“Okay!” Mrs. Barrera had said, clapping her hands together and perching on a wheelie chair with her cup of Greek yogurt and can of Diet Coke. “Welcome to Bereavement Group, everyone! My goal for this year is to create a safe space to sort through our feelings of loss and to build a community of peers who have been through similar experiences! Here, we will strive to understand that loss is not something a person should get over, but instead, get through. I look forward to getting to know each and every one of you so that we can help you get through . . . together! With that being said, why don’t we start today by going around and introducing ourselves?”
Nobody said anything. After a sufficiently awkward pause during which everyone listened to each other’s chewing, Mrs. Barrera soldiered on.
“Okay, then! I’ll go first! My name is Lane Barrera. I’m married with two living sons, and I’ve been a school social worker for ten years! Five years ago, I lost my two-month-old son, Joshua, to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. But with the help of therapy and time, I’ve managed to find happiness and joy again, and now I hope to channel my own grief into helping others who are suffering as well!”
Silence.
“Okay!” Mrs. Barrera pressed on, clutching her Diet Coke. Her eyes ranged around the small group of kids slumped around her. “Why don’t we begin with you?” She pointed at a kid who’d manspread himself on the couch and had just finished eating a large green apple—core, stem, seeds, and all. He was lunky and black haired, with a faint mustache and a big pair of scuffed, untied high-tops.
“Uh,” he said. “What do you want me to say?”
“Well, your name is a good place to start. And maybe tell us who you’ve lost. And any other outside interests you might have!”
“Okay.” The kid shrugged. “Here goes: Sam. Dad. Suicide.”
“Wait,” interrupted a trembling girl with about twelve rings on her bitten fingers. “Your outside interest is suicide?”
“No,” Sam said. “I’m telling you how my dad died.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Mrs. Barrera, twirling her spoon through her yogurt. “It’s not necessary to explain how your loved one—”
But it worked. Sam’s deadpan delivery of such a terrible tragedy was so jarring that all six kids, including Sam, burst out laughing. Mrs. Barrera looked horrified for a second, and then relieved. Sam Dad Suicide had broken the ice. Everyone took turns introducing themselves in the same way: and that’s how, during that first session of Bereavement Group—or the Pity Party, as they would soon rename themselves—Pup met Kailyn Mom Drugs, Dakota Dad Car Accident, Raheem Mom Breast Cancer, and finally, Izzy Brother Leukemia. The little French-braided girl, it turned out, was the only other person besides Pup who’d also lost a sibling. When it was his turn to speak, he cleared his throat to keep it from cracking. “Pup,” he said, looking down at the green squares of linoleum that checkered the counseling office floor. “Brother. Meningitis.”
A little later that week, he and Izzy ran into each other in the hallway after last bell.
“Hey!” She smiled at him and lifted a small hand in the air. “Dead-brother high fives!”
Pup, stricken, looked at her hand and didn’t move.
“Sorry,” she said, her hand falling back to her side. “That was a terrible joke. How long has it been for you?”
“A month,” said Pup.
“Oh. God. Sorry. Definitely too soon. The first year is the absolute worst. I’m in year two. It gets easier, I promise.”
“I hope so,” Pup said.
“We should hang out,” Izzy said, looking him up and down in the same way his sister Jeanine often did, as if he were a DIY project she just couldn’t wait to start rearranging. “It would be nice to spend time with somebody who gets it. People can act so awkward when you have a dead brother. Either they ignore you—”
“Or they act like nothing happened—”
“Or they grab you like this”—she touched his arm for the very first time—“and say, in this urgent whisper, ‘How are you dooo-ing?’”
“‘You’re in my thoughts and pray-yers, and I am—’” And here, they shouted together, almost joyfully, “‘SO SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS!’”
