The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  She kept talking, or babbling, and he listened, following some of it but not all, noticing in any case less her words than her tone of distress, and also the distressed way she was kneading his hand, pinching up—as if absentmindedly—the loose skin around his knuckles, then smoothing out his joints, tracing the lines on his palm, separating his fingers, sliding her own between them, imploring him. She seemed, for the first time since he’d met her, much younger, rather than older, than her twenty-three years. She seemed about fifteen. Even her voice sounded younger: tentative and high. She was not crying but was in a state that seemed to him like crying, her words, her unstructured, nonsensical speech continuing steadily in the manner of tears.

  He’d struck a chord he’d had no intention of striking. She was a stranger—she’d never legitimately progressed beyond that point, no matter how much he might have liked pretending so over the past several weeks—a stranger who seemed at this moment both more and less authentic than ever. But when he folded his arms around her he felt not at all stiff, and barely strange. He was like Ebie coming out onto the balcony and resting her head on his thigh: a body that knew exactly what to do—not forever, not in all situations, but in this moment, for this time. He held Jess and took note of his ease, which was at once novel and native. How amazing. “Shh,” he said. “Shh.”

  5.

  As she explained to Ricky, Jess wasn’t worried. In fact she felt a little silly mentioning it. In fact she had not mentioned it at first, not for several hours after going to the bathroom at Gordie’s house and wiping and seeing the blood on the toilet paper. One reason she wasn’t worried, as she explained to Ricky two or three times (it seemed worthy of repetition; an important, determining fact), was that the blood wasn’t bright red. It was only a pale brown stain, like what you see (she said) when you’re about to get your period but it hasn’t really started yet. Another (this had seemed even more decisive a fact) was that each time she’d gone back to the bathroom since, there’d been no sign of blood, neither on her underwear nor on the toilet paper. Also, she’d read somewhere, hadn’t she (in one of the books on Ricky’s shelves most likely, one of the pregnancy books to which Ricky had specifically and generously drawn her attention), that a little harmless spotting in early pregnancy was common, or at least not unheard of.

  All of this Jess told Ricky in an embarrassed and strangely excited rush, in the upstairs hall that night, not long after Gordie had given her a lift home. To Gordie she’d said nothing. She’d taken stock in his little bathroom with its pill-pink fixtures and fluorescent lighting, staring at the piece of toilet paper with a kind of detachment that was at odds with her racing heart—first seeing: a mechanical, strictly synaptical act; then absorbing: the process of sight becoming reality; then evaluating: trying to assess the image’s possible import—in steps as distinct and methodical as that—the information contained in the definite but faint smear of blood, as innocuous in color as a residue of coffee around the rim of a mug. She had, after several moments, risen and flushed the toilet and washed her hands and washed her face and examined in the medicine-cabinet mirror her own face, which appeared the same as it always had, and as she always envisioned herself: practical, plain, steady of gaze. Then she’d walked back into the living room, where Gordie was kneeling before a low shelf of his dad’s boxes, and, kneeling beside him, did not mention the blood but resumed the conversation they’d been having about dollhouses and letter carriers, babies and art.

  It had seemed important to go on responding, if obliquely, to his charge of falsity, and several times during their conversation she edged close to telling him about her mother and father, how they hadn’t really kicked her out; how they wanted her home again; and how she missed them, and wasn’t sure herself why she was sticking around the Ryries, what it was she was waiting for, hoping for. She came close to telling him, too, how Paul had kissed her earlier that afternoon—wasn’t it terrible?—and how she was ashamed for him, and also sorry for him. But that wasn’t quite right. The truth (though she did not come close to telling Gordie this) was that she was ashamed of herself for letting it unfold as it had: the progression from mandolin to hat to wrestling match to bed. Panting and laughing, laughing and panting, pink and breathless and the bedsprings squeaking—as though she had been curious about her own power, had wanted to see if she could bring him to that point.

