by Lee Woodruff
Yet at odd times she would find herself ravenous, like an animal, and in those moments she’d eat an entire sleeve of Oreos or gobble up the remains of the kids’ Day-Glo orange mac and cheese, right out of the saucepan. Last night she polished off a pint of chocolate Häagen-Dazs, almost as if she were in a trance, savoring each spoonful for the immediate gratification it provided and then feeling disgusted, and yet still empty, when it was consumed.
Her mother had been at her house almost every day, unloading the dishwasher, walking Rascal, folding laundry, and urging Maura to rest. In the first week after the funeral, when Ryan’s summer camp had begun, she would hand Sarah over to Margaret and crawl back under the covers, to feel the weight of grief and guilt in shifting ratios.
Maura had been a morning exerciser, but now she could barely find the energy for a shower. Stopping for a loaf of bread or grabbing a roll of stamps had all fit seamlessly into her days before James’s death. These trivial tasks outside of the house now overwhelmed her. It all seemed insurmountable, devoid of any importance. Her light blue eyes, always her favorite feature, were lifeless. She hadn’t shaved her legs or plucked her brows since before the accident. She looked like that Muppet, which one had the unibrow? Bert? And there were new frown lines on her face, furrows between her brows that hadn’t been so pronounced before. Grief had etched them there, she thought. Grief had disfigured and disemboweled her.
For all of her listlessness, though, Maura was rarely able to drift off during the day. She would lie in bed, willing herself to quiet her mind and sleep, rolling back and forth on the mattress as her trapped thoughts swirled like bats in a cave. She couldn’t stop thinking of James. Sometimes images of him rushed into her mind at once, like a pixilated sensory overload. And then at other times she would panic when she was suddenly unable to recall the exact features of his face.
Maura moved toward the refrigerator door and fixed her eyes on the black-and-white photo of her son held in place by a magnet. She studied his wide, boyish smile, the splay of freckles across the bridge of his nose, and thought for the hundredth time how grateful she was that they had splurged for their first professional family photo shoot last November. The photographer had managed to capture the personalities of each child, including this one of James. How could anyone have known that some six months later, her favorite snapshot of her eldest child would be enlarged for his funeral?
She glanced at the photo of Sarah and Pete, laughing, from that same day, her daughter’s head tossed back and giggling as her father tickled her. Pete. She sighed. Thinking about Pete was so complicated, laced with many competing emotions—guilt, anger, and anxiety. Their marriage, which had not been in a terrific place before the accident, was strained now, filled with long silences. While there was an affable varnish over the top of their parental duties, so much was left unsaid in the corridors between them. When they did talk, it seemed to be more about schedules and the children’s needs and other perfunctory subjects.
Things had been operating on this half-speed for a while, Maura acknowledged, each of them heading down that easy slipstream in marriage where the valuable, intimate parts begin to erode in a tidal wave of banality. Maura had no doubt that she still loved her husband, but she no longer felt in love. How much was enough love? Funny how chemical attraction waned, how the things that made you fall in love with a person changed and the things required to stay in love were so different, deeper.
And then there was Pete’s drinking. Pete had always been a drinker, but in the past, his boozy excess had mostly been contained to his weekly boys’ nights out, although over the years this had become increasingly annoying to her. In college Maura had gravitated toward Pete’s frat-boy, life-of-the-party personality. He had been so like her gregarious father in some ways, always ready to dazzle with a good story or make a self-deprecating remark followed by a perfectly timed punch line. She’d loved the raucousness of him, the spontaneous entertainer side, which was such a nice yin to her quieter yang. After James was born she had tried to lodge a firm protest, expressing her desire for more family time, more attention from him, and she’d even suggested they see a counselor, but Pete had bristled at that. Especially after the birth of Sarah, his simplicity, formulaic life, and unchanged adolescent drinking rituals seemed merely juvenile. Each time she had registered her need for him to change, she’d largely been met with a joking resistance or occasional lip service.
And in the years that followed, Maura had mostly held her tongue about the drinking and gradually about other things as well until she had submerged whole parts of herself from him. She and Pete had lost that easy access to each other’s deeper thoughts and emotions. Part of her wondered if he had even noticed the growing gulf between them. Now in the wake of their son’s death the pace of his drinking seemed to have lurched stealthily forward—a few fingers of vodka refilled at home, the beer bottles piling up in the recycling bin, the sound of a toppled stool as he entered the dark kitchen after his now more frequent evenings out.
It felt as if she and Pete had exhausted all there was to say during the weeklong period that they’d hovered over their son’s hospital bed, taking turns holding his hands and talking to him. In those brief hours they were united by the logistics of fear and grief, alternately bucking the other one up, getting the cafeteria coffee, and quelling each other’s tears with hopeful platitudes.
Maura thought again about Pete’s spontaneous accusation at the hospital. Though he had never said anything more about it, had never raised those questions again in her presence, the guilt hung around her like a shroud.
