I could hear her coming unraveled, and my stomach kicked with visceral anger and frustration.
“I’m sorry,” she moaned. “I just don’t have this in me right now, OK? I don’t. I don’t have any reserves at all. I don’t know how we’re going to get Greta up to my mom’s, and I don’t know how we’re going to get away.”
I don’t have any reserves, either, but you don’t hear me calling you and screaming at you in panic, do you? What gives you the right to do that to me? I snuffed this thought and spoke carefully: “Stacy, calm down. I can’t help you do anything when you’re this upset. Please just go home and get out of the car. Take Greta to visit Jacob if Saul and Amy are home. When I’m done here, I can shop and come get you. We’ll take Greta up on the subway together. Then we’ll go to our movie. And then we’ll have our weekend. OK?”
Stacy took a shaky breath that I could feel over the phone. “OK. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lose it. OK.”
I walked back, face burning, to resume my post, feeling shaken and exposed.
Our fights, when we had them, were always the same: Stacy would blow up and overreact at small inconveniences, and I would blow up and overreact at her. Both of us would lose our composure, both of us felt foolish as it escalated, and neither of us had a leg to stand on when it was over. “The small things are the big things,” she would insist to me, and I agreed with her right up until she got too mad for me to handle, or I got embarrassed and abruptly turned on her. Then we were no longer Jayson and Stacy; we were just two more weary adults miles apart and seething miserably in our mutual failure.
I had a dangerous momentum going by the time my shift ended, hurling moments of her lost temper at her like a prosecutor: Remember when you said this? Or this? Because I do.
When we finally met up again, I found her as angry as me.
“Where have you been?” she demanded. “We were supposed to leave an hour ago. Greta’s a mess. She’s been ready for a nap for half an hour. She had a total meltdown at Jacob’s house, so that was a nightmare.”
I was unready to be the one at fault, and her anger at me knocked me back a step. I muttered something defensive, and the two of us skulked to the subway, Stacy pushing Greta with the seat reclined. Greta was often angry with us when we were bickering, but she was pensive now and just looked up and smiled that knowing smile of hers.
“I know, sweetheart,” I said, ruffling her hair. “Mommy and Daddy are upset. We’re OK.”
The train arrived late and overcrowded, filled with marathoners wearing their numbers. We forced our miserable way in and stood there, cramped and not speaking. Then the train stalled out halfway up Manhattan—no announcement over the loudspeakers, no movement. “Oh god, why are we stopped?” Stacy asked loudly. I felt two sets of nearby strangers’ eyes flick toward us.
Greta squirmed and Stacy reached down to pull her out of the stroller. Someone cleared a seat, and she sat on her mother’s lap, content once more and making eyes at smiling passengers. The train moved. We decided to split up once off the train, so that I could take Greta to Susan’s and Stacy could run errands. She kissed Greta. She looked at me. “This will get better. Love you.”
A block from Susan’s, Greta started rocking in her stroller with delight: this street, this light, this smell meant Grandma Suz was near. Seeing her joy, my weariness ebbed, and I pushed her at top speed down the block.
Do you remember when we said good-bye, baby girl? When I dropped you off with Susan, you squirmed out of your stroller and ambled over to the living room. You dumped a small box of rainbow-colored paper clips on the rug and sat down, putting them back one by one in the box. Susan’s dog, Margie, barked; Grandma Suz started making you eggs.
“We’re all good here, Daddy,” Susan said. “Have a wonderful night. You deserve it. Give my love to Stacy.” I felt it, then, a muscle released: I relinquished care of you.
I told you to come give me a hug and a kiss. You wandered over and I pulled you close, smelling you, feeling your little hands pat my back. You gave me a dainty peck and turned away. I stood up, took one last look, and mouthed good-bye to Grandma Suz, who blew me a kiss. I called good-bye one last time. You didn’t even look up, waving your hand over your head as I closed the door.
