Color Blind by Jonathan Santlofer Page B

husband she loved, forced herself to believe that this body was him, was Richard, her husband, and that he was dead and that he would not be coming back to her, and at that moment something deep inside her cracked.

     

    K ate shifted her weight in the bed, brought her fingertips slowly to her eyes to make sure they were open, that in fact she was awake, that this was not a dream, the nightmare she had wished, prayed it was.
    The digital radio confirmed the hour and the date; it was true, three full days had passed, and she was still at home, in bed, alive, though she was not sure she could stand the thought of living. She was alive and Richard was dead and nothing had changed and everything had changed.

    She breathed in the pillow’s scent, Richard’s pillowcase, which she had not allowed Lucille—the soft-spoken Jamaican woman who had kept house for the Rothsteins for almost ten years—to change. Something, anything to keep his presence alive, the smell of him, his hair and flesh, and a lingering hint of the English cologne, Skye, which she had bought for him on their honeymoon in London, the bottle’s cap a tiny gold coronet. “Here you go, Your Majesty,” she’d said, presenting him with the bottle, the two of them laughing when he’d placed the teeny crown on his head.

    A few bouquets of flowers dotted the bedroom with color. Even in shock Kate had asked that people make charitable donations in Richard’s name rather than send the usual flowers and fruit baskets, which she had no use for, but still they came.

    Phone messages had piled up unanswered. Friends had been turned away.

    Lucille had brought cups of tea and bowls of chicken soup surrounded by perfect triangles of buttered toast, but Kate barely touched them.

    Nola had visited each day, planting herself by Kate’s bedside, gabbing about this and that—school, her constant heartburn, anything to distract Kate, God bless her. But it just made Kate feel bad and guilty, that she was the adult who should be consoling Nola, who had also lost Richard, a man who had been like a father to the girl these last few years—and Nola about to have a baby on top of everything else.

    Kate hardly recognized herself, this sad, weak woman.

    The funeral had been a blur, only days after the murder, the Jews ever-anxious to get bodies into the ground too soon, way too soon for Kate, and so totally unlike the drawn-out Irish-Catholic wakes of her childhood—relatives crowding the McKinnons’ Queens row house, cigarette smoke smudging the edges off sadness, alcohol dampening pain.

    Kate’s memory of her mother’s wake was like so many other family parties: her housewife aunts in the kitchen, cooking and sharing recipes (“…a pinch of sugar in the stewed cabbage, that’s all you need, I swear…”); and her father’s brothers, Mike and Timothy, both cops like her father, in the living room, color television tuned in to any and all possible sports events; the tube’s electric hues reflected in the plastic slipcovers that finally came off the brown plaid sofa and matching armchairs—only after her mother was put into the earth—to collect the cigarette burns and beer stains that her mother had correctly feared.

    Willie had called Kate close to a dozen times from Germany, where he was painting on a Fulbright Fellowship. God, how she missed that kid, so much more than a protégé, she and Richard having sponsored him all the way through Let There Be a Future starting in the sixth grade. Nowadays, he was not only surviving the art world, but thriving, supporting himself as well as his mother, grandmother, and sister, taking them out of that Bronx housing project where he’d grown up and putting them into an airy garden apartment in a middle-class Queens neighborhood, paid for entirely with the sales from his art. Amazing kid. No, not a kid; a young man.

    “I’m coming home,” he’d declared.

    “No, you’re not. You have work to finish for your