The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  But he waited.

  Something changed; something shifted in her eyes. Only then did he know he’d been right.

  “You mean,” she said, twisting the top sheet, “you mean about the baby. I knew. Before I told you. I didn’t tell you right away. Is that it?”

  He rose from the bed, hardly aware he was doing so, and backed away a few steps. “What do you mean you didn’t tell me ‘right away’? When did you know?”

  Just audibly: “In December.”

  It was so far from anything he’d guessed. It was as if he’d braced himself for a burn and been knocked down by a wave.

  She’d received the diagnosis of anencephaly at the five-month ultrasound, along with the statistics, the odds, and their options, and she’d kept it to herself—lied to him—not only throughout the rest of the pregnancy, which maybe, maybe he could have forgiven, could have tried very hard to understand, to chalk up to estrogen, the sanctity of a woman with child, all those things you were supposed to revere even though—or because—you could never understand them—but even after the baby’s birth, even as she held the baby in her selfish, unyielding arms, even after he died in those arms and was taken from them, she had preserved the lie, this lie she’d jammed between them.

  “Why?” John asked, holding himself very still, a necessary counterpoint to the maelstrom crashing within. The weathermap photo of the baby she’d brought home with her from that ultrasound and put on the fridge for the rest of the family to mull and coo over; this, too, he was realizing, had been part of the deception. It occurred to him there had been countless concrete instances between December and April when he’d made some comment about the baby, about the future, and she had let him, had actively allowed the untruth to flourish. The crib he’d bought and assembled. The newborn diapers. The mobile with the cloth moons and stars.

  “I didn’t . . .” Ricky looked at her hands, a piece of the sheet gathered in them in a small white knot. She released it, opened her palms to the ceiling. “I didn’t want anyone to tell me to end the pregnancy.”

  “You think that’s what I would’ve done.”

  “The woman, the technician, said it’s what most people do.”

  “I’m not talking about the technician.You think that’s what I would have done.”

  “I don’t know.” She’d shrugged her slim shoulders.They went up and down. She was a poppet, a little doll with alabaster arms and moving parts. “I didn’t want any counseling.” He watched her carefully, coldly. He had the feeling she was trying out explanations as they came to her. “Or consoling. I didn’t want sympathy.”

  “Or interference.”

  “No.” It was a statement of agreement.

  “You didn’t want my interference.” The word coating his mouth like ground aspirin.

  She shrugged again: the pale oblongs went up and down. He wanted to hit her then.

  “You wouldn’t let me hold him.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “No.” He cut her off. “I don’t want to hear you’re sorry. I thought you were in shock, totally undone. I asked if I could hold him. You remember? You remember what you did? You didn’t say no. You didn’t shake your head. You did nothing. Nothing. You didn’t respond. And I didn’t press. I didn’t ask again.” He stood and ran a hand through his hair. “You weren’t in shock.You’d known for months.”

  Ricky wrapped her arms around her knees, hugged them to her chest. “You can’t sit on the same bed with me?” He didn’t answer, and she answered herself: “You can’t bear to sit on the same bed with me.”

  “And then after,” John went on, as if she hadn’t spoken, “when you still didn’t tell me.When you kept up the act.”

  She looked up at him swiftly. Her pretty chin, her eyes even now spilling over. A trace of wiles? How could he ever know, now, how could he ever now judge what was real and what playacting?

  “What good,” she begged, “would it have done us?”

  “If you have to—” He reached out a hand and it met the wall. He steadied himself.“If you have to ask,” he’d said,“I don’t know how we can be together.”

  “John.” She rose from the bed so that she was standing, too, and he took a step back in case she thought she could touch him. “This is me. Please. I kept a secret. I thought it was the right thing. It wasn’t right, but I thought it was. It was hard on me. I didn’t cheat on you. It’s not like an affair.”

