Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  I contemplate the pretzel shape, about the size of the palm of my hand, six inches down its length. It’s pulled just taut enough for the tubes not to kink, resting in a coil that is one hair’s breadth of pressure away from closing off.

  “A lot of times, these knots get pulled too tight, and babies don’t survive.” She looks at us meaningfully. “So this is a miracle baby. I hope you understand that.”

  Later, much later, I will watch the video of Harrison’s birth. I will notice the way that Rita’s gloved index finger slips discreetly between his neck and the cord that is strangling him, just as his head emerges, to unwrap it with some effort. Yet one more string pulling him back toward oblivion, loosened at the last second.

  * * *

  The days after we bring him home are a dreamy tangle of bedsheets, diapers, pajamas, creams, ointments—Stacy tends to her wounds and we tend to each other, barely dressed. There is a slight discordance haunting the edges of every movement, déjà vu trembling around every action—Didn’t we do this before?—but in all other respects we are blissful new parents once again.

  We spend days simply watching his rib cage rise and fall, waiting for his eyes to open, for him to notice us: I’d forgotten how much of a newborn’s life is spent unconscious. Occasionally one of us rouses slightly to watch him breathe some more, but only for a moment or two.

  When he is awake, he is calm and still; the first time we place him belly first on a mat so he can practice lifting his head, he simply lies there, head turned to the side and those foggy eyes staring into the distance. I hold him to my chest, and my body slowly memorizes his smell, hairier and hotter than his sister’s but otherwise so similar. I feel his soft weight slowly fill out along my chest and strain my arms.

  At night, he is awake and quiet; his little black eyes are open like a parked car’s headlights. I am certain he is listening to her.

  “Stay close to your sister, Harrison,” I whisper. “You will never be closer to her than you are right now.”

  Since Harrison’s birth, I feel Greta everywhere. She comes to me in the petals drifting from trees, which I watch fall slowly, little reminders of passing time. She gazes out at me from his eyes, which have the same soft lines underneath—the same genetic material, slightly different admixture, different timelines along parallel branches of fate.

  I see synchronicities in the most mundane activities. Waiting in line at the grocery store, I look at the shelf of diapers. I remember, briefly, when I wasn’t buying diapers anymore, because my kid was dead. I remember how it felt to look at them on this shelf then. I think about how it feels to look at them and need them again. My chest compresses and I take some odd, gulping breaths to avoid sobbing in the checkout line.

  Raw, unprocessed grief like this startles me whenever I find it, like turning over a rock and finding fresh wet dirt. It’s then that I realize, or remember, that there are hundreds of spots like these inside of me. Children die. I’ve learned this firsthand. The knowledge is hardwired into me now; I only have to close my eyes and peer inside to find the repaved roads, the hazard cones and blocked-off exits, the doors sealed shut to avoid contamination.

  At two weeks, Harrison chokes and splutters while nursing and is unable to regain his breath. His back arches, his eyes bulge in panic, his mouth foams. We pound his back, the world swims, and I see Death rearing up, tugging at his sleeve. He regains his breath a moment later. I clutch him, my body numb from the shock. A voice whispers in my mind, You could still lose everything. The voice will always be right.

  Harrison’s eyes turn a shocking chlorine blue at three weeks. He learns to support his heavy head, already tufted by more blond hair than Greta had when she was one. It shoots up in a little arcing fountain from the back of his head, surging from twin pools of cowlick. I remember a nurse pointing to those swirls after he was born, saying it meant he was intelligent. I remember one of Greta’s last babysitters telling us, after the funeral, that the blue vein running from her left eye to the bridge of her nose meant that our next child would be a boy.

  He finds his voice at a month, grinning at the ceiling fan and making little “egguh” and “gock” sounds, and begins babbling a stream of commentary immediately. His smile gets goofier, and Susan jokes he looks like a Borscht Belt comedian. “I don’t know how you call him anything but Harry,” she says fondly.

