Three days into our trip to Berlin my husband collapsed. Stepping out onto Rosenthaler Strasse he turned pale and sweaty. My gut tightened when he stumbled. I reached for his arm, but he fell away. Dropping everything in my hands I ran forward, tumbling to my knees as he hit the sidewalk. I screamed for help.

A server stepped outside, then the host. One of them nodded, I can’t remember which, and ran back inside. I knew they were calling for an ambulance but had no idea how long it would take. Summers working as a camp counselor in the Ozarks trained me to check my husband for a pulse and position him flat to start CPR. I would have rather prayed, did, in fact, pray in-between every one, two, three, four, five count all of the way to fifteen before I laid my mouth on his and pushed my breath into his chest. The feeling of his cold lips against mine gave me chills and I went back to compressions. The lips I kissed for years no longer moved with my own. His hands began to shake as tears pushed into my eyes. His chest heaved as I forced it down over and over and his eyelids fluttered uncontrollably as he opened his mouth. No sound came out at first. Then a horrible groan pinched his face into a tight grimace. His eyes went wide, and he stayed gripped in a contraction until he went limp.

Hunched over him on the sidewalk, I watched him convulse and tremble as his heart stopped. Neither my exhaustive praying nor my training saved him.

As his body fell still and twilight descended above the rooftops, the streetlights began turning on one by one as if by magic. It sounds so woo-woo to admit but there in the hushed silence of a crowd, I stared at my husband and waited to see his soul rise. He was one of the good ones. Surely a benevolent God would lay claim. A mist, a wisp of smoke. Anything. I waited for an ethereal form to rise out of his chest. I waited for those twenty-one grams to disappear.

By the time emergency workers arrived, I knew with a certain gut instinct it was over despite the fact I continued with my rhythmic compressions. I fell back on my heels and inhaled so deeply it hurt as they tried to shock his heart into beating. Still no pulse, though I prayed for the thunder of blood in vein. No, I thought, no, not this.

Paramedics loaded him into the Rettungswagen to be transported to the hospital. My eyes swept across the half-circle of strangers who fanned out around us, their sad expressions biting at my soul.

Just minutes before, my husband signed the check as I excused myself to the restroom. As I stared into the mirror, applying sheer gloss, I thought about the rest of our evening strolling hand in hand, our twenty-second anniversary mere days away. Our light dinner at the Einstein Kaffee was full of Magdeburger schmalzkuchen. A deep-fried donut-tasting treat covered in powdered sugar. I thought about how it clung to my lips and how we were on our way to Sharlie Cheen Bar. A hotspot of bohemian chic. The Rosenthaler was brilliantly alive as we stepped into the seconds before twilight.

We didn’t rent a car in Berlin, so I rode in the ambulance with my husband, squeezing his limp hand, willing him to sit upright and come to his senses. Hope bound me to the past. Bound me so I didn’t surrender. I held his cold hand the entire way, jostled around by corners and bumps, refusing to let go. It was the first time he didn’t squeeze my hand in return. Sealed inside a rolling metal box that concealed my identity but not my fate, I clung to hope, a merry-go-round that made me dizzy and nauseous. I clung to all the things falling away in an avalanche of events I had no control over. Things I’d never considered.

At the hospital, an English-speaking nurse explained I could stay with the body to say goodbye but then it would need to be transported to the morgue.

Leichenschauhaus. The very word caused me to shudder. I considered what it would be like to live in such a place. I could hang out in the basement and hold my husband’s hand and go mad. That’s how you know you love someone. You go straight to madness without so much as a blink.

“Dad’s gone,” I said to my daughter when she called that night.

“You mean he left the hotel?”

“No, I mean he’s gone.” Emphasis on the last word.

“You mean he went ahead on the tour without you?” The absolute shock in her voice shredded me into pieces.

“No, Mirabelle. I mean he’s dead.”

Mirabelle didn’t say anything. I noticed a sound, the creak from her favorite chair in the hall next to the credenza where her phone charged. Then I heard the low pronounced hiss from the vinyl cushion. In my mind’s eye, I saw her sitting on the edge of the seat, back straight, mouth open in surprise.

