The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  “Well, I do have some news,” said Jess when they were all seated. She proceeded to explain, with considerable gentleness, that she was pregnant, that she would keep it, that she was nine weeks along, that the guy was someone she had no future with, that her parents were dismayed. They wanted her to have an abortion. Here she paused, her eyes flicking briefly first toward John, then Ricky. In appeal? In order to gauge their reactions? At any rate, it seemed a testing moment, swollen with something she wanted or expected. Neither John nor Ricky spoke.

  Well, Jess continued, she wasn’t going to have one. And when she’d told her parents, they’d kicked her out.

  “They kicked you out?” John sounded gruff, either from anger or confusion.

  “They don’t want anything to do with me.Well—it.” She spoke with a lack of bitterness that struck Ricky as unlikely. Her head was tilted a little to the side, her eyes were mild, forgiving. She’d laid it all out with such poise, such tact, that Ricky thought if ever some blow were going to be dealt her, she’d want Jess to be the one to do it. In her mind’s eye she saw briefly, from earlier in the day, the stateliness, almost courtliness, of the paramedics.

  John, having taken the announcement of the pregnancy with apparent equanimity, became visibly upset when Jess described her parents’ reaction. “How can they say that?” he’d demanded. His consternation grew as it emerged Jess apparently neither had a plan nor felt the need for one. He kept asking different versions of the same question: “Where are you headed?” And later, “But how will you manage? What will you do?”

  To which she’d repeated, patiently, that she hadn’t worked any of it out yet; she’d simply wanted to stop in and see them along the way.

  “Along the way where? What’s your plan?”

  “I’m not trying to be difficult.” She smiled. “I just honestly don’t know.”

  Ricky heard the disclaimer not simply in practical terms, but as a larger, existential truth. I just honestly don’t know. She rocked in the rocking chair by the radiator and the ice cream melted in streams in her bowl. Of course what Jess said was so for everyone, for all time.You never knew what was going to be.

  John cleared his throat. He rubbed his fingers audibly against the bristles on his face. Ricky felt tender toward him then as she would toward a fretful child.

  John said, “Well, you need a plan.”

  Jess, betraying a shred of defensiveness at last, and sounding childish for the first time that evening, said, “I’m twenty-three. Four years older than you when you got my mother pregnant.”

  John’s brow darkly furrowed. “Well,” he’d growled, glaring for a long moment at his own bowl of runny ice cream, “I’m not sure how that relates to the present situation.”

  Ricky had laughed.

  The other two looked at her.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just . . . well, not funny, I don’t mean, but ...”

  She was aware of the yellow softness of the kitchen, and how small, how nearly doll-like they were, the three of them, sitting in their three chairs, sitting with their three bowls and spoons. The warmth she’d always held in reserve for Jess—well, perhaps not; but the warmth she’d always felt as a latent possibility—swelled, as though finally having received its cue, and she found herself resisting the urge to put her arms around the girl, make her promises. She’d settled for announcing, at last, that there’d be lots of time for talk in the coming days, and that now it was time for everyone to get some sleep.

  Once in bed, however, Ricky had felt untired, as had John, and they’d lain awake a long time dissecting and analyzing the situation from every angle, taking the aerial view and then zooming in to ground level, referencing the past, wondering about the future, until the quality of their talk developed a leisurely, almost recreational, rhythm and purpose of its own. Rather than wind down toward sleep, Ricky had grown to feel more lively as they talked, and John, if not entirely understanding this then liking it anyway, had been emboldened to move in and rest his head on her stomach.

  Each was surprised when her fingers found their way into his curls. It silenced them. John closed his eyes. He drifted toward sleep (he could do this very rapidly; it was the envy of his wife, this ability to slip so easily from consciousness into R.E.M.). Then all at once, he jerked himself fully awake: he had neglected to tell Ricky what Gordie had said about Biscuit and the ashes.

  John had confronted Biscuit about it, going to her room before dinner and closing the door behind him. “So what was that all about?” he asked.

  She’d played dumb. Ashes? What?

