The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  Deena had been adamant not only about marriage; she’d made it clear he was to have no role whatsoever in the baby’s life. “I’m going to be a single mother,” she’d informed him back in the fall. “You won’t be part of us. I’m going to raise her on my own.”

  When he’d protested (though again, he wasn’t sure he quite meant to protest; he hadn’t figured out whether her decision constituted more of a deprivation or a reprieve for him), she’d pointed out, not unkindly, “I could have not even told you I was pregnant. I could have told you it was someone else’s.”

  She was pre-law, Deena.Years later, after getting her J.D. and passing the boards and marrying Bernard Safransky, whom she met at Cardozo and who specialized in intellectual property law and who made shitloads of money, it seemed, from the get-go, she would chuck it all for throwing pots. But back then, whether he was sitting at Sbarro’s with her in the student center or standing on the doorsill of her private room at North Shore University Hospital six months later, clutching a bouquet of pink carnations rather too hard, John couldn’t help deferring to the future attorney in her, the litigator against whom it was useless to fight—and it was her, not Mrs. Levin, to whom he appealed for permission to hold the baby, this once.

  “Well . . . okay,” Deena said with an eye roll that seemed to imply, devastatingly, that it didn’t even really matter, and she’d rung for the nurse to bring the baby, who was staying in the nursery between feedings so that the new mother could get some rest.

  Mrs. Levin, whether in protest or out of consideration, had vacated the visitor’s chair in pursuit of a cup of decaf, so John had a comfortable base from which to support his infant daughter, whom he held reverently for twenty minutes—or five, or forty; he was out of time, lost in time—until Deena had looked up from the pages of the magazine she was flipping through and said, with unexpected gentleness, “You’d better go now, John.”

  Obediently he’d risen, then looked around, at a loss for what to do with the baby in his arms. Carry her back to the nursery? Ring for the nurse?

  Deena patted the bed. “Bring her here.”

  He’d passed his daughter, in a kind of slow motion, into Deena’s arms. Only once his own arms were absent the specific weight of her body did he have the sickening realization that the baby had slept the entire time. He thought of asking permission to wake her, so he might see her eyes open just once. But Deena had already fitted her, neat as a puzzle piece, in the crook of her arm, the little face tucked in against her mother’s breast so that all he could glimpse now was the smoothness of her cheek, the round back of her head.

  Then he’d been standing once more on the doorsill, threatening to combust with a grief he hadn’t anticipated, barely able to answer when Deena wished him luck.

  The rush of years between that moment’s pain and this blindsided him. No one, not once in all the intervening time, had ever suggested what he’d done was wrong. But that changed nothing. On the stairs, cradling his son’s mug, John bent his head, closed his eyes. The air smelled acrid, as though the memory secreted actual physical properties into the environment.

  He wondered if everyone, in the end, found himself in need of redemption.

  Jess had not, of course, been his only accidental offspring.The baby they’d lost had been unplanned. He was conceived, plain and simple, out of haste and lassitude—John aware that if he paused to get a condom, Ricky might lose purchase on the moment’s rare passion; Ricky, aware that she played bad cop all too often, wanting the relief of playing good cop this once. And although, some weeks later, when their risk had proven consequential, and they had agreed to make room in their family for the manifestation of that consequence, they had not done so enthusiastically. John had been guilty during the first trimester of contemplating (with, yes, something like hope) the increased risk of miscarriage in women over thirty-five. When he, as if in penance for this unvoiced fantasy, offered the idea that Ricky might like to give up her job and stay home with the children, she had not fallen into his arms in gratitude. She had said, “And live on what? What you make?” They had argued then, wantonly, imprudently, about money and responsibility, about who worked harder and who wanted what, bringing up never-before-aired grievances and naming weaknesses that were close to the core of each other’s character. And later all of this seemed to have set the stage for the baby’s death, as if his swift passing out of their lives came in horrifying deference to their wishes.

