The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  “Okay, Jessica?” said the woman again, or a different woman, but with the same professional brightness; there seemed to be various bodies, busy, unconcerned, moving efficiently about the bed. “We just want you to rest now,” said the woman, moving in and picking up a tube, something to do with the IV. “Okay? Just relax.”

  THE NEXT TIME she woke they brought her apple juice, and after she drank it they brought her Ricky.

  “How you doing?” said Ricky from the foot of the bed, and Jess started to cry, but this time it was regular, her own normal crying, close to soundless.

  Ricky, haggard-looking, smiled sadly at her. Jess wondered how long she’d been in the waiting room. This whole time? How much time had passed since she’d come out of the anesthesia and then gone back to sleep again?

  “Sweetheart, I spoke with your mother,” said Ricky. “I thought—we both thought—we owed your parents a call. Both of us talked with your mom, and John also talked with your father. You know, Jess, they’re not mad at you.”

  The intensity of her crying, though not the volume, increased. “I know,” Jess got out, though whether intelligibly or not she wasn’t sure.

  “They never kicked you out.” It was a statement, but one seeking confirmation.

  Jess managed a nod, pushing away the tears as they fell. “I’m sorry.”

  Ricky sighed.

  Jess cried and cried.

  “Poor Jess.” Ricky looked at her, touched her ankle through the blanket. “You’re young,” she said eventually. “You have so much time. And you know it’s common, don’t you? It doesn’t mean you won’t be able to have children.”

  All of this only made her cry harder. She managed to choke out, “It isn’t that.”

  Ricky came around closer. She perched on the wheelie stool beside the bed and brought her face near Jess’s. She took over the clearing of tears, stroking them away with her thumbs.Very gently, she asked, “What, then?”

  Jess’s whole face crumpled. She held her hands over her mouth.

  “It’s hard to let go of this baby, even if there’ll be others,” guessed Ricky.

  Jess shook her head more vigorously: no, not that.

  “What, then, sweet girl?”

  It was too much. Jess looked up, horrified. “I’m not sweet! I’m relieved.” It was as though a scream were being forced through a whisper-sized tube: an ugly, scraping sound from her throat. “I didn’t want it. I didn’t want it.” This was a truth she had not previously allowed herself to know, and now it had come out she felt fear creep into its place. The fear was not vague. It took the form of a certainty: from now on anything might happen to her and no matter how terrible it was, the worst part would be knowing she deserved it.

  Some time passed before the sobbing abated. Ricky did not touch her or speak, and Jess took this as a sign of disgust. But when she finally lifted her face from her slippery fingers, gulped a long shuddering breath and used the edge of the hospital sheet as a handkerchief, she saw that Ricky had not wheeled the little stool any distance from the bed but sat as close as before, gazing at her with sorrow and without judgment. And now Ricky plucked thoughtfully at her own lip, and drew a breath and gazed hard at the blanket, seeming to lose herself in contemplation of some deep and powerful interest, as though whatever she was working out was not for Jess’s sake only. When she looked up she said: “That might be harder.”

  Jess did not follow.

  Ricky spoke slowly, deliberately, as though the words would require time and great focus to comprehend. “Losing a baby you don’t want might be harder than losing one you did.”

  All around them were clean things: sterile, aseptic, hygienic. White and black and red and blue, metal and plastic, wired and motored, nesting and depending. Expensive things, each with its own highly specialized purpose, each invented, manufactured, purchased, and employed in the service of preservation of life. Tubing, buttons, calibrated dials, casings and liners, speakers and lights. They were the living things in this room, or not room but cubicle, this makeshift capsule enclosed by curtains on metal tracks. They, Ricky and Jess, possessed—were—the life that was the object, the sole point, of all these pieces of equipment, none of which could know or grasp or approach how muddy, how complicated and ignoble such lives might be.

