“I know this is sensitive,” the lawyer said. He was a sweet, serious man, but in that moment Melanie imagined ripping the white mustache off his face. “You aren’t required to claim anything of Ms. Dillard’s. Her family in Wisconsin has made notes of the personal effects they’d like, although you understand you aren’t legally obligated. Her will was quite basic.” He picked at the edge of a folder. “As Mr. Salvatore’s executor you can get in there pretty quickly. As soon as six weeks. I imagine you’ll want closure.” Her uncle, the one who’d done up their wills as an early wedding present when he’d passed through Chicago that spring, had volunteered to be here with her, to “speak lawyer” with this other attorney. But Melanie had wanted whatever privacy she could still manage.
“She was his ex-wife,” Melanie said. “You figured that much out.”
“And you were his fiancée. I can’t imagine how—”
“But he’d told me she was dead.”
The lawyer let out a descending whistle, blinked hard.
“I even looked her up online once, the dead wife, and all I found in the city was this living woman, this film producer. I figured it was a different person.” She refused the Kleenex he held out. “He told me she died in a car crash in 2003. And I didn’t know his friends, not the old ones. I mean, they sent Christmas cards. But now I realize I never met anyone who’d known him more than ten years. The thing is, why would I have counted? We only dated eleven months.”
The lawyer scratched his chin, pen in hand, leaving a streak of blue down his cheek. He said, “We take most everything at face value. Otherwise how could we get by?”
Melanie had promised her sisters they could help. But she couldn’t stand the thought of their pity, their mercifully hiding things from her — and so one morning two months after the leak, a week before what had been her wedding date (Melanie had thrown out her calendar, with all its circled reminders for salon appointments, bridal luncheons), she drove down from Highland Park alone. Noble Square was a postage-stamp neighborhood just west of the Kennedy, one she’d never set foot in. One she’d never even heard of. As she entered the building, a young man with shoulder-length hair rushed out past her, nodding. On the ground floor someone was cooking bacon and blasting the TV. She found apartment D on the second story, and the key — miraculously, it seemed — fit the lock.
She stood on Vanessa Dillard’s welcome mat and stared through the open door. She saw brown plants on the windowsill, and felt a dull anxiety that there might also be a dead cat somewhere. She didn’t see one, but she saw a blue couch and sunlight and dishes still on the counter. A print of an O’Keeffe painting, the one of white jimsonweed.
Melanie waited for some dramatic feeling to wash over her. But she hadn’t registered much emotion that summer, unless numb was an emotion. Grief would be an embarrassing surrender, considering the new facts. Rage was inappropriate, given Michael’s death. The two reactions had stalemated each other. She was an abandoned chessboard.
She walked in.
Here is all she’d learned in the time since the leak: It was true that Michael and Vanessa were married from 1998 to 2003, as he’d told her. It was true they’d met in college. She produced educational films. She was survived by a mother, a brother, a niece.
Here is what Melanie learned in her ten-minute search of the apartment: Vanessa had no pictures of Michael on display. She had beautiful shoes. She was asthmatic. She read crime novels. Her bra size (one still hung on the shower rod) was 34B. She liked James Taylor and white wine and Japanese art. She chose photos of herself with her head turned, smiling. Her hair was wavy and chestnut and long.
The sheet lay bunched at the foot of the bed, but this might have been the work of the EMTs. Melanie suddenly wanted to sit, and although there couldn’t have been gas still in the apartment — not with people living here again and a new furnace and updated ventilation — she imagined she could smell it, and that she was passing out or maybe dying. She took her key and sat out in the hall, head between her knees.
She clung to a possibility her friends had offered: What if Michael had come over just that once, to tell Vanessa he was getting married? And then when the leak started he felt so tired that he lay on the bed. (In this scenario, her friends helpfully surmised, he still co-owned the place only to take care of her, the woman he’d once loved.) But why, then, had he been there at two a.m. on a weeknight? Why had he told Melanie this woman was dead? Why hadn’t Vanessa changed her will? Michael’s personal effects, handed over at the hospital, weren’t clues: a T-shirt, boxer briefs, running shorts. What he slept in, but also what he exercised in. She’d been given no shoes.
The man she’d seen before — the one with the long hair — came up the stairs, moving like a sleepy and comfortable animal. He started up the second flight, then saw her and turned back. “Do you need help?” he asked. “You want me to go in there for you?” He seemed recently practiced in his grief counseling.
He sat beside her and told her his name was Jed, that he was a grad student at the School of the Art Institute, that his grandparents had left him their apartment. “I threw away their sheets.” As if the fact would make her feel better. Oddly, it did. “I’m using their furniture, but I couldn’t keep those.”
She said, “Could you just stand here? Stand in the doorway and wait for me.”
He did, and Melanie went back to the bedroom and around to the far side of the bed. She knelt on the floor and looked underneath. Michael’s shoes. His khaki pants, belt still in the loops. His blue striped shirt. His bag.
Jed, in the hallway, heard what sounded like a scream held underwater for years that had finally, violently, bubbled to the top.
When Melanie returned two days later, she walked up to the third floor to thank Jed for the Kleenex and to return the umbrella he’d loaned her when she started home in the rain. He invited her in, and she was glad for the delay in getting back down to the empty cardboard box she’d left outside apartment D. Jed was a lovely distraction. At thirty-eight Melanie figured she had a good fifteen years on him, though, and she shook herself of the notion that his grin was a flattering one. He divided a beer between two glasses painted with oranges.
He said, “How goes the aftermath?”
“I like that word.”
Jed gestured around the apartment, by way of a tour. He’d pushed most of his grandparents’ furniture against the north wall to make a studio space by the southern windows. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “It’s a little boring, compared to yours.” She’d told him, between sobs the other day, the basics of the story. “I did find an old bottle of antidepressants. That’s the only surprise up in here.”
They sat on a red velveteen couch with wooden armrests too ornate to rest their glasses on. Jed had gathered his hair with an elastic, a look Melanie hadn’t seen much lately. Her own college boyfriends all had long hair, and maybe this was why she felt so instantly comfortable with Jed. That and the way you could tell just by looking that his blood pressure was low, that he slept well at night.