  If suffering could ever be considered payment for wrongdoing, he did not know. But he knew it had been a mistake not to speak these things earlier, not to insist he and Ricky speak of them together, all their ugly, half-hidden truths. He should have confessed from the start his lack of desire for another baby; his fear that if he told her she would despise him; his fear that she had grown to despise him anyway; his suspicion that her refusal to express anger signified a withdrawal of her love—or worse, cast aspersions on his love, called it into question. And how much did he love her? These days. Did he even know, or was that something else he’d lost sight of, grown insensate to? He remembered then, with a terrible lurch, that he had yet to tell Ricky about Biscuit and the ashes. He felt suddenly afraid, as though through long negligence he’d put his family in a kind of peril.

  When the alarm went off, piercing his thoughts, it hit him almost with relief, as though it were something that had been gaining on him for ages, something he’d been staving off but which now at last had arrived. So powerful was this impression that it took him a moment to realize the sound was real, and that what he’d been smelling was smoke.

  5.

  Want to go to the Skylark?” Paul was conscious of wheezing a bit. He’d hurried to grab his things from his locker, stuff them in his knapsack, and reach Baptiste at his own locker before he’d gone. He had the feeling of needing urgently to put something right between them, mend a rift, explain himself—even though Baptiste couldn’t possibly have known about science class today, the things Prager and Boyd said, the foul coating they’d left.

  “Can’t.” Baptiste, crouching, sorted leisurely through the books on the floor of his locker, all covered in brown paper, all notably unsullied, considering it was three-quarters of the way through the school year. Considering Paul’s own textbook covers were worn, ripped, adorned with so many layers of ink and Wite-Out and marker and graphite they stained his palms. Baptiste’s books were unblemished, devoid of all marks except the titles, copied out in his distinctive, angular hand. He hefted The World and Its People, slipped it into his pack. “My Grann.”

  Paul clicked his tongue. “Yo, she doesn’t even get home till later.”

  Baptiste shook his head. “I can’t, man.”

  “I got money.”

  “It’s not the money.”

  It was the same frenzied hallway it always was after the bell, the same bodies jostling, same lockers slamming, same conversations and instrument cases and body odor and lunch tickets, but Paul felt it all fundamentally shift. As though transposed into another language. His baseless fears were not then baseless after all.

  “Why?”

  Baptiste stood. He closed his locker. Some girl nearby shrieked, shrill as tacks on glass.

  “Dude. Why?” Yes, his voice did crack as he said this; yes, it did switch registers, making him sound every bit as desperate, as panicked, as he felt.

  Baptiste turned and looked at him, close mouthed. So he had heard. Ryrie’s a homo. Ryrie’s sister’s a retard and his parents are freaks. What else? They had a freak baby and it died and now the whole family’s wack. What else? Did you see Ryrie checking out Boyd’s shorts? Did you see Ryrie checking out Boyd’s ass? Did you see him drawing knives and shit in his notebook? Did you see that look he gave you? Did you see the way he looks?

  “Yo, if you don’t want to go, just say it,” Paul said. “Don’t say you ‘can’t.’”

  Baptiste sighed. “It’s truth, yo.”

  “All right, then, how come?” Maybe Baptiste had
n’t heard. Or maybe he’d heard and didn’t care. It hardly mattered, since Paul could not keep from pushing, needing. One day he would tick Baptiste off and then he’d have zero friends. No time like the present. “You can’t say why? ’Cause you’re lying, that’s why.”

  Baptiste shook his head slowly. He let out a silent laugh.Then he was walking down the hall, but with his pace inviting Paul to fall in beside him. At least that was one way to read it. Together they threaded among the dramas that did not involve them and yet did, that were part of their world: girls whispering, shrieking, whipping their long hair this way and that; boys leaning over them and smirking, then lurching back and throwing things,Yo, catch! playing keep-away with whatever: a juice box, a love note, a cell phone, an Ugg.

  Outside, away from the building, Baptiste stopped and turned to Paul. He said, in the manner of someone divulging a great and volatile secret, “My mom’s coming. My mom and my little sister. From Haiti.” He pronounced it “Ayiti.”

