Around us, people were applauding.
4
IN THE BACK OF THE CAR on the way home for a final reception I had my arms around two of my children.
Sofie sat up front. She was feeling her way that day, hovering in the shadows. She had asked to sit behind the kids and me at the cemetery. She told me in advance that on that one day she did not wish to be a curiosity to people who remained unaware of the slice of Lauren’s history that included her birth.
In my heart Sofie was already one of my children. God, my kids. My salvation. We had a life to build together without their mother. They got me out of bed in the morning. They gave me a reason not to end the day in a chemical stupor.
At times I was disbelieving about what had happened—how can this be true, how can this be my life?—but I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I was determined that the moment should be profound for us. That it should honor an end. And that it should announce a necessary beginning. If I could do that, I told myself, I might sleep.
Ha. I didn’t sleep at all that night. Or the night after.
THE NIGHT BEFORE THE FUNERAL was the first time that I dialed Diane’s cell phone number since that morning, the one when she stepped into my office and shot Lauren in the back. I was a bit of a coward; I made the call from a blocked landline that identified me as PRIVATE CALLER.
I wanted to ask Diane why she killed Lauren. I did not know the answer.
I also wanted to ask her how she was doing, or scream at her that she was getting what she deserved. As the phone rang I was unsure what I would ask.
She didn’t answer; the call rolled over to voicemail. If she had picked up, I might have killed the call. I would have felt like killing something. If I ran into Diane on the street, I would have to choose between slapping her across the face and strangling her.
Or giving her a hug.
I remained confused about that morning. Everything else? All the anger and despair and hope and promise was there in the morning, and again on the morning after that. For days I searched for the sign of a new beginning. After a week or so I stopped looking. I feared that a new mundane was settling in, which meant that I would need to create my own new beginning.
Did I have the resolve, the will, the energy, the vision, to pull that off?
No. But I had the kids. I would do it for them. With them.
A friend who had recently managed to create a lucrative new career from the ashes of the 2008 financial collapse had told me that “personal reinvention is an underappreciated skill.”
It was apparently my turn to learn if she was right.
5
THE DAY AFTER THE BURIAL I began to get phone calls about Gracie’s dance.
Producers. Local TV at first. I politely declined their requests for interviews.
By late morning a new set of phone calls began to arrive from bookers with the national morning shows. Today, Good Morning America, Fox & Friends. By that afternoon, a booker from Ellen was on the line. Then one representing Katie Couric. Others of a similar ilk soon followed.
After I declined the bookers’ overtures I would hear from their producers. Further declinations earned me calls from the shows’ executive producers. The executive producers all wanted the same thing the bookers had wanted, which was the same thing that the local producers had wanted.
They wanted Grace. They wanted to fly Gracie to New York or to LA to be on their shows. They wanted to be first.
I asked each of them why. Partly, I asked for my amusement. Partly, I was wondering if I was missing something. No one had a good answer for me beyond a reference to her celebrity on YouTube. As in “YouTube, you idiot.”
“What she did was so special,” one insisted. “People need to meet her, to know her,” another one said. She said it three times during a breathless one-minute plea.
All I could think was No, they don’t.
THE NEXT DAY AT 7:12 A.M.—I allowed that it was 9:12 Eastern—the reality show bookers and producers started calling with their pleas.
Gracie could have a special onetime appearance on Dancing with the Stars. Or do a solo while the judges deliberated something else—I didn’t know what—on So You Think You Can Dance. Perhaps Grace would be interested in submitting a video for consideration on America’s Got Talent?
The producers sensed my reticence before they felt my resolve. To forestall that resolve they offered me an opportunity for a conversation with the talent, as though my determination could be erased, or my parental judgment demolished, by the chance to have a breathless chat with Nigel Lythgoe. I thought they’d made him up, but he was a real person. I checked Wikipedia.
GRACIE WAS AWARE OF HER NASCENT Web fame. Her friends showed her the YouTube video hours before I learned that someone at the funeral had recorded it. My daughter was a trending topic on Twitter—the hashtag was #dancinggravegirl—before I had scrambled to sign up for access to Twitter, long before I figured out what a hashtag was, well before I began to comprehend why or how my daughter had been assigned one, or how I could track what was happening to my daughter’s sudden damn fame online.
Jonas became my guide. That was nothing new. Jonas was often my guide.
Grace was conflicted about it all. She liked the attention. Celebrity was a big deal for Grace and her friends.
Like the producers and the bookers, though, Gracie could sense my reluctance. She could tell that I didn’t want her to dive in.
At dinner two nights after Lauren’s funeral, Jonas and Sofie and Gracie and I spoke about the flood of invitations I had been juggling for Gracie to appear on national television. Sofie answered Grace’s questions about what all the attention might mean. Whether it would be fun. Sofie’s cross-cultural perspective was incisive. Her birth father worked in national news production in Holland. Sofie had an intuitive feel for the enchantment and for the potential pitfalls.
She was, I thought, beautifully jaded about it all. I could feel her bias—she was a skeptic—but Gracie seemed immune to skepticism, which was worrisome to me as the conversation progressed. Jonas stayed quiet. Until the end of the discussion.