  Susan lives a mile from us now. After months of fighting and resisting, she has sold her Upper West Side apartment and moved to Brooklyn. “I knew you guys were never going to come see me there again,” she admits to us. “And I didn’t want you to come back, either. Now I can be part of Harry’s life.”

  In the beginning, she traces the edges of our lives, tentatively but lovingly. When she holds newborn Harrison, I feel the weight in her heart. She hunches in fear, but her face beams love at him, a signal sent with effort and sheer will.

  * * *

  On her fourth birthday, we stop telling and retelling the same Greta stories. The time she’s been gone has begun to eclipse the time she was alive, like an elongating late-afternoon shadow, and revisiting the same well-worn memories feels like sifting through pebbles. Instead, we invite her to join us again in the present. Harrison, now eight months old, sits in the dirt with us in the park, near the ducks she loved to point out to us. I gesture toward a small bird pecking away at wood chips nearby. “You see this birdie?” I ask him. “Sometimes your sister sends those.”

  We tell him about her, lightly and casually. We want him to know about her, but we haven’t figured out the vocabulary yet, so we mention her when the spirit catches us and say a small prayer that we are doing it right. Your sister loved bananas, too. You have your sister’s potty sense of humor. Your sister was a real pain in the ass about sleep. When he touches a tree, I tell him to say hello to her, and his face softens.

  Susan is with us, as are Jack and Lesley. We all remark on what a beautiful day it is. Harrison sits contently on Jack’s lap, and Jack keeps one hand on him while the other holds a can of seltzer. It’s been months since he’s had a drink.

  “Happy fourth birthday, Greta Greene,” Stacy says next to me. She has taken the day off from her new job, at the hospital where Greta was born. It’s a small piece of serendipity, an invitation to stay connected to her. None of her patients has any idea that Stacy nursed her own child here, a child now gone.

  Two years after her death, we have to work to find ways to connect with Greta. What was once a tidal wave of grief has shrunk to a running faucet somewhere in our consciousness, and we need to make dates, occasionally, to grieve her. We seek out plays, movies about death and loss, crying quietly in the theater. There is something bittersweet in this need to remember. During the first year, the year of her death, the emptiness was overpowering, and we constantly sought her out. Now we are being filled by the deafening song of Harrison’s ongoing existence. It leaves us haggard and split open and grateful at all times, and with no time for anything further.

  Harrison is growing the way a creek floods, imperceptibly and with alarming speed. We love him in specifics now, delight in the way he differs from her. He is warmer than his sister, less intense and less easily perturbed. He is unguarded, more generous with physical affection. Greta ate daintily, delivered spoonfuls of yogurt directly into her mouth without a droplet lost. He eats like a caveman, smearing green stuff all over his high chair and letting out wet burpy giggles through mouthfuls of hummus and guacamole that spatter the table.

  Music electrifies him, where it only vaguely interested her. When I play him upbeat tunes with bright voices—the Beatles, say, or Harry Nilsson—he sits up on his haunches and bounces ecstatically.

  He is energetic, joyful, and, above all, content. When we go outside, he grins at me like we just got off a late shift somewhere and we have some pocket money. He seems to constantly appreciate something simple about our lives, a fact that
never stops dawning on him in real time: we get to spend time together.

  Under his tutelage, I can feel a frankly ludicrous conviction growing inside of me. We—myself and my wife, this growing child in front of us and the one we never see—are going to be all right. It’s a childlike notion, a delusion, and my body fights it. Moments after the thought flashes clearly across my mind, I recoil. No, the deeper voice whispers.

  As if in response to this voice, Harrison comes down with seemingly every bug in existence. When he is eight months, we pull him out of his crib sweating, writhing, aflame. His temperature reads 105, and he has no other symptoms. We put him in the tub, watch him shiver, while I call the pediatrician. His fever subsides with medicine, and she tells us to come in the next morning.

  “It’s just a virus,” she tells us. “A nasty one, but it’s going around everywhere. Trust me, I’ve seen it again and again. It freaks the parents out, but it will pass.”

