Sideswiped

When I was told my husband, Rob, had died in a car accident, I thought the troopers were kidding. Some morbid deranged candid camera. Can you blame me? Maybe it was wishful thinking. Please let this be a joke. I just saw him four hours ago and told him we were pregnant again.

My mother-in-law wailed in incomprehensable Portuguese and paced and pulled at her summer robe. She picked up the phone and put it down again. And picked it up again.

"The number. I can't remember the number." She was crying and gasping.

I knew she meant Gerry, my sister-in-law. Fernanda spoke on the phone in words I didn't understand. I reached for a chair and sat down. The troopers -- three of them -- were still there. I didn't look at them.

Aubrey, my twenty-two month old, cried from her crib. I wrapped Rob's robe tighter around me and floated down the hallway. She stopped crying when I picked her up. Her heart beat and her skin was warm. I held her fast to me.

Fernanda reached for her to comfort the blissfully ignorant, but she clung to me instead. I know I looked at the troopers now, but I don't remember their faces -- only the blue uniforms.

One of them asked if they should wait to leave until someone could come and be with us -- the bereaved.

(It's funny ... it wasn't until August of 2000 that I even knew how to spell bereavement -- and now I was one of their ranks.)

I said, "No. My sister-in-law is coming," though how I knew this was a curiosity.

I was told months later from an acquaintance of an acquaintance of Rob's that one of the younger troopers must have been grappling with his own mortality because he -- strangely -- felt angry with me during his call to my house.

Maybe he wondered why I wasn't with my husband that early morning before the sun came up. (Rob had been driving back from our house to the army barracks in Cape Cod to complete his shift of National Guard A.T. [annual training].)

Perhaps he was confused at my lack of affect, my absence of emotion and tears. (Truly this aspect of my grief would continue to haunt me for months, as well.)

But when Aubrey cried and I returned to the New England parlor that we rarely used, with her in my arms, the reality of what the young trooper was there for hit him with a force that sickened him for a long time. All judgment gone, he recognized that this could be him. This could be his baby.

They left. I called my boss and told her I couldn't open the salon that morning. She was the first person I told that my husband had died.

Fernanda, Aubrey and I went downstairs and waited, with the lights on.

We heard the garage door upstairs. The feet scrambling downstairs.

"Valerie?! Mom?!"

Gerry and Lena, my sisters-in-law, burst through the doorway. One look at them and the tears came.

It wasn't a joke.