Days of Awe (3 page)

“Of course we're here,” Chris murmurs. “God, of course.”

Mark pulls away quickly and I examine his face, which, at least, at last, looks like his: today he looks like Mark, my friend, Josie's widower.

That word,
he said to me once, drunk, in the midst of it. He raised his bottle of beer.
Who is widower than I? Nobody!

“Let's go,” Mark says, and I can tell he hasn't forgiven me, but we won't talk about that today. Chris and Hannah and I fall into step next to him, picking our way across the pavement and through the dampening path toward the area of the cemetery where Josie is buried: a flat and blanched patch of ground in section E, row 20, as if this were a theater, only the seats are horizontal and the audience particularly unresponsive.

Being only forty-two and in good health, Josie had articulated no specific wishes for her final resting place, so we, her beloved friends and husband, improvised, and this is how she ended up here, at the Eternal Home Cemetery off the highway, may she rest in peace lulled by the honking of trucks zooming down I-94 and the faint but unmistakable smell of fried onions wafting over from Grandpa Zip's Old-Fashioned Diner just across the frontage road. The grass on the western edge of the cemetery is always a lush green because of the year-round humid breath of exhaust. Burying Josie here has made us all wonder:
Will we meet up here in a few years? Us, too? Here? Can we do no better than this?
This death thing, it seems, never gets pretty, but it sure does have staying power.

The rain is a steady, spitting drizzle now. We're at the grave site, the brand-new pinkish headstone a shiny heartbreak. Karen Josephine Bryant Abrams. Josie rejected the name Karen in college and never looked back. She would have hated her headstone. Then again, who wouldn't?
BELOVED WIFE,
it says.
CHERISHED FRIEND.

“I prepared a little speech,” Mark says, his eyes watery. He looks away and shakes his head. “But now…I can't.”

Chris moves a step closer to Mark and puts his arm around him, and Mark takes a ragged, heaving breath. “It's okay, man,” Chris says. He's a full head taller than Mark, long and lean where Mark is dense and sturdy. Chris's sharp, even features were chiseled by some cold Northern European ancestral winds, a counterpoint to Mark's dark hair and eyes, the craggy hollows of his face, his perennial stubble. Sometimes when I see them next to each other like this, I can't help but think about the strange miracles of DNA.

Chris removes his arm from Mark's shoulders quickly and suddenly, the way men do, and rubs his hands together. “It's okay. I'll say something. Isabel will say something. Maybe even Hannah, if you want to, sweetie.”

Here's what I want to do: I want to scream. Chris looks at his feet. He looks up at me, his lips pressed together, and swallows. “She was Izzy's best friend, and Mark's wife, and Hannah…well, she was almost like a second mom to Hannah.” Hannah, who still won't meet my eye, sobs quietly. “And I miss her for who she was to you all. But, you know, I loved her, too.” His breath puffs out into the cold air. “She was always at our house,” he says, and I find that I am panting a little bit, trying to contain my fury, trying to hold on to the rhythm of my own breath. As if that solidifies Chris's relationship with her: Josie took up space where he lived!

“She was always around,” he continues, oblivious. He takes off his glasses and wipes them on his shirt, then just holds them. His naked eyes are a surprise to me, vulnerable as a fish. “I didn't, um, I didn't have the same kind of relationship with her that you guys did,” he says. “Sometimes I'd wake up on a Saturday morning and go downstairs, and she'd still be there, crashed on the sofa from the night before.”

An old man carrying a bouquet of pink roses wanders past us, head high, peering left and right, unbothered by the wind and the rain. He looks otherworldly to me, as if he's searching for his own grave. I want to say this to Josie, and for the millionth time, I'm stunned by her absence.

Chris falls silent for a moment, then clears his throat and starts again. “There was always a half-eaten container of something on the coffee table,” he says. “Sometimes she would have it for breakfast, no matter how much it had…” He waves his empty hand in front of him and smiles a little. “Congealed. She was always so happy in the morning.” He glances at me and I can read his mind:
Unlike some people.
“So easy to talk to. We'd have coffee together before Izzy got up.”