  He pressed and cajoled, tried concern and then anger, but she refused to acknowledge, let alone explain, her actions, until, “This is serious,” he’d said, raising his voice. “You could have drowned!”

  To that she’d responded with a small, sweet smile that walked the line between contrition and condescension. “Dad. I wouldn’t have.”

  The maddening thing was, he agreed with her; he could not help feeling she was right, that she was essentially not in danger. But what, then, was she up to? Why all the mysterious absences? Now, as every time, she would not say. She either remained stubbornly, serenely vague or affected lack of comprehension.

  At last John had heaved a sigh, rubbing a hand across his brow and down his beard. “It’s got to stop, Bis. That’s all I can say.”

  Although she had not voiced any argument, he knew already, as he left her room and went downstairs to start dinner, that his words would prove ineffectual and that he’d come no closer to understanding what lay beneath either her truancies or any of her peculiar, largely secretive activities.

  John knew he ought to fill Ricky in on all of this now. He would. He’d count to five and then bring it up. But how he dreaded saying even the word “ashes.” For all it would invoke.

  He’d already made sure, of course, that Biscuit hadn’t somehow found them. He’d done that first, before going to speak with her in her room. Right after saying good-bye to Gordie he’d gone straight up to their bedroom and looked in the closet, feeling around on the back of the high shelf where he’d buried the corrugated cardboard box beneath a mothy old sweater. He was the one who had hidden it, the only one who knew where it was, Ricky having asked him to take charge of it almost a year earlier. “Put it away somewhere,” she’d said dully from the bed, her eyes closed, her face turned away.

  But Biscuit was such an avid spy, and knew no bounds when it came to property or privacy. So that afternoon when John checked, he’d been relieved to find it still in its place, still sealed with clear packing tape. Relieved and then clobbered, blindsided: in his hands, in this small box, this small definite box with its definite dimensions, its definite significant weight, rested all that remained of his son, the son he’d never held in life, in flesh. It made the walls reel about him. He’d replaced the box beneath the holey wool and gone unsteadily from the room.

  John drew a breath to tell Ricky about Biscuit, but the mattress quaked then and Ricky was in flight, having extracted herself from under him and sprung from the bed in a single move, childlike in her fleetness. He propped himself on an elbow and watched her cross in the direction of the closet. For a moment he thought she’d read his mind, was searching out the box of ashes. But she went to her dresser instead.

  He waited, but she did not offer any explanation. “What are you doing?”

  “I think . . . I still have . . .” She was fumbling in the top drawer, groping around at the back, her arm thrust deep. She withdrew it, victorious. “Yes—I didn’t throw it away.” She brought to their bed a plastic bottle: turquoise, he could just barely make out.

  “What’s that?”

  “Prenatal vitamins.”

  “Oh, Ricky.” They’ll be expired, John thought but did not say. “Are you crying?”

  “No.” And it was true: her voice held no sound of tears. She set the bottle on her nightstand and got back under the covers. He wanted to comfort her but she seemed almost g
iddy, and it was she who placed a hand on either side of his face and guided his head back to rest on her sternum. He listened to her heart, felt it like a small animal stirring within her ribs.

  The ashes. Biscuit’s “ashes,” whatever they had really been. They had to talk about Biscuit. He lifted his head again, made a sound preparatory to speech.

  But, “Shh,” she told him, touching his mouth. “Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry so much.” And she undertook to stroke his face, the wiry coils of his beard, the smooth depression of his temples, his lips again. He held himself still and wondering, propped above her on his forearms, his breath shallow. She traced the frill of his ear, then the cord that led from the base of his ear to his clavicle. Drew the backs of her hands down his stomach. Slid her fingers inside the waistband of his pajamas. Here, without warning, was more intimacy than she’d offered since before the baby’s birth. He would not speak now to save his life.

