Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  Stacy breaks the silence. “I’d like him to come back.”

  * * *

  The next morning, we are visited by a body worker named Hannah. I go first, and as she sets up her massage table, I tell her about the dove.

  “It was dark and funny in a way that made me think of Greta,” I say. “She had a slapstick sense of humor, and she loved it when we were flustered. It cracked her up. A dove smacking into a window and scaring the shit out of us—it felt like the kind of signal she would send.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Hannah murmurs, kneading my shoulders. Then she puts a hand to my chest and flinches slightly, as if it were a hot stove. She takes in a short breath and whispers, “She’s right here.”

  She laughs with wonder, her palm softening. My grief pumps out of me, like a broken water main.

  “Oh, Jayson, I’m so sorry,” she says. “I know this might make you sad to hear, but you can never really be alone. She’s right here inside you. It’s remarkable. Right here.” She traces a circle around my right clavicle and breastbone. “Was she here?”

  “Right after she was born,” I whisper.

  After Hannah leaves, we wander the grounds, feeling pliant, suggestible. The dove, the chapel, the solitude—we feel cracked open somehow, ready for wherever else Jim might bring us. We wander to the back fence to pet the two old, watery-eyed donkeys that live on the grounds. We do yoga in the chapel. We wait for Jim to return.

  When he arrives again at the house later that afternoon, he is carrying nothing but a drum.

  “I’m going to lead you on a spirit journey,” he announces, sitting down with the drum between his knees, tracing a line around the stretched skin. “I can’t say for certain what you will encounter, but I can tell you a number of things that some people experience. You may come into contact with a spirit animal; you may be visited by other visions. Some of them might be frightening or vivid, but the important thing to remember is not to be afraid. Sometimes the spirit animal overwhelms you; it might even move to touch you. It’s important not to flinch from that, because whatever it wants to do for you is healing. It may even appear violent, but your spirit animal never wishes you harm. If they move to touch you, it is safe to embrace them; they are offering you healing, and it is medicine they bring.

  “The other thing to remember is that you will trip over the conscious mind along the way,” he says. “It is part of the journey as well. As you go further into yourself, your conscious mind attempts to pull you out of the spirit realm at every step. You might start to fidget, become more aware of your body again, or have an impulse to move your legs, or to remember the room around you. This is all normal, and the best thing you can do when this happens is to just acknowledge it and let it go. You can keep going inward.”

  Stacy lies on the couch; I choose the floor, just beneath the skylight. When I close my eyes, the sunlight turns the landscape behind my eyelids white. Jim starts to beat the drum, rhythmically and deliberately, the cadence of raindrops from a gutter. The light expands behind my eyelids and gathers depth, and suddenly the currents of light become a flitting shape: a butterfly. I see wings, fluttering unmistakably. They are diaphanous, light passing through their webbing. My conscious mind hiccups in disbelief, right on cue, and the butterfly dissolves, bringing the room and the floor and my arms and legs back into focus, but Jim’s drum keeps beating, and as my breathing slows, it reappears. It flutters above me, circles, and lands on my chest. If it were possible for a butterfly to arch an eyebrow, that is what it does to me. Well, come on, it seems to say, playful and expectant.

  It lifts off my chest, and I follow it, watching the slow flexing of its wings as they expand. Suddenly, they are no longer butterfly wings; they are eagle wings, broad and strong and spreading for miles in both directions. There is wind in my face, and I look down, seeing my hands clutching the eagle’s broad shoulder blades. We are soaring high above miles of forest, trees passing below in a blur. The eagle dives and the forest floor rears up before me. I tumble weightlessly off its back and into a wide, open field. Lying there, sinking into the earth beneath me and with grass blades tickling my fingers and grazing my ears, I gaze up at the blue sky.

  Greta walks up. She is wearing the white denim jacket she was wearing the day before the accident, when she and Grandma Suz went to the park. Hi, Daddy, she says, silently. Hey, little girl, I say. I stand up at her beckoning and follow her to the edge of the forest, where the trees get thicker. The eagle reappears, and I mount its shoulders; for some reason, I am unable to follow Greta’s weaving little white dot of a body through the trees without its help.