That's it?
I want to say, grief and rage reacting chemically inside me, creating a new and volatile alloy, something bright and flaming. Furium.
That's it? Leftover Chinese food for breakfast? Coffee on a Sunday morning? Tidying up the living room together, maybe?
She was more cheerful than my wife!
I want to tear his glasses from his hand and fling them against Josie's headstone. But now Hannah is crying harder, and she pulls up the collar of her red windbreaker and presses her face into her father's solid chest, and I remember how on the night Josie died Chris wrapped his arms around me. We hadn't touched each other in months, it felt like, and he just reached for me in that blank, horrible moment, with everything good that he had. Even if I had wanted to shake his arms off, he wouldn't have let go.

Chris rests his chin on Hannah's head, and they stand there together. The geometry of holding your growing daughter is a changing thing: she fits in your arms a certain way when she's four, another when she's six, unwieldy when she's nine, and hardly at all when she's almost twelve. Some nights when she's sleeping, sprawled out like a starfish on her bed, I crawl in next to her, stealthily, taking up just the smallest sliver of mattress, to feel the ghost of the baby she used to be. Motherhood has reduced me to such a pathetic creature that I don't even care how pathetic I am. I'd like to share that thought with Josie. Having an eleven-year-old daughter is like pining over the college boyfriend who dumped you, I would tell her.

Childless by choice, sweetie!
Josie would say.

“It's all right,” I say now, to no one. “We all loved her so much.” To my surprise, my voice sounds clear and calm. Josie observed one of my classes once, as part of Principal Coffey's peer-review program.
It's a wonder Isabel sings so terribly,
she wrote in her assessment,
with that pretty speaking voice.

Mark and Hannah are both crying freely now, they're a chorus of sobs, Hannah still pressed hard into Chris's chest; we're just a huddled mass of mourners in the rain, a single entity, despite all the ways we've been blasted apart over the last year. I'm thinking, with a sort of empty resignation,
This is it,
this is how it will be for the rest of my life, lost in this darkness. But then Hannah turns and looks at Mark, and there is a moment, a strange moment between them, and as if by psychic agreement, they both start giggling. It comes over them as quick as a cloudburst. Hannah first: a swipe of her nose with the back of her hand and a chuckle, her recognition of the sad ridiculousness of the occasion offering a glimpse of the kind of adult she will be, savvy and kind. Then Mark, a small part of him opening up to Hannah, a clearing in the bleakness, and then they're both laughing, just shaking with it.

Chris looks at me over Hannah's blond head and raises his eyebrows and smiles. She is one thing we usually agree on, the best thing about us. Lately I find myself thinking about the night she was born, just flipping through the details in my mind. I've told her the story so many times:
It was three a.m. Daddy blew through four red lights. One of the nurses was on the phone when we walked in, ignoring us, chatting. “Lasagna,” she said to the person on the other end of the line, and I thought,
Who is she talking to about lasagna at three in the morning?
She held up the “just a minute” finger to us, and Daddy yelled at her. You were upside down, breech, and they were preparing me for a C-section, and then, at the last minute, just for me, you turned. You were born howling, loud as a freight train. But then, when they set you down on my chest, you stopped crying, and we just looked at each other, familiar mammals meeting for the first time.

I never tell her how Chris circled the parking ramp twice, looking for a good spot. I never tell her how as he walked me slowly down the hospital corridor he said, “Actually, I don't think this is such a good idea, Iz,” and then laughed unconvincingly. Some details you keep to yourself; you polish them up in private, smooth, shiny jewels of resentment that you save for when you might need them.

“Okay,” Mark says, after he and Hannah have caught their breath and their laughter has subsided and we have all swung safely back to the right side of miserable. “I think we can leave now.” It's raining harder. Chris is trying to clean his glasses again. I fumble around for the small stone I've been carrying in my pocket and place it on Josie's gravestone. We were here.

Hannah is quiet in the car, texting. Chris drops her at the library to meet some friends. (
Are you sure, sweetie?
She's sure.) And then he takes me home, driving slowly along the silent streets. He pulls into the driveway and gets out of the car, and before I realize it, we're walking together into the house, wordless routine and muscle memory. In the entryway near the back door he kicks off his shoes, then arranges them neatly on the mat. He shrugs off his jacket, takes mine from me, hangs them up. We're performing the steps of our oldest dance. And even in this strange, sad, suspended state, I know that we are elegant at it.

