While somewhere nearby Key cried the loud cries of a wounded animal, Jayson listened to all those details, Austin standing at his side close enough that their shoulders touched, poised to hold him up should he need it. But he only cared about the one detail—that his beautiful boy was gone, and not coming back.
After he was gone, they let him see him. Key didn’t need to. She had been there when it happened. And Jayson was god-only-knew where. At the train station? Shooting the breeze for a few moments in the parking lot with Kat? Or maybe he’d been whistling his way over to Starbucks, leaving his cellphone behind in the store like an imbecile, believing so completely that things had turned around and that he no longer needed to be tethered to the thing.
Lee looked like he was sleeping. There was even still perspiration on his forehead, matting his soft curly hair to it. His pink bow-shaped mouth was now a little blue, the lips parted slightly. And he was limp. Completely limp, because he was no longer there in that vessel. Jayson looked but would not touch him. Because he was gone. If he touched him, that would be the memory he carried in his heart, of a cold limp doll of a child, and not the cooing, sweet boy he had held just that morning.
But Key had touched him. She touched and kissed and tried to hold Lee, but then she began wailing again and Chloe had to hug her tight and turn her face away as the hospital orderlies came to wheel away their son’s earthly remains.
“Jayson. Jayson …”
He turned and looked at Austin. They were alone again. The doctor had gone, but he didn’t even notice him leave.
“We should … Maybe we should get her home.”
Austin looked back into the room where Chloe was crying and holding Keisha, both of them rocking back and forth. Key’s cries had quieted to a single note, an elongated “Noooooo. Noooooo. Noooooo,” repeated in an eerie monotone.
“I have to … I have to call her father,” Jayson said, his voice croaking.
His throat felt raw, and on fire. He didn’t recall how that might have happened. Maybe, with any luck, he had bacterial meningitis as well, and would soon be dead. That would be a sweet relief.
“Chloe and I can take care of the phone calls,” Austin said. “So you can take care of Keisha. If you just give us the list of people …”
“No,” Jayson said. “I have to do it. It has to be me.”
“Okay, okay,” Austin said placatingly.
Was that how people would speak to him and Keisha from now on? In that horrible, patronizing, pitiful tone of voice?
“Then tell me what you need me to do,” Austin added.
“Take my wife home,” Jayson said. “Take her home, and just …” His voice cracked. “Stay with her till I come back, okay?”
“Oh … okay. But where are you …?”
“Just do that for me, okay?” Jayson started backing away.
Austin made a move toward him, like he wasn’t sure whether he should let him go, like he was considering tackling and restraining him.
“Jayson, I don’t think …”
“Please. Just do that. That’s all I need right now. Please.”
He turned and began running down the hall, the sound of Austin calling his name, following him the entire way.
The graveyard was as grim as graveyards are wont to be. Cold granite plaques and headstones in quartz, bearing names and dates, tributes to lives. Jayson never went to the site of his parents’ graves, because he knew that whatever was under the ground, was not them.
But someone had been there. And recently. There were two colorful bouquets, wilting a little in the cold, but no more than a few days old. Jay sat between the two gravestones, pressing his forehead on the cold stone of his mother’s trying to remember her face, and from all the memories he had of her, trying to stitch together some sense of what she would have said to him at a time like this.
It was useless. She had died long before he was a father, or even a husband. She had died while he was still an inmate in a New York State correctional institution. She had died with her heart broken, just as his was broken now. Lifting his head from the stone, he lay back on the cold ground, eyes shut.
In just a few days, his baby boy would be in this hard, frigid ground. In a box, and all alone.
It was that thought that caused the tears to come, making slow, hot tracks down the side of his face, and then cooling, and drying almost immediately. Jayson didn’t make a sound. He just let the tears come until there were no more. He didn’t know how long that took, but the sky had darkened again. It could not have been later than noon.
He got up, walked back to his truck and started the engine. He waited for it to heat up before pulling away. And as he did, the very first snow of the season began to fall.
