Page 72 of Call Off the Dark

Every night since they had lived at the farmhouse, Helen had run Wade a bath. But tonight she didn’t want to fill the porcelain tub for the man dirtying the comforter on their bed. She wanted to be in Seattle with Tyler catching a movie in the U District. Tyler. Tyler. Tyler.

Helen went to the bathroom and turned on the bathtub faucet, swearing under her breath. Running a bath wasn’t exactly a task that required great skill. She kept her hand beneath the water flow and adjusted the temperature until it was just right, then straightened up and turned.

Isaac was standing just inside the room.

Her breath caught and a flush spread across her cheeks. She wondered if he’d heard her swearing while she ran the water. It didn’t seem right to swear while wearing a petticoat.

“Sorry,” Isaac said. “I was wondering if there would be enough hot water for me.”

“You can have this one.”

His fingers went to the buttons on his work shirt and he undid the top one, then the next. The bathroom space was so tight that as she exited, she couldn’t help but brush her body against his.

In the bedroom, Helen told Wade, “Isaac is going to bathe now and then you can.”

Wade’s gaze finally moved from the ceiling to look at her. His eyes were still distant, but they held a note of accusation. “You ran him a bath?”

“No, I ran you a bath. And he came in while I was doing that, and he’s our guest, so . . .” She trailed off. Did she really need to explain Hostessing 101? “I’ll run a new one when he’s done.”

“A bath is the last thing on my mind right now.” Wade reached for the bedside lamp and flipped the switch, plunging the room into darkness.

She turned the light back on. “Can we talk, Wade? I’m worried about you.”

“You should be worried about both of us.”

He killed the light again, and this time Helen let him.

Isaac was bathing still as Helen put the fireplace poker back on its stand and considered her poetry books on the mantel. She didn’t want to get into bed next to Wade. He hadn’t even taken off his boots before he’d flipped off the light. Was he really going to sleep the entire night in them?

She selected a John Keats hardcover from her book collection and opened it to a random page. “I have so much of you in my heart.” Not so random after all. The page was folded down to the section with his letters to his fiancée, Fanny Brawne, a woman Keats would never marry due to his illness and untimely death. Helen didn’t remember folding that page down, but of course she must have—she was very familiar with it. It comforted her that she wasn’t the only lost soul living a tragic love story. Across the universe, there had been many unfinished love stories before hers and there would be many after. There were so many brokenhearted people walking around, thinking to themselves, I have so much of you in my heart.

Helen heard the bathroom door open. Isaac was out of the bath. She resisted the urge to inch toward the edge of the room where she could see down the hallway. Instead, she listened. She heard his footfalls whisper and creak down the hall and then disappear into the guest bedroom, the door closing quietly behind him.

Then she sat down on the couch with John Keats’s letter to Fanny Brawne.

So let me speak of your Beauty, though to my own endangering; if you could be so cruel to me as to try elsewhere its Power.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Less than two years ago

Tyler was gone. Without him, the sun forgot how to rise. Helen stayed under blankets of gray all day, waiting for the weight of it all to finally crush her lungs. But she kept on breathing, and it seemed like a cruel joke that the world moved around her like normal, while her brain was stuck in a loop replaying the same hellish night over and over.

There had been a moment when Helen had started desperate chest compressions on Tyler, but that had just pushed incredible amounts of blood out of his stomach wound. So in the end, all she did was hold him and wait for people to show up and start making impersonal, official declarations about time of death and crime scene protocol.

Grief hit her so absolutely—the instant destruction of her entire universe—that in only a matter of weeks it felt as if she had been a grieving widow all her life.

Loved ones circled and began handling things for her. Her mother, her aunt, her girlfriends—they all made “arrangements.”

Tyler’s body was an arrangement to be made.

His life insurance policy was a payment to be doled out.

His personal belongings were things to sort. Helen refused to go through his things. No, she would not give anything away! She held on to the idea that Tyler might come back and need them. She knew, logically, that wasn’t true. But she grasped onto it anyway. She slept in one of his unwashed T-shirts. Initially, his scent lingered.

She sent Tyler text messages each day:

I miss you. I need you to come back because no one understands me like you. No one hugs me like you. No one looks at me or loves me like you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.