She knew couples could and did survive losses on all scales, but could theirs? Could it continue when one person was holding back, harboring a secret? She pushed that thought away. She had no interest in rehashing that past or conversely in thinking that far ahead. It took all of her concentration just to stay here in the present. James’s death was so recent, so fresh, right now it was an enormous effort to plant both feet on the floor each morning and haul her reluctant body out of bed. She couldn’t begin to examine the fault lines in her marriage now.
Insomnia was taking its toll, making it difficult for her to focus on simple tasks, let alone think about the future. Lying in bed, Maura would will her mind to fill with imagined scenes of tranquility, empty stretches of beach in California, remote mountains in the Pacific Northwest, waterfalls in Hawaii, vistas both familiar and unvisited. She would force her mind to take refuge in those places. And then when the visual imagery exercises didn’t work, exhausted by grief, Maura would pop a sleeping pill, which brought sweet and almost instant relief, a chloroformed curtain that silenced her mind and snuffed out all dreams. She worried that she was becoming reliant on them to sleep at all. Addicted. She’d begun to wake up at 3:00 A.M. and would often take another half pill just to drift back off.
Last night, Ryan had come into their bed in the middle of the night and she’d woken, groggy from the sleeping pills. She could hear the TV blaring downstairs and assumed Pete had fallen asleep on the couch. It was increasingly becoming a habit.
“I’m scared, Mommy,” Ryan had said. And she could feel the slimness of him, his insubstantiality as he crawled next to her under the covers. His knobby boy knees and limbs were like a colt’s on the verge of a growth spurt.
“What’s scary, Ry?” she’d asked.
“That I’m gonna die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want you and Dad to die.”
She’d become more alert, swimming up hard through the medication to tackle his fears. “You’re not going to die, honey,” she’d told him. “You are going to live for a long time and be very, very, old. Ancient. So am I. I’m going to be a good grandmother for your kids, and I’m going to get old and very, very gray and love you forever,” and she had tickled him just above his belly button, and they both had giggled. They had lain like that for a few minutes, snuggling, and then Ryan had curled into her chest and let out a long, satisfied breath. As their bodies emanate
d warmth she focused on the memory of being pregnant, of carrying him for all those months.
She had thought him asleep, but then he piped up again, surprising her with his alertness. “I miss him, Mommy,” he said. “I miss James.”
This simple declaration had sideswiped her. She’d been focusing so much on cultivating a sense of normalcy in the house, stepping around the issue, that she had not spent enough time, she realized, probing the loss from her children’s perspective.
“I miss him too, Ryan,” she said, dry-eyed. And again she fought against the power of the medication as it tugged her back toward a dreamless sleep. “And it’s OK to miss him. It’s OK for us all to miss him forever. It hurts a lot.” It must have been this admission that had freed Ryan to nod off in her arms. The next morning she couldn’t recall when Pete had eventually come up and lifted their son back into his own bed. Such was the power of those pills.
Which was why today, Maura was determined to have a family meal. She had spent the last hour making a salad with her homemade dressing and creating a stir-fry of chicken and vegetables that her kids loved. It was 6:00 P.M. Pete should be home any minute. “Dinner,” she called, lifting Sarah into the high chair. “Wash your hands, Ryan.” Maura shook out the dry dog food for Rascal and lowered his metal bowl back onto the floor. “Sarah, here’s your milk.” Her daughter grabbed her sippy cup solemnly, turning it to study the cartoon image of the Little Mermaid on the exterior.
She finished cutting chicken bits for Sarah and spooning out white rice for Ryan as the phone rang. Maura could see from the caller ID that it was Pete.
“Hey,” he said. There was the murmur of bar chatter in the background. The Depot, she thought, his favorite place to gather for a “pop.” She’d been there a few times over the years, a darkened man cave next to the train station with the smell of tapped kegs and a sticky film on the highly varnished bar. Two giant TVs, held by chains, tilted from the ceiling at each end of the room, perpetually tuned to ESPN.
“Hey.” They were quiet for a moment, and she could hear a loud baritone laugh spike over the conversation. How could he possibly sit in a bar, just four weeks after their son’s funeral? She marveled for more than the hundredth time how differently men and women grieved.
“Billy just showed up and he’s had a bad day. I think I’m gonna stick around here for a while longer,” he said. Was he slurring slightly? How long had he been there? She had told him when he left that morning she wanted to have a family dinner, that they needed to reestablish some kind of normal routine for their kids.
“So I figured.” Her voice was cool.
“Save me a plate, will ya? I’m just having one more pop with the guys. Just one. I’ll be there. Billy just broke up with his latest. Or I guess she sort of blew him off. Remember her? Marjorie?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’s been there for us through this thing, you know, Maura? For our family. I just want to support him. OK? Home in an hour.” He practically hung up before she could reply.
On some level, Maura understood that this male camaraderie was Pete’s therapy, his attempt to make sense of such a devastating loss. She wondered if Pete and his friends actually discussed James at all, if they ever even spoke about the accident directly or uttered his name. Either way, she knew it undoubtedly comforted Pete to sit, in communion with a beer, next to his longtime friends Michael, Chris, Thomas, or Billy. She could imagine her husband tamping down his grief, perhaps letting it defuse little by little as he listened to comments about a score or a play, cheered his beloved White Sox, and motioned to the bartender for another round for his pals. Those men had loved James too, she knew.
