Chapter 2 - The Last Week in Lisbon
For years afterward, people asked whether I had noticed anything wrong with James before the aneurysm.
They wanted a symptom, a warning, a small detail that would make sudden death feel less random.
I searched my memory for one until searching became another form of punishment.
He had laughed on the flight to Lisbon because the passenger beside us kept trying to solve a crossword puzzle using words in three languages.
He had held my hand as we stepped into the damp evening outside the airport.
He had insisted on carrying the heavier suitcase even when I told him he was being ridiculous.
There had been no ominous final conversation, only ordinary love scattered through an ordinary day.
James was thirty-eight and worked as an electrical systems engineer for a small safety-technology company in Portland.
He had spent the previous two years developing inexpensive detectors that could communicate with one another when an emergency threatened a row of homes.
That work mattered to him for reasons more personal than his colleagues understood.
His father had survived a carbon monoxide incident years earlier but never regained his health fully afterward.
James had been a teenager when he learned that danger could fill a room without a sound, a smell, or a visible sign.
He said too many families were protected only if they could afford expensive monitoring contracts.
He wanted to build something that would alert an entire neighborhood before one frightened person had to become a tragedy.
I admired that determination even when it filled our dining table with wires and tiny plastic boxes.
Sometimes I joked that he loved the neighborhood almost as much as he loved me.
He always answered that loving me was what had taught him the meaning of neighborhood.
Lisbon was supposed to be a brief professional trip followed by two days of sightseeing.
James had been invited to present a prototype at an international safety conference.
He had worried about speaking in front of strangers and spent the flight rehearsing an opening line that sounded better every time he forgot it.
On our second evening, we ate seafood near the river and made plans for a trip to the coast.
He asked whether I wanted children someday, not because we had decided against them but because grief and work and ordinary postponements had kept that conversation unfinished.
I told him I wanted a future in which we could keep changing our minds together.
He smiled and said that sounded like a perfect marriage.
The next morning, I watched him knot his navy tie in the hotel mirror.
He kissed the top of my head, told me he loved me, and went downstairs to meet colleagues before his presentation.
Less than an hour later, a stranger called from his phone.
I heard an ambulance siren behind the voice and knew, before the stranger finished speaking, that something impossible had happened.
At the hospital, the physicians moved quickly, explained carefully, and never promised what they could not deliver.
They said the bleeding was severe and that the aneurysm had ruptured without warning.
I asked whether I could see him, whether he could hear me, whether there was a treatment somewhere else.
The answers arrived in fragments that would not stay in my mind.
I sat beside his bed and spoke about the pear tree, the neighbor's cat, and the loaf of bread I had forgotten to take out of the freezer.
I told him I was waiting to go home with him.
When the doctor finally said they had exhausted every possibility, I held James's hand and understood that the world had ended without making any sound at all.
The days after his death did not feel like days.
There were official forms, identification requirements, choices about transport, and the slow recognition that a marriage can be reduced to a series of signatures in the hands of strangers.
James had once completed an advance directive for international travel because his work sometimes took him abroad.
It specified that if returning his remains became unreasonably complicated, I should choose a dignified local burial rather than place myself through an extended bureaucratic struggle.
That sentence had seemed unnecessary when he wrote it.
Now it was the only instruction I could find that told me what he would have wanted.
I followed it, and in a small cemetery outside Lisbon, I watched strangers lower his coffin into the ground.
I had called my family as soon as he died.
Mom cried, then asked whether I had made sure the insurance paperwork was in order.
Dad told me to call whenever I needed anything, although every attempt to reach him afterward ended in voicemail.
Troy sent a broken-heart emoji and promised to check in when work calmed down.
I did not ask them to fly across an ocean because I knew the cost would be difficult for them to manage.
I did ask whether one of them could help organize the paperwork from home.
Mom said she was overwhelmed, and Troy said his company was in the middle of an important project.
So I learned which consular office could authenticate a document and which funeral home accepted international payment transfers.
I learned how to stop my hands from shaking long enough to sign forms.
I learned that lonely people can become remarkably efficient when there is no one else to do what must be done.
At the cemetery, James's colleague Leo Park stood beside me with an umbrella.
Leo had flown to Lisbon after hearing the news, using his own savings because he said James would have done the same for him.
He listened while I tried to explain the burial decision to a local official.
Later, he helped me choose a small bouquet of white flowers because they reminded me of the first spring James and I spent in Portland.
Leo also said something I dismissed at the time.
James was worried about the house before we left, he told me.
He said he had installed extra safeguards and wanted to review some readings when he got back.
I assumed Leo meant one of their endless engineering experiments.
Our house had always contained devices that chirped unexpectedly and required explanations I pretended to understand.
When I asked whether there was a problem, Leo hesitated, then said James had become concerned about renovation work at the adjoining property.
He believed a contractor might be ignoring some safety complaints.
I told Leo I could not absorb one more problem, and he immediately apologized.
He said everything important was documented and that James had taken sensible precautions.
On the flight home, I returned again and again to that conversation without understanding why.
Now, in James's armchair, I studied the receipt tucked into his tie.
Remember the little lights, Ames.
There was a second line written so faintly that I had overlooked it in the airport.
If they ever turn red, go outside first and ask questions later.
I looked toward the hallway ceiling, where a small green light shone beside our thermostat.
James had installed that unit about a month earlier, standing on a stepladder while I held the screws in a paper cup.
He had told me it was part of a neighborhood trial and that he hoped the alarms would never need to make a sound.
I remembered teasing him about the number of batteries he owned.
I remembered him saying, with a seriousness I had not recognized, that warnings were only useful if people believed them.
Outside, rain tapped against the windows, and somewhere next door a door slammed.
I placed the tie on the arm of the chair and tried to force myself to eat the crackers Luis had given me for the ride.
The clock above the kitchen read eight forty-one.
May you like
A soft mechanical click came from the hallway.
Then the green indicator changed color.