  Jess let her head rest back against the pillow and closed her eyes, and the hot tears flowed again, bathing her already salty cheeks. “I don’t have the right,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “I don’t have the right to cry.” She spoke in a low, rusty voice, as if she were loath for anyone else to hear, to learn what they were, both of them, guilty of. Yet the thought that she was not alone, that Ricky must be speaking from her own experience, was also a relief. Crying blindly now, she reached for Ricky’s hand. Ricky held on, tightening her grip as Jess tightened hers.

  After a while Ricky spoke. “Listen to me.”

  She waited until Jess opened her eyes.

  “Are you listening?” Ricky’s eyes were dry. “It doesn’t have anything to do with right.”

  6.

  When she woke there was the sun already high in the sky, dappling the slim spriggy branches outside her window. The leaves still had that dainty, new-green look, the tree equivalent of baby teeth. Biscuit lay there, yawning, and saw there was a rolling wind that lifted the branches high and set them down at close intervals. There was something else, too, though she could not at first remember what.

  The space beside her bed was bare: no raft of an air mattress beached broadly upon the floor. The duffel bag that had lolled like a giant sausage in one corner of her room, and which had, week by week, gradually disgorged its guts as piles of clean and dirty clothing scattered and bunched and stacked in the area around it, was also gone. As was, she knew, though its absence could not be marked in her room, her mother’s mandolin, bestowed hastily in the moments just before Jess’s departure and last seen being handed into the back of her father’s pickup.

  It had been a loosely, laggardly frenetic departure, with no one directing it and none of them seeming sure how it was to be handled. There had been Jess, her hair still wet from the shower, a small cloth bag slung over one shoulder, sunglasses perched on top of her head, Congers Community College travel mug in hand, first standing by the open door on the passenger side, then going back in the house to the bathroom, then wandering out again and turning a small circle on the front walk, as if to take everything in one last time. There had been Gordie, insisting on carrying Jess’s duffel down from the porch, then struggling with it across the little lawn before handing it to Biscuit’s father, who would be driving Jess to LaGuardia, and who relieved Gordie of the bag and lofted it easily into the truck. There had been Ebie, trotting down to sniff at the bushes by the sidewalk, then doubling back in an ear-inverting bound to see where Gordie was headed with that bag, then putting both paws up on the tailgate as if debating leaping onto the truck bed, then bumping instead over to Biscuit for a stroke of reassurance before mounting the porch stairs to investigate the sound of someone else coming out.There had been Biscuit’s mother, who’d been outside earlier but disappeared mysteriously back into the house without explanation, reemerging now with the mandolin in its figgy case, and a flush traveled up her neck as she bent at the waist and spoke inaudibly to Jess, sitting on the bottom step, and then transferred the instrument onto her lap. There had been Paul, hanging back in the shade of the porch; he showed signs of having woken up only recently, but managed to deploy this sleepiness in the service of cool, with his bare feet, his ragged jeans, his undershirt and porkpie hat, which he’d slapped rakishly over his pillow-mussed hair.There had been Biscuit’s father, securing the tailgate, checking his watch, scowling across the patch of grass (that scowl a stranger might have chalked up to the sun’s brightness, but which everyone in the family understood to be a sign neither of anger nor of glare, but of knowing a particular emotional response was expected, and not knowing how to deliver it), loo
king caught off guard when her mother approached and, on tiptoe, slid her arms around his neck and pressed the side of her face against his chest, right below the throat. Seconds had passed; then he’d gone ahead and slid an arm around her waist. More seconds, and then he’d slid the other. Then he put his face down and rubbed his forehead, just lightly, back and forth, across the top of her mother’s hair. They’d stood like that for what seemed a peculiar length of time; so peculiar Biscuit felt she was expanding, as though helium were being poured into her body, filling it so completely that her toes might lift up off the porch and she might go floating out over the little lawn.

