My Family Refused to Pick Me Up From the Airport After My Husband’s Funeral, Then They Saw Me on the Evening News

“Amelia.” He looked at me. That serious, quiet look he had. “I’ve inspected two hundred houses in this city that had a guy say ‘within normal range.’ Some of them aren’t there anymore.”

I rolled my eyes. I’m not proud of it.

“So what do you want to do? Dig up the street?”

“I want to install a monitored system. Gas detectors in the basement, the kitchen, near the meter. Carbon monoxide too. If it goes off, it calls us, and if we don’t answer, it calls whoever we put on the list, and then it calls 911.”

“Isn’t that expensive?”

“It’s forty bucks a month.”

“For a smell you’re not even sure about.”

He smiled. “Humor me.”

I humored him.

He spent the whole next weekend drilling holes and running wires and swearing at the instruction manual. He put little white sensors near the furnace, under the kitchen sink, by the water heater, and one in the side yard by the meter in a weatherproof box. He stuck a panel on the wall by the front door that glowed soft green.

Then he sat at the kitchen table with his laptop to set up the account.

“Okay,” he said. “Emergency contacts. Who do you want after us?”

“I don’t know. Ruth next door?”

“Ruth’s eighty-one.”

“Ruth’s tougher than both of us.”

He laughed. Then he said, “What about your family? Troy and your mom?”

I made a face.

“Amelia.” He reached over and took my hand. “I know they’re not… easy. I know your mom says things. I know Troy’s Troy. But they’re your family. Whatever else, they’re family. If something happens and we can’t answer, they should be the ones who know.”

I didn’t argue. It didn’t seem important then.

So he typed them in. Me. Him. Troy. Mom. Then Ruth.

“There,” he said, and closed the laptop. “Now I can stop worrying.”

“You’re never going to stop worrying.”

“No,” he said. “Probably not.”

He also called the gas company again that week. And then a third time. He told me about it in the car on the way to the airport.

“I filed a formal complaint,” he said. “In writing. With the date and everything. If they’re wrong, I want it on paper that I told them.”

“You’re the most stubborn man in the world.”

“Thank you,” he said, and kissed my hand at a red light.

That was nine days before he died.

I must have fallen asleep in the chair.

I don’t remember closing my eyes. One minute I was thinking about him kissing my hand at that red light, and the next minute I was dreaming. In the dream, we were sitting on the stone bridge in Ponte de Lima, and he was reading me a story from the newspaper about a goat, and I couldn’t hear the words. His lips were moving, but there was no sound.

Then there was sound.

It came out of nowhere and filled the whole house.

A high, piercing shriek. WEEEE-OOOO. WEEEE-OOOO. So loud it hurt my teeth.

I jerked awake so hard I nearly fell out of the chair.

For a second, I didn’t know where I was. The room was black. My heart was slamming. The sound kept going, over and over, coming from everywhere at once.

Then a calm, flat, electronic voice cut through it.

“Warning. Natural gas detected. Leave the building immediately. Warning. Natural gas detected.”

I sat there frozen.

And then I smelled it.

Not faint anymore. Not something you had to kneel in the grass to notice. It was thick. Sour. Rotten eggs, but worse, so strong I could taste it at the back of my throat. My head was pounding. My mouth felt like metal.

How long had it been building? How long had I been sitting in it?

I stood up. My legs wobbled. The room tilted to one side and I grabbed the arm of the chair.

My hand went automatically toward the wall. Toward the light switch by the doorway. I needed to see.

My fingers touched the plastic.

And I heard James’s voice in my head, as clear as if he were standing behind me.

Never flip a switch if you smell gas. Never. A switch makes a tiny spark. That’s all it takes.

He’d told me that a hundred times. At dinner parties. On walks. Once, in the middle of a movie, when a character turned on a light in a house full of gas and James threw his hands up and yelled, “Come ON.”

I pulled my hand back like the switch was hot.

I stood in the dark with my heart going a mile a minute.

If I’d turned on the lights when I came home. If I’d walked in like a normal person and flipped every switch the way I always did.

I didn’t let myself finish the thought.

My coat pocket was buzzing. My phone. I’d turned it off in the Uber, but the alarm system had a backup. It was sending messages to the old tablet in the kitchen and to James’s phone, which was in the suitcase by the door, buzzing and lighting up through the fabric.

I grabbed my own phone and held the power button with shaking fingers. The screen came on. A notification was already waiting from the alarm app.

GAS ALERT — BASEMENT SENSOR — LEVEL: CRITICAL.

And under it, a note. One of those little custom instructions you can type in when you set up the system. I had never seen it. James must have written it the night he installed everything.

Amelia — if you’re reading this, don’t touch anything. No lights. No stove. Don’t look for the leak. Just get out. Leave everything. I mean it. Get out and call me. — J

Call me.

I made a sound. I don’t know what it was. A laugh or a sob or both.

I started for the front door.