Competitive Grieving

by Nora Zelevansky

  He closed his eyes and exhaled. “Look, of course you’re deeply upset. I understand that you’re angry—”

  “Well, congratulations! You get a hundred percent on the emotional IQ test. And a failing grade at everything else.” My head was throbbing. Now that I knew that Stewart hadn’t had an aneurysm, it occurred to me that I was free to have one—the odds had gone up.

  “Wren, I did the best I could. You have to believe that! Helen asked me to keep the details private.”

  “Private from me? Even after everything?”

  He looked at the ground. “I know, I know. It’s so complicated. But, please believe me: one thing had nothing to do with the other!”

  The rage that rose in me in that moment was its own entity. If we were anywhere else, I’m sure I would have shouted in his face—or maybe transformed into a wild beast and ripped him limb from limb, but I couldn’t do that here. Instead, I took a step toward him and said quietly, “How fucking dare you. You don’t get to decide what’s connected to what. That night, you told me that his brain stole him. You said it was a ‘mechanical malfunction’! ‘Bad luck’!”

  “It was, Wren! I stand by that. Maybe it wasn’t an aneurysm, but it was dumb, bad luck. It was a stupid chemical anomaly in the way he was built. The depression was as much a twist of fate as anything else! Just as out of his control!”

  “That’s bullshit,” I growled. “The fact remains: You knew that my best friend committed suicide and you didn’t tell me. You let me go on and on about the pills he was prescribed and his bout with mono and the whole time, you knew. You acted like we were in this together, but you let me be the idiot.”

  “Wren, I never thought you were an idiot. Well, maybe when you couldn’t work the bathroom lights in my hotel room.”

  “Don’t you fucking dare be clever right now.”

  “The truth is, on some level, I felt that you knew. You seemed to have all the facts. I felt like maybe you didn’t see what was taking shape in front of you because you didn’t want to know.”

  “You don’t get to decide that! I knew I should never have trusted you. I don’t know what I was thinking!”

  The elevator pinged and opened. I stepped inside, dizzied by the overhead lights.

  “Wren. Please understand. Let me talk to you. I want to make sure you’re okay. This is a lot to absorb by yourself.”

  “I’m not okay, George.” I crossed my arms over my chest, which was rising and falling at an alarming rate. “But it’s not your problem.”

  As the doors began to close, he opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  The ride home passed like it never happened. Ostensibly, people boarded the train, settled in across and beside me with newspapers and books, hovered above me scrolling through their emails and Instagram feeds, but I was unconscious of it all.

  I was angry at myself, but, more than that, I was stunned by the human brain’s capacity to pick and choose what it sees. However angry I was at George, he had a point about the reality that I’d refused to see.

  I was so consumed with my own martyrdom—so invested in the narrative I was creating—that I’d missed an obvious trail of breadcrumbs: the ring Stewart had taken off and placed in his drawer, the secret trip to New York during which he hadn’t reached out to a single soul. (It wasn’t just me he’d avoided, but I’d been too busy with my own hurt feelings to notice.)

  I thought about our last phone call, the tension in his voice, his concern about what would happen to me if he wasn’t around. (Had he said “if” or had he said “when”?) He had gotten paperwork in order; he’d named me as a planner for the arrangements of his death. That’s not something he would have done thinking fifty years down the line. He knew I wouldn’t go first because he knew when he was going to die.

  The messages might as well have been written in fluorescents. But, if you close your eyes against the light, you’re still in the dark.

  Or had I actually known? Some small part of me? I thought about the moment that Gretchen told me—I had felt relief. I had! For an instant, before the shock set in and I began to frame the news, close my hands around it and mold it to my specifications, I had felt relief! If I searched my soul, I had felt Stewart’s unctuous unhappiness during our last conversation, had sensed nervously a depth of sadness that I could not plumb. I had sensed the black hole. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t wanted to tell anyone about it.

  Once home, sitting on the couch in the dark in my apartment with my hands limp at my sides, unclear on how I’d gotten there, I recalled the last conversation Stewart and I had had in person.

  He sat next to me in a cab. It was the end of the night and he’d offered to pay for a fancy Uber to take him home and then me all the way to Brooklyn. That’s just what he was like. It wasn’t showing off; it was just no big deal. He came from money, he earned a ton of money. Money wasn’t a factor—even though, in some ways, it was the only factor.

  The car was giant and black with silver gleaming from its edges. Maybe an Escalade. The interior was smooth leather and looked new, but it reeked of old socks. I remember wondering whether we were smelling the passengers before us and then feeling uncomfortable in my seat.

  We were talking about something—someone famous had died. There was that rash of celebrity deaths and suicides around that time. So maybe that was it. We were discussing how sad it was for the children. It was a conversation I could have had with anyone. Surface. And then he said, “Sometimes I think it wouldn’t matter that much if I died.”

  I was caught off guard. It was the first time I had seen him in a while. We were always close, of course, but it took us a minute to warm back up after a long absence. That’s normal, I guess. I was still feeling clumsy, trying to claw back to our regular level of intimacy. All night, I’d felt I couldn’t quite penetrate his shell. I kept reaching for the real Stewart and coming back with a well-behaved approximation. Now he was serving this doozy up. It was a lot at once.