  “It’s exactly like an affair.” He thought—they both must be thinking, of course, and it was strange to consider, even in that moment, all the intimacies and history they shared—of the affair she’d had before their wedding. “It’s worse than when you had the affair.” He struggled to say why, to think why. He looked out the window at the lights of the bridge. “That was bad. It was a secret and a lie, but you could say, in a way—a stupid way, but still, you could argue it didn’t involve me. Directly.”

  He gathered up, almost absentmindedly, the extra blanket they kept folded on the window seat. He took a pillow from the bed.

  “John? John.” She followed him to the door. She was crying again. “You can’t look at me?”

  He looked at her. He looked at her. “This was my child.Too.”

  PART THREE

  This Year

  1.

  In the little park across the street from the Ryries, Jess lay on the grass mulling the advantages of death. It was idle mulling; she was not suicidal, even if she was feeling somewhat melancholy. And she was, she thought with a sigh, practical enough to tell the difference.

  Jessica Safransky was nothing if not practical. This was both a truism, cobbled from other people’s estimations of her throughout her twenty-three years (she had in fact heard the very phrase “eminently practical” applied to her on two separate occasions), and a point of actual truth. Lying on her back in Memorial Park, arms folded behind her head, the grass young and cool beneath her, she reminded herself, bracingly, of her eminent practicality. Beside her rested her shoes, a pair of scuffed brown clogs.

  Since leaving Berkeley, her moods had swung, uncharacteristically, between giddy excitement and dulling fear. These swings (reasoned Practical Jess) were hardly inexplicable. She was, after all, two thousand miles from home; hyperestrogenized; imposing on the kindness of a family that did not entirely belong to her; and, not to put too fine a point on things, lying to them. Still, the swings were disconcerting. She wished they’d go away.

  She closed her eyes and opened them again. The sky was an extreme, almost rude shade of blue. Lording-it-over-you blue. Bluer-than-thou blue.

  If she were dead all her mistakes would evaporate. Along with the puzzle of trying to unravel which things had actually been mistakes. She could tick off the possibilities on her fingers: sleeping with Seth; sleeping with Seth without a condom; not telling Seth the truth; telling her parents the truth; not getting an abortion; getting a Greyhound ticket; coming to the Ryries; lying to the Ryries.

  Jess sat up and clasped her bare feet. It was the third Friday; she’d been here two weeks, and she meant to stay longer. She felt on an island here, exquisitely removed from the rest of her life. The days were a little boring, yes; she took walks, read, napped.The napping! She’d never been so sleepy in her life, nor found sleep so delicious. And the rhythm of the days was the rhythm of other people’s lives, which was itself a kind of holiday.

  She’d wake each morning, on the air mattress in Biscuit’s room, to a distant electronic beeping, followed by sounds of shower and toilet, then of drawers being opened and closed, then of low-heeled pumps treading smartly down the stairs, and eventually of a car backing out of the drive. That would be Ricky. After a lull, in which she’d drift off, she’d wake a second time to a second round of sounds, some of them quite close by, some in other rooms: there were radio voices and live voices, the clamor of feet running down and up and down the stairs, of dishes set ungently in the sink, of the front door opening and shutting (many dozens of times, it
always seemed), and finally the revving of a second engine: the pickup truck, departing. That would be John taking the kids to school and himself to work. Through it all, Jess would stay put, luxuriating in the dual freedoms of feigning sleep and succumbing to sleep. But the moment each morning when the house grew empty and still, the moment when she should have been able to settle back into real unimpeded slumber, she would find herself unalterably awake.

  She would rise then, shower and dress, and go downstairs, her hunger propelling her toward the kitchen with an urgency she’d never experienced pre-pregnancy. There she’d stand, wolfing a bowl of cereal by the Dutch door, looking out at the neglected jumble of the backyard, its patchy crabgrass sprinkled with pine needles, its border crowded by bushes and shrubs all vying for what scant sunshine reached. A couple of squirrel babies put on a circus act each morning, using the clothesline for a tightrope. As much clowns as acrobats, they performed their scrabbling antics while Jess poured herself a second bowl of cereal and ate this one standing up, too, amused by the gaffes and recoveries of the furry gray siblings.