“Mom, are you making this up? Am I being punk’d?”

“No,” I said, trying to breathe, falling in and out of gulps of air.

Both of us dropped into silence because the honest to God’s truth was neither of us wanted to be the first to speak, confirm, or conjure into existence a reality that could never be erased.

After a few minutes of nothing but breathing in between the lines, she asked, “What happened?”

A lot. Nothing. Everything.

“Where is he?”

“In the morgue.” Leichenschauhaus.

That’s where it stopped being a possible joke. Morgue was not a joking word. Morgue was a word no one wanted to utter yet it was the place everyone ended up. A word reserved for Edgar Allen Poe stories, the final destination before the earth took you back whole. A word for poets and linguists and weirdos, angsty types who loved emo.

There was another pause and she burst into tears. In a fit of choking sobs, she said, “Sparky, oh my God—” and hung up.

Our daughter never hung up on me. A bunch of firsts threatened to overtake my night. Uncomfortable, unwelcome firsts. First kiss or the first time I rode on a train to Chicago or the blue raspberry snow cone when I was in second grade. Gone were my welcome firsts, replaced by uninvited ones.

My mother used to say, “Everyone grieves differently,” and I believed her because she was my rock in every storm. With her gone I had to somehow solidify into Mirabelle’s rock, impossible as that felt. Mirabelle had the right to process, to hang up, to worry about Sparky. Someone had to do it. That dog followed my husband from room to room and looked to him as the leader of his pack.

I didn’t want to take my husband home in a box. But I knew. I could hear them all now.

“You buried daddy in Germany? What were you thinking?”

I was thinking I’d wear some fun outfits and my favorite pair of jeans to trek through quaint villages and art museums filled with stuff hundreds of years old. Not this. Not forced to make decisions that threatened to tear my soul out. Not that.

I looked down. The phone rang in my hand.

“Ello,” a voice said, with a thick German accent. “Mrs. Constantine?”

“Yes, that’s me.” I inhaled waiting for the knife to carve out my soft fleshy heart.

In good English, he informed me my husband was ready for pick up. So casual. So normal. Like I dropped him off for a haircut while the car was getting an oil change.

“Okay,” I said feeling my nose sting.

“You knows where, yez?”

“The emergency workers told me.”

“I will be’s readys.”

Everything was plural as I was on the precipice of singular. I’d gone to dinner as a couple but returned alone. The finality of it bothered me. I pushed deep in my soul and prayed to be able to rewind, turn back the clock, go back to a time, and refuse Germany. Denial arrived as a powerful force. My brain insisted on backward when forward was the only way. Ever onward, into a future without him. Bargaining, bribing, blackmailing to get my way, I stayed stuck in my head, unable to move. A rush of reality I couldn’t comprehend threatened to seize me and I turned my cheek to the comforter. Make sense of this, logic demanded. I couldn’t. That was the truth. I lay back down and thought about losing. He lost his life. As if he were still out on the Rosenthaler Strasse looking for it.

I willed Sliding Doors to be real. A silly movie from the 90s where a girl’s life changed over and over because of the choices she made. Funny what we bargained for when desperate. Firsts and lasts, beauty and nothingness, time and discord. My whole body a numb song of regret, of loss, of a day in the past that I counted forward from. Time stretched out like the unending dirt trail I’d face with Sparky. A place to mourn, a trail to walk as far from the Rosenthaler Strasse as possible.

I laid back on the bed, so the white recessed ceiling looked like it was drifting higher and higher. I closed my eyes. The last time I’d done that was to pray on the sidewalk. An exhausting lifetime away. Yesterday. A Beatles song. One more thing my husband loved. Things were different now. It was today and the sensation of closing my eyes felt so good. Glancing at my phone, I saw the time was 1:44 AM.

