The Grief of Others
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PART ONE - This Year
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
PART TWO - Last Year
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
PART THREE - This Year
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
PART FOUR - Eight Years Ago
PART FIVE - This Year
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
Acknowledgements
ALSO BY LEAH HAGER COHEN
ALSO BY LEAH HAGER COHEN
FICTION
House Lights
Heart,You Bully,You Punk
Heat Lightning
NONFICTION
Without Apology
The Stuff of Dreams
Glass, Paper, Beans
Train Go Sorry
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2011 by Leah Hager Cohen
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Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following:
“Cigars Clamped Between Their Teeth,” from Dime-Store Alchemy
by Charles Simic. © 1992 Charles Simic.
Funeral Customs the World Over by Robert W. Habenstein and William M. Lamers.
Copyright 1960 The National Funeral Directors Association.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cohen, Leah Hager.
The grief of others / Leah Hager Cohen.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54777-9
1. Children—Death—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction. 3. Grief—Fiction. I.Title.
PS3553.O42445G
813’.54—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
to Reba and Andy
and to Mike
Cigars Clamped Between Their Teeth
I’ve read that Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll were managers of their own miniature theaters. There must have been many other such playhouses in the world.We study the history and literature of the period, but we know nothing about these plays that were being performed for an audience of one.
CHARLES SIMIC, Dime-Store Alchemy
PROLOGUE
Last Year
When he was born he was alive. That was one thing.
He was a he, too, astonishingly—not that anyone expected him to be otherwise, but the notion of one so elemental, so small, carrying the complex mantle of gender seemed preposterous, the designation “male” the linguistic equivalent of a false mustache fixed above his infant lip.
His lips: how barely pink they were, the pink of the rim of the sky at winter dusk. And in their curl—in the way the upper lip rose to peaks and dipped down again, twice, like a bobbing valentine; and in the way the lower bowed out, luxuriant, lush, as if sated already from a lifetime of pleasures—how improbably expressive were his lips.
His hands like sea creatures curled and stretched, as if charged with purpose and intent. Five of his fingers closed around one of his mother’s and held it while he slept. He was capable of this.
His toenails: specks of abalone.
The whorls of his ears were as marvelously convoluted as any Escher drawing, the symmetry precise, the lobes little as teardrops, soft as peaches.The darkness of the ear hole a portal to the part of him that wasn’t there, that hadn’t fully formed, that spelled his end.
His mother had been led to believe that the whole vault of his skull would be missing, raw nerve tissue gruesomely visible beneath a window of membrane. She’d pictured a soft-boiled egg in an egg cup, the top removed, the yolk gleaming and exposed. She’d braced herself for protuberant eyes, flattened nose, folded ears, cleft palate: the features of an anencephalic infant. But the opening in his skull was no bigger than a silver dollar, and all his features lovely. She believed, at first, triumphantly, that the diagnosis had been made in error, that now the doctors, seeing the baby, would be forced to downgrade their diagnosis to something less serious—still severe, perhaps, but not lethal.
He was out of the womb and alive in the world for fifty-seven hours—a tally that put him in rare statistical company and caused in his mother an absurd sense of pride—during which time she kissed his ears and insteps and toes and palms and knuckles and lips repeatedly, a lifetime of kisses.
She could not bear to let him out of her arms. He belonged to her, exclusively, a feeling she had not had when her other children were born. This one was bound to her in ways no one knew. Just as she, having hidden his secret these past four months, was bound to him. She would let no one else hold him, not even the baby’s father, who asked only once and then, with great and terrible chivalry, pressed her no further.
During the hours she held him she could not make herself believe how fleeting his life would be.
His breath, above all, gave incontrovertible proof of his being. With grave equanimity, eyelids closed, mouth relaxed, he took and expelled hundreds, thousands, of the most exquisite wisps of air, amounts that might be measured in scruples and drams, and which his mother imagined bore their own delicate hues, invisible to the human eye.They, his breaths, were the one thing s
he wished could be saved. In her state she almost believed it possible (it seemed a matter simply of having the right vial in which to stopper them . . . what were they called, those special vials for holding tears?—lachrymatories, yes; if only she had one intended for breaths: a spiratory), and although she did not allow herself to sleep properly during all those fifty-seven hours, still she had some passing dream or medicated fantasy in the hospital bed, while she savored the feel of his inaudible, numbered breaths still stirring against her cheek, in which she glimpsed herself with an actual such vial on a chain around her neck, an amulet she might wear forever.
