Comfort

by Ann Hood

  MIRACULOUSLY, UNEXPECTEDLY, the fires changed course. Hillary’s wedding day had blue skies, sunshine, that drop-dead stunning view. Lorne and Sam and I sat together, crying, as Hillary got married. We didn’t have to tell each other what we were thinking. We all knew: Grace should be here. A line of little girls in colorful dresses led the wedding party, and I had to turn away from them to gaze out at the mountains beyond.

  Later, from afar, I watched this other Gracie playing tag, eating strawberries, sitting on her mother’s lap. I fought the urge to run from there, back to our condo with its new-wood smell and dangerously high deck. The stars hung heavily above us, and I looked up at them as if there really might be a heaven and Grace was looking down at Hillary’s wedding. But I didn’t really believe that, and my disappointment mingled with my grief.

  I overheard some women saying that Hillary wanted to start a family right away. Immediately, they said. I remembered Hillary cradling my baby daughter, holding her on her lap, the hats she made for her and the way she would smash garbanzo beans for her lunch to be sure Grace had protein. Soon, I thought, Hillary would have a baby of her own, and she would bring all of her love and creativity to mothering her own child.

  HILLARY USED TO make big salads for us at dinner.

  She painted the dingy walls on the third floor warm colors with names like buttermilk and mink.

  She gave us presents for our half birthdays.

  On Saturday mornings she made waffles with warm maple syrup.

  When my father was dying in the hospital, Hillary made pots of black bean soup and left me notes to find when I came home.

  She put quotes from Eloise beside the telephone.

  She planted pansies in our backyard.

  She spent hours with Sam and Grace, teaching them to draw. Even Grace, a little over a year old, would hold a crayon and fill a blank paper with spirals. After Hillary graduated and moved away, Grace kept drawing. Grace wanted to go to RISD when she grew up. She took special art classes, and brought home projects that looked like someone much older had painted or drawn them. Grace moved slowly. She took her time. In the morning, as I tried to get Sam and Grace to school on time, Grace would still be looking for her shoes.

  “Come on, Grace,” I’d yell.

  “You can’t rush an artist, Mama,” she’d tell me.

  Hillary did that. She had made Grace an artist.

  AFTER THE FLUSH of thank-you notes and wedding pictures, Hillary grew silent, adjusting to her new life. Back at home, we struggled to do the same. As time passed, our ache for Grace grew larger, more painful. I spent days sitting alone, simply missing her.

  One night at dinnertime, our telephone rang.

  “I’m pregnant!” Hillary told us. She was due in June. The baby was a boy. They had already picked out the name Henry.

  We gushed together over the phone. Sam and Lorne shouted their congratulations. After we hung up, we all sat back down at the table, silent. I thought of that red-haired girl at my door. Now she was an elegant and sophisticated woman. She was about to have a baby. Life was moving on, without Grace. As much as we had been forced to stand still, we couldn’t really.

  WHEN HILLARY CALLED to tell us that she was taking nine-month-old Henry to New York City to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates in Central Park, we decided to meet her there.

  It had been three years since Grace had died. Slowly, we were back at work, out with friends again. Our loss still filled our home, every corner of it. It still filled us. Time doesn’t heal, I had learned, it just keeps moving. And it takes us with it.

  That blustery day in New York City, when Hillary stepped forward with her baby, she looked as if she had been a mother forever. To me, she had. In the easy way she placed him in the Snugli to making sure he ate the right foods at lunch, I saw her younger self taking care of my baby.

  “I didn’t fully get it,” Hillary told us later that night. “I didn’t really understand what losing Grace meant. Until I had Henry.”

  I nodded, remembering those wildfires at her wedding. I never actually saw them. I just knew they were out there. Once, I would have believed that of course they would stay away. I would have believed that danger could be averted.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hold Me

  I WRITE ABOUT how Hillary cared for Grace from the day she was born. And I write about Hillary’s baby Henry. And I think about my babies. The first baby I ever held was my son Sam. I suppose over my lifetime babies had been put into my arms, but never newborns, and never for very long. Once I held Sam, however, I didn’t want to put him down. Ever.

