Randolph probably thought her mourning period was over. They wanted her back at her desk.
She flopped onto her back. The ceiling was cracked, which she’d just now noticed. Wishbone-shaped. She winced, and resisted the temptation to make the only wish that mattered.
“They’re not kidding; they’re just idiots,” she said, then remembered that the receiver was off the hook—they might hear her. “Gaaaa,” she muttered as she picked it up, then asked, “Hello?”
No one answered on the other line. But she could hear someone’s breath. The sound was distant, as if the speaker on the other end was holding the phone at arm’s length.
“I can’t sleep anyway,” Tom said as he sat up beside her. “All these flowers are killing my allergies. I wish they’d just send cards.”
Jill squeezed Tom’s thigh to silence him. He squeezed back, to be cute. “Hello?” she asked again. More breathing. It sounded further away than before.
“Julian?” she asked, still half-asleep. Next to her, Tom stiffened. It wasn’t him; she knew it wasn’t Julian. But how could she wonder, and not ask?
When he died, they’d both been at work, and the homecare nurse had been drinking coffee in the kitchen. Her last words to him that morning: a caricature of tough love. Teary-eyed and panicked, he’d asked her whether she believed in an afterlife. It had hit her then, though she should have understood as soon as the doctors gave up on the chemo: her son was going to die.
Shut up and stop worrying, she’d told him. You’ve got to be brave and face this fighting, or you’ll never get any better. She’d hated him for just a moment, for having been born, and leading her to this moment of failure as a mother, for not having kept him safe.
“Julian?” she asked again, though she knew it was impossible. Still, it might be the past calling, and this was his death rattle. She could right the wrong, and hear it now and console him, like she should have done then.
Sniffles. “Puh—” The voice said. It sounded feminine, and was followed by panting.
“Who is this?” she asked while Tom switched on the light. Their room was awash with funereal white flowers that smelled worse with each day they ripened. Rancid sugar air.
“Huh, huh, huh,” someone—it sounded like a woman—half breathed, half cried over the line.
“Who is this? Tell me who you are!” Jill said.
“Help me,” the woman begged. Then the line went dead.
Jill’s stomach turned. Something urgent. Something terrible. Her own self, perhaps, calling her from a parallel future, to warn her of what was to come. Only it was too late. Her son was dead. She got up fast and started down the hall to check on the rest of them.
She and Tom had bought the apartment with his trust fund back in the late nineties. Seven thousand square feet in a doorman building in the East Seventies. A long hall connected all the rooms. Up until yesterday, the place had been crammed with relatives. She missed their clutter and hushed voices. The way they cooked and doled out hugs that did not comfort but at least distracted. But Tom’s parents had caught a car back to Greenwich, Connecticut, last night, and for the first time since Julian’s death, her shrunken family was alone with its grief.
She went to Xavier’s room first, and sprung open the door without knocking. One hand clutched a Hustler, the other lay hidden beneath the covers. A freshman at New York University, he hadn’t been ready to leave the nest and live in a dorm. She’d hoped college would bring friends, or unearth a latent talent, but so far, no dice. His bare chest was hairless and pale. Something about its softness seemed unformed. There was a vacancy behind his eyes. She liked to think he was ditzy, but she suspected it was more than that. His mind traveled to solitary, unfathomable places. No matter how many presents or hugs he got, he was always convinced that the world had done him wrong.
She’d been so busy with Julian that it had only occurred to her at the funeral, when Xavier had sat away from the family and off to himself, that there was more wrong with him than spoiled-kid syndrome. “Why isn’t Mercedes coming to clean today?” he asked after the burial, his affect flat as the oil in a level. “I needed somebody to vacuum my room.”
Now, in his own world as usual, he pumped under the covers without seeing