The house is cold. Someone left the light on in the hallway. Our socked feet pad together past the kitchen, which is still a mess from breakfast, up the stairs, into the bedroom, where the curtains are drawn, where although it's two in the afternoon, it's still twilit and dim: romantic or depressing, depending.

“Well,” Chris says, moving toward me. “If there's nothing else…”

“Nope,” I say, inching closer. “Bye.”

After fifteen years together, there is very little about this man that surprises me. His arms around my waist, hands tight against my back: not a surprise. His mouth on my neck, breath heavy and warm: not a surprise. The smell of his skin, like celery and oranges. They say you're attracted to a mate based on his scent, that somewhere, in the simian recesses of your brain, you're sniffing out the smell of genes complementary to yours, the intoxicating whiff of healthy offspring. So there's always that, with Chris. And it, too, is not a surprise. The way he pulls at my clothes as if he doesn't understand the mechanics of buttons and zippers. The speed of his heartbeat, animal desire, heightened now and all this past year, crazier than it has been in all of the fourteen years that came before: well, I guess that's been a surprise.

“Iz,” he whispers, the nickname that sounds like an existential proclamation.
“I need you.”

And I laugh out loud.
Who's writing your lines?
Need? Need! I suck in my stomach at the sound of that word. Tiny spider veins crosshatch my thighs, new ones popping up like dropped stitches; I just noticed one this morning. I caught a glimpse of my upper arm in the mirror a few weeks ago and it looked like my mother was in the bathroom waving to me. There are seven wayward pounds that seem to migrate all over my body, like accessories. The signs of disrepair are faint but unmistakable. I flash back to that birthday party, just two years ago, but it seems like a decade:
No movie star will have me now!

Okay, I'll admit that Chris and I still want each other. But need? Need is for your first lover on your twin bed in your college dorm. And Chris, whose chest hair is going gray; Chris, who has never had any fat on his frame, and so it's his muscles that are softening, loosening a little, his firm stomach growing slightly paunchy, his biceps starting to sag.
Need you?

But here we are again, all the same, answering death with sex. I peel off his sweater, lift his T-shirt over his head. We've lost so much. I run my hands down his back, across his chest, his body as familiar as my own. I can imagine this with someone different, if I try: the ways passion would, or wouldn't, humiliate you. The ways it would release you.

Chris kisses me, unembarrassed. After a certain amount of time with someone, crisis is an aphrodisiac. It's probably best not to think too hard about the implications of that one. And we are desperate for this, the flotsam of our intimacy. It's true. I can hardly breathe for how much I want him. Need him. “Iz,” he says again. “Okay?”

I let him guide me onto our bed, a tangle of soft sheets and heavy blankets. And I don't need to answer, but I do: “Yes.”

I wake up with a start. It must be hours later, still dark, the dead of night. Chris is lying next to me, snoring softly.

“Shit!” I jump out of the bed and scramble for my clothes. “Chris, shit, we were supposed to pick up Hannah hours ago. What the hell? One of us was supposed to get her! Shit!”

Chris glances at the clock and sighs, pulls the covers up to his neck. “It's three o'clock.”

“Holy mother of fuck.” I fumble with my shirt, pull it on backward, wriggle it around until it's on the right way.

“Izzy, it's three in the afternoon. We've just been…dozing for a few minutes.” He rolls over and runs a hand through his fine, disheveled hair and peers at me. In our marriage—in every marriage?—no annoyed glance holds only the displeasure of the moment. Each one reflects all the irritated glances he's ever shot at me for all of my transgressions: for lacking discipline, for being brittle and sharp, for overreacting, for swearing all the time, even in front of Hannah, for letting my worst self porcupine out before I retract my quills. Every exasperated look Chris gives me—and there have been plenty—carries the sediment of all the displeasure that has accumulated over the past fifteen years. “Everything is fine,” he says. He exhales through his nostrils like a bull.