  Nor did she tell Gordie how she lay every night on the air mattress beside Biscuit’s bed making up stories, fashioning lies. A white vinyl purse, a sequined insect. Canadian coins. Mints. A chipmunk tame enough to eat from their hands. How effortlessly she’d gotten Biscuit to collude in those lies, to enjoy them, initiate them; how they invented together, night after night, weaving, in the glow of the night-light, a fake history: half sister and half sister both hungry for threads.

  Nor did she tell him how splendidly, wickedly easy it had been to gain Ricky’s affection; that simply by showing up pregnant she had gained a foothold on this most daunting task. More than a foothold—she’d reaped bequests. A turquoise bottle of prenatal vitamins; a mobile that played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” while cloth moons and stars perambulated; a half-shelf of books advising what kind of fish not to ingest, what kind of oil to massage into stretch marks, what to name one’s baby. All of these offered with an almost eager flourish, as though Ricky had been expecting her, or at any rate aching for someone to whom she might pass these things along.

  Even had she wanted to, she would not have had the means to tell how John, for all that he was unfailingly courteous, seemed in subtle fashion to disparage her, or despair of her. Or maybe what she sensed was simple distrust. She sensed it not in spite of his courtesy but as a result of it, the quality of his courtesy toward her being so careful, so considered. A few times she’d caught him looking at her with nothing in his expression—not admiration, or regret, or wonder, or even interest, really—but a kind of wary bemusement. Jess did not have words to describe this, not even to herself, nor to describe the pain it caused, a pain made sharper by this dearth of language.

  Instead of telling him any of these things, Jess had found herself talking about the baby, that invisible, impractical, incontestably real presence within her, as if it were the best, the ideal, response to Gordie’s accusation of phoniness. “In another month, about, I’ll be able to feel it move,” she mentioned, and, “The button on my jeans is definitely getting hard to fasten.” She noticed how rapidly each mention of the subject induced in Gordie an air of deference, a kind of carte blanche respect verging on awe and which seemed to assume her own superior fortitude, her sparkling, staggering grit. And she saw how it would be this way, how having a baby young and solo would assign her, in the minds of observers, certain qualities—or not simply qualities, but a certain command. She felt rich with it, fat and pleased with the creamy, private thought. She imagined herself with the baby—visible at last!—itself fat and creamy in her arms as she went about her business, walked down the street, mailed a letter, stood in line to buy, what?—milk, crackers, bananas—and no one able to accuse her of being fake.

  Reminding Gordie she was with child suited her purpose in another way, too, since pregnancy seemed (antithetically, when you thought about it) to exempt a woman from her sexual status, and therefore from behaving in any way that could be construed as flirtatious. With their tiff in this way safely put to rest, Jess had stuck around to help Gordie bring out the rest of the trash bags, after which they wound up ordering pizza (she was, she thought, just as glad not to sit opposite Paul at supper tonight), and then they had worked to identify the dozen boxes they imagined John’s colleague’s friend’s etc. would find most interesting, or relevant, or meritorious from an artistic point of view or whatever. After some congenial debate, they packed their selections into the back of Gordie’s dad’s station wagon and delivered them to the Ryries’.

  It was by then a little past nine. John had helped carry the boxes in. Biscuit, pajamaed, had clunked to her knees
and flung her arms around Ebie, submitting to copious, adoring slobber. Ricky had put the kettle on, and they’d all wound up in the kitchen except Paul, who chose to remain in the den, his porkpied head a stolid silhouette against the aquatic glimmer of the TV screen.

  It wasn’t until Jess was getting ready for bed that it happened a second time—she wiped and there was blood on the toilet paper, again not red and again not much, though more this time than last.

  For several seconds she just stood in the darkness outside John and Ricky’s room, underneath the closed door of which a bar of light shone, and argued sternly with her thudding heart against leaping to conclusions. Then she knocked.

  “Yeah?” It was John.