  “Whoa. What, you mean like, today?”

  Baptiste nodded.

  “I thought you said she died.”

  “Dude. My other sister.”

  “I didn’t even know you had another sister.”

  “Tifi.The little one.”

  “How old?”

  “Eight.”

  They resumed walking and when they came to the spot, veered off the road the buses used and took the shortcut down the grassy hill. The apple trees, remnants of an old orchard, were frilly in bloom. Paul’s feet slapped the earth. His Doc Martens, his fat black shoes. Flam, flam, flam. Clown feet. Beside him Baptiste walked like a cat.

  “They’re coming to live? For good?”

  Baptiste nodded.

  “That’s cool,” said Paul, but he was not sure. The relief he felt upon learning that Baptiste had real reason not to go with him to the Skylark today was already being replaced by a different anxiety. He was accustomed to Baptiste having only his Grann, the austerely weary Mrs. Lecompte with her superstitions and certainties, her weirdly staunch fear of intruders with knives. He was accustomed to the idea of the dead father, the dead sister, the mother stripping and making up hotel beds on an island so remote and poor she, too, might as well be no more than a memory.True, Baptiste had voiced hope that his mother one day would come to live with him, but hadn’t this been understood to be a wan, even obligatory, dream? Paul was accustomed to Baptiste’s faint, sweet air of longing, or (si Bondye vle) not longing, but resignation to lack. Above all, he was used to being the anomaly in Baptiste’s life, the deviation from the mean. He did not know what use Baptiste, lacking loneliness, would have for him.

  They were in the thick of the old orchard now, the trees stooped and hunched like crones all around them, their pale blossoms astir with bees. In the distance, a school bus heaved down the road, carrying its burden home. Seen from afar, school buses were happy things. “When’s the last time you saw them?” Paul asked, thinking curiosity might be courteous; being also, in fact, curious.

  Before Baptiste could answer a voice assailed them: “Hey, Ryrie. Heard you like chocolate.That true?”

  It came from overhead. They both looked up. It was Prager, that sociopath, crouched in the lower branches of a knobby tree. He looked funny, crouched like that, his feet on one branch, a hand hanging on to a higher one; you could spot the primate in him, you could grasp the verity of evolution, seeing him there.

  Paul stood still. He heard Baptiste mutter, “Just ignore him, man,” could feel Baptiste willing him to move on.

  But Paul, working hard to keep his voice in the lower register, responded. “What did you say?”

  “You heard.” Prager dropped to the ground. He stood a few inches shorter than them, but it played as no disadvantage. The muscular breadth of his chest and shoulders—Paul could picture him lifting free weights in his basement or garage, rep after rep, pumped—struck him as grotesque, not in themselves, but for the way they made obvious a kind of effort and aspiration. Prager’s Adam’s apple was a protrusive, hypnotic lump; his voice seemed to emanate directly from it. “I asked if you like eating chocolate bars.” His eyes flicking to Baptiste.

  “Fuck you,” Paul said, but breathily, without conviction. A hoot of laughter came from higher up in the tree, and a Slim Jim wrapper floated down. He looked up, trying to appear bored. It was Kenneth, Kenny Something; Paul didn’t really know him. He was an eighth-grader, with coppery hair and a leather wristband. Paul had admired his skateboarding skills from afar.

  “You’d like that, huh?” sneered this Kenny now, clambering down a ways and dropping beside Prager. He’d dropped from so high that his hands touched the ground when he landed, but when he straightened he was taller than any of them, and didn’t bother brushing the dirt off his palms.

  Paul had not moved. He saw, from the way Kenny regarded him, that while he had imagined his immobility conveyed strength, this was not necessarily so.

  “I told you, man,” Baptiste said, louder this time, “just walk away from these assholes.” He began to do exactly that, stride on through the orchard, and Paul saw too late that he should have followed this advice in the first place.

