Most days, these memories streak by in a blur, and my inability to see them clearly feels alarmingly like forgetting. I can feel my mind doing it: I am abridging her, whittling down months of our daily existence into stand-in moments. The afternoon I tied a purple balloon to Greta’s shirt and she drove herself mad with joy and frustration, grabbing and letting it go and watching it float inches above her face—that has become the cover photo for a mental file labeled “Greta, 12–14 months.” My mind never opens the file, and I worry it is because it is empty.
I shot a sixteen-second video of this moment, which took place after Danny and Elizabeth’s daughter Clara’s fourth birthday. Our pictures from the party itself are haphazard, which oddly means I remember it more vividly: my mind has to work overtime to fill in the gaps, to supply smells and sounds. Of the balloon, I can recall only the slight slipping I experienced whenever I snapped a perfect picture. Now that she’s gone, I understand what this feeling meant: it was the sound of my brain off-loading a task. We can let this one go. The more you photograph, the more you permit yourself to forget.
I have thumbed through her existing photos and videos so many times, so hungrily, that my reactions to them have dimmed: they feel used up somehow. I remain haunted by the thought there is more of her, somewhere, yet to be rescued from the digital ether. Maybe, if I just kept looking, I would be delivered her flushed red cheeks again, the light lines beneath her eyes.
I am on my back with my legs angled up a wall. The lights are dimmed, and Mimi has placed weighted sacks on the soles of my feet. Stacy lies next to me, and I can tell from the flickering on her face that she feels sick again. Class is just about over, and we will need to hurry to get her something to eat so her nausea will recede.
Stacy’s sickness is easily twice as intense this time. Most days I come home from work to find her on her back, a hand on her forehead. She has a phobia of vomiting, so the bile stays clamped down while she moans. The nausea is a helpful distraction, in a way: there is something clarifying about her immediate misery, the way it robs us of our ability to think about the future or ponder its meaning.
We leave the studio as quickly as possible, Stacy fumbling for a Ziploc of her always-ready almonds and popping about twelve to fight back the queasiness. We settle across from each other at a café nearby, drinking scalding-hot coffees. I feel wrung out, cool, clear; it is this brief and quickly eroding peace that yoga provides as well. For a few minutes, my mind stops trying to solve the problem of Greta’s not being here.
There is a buzz, and Stacy pulls her phone out, furrowing her brow. “It’s my mom again,” she says, typing back something forcefully. She rolls her eyes, mutters, “Goddamn it,” and slaps the phone facedown on the table.
“What did she say?”
“Oh, you know. Not an apology. An explanation.”
“Should I…?”
“I don’t know,” Stacy snaps, her eyes watering. We sit.
“I know I should be more sympathetic, but her helplessness makes me so mad,” she says after a moment. “And she shoots me down when I try to help anyway. She’s dismissive of everything I say.”
When Stacy is upset, she pulls in from all corners—her shoulders bunch and knot, her lips press together, and her eyes go distant, as if shells have clicked over them. Watching her, I think of self-protecting organisms pulling themselves inside an exoskeleton, a gesture toward invincibility when they are at their most helpless.
Susan texts me irritably: “I’m sorry, but it will be a long time before I will be able to talk to Stacy again. She misinterprets everything I say. She accuses me of trying to make everything about me. She hangs up on me 90 percent of the time, saying, ‘I can’t talk about this with you.’ I can’t do it. I can’t be her punching bag anymore.”
“We are all the walking wounded,” I remind her. “We are all hurting, and we hurt each other. I love you.”
That night, Stacy cries hard in my arms. I hold her, staring at the ceiling, thinking that no matter the evidence mustered on either side, the case made, there is one thing that an arguing parent and child will always both be right about: You didn’t know what it felt like to be me.
* * *
We go for our first sonogram. We choose a new clinic, across the city from where Greta was born. No one there knows about us—not the woman who asks us to sign in without looking up, or the technician who retrieves us from the waiting room where CNN is blaring.