  Then she’d call her mother. Just the same, every weekday morning since getting here, as soon as she’d washed her bowl and spoon she’d pick up the phone and dial. Her mother would answer before the second ring. The mother she’d left in anger and for whom she yearned.

  Deena Safransky was a potter. Back when they’d lived in Elsmere she’d thrown pots in the basement, and behind their current house in Berkeley she’d built a small studio in a shed, so Jess had grown up always close to the rhythms of wheel and kiln. Her mother’s long, wavy hair had silvered prematurely, before Jess started grade school, and as a little girl Jess had assumed this to be a result of handling all that clay and slip, just as her mother’s smock and jeans and fingernails were always stained and spattered, streaked and flecked with palest gray.

  Strange to think it had been less than a month ago, that day—the day before she bought the Greyhound ticket—when she and her mother sat in the parking lot outside the obstetrician’s office and her mother begged her not to have the baby. Pleaded with Jess really in spite of herself, in spite of her long-standing and voluble convictions that a woman should be free to make her own choice on the matter, also in spite of her professions of faith that Jess would make a good mother someday. The car windows had been shut and the air felt too close, with Deena streaming tears, blowing her nose, wadding damp tissues, making points. She’d talked and cried at mind-numbing length, making her case, by turns, passionately, irrationally, resourcefully. Through the windshield, Jess had tracked the progression of women in various stages of fat-belliedness go to and from the building. Nine women in the time she endured her mother’s rant. Three alone, five accompanied. One with an infant in a sling. Deena argued, Jess began to think, with an intensity that suggested more than the moment, the particular instance at hand.

  “It’s what you wish you had done,” Jess said finally. A realization as much as an accusation.

  “It isn’t as simple as that,” Deena protested. After a moment: “And no, not in a million years.”

  But the order of her responses was as good as an admission, and the conversation had ended there, the tone of Deena’s belated insistence lingering, like something faintly noxious, between them.

  Her father, who practiced what Jess had long thought of, with amused affection, as a noninterventionist form of love, had not tried to influence her decision one way or the other. Bernard Safransky was ten years older than his wife. He was pear-shaped and wore bifocals, which, when he wasn’t reading, perched unstylishly on top of his head. His law offices were downtown, at the top of a tall glass building from which you could see both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate. He played clarinet to relax, and sometimes went around the house with a reed sticking, half forgotten, out of his mouth, the way another man might go around with a toothpick. When he was informed not only that Jess was pregnant but that she had decided to keep the baby, he had thought—you could always see him thinking—and pursed his lips as though sucking on a reed.Then he’d bent silently forward and kissed the top of her head in a way that made Jess feel both grateful and ineffably sad.

  It was Bernard who’d supplied Jess with her reading material for the journey—handing her, on the morning of her departure, his tattered paperback Leaves of Grass.“If you’re setting out to see America,” he’d said in his quiet, almost recessive way, “you could do worse for company.” She’d been touched as much by the unexpectedness of the item as by the fact of his giving her something. Who knew her father cared for poetry? Jess was curious about this heretofore hidden side of him, and as she read deeper into the pages, more questions arose. When, near Flagstaff, she’d come to the line “I know I am restless and make others so,” she’d lifted her head from the pages and stared out the window for miles, wondering what else she and her father might have in common. But Bernard Safransky was no good on the phone; she’d have to wait until she was home to explore it further. At any rate, she was not mad at him. It was her mother from whom she’d stormed in a huff (“Fine, then—you won’t have to worry about it. I’m leaving!”), her mother without whom she felt lonely, lost. Her mother she called, perhaps compulsively, at the same time every day.

  At ten in Nyack it was seven in Berkeley. Jess’s father would have just left for work; Deena would be awake but not yet in her backyard studio. They never talked long. They said the same things: sorry, mostly. How are you feeling? Fine. Do you have morning sickness? No. When are you coming home? Soon. Do you have enough money? Yes. The banality of the exchanges soothed and irritated Jess.