  Despite the fact that he arrived at a meager four and a half pounds, his skin the color of ripe boysenberries, in my arms he felt just right. “You have to put that baby down,” my quartet of Italian aunts chided me. “You’re going to spoil him.” But I couldn’t put him down. I felt as if I had been missing a body part for thirty-five years, and now, at last, I had found it. At night, after I tucked him into his crib, I felt weightless, unanchored. As soon as he woke hungry at dawn, I picked him up and brought him into bed with me so that I could hold him again.

  I held Sam while I worked on my computer, when I cooked dinner, as I read the newspaper. Even when he was settled into the Snugli around my neck, I cradled him with my arms. I cannot say that holding Sam made me ecstatic, or superior, or even more maternal. I held him because my arms demanded it.

  Before Sam was born, I was not a thirty-something woman with a loud or insistent biological clock. My arms happily held lovers, cats, friends; they held bouquets of flowers and bags overflowing with groceries. Sometimes my arms were completely free. Unencumbered, I walked the streets of my Manhattan neighborhood with twenty dollars in my pocket, no purse strings attached, my arms swinging in rhythm with the rest of me. At twice-weekly ballet classes, I learned to form my arms into perfect arcs for each position. “Pretend you are holding a big beach ball,” my teacher commanded, and I held my empty arms in front of my chest, satisfied.

  But after Sam was born, my arms were full. They opened wider to accommodate my growing son. When he was two, they ached a little if I carried him too long or too far. He wanted to be held less, preferring to run full speed around my apartment, to walk in his father’s wing tips, to dance like mad to Beatles music. The less Sam needed my arms, the more they needed to be filled. Perhaps, I remember thinking, this is how families grow. A mother’s need for her child snugged against her chest, for the musty smell of the top of a baby’s head just beneath her own face, for the comforting weight of a baby in her arms.

  I still remember the last time I held Sam in my arms. Of course there were many hugs to follow, many evenings with him on my lap and my arms around him. But the last time before he grew too big for me to comfortably hold him, when he could no longer rest on my hip as we took walks together. I was eight months pregnant with Grace. Sam was three. We went for our usual breakfast at a local café. Parking was tight that morning, so we had to park a good five or six blocks away. Sam scampered ahead of me, as he still does when we’re out together. I shouted for him to stop at corners. To slow down. Waiting for me to catch up, he hopped from one foot to the other before racing away again.

  On the way back to the car, a half a block from the café, Sam suddenly dropped to the ground and clutched his knee. “I can’t move one more inch,” he said dramatically. Way off in the distance, I saw the shiny silver roof of my car. “You have to,” I told him. “I can’t,” he said, and began to cry. Awkwardly, I bent and picked him up. My pregnant belly kept me from holding him good and close as we made our slow trek to the car. Sweaty and out of breath, I buckled him into his car seat and said, “You’re too big for Mommy to carry.”

  A few weeks later, Grace was born. When the midwife placed her in my arms right after she was born, Grace looked right into my eyes with a steady, level gaze. She looked right into my heart at that moment. And it wasn’t long before the Italian aunts were chastising me again. “Put that ba
by down!” But again, I refused.

  A month after Grace was born, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. He spent the next six months, before he ultimately died, in and out of hospitals. With Sam happily in nursery school, Grace and I spent our mornings with my father. I sat on the edge of his bed, holding Grace close. Dressed in pretty dresses with matching hats, Grace nestled in my arms and looked out at the world with that same steady gaze. Already, her eyes were the same light blue as my father’s, and she would settle them on him and smile.

  As an infant, Grace developed all kinds of respiratory problems. Coughing fits, pneumonia, raspy breathing, all plagued her. I would sleep holding her in the crook of my arm, her head resting on my shoulder. So that I literally held Grace day and night for the first year of her life. When she finally slept in her crib sometime after her first birthday, I didn’t know where to put my arms without her in them. Although she snored through the nights, I struggled for sleep, first with my arms at my side, then with them bent at head level. Nothing worked. Until the early morning when she woke up, and I brought her back into bed with me, in my arms, and I could finally doze while she drank her first bottle of the day.