  So I said, “Stewart. What does that mean? Do I need to worry about you?” It wasn’t as heartfelt as it sounds. I thought he was fishing, like he wanted me to tell him how much I cared. And I wasn’t in the mood. I thought he was being dramatic. Stewart was dramatic, after all.

  There was a part of me that always resisted giving him what he wanted, maybe because I felt I was the only one who did.

  He shrugged. His forehead had a sheen of sweat; it was hot for May. I noticed he was wearing glasses for the first time in years, so he had something concrete to push back up onto his face. He said, “I mean, my fans would care for a second—people who like the show and would be disappointed that ‘Drake Glover’ was lost to them.”

  “You literally have a fan club.”

  He grunted, forced a half smile. “Yeah. I guess I do.”

  “I think people would care more if you died than if most people did—sadly.”

  “Sadly?”

  “No, I’m teasing. I just mean that people know who you are. You would be missed—by friends and strangers.”

  “But, I mean, I don’t have kids or a partner. Everyone would be fine. Don’t you think? If one day I disappeared?”

  “Stewart. Please.” I was impatient. “That’s just silly.” I rested my hand on the door handle; I guess I wanted out.

  That’s just silly.

  I hadn’t wanted to indulge his neediness. Too much pride. Too much awkwardness. Too much distance where I wanted to pretend there was none. I shut him down.

  He tried to tell me.

  That’s just silly.

  He changed the subject then.

  I closed my eyes against the memory, like I could make myself invisible, make the truth vanish like he disappeared himself. My whole body ached. This was it: the real grief, the guilt, if I let it come. I was subsumed by an all-encompassin
g ache. It took over my insides like the vibration of heavy bass until I stopped being able to tell where the sensation ended and I began. Then the scales tipped; I became more pain than me.

  Why didn’t I reach over and squeeze his hand? Why didn’t I give him what he was asking for? Did he want me to stop him or was he looking for permission to leave?

  I would not be fine if you disappeared, Stewart. I need you. I love you. You are a part of me and losing you is losing me. Stewart, you are important. You are essential. You are the globe, Stewart. My globe. I care. I would not be fine.

  Chapter 47

  Dear Stewart, I am not fine.

  Chapter 48

  I called my mother. It was time. In my bones, I knew I’d reach her. Besides, I needed to talk to someone and there was no one else left.

  It happened as I’d imagined it would. I guess I’d known that all along too: The phone rang, one and a half times.

  “Hello? Wren? Is it really you? We were beginning to think you’d joined a cult. But then you’ve never really liked structure. Or people who don’t bathe.” She laughed.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Wren, honey,” she said, her tone more urgent. “Are you okay?”

  I parted my lips to answer her, but found that I couldn’t. My mouth felt dry.

  “Wren? Are you okay?”

  I opened my mouth two more times before I finally managed to make words come out. “Mom,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’m really sad.”

  And that was it. The first tear escaped my eye like a dam breaking. Once they started coming, they wouldn’t stop until I was struggling to catch my breath like a child thrown from a seesaw.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” my mother coaxed. “Oh, baby. Of course you’re so sad. I wish I was there. I wish I could give you a hug. It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

  When I finally calmed down enough to talk, between hiccups, I told her everything: about my job, the vultures, Gretchen, George (minus certain choice details) and, of course, the truth about Stewart.

  A kind of moan escaped her lips when I revealed that part. “Oh, no. That poor boy. What a terrible, tragic waste. Poor Helen. God. I can’t imagine.”

  “I know! And I just can’t understand why he didn’t confide in me. Other people knew about his ‘dark days’! Why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t he trust me? I think maybe he tried to and I blew him off.”

  “You said you knew he was depressed sometimes?”

  “Yes. Sure! A little blue maybe. Not Sylvia Plath, Vincent Van Gogh, Elliott Smith despondent!”

  “Sweetie, there’s nothing you could have—”

  “I know! I know! I’m not arrogant enough to think otherwise. But I’m surrounded by people who at least claim to be so confident in their relationships with him. I would have said that we were closer than any of them before, but now I’m doubting it all!”

  “Oh, Wren.” My mother sighed. I could practically hear her rotating her wedding ring while she thought, her perpetual habit. “Baby. It doesn’t matter who was closest with him. Comparing your relationship isn’t going to land you anywhere good. There is no winning in the race for Stewart’s affection—because he’s gone.”

  Stewart. Gone.

  I started crying quietly again. Because I missed him, because I couldn’t bring him back, because I finally felt his loss like it was real, because—in that moment—I realized I’d been complicit in turning his death into a competition.

  “You can honor him by remembering the individuality of your relationship—what you meant to each other all this time. How he shaped you. That’s all that matters. Not what anyone else had with him.” I could picture my mother leaning over the kitchen counter—lined with my grandmother’s antique Mason jars of sugar and flour—head resting on her right hand, eyes narrowed in concern. Then she said, “Did I ever tell you about when you and Stewart learned to climb stairs for the first time?”

