First Light

This piece was written as part of a collaborative effort with all the ladies of Tasty Sauce. Each of us has worked on a particular character, and mine is Emma Braddock, a sixtyish woman who has recently been widowed. Here’s Emma’s answer to the question: How well do you sleep?

First Light

I used to sleep like a baby, but now there’s the nightmare that comes every night, the one where James is dead and the heart monitor is screaming its single sustained note. It’s been a year since that awful day, a year without a good night’s sleep.

When the nightmare haunts me, I startle awake and fear going back to sleep. I get up and write in my notebook, hoping that if I write it all down, it will be out of my head for good, drained from my brain, through my arm and hand to the pen and onto the paper. But so far that hasn’t worked. I think the words must run back up my arm and back into my head to whatever corner of my brain they inhabit. In a perverse way I think James still lives in there with the words, and maybe I don’t really want to empty out all the words, because that would empty James out, too. It’s a dilemma I admitted to Georgie and Louie last time we met for dinner.

“That’s absurd,” Georgie said in her don’t-mess-with-me voice. “You could never forget James.”

“It’s not about forgetting,” I said. “It’s about losing him altogether, like he’d be emptied out of my head. I know it’s nuts, but in some way it feels like he’s still alive if I have this dream every night. If I don’t have the dream, I don’t have anything of James left.”

“It’s not about your brain at all, or emptying your brain of James,” Louie said. “James is in your heart and always will be.” She paused and studied me before she said, “His aura is still here, you know.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Louie,” Georgie said. “Don’t get off on that stuff again.”

“But I see it all around Emma,” Louie said calmly.

“What’s it look like?” I asked, looking around and behind me. I couldn’t see a thing.

“Warm and protective,” Louie said. “I see James with you all the time, looking after you.”

“Shouldn’t he be crossing into the light?” I asked. I have become a big fan of Melinda on The Ghost Whisperer and I was suddenly worried that if James was still with me, he hadn’t gone into the light to his eternal rest. I didn’t want to be the one keeping him from heaven.

“Would the two of you stop with the mumbo jumbo,” Georgie said.

Just then the waiter came with our dinners and the clink of forks on china replaced the talk of auras and crossing over.

I took a sip of my wine and glanced over at Louie, who smiled at me and mouthed the words, “He’s fine,” like she really knew that he was. For some reason that comforted me, and I dug into my pasta as if I hadn’t eaten in weeks.

That night I slept undisturbed until the morning sun shone through my bedroom window onto James’s side of the bed. I placed my hand there on the covers and turned it in the sun until the diamond on my wedding band caught the light and gleamed.

Copyright 2010 by Liz Zuercher