Chloe opened the door to his house, just as he was fidgeting with the keys, trying to remember which one of them unlocked it. Her face was a mask of grief and of relief. She hugged and held him close and Jayson fought the urge to pry himself loose. He didn’t want to be held or touched.
“Key?” he asked.
“Upstairs. They gave us something for her at the hospital. It was hard to get her to take it, but I finally did. She’s asleep now. Austin went home,” she added apologetically. “He had to …” Stay with the girls.
She didn’t finish the sentence, and Jayson knew it was because she didn’t want to allude to the bounty of two healthy children she had waiting for her at home. Not when he and his wife had only an empty crib.
“You can go home, Chloe,” he said in his frog-throated voice. “We’ll be okay.”
“Jayson, I don’t think … Keisha isn’t doing well. She’s going to wake up in a couple of hours, but it won’t be much better then.
“You don’t think I fucking know that?” he said.
Chloe’s face crumpled and the tears that had been threatening spilled over onto her cheeks. “Of course you do. I just meant … I’ll stay a little while, just in case. I can …I’ll make something for her to eat. For you both. For when you …”
Feel better? Jayson thought. Was that what she had been about to say?
At least she’d had the good sense not to say it.
“You should call Austin to come pick you up,” Jayson said. “I need to make some calls.”
“I’ll call Austin,” she said. “But I’m going to make something to eat.”
“Whatever you want, Chloe.”
He went into the living room, sat on the sofa and reached for his cellphone, seeing for the first time the dozen missed calls, from Keisha, from Chloe, from Austin that had been made earlier that morning.
He exhaled, inhaled. And then he dialed the number for his father-in-law, Rey.
When all the calls were made, it was late afternoon and the house was filled with the scent of lasagna. The preferred meal for the bereaved. Chloe had called Austin and he had showed up somewhere in the middle of Jay’s second to last phone call, to a woman that Keisha used to walk with around the neighborhood, who had a daughter about Lee’s age. During that call, and the ones before it, Jayson had listened to enough anguished crying to last him a lifetime. His final call, one of the hardest, had been to Kat, because he knew that her anguish was genuine and ran deep.
When Austin came, it was without Gabby and Toni, Jayson’s two nieces. And he was relieved. Toni was just a little older than Lee, and he had loved her. She kissed him so often, that Chloe often had to tell her to stop. Gabby liked to play with and brush Lee’s long hair, putting little barrettes and ribbons in it and lamenting aloud that Lee was not instead a girl.
Because he’s so pretty! she would say, lengthening the ‘e’ so it sounded like ‘preeeeeety’.
Feeling his throat tighten, Jayson forced his thoughts in another direction.
Standing, he went into the kitchen where Chloe was at the stove and Austin was sitting at the table. They both looked so morose, he almost wanted to remind them that things were not so bad. They couldn’t be. At least not for them. Their kids were alive.
He fel
t a hard, selfish, angry sense of loss. This feeling belonged only to him and Keisha. It was theirs to have, and no one else was entitled to any part of it.
“I’m going up to see about Key,” he told them.
He took the stairs slowly, ponderously. The creaky one creaked, as it always did. And at the top of the stairs, he smelled all the same baby scents he always smelled. They had faded over the past week, but now would fade even more.
Pushing the door to the master bedroom, he expected to see Key lying inert under the covers. But she wasn’t. She was sitting up, facing the window and looking outside where large flakes were wafting down to earth. The curtains had been drawn open, and the view faced the house across the street where Jay’s friend—his best friend—Mr. Wilburn had once lived. Funny to think of it, that an old man, his high-school friend’s father, had become his best friend.
Funny to think of lots of things, really. That he had just this morning been a father, and Keisha a mother, and now they were not.
“Look how pretty,” she said. Her voice sounded wondrous.
She didn’t turn, and Jayson wasn’t even sure she knew that it was he who was standing in the dim room behind her.