He wore, during his short life, a white cotton shirt with a single, covered, side snap,a white flannel receiving blanket, and a white cotton cap, fitted so gently over the opening in his head. He was given two diaper changes, the second proving unnecessary.
His mother found that once he was in her arms, she didn’t want to name him anything, not even the name they’d picked out, Simon Isaac Ryrie, a name she had loved but which struck her ears now as a terrible quantity of pricking syllables. It was not that she was trying to resist forming an attachment, nor that she wished to deprive him of any blessing, any gift or token, but only because once he was in her arms it became obvious that a name was too clumsy and rough and worldly a thing to foist on such a simultaneously luminous and shadowy being.
She tried explaining this to her husband, and also to the nurse and the midwife and the neonatologist, and then to the lady who came with the forms that had to be filled out, and to the resident with the beautiful sad eyes and the accent that made her think of anisette cakes and tiny glasses of thick coffee (his name was Dr. Abdulaziz, which she remembered because of the way he kissed the feet of her fading child each time he came in)—but she couldn’t seem to produce words that matched the authority of her conviction; her voice encountered obstacles, so that the easier and ultimately more rightful thing to do was abandon speech and simply hold her baby swaddled against her chest. This was all she could do and she did it absolutely. In the end it was the resident, Dr. Abdulaziz, who dissolved her resistance to naming the child, not by design or conscious effort, not even knowing he’d played such a role.Yet when he stopped in to visit her, visit them, for the last time (he explained it would be the last time, as he’d come to the end of his shift), he called the baby by name, in so low a voice, his accented syllables seeming to drape the baby in a beautifully embroidered garment as he pronounced, with care and not a speck of fanfare, almost as though it were private, not intended for either parent but for the baby’s sake alone, “Simon Isaac,” and bent to touch once more his mouth to the soles of the baby’s feet.
And so she let her husband inscribe the name they’d chosen on the forms.What did it matter? She recognized her child as he truly was: all-spirit, his limbs pale as candles, his eyes never open once, innocent of all terms.
PART ONE
This Year
1.
Shortly past noon on the first Friday of the month, Biscuit Ryrie approached the low brick building where she attended fifth grade. She had ridden her bike a mile already and her lungs were sharp with the sweet-onion sting of early April. Against the wind her cheeks felt tight as marble.The day did not look like spring. It was white: white sky, a pallid sheen on every surface, clumps of snow lingering here and there. In a week’s time, these last remnants of winter would be gone.
The sight of her own classmates gave her a start. She’d counted on their being safely ensconced in their classroom around back, instead of filing out of the building just as she drew even with it. Each student was carrying something, she saw, an identical brown sketch pad. Only then did Biscuit remember Mr. Li’s announcement that today they were to begin making a visual record of the shape and size of the buds on the trees and bushes around the school. Too late to avoid being seen, she scrunched her already small frame lower over the handlebars and veered toward the far side of the street.
“Hey!” shrieked someone, importantly, hilariously. Most likely Vanessa Sett. “There goes Biscuit Ryrie. On a bike!” Laughter followed, and hooting. Biscuit kept her gaze forward, her speed steady. Someone whipped a chunk of petrified snow into the road; it smacked against her front tire and flew apart as stinging crystals. A few of them sprayed her hand and cheek.
If Biscuit had simply stayed at home like other truant children, watching reruns on cable, eating chocolate chips from the bag and peanut butter from the jar, informing her parents when they got home from work that she’d had a stomachache and could she please have a note to bring to the teacher in the morning, nothing might have come of it. But it would no more have occurred to Biscuit to skip school in order to watch TV and eat junk than it would have occurred to her that she wasn’t entitled to make her own decision about attending. She did not look around to see who had flung the chunk of ice, nor did she look when Mr. Li himself called her name in his diffident baritone, which seemed to trail along after her, lofted on a question mark, before she pedaled past the northern edge of the school and went safely around the bend, heading toward the Hook.
That Biscuit was small for her age (newly ten) suited her. She regarded the fact of her size like a convenient bit of camouflage. If she’d been in command of picking her form in the first place she might have chosen different, might have opted for that of an aquatic mammal, or perhaps something avian. But all in all, diminutive human female was acceptable. Of course, she’d had no say over what she would be called, either, yet this, too, had worked out to her satisfaction. Her given name, Elizabeth, had been dispatched by her older brother within days of her birth. Paul, then three, had fixed exclusively upon the last syllable, which he’d rendered bis and gone around the house proclaiming with great gusto. Their parents had been so charmed by his enthusiasm that they’d followed his lead, and from there it had been only a matter of time before they’d appended the -cuit.
