Days of Awe (25 page)

We could never know how Josie had died; we would just go on, living close to the emptiness. That was the best I had. It was, to my surprise, not nothing. Faster than a blink, those jagged fragments of me flew back together, so that only I knew it happened; only I would ever know.

“She's still dead, though,” I said softly, “which is…fucking bullshit shit fuck.”

“It is,” Mark agreed.

I plopped myself next to him on the couch. “What's with that painting?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Why is it not hanging up on your wall?”

“Guess why.” He stretched his legs out and propped them on the coffee table.

“Andi hates it?” I asked.

“Andi hates it.”

We sat for a while, next to each other, in silence. “Can I have it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “That would actually solve a lot of problems.”

I didn't want it. I didn't want to look at that painting every day and think,
I will never get her back,
but I got up anyway and I lifted the rough wooden frame and I lugged that terrible thing across the room and out the door and down the stairs, and I wedged it into the backseat of my car and I headed home, and I had no more knowledge or clarity than I had when I'd come.

But I had Mark back, maybe. With delicate, impermanent stitches, it seemed possible that something torn had been mended.

The day before Mother's Day, another forty-degree Saturday, I decide to take myself to a movie. Hannah is at Chris's now and will be spending the day with her friends Caitlin and Katelyn. Helene is at a wedding brunch for Nancy Teegarten and Ilene Solomon, the two members of her old group of girlfriends, the gay divorcées, who, it turned out, to everyone's surprise and most of all their own, really are.

It's been a chilly spring so far, wet and drizzly. I've taken to drinking my coffee outside early in the mornings, before Hannah is up. Barefoot, I gaze out into our small backyard, and the world looks primeval, green and misty and empty. I get the feeling humans do not quite belong here: there should only be dinosaurs, cold-blooded and hungry, chomping through the ferns. And then the caffeine kicks in, and I'm myself again.

One benefit of the weather is that our students' spring fever has been kept at bay. Normally, in May, an electrical current runs through them, every one of them, first slow, then fast, one to the next to the next, deep through their central nervous systems, and its single message is:
Bust out!
They begin a communal snuffling and snorting, like wild horses or pigs. One day they're in small groups, scanning an e. e. cummings poem, and the next they're laughing hysterically at a broken pencil, a sudden rain shower, a creaking chair that sounds like a fart. The younger ones forget rules they've known since September, push each other in the cafeteria, hurl themselves, en masse, through doorways. The older ones, the eighth graders, are occasionally caught hugging in the supply closet or a bathroom stall. They stage fake fights on the playground that sometimes become real ones without warning. They veer from joyous to cruel, and sometimes you can't tell the difference, and you can never keep up. The last weeks of school are bearable, but only just.

But this year the students are mellow and polite, February students, because although their brains know that the school year is careening to a close, their bodies are clueless, slowed and dulled by the wind and the rain. I miss the warmth, but I appreciate the calm.

Chris has been in his apartment for three months now—long enough to feel as if we are teetering on the razor-sharp edge of something permanent.

I called him this morning. I told myself that it was because I couldn't remember who was supposed to pick Hannah up from Katelyn's this afternoon, but it was written on my calendar and circled in black:
PICK UP H, 6:00.

The phone rang and rang. I felt twitchy and embarrassed, like I was an eighth grader calling a boy I had a crush on.
What's the math homework?

“Hey,” I said when he finally answered, “I'm wondering who picks up Hannah today.”

“It's you,” he said. His voice was low and sleepy.

“Of course it's me! Who else would call you on a Saturday morning and ask whose turn it is to pick up Hannah?”

Chris yawned. “I mean,” he said, “it's you. You pick her up at six, and she's with you until Tuesday. Don't you remember? She'll have all her stuff with her. I hope.”

“Did I wake you?” I asked.

“A little.”

We'd woken up together on hundreds of Saturday mornings: thrilled, when we first started dating; late and luxurious, early in our marriage; ungodly early, when Hannah was tiny. And now, by ourselves, in separate houses. “I'm sorry.”