  The eagle slows where Greta has stopped, at a massive pit of earth. I stand at the lip with her, looking into it. There is a humid, loamy smell emanating from the bottom, a scent that hints at unknown things. I can’t see more than ten feet down and I shrink from the edge; I am afraid. But Greta looks at me, wrinkling her nose in that funny smile of hers, and off she goes, scrabbling down the side. I have no choice but to follow her down, into the very center of the earth. It only gets cooler the farther down we go, and I can barely make out her jacket as she moves eagerly ahead of me.

  We meet at the very bottom, the surface invisible. The dirt down here breathes. Greta kneels down to it and, with her two small hands, scoops up rich, living earth, letting it stream from her palms as she holds it up to me: See? See? She looks at me meaningfully, and I understand: when I returned to the earth, Greta would be literally everywhere. Her love and presence would blanket me. She would be flowers, bees, sky, roots, dirt, frogs, water. And so would I. Suddenly we are standing at the lip of the pit again, and then just as suddenly back in the blinding light of the field. Greta has lifted us out somehow, back to the surface. The eagle lands on a branch above me, fixing me with its stern look. Greta, now a tiny figure at the edge of the field, waves sunnily to me. Good-bye, Daddy, she says to me, confident and serene in her knowledge that I understood.

  And I do; I feel the understanding coursing through my veins, carrying the message with it to every corner of my body. When I die, I will return and sink back into the earth. I lie down in the field again and wait for it to happen. The eagle looms above me, massive, but I am unafraid. I turn my face up to its beak. It pecks out my eyes, drops them in the grass. It tears open my face, spraying blood and pulp and tendons. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I whisper to it. I feel the shredding, but there is no pain, just relief as air rushes over the exposed parts of me.

  Finally it digs its talons into my chest, closing its claws around my heart. I stiffen and strain, fighting back. I watch the organ lift from my chest cavity, the eagle pulling as it beats its wings upward. But I will not let go: it stays connected to me by hard, stretching tendons, thick like backpack straps. With a grateful sigh, I surrender; the tendons snap, and my beating heart lifts free. The eagle, gripping the bloody thing in its talons, flies up, releasing it at the far edge of the field, where my heart lands with a resounding plop. I am free. My chest cavity withers, plants bloom in my blackening rib cage, and I slowly become earth. I become Greta, and Greta becomes me. The two of us are soil cupped in the palms of the world.

  Just then, Jim’s drumbeat changes cadence, signaling that it is time to leave this place. The hard yellow eyes of the protector eagle bore into me with a message: Remember me. Jim’s drum comes to a stop.

  “You may now open your eyes,” Jim says softly.

  My eyes open. Oh, my Greta. My love, my life.

  I finally understand.

  Six

  harrison

  I CRACK OPEN MY FRONT DOOR, gazing up and down the block. It’s eight a.m. and the street is empty: no dogs on leashes sniffing at trees, no neighbors at their mailboxes. I drag cardboard boxes noisily behind me down to the curb. Except for the bus that rumbles past every ten minutes or so, our street is nearly always this quiet—none of our old block’s honking
minivans, drifting trash, glass shards. I love our new neighborhood, but it’s tinged with bitterness. Everywhere I look, there is another place Greta’s eyes never saw—walls she never touched, shady swings she never sat in, a wonderful school she will never attend. You would love it here, Greta, I tell her.

  I make it back inside unnoticed, closing the door behind me with a sigh. My heart is thudding wildly and there are beads of sweat at my temples even though the heat is hours away. It has been eight months since we moved in, but I still fear my new neighbors—their inquisitive smiles, their natural human curiosity. They know nothing of Greta, and I can feel their assumption, from appearances, that we are starting our family, perhaps even newlyweds. I find myself afraid to reinforce this impression or, worse, to correct it. I give them a wide berth as a result, and when I do end up shaking someone’s hand, I fight back panic while smiling: Please don’t ask me too many questions.