Tears curved over my temples, filling my ears and I sat up crying, disoriented, trying to remember what I dreamed. It was jarring. An electric white-hot panic burned straight through me. Morning arrived unwelcome. Traffic hummed below the window, similar to the sounds of home but not the same. Light slanted into the room through the curtains I opened earlier because I wasn’t sure what to do. No one ever died in front of me before. A new theme emerged that smacked of forgiveness.

There I was at the threshold, forced to forgive my husband for leaving me alone in Germany. A dark piece of me hovered and threatened to consume the sliver of light. To feast on it, slurp it up like a messy soul.

I thought of our last night in the States before we left for Europe. How my husband hated Brooklyn. We got roped into it by his brother and his wife who wanted to see us. They loved Brooklyn more than each other. So, we agreed to dinner. Caught an Uber from the Marriott near La Guardia. The brother and his wife drank too much Beaujolais Villages. When the wine ran out, they switched to Jameson whiskey and started fighting like they were in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Watching them fight was both electrifying and terrifying. Nothing new but always staggering to witness. My husband’s brother had gotten literally everything he wanted in the world and hated everyone for it, especially his wife. She was never smart enough, pretty enough, talented enough. On the rare occasion when she was all of those things, he hated her more. So, we caught another Uber back to the Marriott and pretended to sleep. Now I’d never have to pretend to sleep again. I’d never have to pretend to like gangster movies or raw apples or soup or my in-laws.

My authenticity went with it.

I didn’t know what to say.

Maybe start with the truth.

He was gone.

Somewhere else.

Off the map.

Passed away.

Like he slipped down a quiet mountain road, around a bend, into a wisp of fog.

My phone flashed, signaling a low battery. I rolled over and dug in my purse for the charging cord and adaptor. There was already too much dying. Gauls. Huns. Hittites. Entire civilizations long dead in history books. Civilizations that meant nothing to me until they were swallowed alive by a scene replayed in fifteen-second snaps on a sidewalk.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.

Stop.

No sixteen. No turning back. That’s how it was sometimes. I plugged in my phone, and it blipped. I needed to get myself together. Meditate, reign my thoughts in, one by one, heavy with dissonance. I glanced down, realizing the tour guide left messages. We never showed up for the bus to Munich. That meant we wouldn’t be on the plane to Florence for our anniversary. Which meant I’d never get to see Italy with my husband. Ever. That bothered me more than anything. Italy would forever be outlined on the world map as a constant reminder of something I could never have.

To distract myself I listened to each message, deleting one after the other like I was an expert at the art of letting go. Master at the art of saying goodbye. Something I’d sucked at since I was a little kid. I was only procrastinating. The thought of calling my brother-in-law weighed so heavy I couldn’t breathe.

The phone rang in my hand. It was Mirabelle. She was already crying before I said hello.

Skipping the niceties, she choked out, “Are you okay?” Then made this horrible sobbing-sucking sound that broke my heart.

“Not really,” I said, too exhausted to lie, “but I’ll be home soon.”

“Home,” she repeated, then cried so hard she hung up.

After college, my husband went into the Army and was sent to Germany. It was why he wanted to return. To show me all the things he’d once seen, minus the Parisian prostitute. Stationed in the wilderness on a base that met the edge of a forest, one early morning after being on guard duty all night, he stepped out of the warm building into the snow-covered landscape to smoke a cigarette. Cold winter air burned his cheeks as he fired up a stogie to stay awake. Out in the distance, something caught his eye and he reached for his sidearm. Movement pushed through the brush and a second later he was face to face with a gray wolf. Being a city boy, he’d never seen a wild animal. Releasing the grip on his weapon he knelt, smoke curling around his fingers, and made eye contact with the mythic beast. With one hand slung over his bent knee, they stayed like that for almost ten minutes. Two souls on a cold morning locked in time. Both studied the other, as if to say that at any moment, they could switch places and trade lives. Just the two of them out at the border of civilization, each one sizing up the other, each one mere steps into the sphere of a stranger. Finally, my husband stood, locked in the gaze of the gray wolf at the edge of a primeval world where two things met momentarily, then nodded before they went forever on their separate ways.