  It had been Paul, sitting on the porch railing, his big white feet half obscured by twining wisteria, surveying them all from above, who’d finally intoned, his groggy voice even lower than it had become naturally over this past year, so that it sounded like a radio announcer’s, gravelly and imposing, “Uh, not to break anything up, but does anyone here have a plane to catch?” Then Biscuit’s parents had dissolved their embrace, but slowly, her father turning back toward the truck, pulling a tissue from his pocket and blowing his nose, and her mother blinking and wiping her eyes with an embarrassed laugh and a comment about how bright the sun; and Jess rose from the porch steps, and Gordie held his arms apart as though someone had asked him roughly how big a Chihuahua was, a gesture Jess somehow understood was meant to initiate a hug. She disregarded the intended size of the embrace, though, instead flinging her arms around him with such abandon that she managed to whack him with both her shoulder bag and travel mug in the process. Then she’d turned toward the porch, shading her eyes. “Where are you guys?” Paul had shuffled down the steps onto the grass and removed from his pocket his right hand, which he extended in a gesture at once awkward and debonair. Jess stared a moment before taking it; while it was still in her grasp, she leaned in rather quickly and kissed him on the cheek. Then, “Biscuit?” she called. So Biscuit emerged, too, slowly, from behind the wisteria, which had in the past days begun unfurling its pale shag of purple clusters. Why now did she feel shy? She came down the steps into the sunlight and Jess kissed her cheek, leaving behind a tiny damp spot and the scent of coffee and of coconut shampoo.

  Biscuit’s mother was last to say good-bye, the one Jess saved for last. It had seemed to Biscuit, watching Jess go and present herself to Ricky, and on some level watching the rest of them watching—Paul, Gordie, her father, even Ebie—that this final interaction was like a little show, like a scene played out for them, the audience, if only because they were all watching. In any case it played out differently from the rest. Instead of throwing her arms around Biscuit’s mother, Jess clasped herself around the middle. She was smiling, but seeming to bite the inside of her lip at the same time, and her shoulders were hunched forward, her knees a bit bent and her nostrils flared. Biscuit watched as her mother put her hands on Jess’s elbows and brought her own forehead close, closer, until it touched Jess’s. They stood this way. Biscuit couldn’t hear what words, if any, her mother spoke, nor could she be sure Jess was crying. She did know that this good-bye, for all that it didn’t include a full embrace, was in some essential way more intimate—more adult, she supposed—than the others had been, and she had a peculiar reaction to this, a mixture of jealousy and relief, that in turn made her feel more adult.

  That had been a week ago. Now it was Saturday again; again not an ordinary Saturday, large and comfortably shapeless (in Biscuit’s mind “Saturday” evoked the color, texture, and amiable homeliness of a brown paper grocery bag), but one charged with purpose, with plan. She knew this much, lying supine, stretching her limbs luxuriantly, absorbing the fact of the trees tossing their newly frilly branches against the window; she knew it on the level of bones and tissue, of rapidly dissipating dreams, before she remembered in practical terms what that purpose was. Slowly it dawned, or rather solidified, the particulate energy that had been tingling, shimmering at the edges of her awareness gathering and assuming form: today was the funeral. She got out of bed. She pulled on her pilly robe.

  Downstairs she found her father sifting flour over the green mixing bowl. He wore not his ubiquitous costume of jeans or painty overalls but a pair of charcoal trousers, creased sharply down the middles, and a shirt with collar and buttons. And a necktie. Biscuit was pleased to see the tea towel slung over his left shoulder; it comfortably undermined the formality of the look.

  “Where’s Mom?” she asked. And without waiting for an answer: “Are we still doing it?”

  “Good morning.” Her father turned and smiled.

  “Good morning,” she complied. “Are we? Still doing it today?”

  His smile had a deliberate quality, its production seeming not so much forced as conscious, willed. Flour dusted his beard like fake snow in a school play. Gesturing behind him, he announced with delicate grandeur, “Pancakes.”

  “What’s wrong? Are we not doing it?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Mom and Paul just went to the store.They should be back any minute. Come crack an egg.”

