Sorry for Your Loss

by Jessie Ann Foley

  Pup, leaning in to kiss her one last time, was more than happy to agree.

  They spent the following week together in the belly of their empty high school, developing Abrihet’s film, making it into prints, sorting the prints into piles, narrowing the piles into smaller stacks of her strongest images. They worked together in an intimate and easy silence, bodies close, fingers grazing against waists and shoulders grazing against shoulders, never kissing but always close enough to kiss, unworried, knowing they would have many more chances for that when their work was finally finished.

  For her portfolio, Abrihet was doing a series on her Uptown community, a neighborhood that was home to many Eritrean immigrants, but also other new arrivals from Ethiopia and India and Pakistan, Ghana and Nigeria, Vietnam and Cambodia. She had walked around her neighborhood, capturing street festivals, church picnics, kebab vendors, beachfront barbecues at Juneway Terrace, hipsters lining up for a show outside the Aragon Ballroom, old women with raw and peeling hands riding the red line home from their nighttime office-cleaning jobs. Her work was vibrant and kinetic and beautiful, crowded and overflowing with life. The hardest part of the whole process was narrowing it down to just twelve shots.

  Working together feverishly, they got it done just in time, and at the end of the week Mr. Hughes met with them in the school art studio to review Abrihet’s portfolio and get the two of them registered for regionals. Breaking out his magnifying glass, their teacher squinted and grimaced his way through her folder while she and Pup sat together across from him, fingers intertwined beneath his desk.

  “What can I say, Abby?” Mr. Hughes finally said, tearing off his glasses and then jamming them back onto his face. “This is brilliant. If you two don’t get sent to nationals, there is no justice in this world.” He slapped her folder shut. “But don’t take that as a guarantee or anything, because in case y’all haven’t figured it out yet, there is no justice in the world.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Hughes,” said Abrihet. “You happen to be talking to two kids who’ve already learned that lesson.”

  “Well, good.” They watched as their teacher’s eyes wandered to the picture of the weird-looking dog Scotch-taped to the front of his grade book. “Better to learn young, I guess,” he added bitterly.

  “Mr. Hughes,” Abrihet said gently. “Did you lose custody of Hershey Kiss?”

  “My ex doesn’t even know how to groom him properly!” he yelled, ripping off his glasses and tossing them on the desk. “She never does his undercoat right! And then it gets so tangled that it irritates his skin!”

  “What’s an undercoat?” asked Pup.

  “Mr. Hughes, you’re an amazing person,” Abrihet said fiercely, “and if your ex can’t see that, she doesn’t deserve you anyway.”

  “Thank you, Abby.” Mr. Hughes cleared his throat. “I appreciate that.”

  Pup sat there, confused. He’d thought they’d been talking about a dog. He had, he realized, much to learn about love. He gripped Abrihet’s fingers under the table as Mr. Hughes turned to the laptop on his desk. “But enough about my personal woes. The important thing is that in a couple weeks’ time, if luck is on our side, I’ll be cheering you two on when your names are called for nationals. The only thing left to do now is register.” He clicked over to the art show’s website. “Abby, what’s the name of your submission?”

  “I’m calling it Uptown.”

  “Can’t go wrong with a one-word title.” They watched as he pecked out the word into the registration database with his two pointer fingers. “Like Guernica. Simple. Minimalistic. Powerful. What about you, Flanagan?”

  Pup blinked. He was so bad at titles. He needed a word.

  “Um—how about Flanland?”

  “What the hell is ‘Flanland’?”

  “It’s my neighborhood,” Pup explained. “Well, like, the neighborhood within my neighborhood. All twenty-seven of my immediate family members live there. So that’s what we call it.”

  Mr. Hughes wrapped his finger around one of his dreads, considering this. “But your pictures aren’t really about your neighborhood. Not the way Abby’s are, anyway. She’s got streetscapes. El platforms. Jazz clubs. Restaurants. Specific physical spaces. Your portfolio is mostly portraiture.”

  “Well, it’s still about my family, though, isn’t it?”