  “I don’t think so.” Catching my breath, I stood and walked over to Stewart’s People’s Choice Award, picking it up. It didn’t seem grotesque, creepy, or funny to have it anymore. It just seemed like a meaningless hunk of glass. “We learned to walk up the stairs together?”

  “Sort of. At around fifteen months, Stewart started charging the five or so steps in the lobby that led up to the mailboxes.”

  I could picture them instantly: they were white marble with a bronze railing. I had probably jogged up and down them a thousand times in my life.

  “Well, he just started trying to run up them. No matter how Helen tried to dissuade him or hold him back, he was consumed with besting them. He tried every day for several weeks, always falling down and hurting himself. And you would just watch him. You never took a step in that direction.”

  “That sounds right.” I put the award down, unsure of what to do next.

  “Yes. But then one day, he just stopped. He gave up trying. That’s when you started to try. See, you had been studying the whole time—only you had a different strategy. So you approached those steps, and you carefully took just one on that first day. The next day, you tried two, and so on. By the end of the week, you had the steps down. And he would stand at the bottom and watch you.”

  “Helen must have loved that.” I stared out my back window onto other people’s roof decks, decorated with plants and plastic lounge chairs.

  “Well, yes. You can imagine. She insisted that he’d grown bored and that you were finally getting around to what he was already over. She always needed to believe that he excelled beyond every other child.”

  “He did eventually figure out how to walk up the stairs.”

  “Yes, I believe so. But you always had different ways of approaching the world. Stewart was trying to best something—go big or go home. You were just trying to make a place for yourself. I think that’s part of why you valued each other so much. Seems to me like Stewart tried really hard to best this depression by living life as big as could be and, ultimately, didn’t have it in him. It seems like you’ve been watching and waiting for long enough. Maybe it’s time to attack some stairs. In his honor.”

  I dropped my face into my free hand and rubbed my eyes. “Mom, I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Well, you can start by resolving this issue with Operation Sewage.”

  “By apologizing and begging Anton to let me keep my job?”

  “What? No! Have you been listening at all?” She groaned. “You obviously feel ambivalent about the work. Apologize to Anton, offer to do whatever you can to fix things and then go find another career, honey. You’re understimulated.”

  If I was honest, I had experienced a kind of relief even in the panic of realizing my gargantuan error—an untethered, terrifying relief. I said, “I thought you were happy that I picked something stable?”

  “Sure. I’m your mother and I want you to have health insurance. But it’s obvious that you’re ready for the next thing. I think you need to live life a little bit less carefully. Also, really, Operation Sewage is the worst name.”

  I scrunched up my nose. “It really is.” I felt myself smile, then we both started to laugh.

  Deeming the situation diffused and safe, Chris Harrison sidled up beside me, purring and bumping his nose against my calf. I bent down and pet his soft fur.

  “What about George? He lied to me.”

  “Well, there are lies—and then there are lies. Ideally, he would have confided in you. But that would have meant betraying Helen. What would you have had him do?”

  I sighed. “I’m not sure.”

  “Either way, don’t you think it’s positive that you liked someone like him? Someone different? Who isn’t developing a for-profit T-shirt app with a 0.001 percent, supposedly to benefit women in third world nations?”

  I grunted noncommittally, flopping down on the hexagonal rug next to Chris Harr
ison. “And the rest? Gretchen? The vultures? Was I wrong?”

  “Well, that’s your call, baby. Maybe you need to think about what these relationships mean to you—and what’s worth saving. Or forget them all, come move back in with us up here and find new friends. We miss you! I miss you! Your father refuses to watch The Crown with me.”

  When I hung up with my mother, I felt like a wrung-out rag, but also calmer and clearer than I had since losing my friend. I picked up Chris Harrison and plopped him onto my chest. Out of pity, he stayed. I stared at a crack running the length of my painted tin ceiling.

  Whether I liked it or not, my life had changed. Stewart had died and taken the old me with him.

  That’s when I noticed it: my Operation Sewage canvas tote, slumped behind my white leather pouf. At first, I groaned at the reminder of my nonexistent career, but then I remembered what waited inside it. I sat up. Chris Harrison leapt off me and stalked away, our moment of peace interrupted. Ingrate.

  I dragged the bag toward me, heavy with its contents, and dug inside, pulling out Unearthing the Answer: Manifesting Your Authentic Self. I stared at the celestial cover for a good long time before cracking it open. What I found inside stole my breath: There were notes all over the margins in Stewart’s handwriting. As I flipped through the pages, I saw that he had marked up the whole book, underlining and highlighting. Words like heal, joy, process, and journey leapt out at me.

  My heart broke. I hung my head. Destroyed.

  Stewart hadn’t bought this book as part of some silly trend; he was desperate for a solution. He was working to help himself and (now that I’d met Belle, I understood) other people in pain, as well. He had tried so hard. All this time, I thought he’d been deep into this superficial world. In fact, he was looking for distraction, for a life fantastic enough to keep him going, for eyes on him so he couldn’t fade away.