Now, with school well behind her, she let up on her pedaling and even coasted a bit. The air blew gently against her forehead. She thought not about school, not about consequences, but about her destination, her intention. She thought about the tchok tchok sound the teaspoon had made as she’d gathered ashes from the fireplace earlier, the bowl of the spoon tap-scraping the charred brick each time she scooped another heap of gray powder from the hearth. These ashes now resided in a folded-up washcloth stuffed inside the pocket of her parka, along with a few chicken bones she’d fished from the kitchen garbage that morning after everyone else had left. Into her other pocket she’d slipped an egg.
Tchok tchok. She had a thing for certain sounds. She had a thing for lots of things. Images, too, but usually only the narrowest bits. Slivered images, fragments: the way a little piece of ice had been nestled in a crook of the split rail fence in front of the neighbor’s house when she’d left. Even though she had only just set out, she’d had to stop and get off her bike in order to examine it, this piece of ice all curled in on itself like a tiny hand, when nearly all the other ice and snow around it had melted. She’d leaned her bike carefully against the fence and squatted down with her face right up close to the frozen coil. She’d noticed the play of colors in its semi-transparency, and also the gleam of wetness from which she’d deduced, with a moment’s grim satisfaction, that this bit of ice would shortly be going the way of its brethren. The melt is upon it, she’d thought, not in her own voice but in that of a white-coated scientist confirming with a brusque nod a colleague’s more tentative speculation.
She’d gone more than a mile and it was one mile more, straight along Broadway, from her school to the Hook, whose sheer rock face she could already see looming in jagged patterns of red-brown and gray. It appeared deceptively close. Although it was near midday the sun was barely distinguishable from the overcast sky: a white dinner plate on a white tablecloth.
Broadway stopped abruptly at the foot of the Hook, where a small wooden gatehouse, closed for the season, announced the entrance to Nyack Beach State Park. Biscuit flew past it a
nd rode the brakes down the steeply winding road, at whose bottom she coasted to the end of a small parking lot, dismounted, and propped the bike against a tree. The kickstand was broken. It was a boy’s bike, having first belonged to Paul. It had five speeds and was the metallic gilt-green of a bottle fly.
The wind coming off the Hudson held some warmth, or a promise of warmth to come. Biscuit inhaled, open-mouthed, and got a foretaste of rain. Oh well, she had on the hooded parka (another of Paul’s hand-me-downs) and two pairs of socks inside her scuffed work boots (Paul again). She set out along the cinder path that ran north from the parking lot, banding the Hook like a hat brim. To her left rose wooded and talus slopes, broken up by the occasional jumble of boulders.These always looked heartstoppingly precarious, as though they might resume tumbling at any moment, even though Mrs. Mukhopadhyay, the children’s room librarian, had taught her that the cliff had been formed some two hundred million years ago, at the end of the Triassic Period.
To her right the river spread broadly. It was smoke-colored today and choppy, its stiff-looking waves patterned like cake frosting. Biscuit’s father had made a cake from a mix yesterday, a yellow cake with whipped cream for her mother’s birthday.The thought of the cake, and of her mother’s subdued reaction, made her bite the inside of her cheek.
People passed, not many. An elderly couple, the woman wearing a clear plastic rain hat, heading toward the lot. A thin young man with reddish hair and a bearlike dog, off-leash, who overtook Biscuit and soon disappeared around a curve. A middle-aged woman carrying a folded umbrella, who looked Biscuit over appraisingly. Biscuit made fleeting eye contact, gave a curt nod, and did not slow. This was a routine she had perfected. When her father had taken Paul and her to visit their mother and brother in the hospital—this had been a year ago; they’d been twelve and nine—he had explained to them that the policy was no visitors under twelve, but that he didn’t suppose anyone would stop them if Biscuit carried herself the right way. “The trick,” he’d said, “is to walk like you own the place,” a concept and phrase that appealed to her appetite for self-sovereignty. With no further coaching, she’d adopted a cool-as-you-please, look-straight-ahead saunter that had gotten them all through the vast lobby without a hitch. By the wordless glance he’d cast her once the elevator doors had closed behind them, she saw that her father had not been expecting such quick mastery of the technique.