“OK, if mama could get up on the table and pull up your shirt, we can get started,” she says, and I watch it all happen again in front of me: the cold gel smeared from the squelching tube, the large, awkward Doppler. I watch the black of the screen as the rubber head touches down on Stacy.
There is a moment or two of confusion, a growling sound as the tip searches blindly. “Hold a second,” the technician murmurs, more to herself than to us, turning delicate circles with her wrist and keeping her eyes on the monitor. The room is filled with buffeting noise and the screen with white. We wait, breath held, for the confusion to resolve itself.
Then, suddenly, clarity breaks, and an urgent thumping noise fills the tiny room. “There we go,” she says, a note of professional satisfaction in her voice. I had forgotten the startling velocity of a fetus’s heartbeat, like a drowning man’s breaths as he breaks through the surface. WOMWOMWOMWOMWOMWOMWOM.
The sound fills the tiny room; it is loud and urgent and all out of proportion to the wisp of tissue fluttering in water on-screen. Stacy’s right hand grabs mine, squeezing so hard my fingertips go cold. As I watch the fragile clump of cells busily subdividing, I feel a curious sensation coursing through my veins. It is unnamable: there is dread, but joy, too. The first round of antibiotics entering an infected patient, perhaps, or a prompt urging a wrecked system back online.
“Congratulations, guys,” says the technician. “Everything looks perfect.”
We get on the elevator, a little speechless, clutching the little printout with the date and our nameless second child floating on it. As we take the elevator down, I look at it, holding the very edges to keep from getting fingerprints on it. At the center of this little translucent cloud of mingling DNA, a storm is brewing, a million detonations happening soundlessly every second. The being at the center of it is forming already, choosing its road to creation one forked genetic path at a time. Even as the elevator dings on the bottom floor and opens onto the lobby, even as we walk, stricken, into the street, that life is coming further into focus.
The next day on the train to work, I begin, tentatively, to talk to my unborn child, making small promises to him or her. “Hi there, little one,” I venture. My tongue feels thick, like I am recovering after a stroke. “We heard your heartbeat yesterday. It was very strong! You sound like a determined little one. You are going to learn a lot very quickly. Light, dark—first you have to learn about that. You have to learn to feel safe when your hands aren’t bundled. You have to learn how to drink milk from your mommy’s breast. It’s a lot to remember. You will do great, though; I am very excited for you to learn.
“I am going to have lots of work to do, too,” I tell the child. “I am going to have to learn to make the world feel safe for you. This is Daddy’s problem, not yours. He is going to make absolutely certain you understand the world is a safe, good place.”
* * *
My office has relocated to downtown Manhattan, to One World Trade Center. From my new window, I can gaze down directly into the pits of the original towers, now fountains engraved with the names of thousands dead. Down here at the tapered tail of the island, the buildings bunch together, stand shoulder to shoulder, leering at me. Every corner is livid and ablaze with construction, heavy objects erupting like gunshots on corrugated steel and jackhammers turning up chunks of the street beneath me.
If we are truly going to bring another child into this city, I tell myself, t
he least I can do is to teach them not to live in fear. As I think this, a father puts a child on a yellow bus, and I watch in consternation as it rattles off, nearly brushing the side view mirrors of every parked car in its way.
I pace and turn down another side street, feeling it build inside me. There is only one other person in sight, a jogger up the block. I slow down and wait until he passes just out of sight. I take a chance and I open my mouth and I scream—a short, sharp, bottled sound. I feel the rewarding rush of some endorphins; I hear my voice ricochet off the clustered buildings, formidable and full of pain. I listen to the echoes die and feel powerful for once. You can’t hurt us.
After this, I become a prospector for safe screaming spaces in New York. There are eight million people in this city—what are the odds I might find a corner of it to howl like a man being stabbed without being heard by a single one of them? My success rate surprises me. Early-morning malls, before the shops have raised their shutters; one-way streets deep in Brooklyn’s industrial sector, surrounded by nothing but parked trucks and vacant warehouses: these are ripe spaces for my experiments, and I make the city quake, rattling loose screws and hearing myself bounce off walls.