  When the fever persists on the ninth day, she sends us for blood work. Of course, I think. This is how it will happen. This is the beginning. His white blood cell count is suspiciously elevated—inconclusive. Grim and wordless, we take him to the very same ER—Weill Cornell, back up FDR Drive. We park in the same lot, walk through the same glass doors. Harrison sits on my hip, waving and smiling and babbling to everyone. I am assailed by the sight of the orange plastic chair Stacy collapsed in, right outside the room where I first saw Greta’s lifeless body.

  “Have you been here before?” a tattooed woman in triage asks us without looking up.

  “Your son has an ear infection,” a doctor says three minutes into examining him. “He looks pretty healthy to me. And happy.”

  “Guh-gock,” Harrison responds cheerily. We thank her, carry him out, an antibiotic prescription in our hands, and strap our son back into our car seat and drive him home, the ER receding behind us. I had almost forgotten this place existed, this building that my daughter never left. We have delivered another one of our children into it, and we are leaving it again, intact. We feel stunned, thunderstruck, impossibly grateful.

  At nine months, Harrison tumbles down our apartment stairs. He cries hard for a minute, seems groggy for a few seconds, and then is fine. I wait for days, weeks, anticipating in terror signs of brain damage that never appear.

  He wakes up crying inconsolably a month later. He screams and screams for hours, unable to calm himself even when nursing. “Something’s very wrong!” Stacy wails in the dark of the night. Our guts drop; Death claws at our ankles, hell yawning back open and hungering to swallow us all.

  I take him for another appointment the next morning: coxsackie virus, or hand, foot, and mouth disease. Something else Greta never got. He recovers in a few days.

  It occurs to us only later what these awful incidents are giving us: scares. Normal, unremarkable, everyday parenthood scares, the kind we were never afforded with Greta. Greta never fell, never broke a bone. With each accident, each illness, Harrison is teaching us: Sometimes children live.

  We share these bumps in the road with new friends, new parents, who know of our daughter only as something that happened to us. We are entering into the merry-go-round of first parenting with them, and we try to keep ourselves soft, surprised, and wide-eyed at every development: every baby’s tantrum, their first teeth, the quirks of their development. We are both new and not new at this, and we tread carefully through the twin shocks of discovery and déjà vu.

  As time passes, Greta’s toys begin to shed some of their personal meaning. Harrison carries around Daisy, the stuffed dog that had accompanied her at the hospital, everywhere now. Our old high chair was caked with bits of Greta’s food; it seemed only practical to scrub those food bits off and sit him down in it. We give him all her old cups and bowls, but somewhere on the top shelf one remains, a sippy cup with her name on masking tape from her daycare. Her pink scooter sits in the back of the closet still, waiting for Harrison when he is ready for it. Greta never was.

  Susan devotes herself to him: “How’s my Harry?” she cries when I bring him over to her building, as he wiggles and strains and attempts to melt himself out of his stroller straps, his supplicating hands stretching up, desperate to be received. “There’s my baby genius,” she says, scooping him up as he lays his head on her shoulder.

  “He’s a genius,” she insists to me, fixing me with a meaningful stare. “The other day I asked him which pillow he wanted to nap on, this one or that one. He said, ‘That one,’ clear as day.”

  “Amazing,” I say, smiling a little. Harrison has said a number of words so far that it seems only Grandma Suz can hear.

  Susan’s new building is big and airy and anonymous, with a massive third-floor office complex. Harrison likes to play on the couches there. He likes to throw her reading glasses on the floor and laugh. There is a playroom full of toys, pumping nonstop pop music, that they have nearly to themselves, since the building is at half capacity. She follows him around as he scoops up her valuables and tosses them into corners. “I am perfectly content to be Harry’s servant,” she declares when I ask her if he is too much.

  The two of them almost never go outside, however. Susan can’t quite bear to contemplate it yet. One day out walking alone, something in the air catches her eye—a movement of shadow, a bird maybe. For a half second, she imagines a foreign object plummeting from above. Her new doorman doesn’t understand why she is sobbing as she stumbles blindly back inside. She spends the next day and a half in bed, inundated by flashbacks.