  I find Stacy awake and bustling in the kitchen, wearing purple underwear and a black tank top. The two items part to bare a slice of pregnant belly, firm as cantaloupe. I kiss her and walk past into our bedroom, stepping around the half-filled open suitcase, our “go bag” list for the hospital—toothpaste, T-shirts, bag of cashews. I add two more items to the mental checklist—deodorant, phone charger—while sliding open the closet door for a fresh shirt.

  As I do, the glint of Greta’s shrink-wrapped baby clothes catches my eye and I unfocus my gaze. Her clothes are a cube of tightly compressed memories in here, her newborn jammies and her skullcap and all the frilly pink baby clothes we took a single picture of her in before taking them off. Under normal circumstances, we would have passed these on to someone else with a newborn. But now these little outfits are chalk outlines, and to get rid of them would be to surrender more evidence of her existence.

  It is mid-August, and late summer clings to us like a musty sheet. Between the weather, the neighbors, and the final days of Stacy’s pregnancy, we rarely go outside. Our lives are slowly winding to a halt, and we mostly sit inside together, watching television and trying not to think.

  We’ve begun sorting through these sealed bags again, planting items across the apartment like little warning flags. Stacy has sorted out a few of the unisex outfits and brought them into the living room, where she sits with her coffee. There are some pants in muted purples and greens, some yellow shirts. Next to the scattered baby clothes lies the infant activity mat, dangling stuffed animals and shiny toys. An oil painting of Greta, made for us by a friend, gazes down kindly at us, and at the toys, from the opposite wall. Do you want us to give all these to your little brother, baby girl? I ask her silently.

  “I had a dream that I was caring for a dog that somehow became a baby,” Stacy murmurs next to me to break the silence, and it’s only then I notice that she looks troubled. “I picked it up and it was a dog, and then I put it down and it was Greta, and then it was Harrison. There was a boiling pot of hot water next to him. I was just being the most irresponsible mother alive.”

  There’s nothing I can think of to say that doesn’t sound pointless to my ears: her dream speaks directly to all of our worst fears.

  It is Tuesday. Our son is due in three days. If he keeps to his sister’s calendar, born precisely on her due date, he will be in our arms by this weekend.

  When he gazes up at us, who is he going to see?

  Stacy touches my knee with her left hand. “You should shower and get ready for work,” she says softly.

  * * *

  Stacy had a vision at Golden Willow, too. She stood alone in a field, like me. She was greeted not by a butterfly, but by a stag, emerging from the lip of a thick woods. Greta stood next to it, one small hand reaching up to rest lightly at its side. The three of them—Stacy, Greta, the deer—walked through the woods to a clearing, much like the one in my vision, but in Stacy’s there were no other animals. There was just a clear pool, its surface undisturbed. Greta beckoned her up to the edge of the water and motioned for her to look out: there, blue and snug and safe, was our son, floating on the surface of the water.

  Stacy scanned the edge of the woods for another portent, another sign or visitor, but Greta kept gently bringing her attention back to the baby floating on the pool. Stacy asked her, mutely, what she was meant to do, looking to her for direction. Greta only raised one finger to her lips, looking into Stacy’s eyes meaningfully: Shh, she said. She pointed again to the water. Then she left.

  Driving back from Golden Willow, we ruminated on what our visions had given us. It was as if my heart were diseased, I ventured—the sickness of my anger, my bitterness, and my self-pity had spread, and the eagle had torn it out of me, organ by organ. The former Jayson who screamed inside of me, the believer in the benevolent universe who had been maimed but not killed by Greta’s falling brick, had finally been allowed to perish completely. As the eagle shredded my face, I sensed it was the final obliteration I could not perform on myself. I had wanted to die for so long; now, I finally had.

  Stacy, for her part, saw her vision as one about presence, about quietude and calm. “We’ve been taking care of only ourselves now for so long,” she said. “I am going to be a mother again, and that means I have to be ready to give everything I have. Greta was trying to show me how.”

