In the Distance There Is Light Read Free Page B

out. Deflated, I head over to the bookshelf that is still lined with books. It’s too dark to read the titles on the spines, but I let my finger slide over them, concluding that all objects in this room have recently been dusted.
    I pick up a trophy and try to make out what it was for. When he first showed me his old bedroom, he would have certainly told me, but I don’t remember.
    Then I hear footsteps approaching.
    “Can’t sleep?” A whisper comes from behind me. I turn and see Dolores in the doorway.
    “Did I wake you?”
    “No,” she says.
    Through the darkness, I feel her glance land on the trophy I’m holding.
    “Why did you keep this room as his?” Nighttime takes away some of my inhibitions.
    Dolores shrugs. “He stayed here often when Angela was sick. After she died, I could never bring myself to make it into something else. Now I’m glad I didn’t.”
    She looks different in the low light of the desk lamp, stripped of her daytime armor of fancy suits, meticulous hairdo and makeup. Dolores looks more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen her. More vulnerable than at the funeral, where she did cry, but not ostentatiously, and always held her chin up. Her eyes are red-rimmed enough for me to notice, in the feeble light, that she’s been crying. At this time of night, there’s no room for armor, and I see Dolores’ pain to its full extent for the first time.
    “I shouldn’t have taken your bed,” I mumble. “It’s what you’re familiar with.”
    “It’s hardly the bed.” Dolores makes a sniffling sound. She’s crying again. All this falling apart we’ve done, our nerves raw and exposed, all this fragility, I’m so sick of it already, and it’s only been a week.
    At the funeral, my own mother howled louder than anyone else and I hated her for it. She was louder than me even, because I’d managed to wrap myself in a thick coat of stoicism, helped by a double dosage of Xanax.
    “He was like a son to me,” I heard her say to Dolores at the reception afterwards. I was too numb to be angry.
    “What have you got there? Is that his wrestling trophy?” Dolores asks and takes a few steps toward me.
    I give it to her; she examines it, surprising me with her eyesight though, of course, as his mother, she probably remembers what he won it for. She’s just looking at the faded gold plate for show. Just going through the motions as we’ve been doing since we found out about his death. About the truck that didn’t even touch him, but whose passage knocked him off balance enough to make him land headfirst on the curb, crack his skull, and die instantly.
    “At least he didn’t suffer,” the police officer said, wanting to offer consolation.
    “He only ever won one trophy. He wasn’t that big on competition, but he was proud of it nonetheless.” Dolores puts the trophy back. “We should go back to sleep.”
    I nod and wait for Dolores to exit the room. She doesn’t. She just steadies herself, putting a hand against the bookcase. “Would you mind sharing my bed?” she asks, her voice so low and trembly, it instantly connects with that constant, throbbing ache in my gut—the knot that has kept me from eating a solid meal for days.
    Again, I nod, as though her request is perfectly normal. In this moment, it is.
    * * *
    Dolores and I watch television in bed until our eyes are so bleary, it becomes impossible for them to remain open. I must have dozed off for a minute, because the next time my eyes flutter open, she has switched off the television and the room is bathed in darkness.
    “Night,” I mumble and turn on my side, leaving the biggest possible gap the width of her bed allows between us.
    “Night, Sophie,” Dolores says, and the mere fact of someone wishing me good night, simply saying a few words, is enough to make me sink into the mattress a little more deeply, a little more determined to actually sleep.
    At first, I drift in and out, because the air is different in this room, and the