It was at that moment Pup decided he and Izzy were meant to be. They shared a common pain that twisted through their lives, piercing everything it touched. By the end of the semester they were best friends, and Pup never stopped hoping that one day they’d be more than that. At least until Brody Krueger had come along at the beginning of junior year, with his faux California accent and his dirty fingernails, and stolen her away. Pup used to think that his loyalty to Izzy, his willingness to wait for her, showed that he was romantic, patient, true to his heart. Lately, though, he was beginning to feel more like one of those male deep-sea anglerfish Patrick had once studied: a thin, hideous creature, who, once it found its female mate, held on and refused to let go.
“Hey, Kailyn,” Dakota Dad Car Accident was saying now as Pup and Izzy walked into Mrs. Barrera’s office. “I brought you a slice of pizza.”
“STOP!” yelled Kailyn Mom Drugs, putting her hands over her ears.
“Come on,” Dakota said, holding a wedge of pizza on a Styrofoam plate under her nose. “It’s so good. I even got it with your favorite topping: moist cutlets of pepperoni!”
“STOP IT!”
“Here,” he continued, a look of faux concern on his face. “Take a napkin. I wouldn’t want you to get any pizza sauce on your slacks.”
“I’m literally going to die!” Kailyn wailed. “Mrs. Barrera, make him stop!”
“Okay, okay, Dakota,” intervened their teacher, placing a hand between them. “That’s enough.”
Dakota grinned at her and took an enormous bite of pizza while Kailyn plucked a Skittle from the bag she’d just opened and threw it at him. Everybody else settled into their seats. Their group had been together for a long time now, and they all knew the routine: once Dakota Dad Car Accident good-naturedly tortured Kailyn Mom Drugs about her word aversions, the session could begin.
“Welcome to springtime, everyone!” Mrs. Barrera clapped her hands together and sat down in her office chair. “May is one of my favorite months of the year—it’s a time of rebirth, of renewal, of budding leaves and blooming flowers! But! For those of us who are bereaved, it can be a difficult time as well. All this life growing around us can remind us of what we’ve lost.” She sipped some Diet Coke and consulted her little calendar book. “Kailyn, I’m noticing you had a recent red-alert day. Talk us through your mom’s birthday. What were your positives? What were your setbacks? How did you try to strike a balance between honoring her memory and exercising your own self-care?”
Kailyn Mom Drugs was a nervous girl, prone to shrieking and nail-biting. But now that she’d recovered from Dakota’s word assault, she seemed uncharacteristically calm.
“Honestly, guys?” She looked around at the group, tossing a yellow Skittle into her mouth. “It was actually a great day.”
“How wonderful!” Mrs. Barrera clapped her hands together again. “Tell us more!”
“Well, when I woke up on the morning of her birthday, it was pouring rain, and it kept raining all day long. But then, just when school was getting out, the weather cleared and the sun came out. So I was walking home, just about to pass my mom’s hair salon, and all of a sudden I looked up and there was this gigantic rainbow in the sky. Biggest one I’ve ever seen. It looked like a cartoon rainbow, it was so perfect.”
“I remember that!” Sam exclaimed. “Me and my girlfriend were out by the gym dumpsters trying to—never mind, it’s not important—but we totally saw that rainbow!”
“Here’s the thing,” Kailyn explained. “My mom loved rainbows. She was obsessed with them. So to see this big fat perfect rainbow at her hair salon on her birthday . . . I mean, could it get any clearer than that? She was reaching out to say hello. To tell me she was okay.”
As Pup listened to Kailyn’s story, he thought of all the times he h
ad waited and willed and prayed for just such a sign from Patrick. Not a rainbow, of course. But something. He would know it when he saw it. But it had never arrived, and now he didn’t believe in signs. He tried to catch Izzy’s attention to share an eye-roll, but she didn’t look at him. She was listening to Kailyn, rapt.
“That’s happened to me before,” said Sam, placing his Capri Sun on the floor near his untied shoes. “The sign thing. My dad was the one who introduced me to thrash metal, and last year, I was having a really bad day, and I was waiting at the bus stop feeling like shit when this car pulled up to the red light. All the windows were down, and the driver was blasting ‘Black Dawn’ by this band called Dethrone. Anybody ever heard of them?”
