The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  “You don’t think it can wait?” He spoke softly, angling his body so that its bulk afforded him some privacy from the students. “I mean, we’ve all been here before. What am I even going to say? That we haven’t already said.”

  Ricky sipped in a quick breath. Clearly she’d prepared her answer. “It sends a message, though. If you go home now. If we confront—sorry, if you confront her right away. Then at least she gets a sense of the urgency. That we’re not taking this lightly.”

  “Yeah.” He stroked some paint across the top of the stretched muslin, using up what was already on the brush. “You’re right.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Yeah, but—thanks, John.”

  He slipped the phone back in his pocket. It wouldn’t be so bad, returning later tonight. Lance Oprisu, the Llewellyn-Price’s technical director, who ordinarily bore chief responsibility for executing the sets that John designed, was on leave this semester, which had turned out to be both burden and blessing. Although John’s workload was more stressful, he had found the increased solitude, the sheer number of hours he’d been spending alone now in the theater, welcome. Tonight he’d have the scene shop to himself, a ready supply of Diet Coke from the vending machine down the hall,The Doors blasting on the stereo, and no students around to mock, however affectionately, his musical tastes. He knew when he got in the right groove he could work solo with as much efficiency as an entire crew of students. Nor would it be awful to spend a night out of the house. He set the brush across the top of the paint can and turned around to face the students, none of whom looked up.

  Amy and Pureza were working, minimally, on a single flat; mostly they seemed to be deep in conversation, Pureza doing the majority of the talking, Amy murmuring at intervals, “Claro. Claro, que sí.” Iryna wasn’t working on the set at all, but applying color to her face instead, from a seriously impressive eye shadow kit; at a glance it contained some twenty cakes of color. Vivi was wearing red earbuds and grooving to whatever music she was absorbing through them, but she had, bless her heart, finished one flat already and was halfway through her second.

  “Ah, people,” said John. His inclination was to say, “You guys,” but he had learned that this didn’t go over well with his students, predominantly female, first-generation college students, almost a third of them first-generation Americans. Addressing them as “women” seemed too stiff, “ladies” too sexist, “folks” too grassroots, and “kids” too insulting. So: “People?” said John again, louder, and they turned to him. He waited for Vivi to remove one earbud. “I’m going to have to take off early today. I’d like you to finish up these flats, but then you can go. It’s my screwup, not yours, so you can still sign the crew sheet for two hours. Iryna.”

  Sighing, eye-shadow wand in hand, she turned from the little round mirror balanced on her palm. “I’m leaving you in charge of making sure all the brushes get cleaned. And you’re responsible for making sure the paint cans have their lids pressed on. Tightly.Yes?” She nodded with an air of bored self-pity that John ignored.

  From the start he had placed a similar degree of trust in his students as he’d placed in the professionals with whom he’d built Broadway sets, and nearly always his expectations were duly met. In return, the students wound up respecting not only him but, more important, the craft—or so their course evaluations often stated. He knew the students regarded him warmly, too, from the way they gently teased him. John was a tall man, burly, with curling dark hair on his head and face; over the years he’d been mostly amused to hear himself likened to Paul Bunyan, Bluto, the Brawny paper towel man.

  When he left the building a thin rain was falling, and the drive from Congers to Nyack was a palette of grays, broken up by licorice-stalk trees and spectral flashes of snow at the side of the road. The Ford Ranger’s wiper blades needed replacing, something John had been reminding himself and then forgetting to do for months. He took the winding roads slowly: no point hurrying. Lately, something had gone wrong with the car speakers, too, and after a minute of staticky classic rock, he switched the radio off and listened instead to the wet tires, the metronomic wipers. His thoughts were troubled, but not by his daughter, never mind that she was the cause of his leaving work early; it was his wife who preoccupied him as he drove.