“Hannah and I were up late watching that show you hate.
Skin Diseases of the World.
”

“Nice.”

“It was fun. We had chips and guacamole.”

“Ew,” I said.

“I know.” He yawned again, and we were both silent for a while.

“Okay….Six o'clock.”

“Right. Hey, do you still want me to come take a look at the dishwasher?”

“Well,” I said, “it's still not working. I mean, I haven't gotten it fixed. I was hoping it would fix itself, actually. But I don't want to put you out.”

“No,” Chris said. “It's fine. I'll come by later this afternoon. Does that work?”

I wondered if this meant we were going to sleep together. I wondered if “fixing the dishwasher” would become our code, and then, later, something we would laugh about, a phrase we would remember almost fondly, with nostalgia, when we were safely back together and had no need for secret codes and liaisons. My skin felt tingly—
Skin Diseases of the World
! A little termite of hope gnawed its way into my chest cavity. “That works,” I said.

There were kitchen noises in the background,
clink
s and
clank
s. “Uh-oh, sounds like Hannah's making breakfast,” Chris said. “I better go.”

“Get the day started,” I said, and swallowed hard.

“Bye, sweetie,” he said, and then, quickly: “Bye, Iz.”

I clean the kitchen, grade some papers, pass the morning alone, then finally, a little adrift, decide to drive myself to the movie theater early. It's in Gooseburg, a little village thirty minutes from the city, far enough away that I can comfortably sink into anonymity. Chris and I used to go to movies here, back when it was an unrenovated theater with a crowded and slightly dingy concessions counter, two screens, and purple carpeting that smelled funny. Now it's a multiscreen movie house/café where waitresses wander up and down the dark aisles whispering, “Can I get you another basket of fried eggplant?”

I park in front of the theater and realize that I have forty-five minutes to kill, so I walk over to Praise Cheeses, my favorite vegetarian sandwich shop, run by Seventh-day Adventists with a sense of humor.

I wouldn't say I'm starting to feel good. I wouldn't say that. I would say that I'm starting to realize that I can take a breath and look around, survey my surroundings, and find a flicker of happiness in the things I recognize: my mother, pulling out a plastic grocery bag from her purse and securing it onto her head to protect her hair from the rain. Chris, answering the phone with his warm unguarded morning voice. Hannah, humming to herself in the kitchen. I will admit that it's useful to note certain not-unpleasant moments. All the sad things that have happened are different in scope, in quality,
in fact,
from all the sad things that haven't happened yet. There is comfort in pausing.

I'm standing in line behind a very petite woman wearing a high ponytail and a purple polka-dot sweater that can only have come from the children's department. I remember Josie calling my attention to a similarly child-sized woman once and whispering to me, “Look, it's Polly Pocket!”

I'm smiling at this memory and considering the grilled tempeh with Lettuce Pray and Let There Be Light mayo. I'm thinking about Chris coming over later, to fix the dishwasher. I'm thinking about how hungry I am and how good it will be to sit alone at a small, solid table and not even pretend I'm waiting for someone, just to eat my sandwich and watch people go by.

And that's when I see them.

They're sitting at a cozy table near the window, warm light flooding their faces like a religious painting, full, fizzy drinks in front of them in jewel tones of emerald green and garnet red: a man who closely resembles my husband and his companion, a very small, pointy, foxlike woman who looks unpleasantly familiar.

At first it's like seeing something so weird and impossible your mind immediately rejects it:
It's snowing in August?
Your brain spirals, trying to invent a plausible explanation, anything, anything at all—
It's January, and I've been in a coma for five months. Oh, I forgot I moved to Australia!
But then, depending on your constitution, you rearrange your thoughts, and quickly or slowly—but eventually—accept the impossible. Chris and Dr. Gwendolyn Grieco, our couple's therapist, are having a romantic vegetarian lunch together.