They all looked at Sam blankly.
“Exactly! They were this insanely obscure Finnish metal band from the eighties. Nobody’s ever heard of them!” Sam shook his head wonderingly. “Thing is, though, they were my dad’s favorite band. I mean, he learned how to speak conversational Finnish just so he could understand their lyrics. And here’s what’s even crazier: ‘Black Dawn’ was his favorite song.”
“Whoa,” said Dakota.
“Dude, you guys remember that home game we had at the beginning of the year against Lane Tech?” Raheem Mom Breast Cancer was sitting up excitedly, his ham sandwich balanced on his knee. “The one we won twenty-one to three?”
Of course everyone remembered. Raheem Mom Breast Cancer was the celebrity member of the Pity Party, not just because he was a senior but also because he was the star running back of the Lincoln Lions.
“Well, I was standing on the sideline, just before the coin toss. And all of a sudden I get this overpowering smell of perfume. And not just any perfume, either.” He looked around. “It was Donna Karan Cashmere Mist. My mom’s favorite perfume. I swear to god, y’all: she was there, standing right next to me, on the sidelines that day.”
“Didn’t you score, like, three touchdowns in that game?” asked Dakota.
“Two,” said Raheem. “But I also ran for three hundred yards. Broke the single-game rushing record for ALHS.” He clasped his hands together and looked up at the particleboard ceiling. “And don’t think I don’t know who to thank for that.”
Pup put a handful of pretzels in his mouth. His mom had packed them in a plastic baggie and now they kind of tasted like plastic too. He tried to make eyes at Izzy again, but she was opening her mouth to speak.
“I have dreams,” she said. “About Teddy. Do you guys have dreams?”
“Totally,” said Dakota.
“Absolutely,” said Mrs. Barrera.
“All the time,” said Kailyn.
“In the dreams where he’s sick,” she went on, “I wake up and right away I remember that he’s gone. But in the dreams where he’s still healthy, when I wake up, it’s like I’m not alone in the room. I feel him. Just as sure as if he’s standing there. I can practically hear him breathing.”
“Oh, I feel Joshua all the time,” said Mrs. Barrera. “Every time I look into the face of a baby, I can practically feel his weight in my arms.”
Pup finished his pretzels and reached into his lunch bag for his peanut butter sandwich. When he saw that his mother had made it on wheat bread, he sighed wearily.
“Pup?”
“Huh?” He looked up from his sandwich to find that everyone in the Pity Party was staring at him.
“Were you saying something?” Mrs. Barrera smiled at him encouragingly. “Has it happened to you, too? Have you even seen a sign?”
“No.” He bit into his sandwich.
“None?” Mrs. Barrera’s smile wilted just the tiniest bit.
“Nope.”
An awkward silence filled the office.
“Don’t sweat it, Pup,” Raheem finally said. “It’s going to happen when you least expect it.”
“Yeah. When you most need it.”
“When you really start to listen.”
“And even if it doesn’t,” added Mrs. Barrera, “that’s perfectly fine and perfectly normal, too. Everyone’s experience of grief and loss is different.”
Pup took another bite of his soggy sandwich and said nothing. What he wanted to say was that he wished everyone would stop calling it “loss.” When you lose something, there’s a chance you might find it again. Keys, a missing homework assignment, a few extra pounds. But Pup would never find Patrick. He couldn’t feel him anywhere. There was no rainbow, no old familiar song, no ghostly scent floating in the air. Pup had never even seen his brother in a dream. He finished his peanut butter sandwich in silence, knowing it would hurt everyone’s feelings if he just told them the truth: that Patrick wasn’t lost. He was just dead.