I walked downstairs into a daze of crowds and elevators and when I went to cross the lobby, I became lightheaded. People swung abruptly past me like atoms moving in a frenzy, a closed circuit that looped. I stepped outside but only made it half a block before I ducked into a hotel bar.

Crisp citrus-scented candles burned on tables. Mirrors and chrome made the room look bigger but also like a funhouse. Self-conscious, I slipped into the nearest seat at the bar.

The man next to me smiled, “Hallo.”

“Hi,” I said because it was a welcome distraction.

“You’re American.”

“It seems that way.”

Cocking his head toward the bar, he very slowly but in excellent English said, “Perhaps I bother you.”

“No,” I answered quickly behind a forced smile, so fake and tight I wanted to take it back.

He raised an eyebrow. “Alone?”

I nodded and ordered a cheese plate and mineral water at room temperature which was always disgusting but marked my mood. Très Américain. Wrong language, right sentiment. I didn’t speak German. I’d only come along so my husband could wax nostalgic about a snowy day with a wolf.

The man told me he was in town to open a new branch of the company he worked for. I sat there listening, thinking about being squeezed between strangers on the plane ride home.

“Are you married?” he finally asked, tipping the bottle of Port sitting on the bar.

“I used to be,” I said, and by that, I meant thirty-eight hours ago. “You?”

“I’ve been around,” he sighed. “I was a terrible husband once. Maybe twice. I haven’t always gotten things right.”

In the dim glow of candlelight, I ordered a dirty, wet vodka martini.

His name was Cliff, and he was born in Scotland but raised in Nova Scotia. Portugal was his current base of operations, but the highlands were his true home. It’s funny what we will tell a stranger. He picked up a water cracker and gave me a flirty smile. The music was slow, a jazz piece but in German. Not enough days had passed for me to learn phrases like c’est moi or s’il vous plaît in German. All my years of French hung naked in the smoky air. Germany would never be the place I pointed to on a map. I cursed it in French. L’Allemagne est terrible. Vérité.

The man reached over the bar and touched the top of my hand. I was taken by how warm the tip of his finger felt, surprised by how the sensation fanned across my veins, to my wrist, down to my own fingertips where I quivered under a single jolt of lingering heat. The song changed to an instrumental. Miles Davis, maybe. Sketches of Spain, maybe. The warmth in my hand relieved me. A soft subtle dance from one note to the next, one feeling to another.

The man smiled. I’d been married so long I didn’t think about men smiling at me as I chewed two olives and listened to my stomach growl. I set the toothpick on the edge of a napkin and a flush of hunger washed over me. The cheese plate was empty, but I was not full.

“Are you okay?”

“I think I’m so hungry the alcohol is making me dizzy.”

“Would you like to walk over to the restaurant?”

No. “Yes.” I gathered my Michael Kors bag, the one I purchased just for Europe. A purchase so frivolous but filled with such intention. My it bag for the trip. Once I was stateside, I’d dedicate myself to the process of ridding my life of every tiny thing that reminded me of the last few days. Yet as I crossed the marble lobby, full of plush sapphire-colored chairs trimmed in gold, I squeezed the bag so tight my knuckles turned white, and I thought I would keep it forever. A black leather messenger bag that came to symbolize everything I could never forget.

The entire dinner was an odd mixture of extremes. The dish was maultaschen. A strange but good dumpling filled with pork. At first, I thought I never wanted to taste it again but as I finished, I knew I’d be in Publix at 2:36 AM trying to find all of the ingredients to recreate the recipe on repeat.

The man asked, “How is it?”

“Delicious,” I said as I thought of the morgue. It was my next stop after I went upstairs to get my luggage. Mine and my husband’s. When you are under extreme duress, they make room for you on a plane. I learned that at the hospital. By duress, I mean when you’re traveling with a dead person.

The man pulled over the leather case with the check inside and flipped it open.

“On me,” he said.

The same thing my husband said when he pulled me on top of him at night.