  AT THE FAR END of the hall Paul was sitting up in bed, wearing pajamas and the porkpie hat he’d bought at a vintage clothing booth at the street fair last fall. He was drawing. He drew in bed whenever he couldn’t sleep. In the past his mother had reprimanded him for getting ink on the sheets, but as no sign of reform ever made so much as a cameo, she’d resorted to looking the other way (at which point Paul had spontaneously decided that pen and ink were too troublesome to manage in bed; now when he drew from a reclining position his implement of choice was his antigravity pen—the kind used by the astronauts—which wrote like a ballpoint but worked at any angle, even upside down).

  At the moment he was working on a portrait of his alter ego, gaunt and brooding. He wore a trench coat with the collar turned up. On his head, a porkpie hat, angled low. He leaned against a lamppost. Paul gave him dark shadows under his eyes. His own eyes burned with fatigue. He closed them a moment, the lids fairly creaking shut, like the metalwork door of a birdcage elevator. That was pretty good. If he were representing it in a strip, he’d draw it that way, two little metalwork elevator doors for eyes, and he would write in the word “CREEEA-KK.”

  Sleep eluded him by and large. It had for years. When he was younger, he’d get up out of bed five, ten, as many as fifteen times a night, going to his parents with minor, revolving complaints (tangled blanket, stomachache, strange noise, itch), which sometimes progressed, as the night wore on, to tearful, wordless appeals. His parents would resolutely walk him back to his room, and he would submit to being tucked in again, over and over, until exhaustion finally overtook him and ended the cycle until the next night. Paul had been aware, even at the time, of his parents’ efforts to suppress their frustration at these dramas that dragged into the early hours of the next day, and in a way their success at this was harder to bear than their occasional failures. Twice his father had punched a wall; several times his mother had wept and once she’d hissed at him to stop being such a baby. In the course of their desperation they had offered him, variously, relaxation tapes, warm milk and Benadryl at bedtime, a system of star charts and rewards for staying in bed, a system of time-outs and loss of TV privileges for not staying in bed, a beautiful green suede–covered journal in which to vent the ungainly thoughts that were supposedly keeping sleep at bay, and karate classes three times a week in which to vent his physical energy—all to no avail.

  Around the time he entered middle school, Paul had simply stopped going to them for help they’d never been able to provide. While the period that elapsed between hitting the sack and dropping off still often lasted several hours, it had become less fraught, if only because the guilt he’d felt over inflicting so much grief on his parents had been removed from the list of worries that continued routinely to visit him. Contrary to what his parents had so often assured him would happen, the worries, or state of worry, had not subsided with age. Some of the worries were concrete: he’d left his French book in the cafeteria, they were starting floor hockey in gym, he was confounded by cosine and sine, there was another birthday party he hadn’t been invited to. Worse were the nameless ones. When he’d been younger, they’d all been nameless. Paul could still remember hovering, pajama-clad, on his parents’ threshold, his throat and chest tight, his nose prickling with tears, and being utterly incapable of formulating a single word in response to his mother’s exasperated query, “What is it now?”

  Sometimes he suspected that his gravest worries remained nameless, that the concrete, identifiable ones that amassed in his mind were illusions, diversions in the service of a malevolent force whose sole purpose was to prevent his ever resting easy. It seemed to him that as the nameless worries were supplanted, or obscured, by more tangible ones, he was actually moving further and further from the possibility of freeing himself from their root cause. He didn’t like to think about this, but sometimes couldn’t help it, in the way that he couldn’t help picking at his hangnails, even when they bled and scabbed over. Sometimes he wondered if this all meant he would one day likely become crazy.

  All his worries, named and nameless alike, shamed him. Back when he used to go in distress almost every night to his parents, they had reminded him how lucky he was, how safe and privileged to live with his whole family, in a house, in a riverside village, in America—as though that would provide him with consolation instead of another burden, proof of his deficiencies. He was old enough to know his troubles were nothing compared with other people’s, to know the world was full of people with a reason, a right, to be unable to fall asleep. His own best friend, for starters. Baptiste spoke little of his life before moving to Nyack. The name of his village, Jacmel. That he’d worn an ironed shirt every day to school.That his mother still lived there, that she worked in a hotel, that she hoped eventually to come to the U.S. The very starkness of these details—and more, the stark way his friend delivered them, as if each fact were a single dry bean—convinced Paul that if anyone had cause for insomnia, it was Baptiste. Yet Baptiste exuded calm. Not calm: peace. As though everything yet to come had already happened. Sometimes, when Paul got worked up about some future event, Baptiste would try explaining that whatever was going to be would come about si Bondye vle, if God willed it. Paul was made uncomfortable by the submissiveness implied by his friend’s belief, but he couldn’t help envying Baptiste his faith.