7
WHEN PUP ARRIVED AT Izzy’s party on Saturday night, he walked in through the unlocked back door, as he always did, and came upon a bunch of ladies sitting on high stools around the kitchen island, drinking white wine from glasses that were basically goldfish bowls on stems. Spread before them were a couple of buckets with more wine arranged on ice, plus a tray of cheese cubes, grapes, and an assortment of crackers.
As he pushed the handle and the door squeaked closed behind him, all the ladies’ faces swiveled in his direction and Pup cursed himself for forgetting about the book club. If he had only remembered, he could have texted Izzy to let him in through the front door so he could go down to the basement undetected. Pup knew from his experience with his oldest sisters’ friends that when groups of forty-something women got together and drank wine, they always wanted to engage him in some weird conversation that was part flirtatious, part mocking, and all around awkward, at least for him.
“Pup!” He barely recognized Izzy’s mother, who was wearing a floral-print top, big hoop earrings, and an actual smile. The Mrs. Douglass he knew dressed in snappy black power suits, had a mouth permanently zipped shut in a straight line, and had two interests in life: the real estate market and her daughter’s grade point average.
“Hi, Mrs. Douglass,” he said.
“Ladies,” she said, fanning her arms out theatrically as if she were a magician’s assistant and Pup was the magic trick, “this is the very boy I was just telling you about.”
“The chaperone?” A lady in a pink leather jacket up-and-downed him as she raked a Triscuit through a cheese ball.
“Yep.” She turned to her friends in that dismissive way adults have of forgetting you’re there when they’re not directly speaking to you. “Pup’s been Izzy’s best friend ever since freshman year. They met in a bereavement group at the school. Pup lost a brother too. He caught meningitis when he was away at college. Just terrible. But it’s been so wonderful for the two of them to have each other, to have someone who understands.”
The ladies all nodded, suddenly very serious. Several of them murmured, “Sorry for your loss.”
“And now, poor Pup is the only thing standing in the way between my daughter’s virginity and the pawing hands of her fool boyfriend.”
“Oh, Caroline.” Cheeseball Lady stuffed the Triscuit in her mouth. “Don’t you get that if Isabelle really wants to have sex with her fool boyfriend, she’s going to find a way, and there’s nothing that you, or this adorable ginger right here, can do about it?” She peered at Pup over the rim of her wineglass. “You are adorable, you know,” she said. “What’s your waist circumference? You’re so—so lithe!”
“Kendra, don’t call him a ginger.”
“What’s wrong with ‘ginger’?”
“It’s—well, not racist. That wouldn’t be the right word. But it certainly isn’t nice.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” Cheeseball said to Pup. She crossed one tightly jeaned leg over the other and poked his thigh with the toe of her sandal. “Did I hurt your feelings?”
“Uh.” Pup looked down at her toe. “No?”
“Good.” Her voice had gone all husky, and the other ladies were stifling laughs and winking at each other. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Pup,” said Pup.<
br />
“Pulp?”
“Pup.”
“Pip?”
“Pup.”
“Okay. Pup. Tell me, Pup, have you ever read a little novel called Madame Bovary?”
Pup shook his head. “Can’t say that I have.”
“Pup’s not much of a reader,” said Mrs. Douglass, which, though true, he thought was kind of unnecessary.
“Well, that’s all right, honey. I don’t think anyone in our book club is either. We were bad little girls”—here, she dragged her toe farther up his leg, prompting more helpless snickering—“and we didn’t do our homework. So now, because we can’t talk about Madame Bovary, we need something else to talk about instead.”
“Like Isabelle and Brody,” volunteered the lady with the super-long nails.
“Like Isabelle and Brody. So. Don’t you think, Pup—and I know this is hard for you to hear, Caroline—but don’t you think that if Isabelle wants to do the horizontal mamba with Brody, she’s going to find a way to do it?”
“Horizontal mamba!” shrieked one of the ladies, fanning herself with a bar napkin. “Did she just say horizontal mamba?”
Sorry for Your Loss Page 4