“So pretty,” she said. And it was reminiscent of the memory of Gabby saying the same thing, but about their son. “Lee …” At this, the saying of his name, her voice did become choked. “Lee has never even seen the snow.”
9
Nothing seemed to match the deliciousness of sleep. Not food, certainly. Not a hot shower, nor even a warm hug from Jayson. Not the sound of his voice, soothing and coaxing and whispering in her ear. She liked it when he was nearby, though. She snuggled close to him, shoving her face as far as it could get under his chin, hungrily inhaling him. Lee used to do that, and now she knew why. Jayson had a scent that was his own, but Keisha detected that it was Lee’s smell as well. And since Lee’s own scent had all but disappeared from their house, Jayson was all there was.
The first week was non-existent in Keisha’s mind. She didn’t recall any of it and was grateful for that. There had been Chloe, and Kat, moving around the bedroom, speaking to her and each other in low voices. There had been a black dress, and someone behind her brushing her hair. There had been a drive to a church and a service where people sang and talked and came over to her with sad faces and hugged her and pantomimed grief that they could not possibly feel. Not like hers, anyway.
Although in fairness, her grief had disappeared almost immediately. And in its place was numbness and silence. She had nothing to say and did not want anything said to her. She let her body be moved and steered and manipulated and arranged. Jayson, mostly. He was the mover, steerer, manipulator. He walked her into the shower and cleaned her; walked her back out and dried her. Lotioned her, even.
He picked clothes for her to wear, which she didn’t notice or care about. He put her back in the bed, which magically changed to fresh sheets that felt lovely and crisp, but soft against her skin. There was some pleasure, she supposed, but only in small things like that—soft, crisp sheets and the opportunity to lie on them and succumb once again to blissful, delicious sleep.
Only daytime sleeping was blissful or delicious. Because she dreamed then, and in her dreams, the smell and sound and feeling of Lee were almost as good as reality. She saw his beautiful face, smiling and cooing at her. She felt his solid but soft arms and legs, kissed his tiny pink toes.
She felt his hair against the side of her face and he lay on her stomach and lifted his head and looked at her with wide eyes like she was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen. He tugged her hair, and tried to put it in his mouth, and he shrieked at her when she tried to pull it away.
Night-sleep was different. It was then that she knew it was all fake, and that the sweet dreams from her day-sleep were just that – dreams. She woke often at night, thinking that she heard Lee cry from his crib, and that it was time to feed him, but that she had forgotten. She would sit up in bed and listen, and when she did, Jay sat up as well.
Baby, he would say, baby. It’s okay. You’re okay. Lie down. It’s okay. I’ve got you.
And then Keisha would realize that the cries she heard were not Lee’s but her own.
Some time had passed—though she didn’t know for sure how much—when she heard an argument, no, more like an angry, hushed discussion in the hall outside the bedroom door. The two voices were those of her father, Rey and her husband, Jay.
Thinking that, Keisha had almost smiled. Their names rhymed. How had she not noticed this oddity before? Lee’s name had rhymed with no one’s in the family. Gabby, maybe. Lee. Gabby. Toni. No, those were not rhymes.
Anyway, there was a hushed discussion in the hall and it woke her from her day-sleep. Her father and Jay were arguing about clothes. Lee’s clothes and the nursery.
… not healthy! Her father said. Memories … make her worse.
… can’t get any worse. Open your eyes, Rey!
… seen this before, Jayson. You need to get her up and out of … room … real world … will go bad.
… not taking this from her. She’s lost too much. We’ve lost …
And then Jay was making a sound like crying. But it wasn’t crying. It was just a dry, infertile sound, that produced no tears.
Keisha had heard that sound many times before, when he was in the bathroom in the morning, before he got ready to go to the store, or later at night when he got up and sat on the edge of bed and thought she wasn’t awake to hear it. It was awful to hear Jay sound that way, and if she had had the energy, and enough feeling to drown out the numbness, she would have comforted him.
“Good morning, sunshine!”