  Paul envied Biscuit, too. His sister seemed never to worry, not even when, in his opinion, a little worrying might be in order. Today, for instance. It wasn’t so much the playing hooky as it was the biking right in front of her school, for crying out loud, and the part about going to the Hook and falling in the river, even though she’d sworn she hadn’t fallen, or wasn’t at fault, or whatever. Who else but Biscuit would manage to get herself knocked into the Hudson River by a rescue dog? And then there was the question of bringing home the strange man.

  Paul’s objection to this last was not on the grounds of danger. All you had to do was glance, briefly, at the guy—jockey-sized and watery-eyed, with his too-bright red hair and raw-looking mouth—to know he wasn’t dangerous. It was on the grounds of weirdness. Paul had pegged him as a misfit, an odd bird, and that was one thing this family didn’t need more of. Certainly it was one thing Biscuit didn’t need more of. Paul hated it that his sister had no real friends, no school friends, peers. His parents, inexplicably, did not seem to consider this a problem. But Paul knew what it could be like if you didn’t blend in, if you didn’t pass for being like everyone else—especially in middle school, where people were capable of calling you “Chub” to your face and your best friend, “Yo, Haitian”; of blowing milk through their straws into your tray of Fiesta Nachos or Teriyaki Chicken Dippers; worst, of ignoring you so comprehensively that it didn’t even seem intentional, until bit by bit the friends you’d had all through elementary school excluded you not out of malice but because you’d fallen off their radar screens—and you found yourself fair game for all the maggot-faced Stephen Boyds of the world.

  He gave his alter ego a knife, and with a few short lines showed how it gleamed un
der the streetlamp.

  This Gordie might be a nice guy, but encouraging a friendship between him and Biscuit—between him and anyone in this already too-weird family—was clearly a step in the wrong direction. Paul couldn’t help but blame his father, who’d not only invited the guy in but clothed and fed him, too. Not that he should be shocked; both his parents had already proven themselves legally blind several times over.They couldn’t seem to detect anything wrong with Biscuit, never mind that she had no friends her own age, cut school, and could frequently be heard whispering to herself in ridiculous accents. They couldn’t seem to detect anything wrong with him, never mind that he’d rapidly transformed from a happy-go-lucky kid who got invited to twenty birthday parties a year—everyone in his class—to a misfit loser with one measly friend—a friend who hardly ever even came over because of his misfitty Grann. They couldn’t even seem to detect anything wrong with each other, never mind that his mother had been silent for most of the past year, or that his father, for all his apparent optimism, was beginning to show fissures. But no, to hear his folks tell it, things were swell, everyone doing admirably, chins up, noses to grindstones, business as usual, soldiering on—like the very fact they’d all come through the past year made them heroes. Break out the purple fucking hearts.

  And now into all this appeared Jess, magically, like someone stepping through a looking glass, like a character in a book made flesh, standing in their kitchen, smiling at him, holding of all mugs his alphabet mug, like a sign, an omen, but that was stupid, but maybe things were about to change, maybe they’d already begun. Paul was still unnerved by the confusion he’d felt upon walking into the kitchen and seeing her there. He’d had a feeling it was her straightaway, although of course he’d needed his father’s confirmation, so many years had passed. “Jess as in Jessica?” he’d asked, pretending to be unsure but in reality covering for his shock, the mix of happiness and anger that had flooded him. It was as if he’d popped a handful of joke-shop candy, a rush of sweetness followed by the vinegary tang of having been tricked.