  “It is and it isn’t. I mean, if it’s about your family, then why include the picture of this abandoned dorm room here? Or, for that matter, this picture of Abby? You need to think about cohesion, Pup. Thematics. If you want to make it to nationals, it all has to tie together. It has to be greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not just about the individual shots.”

  “I see what you’re saying.” Pup flipped through the twelve pictures in his portfolio. “But if it’s not about Flanland, then what’s it about?”

  “What are you asking me for?” Mr. Hughes’s hands hovered impatiently over the keyboard. “It’s your project, Flanagan!”

  Pup didn’t know what to say. He crossed his leg to scratch a mosquito bite on his ankle.

  “I’ve always thought . . .” Abrihet glanced over at him, then trailed off.

  “What?” Pup looked at her.

  “Nothing,” she said quickly.

  “Spit it out, Tesfay,” said Mr. Hughes. “We’re on a deadline here.”

  “Well . . .” Her eyes slid to his. “I guess I always thought it was about Patrick.”

  As soon as she said it, Pup saw immediately that she was right. His entire portfolio was about Patrick. About his dying, about his absence. It was there in the sag of Pup’s father’s shoulders as he knelt in the back garden pulling dandelions. It was in Annemarie’s faraway smile as she leaned into Sal’s arms on the deck after Sunday dinner. It was in the grip of his sister Elizabeth as she lay on the front room couch with her brand-new son, Oliver, curled to her chest, clinging to him as if she’d already begun calculating the chances that she might lose him one day. It was in Luke’s face, drunk and twisted with rage just before he knocked their mother to the ground, or closed and inscrutable as he lay sleeping off his hangover on the roof. The negative space of Patrick—it was everywhere. It was even in the self-portrait Pup had taken late one afternoon beneath the basketball hoop in his alley. He remembered developing that shot, alone in the darkroom on the day Abrihet had walked out. He’d stood over the chemical bath as if it were a mirror, watching the contours of his own face deepening on the photo paper. And when it was finished, he’d jumped back, stunned, thinking for a wild moment that maybe his sign, his ghost, had finally appeared.

  But no. It was not a ghost. It was only that Luke had been right: the older Pup got, the more he looked like Patrick.

  Value:

  degrees of lightness and darkness

  29

  PUP ARRIVED HOME FROM the meeting with Mr. Hughes to find his mother sitting on the front room couch dressed in a white pantsuit with the jacket draped over her shoulders and her slinged arm pressed against her floral blouse. Her hair was set in gray waves, and she’d swirled makeup onto her cheeks and lips. She was sitting very straight with her purse in her lap, watching the door and dabbing at her eyes with a tissue.

  “Mom?” Pup looked anxiously around the empty room. “Are you waiting for someone?”

  “I bought this suit last month for Luke’s graduation.” She smoothed the creamy fabric with her free hand. Pup could smell her perfume—the spicy, orange scent from the dusty, beveled glass bottle on her dresser that she used so sparingly it had lasted her for years. “It starts in an hour. We can still make it if he comes home in the next ten or fifteen minutes.” She looked out the front picture window where Pup’s dad was looping chicken wire around his tomato plants. “Your father thinks I’ve gone goofy.” She picked an invisible piece of lint off of her lapel. “Maybe I have.”

  “You’re not goofy, Ma,” Pup said, although the strange bright look in her eyes, the angry slashes of makeup on her cheeks, made him say the words
without much conviction.

  “It’s just that I know he would never skip his graduation. And he’d never go without us. I figure he’s going to come walking through this door any minute now. And when he does, I’ve got his suit upstairs hanging in plastic, pressed and ready to go.”

  “Mom.” Pup sat down on the couch and took her free hand. It was cold and trembling, despite the heat of the summer afternoon. “I have to tell you something.”

  Behind him, he heard a floorboard creak. He turned around and saw his oldest sister, Jeanine, standing in the doorway between the dining room and the front room, holding two glasses of iced tea and listening intently to their conversation. “Sorry,” she said. “Am I interrupting?”

  “Yes,” said Pup.