I bowed my head for a second. I didn’t cry though I thought about it. I thought about our honeymoon. I thought about how I was going to have to cross the ocean without him. I thought about how complete change was, how encompassing, how thorough. Just like death. Hand in hand, like first cousins.

“Everything alright?”

I forced a smile and a lie. “As good as it can be.” I’d been pretending to be someone else since my husband’s heart stopped. A cutout version who did not burst into tears in public. There was a point where exhaustion won. It took over, bending inward into a perfect warped rendition of myself. By the time I finally stood from the table and let him hug me goodbye, my eyes watered uncontrollably and I didn’t know the day or the date or even how to make sense of a calendar. Boxes with numbers that filled a page and told a story about how all things came together or didn’t.

He asked me if I wanted to go upstairs with him. In that moment, I hated death. The absolute pain and numbness had done one unforgivable thing. I was just a woman again. No longer a pair, a couple. Single. Out in a sea of people flirting. As his arm wrapped around me, I leaned in and begged forgiveness in my mind. Begged a God who confused and confounded me. For the first time since the whole ordeal, I hated how death reduced me to a single digit. The irony and selfishness were childish. I hated how it came at me unrelentingly, how it forced me to confront truths that existed better as illusions. Running with my pack for so long meant I’d forgotten the utter isolation of being cast adrift in a shiny plush hotel, aromatic with the lingering scents of chocolate martinis and Fendi cologne. I hated how attentive death was, how it wouldn’t be ignored, how it pursued me, moved in, and marked me as one of its own.

The beast within me tossed her head back and howled, full of lonesome anguish. The man leaned down to kiss my cheek and I turned; his lips instantly skimming mine. A warm rush to the surface of my cheeks followed by the scratch of his five o’clock shadow brushing against my nose as he repositioned and kissed me. Weird and unwelcome, I forced myself into the motion, into the tongue, into the soft flushed wetness that told my brain my husband was dead. It was so illogical and yet made so much sense. I couldn’t get my brain to understand it was over, he was gone. Understand this, I wailed inside, but I couldn’t. The kiss brought an epiphany. If my husband wasn’t dead, I’d never kiss another man. There it was, laid out for my conscious mind to process. A kiss meant the end. It felt dirty and wrong and necessary. It felt like I should explain myself. Admit the truth. Say the word, the horrible, horrible word. Which one to choose? After all, there were so many. By then the man took my hand and led me towards the elevator. I would not go to his room, but I would bend into my pain on the ride up and kiss until my old life was gone forever.

By the time I got to the morgue, I wondered if time went on without me when I didn’t sleep. My Wednesday continued but everyone else was on Friday. It was hard to tell where I was on that sliding scale. Hard to tell if I could ever catch up. Hard to tell if I would always be two days behind.

“Yes. That is him.”

The attendant nodded and handed me a clipboard. The document was in German, but he highlighted the places to sign with a blue marker. Signing on those lines threatened to gut me, bureaucracy buried under piles of formalities.

All our luggage was waiting in the reception area, which was just a metal table with a lamp on top. Nothing fancy. A sterile smell, the feeling of cold air against tile, and a chemically scent I didn’t recognize.

A woman in a pair of scrubs came down the hall and translated for me. She folded the paperwork and sealed it in an envelope. “The airline will need this. You’ll travel together,” she said.

Something to look forward to.

The most dreaded moment of my life once again came and went so fast a passerby would have strained to notice. Enter and exit. Past to future. The entire morgue took eight minutes. Tops. A cab waited for me at the side door.

In the taxi, I watched the buildings pass and thought about my list of lasts. Last words, last conversations, last breaths. “Fight Club is the best movie ever made,” my husband said to me. Then, “Let’s go to the Sharlie Cheen Bar. Everyone loves that place.” I stood and went to the bathroom which smelled like vanilla and lavender soap. Then my husband squeezed my still damp hand as we crossed the threshold and I felt him hesitate, hold back and I thought he was enjoying the moment.

