and I am so fucking afraid. I don’t even know what of, it’s just this fear that came with her death. It’s like looking into the abyss and having the abyss look back at you.

So maybe it’s that fear that’s worming its way into all the other aspects of my life. Into my relationship—whatever you want to call it—with him.