Anniversary

She imagines him in the darkened den, the blinds closed, the computer dead and silent. His hair, once dark, now silver, will be awry where his fingers have combed it. It is hard to visualize his face. The eyes aren't clear: they are closed or blank, staring at the wall.

Perhaps he is looking, as only moments ago she was, at a photograph of a family: a man, a woman and a child. A child, flushed and smiling, ready to play. A child full of life.

On this, the fifth anniversary, he will sit there, as he did that day, broken.

He lives in another land, a land she left, where the sun shines relentlessly and the ocean leaps and frolics. It is not a place for grief.

Today she imagines herself back there and feels a fist clench in her chest.

When the policemen left that day, heads down, walking quickly, the news they had imparted gone from the weight on their shoulders, she had dropped onto a sofa, stunned, impossible phrases echoing in her head. As the colors bleached out from the world around them, she looked at him and asked: How can this be?

And he said, I don't know. There are no words for this.

He was right. There is only a darkened den, a photograph of a family, a man alone and a woman keening in another country.