  “Um . . . Ricky?” Jess asked softly.

  A pause.The sound of pants. A man’s pants. Funny that such a thing had its own inimitable sound.The cuffs mutedly smacking the floor, the heaviness of the fabric being drawn up, the jostle of coins in the pocket. Involuntarily, wistfully, Jess pictured her own father, his distracted look as he dressed for work, his thoughts forever remote from things like pants.

  “What’s up?” John’s face appeared in the door. He wore jeans. His broad chest was covered in tufts of curly black, streaked heavily with gray, much more so than the hair on his head.

  “I’m sorry.” She was whispering. “Could I just talk to Ricky a sec?”

  He raised his eyebrows, stroked the wiry beard on one side of his face, then turned, opening the door wider as he did. Ricky was not in bed, as Jess had imagined, but sitting on the window seat, her knees pulled broodily to her chest. When she saw Jess she sprung up at once and pulled a robe over what she’d been wearing: not much, Jess glimpsed. Ricky came to the door, exchanging first glances, then places, with John.

  “Do you mind if . . . well, in private?” begged Jess.

  Ricky closed the door behind her and they moved toward the linen closet, away from all the bedrooms. There was one window at this end of the hall, set high in the wall, and through it a mingle of streetlight and moon washed her features as she listened to Jess whisper her news. Her robe, white terry, looked like snow in the light. She offered no reassurance but laid a hand very kindly on Jess’s cheek, and that is what started Jess shaking.

  THE QUESTIONS—“How many weeks do you think you are?” “What was the date of your last period?” “Have you had your pregnancy confirmed by a doctor?” “When was your last prenatal visit?” “Did you hear a heartbeat at any earlier exam?”—for all that they were put neutrally by the succession of healthcare professionals, those at Ricky’s own ob-gyn office and then by the nurses and technicians and doctors at the hospital, seemed to carry the air of the courtroom, of the cross-examination. Jess found herself responding as though she were covering for a lie, could feel herself reddening in a lady-doth-protest-too-much way, and on several instances she turned to Ricky, who sat unwaveringly beside her in each of the waiting and examination rooms (who had taken the day off work in order to ferry her to these appointments), and repeated the answer she’d just given, adding desperately, as if seeking to persuade, “My mother was with me! The doctor said it.”

  Although Jess was now thirteen weeks along, no heartbeat could be heard on the doppler, not even with the intravaginal transducer. She was sent for ultrasound, which confirmed the lack of heartbeat and put the gestational age of the fetus at seven weeks. “Seven?” Jess repeated hoarsely, and felt the world swing away from her. That meant it had been dead before she ever showed up in Nyack. Perhaps before the Greyhound left San Francisco. “Could be seven and a half,” the short man in the short white lab coat, whoever he was—she never saw his name tag—allowed, but he said it with such terrible, futile compassion that Jess understood it to be a kindness only.

  When they left her alone in the room—“You can dress”—she stood wiping off the gel in slow motion, staring at the nowblack monitor. Gone was the initial, unpardonable giddiness she’d felt when she first saw the blood. (What had that been about? Adrenaline? Gladness for any event linked to her pregnancy, any kind of outward manifestation of what until then had been a silent, unembodied, phantom fact? Or was it gladness for any event that called attention to her, period, anything that warranted her asking for help, for attention, from Ricky, from John?) Gone, too, was any sense of perpetrating a sham. Now that the authorities had detected proof of her failed pregnancy, she no longer found herself in the position of having to insist she really was pregnant. There was something, she recognized mechanically, funny in that. But she seemed to have lost, along with the giddiness and the queer sense of shame, something like proximity to her own emotions. In their stead was a well-water stillness, a thing deep and hard, with an aftertaste of sulfur.

