by Jill Barnett
My mind flashed with the image of Jack Nicholson’s M & Ms separated into jars by color in As Good As It Gets. I wondered if grief could make you OCD. I shoved the hair out of my face—when did I wash it last?—and caught a whiff of lemon oil in the air, which felt kinetic, like it could bend spoons.
For someone who couldn’t feel anything for weeks and weeks, I was acutely aware of the hair on my arms and the back of my neck, and I sat down hard on the bed, hugging myself, looking around and feeling lost, then dragging my nails down my arms because my skin was so itchy.
Was it really possible? If he were there, maybe he could talk to me, like the Ghost and Mrs. Muir or Topper. “Mike?”
Nothing.
“Mike? If you’re there, give me a sign.”
I saw no floating pictures, no rattling of chains, or visions of my husband.
Those kind of things only happened in movies and books and TV, fiction from someone’s vivid imagination. Deep down inside I had to believe the persons who wrote those stories had lost someone very close to them. You so desperately want another chance.
Outside the first morning sunlight was coming up in the eastern horizon, and the flower box hanging on the iron balcony spilled impatiens the same salmon, violet, and neon pink as the edges of the dawn sky. I heard Mickey’s alarm go off down the hall, and a few moments later the rush of water from his shower.
For years at that time of the morning, when outside the city stood still, I would be sitting in bed, sipping coffee Mike had brought me, reading the paper or a book, my quiet time before I had to get up and make breakfast if Mike hadn’t already. Now I would have given anything for some chaos and noise, for the sound of Mike on the treadmill in the next room or in the shower. He sang horribly.
I laughed out of a lost habit; it sounded as odd to me as speaking in tongues. My eyes burned with tears and my throat tightened. The reflection in the wall mirror was a pale image of me I barely recognized. Most days my skin held no color, as if my crying had drained it all away. I laid down to get away from what I saw, and there I was crying again, so I reached for the damned Kleenex box, one that was still embossed with gold Christmas ornaments.
Then I saw our photo was gone. It had been there last night. I was sure I remembered looking at it when I got into bed. For years I had looked at that photo of us before turning out the light.
Perhaps I knocked it off last night while tossing and turning and trying to find sleep, and sadly, another vision of my dead husband. I rolled over and looked on the floor beside the nightstand. Nothing was there.
Then I hung off the side of the bed and pushed back the dust ruffle and saw only a forgotten Ab machine that needed dusting. I slid to the floor, cheek pressed to the wool carpet, and looked under and behind the bed, opened the nightstand doors, but slammed them shut quickly to keep a shaky stack of out-of-date Oprah and Coastal Living magazines from falling out.
I had turned into a packrat who kept everything. Too much had been thrown out already in the name of good sense.
And I hated to admit it, but I had been doing strange things when I did sleep. I awoke in the bathtub once and honestly didn’t remember getting into the water, and again in kitchen, where one night I was standing in the pantry as if I were ready to cook something.
Every night I slept in the middle of our king-sized bed because I didn’t have “a side” anymore. Sometimes I would wake up and believe I was somewhere else altogether, on good nights in a parallel universe where Mike was still alive and he laughed at me and told me everything had been a horrible mistake.
I got up off the floor and pulled open the nightstand drawer. Next to my hand cream was the photograph turned face down. When did I put it there? Why? Waking up in the bathtub, standing disoriented in the kitchen, hiding pictures? I was losing my mind. Widows did that.
I put the photograph back to its spot between the Bose and the lamp and walked out of the room without looking back. Mike’s shoes weren’t in the corner. His clothes weren’t in a mess on the floor by the hamper. No wet towel was thrown carelessly on the bathroom floor. No scent of his shaving cream hung in the bathroom air when I first walked in, or toothpaste stuck on the side of the sink. His belt wasn’t slung on the doorknob. But by God that picture would stay right where it belonged.
