Chapter 45 - The Collar by the Window
Three days after Charlie died, Isabel announced that she was no longer sad.
Then she saw his lead beside the door and burst into tears.
Noah became angry because someone had vacuumed the rug.
Nico said very little.
Grief entered each room differently.
Sometimes it looked like silence.
Sometimes it looked like an argument about a cup nobody actually cared about.
Lena and I tried to notice without turning every difficult moment into a conversation the children had not asked to have.
We answered questions.
We repeated answers.
We admitted what we did not know.
One evening, Noah asked whether missing Charlie meant he would eventually forget Mommy Elena too.
He had never known her.
The fear still made sense to him.
Caroline came the next day with the memory book.
They looked through it together.
There were photographs he had seen before and stories he had heard.
He asked for all of them again.
Meanwhile, Nico disappeared into the workshop with Daniel.
When they returned, he carried a small wooden box.
Nothing elaborate.
A hinged lid.
A place for Charlie’s collar, the green ball, and the photograph Marco had taken of him sitting in the twins’ unfinished cardboard spaceship.
Nico set it beside the living room window.
“Can it stay here?”
“Yes,” Lena said.
“Not forever if we don’t want?”
I looked at him.
“No one has to decide forever today.”
He nodded.
That Saturday, we sat around the kitchen table and made a page for Charlie.
Noah wrote about the stolen loaf of bread.
Isabel drew him purple because she said brown was insufficient.
Lena remembered the first time he had climbed onto our bed and pretended to be asleep when I told him to move.
I wrote about finding him outside the nursery, waiting for the boys to wake.
Nico took the page last.
He read what we had written.
Then he added one sentence beneath it.
He always thought we were coming back.
I had to put down my cup.
Later, while clearing the table, Lena found me holding Charlie’s old metal tag.
“Are you all right?”
“No.”
She nodded.
“Me neither.”
We stood together by the sink.
Outside, someone walked past with a dog that pulled enthusiastically toward every tree.
For a moment, I could almost hear paws crossing our floor.
Then the sound faded.
Upstairs, Noah called for help.
Nico shouted that he had already offered and apparently did not count.
Isabel began explaining something at considerable volume.
The house was still full.
It was also missing someone.
I put the tag into the wooden box and closed the lid.
That night, Nico asked whether we could read the lighthouse story again.
“Of course.”
“All of us?”
We gathered in the living room.
He opened the pages and placed his reading card beneath the first line.
Beside the window, the box rested in the last light.
May you like
Nico began.
We listened.