  Since Greta died, Stacy and I have been asked to live only for each other. Through the blinding nature of our shared pain, we have pulled closer together. We are more tender with each other, less impatient. Now, at the end of another pregnancy, I am acutely aware of the bruising that covers us—how deep the contusions go; how hard all of these spots are about to be pressed again.

  Taking care of a child is, if nothing else, an ongoing exercise in self-neglect: You rock a baby until sweat runs down your back. You pick bits of a toddler’s leftover food off plates. You fall asleep on bedroom floors, inch away from the crib on your belly, praying your kid doesn’t sit up and start screaming again. During the last two weeks, I’ve tried imagining what it will feel like to exist for someone else again—to be climbed on, yelled at, treated like furniture, regarded as eternal and unmoving, like the sun or the sky. I yearn for the return of this feeling, and I fear what it brings.

  Before Greta was born, I tormented myself with an endless series of doomsday scenarios—exhausted, clumsy, I would fall, spinning, in the dark and drop her. Or maybe she would spill something as a toddler while I was making her lunch; I would turn and scream at her. I would see her eyes widen as the fear dawned on her: Even Daddy can hurt me.

  The truth turned out to be much more complicated. I never dropped Greta, never screamed at her. But we stumbled, raw and half conscious, through our days. Her 4:30 a.m. wake-ups never ceased, and sleeplessness gnawed its remorseless way through our brains. The signs of our exhaustion and inadequacy were everywhere, humiliating us: she wore mismatched clothes and socks on her hands in winter because we couldn’t keep her gloves on. We scrambled from work to get to her Brooklyn daycare on time, arriving red-faced and panting. One day, running from the train, I tripped and fell on my carrier bag, feeling my iPad screen crunch beneath me.

  When I got home, Stacy was stirring store-bought tomato sauce, which ran in red streaks all over the stove and on the floor. “I dropped it on the floor, but I think I got it in time,” she told me, her voice palpable with rising hysteria. “I’m boiling it to make sure.” I walked over and glanced in the pot. She had scooped the sauce off our mouse-infested kitchen floor with her hands. I kissed her, suggesting takeout.

  We laughed about these moments when we could. But we were becoming irritable husks of ourselves. When Greta turned eighteen months old, Stacy started taking lactation clients in the evenings after her day’s work: “Mommy’s gotta go talk to the babies,” we would tell her. Greta cried and stomped while Stacy slipped out, stricken and guilty and heartbroken. I would put Greta to sleep and then fight through the cottony blankness of my head to write. We c
ollapsed into bed, barely touching each other.

  Things reached a boiling point the week before the accident. The ropes binding our marriage were fraying; we were mean, brittle, short-tempered.

  “This will be a good weekend,” I promised Stacy. “We’ll go out to dinner. We’ll sleep in. We just need a reset.”

  Stacy buried her head in my shoulder; she is a foot shorter than me, so when I hugged her the top of her head met my chin, and I enfolded her completely. “Man, we need a break,” she mumbled into me. I could feel her sagging against my frame.

  “You’re going to go stay overnight at Grandma Suz’s this weekend,” I reminded Greta every day that week. She was just getting old enough to comprehend the passing of days, and we counted them down together. She knew how to anticipate now, I noted.

  That Saturday morning, I left Stacy and Greta alone. I was scheduled to work my monthly shift at our local food co-op, a quirky Brooklyn institution where crusty hippie socialists mingled with people like Stacy and me, who just liked the produce. My job, that morning, was line director: I stood on a footstool, waving shoppers on to the checkout counter. It was a ridiculous way to spend my Saturday morning, but it was only a few hours. Stacy was driving Greta to the Upper West Side to drop her off with Susan, and then we were going to meet for a movie. It was the beginning of our reset weekend.

  Forty-five minutes from the end of my shift, my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was Stacy, and I answered it to the sound of her screeching.

  “The marathon!” she screamed in my ear. I could hear her pounding the steering wheel and faintly discerned Greta wailing in the car seat behind her. “The Brooklyn marathon is blocking every street. I can’t leave. I’ve been circling around for forty-five minutes and I’m a mile from home.”