  Ricky had turned thirty-seven yesterday. In the afternoon, she’d gone to adult lap swim at the Y and John had baked a yellow cake from a box. He’d topped it—his own inspiration, of which he’d been pleased—with cream he whipped and strawberries he sliced.While he’d been making the cake, the kids had walked into town with a twenty and a ten he’d taken from his wallet and instructions to pick out gifts for their mother. Biscuit had returned with a mood ring and a Whitman’s Sampler, Paul with a woodenhandled cheese knife. John—who found it harder to pick out a gift for his wife every year, and who, although Ricky always expressed gratitude for whatever he gave her, felt increasingly inept at pleasing her (this in turn leading him to make progressively more outlandish choices)—had already bought her a mandolin. It arrived complete with padded case, instructional DVD, practice book, tuner, and set of picks. He’d been excited about it when he ordered it online, then in doubt ever since.

  Part of the problem was his fluctuating inclination over how much to spend. When he bought her something expensive he felt sheepish about the fact that it was so obviously her earnings that allowed him to do so.Yet when he bought her something modest he felt just as sheepish and like a spoilsport, besides.Thus the schizophrenia of his gift-giving over time: one year daisies and a water pitcher; another platinum and emerald earrings; one year a Kiva gift certificate; the next a Kindle. This year, he’d half consciously striven to balance the extravagance of the mandolin with the humbleness of the food. For the birthday supper he’d served tacos and black cherry soda, which had seemed a jolly, festive menu back in the supermarket but inadequate, collegiate, once they were all actually sitting at the table. Ricky looked ten years younger than her age in an enormous SUNY New Paltz sweatshirt and holey jeans, her still-wet hair combed straight past her shoulders. The wavy white-gray strands that had begun to striate the brown this past year were invisible now, weighted down by the dark damp lot. Seeing her this way, as if polished and pared by her swim, and smelling the chlorine in her hair, John could not help but imagine her in water. He could envision the precise stroke of her limbs, the supple way she sliced through liquid, although it had been years since he’d actually seen her swim. After cake she’d opened her presents, and despite the attentive way in which she thanked them each by name, John had the distinct impression the only gift she genuinely appreciated was the Whitman’s Sampler.

  Later that night John had carried the instrument upstairs and set it on the foot of the bed, where Ricky, wearing the giant sweatshirt as pajamas, sat up reading The Economist. “Have you opened it yet?” he asked.

  She’d given him a look that combined, he believed, contrition and resentment before laying aside the magazine. Her hair, now dry, had regained its measure of gold, and it shone in the lamplight as she bent forward to unzip the padded case. A wing of it, faintly threaded with gray, fell over her shoulder, curtaining her face. He’d reached over and with a thick forefinger tucked it behind her ear, a movement that felt at once tentative and bold. She hadn’t reacted at all, neither withdrew nor softened under his touch, but gazed steadily at the instrument in its case, surveying its glossy tobacco surface, the curves of its f-holes, the mother-of-pearl inlays on its fingerboard. At last she’d looked up at him and smiled. “It’s beautiful, John.” He was aware she had not touched it. She zipped the case shut, placed it on the floor beside the bed, retrieved her magazine. Later, under the covers, the backs of her slim bare legs had fit un-protestingly against the bulky warmth of his.

  Ricky never got mad at him anymore. Once, he might have considered her volatile, might even have called her hot-blooded. Feisty. He thought of her in their courtship days, the salty
sting of her, the way she might look up from the table and spike the air with her fork, the way she’d fill a doorway and bring the heel of her boot down. The crack of it, the candor. Now she never expressed anger toward him. Under direct questioning, she claimed not to possess any. Nor could he think of any crime, any infraction, for which she might blame him. And yet. John found himself repeatedly, increasingly, preparing for a sort of imaginary defense, as though he might be brought up on charges at a moment’s notice. Though she no longer roused herself to anger, it felt like she was furious. It had been this way since before the baby’s death.

  Ricky’s crimes were well documented. They numbered two: the ancient infidelity and the more recent one, both of which he’d forgiven, been so broad as to forgive. These events had not broken them. Here they were a year after their greatest trial, standing proof, something very like intact. Thanks in large part to his exercise of tolerance, so impressive to them both. Why, then, with such ample reserves, such stockpiles of goodwill owed him (if you were going to think of it in such terms, make an equation of it, a balance sheet, though of course that was more Ricky’s domain than his), why did he worry he’d done wrong?