At the very end Gracie asked Jonas what he thought. Actually, she didn’t ask on her own. At the very end I suggested she ask her brother what he thought. I was hoping for some help. Until then Jonas had been acting as though the whole conversation was an annoying intrusion into what otherwise could have been a perfect evening to write line after line of code in C++. I thought the language was C++. I was unsure.
Once his silent grousing was complete, he said, “They care about you because you danced at Mom’s funeral. Not because you danced. Not because you’re great. I mean you’re okay, Grace. At dancing. That’s not it.
“But the next time, if you do what they want you to do, if you dance on TV, there won’t be a funeral. You’ll just be a girl dancing by herself on TV. It won’t be the same. Not for you. Not for any of them. Not for the people who see you who have already seen you dance on YouTube.
“When everything is over they’ll be done with you, and I think you’ll wish you never did it. What you did for Mom was kind of great. I don’t want you to wish you never did it.”
I loved the fact that when Jonas dissed his sister he usually squeezed a compliment in there, too. He was a young master of the spoonful-of-sugar diss.
Gracie looked at Sofie. Sofie nodded. “Our brother is smart. Next time—if you go on those shows—you’ll just be a girl dancing. It won’t be special the second time. Not for you. Not for anyone watching who has seen the clip.”
Jonas said, “You don’t want to go on those shows anyway, Grace. They’re lame.”
Grace said, “They’re not lame.”
Sofie nodded. She was agreeing with everyone, all at the same time. She was blessed with the kind of personality that allowed her to get away with it.
Seeing Sofie in action, I became hyperaware that I wasn’t. Blessed with that kind of personality. I recognized, too, that that was important to kn
ow. Going forward.
The family discussion ended. I hoped that the impact of Gracie’s brush with quasi-fame would fade within days.
Again I was wrong. The echoes that continued to sound were not at all what I was expecting. The ones that were most surprising came from the bell that would be rung 2,763,912 times on YouTube.
Some people I once knew were among the bell-ringers.
6
DURING THE EARLIEST HOURS of the blurry day after the one when Lauren was shot, I had called Grace and Jonas to the hospital so that they would have a chance to say good-bye to their mother, who I thought was dying imminently. They arrived in the darkness with a police escort arranged on the fly by Sam Purdy’s partner, Lucy.
I should not have been surprised that Lauren and I were out of synch. Even at the end, about her death. I was not surprised that Lauren was stubborn until the end. Three more vigils would follow that first one, but Lauren didn’t get around to dying until twenty days later. At no time during those twenty days did anything resembling hope emerge about her condition. She lived tentatively but tenaciously, furiously, and sometimes even frustratingly. But she lived in biological definition only. Her brain stem barked orders none of us heard and her organs did what they could to fulfill those orders.
I wondered if anything else was going on with her. Consciously. The kids wondered. Our friends wondered. But the machines said no. The doctors said no.
My heart said no, too. I didn’t feel her presence.
I sat with her and spoke to her for hours every day, mostly sharing old memories and asking new questions, but she showed no indication that she heard any of it.
She never talked back, or shifted her eyes, or squeezed my hand.
She farted once when Grace was with me. About most things Grace was open-minded. She said she thought the fart meant something. I suggested that it did not.
I talked with Lauren about my love for her. How it felt different at the end than it did at the beginning. I told her I wished she could tell me more about her love for me. Whether it felt different at the end than at the beginning.
I became adept at keeping her nails trimmed and polished the way she liked. I brushed her black hair but no matter how much I brushed it, I couldn’t keep it from losing its luster. I was diligent about keeping her lips moist, and her cuticles creamed, because she’d always despised them to be dry. I rubbed her feet until the Colorado calluses on her heels became supple for the first time in years.
Each day I would spend minutes or even hours looking for meaning and metaphor in her apparent determination to stay alive, but I never found anything that convinced me that what I was seeing was anything more than evolution and biology and chemistry at work. I never once managed to discover any comfort in allowing myself a short or long flight toward a fantasy that my wife would recover and rejoin me. And the kids.
I knew from the moment that I accepted what had happened that morning that I wasn’t awaiting a miracle. I was awaiting my wife’s death.
I was not eager for it. I never prayed for it. I never felt impatience about it.
What she proved to me at the end was that her belief seemed to be that life itself could be more important than living. But she never proved to me that was a good thing.
VISITORS CAME AND WENT for the first week and a half at the hospital, for the last ten days at our home under the care of hospice. Given the circumstances—news and rumors that Lauren had been shot for no sane reason by my best friend spilled like floodwater across the Boulder Valley floor—almost everyone who visited approached the tragedy with befuddlement and the kind of curiosity that causes even kind inquiries to end up misshapen by careless words and by the aftereffects of intoxicating gossip.
During the hospital visits neither her friends, nor my friends, nor our friends, knew what to say. I did. I came to know what to say. I would greet the visitors warmly, take their hands in mine, and thank them for coming.
I was delighted to see some of the visitors. Too few, probably, but that was me.