Once or twice, I miscalculate. Underground, I utter three sharp, gasping shouts, like someone whose hand has been crushed by a train. A man runs out suddenly from a corner newsstand, eyes wild: he sees me, alone.
I have nothing to tell him; I simply wave him away.
* * *
Now that our public grief rituals have faded from view, we’ve been forced to come up with private ones like these. And like all life born in the cracks, our private grief rituals are weird: warped and inexplicable. I think of the Greenland shark, a four-hundred-year-old creature that made the news recently due to its gruesomeness: its sticky, putrid flesh is poisonous to the touch, an adaptation to life miles from sunlight. I can feel similar things living in my gut, unrecognizable to me and surely adapting to live just as long.
I have started to carry around little gift-shop Zen books like Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart. I say “carry around” because I don’t even read it, really: I just take it out of my bag on the subway and hold it, running my thumb along the spine. Occasionally I jot down little quotes from it, nonsense like “Everything that occurs is not only usable and workable but is actually the path itself.” When I read them the first time, they glow hot with meaning, but the next day I find them dull and cold again.
My mother tells me she has taken to manically mulching the soil around the pink hydrangeas she has planted in honor of Greta—she is terrified they will not bloom and talks to them continuously. “I need you here, if you don’t mind,” she will whisper into the mulch chips. “To celebrate your life and your beautiful spirit.”
Stacy’s brother, Jack, has been on a downward spiral since Greta’s death. He stays out at bars every night, sometimes until six a.m. Ten, twelve, fourteen vodka sodas pass through his hands in a night, clearing the way for heavier, darker substances. He drinks beer in the shower the next day. He makes new friends or introduces us to old friends we’ve never met or heard of before. You can sense their discomfort and ambivalence at meeting us, feel the clamminess in their handshakes: these are the uneasy alliances forged deep in a committed nightlife, and they don’t flourish in daylight. Jack is clear-eyed about all of this activity: this is his Leaving Las Vegas, it seems, a tribute performance for his late father.
As for Stacy, I am left to guess at the depths of her grief. As always, she prefers to hide in plain sight, deflecting attention and moving under cover of her inexhaustible sociability. Her relationship to Greta is a sealed sanctum, and I fight with a shameful hunger for glimpses into it.
As eloquent as she is with the emotions of others, she has always been deaf and mute to her own. When Stacy is upset or depressed, she will start to say something, trail off, and gesture irritably at me to fill in the blank. I am her interpreter; it is part of our deal.
It is easier for me, because I have all these words. They just fall out of me—they get everyone’s attention, put form and shape and definition to my suffering. Stacy doesn’t have words. Her grief for her lost daughter is a color, a cloud.
When I share with her how good it feels to scream, she admits, “I scream in the car sometimes. I have road rage anyway, so it’s kind of a safe place.” I have a brief flash of her doing this—her face contorted in startling wrath, pounding the steering wheel with the palm of her hand on the Prospect Expressway. The image is so vivid to me that I have a little shiver of empathy.
I’d seen Stacy grieve only once before, after the sudden death of her father, just six months after our wedding. At first we knew nothing—sudden, cause uncertain. Then a flurry of phone calls back and forth from Charlottesville. An evasive call from her uncle, who refused to talk specifics. Then, in horrible slow motion, the details revealed themselves.
“There was a gun,” Stacy told me simply, setting her phone back down in her lap a few hours later, after the truth had been pried loose. His body had been discovered by a friend, hours after he fired the shot, sitting on his bed.