  “No,” his mother said at the exact same time. They looked at each other for a moment before she continued. “Pup was just saying he has something to tell me. And I think I know what it is.” She ran her carefully painted fingernails along the wooden handle of her purse. “Jeanine just told me this morning. Carrie broke up with Luke. Apparently, Jeanine, you’re the only one of my children who feels I have the right to know anything.”

  “Did you know about this?” Jeanine was shooting Pup her best sister-mom stare.

  “Yeah.”

  “Since when?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “A month, maybe?”

  “A month? And you never told anybody?”

  “I told Annemarie.”

  “You and Annemarie.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “Thick as thieves.”

  “Did Annemarie tell you?”

  “Are you kidding? Of course not. I’m only her sister. Why would she tell me anything? No, Mary ran into Carrie’s mother in the cheese locker at Costco yesterday afternoon. Had to pretend like she already knew. She said she felt like an idiot.”

  “Well, it doesn’t even matter,” said Pup, “because that’s not what I had to tell you anyway, Mom.”

  “Oh.” Judy Flanagan’s red-rimmed eyes flashed with fear. But she pushed it away with a determined blink. “Well? Go ahead, dear.”

  “Luke’s not going to his graduation because Luke isn’t graduating. He failed out of law school last year.”

  His mother made a small noise. Her purse fell into her lap and her hands went to her face.

  “I knew it!” Jeanine banged the glasses on the coffee table, sloshing some iced tea all over the new issue of Better Homes and Gardens. “I knew something wasn’t adding up. Who told you about this?”

  “Carrie.”

  “Jesus. You talked to her? I bet she gave you an earful. God, I could kill him. All his brains. All his opportunities. All his potential. Squandered. Gone!”

  From behind their mother’s hands came a ragged sob.

  “God, Jeanine! Will you stop?” Pup put his arm very carefully around his mother, taking great care not to touch her injured shoulder. “You’re not being, like, helpful right now.”

  “Not being helpful? Don’t talk to me about helpful, Pup! I’ve got my own family to take care of, in addition to this one, in case everyone’s forgotten. Do you even understand the logistical feats I had to undertake this morning to juggle the kids’ summer sports camps with getting Mom to her PT appointment?”

  “Well, it looks like you got her there and back.” He dabbed at the spilled iced tea with the edge of his thumb. “So maybe you should, like, leave now.”

  “You want me to leave?” Jeanine gawked at him, her face twisted with both hurt and surprise. She and Pup were the bookend children of the Flanagan family. They were separated by six siblings and twenty-seven years; they had never even lived under the same roof. Pup loved Jeanine, of course, but not in the way he loved Luke or Annemarie or Patrick. She felt less like a sister to him and more like a distant aunt, and not the nice kind who overfeeds you and spends way too much money on your birthday present. Jeanine stood there for a moment, waiting for Pup to apologize, or at least to change his mind. When he didn’t, she picked up her glass from the table, wiped her eyes with a tissue she’d extracted from the tiny waist pocket of her yoga pants, and quietly left the room. As soon as they heard the back door shut, Pup’s mom turned to him and clutched his hand.

  “All this time, I thought he was staying with Carrie. I never would have let your father kick him out if I knew he had no place to go. Never.”

  “But Mom. You had to do something. I mean—look at your shoulder.”

  “My shoulder will heal,” she said sharply. “But Luke . . . there’s something broken inside of that boy. And when your child is broken, you don’t turn them out. When your child is broken, that’s when they need you the most.” She pressed a tissue to her face and when she brought it away again there were little crescents of black makeup beneath her eyes. She looked at him accusingly. “You should have told me, Pup.”

  “I don’t like to upset you, Ma. You know that.”

  “I’m not a Ming vase from Antiques Roadshow, honey! I raised eight children, didn’t I? And watched one be buried, didn’t I?”

  Pup jumped to his feet. He was suddenly furious. “Yeah, and as soon as you came home from the funeral you took down his picture and replaced it with a fat angel with dead eyes and weird nipples, and you never spoke of him again!”

  “That ‘fat angel,’ young man,” she shouted, “is a religious picture all the way from Italy! It was a gift from Father Gambera to bring me comfort in my time of suffering and, if you must know, it was blessed by Pope Francis himself!”

