Twenty Six

The court date approached slowly, and as he had promised, Trent did not contact Emily. His silence seemed ominous to Emily: at one time accusatory and captious; at another resigned. Sad. Guilt ate at her, and a thousand times, she punched his number into her phone, a thousand times, she hung up without completing the call, not knowing what she would say. Scared about what he would say. If he would say anything.

She even stopped listening to Uptown’s music; hearing his voice was more than she could bear. One day when she was in the grocery store, wandering, distracted and aimless down the aisles she found herself singing along to a half-audible song that was vaguely familiar, being played over the PA system. Suddenly, it hit her with a jolt that it was Uptown, a song she knew front to back.

Tears sprang to her eyes, and Emily was cruelly reminded, with a sensation that felt like a punch in the stomach, of a half-buried memory from the weeks after Thomas had died. She had been at work, and had called home for some reason. When no one answered, the answering machine had kicked in. It must have been the first time since his death that Emily had got the machine, and it was Thomas’s voice, warm, familiar, alive, that greeted her. For half an instant, she thought it was him, back home, where he should be, answering the phone. Then, with a visceral crash, she was on her knees in the bathroom, heaving up her lunch, as paralyzed with grief as she had been, weeks before, at his bedside on the day that he died.

Hearing the song in the grocery store, a song she’d heard a hundred times, brought back that gut-wrenching feeling all over again. She left her cart in the aisle and walked out the door. She sat in her car and willed her hands to stop shaking. It took twenty minutes to calm herself enough to feel safe driving.

Contrary to the common wisdom, Emily’s obsession did not get better with time. It got worse. She saw Trent everywhere she went. On concert posters plastering walls, in the walk of a man just up ahead in the mall, in the lazy drawl of a patient or colleague. It was hard enough to avoid hearing his voice; she took to leaving the radio off at home and in her car, which helped. Even certain smells reminded her of him. She considered seeking professional help, but never made the call, knowing with certainty that any counselor worth her salt would tell Emily she was suffering from a garden-variety broken heart, which only time would heal. She wasn’t so sure she could handle hearing it, although she knew on some level that it was true.