  In this way, the uneasy music of our lives plays on, mingling dread and love, fear and bliss. We have long wondered what became of the families that received Greta’s organs. Wouldn’t the boy with her heart be about five years old now? What about the two men sharing her kidneys, the girl with her liver? For the first time since leaving the hospital, we contact LiveOnNY to find out the fate of the recipients.

  One of the grown men who received a kidney is no longer following up for treatment. They have no status update on his health. “Well, I don’t feel great about that,” Stacy says. I grimace. Neither of us voices the awful unspoken thing we are feeling—We gave you a piece of our daughter’s body. The least you could do is take care of it—because it is too ugly for us, too insane. But each of us hears the other thinking it.

  The boy who received Greta’s heart did not survive. He died a year after the transplant, a year he spent hospitalized. Stacy’s eyes go lifeless at the news. For the first time in months, I walk in search of an unpopulated corner, rage burbling its way up my throat. At the end of our block, I scream at the empty shipping containers near the pier. It’s another infuriating reminder: her body is no longer ours to save, ours to protect.

  Bouts of blinding anger like this still overwhelm me occasionally. I am usually somewhere public when they happen, smiling as they detonate. I am learning to accept them, to live with this endless cycle of remission and metastasis. I am allowed to be angry forever. I tell this to myself again and again. I am allowed to be confused forever. I had a child die and chose to become a father again. There can be no greater definition of stupidity or bravery, insanity or clarity, hubris or grace. In my moments of strength, I simply surrender to this confusion and allow it to envelop me.

  In moments of serenity I find myself back in the big open field, the one from my vision at Golden Willow. I am both buried in the ground and standing on it, gazing up at a vast open sky. Here the stars stretch endlessly, looming above like prehistoric creatures. The longer I stare at them, the more I hear the voices of both of my children. They stand beside me—Harrison at my left, Greta at my right. We gaze up at them together. In this exalted place, they both hear me, and I can say to them what needs saying.

  Harrison, baby boy. We must learn to balance something very tricky—you, me, your mother, and your sister. I do not know how to teach you. You have to learn to know your sister and also t
o be at peace with her absence. We are still here, and we must learn to embrace our fragile lives.

  The world points you away from these questions, Harrison, not toward them. It pulls you like a stone to the bottom of the ocean. We must learn to float between, everything visible above and below. Daddy is still learning how. I want you to live with this knowledge inside of you. Maybe I can watch and learn it, secretly, from you.

  I feared, when you were delivered into our hands, that we were going to damage you. My wounds are still healing, but a dead corner of my heart remains. I wonder: Do you see that dead corner, too? Do you fear it?

  I am slowly learning that you see everything I endeavor to hide from you, and that you are unafraid. Your eyes are clearer than mine, and your heart sturdier. I suspect you will understand more of what you see in me than I ever will.

  I have had a vision since you were born, Harrison. Your mommy and I were in this big field together, crouched down at the base of a tree. I reached down to rest my fingers on the moss, pliant and damp. I pressed my palm to it, and your mommy laid her hand on top of mine. Together, our hands sank, and we lay down together in the mud. I saw an old man walk up to us. His eyes were slightly watery and blue, creased with kindness. His skin was spotted, his hair a little yellowed. He stood above us, a little sad but contented, and looked down at us. He had your eyes, baby boy. Thank you. Thank you for letting us come here first.

  Greta, baby girl: Are you near? I think that when I feel you, it is your empathy that I feel: your belief that everyone deserved and needed peace, and that you were a first responder to help bring it. I admired that so much about you, Greta—you had a beautiful soul, and you had room in it for everyone.

  I still have a long time before we find each other again, Greta, and I am sure I will yearn for you during much of that time. But here’s one thing I know, and I think I have you to thank for it: I know you do not struggle. I can sense that you are at peace, with both yourself and your time with us. I can sense you stepping in, where you see an opening, to direct us through our path. When I stick my hands in dirt, I hear you giggle and whisper to me.