I press my shaking hands against my thighs, turn around, and take stock of the line that is rapidly growing longer behind me. I have two escape options: head back outside against the crowded restaurant's traffic or slowly ease my way through the line to the front and pass by Chris's table.

I glance over at the two of them. Dr. Grieco is saying something, gesturing with her hands. Chris is leaning on his elbows, gazing at her, enthralled. He stops one of her hands midgesture and grabs it, turns it over, examines it. She quits talking, looks at him.

He read my palm, too, on our first date, on that Fourth of July picnic fifteen years ago. “Whoa, check out that head line!” he said to me. “I wouldn't want to get into an argument with you, Madam Brainiac! Mmm, and your love line….It starts late,” he said softly, “but it's deep.”

“Oh, please,” I said, flushed. “You don't believe in this nonsense!” I let my hand stay in his, resting there.

He looked up at me and smiled such a private, sizzling smile, full of heat and promise, all my bones melted. “Maybe I do.”

Dr. Gwendolyn Grieco throws back her head and laughs. The sandwich shop is packed, a Saturday lunchtime rush, but her laughter is as loud as a bell; I think I can hear it ringing over all the noise, jangling, clinking, clanging in my skull. Or maybe I'm just imagining it.

But suddenly I'm like one of those mothers who can lift a truck off of her child by herself, powered by pure adrenaline and fire. I can practically feel Josie's hands on my back, pushing me forward.
No way, Izzy. No fucking way.
“Excuse me,” I say, bumping into Polly Pocket, tearing through the crowd, making my ill-considered beeline to their table. “Excuse me, excuse me.” And then I'm standing above them, a mute waitress. Today's special is rage!

I have one fleeting moment of perverse pleasure on seeing their faces, their thunderstruck faces, Gwendolyn Grieco's lovely olive skin draining of color and turning a seasick shade of greenish gray, Chris's mouth dropping open and then closing like a big stupid tuna's.

But then that pleasure is gone, and in its place is shame: a full-body transfusion of it.

“You are…,” I squeak, not knowing what will come next. My heart is cracked, shattered; an avalanche of shards cascades down, down to the floor. I fix my gaze on Gwendolyn Grieco. “You are…a really bad therapist!”

Dr. Grieco, well trained, places her hands flat on the table in front of her. Her nails are short and neat and shiny; she's the kind of woman who probably indulges in a weekly mani-pedi but doesn't want it to look like she does. “Well, I'm not your therapist anymore,” she says quietly. “Which you know, of course.” She glances at Chris, who doesn't meet her gaze but instead looks down at the table—at least, I think, ashamed.

There's a little girl at the next table who has been staring at me the entire time. She's gnawing on a slice of green apple, and she can't take her eyes off of me. Her hair is a fuzzy tangle of brown curls, and she looks like she's about two. I feel a piercing stab of love for her, for this tiny stranger, unsculpted, all beating heart and hunger. Nobody knows that a running clock in my brain still calculates the ages my babies would be, my own private doomsday clock, counting forward from my personal apocalypses. And, yes, there would be a two-year-old, but never mind about that.

Dr. Gwendolyn Grieco is still talking. She's midsentence,
and so it seemed to me,
when I stop listening. I smile and wave bye-bye to that staring baby and then it's shockingly easy: I just turn and leave.

I'm halfway down the block from the café, shivering in the joyless spring chill, when Chris catches up with me.

“Isabel.” He's jogging toward me, a little out of breath. I pick up my pace. “Isabel!”

“I'm actually going to a movie right now,” I say. “I'm meeting someone. I'm late.” An older couple holding hands walks past us; the man nods. Ahead, two teenage girls in identical short plaid skirts are all exaggerated gestures and hysterical laughter. If Hannah were here, she'd be studying them like a scientist. One of them does a cartwheel in the middle of the sidewalk. “You are
completely insane
!” the other one shrieks.