* * *
We missed the movie and it was too early for dinner, so we regrouped at a bar. We both felt it then—our weariest and worst selves falling away. Stacy looked at me, her eyes full and pleading, and I felt instantly ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered. Even as I said it, something writhed and kicked in me, some small defiance that refused to settle. I curled my toes and took an unsteady breath and tried again. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Stacy said. “I overreacted, I know. I’m just so tired. Everyone says the first two years are the hardest. But…maybe we’re finally coming out of the tunnel, you know?”
She reached out and clasped my hand in hers, urgent.
“We have so much to be grateful for,” she pleaded. “We have each other; we have Greta. She’s so smart. I can feel her understanding more and more every day. You can feel that too, right? When we took her to the aquarium, it felt like we were sharing the experience. The fish, the sea lion—she wanted to talk about it the whole way home. She’s going to grow so much in the next year. I just…this is going to be a good year for us.”
The next morning, we slept in until nine. We lay in bed, looking at pictures of Greta. Susan texted us a shot from their morning: Greta had demanded coffee of her own, so Susan gave her one teaspoon of coffee in a mug with milk, and she was tipping it back with gusto. Later on, she told us, they were going to go for a walk in the neighborhood. We should take our time. Stacy and I stretched, luxuriant, in the warmth from the window.
We sat with our coffees, savoring the quiet. We gathered up two big bags of laundry, setting them aside to do later.
“We can still see that movie,” I said. “Our last indulgence before we get Greta.”
We took our time getting dressed; we wandered out to the elevator, unable to believe our good fortune.
“I really miss her,” Stacy confessed.
I took her hand. “Yeah, me too. It’s nice to miss her, isn’t it? We’ll see her again soon. Thank god for Grandma Suz.”
“I wonder how they’re doing,” Stacy said. She took out her phone. She paused. “Huh.”
“What?”
“Oh, I just missed a call from her. That’s odd.”
“That is odd. Just a call, no text?”
“No text.”
“Hmm. Weird. I wonder what she wanted?”
I pulled out my phone. I looked up at Stacy.
I had missed a call from her, too.
* * *
A year and three months since that day, and two days before Harrison is scheduled to arrive, I take turns talking to both of my children. They seem to be in the same place right now—one dead, one unborn—which makes my life on earth feel even more tenuous. We’re right here, Daddy, I keep hearing, but no matter where I walk, I never find them. There are none of my children here, either, I think rounding every corner.
I’m so sorry, baby girl, I tell her. Your mommy and daddy just needed a weekend. If we hadn’t gotten overwhelmed you’d still be here. You have no idea how exhausted I would agree to be to keep you here. Daddy would do anything, give anything, endure anything—Mommy and I could be broke, overwhelmed, tearing each other to shreds with our teeth. Just once more.
Can I tell you a secret, baby girl? I envy you. You are free from time. I can feel time happening to my body now, and it hurts. It stretches me taut like skin over a drumhead. Each minute, hour, passing day, each month, the awareness of all of it accumulating behind and before me. It feels like a sort of dull violence on my heart.
When I was with you in that field, I could feel how free
you felt; entire forests rose and fell while we were together. I watched entire mountains rise up from the ground; we were inside one, a couple of faded fossils holding hands embedded in rock. When the eagle took my heart, time is what snapped free.
Eternity sounds comforting. Thank you for teaching me that it exists.
Harrison, I confess you feel unreal to me still, a dream from which I might still wake up. But I have faith that we will find each other. From the first moment your sister appeared to me, popping out from behind that tree in the park, I have been willing to go where you both lead. I am filled with awe at the lessons your sister has taught us; I am ready to receive yours.
* * *
On Harrison’s due date, Stacy and I eat dinner, both of us in underwear and T-shirts. For some reason, I find myself adopting her dress code as the moment approaches. After dinner, we go for a walk, a nightly ritual. There is a full moon tonight, and we are hoping that it will exert its pull on Harrison.