  Turning the truck onto their street, he had actively to remind himself of the task at hand: it wasn’t Appeasing Ricky, but rather Confronting Biscuit. He supposed he agreed with Ricky that one of them ought to deal with the issue straightaway, but despite what he had to admit would at this point be called his daughter’s chronic cutting, he couldn’t manage to summon real anxiety over Biscuit. If he did not understand her, neither did he worry about her. Whatever her idiosyncrasies, she struck him as being herself untroubled by them, which was in a way what mattered most. Sometimes he had the odd thought that of them all, Biscuit alone seemed to know what she was doing, what she was about.

  John parked in the gravel driveway, cut through the rain over the scrap of front lawn, and strode up the steps to the porch.This porch had been the great hook back when he and Ricky first saw the house, on an October afternoon eleven years earlier. They’d been living in the city then, in a one-bedroom way over on West Twenty-ninth, near the river. They had borrowed Ricky’s parents’ car in order to take little Paul, then two, apple picking in Rockland County.The day was unseasonably hot, the orchard packed, the remaining fruit all on the highest branches, the ladders all taken, and to top it off John got stung by a bee. But then they’d gone and had lunch in Nyack and a river breeze wafted up the hill, and afterward, as they’d been strolling down the sidewalk toward ice cream, with Paul asleep in the carrier on John’s back, they’d paused to look at the photos in the storefront of a real estate office, and popped inside on a lark.

  It had been premature: they didn’t really have the money for a down payment (this was before Ricky had been recruited by Birnbaum and Traux, back when she’d been working downtown part-time as a consultant), nor had they convinced themselves they were ready to leave the city for the suburbs. But as luck had it, one agent had been sitting idle and fairly pounced on them with an offer to show a handful of properties straightaway. For the next several hours, as they’d viewed house upon house in the hilly, residential neighborhoods, their sense of themselves as essentially urbanites only increased. But the fifth time they’d emerged from the agent’s car—this time stepping out into eighty-degree heat just a block from the main drag, where a small public park sloped down toward the river—and saw the FOR SALE sign marking a perfectly modest dwelling in the middle of the block, they’d both felt something neither had ever known before: house lust.

  In a village architecturally dominated byVictorians, this house had been small and plain as a swallow’s nest. A big fir shaded the low structure, whose stucco was the color of shredded wheat, and it had covered the diminutive lawn with pine needles, a blanket of bronze. The clay tile roof had a few bald patches, and the chimney a visible crack.There’d been something of a witch’s cottage about the dwelling, echoes of a house under an enchantment. What tilted it away from outright cheerlessness and delivered it instead—just—into the realm of charm, had been the wide front porch, disproportionately deep, disproportionately gracious, the entrance framed by the sinewy branches of a wisteria. It had been well past the season of its blossoming, but its leaves hung thick and heavy, the lush gold of ripened pears.

  Instantly, John began playing the game he occasionally played: if this were a set he had built, what would have been his intention? What would its design have been meant to convey to an audience, even before the play had begun? A haunting tranquillity? A disheveled haven? Indulgence? Humility? Beauty? He could not decide.

  The block ran downhill, sloping steeply at the bottom toward the river’s edge. The water on this day of unseasonable heat had looked quenching and calm. Ricky, whose second pregnancy had just been beginning to show on her slight frame, and John, with the sleeping Paul drooling a dark wet patch on his shoulder, had reached out at the same moment and found each other’s hands. The agent, shrewdly enough, had taken note and said nothing, giving the fantasy time in which to colonize her clients’ hearts. She had let them be the ones to initiate movement toward the house, materializing before them somewhat magically as they approached the door and handing the key—this had been the master touch—to Ricky. Turning it in the lock, Ricky had slid John such a look as he had never before seen on her face: like a cat scenting cream, almost sultry with determination.

  Many times over the ensuing years of variously stressful mortgage payments, insurance premiums, and property tax increases—not to mention broken hot water heaters, windows that no longer fit snugly into their casements, and roof jobs gone awry—one or the other of them had looked up from a clutter of bills and contracts to curse the real estate agent; it was their private joke that she had indeed been magic, an evil sorceress. But beneath the jest, it was understood that he and Ricky remained in the house’s thrall, and having bought it was one thing they never regretted.