On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-February, I answered the door to two pounds of Belgium chocolates and a huge bouquet of gorgeous, blood-red South American roses the size of your fist, arranged in an extravagantly expensive crystal vase, along with a note from my dead husband.
To my only Valentine,
Love always,
Mike
I sank down on the marble steps to our living room, hugging the vase at my side as the heady scent of red roses surrounded me, the chocolate box balanced on my knees. What I should have done was call the florist then and there and cancelled Mike’s standing order. Instead, one by one, I ate the whole box of chocolates.
A few weeks later, on my birthday, a box needing a signature was delivered from Cartier in Union Square. Wrapped inside was the pave diamond panther bracelet I had been telling Mike about for so long. When had he done this? I wished I would have known the exact day he’d had me on his mind, because unlike the florist note, a standing order, this card was in his handwriting.
Now you can’t accuse me of never listening . . . . Happy Birthday, Sunshine.
Love,
Mike
Chapter Thirteen
I was in the kitchen making dinner around five o’clock one afternoon when Phillip walked in the back door. I glanced over my shoulder. “I didn’t know you were coming over.”
He closed the door and turned around, a brown grocery bag in his arm, but he took one look at me stopped; the look he gave me was broken. “Mom . . . ”
Now what had happened? I dropped the knife and faced him, bracing myself against the granite counter, my stomach sinking. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re crying.”
The silence drew out between us before I understood, and relieved, I laughed then. “I’m cutting onions. Look.” I stepped away from the island and swiped at my eyes with my forearm. My face was damp and probably red and blotchy. The odds were high that I looked like hell anyway. My makeup drawer hadn’t been touched in more than a week. I was dressed in old jeans and a sweatshirt, and early that morning I had pulled my hair into a ponytail in a lousy attempt at personal grooming. If anyone leaned too closely, my fragrance of late was eau du lemon oil, Comet, or in this instance: chopped onions.
He laughed, relieved, and set the grocery bag on the counter. “Keely’s got a dinner meeting tonight, so I was winging it. I thought you could feed me.”
“You mean it’s your turn to check on the grieving mother.” I turned back to the counter.
“That, too,” he said without missing a beat. “Where’s the punk?”
“Mickey had a team meeting after school and practice. He’ll be home later.”
“Good.” Phil crossed to the fridge and took out a carton of milk. “He can give me a ride home.”
“What’s up? No car?”
He turned away from me. “I had a couple of drinks after work so I took the cable car.”
“Take the Porsche if you want.”
“Mickey can drive me,” he said casually and drank the milk from the carton.
I said nothing about the milk carton. Telling the boys to use a glass hadn’t done me any good over the years and I wasn’t going to waste my breath now, but something about his tone bothered me. Last weekend Mickey had been with Phil and he had come home quieter than he’d been in a long time. I thought maybe something had happened between them, but I couldn’t get him to talk to me about it. “Try not to push your brother, okay?”
“What? Me?”
“That innocent act didn’t work when you were a kid and it isn’t going to work now either.”
“Hell, Mom, sometimes he’s just so easy.”
“Well, life isn’t exactly e
asy for any of us right now. He needs your ear, maybe even your shoulder, not your teasing.”
Phillip’s cell phone rang and he flipped it open. “Hi, Babe.” My son’s expression grew tight as he listened. “I’m sorry.” His voice was tense and his usually casual posture was stick-straight. “I don’t know why it’s so hard. I know.” He paused, listening intently. “I know. We’ll talk tonight.” He flipped his cell phone closed and pocketed it. “Life isn’t easy,” he said quietly, “I would be happier right now if no one needed me.”
If ever there was a cry for help, that was it. I pulled my hands out of a bowl of meatloaf and washed them, leaning against the counter as I used a dish towel. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Another false alarm on the pregnancy front.” His tone was more bitter than I’d heard from him in a long time. “She cries and I don’t know what to say anymore. She keeps asking why it’s so hard when this is supposed to be the most natural thing in the world, and I can’t do anything but give her weak apologies. I know she needs to hear more from me, but there’s nothing else to say that hasn’t been said for too many months already.” He faced me, his hands out in frustration, his color high. “I have no new words to take her disappointment away, nothing to encourage her, and every time she cries about it, I feel even more inadequate.”