I gaped at her and felt the floor give way beneath me. She no longer seemed to require my support. When her father was simply dead, no explanations, she had been inconsolable. But now that something far more horrible had revealed itself, she stopped crying and became eerily lucid and composed. She served as our guide through the next week, quietly making preparations and discussing logistics with her uncle. She navigated family dynamics. She shopped around for the right urn. She helped write the ceremony. I rarely saw her cry anymore. She was needed and, perhaps, was therefore relieved of the burden of needing anything.
Her father lived a truncated life according to some basic convictions. He idolized tragic figures like Gram Parsons, Roky Erickson, Ian Curtis. He cut a rueful, wry, ruggedly handsome figure, a man of few words but probing intellect and discerning taste, and he bonded with Susan in college over narrow but intense shared interests: rock music, books, counterculture, food. He had a generous grin and a quiet manner; “You never knew what was behind that grin of his,” a friend remembered fondly at his funeral.
As years went on, Susan began to want different things: New York City, art, music, new communities. Stacy’s father wanted exactly the same thing, night after night, in Virginia: beers, steaks on the grill, the family gathered around the television. The divorce, when it finally happened, was long, ugly, and acrimonious. Stacy was in college; Jack was at home. At Stacy’s graduation, her father lurked mournfully in the background, fearful of igniting a confrontation and ruining the event. He met Stacy in an alleyway afterward, handing her a card with a check while mumbling and crying silently. Then, still hoping to avoid creating a scene, he turned and skulked off into the night. Stacy still chokes up when she talks about it.
Her father moved to Charlottesville after the divorce, while his children followed their mother to set up in New York. Hundreds of miles from his family, he started acting the part of a divorcé—rented condo, Hawaiian shirts, new BMW with electrical issues. He had a massive television and a voluminous DVD library, heavy on exploitation and camp: Rocky Horror, Motel Hell, Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors, Pink Flamingos.
When I met him, he had the ruddy face and broken capillaries of a man capable of drinking a handle of whiskey in a matter of hours. I watched him do just that our first night together without a noticeable change in his demeanor. There was something doleful in his figure, which slumped slightly, but an untouchable dignity of bearing in there, too, and I saw in his arched eyebrows and undimmed eyes an observer’s mind still at work.
The night of his suicide, Stacy and I went to dinner. We were still young, married only six months. I raised a glass to hers: “To the worst night of our lives,” I said somberly.
Jack drove down to Charlottesville immediately and spent two weeks alone cleani
ng out his dead father’s condo, taking loads out to the dumpster and selling off boxes of new shirts, ties still in their plastic wrapping. When Stacy and I joined him, the condo was nearly empty. I stood alone with Jack in his father’s bedroom, the bed and bed frame already gone. It was determined that I would inherit the stereo; as I worked to dismantle it, pulling apart wires, Jack stuffing random leftover items into bags, I tried not to look over my shoulder at the irregular hole in the far wall.
Sometimes I wonder if her father’s sudden death didn’t prepare Stacy, on some level, for our lives capsizing this completely. It is a shameful thought, one I try to squirm away from as it hits me, but drowning quietly in my own rage and despair, I am unable to escape it.
One night after dinner, when we have relocated to the couch, I lower the volume on the music because I don’t want distractions. I turn to her; I have a question.
“Before Greta died, did you think the world was”—I hesitate and think of my promise to my unborn one—“a good, safe place?”
She looks at me with surprise, sensing the weight of my need.
“Huh. That’s a hard one.” She furrows her brow, her words emerging slowly: “I think moments in my life…made me assume horrible things just happen,” she said. “Maybe before the accident, I assumed we were safe from some of those horrible things. But no. When Greta died, I didn’t have a worldview that was shattered.”
As she says this, I feel the embarrassing truth curdle inside my gut. I would have said yes. The naïveté of this belief sears me now, fills me with self-loathing that is almost blinding. I might have hemmed and hawed, qualified, but I would have said yes. This is the scream living in me, I realize. This version of me—this contemptibly happy and thoughtless child—has been mauled. He vomits blood, paws the blacktop with curled fingers, but grotesquely refuses to die.
Once More We Saw Stars Page 13
