Read Online A Notion of Love by Abbie Williams - Free Book Online

kitchen. A distant, detached part of myself, who seemed to be hovering near the ceiling to silently watch events unfold, was ashamed that I didn’t move to comfort my son.
    Mom and Gran and Ellen were in my living room next. Time had passed as I huddled on my couch, covering my head in both arms, unable to move. Gran managed to unfold me, her eyes dark with concern as she wrapped me in her arms, holding me tight to her bosom. She rocked me and smoothed my hair, murmuring words I wouldn’t later recall. Mom and Ellen clutched Elaine, whose weeping was destroying me, while Dodge did everything Gran ordered, including talking with Charlie Evans and Dave Jensen, the cops who came to the house.
    â€œJoelle will be here in the morning,” Mom said at one point.
    Dawn broke, morning came, sunlight sparkling over the snow, despite the fact that my husband was gone forever. It would be months before I could manage to say the word ‘dead.’ I felt hollow, and would, for a long, long time after. But that first morning was the most horrible, surreal and sickening.
    â€œI want to see him,” I insisted later that day, despite Mom’s gentle suggestion that I remember him how he was. Elaine had already been to the funeral home with Gran, had picked out a coffin at my request and taken along the suit in which her only child would be buried. I had spent most of the day wrapped in a blanket on the couch. Neil, Chris’s best friend and the one who’d pulled him from the frozen lake, came to the house to see me, but I couldn’t manage it and left Jo to explain.
    â€œI’ll bring you, Jilly,” Jo said as the afternoon drifted away.
    I was numb, heavy, as though made of concrete, as Jo drove me across town to the Price’s funeral home. I rode with my forehead pressed to my knuckles and had to be helped from the car. Oddly, I’d just been up these same steps twice in the last few months, for both Minnie’s and Tom’s funerals. Never in all my imaginings would I have suspected that next I’d be climbing them to view my husband’s body.
    Oh God, oh God.
    I wasn’t warned. A Notion hadn’t alerted me, hadn’t flashed into my mind to save my husband.
    Why?
    â€œWhy, Jo?” I asked her, as she helped me up the steps. My voice was weak as a kitten’s, and I hated that.
    â€œI don’t know, sweetheart,” Jo said, holding me tightly. I knew she didn’t understand the question I was actually asking.
    Later, I was glad that I had insisted upon seeing him. But nothing, not one thing, could have prepared me for the rending in my soul. He had drowned. It was too unbelievable to be true; my Christopher, who’d spent a third of his life swimming, who had just been dancing around the bedroom with me, night before last, teasing me that it was time to have another baby—or at least keep trying. I would remember him like that, not like this. But I had to see to believe that he had actually left me forever.
    I touched him, my fingers tentative and my heart like ice, ran my fingers over his still, waxen face, his hair. His same face that I had kissed a million times, the same hands that had held me with more love than probably anyone deserved in this life. Terror was too thick in my throat to allow for sobs, disbelief too rampant in my veins. The coldness beneath my fingertips was shocking. I wanted to see his eyes, was suddenly overwhelmed with a terrible and perverse need to see them open, because the last time I had seen them open he’d been alive and was kissing me good-bye wearing his snowmobile face mask, the silver one that covered every part of his face but his mouth and eyes. He’d said, “See you later, honey.” And now his eyes were closed.
    A panic attack hit me so hard I went to my knees.
    The door of the viewing room banged against the wall as Jo came racing through.
    Later I didn’t remember anything about her getting me