There is no way you can’t think of the accident now, not in the dark room, not staring at the young woman’s face. Ben’s anger is still new on your skin, and you feel a fresh wave of annoyance beneath your sorrow, as if the fight has just happened.
It’s hard to be in the same profession as the person you love, you had told Lucy over dirty martinis, back when Ben was alive. It’s even harder when you are certain they love the profession more than they love you. “It’s bad enough to think that an unknown profession is valued over your company,” you’d said drunkenly, attempting to spear an olive with a toothpick four times before finally lancing it. “It’s easy to glamorize work you don’t understand.“
But when you know the ins-and-outs of it—the dull thrill of the minute brushwork, the ruffling of delicate tools, all things that you mete out in even doses, so as to be more with the person you love—imagining them making the opposite decision is painful. It made you angry.
It was a stupid fight, and you’d had it half a dozen times since the New Year. He said he was taking the car to go do some late-night work, and if he had, perhaps he would have lived to see another dozen of those fights.
But at the intersection of Valencia and Madison—for reasons unknown to you or the police who eventually found his body, thrown deeper into the ravine than they knew possible—he went left instead of right. Instead of the chemical tang of your shared office, or the minor Flemish painting from which he was siphoning away years of smoke damage, he drove up into the mountains, and at a particular turn in the road, in a place with no skid marks or ice, his car simply fell off the edge.
When he didn’t come back, you convinced yourself that he had fallen asleep in the office. But the next morning the office was cold, empty.
The phone call came a few hours later. A rough explanation for the accident? A day after that. Blame, around the same time. Grief? It never stopped. It feels like it has always been there.