By and large, the people I was happiest to see were the people whose grief about Lauren’s condition was as real as my own. The people whose confusion about fate and finality was as real as my own.
I found myself most confused by the people who seemed to believe they understood what was going on. They baffled me.
After the awkward first few minutes that most of Lauren’s visitors would spend either staring at my unresponsive wife or doing everything they could to avoid looking at my unresponsive wife, I would inevitably be ready for the well-meaning guests to leave. Some sensed it. They left. I thanked them, again, for coming. I completely empathized with their instinct to be by her side, even momentarily, and I sympathized with the helplessness they felt while they were actually sitting at her unresponsive side.
I never thanked the guests for leaving quickly, but I felt gratitude for that, too. I let each visitor know how much Lauren would appreciate her time with them.
Others would arrive at Lauren’s room like pilgrims. They came with a certainty that a hospital visit had to be of some predetermined length in order to count on some ledger kept somewhere. About such things. When people with that mind-set visited we would sit on opposite sides of Lauren’s bed and pretend that she wasn’t there while we conversed about something that wasn’t important, or that we couldn’t influence.
The weather. The wildfires. The coming solstice. The damn Broncos. Global warming was a frequent topic.
Or we’d talk about things that were important but weren’t germane. My kids. Their kids. The looming holidays. The future.
And politics. Politics it turned out was a safe topic at the bedside of a coma victim. Religion? Not so much. Who knew?
At ten minutes, or fifteen—whatever time-target they’d arrived with in their minds—the ledger could be marked. The visit counted. The pilgrims would discreetly check their watches or the clocks on their phones and realize they were free to leave.
I thanked them for coming. If they had handed me a document to verify their efforts, I would have gladly stamped it for them. Added my initials.
AMONG THE FIRST VISITORS was her assistant at the DA’s office, Andrew. Andrew’s family’s roots were in Eastern Europe. His surname was a jumble of consonants that I had learned to pronounce only from hearing Lauren’s repetitions. I couldn’t recall ever seeing his name written out.
I had no idea how to combine consonants to make them sound like his last name. If God announced to me that Lauren would rise from her bed if only I could spell Andrew’s surname, Lauren would have expired among the ruins of my misordered consonants.
Andrew missed Lauren. He arrived at the hospital carrying calla lilies, one of her favorites. Andrew said, “She loves these.”
“She does, Andrew,” I said, choking back tears. I hugged him. In an almost whisper, he said, “When the time comes, I will bring her things from the office for you. I have them set aside at my apartment. Some of them are personal. Things she had going.”
As we talked I learned that his family was from Hungary, a few dozen kilometers from the Buda side of the Danube. He tried to help me spell his last name by teaching me a trick to remember the order of the consonants. I memorized the mnemonic, but then the vowels tripped me up.
Before he turned to leave he reached into a lapel pocket and pulled out a deep-red Field Notes memo book. I recognized it instantly. He said, “This one is blank. From the stash I kept for her. If you run across a yellow one of these, would you let me know? I number—numbered—and dated them all for her. To keep track. A yellow one is missing. It was on her desk. That morning.”
“Did you say yellow?”
Lauren was addicted to the tough little notebooks. She liked that they were flexible and almost flat, that they fit anywhere—whether in a slender purse pocket, or the back pocket of her tightest jeans—and she liked that they were graph paper, not lined paper. For Lauren, having MS and writing between lines didn’t get along.
For Lauren, double vision, flawed dexterity, and the tiny keyboard of her smartphone often combined to create frustration. She carried two Field Notes notebooks with her most of the time. The red ones were for work. The blue ones were for family. One of each was always close by—in her purse, or by the kitchen phone, or on her bedside table—often paired by a rubber band.
In the blue Field Notes she would jot down changes or additions to the family schedule that she would later add to the big calendar on the fridge, or thoughts, or personal things she was eager to recall. A brand of body lotion she wanted to try. Grace’s new friend’s mother’s name. Jonas’s math teacher’s email. A Christmas gift idea for the kids that came to her in July. A wine she liked. A promising recipe. Her determination to eat more chia seeds.
In the red Field Notes—those were the work versions—I never knew what she wrote. Work things. Privileged things. Those thoughts were not intended for my eyes.
We had each, always, respected the sanctity of the other’s work.
Andrew confirmed he’d said “yellow.” I said, “It wasn’t with her when—”
Andrew rescued me from having to complete the sentence. “No, she’d left it with me, to transcribe some notes and look into something, before she went to your office. That’s how we worked. She would put my initials on certain pages. I would take the information from those pages to put dates on her calendar, or add phone numbers or email addresses to her contacts, or to call someone with a follow-up on a subpoena or a warrant or a legal question about a case, or to get back to a detective about a witness statement. But when I got back to the office after the Dome Fire evacuation, the yellow notebook she had given me before she went to see you was missing.”
I clarified. “I knew about the system with the red notebooks. She did something similar herself with the blue ones at home, late at night in bed. Were the yellow ones”—I did not recall ever seeing a yellow one—“for work, too?”
Andrew said, “Not exactly. They were something else she was doing. The yellow ones were for ongoing … projects.”
Compound Fractures Page 4