He spent most of the pregnancy head down, but three weeks ago, Stacy’s eyes widened and she gasped in pain midsentence as he suddenly went sideways, then crawled upward until he sat breech, his feet kicking freely at Stacy’s bladder and his head in her rib cage.
Like any modern citizen helpless in the face of the unknowable, we googled “how to turn a breech baby” and dutifully performed the rituals. I murmured songs to him, my face at Stacy’s belly button, hoping to entice him to swim back down. Stacy did headstands against the wall in our living room; I watched her forehead veins work.
Some of the suggestions seemed so arcane they bordered on witchcraft: I ordered odd, smelly herbs from the internet that were rolled like massive joints; after reading a primer and watching a YouTube video, I lit one, held it to her pinkie toe, and turned it in noncommittal, hesitant circles. “If one of these sites told me to gut an animal, there would be entrails on our rug right now,” I joked to her. Was there, finally, nothing we would not embrace headlong in our blind tumble back into parenthood?
One week ago, he rewarded us with a partial turn, and now he lists playfully between six o’clock and three o’clock. That night in bed, I lay my head on her belly and feel feet drumming madly away. Even as his limbs thud at my head, some part of me disbelieves his physical existence; I have seen the outline of him, his head and his rump. But he seems like a thing rather than a person now, an animate part of Stacy. His arms, his face, his beating heart—just thinking about them feels like being fed spotty reports from a dubious source. Best to wait until we have all the facts, says some solemn voice inside me. His feet are inches from my face, but when I close my eyes, I only see vast, lapping water, glassy and dark.
* * *
Two days pass. Stacy keeps having minor contractions, but they subside. Clara, Danny and Elizabeth’s daughter, is going nearly apoplectic with waiting.
“There’s been a lot of Harrison-related activity over here,” Elizabeth reports drily. “We are writing cards to Harrison, reading books to Harrison, drawing pictures of him. We keep making him unbirthday cakes, and Clara keeps eating them.”
We go out to dinner at a pizza place in their neighborhood. Clara has ordered “the Clara,” which is in fact just a margherita pizza presented with a conspiratorial, personalized flourish, as if Clara is the only customer granted the privilege. Clara picks up a small slice and hops off her chair to put her hand on Stacy’s belly again. “What’s he doing in there?” she asks, exasperated.
“Every single morning, she runs out of bed yelling, ‘Did Harrison come?’ ” Danny reports. “When I tell her no, she droops and pouts and walks away.”
Clara glares at Stacy, suddenly stern: “Tell me the minute he starts to come out,” she orders.
Stacy hugs Clara, laughing. Clara puts her hand on Stacy’s perfectly round tummy, and her eyes widen: “I can feel him, I can feel him!” she squeals. She turns to Danny and Elizabeth: “Mommy, he just kicked my hand!”
Clara looks up again, suddenly serious: “Even though Greta died, she will still be Harrison’s sister, right?”
Clara talks to Greta constantly, makes space for her. She is five, but we have spoken more openly with her about Greta’s death than we have most adults, including my therapist. There is something bracing in the clarity of her grief; it is like mountain stream water, free from contaminants like fear, anger, or guilt.
A few months after the accident, we visited Danny and Elizabeth, and Clara pulled out a folder. “Here are all the notes I wrote to Greta at my school,” she told us. She took one out, a piece of purple construction paper with a cutout and glued picture of a big dog on it: “Greta, I hope you’re having fun in the underworld, not this world,” read a note in clear, looping schoolteacher’s hand, clearly taking dictation. “P.S. Why do you like dogs so much?”
We made plans with Danny and Elizabeth for when to tell Clara about Harrison. We waited until Stacy was about twenty weeks along; we had them over for dinner, and right before we broke the news, my stomach fluttered with nerves I didn’t even feel when telling my family.
“There’s a baby in Stacy’s tummy right now,” Elizabeth said, and Clara gasped and began running back and forth between the bedroom and living room of our small apartment.
“This is the best day of my life!” she declared.