Chloe always greeted her that way. She came over every day, arriving not too long after Jay left for work. Because they were all on some kind of Keisha-Suicide-Watch and had obviously made some pact or other not to leave her alone for very long. There had been a few mornings when Chloe hadn’t been able to make it, and Austin had come in her stead, awkwardly standing at the threshold to the bedroom and asking her what she wanted for breakfast, coming back with something barely edible. Which was fine since Keisha rarely ate anyway.
This morning, Chloe—the regular detail—was here. She did the things she always did, straightening the room, opening curtains, checking the heat and turning it up a little—because Chloe liked a warm house—and then going down to make breakfast. Chloe never asked what she wanted, because as a mother, Keisha supposed she knew intuitively that she could serve her cardboard with maple syrup and it would be all the same to her as a stack of fluffy pancakes.
Keisha, who was already showered and clean, courtesy of Jay who dragged her in there with him every morning, sat up and looked at Chloe. She was such a suburban mom. Super-pretty but destined to a life of khaki capris, slides on her unpedicured feet, and loose cotton tops. She didn’t do much with her hair, and never had. Keisha had once worried that she would become that way as well. But look how happy Chloe seemed. She had embraced her lot, and as a result, God let her keep her children. Chloe had not been ungrateful and had been rewarded.
“How come you never bring Toni?”
The sound of Keisha’s voice seemed to startle her, and Chloe gave a little yelp, jerking upright from where she had been scooping up Jayson’s discarded clothes from last night, and a damp bath towel.
“I have someone coming in now,” Chloe said, acting as though she wasn’t surprised that Keisha had spoken.
“Coming in where? To your house?”
“Yes. She … you know, helps out.”
Keisha exhaled a short burst of breath. “But why?”
“You know,” Chloe said, not looking at her. “Extra hands.”
“So you can come here and look after me,” Keisha said.
“It’s not …”
“That’s silly.”
“No, it’s not.” Chloe looked at her, her eyes both fierce and full of pain. “You and Jayson need … You’re my family. It isn’t silly
at all.”
Leaning back against the pillows, Keisha looked outside at the snow-covered streets. Everything out there looked fresh, and clean and brand-new. Today, for some reason, she felt like brand-new.
“Could we walk later?” she asked. “Let’s just put our boots and coats on and go for a walk.”
“We could …” Chloe said, looking surprised. “If you want. Sure.”
“Let’s do that,” Keisha said, nodding. “After breakfast.”
She ate what Chloe brought her. Toast and a fried egg, tea that had grown a little tepid by the time it got upstairs. But Keisha had it all. None of it tasted like anything, but she had it because she needed something in her stomach if she was to go for a walk.
After breakfast, she didn’t nap as she normally might, which surprised her because her naps were like visits to Lee, and she didn’t like missing one. But this morning she couldn’t seem to make the nap come. So, instead she listened to the sounds of Chloe, busy downstairs loading the dishwasher, washing pots, going up and down the stairs to the basement carrying loads of laundry; and vacuuming.
Finally, it was almost noon when she returned.
“Still want that walk?” she asked.
It was shockingly cold outside. She was bundled in her thermal underwear, jeans, a fleece pullover, and a puffy jacket, but still the wind seemed to pierce through it all and down to Keisha’s bones. Only once in the open air did she realize that she had not been out in what must be weeks.
“Will it be Christmas soon?” she asked.
Chloe looked at her, a flash of something like shock crossing her face. She said nothing for a moment.
“No,” she responded finally. “It isn’t even Thanksgiving yet. That’s … that’s next week.”
“Oh.”
Keisha kept walking.
Thanksgiving. Now there was a holiday she had no interest in. Not this year. Maybe never again.
They walked the length of the block, Keisha concentrating on her breaths, seeing each exhalation like a puff of smoke, feeling each inhalation like a breath of fire. The farther they got from the house, the more she felt herself panic, but she fought through it because feelings like that were dangerous and could turn into full-blown phobias. And by the second block, her panic had subsided. Instead, she felt tired and winded.
Four: Stories of Marriage Page 55
