Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  There was something else alive in the air between us—something we’d been too afraid to prematurely identify as “hope,” but we recognized the weather conditions for it. One night, while discussing the move, Stacy said it: “We can’t do it all over again here.”

  I had already discovered this thought living in my heart: I wanted to be a father again. But I did not simply want to be “a father” again. I wanted to be Greta’s father. I liked Greta’s father. Greta’s father was bursting with pride and happiness, even when he was exhausted and frazzled. Sometimes I still expected to look up and see Greta and me laughing and walking together down the block, as if observing my old self from a great distance.

  * * *

  Just as we began our apartment search, a report was published in The New York Times. How is it that a chunk of windowsill simply fell eight stories to strike a child? Although no one thought to notify the parents, the city apparently commissioned an inquiry on Greta’s behalf, and the Department of Investigation was dispatched to find out the answer.

  According to the city’s report, the senior center around the corner from Grandma Suz’s, where she and Greta regularly stopped and chatted with the residents, was certified “OK-SAFE” by an inspector who never visited the building. He never saw it, never even stood across the street with binoculars. He did not observe the large, S-shaped crack in the facade that telegraphed such imminent danger that an inspector across the street, working on a completely different building, sent an email about it to the Department of Buildings. Someone responded to that, the Times reported, but no action was taken.

  There were hundreds of other buildings across New York City that had safety-code violations just as severe, it turned out.

  After the report, the falling brick began its gruesome replay in my mind again—forever spiraling out into free space, crushing the firing brain of my Greta. I started thinking a lot about the word “mortified.” “I was so mortified,” people will say—I was so embarrassed, I was made to feel like nothing but a body. “I died,” people also say, but that doesn’t pack the same oomph: all college English students eventually read John Donne’s “The Canonization” only to have the professor, eyes twinkling, explain what “we die and rise the same” really meant. To die was romantic, even sexual. “Mortified” had that stiffening current coursing through it, the threat of lowering temperatures.

  Greta didn’t die. Greta was mortified. The brick was a grievous insult sent from the universe, a refutation of her small hopes, dreams, plans. Now, her spirit was diffused, a comet trail of dashed expectations.

  In the wake of the report, the city I’d called home for ten years was suddenly too loud, too noisy, too dangerous. I looked up wherever I walked, thinking something could fall at any time. I crossed the street to avoid scaffolding and sidewalk sheds, a completely irrational response since a lack of both killed Greta. As I darted under air-conditioning units that groaned out of windows, like overripe fruit ready to drop, I wondered: Was I simply rooted to the spot of my trauma, unable to muster the bravery to imagine leaving? Should we leave the city forever?

  “After 9/11, I saw two kinds of patients,” said my therapist. “People who considered leaving and people who left. None of them were wrong. This may change, but I’ve been talking to you now for a few months, and you sound to me like the people who don’t leave.”

  She was right, we thought. We couldn’t imagine it, even now. We had spent too long, poured too much of ourselves into this inhospitable climate, and now we were like two trees growing straight out of the side of a cliff; having adapted to life here, we felt unsuited to flourish anywhere else.

  So as the trees began to yellow, we drove to an open house in Crown Heights. It was a gorgeous day, families everywhere—children sitting on fathers’ shoulders and toddlers Greta’s age on scooters. The apartment was a three-bedroom, with elementary-school children’s drawings framed on the walls. The boy’s bedroom, eerily well organized for a showing, was painted bright red, with sports pennants and posters and trophies. We wandered through the empty home, feeling like ghosts.

  “It’s beautiful,” we told the woman standing around collecting names and trying not to loom. We left as quickly as possible.

  Next, we fell unaccountably in love with a duplex, an odd and charming cottage-like house on the fringe of Park Slope with a basement floor and a backyard. The layout was nonsensical—a little dollhouse veranda, barely big enough to stand on, opening onto a small yard only accessible by a shared hallway. But the patch of green, the promise of seclusion—these visions clouded our eyes. We made an offer, then were dismayed when it was accepted.

  Suddenly Stacy was staying up half the night to pore over the floor plan, imagining where our two couches would fit, where we would park a stroller, how we would block off the stairs. “OK, I think I’ve got it,” she announced every morning when I woke up, bringing me over to examine her latest floor plan. “Oh no, but then the changing table will block the window,” she would realize, crestfallen.

  “What if our media cabinet went over here?” I inquired, pointing to another corner.

  We both considered that. “That could work,” she conceded.

  We went back to see the place to reassure ourselves, and I found myself slapping away mosquitoes—five, seven, nine—from the disconcertingly buggy backyard as the real estate agent sought to comfort us: “This is a really special place, and you guys had a real connection with it,” she reminded us. We walked outside; it was a gorgeous, quiet block. Green-Wood Cemetery, an acres-long resting place that housed Leonard Bernstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat, lay just across the street. We mentioned, again, how morbid others might find that. We agreed, again, how oddly comforting it was.

  Driving home, Stacy noticed a power substation at the end of the block. “Is that safe?”

  “Of course,” I answered reflexively, and then felt the discomfort sit in my stomach.