  “Who cares? Will you stop erasing him, Mom? Patrick’s face is the only one that belongs on the seventh step. That was his name. That was his name! Patrick! And you won’t even say it out loud!”

  “I don’t need to say it out loud! That name lives in my heart every minute of my life, so I don’t need to say it!”

  They were alone together in the front room, staring at each other as if from across a great distance. Any other time Pup had tried to bring up Patrick to his mother, her tears had broken his heart, had made him relent, had sent him scurrying back into their agreed-upon silence. But not today. Today, after all that had happened and all that he’d learned, her tears just made him angrier.

  “You know what, Ma? Maybe I need you to say it! Did you ever think about that? Did you ever think about what it’s been like for me, to be stuck in a family where nobody ever talks about anything? Where everything that hurts gets shoved down inside to just, like, rot?”

  “Fine, Pup!” His mother threw her purse to the floor. She was crying hard now, but Pup still didn’t feel guilty. He felt great, actually. Finally, at last, she was fighting with him. “You win! I’ll say his name. Patrick! Patrick! Patrick, Patrick, Patrick! Patrick Michael Flanagan, my son, who’s been dead for nine hundred and eighty days and”—she looked at her watch—“six and a half hours. There! I said it. Now are you happy?”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. And it was true. There was still life in her, after all. He watched her as she squinted out the window at her husband’s tomato plants, letting the tears fall.

  “And now I’ve turned my other son out into the street, and I’ve lost him, too.”

  Pup sat back down next to her, sinking into the worn cushions. “Luke’s not lost, Mom.”

  “Well, then where is he? Nobody’s heard from him in over three weeks, Pup. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. But I know he’s somewhere. I still text him every day, and even though he doesn’t answer, I always get a delivered receipt.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” she said miserably.

  “It means he’s around. It means he’s charging his phone. It means he’s not lost. Not the way Patrick is lost, anyway.”

  “Well, if he’s not,” she whispered, leveling Pup with her blue, watery eyes, “then go and find him.”

  30

  PUP CLIMBED THE STAIRS SLOWLY, sticking his middle finger up at the angel on the seventh step with extra viciousness. The air in the second-floor bedr
oom was muggy and hot. It made him feel anxious and claustrophobic, so he shoved open the crescent window in his bedroom and stepped out onto the roof. The sun was setting, one of those spectacular, sky-on-fire sunsets that photographers dream about, but Pup barely noticed. He took his phone from his pocket and composed the text message.

  What you did was really bad, he wrote. It was probably the worst thing you ever did. But I still love you and so does everybody else so just come home already. Please.

  He took a deep breath and tapped send.

  The automated response came back immediately:

  Not deliverable.

  Pup felt the world go quiet as he stared into the phone in his palm at those two words on the screen. A familiar terror was building inside of him, a terror just like the last time he’d been blindsided by two little words.

  Bacterial meningitis.

  When he’d first heard those two words, as he rushed to stuff his bag into the trunk of Annemarie’s car on that rainy afternoon two Octobers ago, he’d figured it was a kind of flu. Maybe a bad flu, but nothing that modern science couldn’t fix. But then, as their three-car caravan of family members sped down I-57, rain pelting the windshield and the dead corn lying hacked down in the fields on either side of the road, he’d Googled it. An acute infection of the brain and spine. . . . Complications can be severe. . . . Mortality rate without immediate intervention high . . . Medical explanations of fluid and membranes and strains of bacteria had been interspersed with the stark language of sad poetry: grave. Profound. Catastrophic.

  All they knew, as Annemarie jerked her car to a stop and she, Pup, Sal, Luke, and Carrie ran through the hospital parking lot, huddled together against the rain, was what Patrick’s roommate had reported to their mother: that he hadn’t been feeling well, that he’d gone up to bed to take a nap, and that when they’d gone upstairs to check on him, hours later, they were unable to wake him up.

  It was only after they checked in at the front desk, were redirected up to the ICU, and met their glazed-eyed father in a long, white-walled hallway that they learned Patrick was in a coma. A coma? he remembered asking nobody in particular. But that doesn’t happen to real people. That only happens in soap operas.