Phillip sat down at kitchen table, resting his forehead on the heels of his hands, before his words came out in a flood, “I feel like nothing but a failure, and I think I resent it. Maybe that’s why I can’t summon the words to placate her anymore, Mom. I know I should say something, but it’s all too much. Because of SKISTAR, I have to prove myself at work, and to Scott, and I want to do well for Dad. He had such faith in me, and because of Keely, I have to prove myself in the bedroom. My life feels like it’s all about performance.”
I stood behind him and massaged his tense shoulders, waiting for him to get all his feelings out.
“I’m not even sure I want a kid anymore.” He closed his eyes and let his head hang back against my hands.
Phillip was a grown man on the edge of fatherhood, and yet I could look at him and see him at every age, as a conglomerate being—all those stages of hurt over the years, suffering the meanness of other children, fights with his older brother, disappointments, tennis team loses, broken hearts, the loss of his grandparents, and the harsh consequences of the same kind of stupid mistakes we all make.
I brushed his forehead with my hand and he opened his eyes, staring up at me upside-down and looking for answers from me that I couldn’t give him, because I wouldn’t help him by picking sides in this. My kids were raised to think for themselves and thinking for him now wouldn’t help him.
“You’re frustrated and hurting,” I told him. “It’s hard to decide what you want when you’re under pressure. I do know this. You’ve always made no bones about wanting a van full of kids. But even if you do change your mind at some point, I don’t think that’s the best thing to say to you wife right now, especially when what you’re feeling is probably pressure.”
“I know,” he said with resignation.
I sat down next to him and took his hand in mine. “It wasn’t all that long ago that you sat at this very table telling us how ready you were to start a family. Both of you were so excited.
“Then disaster hit. I was afraid I was going to lose her, Ma.” Phillip said, the emotion still choking his voice more than a year later.
“I understand. It’s perfectly natural to be afraid after what you both went through.”
“But she wants a kid. It’s like she’s driven to do this, like she has something to prove. I don’t know what’s happening to us.”
“She told me the doctor says she’s fine now and that you can go on to have a normal pregnancy.”
“It could happen again.”
“Then you deal with that if it happens. If this pregnancy issue comes between you, then you need to think about some counseling, before you both crack under the pressure and say things you don’t mean.”
He was quiet for a long time, then he said, “I shouldn’t have dumped this on you.”
“Phillip, I would hate it if you were to stop coming to me to talk out your problems. I’m always here to listen. Don’t you know that I cherish the knowledge that you feel you can come to me whenever you need to vent? I’m here, just like I’ve always been. Please don’t tiptoe around me. I just hate being treated as if I’m going to shatter in a million pieces any moment. I haven’t shattered yet.”
“Life isn’t easy right now for any of us,” Phil admitted. “You’re right about why I’m here. We all decided to take turns checking on you.” Phil paused, looking thoughtful, then he shook his head. “It’s pretty arrogant when you think about what we’re doing. Scott, Molly, Mickey and I . . . we think we can keep your life together just by our mere presence in it.”
“I don’t know what I would do without your presence in my life. Although there are days . . . . ” I teased him. “Honestly? I don’t know what to do with you and I don’t know what I’d do without you, and I love each of you, even when you all have some annoying and screwball master plan to protect me.”
“Hell, Ma, we have to have something to do.” When he called me Ma he was back to teasing. “We’re your kids. We figure we can each take turns butting into your daily life, and then we can argue over who screwed up the most.”
I laughed. That was probably one of the most truthful things to be said in the last five minutes. Our family either joked or argued over almost everything.