  We googled it that night. From a UK government website: “Studies show a link between living near or under high-voltage power lines can increase risk of childhood leukemia.”

  Reading it, I felt a little helpless, like someone who suddenly believed in chemtrails. Was it true? Maybe. It was probably true enough. What if it wasn’t true at all? Even then, the insinuation, having hatched in our brains—is it true?—would haunt every moment.

  Suddenly, the apartment was too small, too impractical, too far from the subway. We withdrew our bid. The knot in my stomach released, and Stacy began sleeping again. Apartment hunting while in shock, we were learning, was tricky business.

  * * *

  Our apartment search went on and on, far beyond when our actual apartment sold in October, and we had to move out. The couple who bought our place seemed unpleasant, and Stacy and I felt a slight pang: these people would be sleeping in Greta’s old room, the only room she ever knew. But without her crib or her toys or her pattering feet, it was just a room.

  Movers came and relocated our couches, tables, and dressers to a storage pod. We packed about a month’s worth of clothing and toiletries into a suitcase and distributed the remainder of our belongings across Brooklyn—Greta’s car seat and all of our pictures in one couple’s basement, our instruments in another. In the back of our car, we kept Greta’s ashes, zipped in a red bag given to us by the funeral home. They sat on top of a bin filled with dry goods from our pantry: granola, tea bags, half-eaten bars of chocolate.

  Half an hour later, I stood outside of my old building, where I already did not live. This was Greta’s home, the front stoop where I watched her play with her neighbors. Watching her run and squeal with the other kids, I had imagined them growing older, sneaking out to visit one another in the basement, having sleepovers in one another’s apartments. Now she and we were gone.

  * * *

  After abandoning our home, we forswore family. The decision felt instinctual, more animal than
conscious. We lacked the capacity to discern our motives. Maybe we were curling up like injured dogs? Scattering, roachlike, from scrutiny? We didn’t know, and, more important, we didn’t care. Not caring was a novel sensation to us, and we embraced it.

  The break was less literal than our move—I spoke with my mother on the phone regularly, dully reporting on the facts of our dwindling existence—but I didn’t hear a word of her bright voice in my ears, and when I hung up it was as if my parents had ceased to exist. Stacy and Susan, meanwhile, were an open wound. I avoided mentioning her at all to Stacy, only texting Susan privately once in a while. “We’re on inner tubes, floating down a lazy river of grief,” Susan told me. “We’re on the same journey, but we don’t control any of it.”

  We all saw one another exactly once. Hundreds of my coworkers and colleagues raised the money for a tree to be planted in Prospect Park in Greta’s honor. My mother and father returned to Brooklyn for the planting on October 15, and Susan joined us.

  Fall had been unusually dismal, and on the day of the planting, the cold was settling in, wind biting us from the duck pond. My parents looked grey and depleted in a way I’d never noticed before; Susan barely spoke apart from some mumbled pleasantries. She still seemed to be stranded in some purgatory, not really here. None of us was ready to be together, I realized.

  After flipping through a pamphlet provided to us by the park, Stacy and I had settled on a black gum tree. In time, we’d read, it would sprout flaming-red teardrop leaves and grow tiny sour berries, which small birds would eat. We liked that idea.

  The sapling looked weak and bare. Park volunteers labored quickly, lifting its squat base into a hole. We put a small laminated photo on the flimsy protective fence and then stood back to take stock of the effect. The planters left us in respectful silence.

  I sat down next to Susan on a bench while she cried. She kept going until she had nothing left, and then she just stared out at the pond, emptied. My mother’s hands gripped my shoulders, and I could feel her anger, her helplessness.

  Just then, a beagle on a leash circled the base of the tree and lifted its leg. We shouted frantically to the dog walker, who looked at the photo, the fence, and then, as it slowly dawned, hurried off, horrified. We laughed about this later, a faint warmth finally touching us. Greta would have found it hilarious.

  * * *

  After moving out, we embarked on a strange, itinerant crawl through Brooklyn that mirrored the directionlessness of our internal lives. We crashed on couches, we stayed in spare bedrooms. It was oddly like being in college again: we were forever on break, the bedraggled cause célèbre of adults who had things we did not—kitchens, clean sheets, children.

  We played our roles as well as we could: babysitters, doers of dishes, dinner companions. We visited often with parents whose children were Greta’s friends; I’d stoop down to the floor and play with the children as the adults drank and talked. I played with their toys and read them books and took goofy selfies with them, and I did not cry later at night, even as I couldn’t help but notice the ways in which they changed, physically and emotionally, in ways Greta never would. Their voices cleared up, their hair grew longer.

  Greta never grew much hair; she was “our little baldy,” as we fondly called her. “Oh, Stacy and Jack were bald forever,” Susan would laugh, as Greta ran around her living room. “You didn’t grow any hair until you were almost three years old, Stace!”

  My mother confirmed the same about me. “When you were two and a half, you finally grew these long blond curls,” she remembered. “Oh, I loved those curls. They were so beautiful.”