Minutes later, she sat down and drew us as a family in marker: two oblong blobs with protruding stick arms for Stacy and me, and scribbly blots for both Harrison and Greta. “U R going to be so cute,” she wrote. She left it at our apartment, and we put it up on our fridge, underneath the two sonograms of our children, their profiles facing each other and nearly identical.
* * *
Stacy is forty-one weeks pregnant. It is 93 degrees, and Harrison seems content inside her belly. At our biometric scan, the doctor assures us everything is fine—his heart rate, her fluid levels, his practice breathing. The placenta is providing him with ample nutrition. “Now you just have to go into labor!” she says brightly, ushering us out.
My parents are visiting; they were supposed to be here to meet Harrison, and instead they find themselves in the company of two miserable adults. We tried to hint to my parents to stay away—the very last thing we want to do in our current miserable limbo is entertain—but my mother steamrolls through our protests with her usual cheery determination. My mother’s love is the kind that might leave many things unsaid, but nothing undone.
“I’m sorry if you didn’t want us here, Jay,” she tells me later, in a quiet moment. “I heard what you were telling me. I just…had to be here for you guys. I was feeling pretty powerless. I hope we’re helping.”
Instead of answering, I take her hand, and I sense it again: our old closeness, or at least its proximate, mournful outline. “You’ve got to cut that umbilical cord, Mom,” John used to say to her, acidly. And so we did. And thank god—what would have become of her otherwise when my first child died? Surely it would have killed her, too. This constant, nagging, polite loneliness in its place: It was a small price to pay in return, wasn’t it?
In truth, my parents do help; they offer welcome distraction. My mother walks with the two of us to yoga, and we meet up with one of Stacy’s favorite teachers in front of the studio.
“Still?” Michelle asks in disbelief, laughing a little in sympathy. “Oh, guys. He’s really taking his time, huh?”
“He really likes it in there,” Stacy says ruefully.
“Well, are you having sex?” Michelle demands. “You’ve got to keep at it!” At this, to my amazement, she mimes a ramming motion with her fist.
My mom laughs. “I was going to ask them. But, you know.”
“We’ve been doing that,” I deadpan. “And thanks, Michelle. This is my mom, by the way.”
“Talk to that baby and tell him you’re ready when he is,” our doula advises later that day. She’s leaving town on the thirty-first, twel
ve days after our due date, and the way things are going, we begin to wonder if she will even attend the birth. “Maybe investigate if there’s something that’s been left undone that needs tending to so you can both exhale and feel more ready. Are you in a fight with someone? Is there a project still hanging over your head? Is there a fear or resentment with someone that you need to get off your chest?”
Stacy and I pause at this.
We have arrived at a sort of peace with Greta’s spirit. Stacy brought the dove wings home from Golden Willow and had them fashioned into a prayer stick, attached to a piece of deer bone and decorated with crystals—fake diamonds for Greta’s birth month and emeralds for the month of her death. We keep it in our living room on a shelf with her picture, a constant reminder of the realms we’ve passed through on our search for her.
Meanwhile, Greta’s ashes remain in our bedroom closet, still in that zippered red canvas bag given to us by the funeral home. They are freighted with meaning, and yet it is hard for us to know what to do with them exactly, or what to feel. Stacy peeked into the sack the night we retrieved them, breaking down sobbing while I stood stone-faced in the doorway. I have never laid eyes on them.
Elizabeth’s mother, a sculptor, has made us a hand-thrown urn, a shapely cream-colored vase with a pigeon, her specialty, perched on top of the lid: a city bird, just like Stacy’s sparrow. It is immaculate and beautiful, but we have found ourselves unable to conscript it to its designed purpose. We have grown used to the bag in the corner, somehow, a final piece of her that we are both unwilling to face and unwilling to part with.
Now that we are emerging from the underworld, we find ourselves confronted once again by a world full of bodies—meat, sinew, blood. Bodies passing through other bodies, bodies broken and cared for, bodies burned and buried.
Once More We Saw Stars Page 17