  Still he remained unmoving, even as he watched Kenny’s foot come up, watched it connect with Baptiste’s backside, watched Baptiste stumble forward and sprawl flat, his backpack flying off his shoulder and skittering down the slope. He watched Baptiste scramble to his feet and swivel around, looking from Kenny to Prager and back as if trying to figure out which had done it. He had grass stains on his shirt, dirt on his face, blood on his teeth. He spat. Kenny and Prager were laughing. Baptiste said something in his language. French, Paul used to think it was, but Baptiste said it was Creole. The words came out in a torrent, rapid and full of vitriol.

  “What the fuck is that,” said Prager, “voodoo?” and he and Kenny laughed harder and more derisively, as if by cursing in his mother tongue Baptiste had contributed to his own humiliation.

  The filthiness of their laughter—the incongruity of it, amid all the creamy blossoms, all the languid, unbothered bees—seemed to Paul to break with reason.The world about him reeled.

  Justice would have been a black panther springing, saliva pouring from its fangs as it lunged; an invisible, pitiless hulk with a knife, ripping his blade jerkily upward through their spinal columns. So quickly he didn’t have words for the action, Paul charged them from behind. He punched Prager in the side of the head, hard enough to make him stagger left, hard enough to feel pain in his own knuckles and wrist, reverberating straight up along the nerves of his arm. He pivoted, his hunger whetted, wakened, lusting now for a second taste of this, but Kenny was fast. Kenny looked older than fourteen, come to think of it, looked like he might have been left back a grade or two. That was Paul’s oddly detached thought as Kenny’s foot rammed his gut. He heard a dismaying sound come from his throat as he went down: a moist, involuntary expulsion.

  He landed on his rump, which did not hurt, clutching his middle, which did, unable to retch for want of wind. The tears in his eyes infuriated him; they were a result of physics, mechanics—not emotion. Or if emotion, then only the cold burn of frustration, of having been robbed; he ached to feel his fist impact Kenny’s face.Yet somehow he was down here, an ungainly clod on his ass, the wind knocked out of him, ineffectual once again, while Kenny was up there, sneering. And ugly—so ugly!—all things ugly gathered and amplified in the squint of his eyes, the curl of his soft, freckled lip.

  For just a moment then things turned brilliant, became the living realization of Paul’s comic book fantasies, as, from nowhere, flashed Baptiste, lissome and gleaming. He seemed actually to enter the frame horizontally, as in a kung fu movie. He grabbed a fistful of shirt and jabbed, and his fist landed with an audible crunch—surely it had made a crunching sound, or maybe that was only the sound of twigs underfoot, or the sensation of Paul’s own ribs expanding as air at last rushed to fill the vacuum of his lungs, a sensation at once reassuring and se
aringly painful. But this much was true: Baptiste’s fist came away bloody. This, too, Paul saw as though on screen, the cinematic surprise of crimson glistening on Baptiste’s brown knuckles, and the whites of his eyes very bright as he regarded, amazed, what he had done. Kenny, whose face Paul could not see, drew his arm back in what seemed almost leisurely fashion—as if the whole thing were a play-fight, boys acting out their fantasies in slow motion—then brought the point of his elbow smashing against Baptiste’s chest. Baptiste staggered several steps back, doubling at the waist. Kenny finished with a kick in the balls and Baptiste dropped to the ground.

  Through this Paul was aware, dimly, of other kids not far from them, classmates cutting in twos and threes through the orchard. If any noticed a fight going on (and how could they not?), they gave it wide berth. They were like figures belonging to another world, and they passed as no more than slivers of clothing and fragments of speech through the flower-studded branches. It lent the whole scene an inconsequential, almost serene, air, as if it were no more than a skit or a dream.

  In the next instant, though, any illusion of serenity dissolved. Prager, having recovered (sort of: he was openly crying) from the blow to the side of his head, appeared above Paul, raging with a shrillness that bordered on hysteria: “You fucker, you motherfucking dirty fucking gay retard cocksucking shit . . .”

  “Hit him.” Kenny’s face, too, appeared above him now. Blood ran thickly from his nose. He kept wiping it with his arm. There was something horribly workaday in his tone as he coached Prager: “Get him back.”