  The longest hairs on Greta’s head were just above her ears. They were translucent and cobwebby, and they caught the light in a way that suggested dust motes floating in a window. Once, gazing at herself in her toy mirror just above her toy kitchen, she brought up a hand to a wisp, touched it, and exclaimed, “My hair’s getting so long!” We laughed about it for days.

  Stacy and I used to joke that we could not begin to imagine Greta as an older person. “I can only imagine her hairless baby head on a slightly taller body,” I’d say. I thought about how macabre this seemed now.

  One day we found ourselves picnicking at Brooklyn Bridge Park with our former neighbor Amy and her son, Jacob, another friend of Greta’s. Amy and Saul, her husband, were letting us sleep in their third-floor bedroom, and we were doing our best not to be in the way.

  I spent the afternoon with Jacob, playing daddy. He ran up ahead of me, laughing. I chased him, tickled him, joked with him. I could feel from his eyes and the intensity of his attention that he loved me in his generous little-boy way. His chatter was a constant stream of need and curiosity, and he kept asking me to sit next to him. I held his hand while he balanced and walked on the upraised curb; I lifted him up and lowered him playfully into the tall weeds behind it. I chased him, and let him chase me, around an empty bicycle rack.

  As we played, my parental sensors switched on. I knelt down in front of him and spoke quietly, drawing his attention to small things. Look at this small flower in the sidewalk crack. Where is your mommy? There she is, sitting over there with some food. Should we go over there and sit next to her? Yeah, I think so, too.

  Jacob’s smile illuminated some broken sanctum in me that hadn’t seen or felt much light since the pain. Children didn’t smile at you; they smiled into you, and I could feel my love for Greta seeking a transference point. I needed to care for and love a little person; my need was as profound as walking, now that I’d developed it. What child might I love now?

  Stacy sat with Amy in a pocket of shade. I joined her with Jacob, who sat between his mother and me. I looked at him, thinking how far away we were from nurturing a life like his. I wondered if my Greta, who once kissed Jacob on a playground in the cold of winter—their cheeks red from the wind and Jacob grinning like a man who’d won the lottery afterward—was watching us.

  On the drive home, I sat next to Jacob in his car seat, keeping him occupied and awake so that his nap didn’t begin in the car. He was giddy, approaching exhaustion and meltdown, and his laughter had a dangerous edge. We pulled up to Saul and Amy’s house, and suddenly Jacob asked me, “Jayson, do you have a baby in your house?”

  I felt Amy stiffen in the front seat. No one said a word. Greta had completely disappeared into the murky depths of his toddler’s psychology. It was unclear to me if Jacob was aware of her ever having existed.

  “No, Jacob,” I managed. “No, we don’t.”

  Jacob persisted: “But why don’t you have a baby in the house?”

  “I don’t know, Jacob, little guy,” I said, my voice breaking a little. “We just don’t.” I was unable to offer him anything else, because this was the truest answer. We just didn’t.

  I helped him out of his car seat and carried him up to their front door; he was already limp and pliable. I closed my eyes and smelled his hair. His little head rested on my shoulder and some part of me flickered alive, if only for a moment.

  * * *

  We left Saul and Amy’s house. They protested we could stay indefinitely, but being underfoot in another family’s routine had only heightened our sense of rootlessness. So we checked into a three-hundred-square-foot studio on Airbnb; our renter, a bachelor named Asaf, left us a twelve-dollar bottle of Merlot as a welcoming gift. A visible inch of dust covered everything when we walked in. We set down our bags and got to work: Stacy scrubbed the toilet bowl while I passed a roll of paper towels over every surface, each one turning up black.

  It was in these highly unromantic surroundings that we decided to begin trying again. We’d had unprotected sex a number of times since the summer, but after a week in “Asaf’s Kingdom” (the wry name we gave the place, based on its Wi-Fi name), we bought several boxes of fertility tests. After a few nights, the applicator screen smiled at us, and we acted accordingly. There was c
omfort in the act, in the closeness and intimacy, but no hope—not yet. We were performing the act of hope, watering irradiated soil.

  Stacy lay on her back on the bed, her legs up the wall. I lay next to her, with my legs jokingly up the wall, too. Our faces were a few inches apart: Her cheeks were slightly pink, a strand of hair falling over her slim, aquiline nose with its slight bump in the middle. Her eyes went deep and still in the moments right after. “Isn’t it crazy that we find ourselves doing this again?” Stacy wondered, her gaze searching mine.

  After, as when we were conceiving Greta, there was something luminous and mysterious in her eyes, a recession into some deep, private corridor—the wordless place, where all her deepest emotions roiled. I could see her as a small child in these moments, smaller and more frightened but lit from within by the same powerful emotional intelligence, the kind that allowed her to see other people’s motivations more clearly than they saw their own. I imagined how lonely and bewildering it might have been growing up with this intuition. Greta had my round, moonlike face, my smile that turned slightly crooked and goofy in the lower left corner—but she had Stacy’s eyes, crystal blue and fathomless.

  I turned my head to take in our surroundings: “At least our accommodations are nicer,” I joked. “Remember when we started dating? The first time you came over to my apartment, with that twin bed?”