The airport was loud and rambling, sleek and modern. So much of Germany maintained its history in a bizarre juxtaposition of old and new. I walked to the counter where a woman smiled until I told her why I was there, and she stopped smiling. I handed her every piece of documentation and finally walked away from the counter through a maze of people to sit at a gate, drinking a sugared coffee to stay awake until it was time to board. My one hundred and ten hours in Germany were almost over.

Through huge windows, I sat there watching planes taxi down a runway, thinking about how all airports are similar. How if no one ever spoke I could easily mistake one for another. Similar but not the same. I could say that of almost anything in the world. All so similar and yet none of it the same. My eyes were pulled down by the ways of the last days. I went with it, to the depths of feelings I didn’t want to face and started crying. I couldn’t wait to see Mirabelle and Sparky and smell the lavender burst of shampoo as my daughter’s hair tumbled across my cheek from her messy ponytail.

I fell exhausted into my window seat and noticed how uncomfortable airplane seats were. Maybe I noticed how uncomfortable everything was for the first time. I sat there silently. I closed my eyes, thought of why we’d come to Germany, thought about leaving, and what it meant. Still in pre-board, I had the luxury of space but it would fill soon. Quietly, I let my arm fall over the armrest into the empty seat. My hand dangled casually as if to say I needed a little extra room because I was not myself. It was true. My husband was my greatest champion, my most loyal fan. I had no idea how I’d navigate the waters of life without his words of encouragement. I thought of him back in the cargo hold alone, stacks of luggage surrounding his box. I sighed and thought of something else, drifting back to times that brought me happiness or relief.

A few months after we married, I had a dream. My husband and I were in some kind of basement, a place I’d never seen. The room was full of people who suddenly erupted in cheers. I looked about the room to orient myself, to figure out what was happening. At that moment my husband grabbed my hand and spun me around. His blue eyes were so alive. Sweat glistened over his chiseled cheeks, down to his chin where it dropped onto an army uniform. With his dark hair tumbling over his forehead, I started to get the idea we lived in a different time and I looked for clues. I realized we were dancing and had been dancing the whole time. I looked nearby and saw a calendar pinned to the wall with days crossed off. An album on a record player turned round and round. It was then I recognized everyone was speaking French. A wild happiness emanated from my husband as he twirled and spun me away, holding tight to my hand to pull me back. It was then I realized the war was over but had no idea which one. There I was in some basement on the other side of the world doing the Charleston, my hair whipping across my face. I did not know I was dreaming but I did know it had to be World War II. Ducking and rising to the music I laughed, spinning into my husband in a mad delirium of hope and victory. A wave of relief swept over me. There I was in 1945, celebrating the end of a war I’d never lived through and yet it was one of the single most dynamic moments of my life. A dream I’d have dozens of times during our marriage, both of us so ferociously alive, and every time I’d wake startled to see my husband sleeping next to me, silver moonlight cascading through the oak leaves outside. I closed my eyes and prayed for that dream to come, to inhabit my entire world, to take me back to a time that didn’t exist, so I could find a piece of make-believe I carved into reality long ago. A moment that defined us more than any other. A moment that never even happened.

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Hailed as “an author with a genuine flair for originality” by Midwest Book Review and “a loveable, engaging, original voice…” by Publishers Weekly, Lis Anna-Langston is the author of Skinny Dipping in a Dirty Pond, Gobbledy, Tupelo Honey, Maya Loop, Wild Asses of the Mojave Desert and the short story collection Tolstoy & the Checkout Girl. Raised along the winding current of the Mississippi River on a steady diet of dog-eared books she attended a Creative and Performing Arts School from middle school until graduation, went on to study Literature at Webster University, Creative Writing through the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and recently graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in Creative Writing. Her novels have won the NYC Big Book Award, Independent Press Awards and dozens of other book awards. As writer and producer her films have screened and won at film festivals around the world. A three-time Pushcart award nominee, her work has been published in dozens of literary journals including The Brussels Review, Emerson Review, Hobart, Barely South Review, and Emrys Journal.

You can find her in the wilds of South Carolina plucking stories out of thin air.

Get social with her @lis.anna.langston on Insta or find more at www.lisannalangston.com

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