“Hey! Is that the radio I hear playing upstairs? And what’s that sound droning from the media room? How many times over the years did you yell at us for leaving the stereo on and abandoning the TV?”
I raised my hand. “Guilty. You caught me.” I didn’t tell him that I needed sound around me because the utter and complete silence made me want to scream. The sound from electric appliances had become my new companions. “I just forgot to turn them off,” I lied.
Lies seemed to roll so easily off my tongue nowadays. We all lied now. Better to lie than live in the painful, if-only silence caused by the truth.
Dad is gone. What do I do now?
I’m falling apart. I think your father is a ghost.
Each of us chose to hide from the truth instead of looking too closely and deeply into the fact that we were all trying to stay afloat and clearly drowning. Yet somehow, we had to not tread on each other’s fragile spirits.
Phillip watched me as if he could read the truth just looking at me, and for a second I thought he was going to call me on it, so I admitted, “I’m scattered a lot. Last month I sent the check for the power bill to the phone company. I sent the phone bill payment to VISA, and I forgot the American Express bill altogether. I expect my credit score is in the tank, and I don’t give a damn.”
“I can pay your bills for you if you want.”
“No!” I snapped, then regretted it immediately when I saw my son’s face. His offer was automatic. That he cared and was thoughtful was not something to shout at him for.
What was it that made me feel as if I had to protect myself from my own children who were trying to protect me? “I’m sorry. Thank you for offering, but I can handle the bills. I don’t want you taking care of me. I just need for everything to be normal . . . to feel normal,” I added, my voice drifting off. I wanted to spin my life backwards and relive my adult years and my marriage to Mike all over again, but I couldn’t say that aloud, because I knew my children had their own regrets.
The temperature buzzer on the oven went off.
“What’s for dinner?” Phil asked, clearly changing the subject.
“Meatloaf. Food of the gods. A gourmet specialty.” I filled a loaf pan, topped it with a ketchup, dry mustard, and brown sugar sauce, and put it in the oven along with some roasted potatoes drizzled in garlic infused olive oil.
“You’re fixing Mickey’s favorites,” Phil said.
“Had I known
you were coming, I’d have made spaghetti and meatballs.”
“My favorite.”
“Your favorite.” I smiled at him
“What’s going on with him?”
“I think he’s afraid to pick a college that’s too far away.” I washed my hands and dried them on a towel. “Would you talk to him when he takes you home? I want him to pick the school he wants, not the one he thinks is closest to home.”
“Didn’t he apply to Stanford?”
“He’s waitlisted.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to him.” He looked at me through wise eyes. “Tell me something.”
“What?”
“Are you sleeping okay?”
My hands went to my bare face and then to my hair, which was falling out of the rubber band. “I look like hell, don’t I?”
“You look tired.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, certain I would never be fine again.
He placed the grocery sack in front of me. “I brought you a present.”
“What’s this?” I looked inside and there were four industrial sized cans of Pledge Lemon Oil Furniture Polish. My son’s expression was half knowing, half sardonic. I burst out laughing.
“I didn’t want you to run out. In the middle of the night . . . ” he said dryly. “You know, when you’re sleeping so well.”
Other than a few lapses, I focused more diligently on hiding my grief from my kids. I stopped grocery shopping in the middle of the night and was cautiously quiet when I went out for lattes at an hour when most of the city was asleep in their warm beds. I certainly didn’t run the vacuum at four in the morning anymore or else my youngest son—the mouth that roared—would have told the others like he did before.
I believed I was becoming pretty accomplished at being Wonder Widow whenever my children were around. I was certain I was showing them how well I was moving forward and powering through without their father.
Show was the right word. All for show. I came from a generation who believed mothers were strong. Mothers shaped futures. But I wasn’t exactly the 1950’s prototype for the perfect mom. My job as a mother was important to me and certainly part of how I had identified myself for years, because I took the job seriously. My kids had been tantamount in my life. I’d spent years learning balance between my children and my husband. Now I was unbalanced.