  But this morning, when Jess was once again vague about her return, Deena, unable to let it go, had fished. “Do you think you’re getting whatever it is you went out there to find?”

  “I didn’t come to ‘find’ anything. This isn’t a coming-of-age novel, Mom.This isn’t the Oxygen network.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  Jess sighed. “A cable station, Mom.You’ve watched it.”

  “I’m wondering if I should call John, speak with him directly.”

  “No.You should not.”

  “Why?”

  “For starters, because I told them you kicked me out and want nothing to do with me.”

  A silence and then: “Why would you do that?” Deena sounded as though she’d been pricked by a hot needle. She sounded like the vortex of all pain. Jess was reminded of the morning in the parking lot, her mother’s wet tissues and swollen eyes, her sense of injury, the tedium of it. “I can’t believe you would do that.”

  “I’m just kidding.”

  “Jessica.”

  “What? Sorry.”

  “Do you think they feel put-upon?”

  “What do you mean? No.”

  “You don’t think you’re outstaying your welcome?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Don’t be defensive. It’s just, they have those two little children. And I don’t know how the wife feels about you there. I don’t want—”

  “The kids aren’t little. And Ricky likes me. She gave me her mandolin.”

  “But are you—oh honey, are you getting what you want from this visit, what you hoped for?”

  “Mom. Yes. Whatever.” Deena would be happy, Jess thought, with nothing short of a full renunciation of any interest whatever in the Ryries. “I don’t hope for anything.”

  “Well,” said Deena. “I hope that isn’t true.”

  After they hung up a fretful melancholy set in. The way the call had ended. Jess shuffled over to the counter and began, almost without noticing, her third breakfast: the remains of the cake she’d brought back yesterday from the bakery in town. She liked to surprise the Ryries with little gifts, things. She picked at the remaining wedge with a fork. It had been left out on the counter in its cardboard box overnight and the edges had grown hard.

  She did hope for something. She only didn’t know what.

  She’d loved the Ryries since t
hat summer in her teens when she went camping with them. The fact that she’d narrowly missed being a full-fledged member of the family enhanced its allure, as did the fact that she’d had only minimal contact since. But her impressions of them, as well preserved and as limited in scope as the single roll of photographs she’d taken that summer on a disposable camera from the Cabruda Lake drugstore, did not mesh with what she’d found.

  Back then John and Ricky had struck her as excitingly in love, a couple almost at the mercy of their own passion. They had been far more physical with each other than her own parents ever were, making them somehow seem at once more sophisticated and more innocent. Her memories of Biscuit were a toddlerish blur, but Paul had left a distinct impression: a slender stalk of a boy with white-gold hair and teeth like so many mini-Chiclets. She remembered him always moving, full of vigor and light.

  The disconnect between these memories and the Ryries as they appeared now was disquieting. People changed, of course—but this was like a different family. It was like being a loyal fan, president of the fan club, and finally meeting the object of your adulation only to have your attentions dismissed. No, that was wrong—no one had dismissed her. It was more like finally meeting your favorite star only to find him flatter, more ordinary, than he appeared on screen. At least they had been kind, invited her to stay. Ricky of all people had been the warmest, shown the most overt interest. She’d made up the bed for Jess, had given her the bottle of prenatal vitamins, had offered, on the second day, use of her mandolin.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Jess had breathed, sitting on the end of Ricky and John’s bed and examining the instrument, running her fingers lightly over its bowl-shaped back, its mother-of-pearl inlays. She tried out some guitar fingering, then lightly stroked the neck. Looking up, she saw Ricky watching her with keen, almost hungry, interest. “Are you sure you don’t mind me playing it? It looks brand-new.”

  “It is,” Ricky answered. “John gave it to me for my birthday.” And she pulled a little face, as if Jess ought to agree this made him somewhat ridiculous.