  The eggs were already on the counter, ensconced in their clear plastic bubbles: two rows of pale dun. Some were freckled and some clear, some scabrous and some smooth. A suitable specimen, approved the white-coated scientist as Biscuit selected one with a smattering of little bumps. She broke it against the side of the bowl and pried the halves apart. The yolk dropped cleanly out. The whites drooped after. She saw the egg she’d cracked into the Hudson that rainy day over a month ago. Its last earthly ties, intoned the scientist, are severed by breaking an egg. She saw the twin jagged cups of shell floating on dark, pointy waves. Strange to think of what had happened since that day, the day Gordie came, and Ebie, and Jess with her baby inside her, hidden and already dead. Suppose her poor ritual, so full of substitutions and never properly completed, had actually set something in motion?

  “Beautiful,” said her father. “Do another.”

  Biscuit cracked the second egg into the bowl, then went and perched up on the radiator, its cold metal pleats pressing against her thighs, and watched her father mix the batter with a long wooden spoon.

  The egg in the Hudson was no longer a secret, nor were the fireplace ashes and chicken bones, the stolen library book, or her reason for setting fire to the upstairs bathroom. Revealing all had been something of a relief, but not nearly so great as the relief of having been, at last, made to tell. This had happened a week ago, just after her father came back from taking Jess to the airport. “Come on,” he’d said, “take a walk with me,” and she’d followed him down the street to the river, where they sat on a bench looking out at ruined pilings and the distant shore. It had been late afternoon by then and the water was sapphire, cold-looking on a cold spring day. Brave, early sailboats, just a smattering, tacked this way and that.They could hear, sporadically, the shudder and snap of the sails on the ones nearest them.

  They hadn’t said anything for a while. Some Canada geese had been strutting in their proud, ungainly way along the water’s edge. Biscuit admired their handsome black heads and white chin straps, but they seemed ill-tempered, almost devoutly humorless, and when they drew near she slid over on the bench a little closer to her father. At last he spoke.

  “The thing is, you can’t skip any more school,” he said. “It was wrong of me to let you get away with doing it so much.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Right. The skipping’s not. But not doing more to end it is. You can’t do it anymore, Bis. It stops.That’s one thing.”

  She sat curled tightly beside him, her sneakers up on the bench, tucked against her bottom, her arms locked around her shins. Her parents couldn’t stop her. That was a lonely, terrible truth, one which she’d discovered this year and which made her hate them a little. But he had gotten her attention. She was interested in the way he said it, the way he spoke as if he could stop her, as if his forbidding her were enough. They might pretend together.Though if she did stop cutting class, it wouldn’t be prete
nse, would it?

  “The other thing,” he went on, “is I need you to tell me what you’ve been doing when you skip school. I don’t just mean ‘I was at the Hook,’ or ‘I was home.’ I mean: doing what?”

  Across the river a train was gliding along the water’s edge. There were people in it, going north. She could not see them, but she saw their train and she held the idea of them in her mind. They could not see her, a speck on the bench on the opposite shore, but she was here, nevertheless; and she, too, was traveling, in slower fashion, following a kind of coastline, too, as faithfully and inexorably as they. It would lead somewhere else. Someday she would be someone else. A grown-up lady. As distant to her present self as were the strangers on that train.That truth, too, was lonely and terrible. She thought of the gray lady: sad and just and mute. Who marked her now and marked her then, who was acquainted with everyone she knew, including her future self. Perhaps—the idea caused in her a startling gladness—the gray lady was a piece of her future self.

  “It’s not a choice, Bis. I need you to explain.”

  He’d looked at her, stern and unwavering. She’d waited for this for so long. Biscuit looked away from him, watched the train recede from view. It faded into the landscape’s curves, its metal glint melding into the shimmering, scalloped distant shore. Good-bye, my darling, she bid it as the train disappeared, and whether she thought these words to the gray lady or as the gray lady she was not sure, but there were long pearl-buttoned gloves in the voice, and a hat with a veil, and expectance. And acceptance. Fare thee well. Until we meet.

  Biscuit unfolded her legs and stood.

  Her father touched her arm. “Biscuit.” He looked angry but sounded weary. “Tell me.”