  As John crossed the porch now, rain beat on the roof loud as pebbles on tin. A broken drainpipe caused a cascade beyond the eastern end of the porch, making an opaque curtain of water there. John wiped his feet and went in, called out to Biscuit and was answered by the shrilling of the teakettle. If he had paused to consider, he might have found this odd, as his daughter was not a tea drinker. But he did not, and it didn’t occur to him until he entered the kitchen that he would find there someone other than Biscuit.

  3.

  Gordie Joiner, an only child, aged nineteen, was not minding the rain. He took it as affirmation of his own melancholy and did not let it alter his unhurried course, but continued in a northerly direction along the cinder path. It was slightly past one, and he had nowhere he needed to be. Not this day, nor the next. Nor, for that matter . . . but it did no good to think along those lines. Only when his dog cast him a series of questioning looks, head cocked, mouth ajar, and then gradually lagged behind him, ultimately declaring her reluctance by coming to a stop, legs slightly splayed, in the middle of the path, did he relent.

  “All right. Sissy.”

  Ebie, who was mostly Newf—that enormous, double-coated breed famous for having both the ability and instinct to perform water rescues—was not a sissy. She relished being in water, any form of water—ocean, river, pond, bathtub—anything except rain.

  Now she swung about, her wild approval of the decision to retreat making a puppy of her. Somehow an ear had become inverted, giving her a ridiculous, spastic look. She glanced over her shoulder: Coming? Her tail knocked out raindrops right and left. Gordie caught up, smoothed down her ear and gave her rump a tap. She sallied forth erect, all bearish one hundred thirty pounds of her. The rain fell greenly, pocking the remnants of crusty snow that banked the curving, riverside path.

  He did a double take when, coming around the bend, he saw Ebie take off from the path and trot—for a moment it looked like this—out across the water, messiah-like. Then he blinked and squinted through the rain, which had become a downpour, and his perceptio
n was corrected: she was in fact picking her way across a spit of rocks that jutted some fifteen yards straight out into the river. Gordie’s confusion at this unlikely sight was compounded almost immediately by another, that of a peculiar figure at the very end of the spit: a dwarf in hooded cape. Or child in large green parka. Ebie’s Newf instincts, however partial, however misplaced, had kicked in: she was off to the rescue.

  Gordie whistled for her, one sharp commanding note, knowing even as he did that it was futile. When she sensed danger, she would not be dissuaded. He sighed and began to climb down onto the rocks himself, then froze. Ebie, too, had stopped, just three or four feet from the child, who seemed not to have noticed the advent of company. He or she seemed to be holding an object in one hand, and with the other hand scooping and throwing . . . something, toward the water. Ashes, from the look of it, fine, dark ashes and a few chunks of something denser, bone. Gordie would not have known if he hadn’t done it himself that winter.

  For the first time since he’d started this walk, he felt the cold. His oversized jacket—really a heavy, woolen lumberjack shirt that had been his dad’s—was finally soaked through at the shoulders, and the thighs and cuffs of his jeans, all drenched to the skin.

  Ebie moved then. He could tell she meant to use her head, her bulk, to nudge this person away from the edge of the spit, toward dry land.The rocks out there at the edge must have been more slippery than she’d judged. He saw first his dog slip—her paw faltered and went out from under her—and then, as she scrambled with canine dexterity to gain a solid foothold, he saw her shoulder plow against the child’s legs, and the child’s legs buckle at the knee. There was a vanishing and a splash, and he could not have said which came first, they happened so fast.

  The child didn’t go underwater, at least not all the way. Her head—he could see now it was a she—remained visible, and an arm, one bare hand clinging to the jagged rock upon which she had been standing. Behind her, on the water’s shimmering surface, something pale appeared to float momentarily, and then was gone. Ebie, her own singular shortcomings now in full display, declined to go in after the girl but half stood, half sat anxiously at the water’s edge, wagging her tail as if in mad apology or frantic encouragement: a real hero manqué.