You didn’t answer, and you said you’d answer, just like he’d said, I’ll be here reading the Times til you come home, and when I came home his car was gone. And he was gone. And his phone lay under a pillow in our bed, which was not the plan. His death certificate in my desk drawer (cause of death: Suicide) was not the plan.

Now you’re at some Airbnb in Connecticut with a guy I’ve never met and all I asked was for a text, a word, I’m alive, you’re a pain in my ass, whatever, something. But there’s nothing, and I call 25 times in a row, expecting you to answer, because you said you’d answer, and I’m pleading with the ring. I’m urging the ring of the phone to grab onto your shoulders, with that Icarus-girl tattoo I hate (because, Jesus, he jumped off a bridge and why you’ve got to brand your body with a falling figure I’ll never know). I want to hold you by your feet (with the painted toes I piggied for hours when you were small). I’ve just got to stop you wherever you are, smoking weed on the roof or stripped down in the Long Island Sound taking a night swim with this guy. I don’t even know his last name. Why didn’t I get his number? All I’ve heard is he’s a political comedy major at NYU, and Oh My God, now I’m going to have a heart attack. I literally feel like I’m having a heart attack.

Even after seven years. And a new marriage. And a puppy. Even with the advantages of a heated bathroom floor and a writing life, two wise daughters and apps for organic acai bowls, I cannot, ever, shake it.

Back then, when we lost him, friends were all,  Oh, you’ve managed so well and You’re so strong, but with you there’d be no management, no moving forward, only me going boneless and silent like Trixie from your favorite children’s story, when she left her stuffed bunny at the laundromat and couldn’t speak the words to tell her father. I’m that close to an unmoored, perpetual descent.

With him, it happened before I could stop it, but now I’m bursting out of my skin to stop it and I’ve got an idea. Searching the reverse directory, I find the Airbnb guy’s number, which gives me a slight jolt of mastery. I press the area code hard into my phone, no decorum, not giving a fuck because I need to find my kid, all Karen and privilege and Get me a supervisor, I don’t give a shit. This poor schmuck answers the phone and I ramble that my child is upstairs (I don’t say “my daughter” is upstairs because what if this guy is a maniac too and thinks lewd thoughts about my daughter up there, far from me, her sole protector, no dad to save her because he couldn’t save himself).

But the Airbnb guy has a kind voice, the voice of a man who’d remain on the couch reading the Times until his wife came home, if that’s what he said he’d do, and he says he’ll check upstairs, and I hang up, and my heart slows and as I sit curled in a ball on the floor weeping, spinning from the years of, Could I Have Stopped It, How Did I Miss It, Why Me Why Us, my phone buzzes and it’s you and you say: Mom, what’s going on, my phone died. We’re here, I’m here. Everything is fine.
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Rachel Zimmerman, an award-winning health journalist, is the author of Us, After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide, forthcoming in June 2024. A contributor to The Washington Post, she previously worked as a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and a reporter at WBUR, Boston’s public radio station. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times; Vogue; “O,” The Oprah Magazine; Slate; and The Huffington Post, among other publications. Zimmerman is co-author of The Healing Power of Storytelling, and The Doula Guide to Birth. She lives in Cambridge, Mass. with her family.

Artwork by Marvin Liberman