  Sam came into bed too every morning. Often, I would have Grace resting in my right arm and Sam cuddling under my left arm. I would close my eyes and, like all mothers, revel in the sound of my children breathing beside me and the warmth of them in my arms.

  Unlike her brother, Grace was content to sit on my lap and draw, or look at picture books. She did not leave my arms as she grew. Instead, she stayed close. After she finished eating dinner every night, she climbed onto my lap, wrapping her arms around me tight. I guess it is fair to say that when Sam was young, I held him in my arms; but Grace and I held each other.

  April of 2002 arrived with unusually hot weather. By mid-month, Sam was already wearing shorts and Grace was putting on her new hot-pink-striped capri pants and sleeveless shirts. One day, after we dropped Sam off at school, as Grace and I walked across the parking lot to the car, I bent and swooped her up into my arms. At five years old, Grace was tall for her age, but slender, with long legs that she wrapped around my waist tightly, giggling that her mama could still pick her up and carry her. I can still vividly feel the tickle of her fine blonde hair against my cheek that morning and her perpetually sticky hands around my neck. Grace had worn glasses since she was two, and her wire-rimmed ones bounced against my own tortoiseshell glasses as we walked.

  I can still feel the heft of my daughter in my arms that morning. I remembered carrying Sam those years before when I was pregnant, and felt grateful that Grace would probably let me hold her in my arms for some time to come.

  It was the very next day, that strangely hot and humid April day, when Grace spiked that fever and I raced her to the emergency room. I have told all of this before. But somehow I need to say it again, to tell you that a doctor took my daughter from my arms, even as I struggled to hold on to her, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Your daughter is not going to make it.”

  They tried everything to save her, and they failed. We watched through a Plexiglas window, me pounding on it hard enough to bruise my elbows and palms, calling out my daughter’s name. No mother should hold her dead child. But as I did, I could only remember how just two days earlier I had held her, warm and laughing, in my arms. How I had carried her to the car, breathing in Grace.

  When we finally left the hospital, numb and stunned, we picked up Sam at our friends’ house and told him the terrible news. That night, the three of us slept in one bed, holding each other until that cruel bright sun rose. Even then, I did not want to let Lorne or Sam go. I wanted to stay in that bed and hold them forever.

  In those days and weeks after Grace died, I walked the house as if I might still find her there, my arms aching from wanting her in them. I found a trail of sparkles she had left after she had finished one of her art projects. I found her new hot-pink-striped capri pants in a happy heap on the floor, and her leopard rain boots resting against my own yellow ones. Her glasses were on my night table, left behind in our rush to the hospital. Her stuffed dog Biff and her blanket that she called Cow were all still tossed on the floor at the foot of my bed. These were the things I held in those horrible days. I lifted them to my nose and inhaled Grace’s scent. I held them and cried.

  I have read that when someone loses an arm or leg, for months afterward they still feel pain in their missing limb. A phantom limb, it is called, as if the outline or shadow of that limb is still there. That is what my arms became. Phantom limbs, aching for Grace. At night I would wake up in pain, my arms actually hurting with longing for her. It is hard to imagine that emptiness can cause pain, but my empty arms ached.

  Sometimes, as months passed, I would find myself rubbing my arms hard, up and down, as if to bring them back to life, the way a person rubs their arms or legs when they “fall asleep.” But my arms did not come back to life. The ache remained.

  I tried to fill them. I learned to knit and held skeins of yarn in my arms. I held my dog, my books, my husband at night. But losing Grace made my arms emptier than they had ever been. Even now, as I write this, they tingle with pain. They reach out for what is gone. They have the kinetic memory of Grace, her soft five-year-old skin, her long legs, the tickle of her hair. I close my eyes. My arms are heavy. When I open them, I long for the steady gaze of her blue eyes looking back at me. They are the same blue as my father’s.