  No, she replied blandly, obediently, to their questions, she had not “passed” any more “fluid,” “colored discharge,” “tissue,” or “clots.” She had not experienced any “pain or cramping” in her “abdomen or lower back.” She had no fever, no chills. Her options, she was informed, were “expectant management” (go “home” and wait for her body to “expel the fetal tissue” by itself; this could take “a few days” or “weeks”) or a “dilation and aspiration,” which, contrary to its hopeful-sounding name, referred to a “procedure” that used a “suction curette” to “empty the uterus.” Did she have a “preference”?

  “Jess?” Ricky prompted.

  She said, “I have a dead baby in me.” It was not properly either a question or a statement, but the dumb parroting of a sentence that had formed, seemingly all by itself, inside her head, and now required expulsion. “Take it out.”

  THEY WERE ABLE to schedule her for the following day, a piece of information delivered not quite grudgingly but with the clear implication that she was lucky in this regard. This still left nineteen hours from the time she and Ricky got home from the hospital to the time she was scheduled to arrive at the day surgery. Nineteen hours, stretched before her like a bridge, a grim, girdered span extending into heavy fog, appearing to lead nowhere.Yet crossing it turned out not to be hard, only joyless, only dull. She sat with the family at supper, ate a little chicken. Biscuit cleared her plate for her, and gave her a pat as she passed behind her chair again on her way to the den. After dinner Jess retired to the living room couch with her father’s paperback Whitman, which she thumbed but did not read. Paul, having apparently decided to play off their brief, mortifying entanglement as if it had never happened, stopped before her and said in a voice that might have been pitched for sincerity but came out sounding drily comic, “Uh, sorry about”—tongue click—“you know.” He had his hands clasped behind his back in what looked like mock-formality.“The pregnancy thing.” Perhaps it was simply a teenage boy’s valiant, dissonant effort to introduce levity into all situations, the sadder the situation, the more pressing the urge. She turned up the corners of her mouth dully. John had cleared off the mantel in the living room and lined up Will Joiner’s boxes in a row. He had not, he said, made the call yet to the art world friend, but he would, he promised, soon. Now, this evening, he stood before the boxes, examining them at length, making frequent appreciative comments, and Jess felt it was for her benefit and was not ungrateful.

  Ricky came to her later, knelt by the couch. “You must want to call your mother.”

  Jess shrugged.

  When Ricky continued to look at her searchingly, her brows tilted up in encouraging inquiry—as if what she sought was not simply an affirmative response but the whole story behind the purported estrangement, the mystery revealed, the offenses confessed—Jess proffered a tiny, empty smile, shook her head and turned her face into the couch.The truth was she wanted nothing more than her mother now, but how to make that happen when it would mean everyone finding out she’d been telling tales? That was the real unnavigable bridge, the span leading into blind mist.

  SHE WOKE FROM the anesthesia in tears and shivering. Her teeth chattering. “Do you kn-kn-know . . . ?” she tried, but it was difficult because of the
crying, which seemed different from her own crying. It was like a foreign species of crying, something she hadn’t remembered encountering but must have acquired while traveling far from home. “C-c-c-could you t-t-tell . . . ?”

  “All right, Jessica,” someone soothed, a woman, who adjusted something at the side of the shiny hard bed, and looked at something, a monitor, mounted high over her head.

  “C-c-could you t-tell if it was a b-b-b-boy or a g-girl?”

  There was the doctor on her other side now, she recognized him: Asian, elderly, with a wonderful mane of white hair and a peaceful, wrinkled countenance. “No,” he said quietly. He seemed to be taking her pulse, or maybe just trying to steady her.

  “I kn-kn-know . . .”Jess meant to say she’d known the answer, she didn’t want him to think she was ridiculous; she’d known the fetus got suctioned into a tube, came out unrecognizable as anything human; it had just not been possible not to ask. But these tears, this sobbing: it was hard to get any words by this kind of crying, so virulent, so thorough was it. A warmed blanket was placed over her shivering legs, and both the heat and the weight reminded her of being buried in sand at the beach.