The nurse handed me a plastic bag with my husband’s name written on it in black marker.
JACK MORGAN. ROOM 412.
That was all that was left of him in that building. A bag. A name. A room number that probably already belonged to someone else.
“I’m so sorry it took us this long,” she said. Her name tag said RACHEL. She had been on the night shift most of Jack’s last month, and she was the one who used to bring him extra pudding cups even though he couldn’t eat them. “Things got mixed up after he passed. It was in the wrong storage room.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
It wasn’t fine. Nothing had been fine for a long time. But it was a week after the funeral, I was six months pregnant, and I had learned that “it’s fine” was the fastest way to get out of any conversation.
I opened the bag right there at the nurses’ station because I didn’t trust myself to open it at home.
His watch. The cheap black one he refused to replace because “it still tells time, Claire, that’s the whole job.” His phone charger, the cord bent at the end where he always wrapped it too tight. His toothbrush and deodorant in a ziplock bag. A paperback thriller with the corner of page 211 folded down. He never finished it.
And underneath all of that, folded neatly, was a gray cardigan.
A woman’s cardigan. Soft, a little worn at the elbows. It smelled faintly like vanilla.
I didn’t own anything that smelled like vanilla.
See more on the next page