  But of course, when I open them, there is just the memory of Grace, the ache in my arms. Yesterday, Sam, now almost twelve years old, five feet six, so far from that four-and-a-half-pound baby I used to hold, came up behind me and picked me up. Like Fred Astaire lifting Ginger Rogers, he lifted me into his arms, ever so briefly. And in that instant I was in my son’s arms, I remembered how briefly I was allowed to hold Grace. Then he put me down and walked off. I stood watching him go, my arms at my sides, my phantom limbs. Sam was opening his own arms wide, ready to hold whatever came his way.

  That is what we all do, I suppose. We open our arms wide. We hold on. We hold on tight.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Staying

  IT WASN’T ALWAYS this way. In fact, I leave things: dishes in the sink, clothes on the floor, magazines on tabletops, empty coffee cups in my car. I leave movies that are boring and parties that aren’t fun. Once, in college, I left a waitressing job after an hour because they recycled the rolls from the breadbaskets. A few years later, in a bout of perpetual unemployment, I worked for thirty minutes in a travel agency before walking out. I leave the places I’ve called home with an ease and efficiency that is hard for some people to understand. In 1981, I rented the first floor of a renovated Victorian house in Marblehead, Massachusetts. A week before Christmas, I began to notice strange disappearances: the two sweet potatoes I left on the counter for that night’s dinner, the silver icicles hanging from my Christmas tree, my springer spaniel Molly’s kibble. One afternoon, staring at the missing pages of a paperback, a rat almost the size of Molly sauntered past me. The rat paused to check me out before continuing into the kitchen. I packed a suitcase and left, returning a month later only to salvage what the rats had left behind. Not only did I leave that apartment, I left Massachusetts for good.

  It’s probably no surprise that I also leave people. When I quit a job or moved away, I usually left the people who came with them: neighbors, coworkers, roommates. Sometimes I stayed in touch, but more often, either to put the bad stuff behind me or just eager to move into a new phase of my life, I simply left. When boyfriends got sullen, or disagreements grew too frequent, I broke up. Sure, I cried when “our” song came on the radio, called just to hear his voice on his answering machine, but that didn’t stop me from walking out the next time a relationship hit some bumps.

  There have even been a handful of times when I have left friendships I had thought would endure, not blithely but after feeling betrayed. I know that another kind of person, one who sticks things out, works on problem
s, has some character trait that I lack, would have fought to the bitter end to salvage even these relationships. That same type of person, I suppose, sends chatty Christmas cards to former neighbors and roommates; cries when she packs up her china to move; does her dishes and cleans her car; stays at the same job until she retires. Me? I leave.

  The one place I thought for certain I would never leave was New York City. The first day I moved into my tiny sublet on Sullivan Street, in a former convent painted pink, I walked the maze of streets that made up my new neighborhood and actually felt the cells in my body shift and settle. Standing on the corner of Bleecker and Third that hot June day, I knew that I would be leaving jobs and lovers and even the apartment where I had just dropped a Hefty trash bag full of belongings, but I would not, ever, leave New York City.

  A dozen years later, almost to the day, I was driving a rented U-Haul up the West Side Highway, watching my beloved city growing smaller in the rearview mirror. At thirty-five years old, I had fallen in love, hard and fast, and the man who was about to become my husband lived in Providence, Rhode Island. The night Lorne told me his plans for us—that I would move to Providence and live with him in a quaint historic house, that we would get married and have children and grow old together, I laughed and said, “I will never leave New York.”

  But I leave things. Even things I love. Even things I promise never to leave. So, with my cats screaming in their travel cases beside me and the truck bumping beneath me, with my future ahead of me, I left.

  THE THING ABOUT MARRIAGE IS, you’re not supposed to leave. You stand up in front of a hundred of your best friends and closest family members and promise them and the person you’re marrying that you will stick it out. No matter what. I know people don’t. All the time. I was even one of those people a couple years earlier, a person who left a marriage after five years. And having left one, the pressure to stay in the next one is even greater.