And yet as she sat down to eat with Sarah and Ryan, making an excuse for Pete, she couldn’t help nursing the old grudge. Pete was cheating her and the kids with his absences. She had hoped that at the very least James’s death might cinch them tighter as a family, draw them closer. If anything, Pete needed to redouble his efforts as a father instead of burying his head in a beer with the boys. How would they begin to rebuild their broken family if he didn’t show up?
After reading to Sarah, she entered Ryan’s room to kiss him good night. Lowering the shade, she looked out the window, half-hoping to see Pete’s headlights sweeping the lawn as they turned up the driveway. Maura was transfixed for a moment by the base of the giant maple tree in the center of the front lawn. The long fingers of yellow light spilling out from the front room windows and onto the grass touched the skirt of the trunk on one side; the other half was shrouded in inky darkness. James had loved to climb that tree, and he’d tried to convince Pete to build a fort there.
“Forts are for backyards, buddy,” Pete would routinely answer. “And we don’t have a really good tree back there.” How much of that was true? Maura wondered ruefully, and how much of it was laziness on Pete’s part? Maura’s eyes scanned the lawn again from Ryan’s window, and she gazed out onto the street where the lamplight pooled in a neat elliptical shape. The soft whir of the air-conditioning kicked on, and the blast from the vent furled the curtain slightly.
There it was again. Out of the corner of her eyes. A movement, almost as if a figure were down there. Was someone under the tree? Suddenly she wished Pete were home. It was Friday night in the dead of summer. Maybe the neighborhood kids were getting into some mischief now that school had been out for a while. The thought made her uneasy, and Maura leaned over and kissed Ryan one last time as she pulled her thin bathrobe around her, repositioning and tightening the belt. She padded swiftly down the stairs and into the family room at the front of the house, moving over to the plate glass window and adjusting the curtain on the side. It was unmistakable now, the faint outline of someone lying under the maple. A tiny speck of orange glowed and then moved in an arc. Someone was smoking a cigarette on her front yard.
The unexpectedness, the pluck of it, banished her fear for a moment. Maura yanked open the heavier oak door and felt a rush of humid air whoosh through the screen door, as if the house had inhaled. The brightness of the interior lights made it difficult for her to distinguish shapes instantly, and as her pupils adjusted, she saw a blur of movement on the side of the tree. The figure had bolted upright and was running down the driveway and into the street with long, measured strides. It was definitely a boy, a teenager from the lankiness of his legs, and as the shape got smaller, disappearing and then reappearing at intervals under each streetlight, she thought she could make out longish dirty blond hair and a faded red T-shirt.
Maura was frozen for a moment on the front porch, her heart thumping wildly, and then gradually settling. It had all happened so fast that even as she closed and then locked the door behind her she was already beginning to doubt exactly what she’d seen.
7
One month after his death Maura felt the hollowed-out absence of James more acutely than she had during the funeral, or in the days immediately following, when she��d confined herself to her bedroom, shades drawn. Her mother was no longer coming daily, and Pete’s parents too had cut back on their check-ins, which was both a relief and a loss. This “after” part was almost worse, her grief sharper and more intense during the empty stretch of hours in the house while Ryan was at summer camp and Sarah napped. In those moments of acute silence, Maura would visit James’s room. She had created a ritual of lying on his bed, eyes closed, imagining him here.
She stood in the doorframe and took in the posters of her son’s sports and music heroes on the pale blue walls, the worn stuffed animal frog above his desk that had been retired when he’d become “a big boy.” Stepping over to the bookshelf, which she had sanded and painted with constellation stencils when he was four, Maura ran her fingertips across the books’ spines. She brushed a light layer of dust off the volume of Greek mythology he had cherished, the encyclopedia of dinosaurs, the Harry Potter series that she had first started reading to him and then, with each passing installment, he had begun to read more quickly himself. There were the baseba
ll trophies, the yellow dried palm frond in the shape of a cross from this past Easter, and the porcelain piggy bank that had been a baby gift from Erin with JAMES PATRICK CORRIGAN painted on the belly and under it his height and weight. Seven pounds, four ounces. Maura blinked, dry-eyed. She lifted the bank, and the coins slid into the pig’s head. It was heavier than she’d expected. James had always been a saver.
Opening the closet door she drank in his boy scent on the baseball uniform and discarded pajamas from that very last morning. She had left his dirty clothes in the hamper so that she could retain this scent memory, and she felt him here, trace elements present in the objects of his room. But she could not yet fully admit that his smell was disappearing, being erased, the clothes in his drawers gradually assuming the generic scent of laundry detergent, mingled with the slight cedar odor of the round wooden air fresheners. With each passing week, little bits of James were slipping away and dissolving, thwarting her efforts at preservation.
